Augustus, Tiberius, Clementia and the Lex de Imperio Vespasiani

Clementia (mercy)

Writing of the First Settlement in 27BCE Augustus says:

"...by senatorial decree, I was named Augustus, and the doors of my house were publicly clothed in laurel, and a civic crown were fixed over my door and a golden shield was put in the Curia Julia, which was given to me by the senate and the people of Rome for my courage, clemency, justice and piety, as attested by this inscription. After that time, I surpassed all in influence, although I had no more power than those who were my colleagues in the magistracies." (Res Gestae 34)

mihi senatum populumque Romanum dare virtutis clementiaeque et iustitiae et pietatis caussa testatum est per eius clupei inscriptionem. Post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatisautem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt.

maarjaara [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Clementia was not always very much in evidence during the civil wars and proscriptions:

Suet. Div. Augustus

CLEMENTIA as AUTOCRATIC and MONARCHIC

SENECA on CLEMENTIA

To offer clementia (mercy) is not within the reach of normal people because it requires that you explicitly give less punishment than is required by justice and law. Seneca writing of Clemency in the middle First Century says, "None is better graced by mercy than a king or a prince (quam regem aut principem)"(de Clementia I.2.iii) and further notes in the voice of the ruler "anybody can kill against the law, but no one other than I can break it to save  (Occidere contra legem nemo non potest, servare nemo praeter me)" (De Clementia I.v.4). That is, he explicitly links this ability to step outside the law with the power of monarchs and princes. 

So, whilst Augustus is boasting, "I had no more power than those who were my colleagues" he is simultaneously advertising his ability to do less than the law demanded (and so be above or outside it).  Exactly why he chooses to advertise this virtue in the same breath as describing his powers as limited to the levels of senatorial colleagues I am unsure and thinking about.

LEX DE IMPERIO VESPASIANI

In the Capitoline Museum you can see a law granting Vespasian (the emperor from 69-79CE) his powers. 

It famously grants Vespasian many powers and exemptions from laws because those were the powers held by his Julio-Claudian predecessors.

https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Anglica/vespas_johnson.html

The exemption from laws, which is tracked back to Augustus (though given how much his position changes through 43BCE-14CE, it is not obvious when this means or even if it is true), identifies perhaps the nature of Imperial power - the laws which bind others, do not have to bind them.

TIBERIUS - autocracy

Under Tiberius the problem that Clementia indicates a princeps being outside/above the law becomes very pronounced. I want to think and read more about this, but you might think about:

The aftermath of Libo Drusus' trial, where Tiberius stated he would have intervened AFTER due process had happened had he not committed suicide (Tacitus Annals, II.27-32)
 or 
Urgulania's trial, where Tiberius undertook to appear for his mother Livia's client, but in dismissing the Praetorian Guard to a distance publicly showed he intended to appear as a privatus (private citizen), not as the Princeps, with attendant powers to stand outside the law. (Tacitus Annals, II.34)
or 
Clutorius Priscus' trial, where Tiberius' desire to show clementia is flagged by Lepidus and Tiberius seems to have required a ten day delay in future between legal condemnation and execution to allow room for him to exercise Clementia and overturn legal process. (Tacitus Annals, III.49-50)

Sappho - He is Like A God That Man

He Is Like a God That Man

This is the (an?) opening to Sappho's most famous poem 31 (one on the OCR Specification) in one rendering. I first came across the poem in Davidson's book, "The Greeks & Greek Love", in which Davidson offers a translation of the poem and some thoughts on how it radically shifts perspective.

Davidson translates:

He comments:

His translation (in a book whose object is not poetry) starts to capture some of the magic of Sappho, but other translations do it differently.

Anne Carson's translation is exceptional

and she captures with her more lyrical language the force of the poem. We might compare, "puts the heart in my chest on wings" with the rather more pedestrian, "makes my heart thump"

The line "greener than grass" seems odd in combination with death, and you will find translations suggesting that we should instead think of the colour of grass in the hot mediterranean where it is bleached and pale. 

You will notice in the Carson translation (left) the final line makes no sense and that this is a fragment of a possibly rather longer poem.

Tony Kline, whose translations you have met in the Augustus module, both uses the pale grass motif and drops as unwieldy the last fragmentary line. 

Kline translates: (@PoetryInTransl

www.poetryintranslation.com )

We are left in no doubt by Sappho of how love makes her feel and the symptoms of love and in this way she can see astonishingly contemporary. 

Daniel Mendelsohn (writing at greater length here) has phrased it like this:

Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world—the girl, the man she’s talking to—dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from “he seems to me” in the first line to the solipsistic “I seem to me” at the end says it all.

Even Red Dwarf are direct inheritors of her description of the symptoms of love:

Tongue-tied, cold sweat, feel like death... nothing in the human condition changes. That Sappho, a woman, admires not the man's beauty, but his composure when talking to the female object of her love reminds us of the envy we universally feel for those more at ease and more articulate than us when Eros is about. 

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2015/10/19/before-redbull-eros-gave-you-wings-alcaeus-plato-and-homer/

Amy Pistone 

This universality and modern feel to Sappho has also provoked rather freer translations/adaptations of Sappho with a more explicitly modern twist. My favourite, which I came across recently, is by Amy Pistone (@apistone https://www.amypistone.com/)

It is clear that this translation is trying to do something other than a verbatim translation (though the inclusion of parallel Greek to give an illusion of authenticity to those brought up on Loeb texts is a particularly nice touch) and instead use and remake the poem for a modern readership.

I also like how the broken thought in the last line, with ellipses for effect, picks up the fragmentary line.








This is not a new development, the Roman poet Catullus also sought to use the poem (already centuries old and in Greek to his Latin) with a similar mixture of translation and free adaptation and he too made use of its fragmentary state. I borrow here a translation by Lauren Hunter  (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nm542kj)

 of Sappho and Catullus side-by-side:

You will notice that Catullus too chooses to use the fragmentary end to move the poem's end to a new purpose.

What do we learn? Well most obviously never assume that any translation is "right" in any definitive way, they reflect choices and possibilities. In addition that the poetry and ideas of the past need not be studied as fossils, but can be used, reworked and enjoyed in new ways. I would add too that Sappho is a poet who, even in current fragmentary state, gives us reason to understand why Plato (perhaps Plato, the attribution is not certain) said:

For More on Plato see the excellent In Our Time episode.

Bibliography

Carson A., (2003), If Not Winter, Virago Press

Davidson J., (2007), The Greeks and Greek Love, Phoenix