Sphinx

As anyone who follows me on Twitter might have gathered, I’ve spent the last couple of days at a conference in Cambridge on (Re)approaching Roman Frugality, organised by Cristiano Viglietti; this is part of the explanation for the silence on this blog over the last month, as I went straight from a couple of weeks’ exhausted collapse and catching up on sleep over Christmas to hasty re-reading of Varro in order to pull together something more or less coherent on the theme. As often happens, I’d invented a title for the paper and scribbled a short abstract on the basis of limited thought and more or less no research – the conference theme appealed not because it was a topic I was working on but because it’s something that fits with possible future work – and it rapidly became clear that this was not one of my most successful bits of intellectual improvisation…

I read Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum several times in great detail back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, and had always meant to go back to it; it’s a fascinating text, highly sophisticated and literary in its presentation (complex paratexts, dialogue form with clear characterisation of different protagonists, very specific historical setting with regular interruptions of the discussion by external events etc.), that has nevertheless been treated by most readers as a straightforward source of factual information about Roman farming. My clear recollection was that it was absolutely permeated with ideas of frugality, and so this was an ideal opportunity to explore ways on understanding the role of such concepts or values within the general category of ‘Roman economic thinking’ – not rhetoric or ‘mere ideology’, let alone evidence of primitivism, but mental structures that influenced (not determined) behaviour in terms of production as well as consumption (the conventional field for concern about the right and wrong ways of using wealth) and need to be understood in a sociological and/or anthropological manner.

All of which would be fine – except that Varro’s characters scarcely use the word ‘frugalitas’ or related terms, and they do it solely in the context of the discussion at the beginning of Book III of different kinds of villas and different approaches to pastio villatica – in other words, a conventional discussion of luxury and consumption. What actually permeates Varro’s whole text might be better described as parsimonia; yes, clearly a related concept, and certainly an appropriate enough topic for the conference, but its relation to frugalitas clearly could not be taken for granted – was one a sub-set of the other, or a development thereof, or were they both sub-categories of some wider concept? In the absence of a decent amount of time to research this properly – by this stage, it was the day before the conference – I was reduced to organising my paper around the problem, without any prospect of a hypothesis let alone an answer.

The good news was that this actually constituted a valid contribution to discussion, rather than being treated with derision; as it turned out, most other people had also tended to assume that Varro was full of frugality. Indeed, it rapidly became clear that the more or less universal assumption that frugalitas was a central term of Roman moral discourse could be put under interrogation. This was made most evident in an excellent paper by Ingo Gildenhard, that simply looked at the uses of the term and its cognates by Cicero – whose remarks in Tusc are inevitably cited as a distillation of this long-established Republican concept (sic) – and noted that he actually uses it at only two very specific periods in his career, in particular contexts; while frugalitas is indeed a key term in Tusc, it is entirely absent from de Officiis, written the very next year.

The debate about frugality has hitherto tended to focus on whether it was an eternal and universal value, or whether it was rather developed in the late Republic on the basis of an imagined virtuous past in contrast to the decadent imperialist present; the conference suggested rather that the term became a commonplace of moral discourse only under the Principate – if then, as Suetonius for example doesn’t employ it consistently as a sub-heading for his accounts of imperial behaviour. Of course, the absence of the term doesn’t automatically entail the absence of related terms and relevant behaviour – Cato’s activities, even if labelling them as the archetype of frugalitas turns out to be a far later development, are clearly self-consciously frugal and must in some way be related to contemporary norms and expectations – but the taken-for-granted conception of the frugality of the Romans of the late Republic and their obsession with evaluating each other’s behaviour in these terms has suddenly been exposed as problematic.

Indeed, I’m increasingly inclined to think that the whole thing may actually have been invented in the early modern period, maybe even in conjunction with discussions of luxuria as a means of responding to contemporary economic and social transformations – a composite of quotations from a range of authors (both explicit uses of relevant terms, as in Cicero, and those taken to illustrate what is now assumed to be an established category of thought, as in Cato and Varro), that is then attributed to the Romans themselves. So much for offering a different reading of the standard elements of Roman thinking on wealth and its uses; it looks like we need to establish what the standard elements of Roman thinking on that topic actually were…