CARLIN A. BARTON, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); xiii plus 326; hardback: ISBN 0520 225252, $US 47.50/ 33.50. Intending readers of this book are advised to start at the end, at the so-called Philosophical Coda (289-295), which is, in reality, a kind of personal explanation by the author of where she is coming from. It begins: In dealing with the emotions, being a modem Euro- American, it was necessary for me to abandon the linear and dichotomous tendencies of modern thought and to locate and straddle the vague border between words and sensations, between the vast repository of inarticulate experience and the comparatively small but still huge distillate of symbols and symbolic actions. Moreover I was compelled to do this for my own culture simultaneously with that of the ancient Romans a mental act requiring the elasticity of Plastic Man. This seems to be an attempt to excuse the most glaring faults of the book, its failure to abide by the normal rules of academic argumentation ( the linear and dichotomous tendencies of modem thought ), its failure to relate the author s conceptual framework to the conceptual vocabulary of the people she is studying ( straddle the vague border... etc.), and its failure to distinguish the culture she is studying from her own cultural ideology (Ί was compelled to do this for my own culture simultaneously with that of the ancient Romans ). Furthermore, this is presented neither as an arbitrary nor as an informed methodological choice by the author but rather as something imposed upon her ( it was necessary for m e...; I was compelled to do this... ). By whom? And what is a modem Euro-American and why are they the only people who matter? Barton seems to have forgotten the existence of the Southern hemisphere. At the close of this Philosophical Coda, under the subheading Historian of the Absurd (295) Barton attempts to define herself as being somehow both a Pyrrhonian and an Academic sceptic, which would allow her to assert that the statement everything is open to 227
doubt is itself both open to doubt and not open to doubt. Her last paragraph goes as follows. If I am willing to let go of the lever by which 1 can overturn the world, if I am willing to be catapulted from the center of the universe, perhaps I can make the weightlessness of my position into a methodology, a methodology of the untenable position. The alternative to complete control would be (as it was for Ovid or Petronius or Apuleius) endless metamorphosis, endless transformation, endless revision. What this means is by no means clear. Barton seems to be saying in the first sentence that she would like to abandon Academic scepticism and embrace Pyrrhonian scepticism as the basis for a historical methodology. The second sentence seems to conclude that this would require her to treat all her own interpretations as tentative and subject to endless revision. The point of the references to Ovid, Petronius and Apuleius is meant to seem profound but is supported only by the looseness and repetitiveness of language that treats revision as synonymous with transformation and metamorphosis. This conclusion amounts to a refusal by the author to stand by the positions she has previously articulated throughout the preceding 294 pages of her book; it reinterprets her own text as no more than work in progress, raw material for future revisions. Readers are entitled to feel a little miffed. Surely the author ought to have thought more about her methodology and convinced at least herself o f her interpretation before rushing into print. The natural expectation is that a book called Roman Honor will be about Roman honour. But what is honour? In common parlance it is an ethical quality or a token of respect. Yet Barton insists from the outset that her subject is to do with the emotions: it is as moving forces, motives, the sources of energy and action, that I treat emotions in this book, (2). O f course, honos and honores are important Roman ideas, but Barton rejects these as having little to do with the subject with which she is concerned ( 10-11). Although our English word honor is a direct descendant of the Latin honor, the latter played a relatively modest part in 228
the Romans vocabulary of emotions; it rarely subsumed, as it does in English, the tangle of ideas and emotions of which it formed a part. Honores, in Latin, were the prizes, the tokens of esteem and recognition that one received from others and that gave one status... With a few notable exceptions, the word did not refer to the emotions. What then does Barton mean by honour? Something close to what it means in English, but not even that (11). I use English honor, and frequently. But my efforts are directed not to defining the English term honor', but to the harder task of describing the dynamics of an array of emotions that the English word honor can only point in the direction of, an array of emotions working with and in counterpoint to the articulate codes and statuses of ancient Roman society. So we are left with a book said by its author to be about a concept of honour that relates neither to the meaning of the Latin nor of the English word at all closely but to an ill-defined set of emotions. The closest I can suggest as a description of what Barton means by honour is anxieties about status, which she takes to be universal among Romans of the male gender in what she defines as a contest-society. At least the reader knows what the word Roman means in the title. Presumably it should refer to those persons who lived in ancient Rome, with all their individual opinions, motivations and personal, political and philosophical disagreements. But no, the Romans find themselves reduced in the Introduction (3, n.7) to an ideologically circumscribed mentality in which individual characteristics are boiled down into a predetermined core of Romanness. I use the word Romans advisedly. 1 do not intend it, as a category, to be essentializing or totalizing but rather a collective and composite term for a group of people who shared an array of ways of understanding the world, of making associations and connections, of putting together cause and effect. 229
As I have created composite Romans, so I have created a convenient and composite we, which is based, more than anything, on the ideas and opinions of myself and all the students I have known and taught over the past thirty years. So those ancient people living in Rome who did not share the majority way of understanding the world are not Roman at all for the purposes of this book. Barton can decide which Romans count as Romans and which can be ignored. The Romans are not people but a set of opinions believed to be normative in that society. It is to be delineated by contrast with an equally impressionistic and reductive modern American (or should 1 say Euro-American?) mindset, constructed out of the author s own recollection of her own experience. This is a great advantage to any historian, to be able to replace the actual historical society under study with another neater, simpler one with all its complexity and internal variety removed. Consequently, from the outset, before any case has been made, the book is full of generalisations of the type the Romans believed.... There is room here for only a few examples. The Romans did not conceive of the emotions as repugnant to reason... (2) But the restless Romans... thought less in terms of synchronic structures... (4) The Romans, like the dentist of Haifa, believed that they experienced more than could be put into words. (5) The Romans believed, like the anthropologist John Blacking, that...(5) There was, for the Romans, a kind of shared body in the universe...( 8) Their thinking was layered and sedimented, reticular and analogical... (16) Romans expected of one another... (20) The Romans believed that the person allowed excessive privacy would lose all self-control... (22) The Romans understood, however, that limits and restraints must apply even to the shaming that punished shamelessness. (23) 230
The Roman was radically present in a role or game... (25) The Romans had a taste for high tension... (32) One gets the impression that this book, like the same author s earlier Sorrows o f the Ancient Romans, was written in a library that contained no books other than dictionaries of quotations. The reader is bombarded with a torrent of quotes on every page. They are used in a way that is simplistic and undiscriminating. All quotes from ancient authors seem to be accorded equal value, regardless of context, regardless of whether they were meant to appear extreme or moderate, regardless of genre. Some are taken from historians, others from speeches by characters in comedies or tragedies or novels or satires. A statement by Trimalchio is accorded the same evidentiary value as a statement by Cicero or Augustus. Whether the source is in Greek or Latin, from a Republican or an imperial author, from a Stoic or an Epicurean, is rarely, if ever, explored. Quotes from modem authors jostle with those from ancient authors for attention. Extended passages o f text that might serve to clarify the meaning of the quotes are not provided, let alone analysed. There is no index of passages cited and the general index excludes proper names, so it is almost impossible for the reader to check which ancient authors opinions are omitted or underrepresented. Barton does attempt, at one point, to justify her procedure (14-15). It does not matter for my purposes, whether the actors and speakers are historical persons or fictional personae, whether their words arc willful obfuscations or naked confessions. I have attempted to discern the depths of the Roman soul in the moving configurations of their thought: the symmetries and syncopations, rhythms and reciprocities, the obliquities, torsions, discords, ruptures, reversals, broken contours, and collapses... I listened for as many and as varied voices and gestures as 1 could, keeping in mind that my goal was, in the end, to create a sort of composite psychological portrait of the Romans, a case history of a sort. I have tried, wherever possible, to let the Romans speak for themselves. Ironically, because of my desire to quote as much as 231
possible, I have had to impose a rather elaborate and artificial organization on the material I am presenting. She does not, however, let the Romans speak for themselves but prevents it, by selective quotation and decontextualisation of their words and by confusing the historical with the fictional. Her composite psychological portrait turns out to be a barely recognisable caricature. A number of glowing tributes to the book are reproduced on the back cover. Erich Gruen says he found it profound and penetrating. Kate Cooper uses terms like stunning and scholarship... of an exceedingly high caliber. Daniel Boyarin calls it remarkably original, beautifully written and deeply researched and documented. One s confidence in the objectivity of these assessments, however, is undermined when one finds the same people thanked on the author s Acknowledgements page (xiii) as having either inspired the author to write the book or assisted in its preparation. On page 270 Barton mentions the name o f someone who, she suggests, embodies the concept of the honorable in her own society. This person is a certain Mr Cal Ripken. The context suggests he is a sportsman of some type. It would be a service to scholarship if readers could be given some more specific information. Does he play cricket? Marcus Wilson University of Auckland 232