Book Review: The Life of Roman Republicanism

The Life of Roman Republicanismby Joy ConnollyPrinceton University Press, 2014Joy Connolly is dean of humanities and a classics professor at New York University, but these things alone aren't sufficient explanation for the frequency with which her latest book, The Life of Roman Republicanism, lapses into borderline incomprehensibility. The departmental jargon of specialized academia is surely the more likely culprit - and the too-nice academic blinkers that so often accompany that jargon.Connolly proposes to examine the republican tradition of Ciceronian Rome through a close reading of three writers: Cicero himself (his Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws), Sallust, (his Catiline and Jugurtha), and Horace (the Satires). The trio is well-chosen: they complement each other in inherently interesting ways. And the project sounds promising - until midway through the first paragraph, where we're told, "Nor is my ultimate purpose to discern what these authors intended to convey to their original audience." Followed by: "I balance contextualist knowledge and regard for the words on the page with possible meanings that were not, perhaps because they could not be, expressed openly or given special emphasis in that originary moment."That's quite a lot of headwind for Page 1 of a book, regardless of the promise of its premise. It can feel a bit foolish hoping for clarity from an author working so hard to obfuscate ("contextualist" used here instead of the correct "contextual," and the nonsense-word "originary" used instead of "original," etc.), and things only fitfully improve from there on in. At one point Connolly relates a strange story from Sallust, in which Carthage and the Greek city of Cyrene fight over the boundary between them. After a series of wars, they decide to settle the dispute by each sending out rival teams of agents, who'll determine the boundary-lines according to where they happen to meet - and who'll consecrate those new lines by being buried alive at the borders. Since Connolly has already announced that she's not going to concern herself with what Sallust might have been trying to convey to his original audience, she's free to play:

... the story of the Carthaginian sacrifice directs attention to the fleshy experience of bodies facing death, as if their dramatic extremity grants the reader an embodied knowing of the world. Further, and rather mysteriously, Sallust's descriptions of the perceiving, moving, intentional, living-then-dead body show that far from being a passive instrument of the agent's will or an inert surface on which power inscribes itself, the body helps compose its environment.

It can be safely suspected that a prose so tortured with seminar-ready signifiers is intended solely for graduate students in textual theory ... indeed, perhaps solely for Connolly's graduate students, and nobody else's. It couldn't exclude the curious general reader more thoroughly if it were written in Klingon.The maddening part of all this is that Connolly displays on virtually every page of her book what Agatha Christie might have referred to as "a mind like a bacon-slicer." And her prose itself, when not chasing its own tale, can be exceptionally vigorous. One sample paragraph of this, about the curious dramatics that were so fundamental a part of the Roman public advocate's job, is thrillingly good:

The orator is an expert in the realm of opinion, not truth; he is the master of the realm of appearance; he fashions himself like a work of art; he seeks to project simultaneously consistency and adaptability. He can live with and negotiate political difference, because he has examined the fundamental conflicts in his own soul; he understands his history as a series of violent struggles; and he employs a strategy of self-acknowledgment that exposes the internally contradictory fragments of the speaking self, which in turn opens unexpected avenues of identification between the speaker and those who oppose him. This is an exemplary civic ethos.

This voice - thoroughly grounded in history and yet neatly evocative - is heard far too rarely in The Life of Roman Republicanism, shouted down by lecture-room argot of a type that never won a classics professor a wider audience. The strong suspicion that Connolly merits such a wider audience will keep her more dedicated readers hoping warily for her next book.