Fiction, tradition, and the citizenship in Livy’s history of early Rome
The lecture analyzes Livy’s awareness of the fictive basis for many important aspects of Roman tradition. In Livy’s history, Roman “soft” power is itself grounded on the subject peoples’ acceptance of mythical ideologies, and Roman political and religious institutions are regularly shown to be based on fictions of one kind or another. The lecture discusses above all Livy’s presentation of Rome’s ultimate corporate fiction, the citizenship, from Romulus to the settlement of 338 BCE and down to the historian’s own time.
After his first degrees at Auckland University in New Zealand, Denis Feeney went to Oxford for his D.Phil. (1982), and after positions both in Britain and the United States came to Princeton in 2000 as Giger Professor of Latin. In addition to articles on Latin literature (particularly on his favourite Latin poets, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid), he has written four books: The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition (Oxford UP, 1991); Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge UP, 1998); Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginning of History (California UP, 2007); and Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (Harvard UP, 2016), which discusses how come there is a literature in the Latin language when there shouldn’t really have been one.