I am very aware that I haven’t blogged very much this term – mostly because of handling a full teaching load plus taking on the role of Undergraduate Education Lead solo. It’s not necessarily a difficult role, but it does have lots of fiddly moving parts, and involves a lot of e-mail and admin.
But! One very exciting thing that has just happened is that my article Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves: Roman Paracomedy and All-female Stage Space has just been published in Eugesta. It’s an open access publication so everyone can read it for free.
The story of this piece is, once again, one that begins before the pandemic, with a proposed collected volume; I wrote the first rough draft in my trashfire sabbatical, as a way to get myself into thinking about Roman drama and a run-up into the second Seneca book. So I wrote the first draft… and then the pandemic happened, and the volume went the way of all flesh, and other things took over. So last autumn, I sorted myself out, dug the piece out and had another go.
It was, I have to say, quite a pleasant experience, because to my great surprise, I discovered that the manuscript I’d pulled together and had left as a ‘we’ll come back to it’ actually had something quite interesting and valuable to say! It was a much quicker piece of work to get it polished up than I had feared, and the readers’ reports also really helped me articulate what it was I was trying to say. It’s been a very quick process, comparatively, and I’m delighted to have it out as my first piece of work around Roman drama.
The piece itself really draws on something I spotted about a decade ago about all-women spaces in Plautus, which I then realised was also happening in Seneca’s Trojan Women. I think I’ve come up with a rather elegant explanation about stock scenes, which is something the literature on Plautus vaguely gestures at but hasn’t really thought about in relationship to Seneca. Given some excellent recent work on how Seneca interacts with Plautus via stock characters, this feels like it’s a sensible step forward.
I’m fully aware that this suggestion won’t be to everyone’s taste, and that some people will find it rather a stretch, but I hope others will find it fruitful and a stimulus to new ways of thinking. My main goal, as anyone who I’ve taught Roman comic texts to in recent years will know, is trying to move the academic conversation on beyond Eduard Fraenkel’s Plautinisches im Plautus, a magisterial volume but very much reflecting the concerns of the time it was published, namely 1922. I think that, over a hundred years later, we can find other directions to take the conversation.
I’ve been writing a bit on here about the article on blogging that came out of a conference presentation at the start of 2024, and the odd meta nature of that experience. After some rather intense proof-wrangling, I’m glad to share that the article is now out in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition! Even better, the article is open access, which means that everyone can read it if they feel so inclined.
As you’ll see, the direction of the article moves from some general autobiographical reflection into some broader comment on the nature of blogging in the current internet environment. I hadn’t quite expected it to take that turn, not least because the original conference paper was firmly grounded in the autobiographical, but it turned out that I also had a lot to say about that more theoretical or abstract side of things. I will also admit that it was a very odd experience to send something through peer review that I knew, as an author, there was no way under the heavens of anonymising. For those of you not familiar with the process, when you submit a manuscript you are supposed to make sure there’s no trace of who you are in it (so putting ‘as Gloyn argues in…’ rather than ‘as I argued in…’ for the first instance, no names in the document, and so on); readers then read the piece ‘cold’ and offer their feedback without knowing who the author is; comments are then returned to the author without knowing who the reviewers are, thus ensuring that everything is totally unbiased and rational.
At least, that’s the theory… sometimes, you have a very strong suspicion of who an author or peer reviewer might, and sometimes you turn out to be completely wrong about that! There are ethical questions about what to do, as a peer reviewer, if you guess who the author is (for instance, if you get asked to review an article with the same title as a seminar paper that’s been doing the rounds of the departmental seminars for the last few months and you’ve not quite got around to attending). Declining to act as a reviewer if you get asked to review your best friend’s article that you’ve already looked at three times, for instance, is a fairly easy on. I once was asked to review a piece which then turned out to be by a friend; I knew their overall work well, but the existence of that particular article was unknown to me and I had no idea until they shared the title and said ‘I had some really great peer review comments!’ Sometimes you work out who the author is but it’s not someone you have any particular relationship with, in which case you have to ask yourself if you can offer comments in dispassionately despite knowing who the person is; if you can’t, then obviously you need to reject it. Of course, an article going ‘here is my blog, tell me you thoughts!’ is… well, it’s not behaving as it should do, really. Thankfully the editors of the special issue found a way to make it work, and I got some exceptionally useful peer review comments back to sharpen up the manuscript.
I think what really struck me, though, was that I thought this was a casual little paper, then a casual little article, but everyone who read it in various forms responded with ‘more of this! Or this! Or that!’ and suddenly it wasn’t such a little light-weight piece any more. It’s been one of those writing experiences where I’ve been incredibly grateful for the insight of others into precisely why what I’m writing about is important and significant; the time they gave to read my (not terribly well articulated) ideas and think some constructive thoughts about them really helped make the piece stronger. It also led to a place of slight frustration, in that there were some really big questions that I just didn’t have the word-count (or the time) to explore in the detail that they deserved. I don’t think I particularly want to explore those details in future work, but it was quite eye-opening about what had started as (to me) a very introspective project suddenly turned out to have far more implications than I’d realised.
My sabbatical year is drawing to an end. For various internal administrative reasons, I’ve now picked up the Undergraduate Education Lead role again; the academic year is all but put to bed, awaiting the few small administrative tweaks to get the release of results over the line, then graduations at the end of this month; following Jo Van Every’s advice, I start my academic writing year in July (so that the summer is the start of the year, not the ragged tail-end – it’s a mental trick, but an effective mental trick). This is probably the right moment to look back over my sabbatical plans and see how they’ve actually gone.
In a funny sort of way, I think this year has been a lot about exorcising ghosts. Or, given what I’ve been reading in Derrida’s Specters of Marx with the Magpie Theory Reading Group over the last month or so, perhaps the acknowledgement of ghosts. The image of the ghostly and the haunt have been surprisingly intellectually present this year, right from the start. Two articles that have, in different ways, been haunting my CV finally got off my desk; it’s not been smooth sailing for either of them, but they are both projects that predate the pandemic and now aren’t… stuck there. For one of those articles, the imagery and language of haunting turned out to be much more important than I anticipated; it’s not a dry-run of what might happen in the Seneca Redux book, but it might be a bit of a forerunner.
Seneca Redux has lurched to a bit of a stop over the summer term, but I’m hoping to pick it up over the vacation and get some more groundwork done. I now have a much better sense of what the book is going to try and do, and how various bits might fit together. I’m still not sure anyone else is going to read it, mind, but we’ll see. I have been dwelling with ghosts as part of that work, because nobody has yet thought about Seneca ghosts in a way that I think is satisfactory, but also because haunting is a helpful way of thinking about hereditary in a way that doesn’t get too genetic about it all. I’ve realised that there’s a lot about epigenetic trauma and circular abuse in Graeco-Roman myth, and in Senecan drama in particular, which is worth dwelling with. I could wish that I had got more done, but in the three months of official sabbatical, I planned out the project and got a draft chapter written, and I should probably be pleased with that at this stage. I might also wish I’d made more significant progress on the grant application that’s meant to go with the book manuscript, but I’m going to try and carve out some time for that over the summer (and you can’t do that too early on anyway).
A couple of things have turned up which weren’t in the plan, like the article about blogging, and a conference paper for the Classical Association conference this weekend (which should feed into the book one way or another). I also have a small article that’s grown out of some priest school coursework that I’m going to try and send off this week – I feel a little bit bad for opening another channel, but it would be lovely to get it out there.
In terms of non-ghostly things I’ve achieved over the sabbatical, I think I did pretty well at managing expectations of how much I was available! I’m taking it as a good sign that my colleagues and students recognise that if I set a boundary, I observe it. I also learned that I really object on a visceral level to teaching on a Monday. I don’t think I’ve done that since I was in Birmingham, and possibly not even then. There’s something about having Monday as a run-up, a day to prepare and get your ducks in line, before jumping into teaching on Tuesday or Wednesday – you get to mentally gear up for the week. Heading on to campus for Monday, so you get about half an hour in your office to scan e-mail, print what you need and then dive straight into teaching. The start of the week through the autumn term felt really quite harried, and it wasn’t until I realised I was missing my buffer that I understood why! I’m glad that my teaching will be returning to its normal pattern next academic year, even though other things will be changing.
Plenty of other things have happened this year, including the conclusion of my theological training – but that, I think, is another post.
A couple of weeks ago, completely out of the blue, I was delighted to receive an e-mail from the US Library of Congress asking permission to republish a piece I wrote on the blog many years ago about the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The film was included in the National Film Registry in 2004; the Library provide extended essays about the various films as additional resources for understanding the films, and it is both a great privilege and a rather lovely thing to have this piece up there doing that. You’ll need to scroll down to the entry for Seven Brides to see it, and it’s in PDF rather than a hyperlinked page, but it is there! Hopefully it will be helpful for people wanting to understand the classical reception elements of the film, and it’s good to have it made available as a specific resource within the National Film Registry.
More generally, this is also a lovely reminder that writing public scholarship on the internet can have surprising and exciting consequences. That piece is very much a personal response to watching an interesting bit of classical reception and having some thoughts about it; I certainly never wrote it with the intention that it would get picked up in this way, but here we are. Perhaps, even in the age of internet decay that we are living through, some of the good stuff is still getting through.
This is one of a series of posts designed to support students and teachers looking at the Love and Relationships unit of the OCR Classical Civilization A-level. You can find all the posts in the series by clicking on the OCR Seneca hashtag.
I’ve written before about whether you can be a Stoic and be in love. As a quick recap, the Roman Stoics have no problem with amor as a positive emotion between spouses, but they think it’s dangerous when it spirals out of control and becomes irrational affectus. However, there is a missing puzzle piece here – how does this emotional definition of amor and what we would now think of as sexual attraction fit together?
Take, for instance, the first stirrings of sexual desire as experienced in the early stages of a relationship. In Plato’s Symposium (210), the priestess Diotima is reported as saying that the first step is falling in love with beautiful bodies, which in turn unlocks a realisation that there is something more to beauty than just the body, and thus the mind of the lover begins to turn towards what is truly beautiful. I don’t think Seneca would necessarily disagree with this as a way of describing the journey towards fully rational amor; he knows, after all, that the sage is not born already in possession of sagehood, and that we are all likely to be gripped by irrational desires as we seek to uproot them. I think Seneca would become concerned if someone did not step back and consider the basis for their desire; it is not experiencing the initial impulse that is the problem, but acting on it without proper reflection. It would be entirely possible, for instance, to feel an intense physical attraction to a person, and then upon rational consideration to conclude that they were also attractive because of their reason (or potential for reason). I type this fully aware that people, particularly people in love, are excellent at self-delusion, and thus might pretend that they’ve engaged in the appropriate kind of rational reflection when they are kidding themselves; all the more reason to diligently root out such false thought patterns.
Similarly, while it’s clear that Seneca and the Stoics are in favour of procreative sex as something that is according to nature, it’s less clear what view they would take about sex purely for pleasure. Here I think it’s most helpful to turn to On The Tranquility Of The Mind, where Seneca says “let food tame hunger and drink thirst, let lust flow as is necessary” (cibus famem domet, potio sitim, libido qua necesse est fluat; 9.2). The parallel with hunger and thirst here is, I think, helpful; like them, libido or sexual attraction is a natural urge which the body has from time to time, and which should be satisfied. He doesn’t talk about it as something that is an enjoyable way to pass the time, but as a natural need the body experiences. Like hunger and thirst, it should be tended to in an appropriate and moderate manner; there is a satisfaction in satisfying it, but that satisfaction does not need to be acquired through the most indulgent means. When you think of lust as a physical appetite like this, it becomes easier to separate that from the kind of sexual overindulgence which would cross the line into irrational affectus.
Thinking about sex in terms of a leisure activity, then, is to frame the debate in rather modern terms. Seneca, I think, instead frames sexual attraction within a framework that has a clear separation behind what we might categorise as physical needs and emotional indulgence. There is no problem with feeling the former and meeting those needs, but the problem comes when someone begins to prioritise an irrational desire for the experience of meeting those needs.
A quick post for those who are interested in Stoicism – the Centre for the Study and Application of Stoicism will be holding its second one-day conference on Friday 20th June, from 9.45am to 5pm, in room 1 of Stewart House in Senate House. Everyone is welcome and no registration is necessary.
You can find the full program here. The overall goal of the event is to bring together the various different groups working on Stoic philosophy in contemporary contexts, and to report back on whether applying Stoic techniques to (for instance) anger management or mental health improvements actually works. This is an area in which a lot is said without proper cognitive studies to back it up, so the work being done by the people presenting is filling a really important hole between what we might called a vibes-based approach to applying Stoic ideas to modern problems and having a solid evidence base for what works, and whether it works better than other approaches.
This is one of a series of posts designed to support students and teachers looking at the Love and Relationships unit of the OCR Classical Civilization A-level. You can find all the posts in the series by clicking on the OCR Seneca hashtag.
When we expand our sense of what counts as a relationship for Seneca, we naturally come to the concept of friendship – a close relationship with another human. There’s a challenge for Stoicism here – friends run into the same problem as spouses when considered as indifferents, in that having friends might be considered a preferred indifferent, but it’s not something that’s necessary for virtue.
The Stoic sage, as you may recall, is entirely self-sufficient – he has everything within himself that he needs in order to live a good, a rational and a happy life. However, if this is the case, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether there is any point in having relationships with other humans – does that mean that friendships aren’t worthwhile? If it’s any consolation, this is exactly the question that Seneca puts in the mouth of Lucilius when he writes to him in the Moral Epistles, where he begins Letter 9 by saying “you desire to know whether Epicurus is right when, in one of his letters, he rebukes those who hold that the wise man is self-sufficient and for that reason does not stand in need of friendship” (trans. Gummere). The word Gummere translates as ‘in need of’, indigere, is a bit stronger than I think the English quite manages; ‘require’ might be better here, or ‘feel the absence of’. That is, the Stoics argue that the wise man will not mind if he does not have friends, because he is self-sufficient; Epicurus was clearly unconvinced by the argument.
In order to buy into the Stoic position, I think you also need to buy into the principle of indifferents. It isn’t that the wise man will not seek out friends if he is given the opportunity, or that he does not think that friendship has a value; it is that if, for whatever reason, he finds himself isolated on a desert island or left alone in the city during the summer, the absence of friends will not impact or damage his virtue, and thus his happiness. Since friends are a preferred indifferent, we will seek friendship; since they remain, nonetheless, an indifferent, if there are no friends (or no suitable friends) available, then that will not affect our ability to behave rationally and pursue virtue.
I mention the importance of suitable friends because the question of who one spends time with is something that Seneca feels is important for Lucilius (along with his wider readership) to get his head around in the Moral Letters. He addresses this question right at the beginning of the collection, in Letter 3. The scenario Seneca sets up is that Lucilius has sent him a letter via someone described as an amicus or ‘friend’, but at the same time has told him not to discuss anything about Lucilius with him. This gives Seneca a springboard to essentially ask why on earth Lucilius is calling him a friend if he’s nothing of the kind, as if you call someone you don’t trust as you trust yourself, then you haven’t actually understood the true nature of friendship (3.2).
Seneca goes on to give guidance for how to make friends – think over whether to admit a person as a friend for a long time, but when you have made that decision, open up your whole self to them, and share all your worries and concerns (3.2-3). When you are with a friend, you should feel like you are with yourself (3.3). This is a very different standard of friendship than that which pervaded elite Roman circles, where amicitia formed an important part of the social obligations between politicians and business partners – Seneca asks for friendship to become elevated into something precious which supports us and guides us, not something that is cheaply given. In this, Seneca’s attitude to friendship is very similar to his attitude to marriage. Both friendship and marriage themselves, as abstract constructs, are indifferents; what makes the difference is the moral qualities of the people who enter into those relationships.
A quick note to say that I had the pleasure of appearing on the Classical Antiquity Sidequest podcast this week, talking about Seneca and his letters – you can find the Youtube link to the audio here, and the blog post of the podcast is here. (The podcast is also on the usual platforms.)
This podcast was particularly fun to do because it lined up with the work I’ve been doing on the new edition of the Penguin edition of Seneca’s letters; I’ve just head that the corrected proofs have been sent over to the typesetters, so fingers crossed it won’t be long until I’ll have some more exciting news to share.
Classically Inclined 