latrones - Get a Free Blog

IMPERIAL CHALLENGERS: BULLA FELIX AND MATERNUS
pales next to a barbaric affair of human sacrifice and cannibalism that makes
the reader’s flesh crawl. The same literary device was exploited by Achilles
Tatius, a contemporary of Dio and author of the novel Leucippe and Cleitophon. 96
The older view was that the case of ritual murder supposedly carried out by
Bukoloi, as reported by Dio, may have inspired Tatius and other writers of
entertaining literature down to Heliodorus to work up the theme in their
stories. 97 However, an attractive proposal by J. Winkler – albeit in the last
resort unprovable – suggests the opposite: it was probably the cannibalistic
episodes of the novels (set in rural backgrounds) that moved Dio to embellish
his account of the uprising in the Nile delta. 98 In Winkler’s view, the
literary motif, serving in the first instance to give some colour to the dry
historical narrative, was deployed further to discredit the Bukoloi, who anyway
counted little with Dio and his readers, by attributing to them the most
monstrous of crimes. Dio’s account could rely on a fair credence since there
was strong public belief in cannibalism among the Bukoloi. 99
This is not the place to determine whether such an act was dreamed up by
a novelist or an historian. The use of the motif seems to be more in the style
of Herodian, well known for his ornate descriptions, 100 than of the comparatively
serious Dio. This makes all the more remarkable the strong sense of
atmosphere with which Dio infuses the books dealing with his own day
in his description of the Bukoloi uprising and in his other robber stories. In
this aspect of his historiography, already characterised as his perception of
crisis, he reveals himself close to the work of Herodian and the novels of his
day. At the same time, this shows the taste of the late-second/early-thirdcentury
reader, who clearly liked to see literary variations on such themes.
That tales of impudent bandits, such as the Bukoloi, Maternus, Claudius
and Bulla Felix, pleased contemporary taste is shown by the novels of Achilles
Tatius and Lollianus, which, surely hardly accidentally, abound in brigands.
This choice of theme – a particular inclination towards accounts of disturbing
(because exotic, horrific or scandalous) happenings – linked the writers
of the period, be they historians or novelists, with each other and with their
readers. If we may interpret this theme as characteristic of a literary taste
formed by its age and circumstances, through it we can gain an inkling of
the way of thinking of at least the educated class, and perhaps even of others
in society. In comparison with those of the reigns of the preceding adoptive
emperors, living conditions under Commodus and the Severans were subject
to many new and profound changes. It was the age of the orientalisation of
Roman spirituality, of the turning towards the mysterious and the irrational,
of the decadence of the imperial office, of the fragility and impotence
of the political elite, of economic distress, of increasing social tension, and of
the beginning of the military threat from Rome’s neighbours. If Cassius Dio
or Herodian, whose account of the deserter Maternus will be dealt with next,
provoke us to extreme disbelief with their tales of bandits, this is only a
reflection of the Roman mind-set in an age of incipient crisis.
123