Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Philosophical norms and political attachments: Cicero and Seneca 435
I want to insert into the record the motions that were passed in heaven on
October 13, in the new year that began an era of great happiness. My account
will bear no taint of bias or spite: it is the objective truth. If someone
should ask me where I got my information, first of all, if I don’t feel like it,
I won’t answer. Who’s going to force me? I know that I was emancipated
from the moment he met his end – that man who was living proof of the
proverb, ‘One should be born either a king or a fool.’ If I feel like answering,
I’ll say whatever the fuck I please. Who ever required footnotes from a
historian? (Apoc.1)
How does the speaker present himself, and what sort of audience is he
presented as addressing? First of all, the person is a knowing political insider:
the parody use of official terminology marks his audience, too, as
knowing insiders. At the same time, the speaker also parodies the language
of historiography and its protestations of bias-free truth, and obviously
expects his audience to be in the know about this sort of writing
as well. (The joke being, clearly, that what is about to be a most spiteful
and biased account of Claudius is being presented as only the plain truth
– as, in a sense, it may be.)
Such a self-presentation is not inconsistent with Stoicism, but making
fun of the official and the historical in this light-hearted way is not a
familiar Stoic tactic. Moreover, the speaker’s cavalier attitude to his audience,
his use of flippant vulgarisms such as quod in buccam venerit, which
I have translated as “whatever the fuck I please”, to capture its vulgar yet
defiant tone, none of this suggests any sort of sobriety. 6 Indeed, there is
an unstable lurching tone, as the style slips from formal to very low –
rather as if a cork had just been taken out of a fizzy bottle and all the
drops were flying around in all directions, without control. 7 And indeed
there is a sense of sudden liberation, as the speaker celebrates a new absence
of constraint on political speech. “Who’s going to force me? I
know that I was emancipated from the moment he met his end.”
The speaker presents himself as lightheartedly celebrating the end of a
tyranny that prevented him from speaking freely – thus, as someone
who cares about politics and the changes it brings, who is vulnerable before
these changes. A Stoic could not say “I know I was emancipated
6 Bucca, the ancestor of French bouche, is not at this time a polite word for
“mouth”; it is difficult to know how coarse it is, but it is more in the neighborhood
of French gueule than French bouche. My translation assumes that in colloquial
American, “whatever the fuck I like” is not all that uncommon or all
that shocking, but just defiant and impolite.
7 I owe this lovely image to Richard Tarrant, in oral comments.