BMCR 2009.06.23: Capponi on Carsana, Utopia e utopie nel pensiero storico antico. Centro Ricerche e Documentazione sull'Antichita Classica. Monografie 30

Chiara Carsana, Maria Teresa Schettino (ed.), Utopia e utopie nel
pensiero storico antico. Centro Ricerche e Documentazione
sull'Antichita\ Classica. Monografie 30.  Roma:  "L'Erma" di
Bretschneider, 2008.  Pp. vi, 216.  ISBN 9788882654733.  EUR 110.00
(pb).

Reviewed by Livia Capponi, Newcastle University
([email protected])
Word count:  2900 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Utopianism is a fundamental category of Western political and
philosophical thought, and has also been at the centre of the modern
historiographical debate on the ancient world. The present volume,
originating from some papers delivered at two international conferences
of the Utopian Studies Society at Madrid and Porto in 2003 and 2004,
offers a variety of perspectives and analyses of various utopian
aspects of ancient thought, historiography, architecture and urban
planning, from the end of the Roman Republic up to the later Roman
Empire. Written in the footsteps of the earlier, pioneering works by
Santo Mazzarino, Moses Finley and Emilio Gabba,[[1]] this book presents
itself as a work-in-progress on the potential application of utopian
models to the Roman world, and will hopefully stimulate further debate
on this important, fascinating and, yet, often neglected topic.

The volume is divided up into three sections. The first tackles the
complex problem of the relationship between political action and
utopian theory. This section opens with Chiara Carsana's reflection on
the utopianism in the ancient theory of the so-called mixed
constitution. Carsana examines a series of Latin and Greek texts
containing retrospective utopia, that is, the idealised past or the
myth of an ancient ideal constitution as the model and constant
inspiration for the political choices of a state. The obvious precedent
for all these constitutional utopias is, obviously, the Republic of
Plato. In the Roman world, constitutional utopias are always elitist
and conservative. The ideal of the mixed constitution was present as
early as Isocrates (on Solon), and Polybius construes a peculiar
variation on the theme. In Polybius, the utopia of the mixed
constitution is not projected on the past, but on a foreign nation,
that is, Rome, while Cicero, by transporting the near past to a
mythical level in the De Republica, goes back to the projection of an
idealised Sullan constitution. Subsequently, Tacitus (in the fourth
book of the Annales) no longer believes in the ideal of the mixed
constitution, since in his aristocratic perspective every political
form should gravitate around the senate. However, in the same period
Dio of Prusa offers a radically different opinion, believing that the
mixed constitution has been happily realised. Aelius Aristides' praise
of Rome likewise voices the ideals of the Eastern e/lites.

The second contribution, by Sylvie Pittia, turns to the application of
utopian concepts to people, by looking at the image of the optimus
princeps in the Roman period, and specifically at the idealised
representation of emperors Tacitus and Probus in the Historia Augusta.
There, utopia may be traced in the elite concept of the optimus
princeps as the ideal senator. Tacitus is regarded as the ideal emperor
because he had returned some Republican prerogatives to the senate,
leaving the senate free to choose his successor, and similarly, Probus
represents the utopia of the fourth century: a restored, idealised
senate, and an army deprived of any political authority. Going back in
time, Pittia looks at a possible example of utopian literature of the
late Republic, Cicero's De legibus, which aims to offer new bases for
the Roman constitution. Cicero hopes for an evolution of the Roman
censorship as an institution capable of the custody of the laws, and
reflects on the problem of the education and morals of the politician.
For Pittia, whether Cicero was talking about an idealised world, or
about the reality of his own day, depends on whether this work was
written in the 50s BC or in the Caesarian period. In any case, the
Ciceronian model was never taken up by later thinkers - except,
perhaps, in the Letters of Sallust.

The third contribution, by Lucio Troiani, looks at some Jewish
apocryphal texts of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, that have come
down to us through the Christian manuscript tradition. In texts such as
the Prayer of Joseph, the Testament of Moses, the Apocalypse of
Sophonias, or the Greek Apocalypse of Enoch, utopia takes the form of
apocalyptic and visionary elements, such as predictions about the
succession of the empires and the end of times. Even in the so-called
Jewish historical literature, past events are often elevated to a
prophetic level, such as in Eupolemos, who chronicles the history of
the Jews from Moses to Solomon in the context of a (lost) work on the
prophecy of Elias; or in the historical drama on Exodus, which was
written in the second century BC by a Jewish playwright of Alexandria,
that emphasised and amplified biblical episodes, such as the dream of
Jacob, and adorned the biblical narrative with additional legends, such
as that of the Arabian phoenix. Perhaps, argues Troiani, it was
precisely against these literary trends that the Jewish philosopher
Aristoboulos, tutor of a Ptolemaic king, invited the readers of the
Bible not to degenerate into the mutho^des. Even in a historical book
of the Bible, 2 Maccabees, the writer often inserts episodes (such as
the apparition of angels) that are supernatural, possibly in order to
convince his readers that in history even the most sudden and
unexpected changes may happen. In Philo's exegetical works, too, Moses
and other celebrated figures of Jewish history become metahistorical
and idealised, and are transferred to a spiritual and speculative
dimension, with no link to human time and space.

The essay by Alessandro Galimberti concentrates on another case of
retrospective utopia. He shows that the constitutions of Draco, Solon
and Cleisthenes, along with the so-called third constitution, probably
devised by Demetrius of Phaleron, were among the ideal models of
politeia that Hadrian used when giving a new constitution to the
Athenians. All these models were crystallised by the Greek tradition as
perennial paradigms that could be applied to any state at any time.
Sometime in the first or second century AD, in addition, the Roman
juridical tradition began to draw a parallel between the Solonian
legislation and the decemviral legislation of the Twelve Tables, a
parallelism clearly in fashion in the Enchiridion and in the
commentaries by Gaius, both of the Hadrianic period. Conversely, the
biography of Hadrian in the Historia Augusta associated Hadrian's
legislation to that of King Numa, almost to redress the balance between
the Greek and Roman heritages (or in order to engage polemically with
Plutarch's preference for Lycurgus to Numa in the Bioi).

Maria Teresa Schettino analyses a well-known constitutional utopia,
namely the dialogue between Maecenas and Augustus in Book 52 of Cassius
Dio's Roman History. Dio's Maecenas advocates a moderate monarchy, with
a prominent role of the senate, as the best form of government of the
state. The problem is that the whole dialogue is a projection backwards
of political debates of the third century AD. In fact Septimius
Severus, whom Dio admired, referred to Augustus and Sulla as models --
not to Caesar, who had deprived the Senate of much power. The Severan
constitution must thus be regarded as a peculiar form of mixed
constitution that appealed to the elites of the Eastern Empire, because
these elites had just made their way into the Senate.

The section is closed by the contribution by Agne\s Molinier Arbo, who
analyses the figure of the optimus princeps in the Historia Augusta. In
this work the author, disillusioned about the past and future of the
empire, seeks refuge in the elaboration of unrealistic models, where
fantastic and imaginary elements prevail over the utopian one.

The second section of the book is devoted to the organisation of space,
both at the private level and with regard to the foundation of cities.
Renaud Robert looks at the antinomy between public and private space in
the Roman house, and identifies the latter as the possible space for
private utopias and evasion from the political preoccupations. In this
case, the concept of utopia must be sought in the ideal of otium that
governed the life of the Roman upper classes, both in the republican
and in the imperial period. The Roman house becomes the mediating space
between public and private life, to the point where the public space of
the forum or agora is gradually replaced by the atrium, the open space
for meetings and hearings in the domus. Traditional public spaces, such
as the peristilium, the library, the pinakotheke and even the basilica
(cf. Vitruvius, De Arch. 6.5.2) also enter the Roman private house,
and, furthermore, in houses modelled on the structure of the
Hellenistic palace the theatre plays a major part as a space of
aggregation and exchange with the outer world.

Elena Calandra focuses on a specific case, a macroscopic, almost
feverish operation of utopian creation of the Roman imperial period,
namely the foundation by Hadrian of Antinoe^ or Antinoupolis in Egypt
in honour of his boy-friend Antinous, drowned in the Nile on 22 October
130. The diffusion and elaboration of an idealised image of Antinous
itself shows the power of utopia as a means of communication and
propaganda in the ancient world. The ideal model for the city is, of
course, Athens, with its system of tribes and demes, assemblies and
deities. Before Hadrian, Hellenistic kings had founded new ideal
cities, like Hadrian, as a form of imitatio Alexandri: Seleucus I
Nicator created Antioch as a New Macedon, and, later, Constantine
reinvented Rome at Byzantium, while his mother restructured the holy
space for devotion in Palestine.

The third and last section collects a series of representations of
Other Worlds, with a utopian or dystopian character. The description of
unknown peoples, often living on remote islands, allows the writers to
describe extraordinary communities, with utopian governments and
egalitarian societies. The theme of the voyage is at the centre of the
first contribution, by Sandrina Cioccolo, which deals with the figures
of the sailor and the fisherman as the ideal king. In the ancient
sources the sea voyage became the metaphor of the quest for knowledge,
and therefore the voyage of Odysseus becomes the archetype of the
intellectual formation of the sage and the king.

The essay by the late Dino Ambaglio looks at the colourful catalogue of
second-hand utopias offered by Diodorus Siculus in his Historical
Library. Ambaglio argues that, although it is dangerous to interpret
all ancient descriptions of remote peoples and islands as positive
utopias, we can definitely detect in Diodorus a genuine interest in the
history of human progress. This interest mirrors the enlarged political
context of Diodorus' day, that is, the universal empire of Alexander
the Great further advanced by Rome. The Roman expansion, from Caesar
onwards, stimulated the exploration of the world, and consequently
promoted further ethnographical research on the populations recently
annexed to the oikoumene^. In his ethnic descriptions, which Diodorus
takes from sources almost entirely lost for us, such as Euhemerus,
Iamblichus, and Dionysius Skytobrachion, the historian did not feel
obliged to distinguish between mirabilia and reality. The desire to
encompass a universal space legitimised Diodorus to take into account
novelistic or fantastic elements and call them history.

Chiara Carsana analyses the extraordinary fortune of the work of Lucian
in the political and philosophical thought of modern utopians. Lucian's
narrative is not a political pamphlet, but an exquisitely meta-literary
narrative, which deploys imaginary voyages to other worlds as a means
to criticise human society. Lucian dreams up and represents alternative
systems, based on principles of justice and social equality, but
utterly unrealistic and impossible to apply to the contemporary world.
Even the representation of Hades as an alternative society built on
peace, justice, and on the absence of desires or passions, is a mere
literary fantasy, in which Lucian himself does not believe. Lucian's
ideals are not those of a political radical, but of a morally sensitive
intellectual, who regards money as the origin of the decadence of Roman
society.

Maria Teresa Schettino turns to the relationship between utopia and
voyage in a fragment of Theopompus (FGrHist 115 F 75c) as preserved in
Aelian's Varia Historia 3.18, written under Caracalla. Schettino warns
us that Aelian's account does not coincide with the original text of
Theopompus. In Aelian's representation of the world, the orbis terrarum
coincides with the extension of the Roman empire, and the Ocean was
seen as the extreme Western limit of the empire. Aelian's interest was
probably focalised on the populations situated in the North-Eastern
regions of the empire, consistently with the strategic plans of the
Severan court. Besides, in Aelian's ideological framework, the
territorial expansion and the political power of the Roman empire made
it difficult to imagine a better world than the actual one, hence
utopia became something mythical, impossible, or out of the earth,
exactly like the description of life on the moon in Lucian's Vera
Historia. This kind of ideal was certainly critical of the life on the
real world, but did not propose any alternative system in opposition to
the Roman imperial institutions. Schettino also points out that
Aelian's work is pervaded by Aelian's Isiac and Pythagorean religiosity
and by his belief in reincarnation (Aelian himself was a priest in the
temple of Isis at Praeneste). This peculiar spirituality must have
played a major role in his critique of the earlier and more material
utopia of Theopompus.

The volume ends with a contribution by Giuseppe Zecchini, examining a
series of texts of the late antique period, in which the description of
the contemporary situation of the empire is so anachronistic that it
could seem like an utopia. In particular, the De gentibus Indiae et
Bragmanibus by Palladius (V century) describes the voyage to India of a
scholasticus from Egyptian Thebes, who ends up on the mythical island
of Taprobane (Sri Lanka). This island presents analogies with other
utopian islands of the Hellenistic tradition; for instance, the
inhabitants live happy and extremely long lives. A strikingly odd
element is that these people are terrorised by the idea of being
invaded by the Roman empire, which they deem superior to themselves in
both military and political terms -- something not really credible for
the fifth century. Why did Palladius represent the Roman empire as
superior to any form of utopia? The late antique period was
particularly sensitive to military utopias that looked at the reigns of
Trajan and Hadrian as ideal times (Vegetius' Epitoma rei militaris,
addressed to Theodosius), or even celebrated the armed forces of the
age of Diocletian and Constantine (Synesius' Peri basileias, addressed
to Arcadius). Zecchini raises the important question whether these late
antique aspirations to a renewed strength of the Roman empire may be
regarded as utopias, or were just nostalgic revivals of the Roman
empire, or hopes that the contemporary army could manage to save the
empire from the crisis. He concludes that most authors of the fourth
and fifth centuries looked back not at the classical or the Augustan
period, but at a recent past, namely the Diocletianic-Constantinian
period, and at emperors such as Carinus and Galerius as the ideal
models for a renewal of the empire. It is because of our modern
awareness of the military crisis of the late antique period that we
cannot share with these authors their militant hope that the crisis
could be defeated by a reformed army and an improved administration.
The late antique period is also crucial as the time when Christianity
first negates and then overrates utopian aspirations, with Augustine's
De Civitate Dei, for instance, where the Christian version of the ideal
city supplants its Graeco-Roman counterpart for good. After the impact
of Christianity, echoes of the utopian constructions of the
Graeco-Roman period will resurface only with Erasmus and Thomas More.

This volume is presented in a beautiful and sophisticated, although a
little overpriced, editorial dress. It is certainly a very welcome
contribution to a debate, which is bound to be continued, as the
philosophical and the strictly literary perspectives of utopian
representations in antiquity are still open to further research. The
selection of topicsby the editors is varied and exhaustive, and the
contributions are both solidly researched and clearly presented. Chiara
Carsana and Maria Teresa Schettino should thus be congratulated on
their excellent and extremely helpful work, as both authors and
editors, of what will constitute a necessary read for all interested in
the ancient world and in the history of ideas.

Table of Contents

Introduzione 1

Parte I: Pensiero utopico e prassi politica
Chiara Carsana, Riflessioni sulla teoria della costituzione mista alla
luce del concetto di Utopia 17
Sylvie Pittia, La dimension utopique du traite/ cice/ronien De legibus
27
Lucio Troiani, L'Utopia in alcuni testi della letteratura ebraica di
eta\ greca 49
Alessandro Galimberti, Tra utopia e idealizzazione: Adriano, Dracone,
Solone 57
Maria Teresa Schettino, Storiografia, politica e utopia in Cassio Dione
79
Agne\s Moliner Arbo, L'optimus princeps dans l'Histoire Auguste:
mode\le politique ou figure utopique? 87

Parte II: Gli spazi dell'utopia
Renaud Robert, Priuata modo et domestica nos delectant. Espace
domestique, espace utopique? 109
Elena Calandra, La citta\ e il nome: progetto politico e utopia nella
fondazione di Antinoe 133

Parte III: Utopie e distopie: descrizioni di mondi ignoti
Sandrina Cioccolo, Il re-pescatore: il viaggio metafora di conoscenza
161
Dino Ambaglio, Un archivo di utopie di seconda mano: il caso di Diodoro
Siculo 169
Chiara Carsana, Gli altri mondi nella satira di Luciano 177
Maria Teresa Schettino, Viaggio nello spazio e nel tempo: critica di
Eliano all'utopia di Teopompo? 185
Giuseppe Zecchini, Utopie militari tardoantiche? 195

Personaggi storici e mitici e autori antichi 207

Popoli reali e mitici 213

Toponimi reali e mitici 215


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Notes:


1.   S. Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, Vol. 2, Roma--Bari
1966, 37-53, 412 n. 555;  M.I. Finley, Utopianism ancient and modern,
in The Use and Abuse of History, London 1975, 178-192, repr. in B.
Moore and K.H. Wolff (eds.), The Critical Spirit. Essays in Honor of
Herbert Marcuse, Boston 1967, 3-20; E. Gabba, True History and False
History in Classical Antiquity, JRS 71 (1981), 50-62, repr. (in
Italian) in Cultura classica e storiografia moderna, Bologna 1995,
23-29.