Maurizio Bettini

Weighty Words, Suspect Speech: Fari in Roman Culture

When he set out to recount the legend of Tarpeia—that ill-fated roman maiden who, out of love for the Sabine Tatius, allowed rome’s enemies inside her gates—Propertius did not neglect to preface his poem with a solemn declaration of his intentions, as was customary for ancient poets. Tradition demanded that this preamble somehow advertise the subject of the poem; only on this occasion, Propertius’s choice of words was rather particular (Elegiae 4.4.1–2):

Authority as ‘Resultant Voice’: Towards a Stylistic and Musical Anthropology of Effective Speech in Archaic Rome

Abstract Analysis of a large number of texts from the archaic period of Roman culture shows that the authoritative character of a solemn utterance (a prophecy, the formula uttered by a praetor, a religious praefatio) was based principally on specific sound patterns. From these utterances’ use of parallelisms, phonic echoes and syllabic repetitions there emerged a sort of ‘resultant voice’, which made their exceptional character immediately apparent. From the perspective of their intended hearers, the sound-construction of these pronouncements had the capacity to arouse what the Romans called delectatio: that is, the disposition to believe in the truth and validity of what they were hearing. That the Romans included all these acoustic phenomena within a single perceptual domain is demonstrated by the fact that music, too, had the power to produce delectatio—and by the fact that the verb cano and its derivatives refer as much to musical as to poetic expression.

Mythos/Fabula: Authoritative and Discredited Speech

mythos the reliable In the early Greek tradition—from Homer to Hesiod—the term mythos obviously meant “word,” “discourse,” and “account.” But anyone who would have expected mythos to come to be defined exclusively as an imaginative sacred tale or simply as a story not to be taken as fact—all of the meanings that the fortune of this word has accustomed us to—would be destined to disappointment. 1 In Homer and Hesiod, mythos does indeed indicate a discourse or account, but not the unbelievable kind. So much so that in order to label a discourse as false, it is not enough to define it as mythos; the term

Un'identità troppo compiuta. Troiani, Latini, Romani e Iulii nell'Eneide

Lazio; ma sa anche che, in cambio della fine delle ostilita, puo chiedere a Giove qualcosa che non dipende dal fatum:1 quando Troiani e Latini si sposeranno fra loro (cum iam conubiis pacemfeliribus, esto, component),2 possano i Latini restare Latini, mantenendo il loro nome, la loro lingua, i loro costumi... Giove sorride, e dopo aver ripetuto le varie voci che compongono il contratto, quasi a rassicurare formalmente la moglie sulla serieta del suo impegno, le concede quello che chiede.

Laughing at the Gods

The Charlie Hebdo shooting has tragically attracted new attention on a characteristic of the monotheistic religions that had been progressively overshadowed at least in Western societies: the impossibility of making fun of God and religion in general. On the contrary in Greek and Roman societies the practice of “laughing at the gods” was considered perfectly legitimate, as shown by a plurality of examples from Homer to Lucian of Samosata. The essay aims at describing the cultural motivations of this phenomenon, by emphasizing some of the most relevant differences between polytheistic and monotheistic religions.

Missing Cosmogonies. The Roman Case

I am not saying that the Romans, in the course of their history, did not at some time compose works dealing with the origin of the cosmos and of Man: they did, of course – but only after their city had already been in existence for six centuries and its citizens had acquired a great empire. Only at this point did Lucretius write the fifth book of De rerum natura, Vergil the sixth Eclogue, and Ovid the first book of his Metamorphoses. Naturally, in order to have something to speak about, I could have chosen one of these poems. That I have not done so owes to my interest in another aspect of the question: namely, why did the Romans wait so long to compose works of this kind? Why did they not do so earlier? This is the question I will try to answer – in the conviction that in order to understand a culture, sometimes it is as useful to reflect on what is absent from that culture as to study what is actually present in it. Surveying the most ancient Roman sources – or at any rate the texts describing the most ancient period of Rome – scarcely any reference at all can be found to cosmogonies, theogonies, or anthropogonies. The Etruscans, by contrast, have left at least one trace of a cosmogony. To explain this silence on the part of the Romans it may be tempting to follow the route once taken by Georges Dum zil, who suggested that the Romans – like other Indo-European peoples – did in fact once have myths of this kind. It is only that by the historical period they had forgotten these stories to such a degree that they were no longer recognizable. An explanation such as this can hardly be satisfying. If the scholar of ancient Rome were to accept this principle, he would have to become an expert in decoding “rebus” puzzles, capable of uncovering mythic