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INVITUS INVITAM: A WINDOW ALLUSION IN SUETONIUS' TITUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Duncan E. Macrae
Duncan E. Macrae*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
*
duncan.macrae@uc.edu
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Extract

Berenicen statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.

As for Berenice, he immediately dismissed her from the city against his will, against her will. (Suet. Tit. 7.2)

Suetonius' laconic description of Titus' dismissal of his consort, the Herodian Berenice, after his accession to the Principate has attracted the attention of readers across the centuries. The biographer's use of polyptoton, invitus invitam, to describe the mental states of the Roman princeps and Judaean princess has been read as particularly moving. Perhaps most notably, Racine turned the emperor's banishment of his lover into the central dilemma of his tragedy Bérénice. At the start of his preface to the text of the play, the dramatist amalgamates this sentence with another from earlier in the chapter, retaining the striking repetition, ‘Titus reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam’. Racine claims that this account of the dismissal of Berenice provides appropriate subject matter for tragic poetry and, to support his case, he compares Virgil's treatment of the separation of Aeneas and Dido to the situation of Titus and Berenice. Suetonius is not normally read as a literarily sophisticated writer, but we should take a cue from Racine's response to this sentence. In this article, I argue that Suetonius himself chose to compare Titus and Berenice with Dido and Aeneas by an allusion in this sentence to Virgil's Aeneid and to Catullus' translation of the Coma Berenices. Within a rather matter-of-fact presentation of the relationship between the Flavian emperor and his Herodian consort, Suetonius evoked a more dramatic model.

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Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 415 - 418
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

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References

1 For the standard interpretations and historical context, see the commentaries on this passage: Price, H., C. Suetoniii Tranquilli De Vita Caesarum Liber VIII Divus Titus: An Edition with Parallel Passages and Notes (Menasha, WI, 1919)Google Scholar, 43; Mooney, G.W., C. Suetoni Tranquilli De Vita Caesarum Libri VII–VIII: With Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Dublin, 1930)Google Scholar, 486; Martinet, H., C. Suetonius Tranquillus Divus Titus Kommentar (Königstein, 1981)Google Scholar, 74. Luck, G., ‘Über Suetons “Divus Titus”’, RhM 107 (1964), 63–75Google Scholar, at 67, places this sentence in the laudatory thematic programme of the biography.

2 Racine combines propterque insignem reginae Berenices amorem, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur (Tit. 7.1) with the sentence quoted at the head of the paper. For the programmatic significance of the combination (which is not attributed to Suetonius by Racine), see Schröder, V., ‘Re-writing history for the early modern stage: Racine's Roman tragedies’, in Feldherr, A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (Cambridge, 2009), 380–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Mooney (n. 1), 486, Victor Hugo used this sentence to interpret the five acts of Racine's drama: Act i Titus, Act ii reginam Berenicen, Act iii invitus, Act iv invitam, Act v dimisit.

3 Racine, J., Œuvres Complètes I: Théâtre – Poésie (ed. Forestier, G.) (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar, 450: ‘Cette action est très fameuse dans l'Histoire et je l'ai trouvée très propre pour le Théâtre par la violence des passions qu'elle y pouvait exciter. En effet nous n'avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poètes que la séparation d’Énée et de Didon dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matière pour tout un chant d'un Poème héroïque, où l'action dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d'une Tragédie? Il est vrai que je n'ai point poussé Bérénice jusqu'à se tuer, comme Didon, parce que Bérénice n'ayant pas ici avec Titus les derniers engagements que Didon avait avec Énée, elle n'est pas obligée, comme elle, de renoncer à la vie. A cela près, le dernier adieu qu'elle dit à Titus, et l'effort qu'elle se fait pour s'en séparer n'est pas le moins tragique de la pièce; et j'ose dire qu'il renouvelle assez bien dans le cœur des Spectateurs l'émotion que le reste y avait pu exciter.' For Dido as the model of Berenice in Racine's drama, see Mueller, M., ‘The truest daughter of Dido: Racine's Bérénice’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 1 (1974), 201–17.Google Scholar

4 The allusion has been discussed frequently. See Griffith, R. Drew, ‘Catullus' Coma Berenices and Aeneas' farewell to Dido’, TAPhA 125 (1995), 47–59Google Scholar and Wills, J., ‘Divided allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices’, HSCPh 98 (1998), 277–305Google Scholar for recent analysis and earlier bibliography on the specific allusion between Aen. 6.460 and Catullus 66.39. The Callimachean original of Catullus 66.39 is lost. These particular lines are only part of a much more complicated engagement with Callimachus' Coma and Catullus 66 in the Aeneid, as has been demonstrated by recent work by Konstan, D., ‘A pun in Virgil's Aeneid (4.492–3)?’, CPh 95 (2000), 74–6Google Scholar and Reed, J.D., ‘Another Greek pun in the Aeneid’, Mnemosyne 61 (2008), 300–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 On ‘window allusion’ or ‘window reference’, see Thomas, R.F., ‘Virgil's Georgics and the art of reference’, HSCPh 90 (1986), 188–9Google Scholar. Price and Martinet (n. 1) as commentators on this sentence note the polyptoton, but not the possibility of an allusion to Virgil or Catullus.

6 Other uses of polyptoton in Suetonius: Aug. 29.5: multa a multis tunc extructa sunt; Tib. 2.1: multa multorum Claudiorum egregia merita (extant); Tit. 8.1: quam si eadem isdem et ipsi dedissent. For the figure of polyptoton in Suetonius, see Freund, J.W., De C. Suetonii Tranquilli usu atque genere dicendi (Berlin, 1901), 25–6.Google Scholar

7 Wills, J., Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford, 1996), esp. 225–31.Google Scholar

8 Cass. Dio 66.15.4: Βερενίκη δὲ ἰσχυρῶς τε ἤνθει καὶ διὰ τοῦτο καὶ ἐς τὴν Ῥώμην μετὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ Ἀγρίππα ἦλθε· καὶ ὁ μὲν στρατηγικῶν τιμῶν ἠξιώθη, ἡ δὲ ἐν τῷ παλατίῳ ᾤκησε καὶ τῷ Τίτῳ συνεγίγνετο. προσεδόκα δὲ γαμηθήσεσθαι αὐτῷ, καὶ πάντα ἤδη ὡς καὶ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ οὖσα ἐποίει, ὥστ' ἐκεῖνον δυσχεραίνοντας τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ἐπὶ τούτοις αἰσθόμενον ἀποπέμψασθαι αὐτήν.

9 Cass. Dio 66.18.1: ἀλλὰ χρηστὸς καίπερ ἐπιβουλευθεὶς καὶ σώφρων καίτοι καὶ τῆς Βερενίκης ἐς Ῥώμην αὖθις ἐλθούσης ἐγένετο.

10 Suet. Tit. 7: nec minus libido [sc. suspecta erat] propter exoletorum et spadonum greges propterque insignem reginae Berenices amorem, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur ... Berenicen statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.

11 Crook, J.A., ‘Titus and Berenice’, AJPh 72 (1951), 162–75Google Scholar, followed by Rogers, P., ‘Titus, Berenice and Mucianus’, Historia 29 (1980), 86–95Google Scholar, at 94, reconstructs two visits to Rome by Berenice and two dismissals, one before accession and another after Vespasian's death; Braund, D.C., ‘Berenice in Rome’, Historia 33 (1984), 120–3Google Scholar suggests two visits, but only one dismissal, right after Titus' accession; A. Keaveney and Madden, J., ‘Berenice at Rome’, MH 60 (2003), 39–43Google Scholar prefer to follow Suetonius alone and reconstruct a single visit and dismissal.

12 Power, T.J., ‘Priam and Pompey in Suetonius' Galba’, CQ 57 (2007), 792–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar (also raising the possibility of a ‘window allusion’ to Asinius Pollio's lost account of Pompey's death); id., ‘Pyrrhus and Priam in Suetonius' Tiberius’ CQ 62 (2012), 430–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar