Isaia Crosson
I am a Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Philology, and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia and Fordham University. My dissertation, "Lucan's Mutilated Voice: The Poetics of Incompleteness in Roman Epic", explores the ways in which Lucan shapes the body of the text according to anti-Aristotelian parameters, thus anticipating modern and post-modern interpretations of historical reality as disunity and incompleteness.
My main area of interest is Roman literature, with an emphasis on epic and drama; the aesthetics of the body of the text in ancient and modern poetry; trauma studies and the representation of large-scale trauma in literature.
My method is multidisciplinary: I bring together features of aesthetics, epistemology and sociology in an attempt to reassess the criteria informing the theme, content and ideology of ancient and modern texts.
To read more, please visit the page below:
http://classics.columbia.edu/isaia-m-crosson
In my free time I enjoy photography, and I held exhibits in NYC and in Italy:
www.isaiacrosson.com
Supervisors: Gareth D. Williams (Columbia University), Katharina Volk (Columbia University), Matthew Leigh (Oxford University), Stephanie A. Frampton (MIT), and Kristina Milnor (Columbia University)
Address: 604 Hamilton Hall
1130 Amsterdam Avenue
10027 New York, NY
My main area of interest is Roman literature, with an emphasis on epic and drama; the aesthetics of the body of the text in ancient and modern poetry; trauma studies and the representation of large-scale trauma in literature.
My method is multidisciplinary: I bring together features of aesthetics, epistemology and sociology in an attempt to reassess the criteria informing the theme, content and ideology of ancient and modern texts.
To read more, please visit the page below:
http://classics.columbia.edu/isaia-m-crosson
In my free time I enjoy photography, and I held exhibits in NYC and in Italy:
www.isaiacrosson.com
Supervisors: Gareth D. Williams (Columbia University), Katharina Volk (Columbia University), Matthew Leigh (Oxford University), Stephanie A. Frampton (MIT), and Kristina Milnor (Columbia University)
Address: 604 Hamilton Hall
1130 Amsterdam Avenue
10027 New York, NY
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Conference Presentations by Isaia Crosson
In book 1, Lucan announces that great things come crashing upon themselves (in se magna ruunt): it is a destiny shared by all, from Marius and Sulla to Pompey the Great, who went from glorious victories on the battlefield to resembling an old oak. Only Caesar appears to be immune to this universal law: since his crossing of the Rubicon against the will of divinized Roma, Lucan has granted Caesar an almost omnipotent power (Henderson 20102). Episodes like Ilerda in book 4, where Caesar is said to recognize the favor of Fortune and heaven in his military and moral triumph; or like the storm of the Adriatic in book 5, where he hybristically challenges the gods and nature and yet suffers no harm; or like Pharsalus in book 7, where he dares to banquet among the corpses of his fellow-citizens without paying a price for his unprecedented impiety, all seem to corroborate the view that Caesar can do anything he wishes. Book 3 offers perhaps the most excellent example of this: Caesar cuts down a grove sacred to Druidic gods and explicitly states that he has committed a nefarious deed (... me fecisse nefas). As Keith has convincingly argued, Lucan resorts to subtle intertextual allusions to recall the impiety of Ovid's Erysichthon and Narcissus in this episode. And yet, no Ovidian nemesis strikes Caesar down. In other words, Caesar persistently contributes to creating the very subject-matter of Lucan's poem, the nefas of civil war, but never incurs a punishment. Stover, Ahl and others, who think that the poem is unfinished, believe that Lucan might have eventually portrayed the Ides of March in terms of a divine nemesis against the Roman tyrant.
However, I believe that Caesar's punishment occurs within the boundaries of the poem as we have it, making book 10 an ideal endpoint for Lucan's epic. At the beginning of book 10, Lucan unexpectedly divests Caesar of his quasi-Jovian power and turns him into a man full of fear. Later on, after Pothinus' troops surround the palace of Alexandria, Caesar is even compared to a child (puer) and a woman (femina). This characterization of Caesar is unique not only if we compare it with that of the preceding nine books of Lucan's De Bello Civili, but also if we compare it with that of all extant historical sources (including Caesar's own commentarius). Towards the end of book 10, Caesar is paralyzed: he cannot act anymore, and he cannot even think clearly. For the first time, then, he is completely unable to create nefas. This, I believe, is an excellent endpoint for Lucan's narrative, because it allows the poet to recall the end of Caesar's own version of the civil war and to avoid recounting the far worse nefas of Caesar's final suppression of the Republic (cf. Tracy 2011).
Against the wicked will of heaven and Fortune, who have elevated men like Caesar to the rank of the superi, it is the poet himself who chooses to put an end to the nefas he has recounted down to book 10. Thus, Lucan grants supernatural proportions to the character of Caesar only in order to strike him down most vehemently at the end: even the ultimate maker of nefas must eventually crash down upon himself. So does also Lucan's poem, an inmensum opus subject to the very destiny of his protagonists.
In the De Imitatione, Dionysius claims that neither Thucydides’ style, nor his subject matter is worth imitating. In the De Thucydide he seems to express a more objective judgment (Weaire 2005; Grube 1950): while pointing to flaws (κακίαι) in Thucydides’ arrangement of events, convoluted style and biased depiction of Athens, Dionysius also devotes some space to his predecessor’s qualities (ἀρεταί): devotion to the truth, which corresponds to the rejection of mythical elements (τὸ μυθῶδες), is the most important ἀρετή. Recent scholarship (Irwin 2015, Luraghi 2003) points to the fact that Dionysius’ opinion of Thucydides in the De Imitatione is not in contrast with that expressed in the De Thucydide, because the praise of Thucydides in the latter essay is merely a captatio benevolentiae aimed at captivating the reader. Although I agree with this, I believe that there is more to Dionysius’ rhetoric. In fact, the introductory chapters of the De Thucydide reveal a systematic, yet implicit, attempt at imitating the History, teaching the reader simultaneously how to read and to emulate Thucydides.
At the beginning of his essay (Thuc. 2), Dionysius adopts a position analogous to that of Thucydides: whereas most men accept the latter’s account without question, only Dionysius understands the truth about Thucydides, a writer biased in his nature (χαρακτήρ). Similarly, Thucydides criticizes men’s uncritical acceptance of ready-made accounts and claims that only he was able to discover the truth about the Peloponnesian War.
A second parallel can be seen in Dionysius’s survey of ancient historians (Thuc. 5-6), after which the uniqueness of Thucydides becomes all the more manifest (Toye 1995). In the History, the survey of events preceding the Peloponnesian War shows that no earlier military endeavor was as exceptional as the war between Athens and Sparta (Hornblower 1991).
Dionysius goes further, for he appropriates Thucydides’ techniques of persuasion, based on repetition and accumulation rather than on proof (Plant 1999). In fact, it is by accumulating statements that emphasize the difficulty of his enterprise (1.20.1; 1.22.1; 1.22.3) and discrediting the reputation of others (1.20.3; 1.21.2) that Thucydides appears irrefutable, even though he may not be. Dionysius does the same: he discredits his critics (Thuc. 2), subject to envy or arrogance, and he accumulates statements on his unbiased attitude in order to appear irrefutable (Thuc. 2, 4, 8). Truth itself becomes a topos of persuasion in both authors. Despite his apparent rejection of τὸ μυθῶδες, Thucydides resorts to mythical characters (Hellen, Deucalion...). A mythical framework of events is in fact necessary to make Thucydides’ work acceptable to as large a Panhellenic audience as possible (Howie 1998). Since Dionysius refers to the rejection of myth as Thucydides’ most praiseworthy means to achieve the truth (Thuc. 7), it appears that also Dionysius is trying to persuade his readers of something untrue. One reason may be that he himself resorts to myth in his Antiquitates Romanae, because he wants to produce an idealized account of Rome (Fox 1993). Despite claims to truthfulness and lack of bias, Dionysius incurs the same κακίαι as his predecessor, but he is equally canny about not seeming to do so. Dionysius’ appropriation of Thucydides’ rhetoric shows the very power of this rhetoric and is the most effective way to prove that the History is flawed.
In the De Thucydide, Dionysius maintains the same opinion he had in the De Imitatione. However, his criticism, subtler than in earlier essays, takes the form of direct imitation of Thucydides’ χαρακτήρ.
In this paper I argue that Plato’s eschatological model, illustrated in the myth of Er, has its core in a fourth type of torture, which I call metaphysical and define as a point of intersection between Gagarin’s types: the metaphysical torture shares the punitive purpose of penal torture, the coercive violence of judicial torture, and the rhetorical threat of evidentiary torture. Its function in the myth is to chastise the guilty through hyperbolic representations of pain, thus deterring the living from immoral acts. According to my view, Plato encloses in a myth all the forms of punishment existing in Athens (whether in practice or in words) in order to make torture after death as dreadful as possible. He thus reaffirms his teleology: the supernatural world tends to the supreme good. The realism, crudeness and infallibility of metaphysical torture all contribute to fortifying this Platonic idea: in Er’s vision, every human deed is subordinate to an insurmountable system of justice, a reverberation of the good permeating all things.
Given the highly educational value of the myth of Er, I disagree with Annas (Annas 1981) and Cerri (Cerri 2000): the tale is not an inconsistent addendum, nor a contradiction of the ideas developed in the previous nine books of the Republic. Rather, it is the enactment of precepts already stated at 2.377a-380d: if useful to the education of future citizens, tales (μύθοι) shall be impressed upon (ἐνσημήνασθαι) their minds. While displaying a teleological effort, Er’s vision also reaffirms the essence of the Socratic ethical core: the personal care of the soul. In 10.612a-b, it is stated that justice in itself is the best thing for the soul, and every soul ought to pursue justice. By using his μύθος as a rhetorical device of dissuasion from evil (De Luise 2007), Plato shows that unjust souls are destined to suffer, and that men should educate their souls to be just. In order to be still more persuasive, Plato has his Er describe a world comparable to the material one, and specifically to the judicial reality of Athens. The Athenian penal system, however, is perfected in the afterlife: punishments become infallible and the sinful pay a penalty far greater than each wrong they perpetrated. In chronological terms, this means ten times a hundred years. As for the nature of the punishment, Plato refuses to theorize and quantify it. Rather, he uses the example of the tyrant Ardiaeus (10.615d-616a), whose soul is described in terms of a suffering body. Careful to achieve the same realism as the orators do in resorting to evidentiary torture (for example, Dem. 18.133), the philosopher gives the soul corporeal plasticity and disfigures it: Ardiaeus is bound, flayed alive and mutilated with thorns. As Foucault (Foucault 1975) observes, “from the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime”.
By ascribing the Athenian tripartite system of torture to a fictive, supernatural world, Plato practices what Socrates theorized in book 2: his mythical sinners leave an indelible impression (σημαίνοντες) upon the minds of those contemplating them. The pain of the dead educates the living towards recognition of the good.
My paper consists of two parts: first, it argues that whether we date the ARD in the 50's or in the 40's and whether Caesar's plan for reconstituting the mos maiorum was more or less defined, it is wrong to decontextualize Varro's work from the inflamed politics of its time. The preponderant role of theologia civilis (whose preeminence over the other two kinds – mythica et naturalis – is first proclaimed by Varro himself, as Boyancé pointed out) demonstrates that the author had some kind of political agenda: the entire project of the Antiquitates is orchestrated according to the civic function of religion, according to whether religion is useful to the civitas, and if so, how. Since civitates priores sunt quam ea, quae a civitatibus instituta sunt (Cardauns 5), the antiquities of men (ARH) must precede those of the gods; in addition, even in the ARD only the last three books strictly pertain to the gods and their nature, because the worship of such deities depends on the politicians selecting them. Furthermore, Cardauns 2 (and the testimonium of Aug. Civ. 3.17) leaves no doubt about the preoccupation triggering the antiquarian's endeavor: the Roman deities ought to be saved from civium neglegentia and to be preserved in memoria bonorum. These words evoke Cicero's political theory, highly concerned with the identification of good (boni) citizens and rulers (Rep. 2.51).
And yet, if the ARD fulfills a political function, we have to face the issues related to its date of composition, the relationship between Caesar (the dedicatee) and his dedicator and the fragments apparently disconnected from politics. How is it possible to respond to these issues? A new approach, as I set out in the second half of my paper – focusing on what I call a “civically didactic goal” – is the following: Varro’s political contribution in the ARD is to establish the religious identity of the ideal Roman citizens, providing the necessary information for the boni both of his generation and of the generations to come. Varro does so by the same investigative method he resorts to elsewhere: antiquarian collection (Rüpke). It is true that despite the fragmentary nature of the ARD and the multiplicity of its themes a unifying motive can be detected. However, this is neither to illustrate Caesar's reforms, nor to recover the past for the sake of preserving it, nor to demonstrate the philosophical truth hidden behind the gods. Instead, Varro gathers the material his fellow-citizens need in order to be the gubernatores civitatis Cicero hopes for. As far as state cult is concerned, this implies their ability to select the best gods for the public worship and to tailor religion to the welfare of the urbs (Cardauns 10, 20, 21, 32; cf. Aug. Civ. 3.4). If we accept this interpretation, even the fragments concerned with obsolescent rituals and etymology become important from a political perspective: all together they contribute to forge the Roman national identity, later sponsored by the Augustan propaganda.
Book Reviews by Isaia Crosson
Papers by Isaia Crosson
Books by Isaia Crosson
In book 1, Lucan announces that great things come crashing upon themselves (in se magna ruunt): it is a destiny shared by all, from Marius and Sulla to Pompey the Great, who went from glorious victories on the battlefield to resembling an old oak. Only Caesar appears to be immune to this universal law: since his crossing of the Rubicon against the will of divinized Roma, Lucan has granted Caesar an almost omnipotent power (Henderson 20102). Episodes like Ilerda in book 4, where Caesar is said to recognize the favor of Fortune and heaven in his military and moral triumph; or like the storm of the Adriatic in book 5, where he hybristically challenges the gods and nature and yet suffers no harm; or like Pharsalus in book 7, where he dares to banquet among the corpses of his fellow-citizens without paying a price for his unprecedented impiety, all seem to corroborate the view that Caesar can do anything he wishes. Book 3 offers perhaps the most excellent example of this: Caesar cuts down a grove sacred to Druidic gods and explicitly states that he has committed a nefarious deed (... me fecisse nefas). As Keith has convincingly argued, Lucan resorts to subtle intertextual allusions to recall the impiety of Ovid's Erysichthon and Narcissus in this episode. And yet, no Ovidian nemesis strikes Caesar down. In other words, Caesar persistently contributes to creating the very subject-matter of Lucan's poem, the nefas of civil war, but never incurs a punishment. Stover, Ahl and others, who think that the poem is unfinished, believe that Lucan might have eventually portrayed the Ides of March in terms of a divine nemesis against the Roman tyrant.
However, I believe that Caesar's punishment occurs within the boundaries of the poem as we have it, making book 10 an ideal endpoint for Lucan's epic. At the beginning of book 10, Lucan unexpectedly divests Caesar of his quasi-Jovian power and turns him into a man full of fear. Later on, after Pothinus' troops surround the palace of Alexandria, Caesar is even compared to a child (puer) and a woman (femina). This characterization of Caesar is unique not only if we compare it with that of the preceding nine books of Lucan's De Bello Civili, but also if we compare it with that of all extant historical sources (including Caesar's own commentarius). Towards the end of book 10, Caesar is paralyzed: he cannot act anymore, and he cannot even think clearly. For the first time, then, he is completely unable to create nefas. This, I believe, is an excellent endpoint for Lucan's narrative, because it allows the poet to recall the end of Caesar's own version of the civil war and to avoid recounting the far worse nefas of Caesar's final suppression of the Republic (cf. Tracy 2011).
Against the wicked will of heaven and Fortune, who have elevated men like Caesar to the rank of the superi, it is the poet himself who chooses to put an end to the nefas he has recounted down to book 10. Thus, Lucan grants supernatural proportions to the character of Caesar only in order to strike him down most vehemently at the end: even the ultimate maker of nefas must eventually crash down upon himself. So does also Lucan's poem, an inmensum opus subject to the very destiny of his protagonists.
In the De Imitatione, Dionysius claims that neither Thucydides’ style, nor his subject matter is worth imitating. In the De Thucydide he seems to express a more objective judgment (Weaire 2005; Grube 1950): while pointing to flaws (κακίαι) in Thucydides’ arrangement of events, convoluted style and biased depiction of Athens, Dionysius also devotes some space to his predecessor’s qualities (ἀρεταί): devotion to the truth, which corresponds to the rejection of mythical elements (τὸ μυθῶδες), is the most important ἀρετή. Recent scholarship (Irwin 2015, Luraghi 2003) points to the fact that Dionysius’ opinion of Thucydides in the De Imitatione is not in contrast with that expressed in the De Thucydide, because the praise of Thucydides in the latter essay is merely a captatio benevolentiae aimed at captivating the reader. Although I agree with this, I believe that there is more to Dionysius’ rhetoric. In fact, the introductory chapters of the De Thucydide reveal a systematic, yet implicit, attempt at imitating the History, teaching the reader simultaneously how to read and to emulate Thucydides.
At the beginning of his essay (Thuc. 2), Dionysius adopts a position analogous to that of Thucydides: whereas most men accept the latter’s account without question, only Dionysius understands the truth about Thucydides, a writer biased in his nature (χαρακτήρ). Similarly, Thucydides criticizes men’s uncritical acceptance of ready-made accounts and claims that only he was able to discover the truth about the Peloponnesian War.
A second parallel can be seen in Dionysius’s survey of ancient historians (Thuc. 5-6), after which the uniqueness of Thucydides becomes all the more manifest (Toye 1995). In the History, the survey of events preceding the Peloponnesian War shows that no earlier military endeavor was as exceptional as the war between Athens and Sparta (Hornblower 1991).
Dionysius goes further, for he appropriates Thucydides’ techniques of persuasion, based on repetition and accumulation rather than on proof (Plant 1999). In fact, it is by accumulating statements that emphasize the difficulty of his enterprise (1.20.1; 1.22.1; 1.22.3) and discrediting the reputation of others (1.20.3; 1.21.2) that Thucydides appears irrefutable, even though he may not be. Dionysius does the same: he discredits his critics (Thuc. 2), subject to envy or arrogance, and he accumulates statements on his unbiased attitude in order to appear irrefutable (Thuc. 2, 4, 8). Truth itself becomes a topos of persuasion in both authors. Despite his apparent rejection of τὸ μυθῶδες, Thucydides resorts to mythical characters (Hellen, Deucalion...). A mythical framework of events is in fact necessary to make Thucydides’ work acceptable to as large a Panhellenic audience as possible (Howie 1998). Since Dionysius refers to the rejection of myth as Thucydides’ most praiseworthy means to achieve the truth (Thuc. 7), it appears that also Dionysius is trying to persuade his readers of something untrue. One reason may be that he himself resorts to myth in his Antiquitates Romanae, because he wants to produce an idealized account of Rome (Fox 1993). Despite claims to truthfulness and lack of bias, Dionysius incurs the same κακίαι as his predecessor, but he is equally canny about not seeming to do so. Dionysius’ appropriation of Thucydides’ rhetoric shows the very power of this rhetoric and is the most effective way to prove that the History is flawed.
In the De Thucydide, Dionysius maintains the same opinion he had in the De Imitatione. However, his criticism, subtler than in earlier essays, takes the form of direct imitation of Thucydides’ χαρακτήρ.
In this paper I argue that Plato’s eschatological model, illustrated in the myth of Er, has its core in a fourth type of torture, which I call metaphysical and define as a point of intersection between Gagarin’s types: the metaphysical torture shares the punitive purpose of penal torture, the coercive violence of judicial torture, and the rhetorical threat of evidentiary torture. Its function in the myth is to chastise the guilty through hyperbolic representations of pain, thus deterring the living from immoral acts. According to my view, Plato encloses in a myth all the forms of punishment existing in Athens (whether in practice or in words) in order to make torture after death as dreadful as possible. He thus reaffirms his teleology: the supernatural world tends to the supreme good. The realism, crudeness and infallibility of metaphysical torture all contribute to fortifying this Platonic idea: in Er’s vision, every human deed is subordinate to an insurmountable system of justice, a reverberation of the good permeating all things.
Given the highly educational value of the myth of Er, I disagree with Annas (Annas 1981) and Cerri (Cerri 2000): the tale is not an inconsistent addendum, nor a contradiction of the ideas developed in the previous nine books of the Republic. Rather, it is the enactment of precepts already stated at 2.377a-380d: if useful to the education of future citizens, tales (μύθοι) shall be impressed upon (ἐνσημήνασθαι) their minds. While displaying a teleological effort, Er’s vision also reaffirms the essence of the Socratic ethical core: the personal care of the soul. In 10.612a-b, it is stated that justice in itself is the best thing for the soul, and every soul ought to pursue justice. By using his μύθος as a rhetorical device of dissuasion from evil (De Luise 2007), Plato shows that unjust souls are destined to suffer, and that men should educate their souls to be just. In order to be still more persuasive, Plato has his Er describe a world comparable to the material one, and specifically to the judicial reality of Athens. The Athenian penal system, however, is perfected in the afterlife: punishments become infallible and the sinful pay a penalty far greater than each wrong they perpetrated. In chronological terms, this means ten times a hundred years. As for the nature of the punishment, Plato refuses to theorize and quantify it. Rather, he uses the example of the tyrant Ardiaeus (10.615d-616a), whose soul is described in terms of a suffering body. Careful to achieve the same realism as the orators do in resorting to evidentiary torture (for example, Dem. 18.133), the philosopher gives the soul corporeal plasticity and disfigures it: Ardiaeus is bound, flayed alive and mutilated with thorns. As Foucault (Foucault 1975) observes, “from the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime”.
By ascribing the Athenian tripartite system of torture to a fictive, supernatural world, Plato practices what Socrates theorized in book 2: his mythical sinners leave an indelible impression (σημαίνοντες) upon the minds of those contemplating them. The pain of the dead educates the living towards recognition of the good.
My paper consists of two parts: first, it argues that whether we date the ARD in the 50's or in the 40's and whether Caesar's plan for reconstituting the mos maiorum was more or less defined, it is wrong to decontextualize Varro's work from the inflamed politics of its time. The preponderant role of theologia civilis (whose preeminence over the other two kinds – mythica et naturalis – is first proclaimed by Varro himself, as Boyancé pointed out) demonstrates that the author had some kind of political agenda: the entire project of the Antiquitates is orchestrated according to the civic function of religion, according to whether religion is useful to the civitas, and if so, how. Since civitates priores sunt quam ea, quae a civitatibus instituta sunt (Cardauns 5), the antiquities of men (ARH) must precede those of the gods; in addition, even in the ARD only the last three books strictly pertain to the gods and their nature, because the worship of such deities depends on the politicians selecting them. Furthermore, Cardauns 2 (and the testimonium of Aug. Civ. 3.17) leaves no doubt about the preoccupation triggering the antiquarian's endeavor: the Roman deities ought to be saved from civium neglegentia and to be preserved in memoria bonorum. These words evoke Cicero's political theory, highly concerned with the identification of good (boni) citizens and rulers (Rep. 2.51).
And yet, if the ARD fulfills a political function, we have to face the issues related to its date of composition, the relationship between Caesar (the dedicatee) and his dedicator and the fragments apparently disconnected from politics. How is it possible to respond to these issues? A new approach, as I set out in the second half of my paper – focusing on what I call a “civically didactic goal” – is the following: Varro’s political contribution in the ARD is to establish the religious identity of the ideal Roman citizens, providing the necessary information for the boni both of his generation and of the generations to come. Varro does so by the same investigative method he resorts to elsewhere: antiquarian collection (Rüpke). It is true that despite the fragmentary nature of the ARD and the multiplicity of its themes a unifying motive can be detected. However, this is neither to illustrate Caesar's reforms, nor to recover the past for the sake of preserving it, nor to demonstrate the philosophical truth hidden behind the gods. Instead, Varro gathers the material his fellow-citizens need in order to be the gubernatores civitatis Cicero hopes for. As far as state cult is concerned, this implies their ability to select the best gods for the public worship and to tailor religion to the welfare of the urbs (Cardauns 10, 20, 21, 32; cf. Aug. Civ. 3.4). If we accept this interpretation, even the fragments concerned with obsolescent rituals and etymology become important from a political perspective: all together they contribute to forge the Roman national identity, later sponsored by the Augustan propaganda.