Saeculum brings together a wealth of material on a nexus of topics that the Romans found “good to think with”: the Golden Age, moral decline, cataclysms, and cultural pioneers (the primus inventor). Some of these themes have individually received thorough treatment in the past, as have many of the passages discussed, but Hay has put his finger on something productive by studying them together as ways of organising time into periods. After summarising the argument of the Introduction, six chapters, and Conclusion, I will examine how the book as a whole approaches some fundamental issues, relating to four of the proverbial Five Ws: Who?—what?—when?—and why?
The Introduction defines the book’s key concept, ‘periodization’. Hay argues that despite the effort the Roman republic expended on organising time, Romans did not think in terms of qualitatively different periods until the advent, inspired by the Etruscan saeculum, of what he terms the ‘discursive mode’ of ‘saecularity’ (5). His concept of ‘saecularity’ embraces diverse vocabulary (saeculum, aetas, tempus) and phenomena, reflected in the book’s varied chapters. The book’s timeframe begins with Sulla’s consulship (88 BCE) and ends with the death of Augustus (14 CE).
Chapter 1 argues that ‘Sulla depicted himself as the inaugurator of a new era’ (17), in his memoirs (for which we must read Plutarch) and in other media (inscriptions, coins, building), inspired by the Etruscan concept of the saeculum, which Hay tries to reconstruct from various sources. Hay argues that Sulla’s use of the concept was crucial for its future development.
Chapter 2 traces the groundwork laid for ‘saecularity’ by the Roman reception of Greek philosophy. (Neo)Pythagorean metempsychosis (reincarnation) suggested cyclical time divided into discrete units. Lucretian palingenesis (the chance reconfiguration of atoms in identical structures) offered a model of return to the past. Stoic ekpyrosis (periodic cosmic conflagration) underlies increasingly apocalyptic Roman depictions of ‘metakosmesis’ (the transition between eras); this led, Hay argues, to the fiery Phaethon and the flooded Deucalion and Pyrrha being ‘grouped together cognitively by Romans’ (50). Hay considers this to be one of the book’s major findings (168, and publicity interview), but I am not convinced that his passages support this: only in Manilius are the myths genuinely equated, and the best connection Hay can find between the story of Deucalion in Metamorphoses 1 and Phaethon in Book 2 is that both feature seals (n. 85). He is on firmer ground with the suggestion that Academic and Peripatetic ideas of civilisational collapse inform visions of a ‘post-Roman world’ (62).
Chapter 3 suggests that narratives of moral decline gained greater flexibility from periodization’s multiple ‘inflection points’. Hay identifies in Augustan poetry the recurring ‘saecular outlier’ (73) who bucks their era’s trends, with a good discussion of Propertius. Hay claims that Ovid ‘reframed the narrative of decline into a value-neutral shift’ (80) from rustic to refined. In fact, rusticity and refinement were far from value-neutral terms; this chapter might have benefitted from engaging with the past three decades of proliferating scholarship that takes a critical approach to Roman moral vocabulary.[1]
Chapter 4 treats the ‘metallic ages’. A lengthy reading proposes that Empedoclean cyclical time underpins the progression of the ages in Eclogue 4 (now shown to be a ‘pendular sequence’ (89)). Hay discusses the culture hero and the primus inventor, alongside ‘technical histories’: narratives of the development of a particular discipline.
Chapter 5 discusses ‘Roman politics after Sulla’. Cicero was not portrayed as ‘man of the saeculum’ and neither was Caesar, but perhaps Messalla Corvinus was (Ciris and Catalepton 9). In one of the most original and suggestive parts of the book, Hay uncovers how Agrippa used his renovation of Rome’s sewers to associate himself with the culture hero Hercules mucking out the stables of Augeas. Unsurprisingly, the age of Augustus provides extremely rich pickings, but Hay aims to decentre Virgil from the discussion by focusing on Horace Odes, the Ludi saeculares, calculations of Augustus’ birth date and horoscope, and building work on the Palatine.
Chapter 6 discusses periodization in Roman literary histories, with a perceptive reading of Catullus and some neoteric fragments, which measure their own poetry and that of their rivals against both present and future saecula. Hay traces similar anxieties about critical reception and posterity in Horace, Phaedrus, and Ovid, before attributing the Roman tendency to periodize literature into Greek (past) and Latin (still to be written) to the impact of Augustus’ Palatine Bibliotheca.
The brief Conclusion gestures towards the Jewish influence and Christian aftereffects that were beyond the scope of the book, and sketches out the onward story with some readings of Tiberian historiography. The book’s aims are reiterated: to show the importance of Sulla in triggering an ‘Age of Saecularity’ (168), and in doing so to decentre Augustus and Virgil.
It will be clear even from this brief summary that Saeculum covers a wealth of passages and themes, drawing on material that is impressively wide-ranging in time and medium. It will also be clear that, as is perhaps to be expected when dealing with such variety, individual discussions achieve mixed success. However, I now turn to some fundamental issues that affect the book as a whole: the argument’s effectiveness both in sum and in its parts rests on a somewhat vague approach to four key questions.
Who?
The book’s attempt to draw wider conclusions from its rich range of individual authors and texts is made murky by a lack of precision about exactly who was engaging in the discourse of saecularity: Hay refers variously to ‘the Roman intellectual community’, ‘the Roman intelligentsia’, and ‘the Roman creative class’, without ever defining those groups or examining their intersection with other matrices of sociopolitical identity. The matter is not helped by such specious contrasts as ‘interest in Greek philosophy was not solely the pursuit of eccentric Roman elites with leisure time, but was fairly widespread throughout the Roman intellectual community’ (40) or ‘The topic was not just a theoretical idea for philosophers to ramble about; even a sober historian like Polybius…’ (60). Where Hay does examine the ‘sociocultural forces’ (101) at play, he is rewarded with a much more cogent analysis, as in his suggestion that ‘technical histories’ were the product of a shift in knowledge-making from generalist elites to specialised scholars (part of Wallace-Hadrill’s ‘Roman cultural revolution’).
What?
When defining the concept of ‘saecularity’ in the Introduction, Hay widens the scope beyond the lexeme saeculum to other words (aetas, tempus), and treats them as synonyms throughout. It is of course possible for several words to denote one concept, but this smoothing over of the lexical specificity of his passages does not seem to pay off in better close readings. Likewise, the passages discussed encompass a number of different types of periodizations, of different lengths of time (from a reign to a lifetime to a cosmic cycle), but Hay often misses out by trying to elide differences rather than find meaning in them. His early discussion of a senatorial proposal to mark an ‘Augustan age’ does well at bringing out the tensions created when multiple periods overlap (6–7), and this kind of attention to detail would have been welcome elsewhere.[2]
When?
The most serious problem with the book is that its stated aim to decentre Augustus by emphasising the earlier importance of Sulla (in Chapter 1 and throughout) unhappily coexists with the wide range of evidence it presents showing that Augustus was in fact crucial, and Sulla of little importance. There are two issues at stake: did Sulla engage in ‘saecular discourse’? And did he inspire others to do so? The answer to the first question is ‘probably’, but this book adds little to that case. Where Hay goes beyond the work of Trevor Luke and Edwin Ramage (which he draws on heavily and generously acknowledges), he is reduced to a kind of unsupported guesswork—with frequent recourse to ‘(more than) likely’, ‘surely’, ‘no doubt’—that is mercifully rare in other chapters.
As to the question of Sulla’s influence, Hay is satisfied that correlation (after Sulla) equals causation (because of Sulla), even though the correlation itself is not borne out by his own evidence. Throughout the book, the incantatory refrain of ‘after Sulla’ and ‘post-Sullan’ attaches itself to authors and events that are almost entirely (post-)Augustan, while discussions of the time between Sulla and Augustus usually find little trace of saecular thinking. It is left to the reader to join up the dots and conclude that this book has fairly conclusively shown the opposite of what it claims to. In a rare moment where causation is explicitly raised, Hay ventures that Sulla may have been emulated by others because he was ‘in many ways a tremendous success’ (36). Two pages later, he suggests instead (much more ingeniously) that instead of being a catalyst for saecularity’s development, Sulla may have been a brake: ‘perhaps the negative reputation Sulla received after his death led Roman political figures to try to avoid any connections to the dictator’ (38). Bold claims of Sulla’s primacy give way temporarily at the end of Chapter 1 to a more cautious voice expressing doubts about Sulla’s influence, leaving the book with two irreconcilable views on its central thesis. If, as seems likely, this inconsistency emerged during the process of adapting the PhD dissertation into a book, then the insertion of these minimalist caveats has not been accompanied by moderation of the original maximalist assertions.
Why?
What was saecularity good for? Hay suggests that it allowed Roman discussions of time to be ‘more robust’—an adjective he uses frequently throughout the book. He also thinks it makes things more ‘complex’ and ‘nuanced’, but his close readings tend to shy away from considering what that complexity might consist of in particular cases. One persuasive answer Hay offers is that periodization tells a story of ‘both rupture and continuity’ (10): a version of this book that had avoided the distraction of Sulla might have fruitfully examined how this particularly useful affordance of saecularity made it such a central (and innovative) part of the Augustan project.
The University of Texas Press deserves praise for a well-produced volume, striking cover, and easily navigable PDF ebook. The General Index (by Michael Hendry) is extraordinarily detailed; there is also an Index Locorum. Although typos in the main text are rare, proofreading of the bibliography seems to have been poor: there are several absences,[3] and the non-Anglophone entries especially are littered with mistakes.[4] I noticed two errors in quoted Latin and Greek.[5] If the prose style lacks some concision and precision, then that perhaps, when considered alongside some of the unbalanced or vague claims highlighted above, suggests a lack of editing when publishing the PhD dissertation as a book. A sense of what might have been achieved with more careful revision is apparent in Hay’s chapter in a 2019 edited volume.[6] That chapter, which has clearly undergone much more radical revision than this book, presents a shorter and more disciplined version of the argument, and gives a better account of the fascinating area of Roman thought that Hay has identified.
Notes
[1] Rusticity: e.g. Dench, E. (2005) Romulus’ asylum, Oxford (167–73). A particular omission: Edwards, C. (1993) The politics of immorality, Cambridge.
[2] Caroline Levine on ‘colliding forms’ should be essential reading for anyone thinking about periodization: Levine, C. (2015) Forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network, Princeton.
[3] Alongside a few typos, the following, cited in the notes, are missing in the bibliography: Cairns 2009; Keyes 1928; Oakley 2020; Thein 2009; Wiseman 2009; Wiseman 2017.
[4] Items in French are badly affected by autocorrect and missing accents, those in German by inconsistent treatment of the umlaut and capitalisation.
[5] (30) for adque read atque;
Ch 2 n. 18 for τινάς τά γενόμενα ποτε read τινὰς τὰ γενόμενά ποτε.
[6] Hay, P. (2019) ‘Saecular discourse: qualitative periodization in first-century BCE Rome’, in Morrell, K., J. Osgood, and K. Welch (eds.), The Alternative Augustan Age, London, 216–230.