Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of (THE OUTSIDER WITHIN: SELF-SECLUSION BY THE ROMAN ELITE FROM TIBERIUS TO HADRIAN), by (Darrel Janzen), Ph.D., Brown University, May 2018. This dissertation examines voluntary seclusion as a social behaviour of the Roman elite between the reigns of Tiberius and Hadrian as documented in prose and poetry written during that period. After an introductory chapter (Chapter 1) explaining the project and its theoretical background, Chapter 2 examines how Stoic authors employ the figure of withdrawal into the metaphorical space of the self to describe an ascetic moral disposition that was felt to constitute a safer and more effective response than physical self-seclusion to the frustrations and dangers of public life under the principate and that nevertheless allowed the ascetic to achieve certain traditional elite cultural objectives. Chapter 3 analyzes how Statius uses the seclusion of the Epicurean retiree Pollius Felix in Silvae 2.2 on his Surrentine estate to express Pollius' estrangement from the restless ambitions of the rest of society, simultaneously investing this detached social stance with a heightened sense of cultural value. Chapter 4 argues that Pliny the Younger and characters in Tacitus' Dialogus portray poets and orators in solitude as a part of conflicting arguments that reflect a shared feeling that at least certain parts of Rome's intellectual class pursue various forms of social distinction while struggling against a range of social and political obstacles posed by an unsympathetic or hostile Roman society. Chapter 5 contends that a variety of imperial authors mostly associate the reclusive tendencies of the emperors Tiberius and Domitian with their alienation as tyrants from civic society at Rome, with the important exception of Statius, whose laudatory portrait associates Domitian's physical and metaphorical detachment from others with his position as a god-like emperor. This project illustrates how Romans of the early principate are able to construe the voluntary occupation of a range of secluded physical spaces as an expression of different kinds of social nonconformism in an era of turbulent change for Rome's upper classes that left some elites profoundly alienated from Roman society. This dissertation advances research on the relationship between the symbolic value of discrete physical space and expressions of elite individuality in Latin literature of the early imperial period.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Janzen, Darrel Clair,
"THE OUTSIDER WITHIN: SELF-SECLUSION BY THE ROMAN ELITE FROM TIBERIUS TO HADRIAN"
(2018).
Classics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/7tdw-nq58
