Weeping and Virtus in Early Imperial Roman Epic
Are men always feminized when they weep? It is well-known that Greek epic heroes like Odysseus weep without losing their claim to masculinity; does the same rule hold true for Roman epic heroes? In this dissertation I examine how men weep in Roman epic poetry of the early Roman empire as an aspect of the performance of masculinity. Specifically, I explore the multiple valences of male tears and related emotional expressions across three core texts: Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Statius’ Thebaid. I seek to understand judgments of and explanations for men’s tears within my sources, using philological analysis in a roughly dramaturgical framework. By comparing scenes where men weep in epic poetry to scenes in other forms of literature, I argue for specific masculine roles which these various men are performing – sometimes performing well, sometimes poorly – to understand more about the emotional culture of elite Roman men. My chapters formulate readings of individual epics which, taken together, show shifts in Roman emotional and literary culture. In Vergil’s Aeneid, I argue that Aeneas learns how to weep like a Roman man over the course of the epic. At the beginning of the epic, he weeps like a Homeric hero; by the end of the epic, he is demonstrating the self-control of a Roman general or politician. Lucan’s Bellum Civile picks up historically-relevant characterizations of his leading men Caesar, Pompey, and Cato, and reveals their shortcomings through flawed or otherwise ii i inappropriate displays of weeping. In agreement with some scholars of Lucan’s poem, I also suggest that these flawed displays of weeping suggest that the universe of Lucan’s poem is hopelessly disordered. The men of Statius’ Thebaid tend to shed tears which approximate fides or feign pietas, reflecting a larger shift in Roman culture over the course of the early empire: the rise of overt emotionality as a valid form of expression among men. The Thebaid generally challenges the tradition in which the poet locates it, melting down many of the values of Roman epic poetry in the tears of its men.
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