Reading is delusion. In order to read, we have to suspend certain standards of reality and accept others; we have to offer ourselves to deceit, even if it is an act of deception of which we are acutely aware. One way of considering this paradoxical duality in the act of reading is more or less consciously to posit multiple levels of reading, whereby the deceived reader is watched by an aware reader, who is in turn watched by a super-reader; and (...) so it continues. The ancient art critics, obsessed as they were with deceptive realism, provide in anecdotal form a good example of such multiplicity of perception when they tell stories of birds trying to peck at painted grapes, horses trying to mate with painted horses, even humans deceived by the lifelikeness of works of art. Such stories act as easy but potent signifiers of ‘realism’ in ancient art criticism, by showing the reactions of a ‘naive reader’ whose deception the aware reader can enter into but also see exposed. In verbal or visual art parading itself as realistic, the artistic pretence of a pose of reality is, at some level, intended to be seen as deceptive; when it is non-realistic, or anti-realistic, or even stubbornly abstract , art still demands that the reader suspend ordinary perception. But deception alone is not enough: ‘deceit’ only becomes artistic when a viewer sees through it, for a work of art which is so lifelike that no-one realizes it is not real has not entered the realm of art. The appreciation of deception happens at the moment when the deception is undone, or by the imaginative creation of a less sophisticated reader who has not seen through the deceit. That is what happens in comedy, more overtly than in other artforms, but in the same way. (shrink)

Based on a full reading of the Plautine corpus in light of theories of class resistance, this essay argues that the palliata grew up in the 200s bce under conditions of endemic warfare and mass enslavement, and responded to those conditions. Itinerant troupes of slaves and lower-class men performed for mostly humble audiences, themselves familiar with war and hunger; the best of these troupes were then hired to perform at ludi in the cities of central Italy. The first sections of (...) the essay look at types of speech and action in the plays in which slave or poor characters make use of these shared experiences: jokes about flogging and hunger, fantasies of revenge and escape, double speech. The latter sections examine the evidence for lower-class constituencies in the 200s bce and for actors, writers, and venues to match, arguing that none of these categories can be treated monolithically. (shrink)

This article proposes a new interpretation of slave religious experience in mid-republican Rome. Select passages from Plautine comedy and Cato the Elder's De agri cultura are paired with material culture as well as comparative evidence—mostly from studies of Black Atlantic slave religions—to reconstruct select aspects of a specific and distinctive slave “religiosity” in the era of large-scale enslavements. I work towards this reconstruction first by considering the subordination of slaves as religious agents before turning to slaves’ practice of certain forms (...) of religious expertise in the teeth of subordination and policing. After transitioning to an assessment of slave religiosity's role in the pursuit of freedom, I conclude with a set of methodological justifications for this paper's line of inquiry. (shrink)

This article examines a simile preserved in the fragmentary book 5 of Cicero's De Re Publica, which figures the ideal statesman in terms of a farm bailiff and a household steward. Through a philological, philosophical, and socio-cultural explication of these similes and their context within De Re Publica, this article argues that Cicero draws upon Greek philosophical treatments of household and political relations and reworks traditional Roman political ideology so as to refigure the conceptual relationship between the statesman and the (...) state: from the farmer of res publica to its subservient, yet still overseeing, bailiff. By casting the ideal statesman in the decidedly servile role of a public bailiff, Cicero subordinates his statesman to res publica, yet also empowers him to act as its jurisprudential overseer, and this change marks a significant and perhaps strikingly original contribution to Roman political thought. (shrink)