Sphinx

This spring, I’m teaching on the Roman Principate, including the nature of political and social life under a capricious autocracy (think not only of the grotesque antics attributed to pantomime villains like Caligula or Nero, but also the air of casual menace in Trajan’s letters that prompts Pliny’s desperate, paranoid grovelling). I’m already wondering what to do about possible Trump analogies, given the prevalence of classical references in current discourse – all the Suetonius-style kinky stuff to add to Caligula’s horse references, consumption habits straight out of Trimalchio and so forth. I’m not (at least at the moment) planning to make any – given everything I’ve already written about the problems of seeing the world in such short-term, individualistic terms – but I can certainly imagine some of my students making such points or raising questions in discussion. Which could be tricky.

The problem is not the intrusion of the political into the neutral space of history, given that I don’t think history is remotely neutral or unpolitical, but rather the potential conflict with time and relevance. Now, if it’s in a seminar – we’re not doing Suetonius or Tacitus, as they feature heavily in another course, but will be looking at Pliny in depth – that’s fine: format is flexible and open-ended, so as long as they don’t wait until the final minute, there’s plenty of time to explore the different issues of evidence, competing interpretations, institutions versus informal relationships, different theories of power and so forth.

The problem is rather in lectures; there is time set aside for discussion, and questions are always encouraged – but in both cases this is rather more directed and goal-orientated than in seminars, as the aim is to cover a set body of material and ideas more or less adequately in the available time (with one two-hour session a week, running material over into the next class is an absolutely last resort). An unplanned 5-10 minute digression on, say, whether a tyrant’s sexual proclivities are really relevant or even ascertainable, let alone getting into issues of power and sexual consent in suitable depth, could throw the rest of the lecture off-balance – but at the same time, simply closing down any such question isn’t an option.

And of course an additional consideration is that the lectures are being recorded, if I forget to pause the system during discussion sections – though this is probably a bigger concern if I embark on a comparison of the absence of strategic thinking in the government of the Roman Empire, its dependence on a confused mixture of tradition, institutional inertia, factional self-interest, pragmatism, knee-jerk reactions to events and rulers’ whims as a basis for decision-making, with, I dunno, the current UK regime…

One possibility – which I’m going to have to decide on quite quickly, as the class is at half twelve – would be to address the more general issue directly via Augustus and Syme’s Roman Revolution (and Zanker’s Power of Images). That is, avoid the trite pantomime villain analogies (and signal them as something worth avoiding) by acknowledging the established tradition of making sense of the Principate – even or especially a ‘good’ emperor like Augustus – through comparison with modern autocracy, and vice versa. Focus on systems, on formal and informal institutions, and on the potential pitfalls of such comparisons – giving license to students to analyse Trump in these terms while attempting to judge that analysis in a more productive direction.

Put another way: my classes don’t try to pretend that history is apolitical, or that the past has nothing to offer the present, but I certainly don’t seek to impose any sort of party line. Start peddling crude Great Man Theories of History, however, and you’ll get stomped…