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Why did Seneca get so bent out of shape because Maecenas failed
to hitch
up his tunic properly? He seems positively fulminating . . . and
at a man who has
been dead for close to sixty years (Sen. Ep. 114.2).1
Quomodo Maecenas vixerit notius est, quam ut narrari nunc
debeat,
quomodo ambulaverit, quam delicatus fuerit, quam cupierit
videri,
quam vitia sua latere noluerit. Quid ergo? Non oratio eius aeque
soluta
est quam ipse discinctus? Non tam insignita illius verba sunt
quam
cultus, quam comitatus, quam domus, quam uxor ? Magni vir
ingenii
fuerat, si illud egisset via rectiore, si non vitasset
intellegi, si non etiam
in oratione difflueret.
How Maecenas lived is too well known to need to be told here:
how he
walked, how effeminate he was, how he longed to be looked at,
how
he had no wish to hide his vices.2Well, then. Is not his
language as
loose as he was slovenly (unbelted)? Are not his words as marked
as
his dress, his retinue, his house, his wife? He could have been
a man
of great talent, if he had gone about it in straightforward way,
if he had
not avoided being understood, if he had not leaked3everywhere in
his
speech.
We do not need Barthes (1983) to tell us that fashion is a
system, and
examples of how items of clothing can be reified as status
markers are all around
us: white collar, blue collar, the suits, a bit of skirt, a big
girls blouse, the pants in
the family. And the Romans are a particularly conspicuous
example of homo
hierarchicus(Dumont 1976, 1980; Appadurai 1986). Despite a
limited wardrobe,
every Roman male went about with his exact social standingand
net worth
draped around his body for all to see (Sebesta and Bonfante
1994).
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So a genuine, Latin, etymological case of habitus, not just a
way of dressing
but of carrying oneself (Mauss 1936: 175, 186 = 1993; Bourdieu
1977: 72-95).
Maecenas is performing gender (Butler 1990: 25 = 1999: 35); the
problem is
according to Senecahes performing it all wrong. Summer's old
commentary on
Senena (1910: 198) neatly sums up the message that Maecenas was
sending:
"Habitual nglig was very incorrect . . . Irregularities of this
kind marked a man
as idle, effeminate, or fastit is often hard to distinguish the
various shades."
This is a relatively famous passage and one of the starting
points for Buffons
constantly renewed argument that le style cest lhomme mme.4But
clearly,
something more is going on than merely a failure to observe a
dress code, more
than a dislike of someones prose style. Something about Maecenas
not drawing
his tunic in tight with a belt seems to drive Seneca mad. The
effeminate
Maecenas has been well examined by Richlin (1983/1992: 4-5),
Williams (2010:
162-3) and others, but I think we can say more about it and use
Senecas diatribe
to open uppart of the Roman gender system and see what lies
within.
To answer this question, we need first to take an excursion into
the realms of
anthropological theory and then back by way of some curious
paths in a Latin
semantic and semiotic field.5I want to sketch out a couple of
broad ideas and
illustrate them with only a few examples.
I am using the word fieldin Victor Turners sense of the abstract
cultural
domains where paradigms are formulated, established, and come
into conflict.
Such paradigms consist of sets of rules from which many kinds
of
sequences of social actions may be generated but which further
specify
what sequences must be excluded (1974: 17).
1Cf. Cic. Tusc. 5.47.
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2Seneca uses similar language about Mamercus Scaurus (Ben.
4.31.3-5).
3By this point, diffluois almost a technical term of style:
Rhet. Her. 4.16, Gell. 1.15.1, Sen.
Tranq. 17.4.
4 , .Cicero (Tusc. 5. 47) attributes it to Socrates.
5For some helpful surveys of anthropology of the body, see
Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987;
Lock 1992; Halliburton 2002; Joyce 2005; Turner 2008;
Mascia-Lees 2011. Rescent collections
with a focus on Greece and Rome include Hopkins and Wyke 2005,
Fgen and Lee 2009.
