Wars More Than Civil: Memories of Pompey and Caesar in the Octavia

American Journal of Philology 134 (2013) 637–674 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

1 The text used throughout is Zwierlein 1986 except where noted. All translations are my own. For Messalina, see Oct. 10–17, 257–69; for Claudius, 25–33, 137–44; for Britannicus, 45–46, 65–69, 115–24, 166–73; for Agrippina, 44–45, 309–76, 593–645. The choral ode on Julio-Claudian women (924–57) might also be considered autobiographical memory in some sense. The Octavia focuses on the dynastic purge of 62 C.E., the divorce of Octavia, and the riots in her favor. Nevertheless, the historical events mentioned in the play span the vast period from the monarchy through the Republic and early empire, and thus 62 C.E. becomes a focal point through which the playwright confronts larger historical patterns and themes.

2 Halbwachs, the father of collective memory studies, distinguished between autobio-graphical memory—or memory rooted in events of one’s own life experience—and historical memory that is grounded in one’s participation in a society that promotes memories of certain events. See the concise introduction to these terms in the introduction to Halbwachs 1992, 23–25. For the development of this idea in modern studies of collective memory, see Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011, 19–20. See also Small 1997, 127, on learned vs. natural memory in antiquity, or rather the difference between historical memories that are memorized vs. those personally experienced. For Assmann’s famous distinction between

WARS MORE THAN CIVIL: MEMORIES OF POMPEY AND CAESAR IN THE OCTAVIA

LAUREN DONOVAN GINSBERG

!Abstract. As the Octavia replays a moment in Rome’s recent history—the struggle to see which Caesar would outlast the rest—its characters simultaneously replay a crucial struggle from the Julio-Claudians’ rise to power: the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. The Octavia’s allusive language recasts its Neronian characters as the Republic’s leading generals, turning strife within the imperial family into a civil war that threatens to engulf the Roman world once more. The play thus challenges the predominant cultural memories of peace fostered by the Julio-Claudian dynasty and promotes instead a counter-memory rooted in civil strife.

MEMORIES OF CONFLICT HAUNT THE OCTAVIA. The bloody murders of Messalina, Claudius, Britannicus, and Agrippina plague its characters in every scene, as if these violent memories of recent trauma condemn them to an equally gruesome future.1 At the same time, memories of the distant past beyond the autobiographical experience of the Octavia’s characters loom equally large, connecting the events of Neronian Rome to seminal moments from the city’s history.2 This type of memory—

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communicative v. cultural memory, see n. 3 below. In her opening monologue, for example, Octavia emphasizes the autobiographical nature of her traumatic memories (e.g. vidi, 16), and her focus on her own lived experience differs from, e.g., the chorus of Roman citizens who seek to remember the early Republic (Lucretia and Verginia, 291–303) in order to counteract their own loss of identity—a state they describe as a “forgetting of themselves” (nos quoque nostri sumus immemores, 288). The use of memory language here clearly extends beyond the autobiographical, bringing Neronian Rome into dialogue with Rome’s past.

3 The term “cultural memory” was promoted by Jan Assmann, e.g., 1988 and 1992 and Aleida Assmann, e.g., 1995 and 1999 as a refinement to Halbwachs’ “collective memory,” a term often criticized for how it disassociates memory from the individual. The Assmanns distinguish between communicative memory (memories of little collective significance which circulate throughout a given community) and cultural memory (a memory of a shared past marked by the community—and especially its elite authorities—as of constitutive significance to group identity). Cultural memories stem both from the distant, mythologized past (e.g., the Trojan war) and more recent events which quickly develop a significance akin to a mythologized past, often in combination with political upheaval. See also Erll and Nünning 2008, 3–4. Yerushalmi 1982, 95, and Kirk 2005, 5, likewise note the role that the community plays in marking specific memories as important to its group identity and in allowing other less important memories to fade into oblivion. Aleida Assmann has also laid important groundwork for studying the role played by literary production (“cultural texts”) and canonization as vehicles for and witnesses to the cultural memories of a given period (1995 and 1999). See also Grabes 2008.

4 For an overview of the centrality of the Republic in the cultural memory of the empire, see Gowing 2005 and Gallia 2011. Despite this centrality, however, the Republic never became a monolithic symbol; various competing discourses always existed and this is even more the case when it comes to the cultural memories of the civil wars of the 40s and 30s B.C.E. Under the Julio-Claudians, as has been well explored by Gowing 2005 and 2010 and others, literary authors variously expressed memories of civil war in terms of the cost of peace, some finding the loss of libertas—real or imagined—as worth the price for the end of the civil wars, while others wistfully imagined they were still fighting for a Rome now lost to them. The year 69 C.E. and the reemergence of civil war under the empire, however, challenged these strategies of remembering, suggesting new ways of reading the bella civilia of the Republic and new ways of considering their importance to contemporary imperial politics (Gallia 2011, 13–55). As will be discussed in more detail below, the Octavia sits at a liminal point between Julio-Claudian and Flavian literature, at the rupture between previ-ous strategies of remembrance and the development of new narratives. As a result, it is a unique witness to the reception of Julio-Claudian literature and to the cultural memories represented by that literature at a time when the interpretation of both was thrown sud-denly into flux. For an overview of the effect of political change on the dominant cultural memories of the past and for literature’s role in disseminating new commemorative strate-gies, see Assmann and Shortt 2012, 1–14. See also Connerton 1989, 6–7.

grounded in events which the Roman people have marked over time as of constitutive significance to their history and collective identity—is what scholars often term “cultural memory.”3 As in many imperial texts, the Republic and its strife-ridden history become the dominant sites of memory for the Octavia’s interpretation of the past.4 Through allusions

639MEMORIES OF POMPEY AND CAESAR IN THE OCTAVIA

5 For the foundation of the Republic, see Oct. 91–308; for the Gracchi and Livius Drusus, see 877–98; for the Triumviral period, see 503–29.

6 To take just a few examples, Nero and Seneca argue about how to remember the triumviral period and the lessons that Nero should learn from his ancestor Augustus’ century-old conflict (Oct. 477–529). Elsewhere, the chorus of Roman people reaches into the even more distant past, spurring itself to action through memories of Lucretia (300–303), Verginia (294–99), the Gracchi (882–87), Livius Drusus (888–902), and others. As noted above, the chorus, who reaches the furthest back in time of any character in the play, makes most explicit the value of cultural memory to Rome, or rather the danger that forgetfulness of the past poses to Roman identity: nos quoque nostri sumus immemores . . . vera priorum virtus quondam / Romana fuit (288–92).

7 For one reading of the Octavia as creating a new (and lasting) cultural memory, see Flower 2006, 202–9. For the Octavia’s significance more generally, see Wilson 2003.

8 For a succinct recent discussion of the wider intertextual program of the Octavia and its “palimpsestic” nature, see Boyle 2008, lix–lxxv.

9 As noted above, in her work on memory spaces and cultural texts Aleida Assmann 1995 and 1999 demonstrates that works of literature often act as vehicles for and shapers of cultural memory, especially when the works of literature in question have been otherwise marked as significant by the process of canonization. Following Assmann, I suggest (1) that the works of Julio-Claudian literature with which the Octavia engages become important not only for their literary significance but also for their marked cultural significance as products of the Julio-Claudian age and (2) that the Octavia’s intertextual engagement works on both levels. For wider current discussions on the intersection of literary and cultural memory, see Grabes 2005; Erll and Nünning 2005; 2008, 299–343; and Erll 2011, 144–71. Lachmann (e.g., 1997 and 2008) has been a pioneer in studying the interconnection

to seminal moments of political strife from the Republic’s foundation through Actium, the playwright creates various lenses with which to examine the dynastic struggle of 62 C.E. and its wider significance;5 each historical layer from Rome’s past creates a different way of understand-ing its Neronian present.6

The play’s engagement with Roman cultural memory can be stud-ied on multiple levels. On a macroscopic level, as a work of historical poetry, the Octavia seeks to shape its audience’s retrospective perception of Neronian Rome and Julio-Claudian history through its specific com-memoration of 62 C.E., and within the play cultural memory is further thematized through historical exempla.7 At the same time, however, addi-tional literary-historical parallels are embedded in the play’s very language through its striking intertextual program. For as the playwright stages the fatal conflict between the last Julio-Claudians, his language simultaneously recalls previous literature that had commemorated earlier moments of political strife.8 In this way, the playwright weaves important literary-historical models into the very fabric of his poetry, imbuing his language with a range of cultural memories significant to the play’s interpretation.9


between cultural memory and intertextuality. “When literature is considered in the light of memory, it appears as the mnemonic art par excellence. Literature is culture’s memory, not as a simple recording device but as a body of commemorative actions that include the knowledge stored by a culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and by which a culture is constituted. Writing is both an act of memory and a new interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space . . . As a collection of intertexts, the text itself is a memory place” (2008, 302).

10 The study of the Octavia’s allusivity, especially given its status as a work of histori-cal poetry, has much to gain from current discussions of intertextuality and historiography. As Damon 2010, 381–83, has shown, authors of historical texts can allude “intertextually” both to previous texts and to actual events—and often do both simultaneously in order to connect their narrative to wider historical patterns. See also O’Gorman 2009; Levene 2010, 82–163; and the papers presented at the seminar “Historiography, Poetry, and the Intertext” at the APA 2012 meeting in Seattle, esp. Chaplin 2013 and Elliot 2013 (both cited with the authors’ permission). The Octavia’s intertextual engagement with the liter-ary traditions around Pompey and Caesar works the same way: the play’s allusions to, e.g., Lucan’s particular narrative, are as significant as its engagement with the historical events narrated therein. Likewise, when the poet suggests literary parallels between Octavia’s curse and the narrative tradition around the death of Caesar (below), he also suggests historical parallels between Octavia’s wish for Nero and the historical events surrounding Caesar’s assassination. Due to the status of Pompey, Caesar, and their civil war as Erinnerungsfiguren (“figures of memory,” Assmann 1992), the literary texts that commemorate them, and the historical events they participated in, each generate “intertextual” parallels through which the playwright rewrites Neronian history.

This article explores one such web of literary-historical allusions and its significance for the play’s larger portrait of life in Neronian Rome.

As the Octavia replays a moment in Rome’s recent history, and the struggle to see which Caesar—Nero or Octavia—would outlast the rest, its characters simultaneously replay a struggle significant to the Julio-Claudians’ rise to power: the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar.10 More precisely, I argue that the playwright models his rebellious imperial women—Nero’s erstwhile wife Octavia and his mother Agrippina—on the Republic’s great victim, Pompey. In this way, he creates out of these women’s tragedies a new Pompey for a new generation of Roman strife, as he has them collectively replay for imperial Rome the fall of the Republic’s storied general. The play likewise condemns their oppressor Nero to the role of Julius Caesar, the man who triumphed over his son-in-law and yet who soon paid the ultimate price for his victory. In this way, the playwright creates out of the dynastic crisis of 62 C.E. a reflection of the civil wars that first brought the Julio-Claudians to power. In doing so, I contend, the play offers a powerful challenge to the pre-dominant messages of peace and tranquility (pax et princeps) fostered


11 For the collocation pax et princeps, see Tac. Ann. 3.28.3 and Hist. 1.1.1. The idea, however, is found often in Augustus’ Res Gestae (e.g,. 3, 12–13, 25, 34–35), and elsewhere in Julio-Claudian literature (e.g., Hor. O. 4.15.17–20; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.7.2; Man. Ast. 1.922–24; Vell. Pat. 2.89.3–2.90.1; Sen. Apocol. 10; Sen. Clem. 1.9–11). See also Levick 2010, 69.

12 I follow throughout the text of Lucan in Housman 1926. All translations are my own.13 The intertext was noted as early as Hosius 1922. At various points in his recent

commentary, Boyle 2008 notes that Octavia intertextually recalls Pompey. As will be noted throughout, my own analysis builds on Boyle’s suggestions in order to link individual echoes of Pompey to the play’s wider intertextual program and to expand upon the thematic sig-nificance of Pompey as a model not only for Octavia but also for Agrippina.

14 In the Flavian period, the popularity of Lucan’s BC adds the poet to the roster of those canonized by the Julio-Claudian period such as Vergil, Horace, Ovid, etc. Lucan, along with Seneca, became a new classic for a new era (much as Horace’s popularity in the Neronian period increased his prominence in the Latin canon; see Mayer 1982). Lucan’s political history likewise seems to have influenced this reception: the tension between the epic poet and the man who died for his struggle against tyranny retrospectively promoted a reading of Lucan’s BC in opposition to Vergil’s Aeneid. That the comparison between

by the Julio-Claudian family during their time in power and promotes a new cultural memory of a dynasty rooted in civil strife.11

ON THE MODEL OF POMPEY: OCTAVIA, AGRIPPINA, AND NARRATIVES OF LOSS

The Octavia opens with its eponymous heroine lamenting not only her own current experience at the hands of Nero but also the tragic history of her family’s experience of imperial power. Together with her nurse, she recounts the dynastic bloodbath that marks her memory of Nero’s rise to power (Oct. 1–71). Within this survey of recent history, the playwright also triggers our memory of Rome’s strife-ridden Republican past. For as Octavia ends her tragic lament, she declares that she “remains the shadow of a great name” (magni resto nominis umbra, 71), a marked echo of Lucan’s famous introduction to Pompey the Great in his Bellum Civile (stat magni nominis umbra, Luc. 1.135).12 Although critics have long recognized the similarity in expression between Octavia’s description and that of Lucan’s Pompey, and Boyle in particular has suggested a larger thematic purpose for the allusion, the echo has not yet been adequately studied for its significance to the play’s wider intertextual program.13 I argue that the playwright has his Octavia echo one of Lucan’s most celebrated lines in order to suggest a more pervasive alignment with the Republican tradi-tion’s doomed hero than has previously been noted, and that this nexus of Pompeian parallels ought to be investigated more comprehensively for what it can tell us about Octavia’s allusive characterization.14


them was so stark at the time Lucan was writing—or that Lucan meant his epic to be read in these terms—is far from clear. Cf. Thomas 2001, 83–92; Casali 2011. For Lucan’s vari-ous receptions in the Flavian period, see esp. Malamud 1995; Marks 2010; Ganiban 2011; Newlands 2011.

15 For the role of this line as a leitmotif throughout Lucan’s epic, see Feeney 1986. Ahl 1976, 50–53, suggests that through this description of Pompey, the reader is later asked to understand Rome itself as the shadow of a great name, an argument also suggested with reference to the Senate by Rossi 2000, 585. This interpretation squares well with Octavia’s (and the chorus’) understanding of the empress as a symbol for Rome (e.g., Oct. 132–33, 277–81). Bartsch 1998, 114–15, suggests that this description of Pompey’s name is echoed throughout the epic to underscore the emptiness of the cause to which the Republicans were committed and the difference between power and its empty representations—an interpretation, I think, much in the background of Octavia’s characterization.

16 For the two ways of reading Lucan’s non . . . tantum (“not only” vs. “not so great”), see Roche 2009. While Roche favors “not only,” I prefer the ambiguity of Lucan’s expres-sion when compared with Pompey’s great but empty name.

17 See Boyle 2008 on this echo.

Lucan describes Pompey as the “shadow of a great name” while comparing him to Caesar (Luc. 1.120–58).15 Pompey trusts in his fortune, in the love of the people, and in his past deeds; he seeks no means of increasing his dwindling power (1.121–23, 129–43). Thus he stands the shadow of a great name: the shadow of his former self and his former significance to Rome. Caesar, on the other hand, has a name not yet so great and is also more than a name (sed non in Caesare tantum / nomen erat nec fama ducis, 1.143–44).16 Rather than relying on an empty rep-resentation of power, like Pompey, he uses lightning speed and military expertise to bring men to his side (1.143–57). Throughout the epic, the two forces clash until the defeated Pompey boards a ship for Egypt where he loses his head at the hands of a satelles of those who want to please victorious Caesar.

Once Octavia’s allusive language is recognized, additional thematic and contextual parallels between the experiences of Octavia and Pompey appear. Octavia, like Pompey, is beloved of the people and revels in this love and in her memories of a celebrated past (e.g., Oct. 183–85, 646–48; cf. Luc. 1.129–43, 7.7–44). Unlike Pompey, of course, Octavia has no past military glory of her own on which to rely. Nevertheless, she celebrates the military achievement of her father and describes his victories in language reminiscent of the literary tradition around Pompey, appropriating his historical victories for the fashioning of her own identity. When Octavia describes how “the whole world obeyed” her father (cui totus paruit orbis, Oct. 26), she borrows language from Ovid who praises Pompey in similar terms (cuique viro totus terrarum paruit orbis, Pont. 4.3.43).17 While the


18 Lexical searches throughout the paper have been performed using the Packard Humanities Institute’s database of Latin texts. Where the frequency of a seemingly com-monplace phrase seems especially important for interpretation, it will be noted in the footnotes. Such reliance on data generated purely from surviving literature, however, should not imply that every echo would resonate with every reader. Intertextuality is a dialogic process between author and reader that cannot be pinned down through statistical probability. This is the sort of hunting game that poets encourage us to pursue with their allusive language. Most famously, the Aeneid’s overarching engagement with the Iliad and Odyssey can be felt both in individual echoes and in its large-scale pattern of allusivity even in the absence of precise markers at every turn: “the more obvious, and obviously intended aspects of Vergil’s allusive program encourage the reader to look further for less obvious, less obviously intended examples as well . . . Here a situation arises in which, if a Homeric scene is not represented by an obvious Vergilian imitation, the reader is encouraged to hunt for it” (correspondence from Joseph Farrell quoted in Edmunds 2001, 154). This idea of Roman audiences as “allusion hunters” is supported by ancient evidence as well. Seneca the Elder, for example, preserves several examples of an audience’s active participation in finding and interpreting allusions regardless of authorial intent (Controv. 7.1.27 and Suas. 3.5–7). It seems that imperial audiences viewed active allusion hunting as a key part of their reception and interpretation of literature, suggesting just the sort of balance between marked allusion and more subtle echoes that I see at work in the Octavia. For more on Seneca the Elder’s theories of allusivity, see Trinacty 2009.

language in and of itself may not seem striking, this particular combina-tion of words in such close proximity only occurs earlier in this Ovidian passage and the contextual parallels suggest its deeper significance.18

Ovid addresses a faithless friend who mocks his misfortune. Accord-ing to Ovid, however, fortune is fickle and can quickly turn on those who least expect it: so it turned on Magnus who ruled the known world before losing his head to a lowly client (Pont. 4.3.41–43). Ovid uses Pompey’s great success as a means of increasing the pathos of his own exemplary fall, creating a warning for future Romans. Octavia, too, views her father’s military victories in pathetic contrast to his untimely and treacherous death (Oct. 25–30), and thus she not only echoes Ovid’s earlier praise of Pompey but also the underlying moral of his redeployment of Pompey’s story. By characterizing her father in language that previous poets use to commemorate Pompey the Great and his defeat, Octavia’s language pre-pares us to read the struggles of her family through the lens of Pompey’s fall, eerily foreshadowing her own fall from power at a Caesar’s hands.

Octavia’s Nurse echoes the same Ovidian line when describing the former obedience of the world to Claudius, “to whose power the world was subject, [and whom the Ocean] obeyed, though free for so long” (cuius imperio fuit / subiectus orbis, paruit liber diu, 38–39). She then goes on to recount his victory over the Britons, as “he covered the waves with such fleets amidst barbarian peoples” (tantis classibus texit freta / interque


19 The echo is also noted by Ferri 2003 and Boyle 2008. The phrase tantis classibus occurs only once in previous literature: the passage of Lucan’s BC cited here. Once this echo is recognized, Octavia’s barbaras becomes a compressed gloss for Lucan’s tam variae cultu gentes, tam dissona volgi.

20 O mea nullis aequanda malis / fortuna, licet / repetam luctus, Electra, tuos: / tibi maerenti caesum licuit / flere parentem, / scelus ulcisci vindice fratre, / tua quem pietas hosti rapuit / texitque fides: / me crudeli sorte parentes / raptos prohibet lugere timor / fratrisque necem deflere vetat, / in quo fuerat spes una mihi / totque malorum breve solamen. / nunc in luctus servata meos / magni resto nominis umbra (Oct. 57–71). For the significance of Sophocles’ Electra for the Octavia’s reworking of Greek tragic models, see Ladek 1909; Herington 1961; Bellandi 1997. While acknowledging the significance of these models, I borrow Littlewood’s assessment of Seneca: “if the ghost of Euripides haunts every line . . . it is as one ghost among many” (2004, 260).

21 Champlin 2003, 297–303; Erasmo 2004, 83–91; Boyle 2006, 155–57. The Theater of Pompey becomes such a dominant monument for his legacy in Rome that Lucan’s Pompey, on the eve before his disastrous loss at Pharsalus, dreams that he is seated in his theater at Rome listening to the roar of crowds applauding his glory (Luc. 7.7–44).

22 When Suetonius describes how Octavia’s shade haunted Nero after her death, he notes also how simultaneously Nero saw himself besieged by statues dedicated at Pompey’s Theater (Ner. 46.1). That this was the space in which Julius Caesar met his end may add further symbolic significance for the Octavia’s theatrical reimagining of the clash between the two leaders. Even after death, Pompey and Caesar kept fighting for Rome.

gentes barbaras, 42–43), in language reminiscent of how Lucan’s catalogue describes the unsurpassed might of Pompey’s troops (aequora . . . tantis percussit classibus . . . tam variae cultu gentes, tam dissona volgi, Luc. 3.287–89).19 In fact, this language suggests an additional allusion—this time from the world of mythology—that further unites the two texts.

According to Lucan, not even Agamemnon had such a large fleet as Pompey when he went to avenge his brother’s love (3.286) and the above lines serve in Lucan’s text to characterize the forces of both men. Octavia draws a similar comparison between her father and Agamemnon (Oct. 57–71) when she describes herself as an Electra without the ability to avenge.20 Moreover, Rome had long had cause to connect Agamemnon to Pompey in cultural memory. For Pompey had notoriously modeled himself on Agamemnon, King of Kings, and this is nowhere more appar-ent than at the opening of his Theater in 55 B.C.E. where a restaging of Accius’ Clytemnestra became a vehicle through which Pompey restaged his triumph of 61 B.C.E.21 Pompey’s mythological self-fashioning as Agamemnon seems to have become a lasting element of his identity at Rome, even subject to ridicule and scorn (Plut. Pomp. 67.3). Thus for a Roman audience, the Octavia’s various allusions to Agamemnon—espe-cially when couched in Pompeian language—may have conjured up the associated memory of the Republic’s doomed general.22


23 For Lucan’s allusions to the domus Pompeiana as contrafactual rivals to the domus Augusta, cf. Luc. 6.819. Much as Tacitus later creates an alternative Pisonian dynasty (O’Gorman 2006), so Lucan suggests the same for Pompey and his sons (Rudich 1997, 183).

24 Ferri 2003 and Boyle 2008 also note the echo. Both phrases occur at line begin-ning, causing the Nurse to echo also Lucan’s hexameter and further connect the passages.

It is at the end of this passage (57–71) and within this nexus of potential Pompeian allusions that Octavia declares herself the shadow of a great (Magnus) name; it is important to note that when Octavia describes herself and her father in this language, the playwright not only suggests that her plight be read through Pompey’s fate but also that the plight of her family be read this way. It is as if Octavia herself reads the Claudian side of her family as an echo of the domus Pompeiana that hovers throughout Lucan’s text and throughout the cultural memory of Pompey’s family, a rival dynasty whose dreams of empire never came to fruition.23 The playwright uses the literary-cultural model of Pompey vs. Caesar to stage his own war between Octavia, the last Claudian, and Nero, the last Julian. In other words, he applies to this intradynastic political jostling the recognizable model of civil war, and a particular civil war at that: the one that in hindsight forever changed Rome by removing entirely one of its great rival generals and by putting his enemy and his enemy’s descendants permanently in power. Through this intertextual frame, the Octavia suggests that the stakes in this struggle are just as high. This is not simply a matter of a woman’s bruised ego in the face of rejection, or even a Claudian’s disappointment at not producing the next Julio-Claudian heir; rather, from the Octavia’s perspective, 62 C.E. becomes as pivotal a moment for imperial history as Pharsalus and its aftermath had been for the Republic.

As Octavia’s story continues, further contextual connections appear between the former empress and Pompey the Great, especially as the lat-ter is portrayed by Lucan. Both view themselves as the final obstacle in the way of a Caesar’s illegitimate tyranny. Nevertheless, both ultimately see that their opposition will fail and each slowly comes to accept fate. The Nurse eerily foreshadows Octavia’s Pompeian end when she urges Octavia to “submit to fate” (sed cede fatis, 253). For the Nurse’s language recalls Lucan’s description of Pompey as he consciously decides to board the small raft where he will die at the hands of men loyal to Caesar: “but he submits to fate and, ordered to leave his ship, he obeys” (sed cedit fatis classemque relinquere iussus / obsequitur, Luc. 8.575–6).24 Moreover, elsewhere the Nurse often advises Octavia to obey (obsequium, Oct. 84, 177, 213) rather than fight her Caesar, and in this language, too, she


25 Much like Nero, Lucan’s Caesar expects the obedience of the entire world (omne deorum / obsequium speres . . . Caesar, Luc. 5.293–94), a wish fulfilled intratextually by Pompey’s death (obsequitur, 8.576).

26 Lipsius 1588 first suggested the emendation Pandatariae and he was followed by Bothe 1819, Leo 1878–79, Pedroli 1954, Viansino 1965, Zwierlein 1986, Ferri 2003, Fitch 2004a and 2004b, and others. Efforts to prove historically that Egypt was also a place of exile in the early empire have not largely convinced those who favor the emendation. Giardina 1966, Ballaira 1974, Whitman 1978, Barbera 2000, and Boyle 2008 retain the manuscript reading. For a thorough discussion of the issue of emendation on both sides, see Boyle 2008 and Ferri 2003 on this passage. Smith 2003, 429, also argues for retaining

recalls the exact point at which Lucan’s Pompey abandons his similar fight (obsequitur, Luc. 8.576).25 The Nurse, of course, is not yet aware of Octavia’s impending demise; rather, she urges her mistress to obey her husband and restore herself to his favor. In this way alone, suggests the Nurse, will Octavia find safety, and maybe even future happiness.

Although the Nurse intends her advice to be taken in practical, not fatal terms, the play’s refiguring of Octavia as a latter-day Pompey and its marked echoes of the Bellum Civile encourage us to hear the Lucanean undertone of this language and to understand its role in foreshadowing the empress’ demise. Beneath the Nurse’s pragmatic—or even optimis-tic—language lies the suggestion of the historical tragedy that we know is to come. Octavia will not follow her Nurse’s explicit advice but will instead follow the advice intertextually implicit in the Nurse’s language by preparing herself mentally for death. Thus by the end of the play’s first scene, Octavia’s fate is already scripted along Pompeian lines as she anticipates almost eagerly her imminent death. When she declares herself the “shadow of a Great name,” we hear her declare herself the leader of the losing side in the civil wars at the Republic’s end, foreshadowing how—in the drama at least—she becomes a figurehead for the losers in the strife that will lead to the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The difference between the two historical figures and their demise seems, in the end, not so very great.

This is even more marked at the end of the drama where Octavia’s final destination—the subject of much scholarly scrutiny—comes into play. The manuscripts unanimously report that Octavia believes she boards a ship whose “commander seeks the shores of Pharian land” (petat puppis rector / Phariae litora terrae, 970–71). Given, however, Tacitus’ account of Octavia’s end as well as other historical evidence for where Julio-Claudians sent their exiles, critics have been quick to emend Phariae to Pandatariae, and this is the text printed by Zwierlein in his landmark OCT.26 Nevertheless, I concur with Smith’s and Boyle’s choice to print


the manuscript reading based on the other Egyptian allusions throughout the play such as Nero and Octavia’s Egyptian style brother-sister dynastic union.

27 Cf. Luc. 8.443: petimus Pharon arvaque Lagi. This reading also explains Octavia’s persistent fear of decapitation (e.g., Oct. 133). For the prolonged execution of Octavia, see Tac. Ann.14.60–64 with Murgatroyd 2008. For Pompey’s decapitation and its resonance in another Flavian historical poem (Silius’ Punica), see Marks 2008. In general, the decapitation of Pompey caught on as a topos in imperial literature: see, e.g., MacGuire 1997.

28 See Boyle 2008 on this passage.29 Levick 1993, 42; Osgood 2010, 31.

Phariae and with Boyle’s suggestion that the geographical allusion might even here play into Octavia’s Pompeian model. If one recognizes the intertexts—and especially the redeployment of Lucan’s “shadow of a Great name”—it makes sense that Octavia imagines she will sail to the shores where Pompey lost his head to Caesar’s would-be supporters.27 Whether the historical Octavia went to Pandataria, or whether the Julio-Claudians ever sent such exiles to Egypt, matters little; at the end of her tragedy, Octavia imagines that she will fulfill the literary-historical parallel suggested at its opening.

That the playwright models the empress’ tragedy on Pompey the Great is significant on multiple fronts. At the most basic level, he repre-sents Octavia as the losing figure in a bellum civile of constitutive signifi-cance in Roman cultural memory, and he therefore suggests that we are to read her experience with Nero—at least metaphorically—in terms of civil war rather than as a struggle between man and wife. Nevertheless, the parallel between Octavia and Pompey is made more complicated by the differences in their positions vis-à-vis their Caesarean enemy. In his introduction to Pompey and Caesar, as we saw above, Lucan draws attention to the difference between the famous name of Pompey and the not yet as significant name of Caesar. Octavia and Nero, however, are both heirs to Caesar’s legacy and thus when she asserts that she, like Pompey, is the shadow of a great name, we must pause to consider which name she means. Some commentators suggest that she means the name of Claudius, an interpretation perhaps suggested by the fact that throughout the play many characters refer to her as Claudia.28 Neverthe-less, this interpretation glosses over the fact that at the thematic heart of the play is a struggle over the name Caesar itself and the imperial power it bestows (e.g., 249–51, 536). The historical Claudius, Octavia’s father, was the first emperor to consciously adopt the name upon his accession in order to legitimize his own power and that of his descendants.29 Thus I believe it is, in fact, the name Caesar to which the play here alludes, creating a multivalent comment on Lucan’s famous tag.


30 For the legacy of Caesar’s name, esp. in this period, see Levick 2009, 218–20, and Flower 2006, 198–99.

31 The historical Octavia may have been adopted into another gens to prevent negative reactions to her marriage to Nero (Dio Hist. Rom. 60.33.2). If this is true, the playwright ignores it.

32 In her work on lament in Lucan’s BC, Keith notes that the wives of Pompey domesticate the passions of civil war in their implicit rivalry: “Cornelia’s jibe at Julia [Luc. 8.102–5] recasts the murderous confrontation of Roman strongmen in a civil war over the spoils of empire as a catfight between two women competing for Pompey’s marital atten-tion. Her words recall Julia’s apparition as a ghost to Pompey at the opening of book 3, when she predicts disaster at the start of his voyage (Luc. 3.20–23) and calls his new wife a sexual rival (paelex, 3.23)” (2008, 241). The writer of the Octavia, however, makes this domestication of civil strife more explicit and centers his drama on it.

In Lucan’s epic, Pompey has the now ghostly nomen, and Caesar’s name does not yet overshadow his individual actions (Luc.1.135, 1.143–44). But at the time Lucan was writing, of course, the name Caesar itself had become synonymous with princeps and the Julio-Claudian heirs to the throne, and therefore the assertion that Caesar lacked a name at all would already have been heavily ironic. In the context of the Octavia, however—a play that stages the final years of the Julio-Claudians and anticipates their fall—the name Caesar appears to be in danger of becoming, like Pompey, a ghostly shadow of its former powerful identity, or at least a less straightforward symbol of imperial power. In the years after Nero’s fall, all four claimants to the throne struggle with the decision of whether to adopt this nomenclature.30 The idea that a new name might take its place for a new line of emperors was a real possibility, even if a brief one. Thus at the point of the Octavia’s composition (discussed below), the name Caesar was on the verge of becoming a shadow of its former self.

Additional factors enhance and yet complicate this parallel between erstwhile empress and Republican general. Although Pompey and Caesar had been united by a marriage-bond, Octavia is an imperial princess mar-ried to her Caesar, a man whom the play takes great pains to emphasize is also her brother (cf. Oct. 46, 220, 284, 658, 828), and thus the bonds that bind them are even stronger than the socer-gener bond tradition-ally emphasized in civil-war narratives.31 Here is a sister and wife turned against her brother and husband, a female symbol of what civil strife does to the core values of the Roman family. The battles fought within the palace walls are thus “wars more than civil” to a greater degree than even Lucan’s had been.32 Lucan emphasizes the death of Julia as the breaking point that turned father-in-law and son-in-law inevitably towards civil war. While she lived, the Roman world had hope that the two men would be forever bound by the birth of the child who would unite their


33 In military contexts, “tokens of peace” often refer to hostages (esp. children) exchanged to ensure peaceful negotiations (cf. TLL s.v. pignus, esp. 10.1.2122.69–23.12). In civil war contexts—in which warring parties are members of the same society and even the same family—children become even more symbolic. Thus in the Aeneid, Lavinia and her reproductive potential are seen by the Latins as the means of ending proto-civil war (pacis solum inviolabile pignus, 11.363). In Ovid’s Fasti, the Sabine women restore peace by placing their newborn “pledges” between warring husbands and fathers (cum raptae veniunt inter patresque virosque, / inque sinu natos, pignora cara, tenent, 3.217–18). Sometimes the absence of such a child dooms Rome inevitably to civil war, as in Lucan’s description of the death of Julia’s child at the opening of his BC (nam pignora iuncti / sanguinis et diro ferales omine taedas / abstulit ad manes Parcarum Iulia saeva / intercepta manu, 1.111–14). Lucan repeatedly returns to the image of the broken pignus between Julia and Pompey, and thus between Pompey and Caesar (cf. Julia’s final words to Pompey: numquam tibi, Magne, per umbras / perque meos manes genero non esse licebit; / abscidis frustra ferro tua pignora: bellum / te faciet civile meum, 3.31–34). Cf. also Velleius’ description of Julia (concordiae pignus, Vell. Pat. 2.47.2). This phraseology seems to have become a key part of Julia’s tragic cultural memory and literary afterlife, perhaps influencing the playwright’s choice of language here.

blood and create a shared Caesarean-Pompeian legacy: “tokens of blood united” (pignora iuncti sanguinis, Luc. 1.111–12). Throughout the Octavia, characters outside the imperial family similarly confide their hope that the two Caesars can be reconciled and produce a child of such political significance (e.g., pignora pacis, 279). The devastating consequences of this barren marriage for Rome are made all the more prominent by the echo of Pompey’s doomed marriage, his unborn child, and the resulting civil war.33

Thus while the playwright suggests that we read Octavia’s domestic troubles in light of the civil war which led her ancestor to power, he also highlights the complications that arise from replaying the war between Caesar and Pompey through two of Caesar’s descendants. What had been a struggle that shook the entire world is now played out within the walls of the palace between man and wife, and yet the consequences appear no less devastating for the Roman people. The parallel also further ques-tions the value of this struggle and the significance of victory: what in Lucan’s epic is a struggle over which man—Pompey or Caesar—would become master of the world and whose name would have lasting power, becomes in the Octavia a struggle over which Caesar will maintain the empty familial designation in a play that already anticipates a time when Caesar’s family will no longer rule. The playwright denies significance or lasting value to the winners. If the name of Caesar has become as empty as Pompey’s, there is nothing more worth fighting for; all that is left is for one to die and the other to quickly follow.


34 Additional language connects Octavia and Agrippina as literary-historical doublets. The phrase “hope of safety” (spes salutis) acts as a refrain throughout the play, uniting their experiences (e.g., of Octavia at 130; of Agrippina at 330; and of both women at 906), and at the end of the play, when Octavia sees her Pharos-bound ship, she recognizes it as Agrippina’s (908–10).

35 I have followed Boyle 2008 in printing A’s fata for the emendation of freta. See above (pp. 642–44) where Octavia and her nurse both echo the same Ovidian description of Pompey, but slightly alter the language, allowing the two intertexts to mutually reinforce each other. This combination of intertext and intratext is a fundamental aspect of the Octavia’s poetics, uniting disparate characters thematically across the play. That Agrippina and Octavia share their intertextual models is of prime importance to the interpretation of Julio-Claudian women within the text.

And yet, as many have noted, the Octavia poet chose not to include his heroine’s death; he merely hints at it allusively. This does not mean, however, that he has chosen not to incorporate Pompey’s famous death scene in his text. Rather, I argue, he does so through the equally famous death scene of another Neronian woman: Agrippina, mother of Nero. For as the chorus of Roman people recounts Agrippina’s murder, its language likewise recalls Pompey’s death scene from Lucan’s Bellum Civile, sug-gesting that we read the final—and fatal—conflict between mother and son also through the lens of this civil war.

As with Octavia, the thematic and contextual parallels between Agrippina and Pompey—both of whom died gruesomely at the hands of a minion after a fatal voyage to what they thought would be safety—are reinforced by more specific verbal echoes. Lucan’s Pompey recognizes that certain death is upon him and chooses to give himself over to fate (sed cedit fatis, Luc. 8.575), and we have seen this language intertextu-ally activated to describe Octavia’s plight in the play’s first scene.34 Thus the echo is already active in our minds when it appears again, slightly altered, within one-hundred lines to describe another Julio-Claudian’s similar resignation at the end of her fatal voyage: “she flails with her hands, fear fending off her fate, but weary she submits to the struggle” (pellit palmis cogente metu / fata, sed cedit fessa labori, Oct. 348–49).35 Moreover, Pompey, too, calls his hardships a “labor” later in the same passage (saecula Romanos numquam tacitura labores / attendunt, Luc. 8.622–23) as he ponders how history will remember him.

As Pompey disembarks, he is met by Ptolemy’s minion—a fellow Roman sent to murder him in cold blood, “Septimius who, shame to the gods, bore royal arms as a satellite” (Septimius, qui, pro superum pudor, arma satelles / regia gestabat, Luc. 8.597–98; cf. 8.675, 9.1010, 9.1064,


36 In Lucan, the satelles becomes a leitmotif in his descriptions of Egyptian tyranny (10.405, 10.418, 10.468).

37 Cf. Tac. Ann. 14.1–8 where the near fatal voyage gets one chapter (14.5), and the events afterwards get three (14.6–8), clearly separating the failed assassination from the eventual execution. Moreover, in Tacitus’ account, several men are sent to assassinate Agrip-pina in her own home, and in no other surviving account are the assassins called satellites.

38 The marked shift in narrative details from the historical tradition as we have it and the deliberate confusion as to where in space and time Agrippina actually dies is reminiscent of how Vergil creates a Pompey out of his Priam, on which see especially Bowie 1990. Like Vergil, the Octavia’s chorus tells a traditional story differently, creating out of Agrippina’s death a tragedy reminiscent of Pompey’s through a shift in narrative details and through verbal echoes of Lucan’s now-famous death scene. In fact, at the moment of her death, Agrippina recalls Vergil’s Pompey-Priam, bringing additional Pompeian allusions into the text (“at tibi pro scelere,” exclamat, “pro talibus ausis . . . praemia reddant,” Aen. 2.535–37). As Agrippina rhetorically questions why she deserves such a death, she echoes Priam’s curse (“haec,” exclamat, “mihi pro tanto / munere reddis praemia, nate?” Oct. 332–33). For the intertextual conflation of Pompey and Priam in the post-Vergilian tradition, see Marks 2008.

39 These sorts of thematic and linguistic parallels become part of Pompey’s inter-textual legacy in later silver epic (cf. Marks 2008). As Agrippina curses Nero, she recalls how she had been the one to give him ultimate power and the name of Caesar (imperium nomenque dedi / Caesaris amens, 336–37). The emphasis she puts on the significance of Caesar’s nomen reminds us of Octavia’s declaration that she is but the shadow of Caesar’s great name (71). The Great name of course is no longer Pompeius Magnus, but Lucan’s phraseology continues to haunt the text just as the memory of his doomed protagonist does.

10.98).36 So, too, Rome’s own tyrant sends his satellite to kill Agrippina as she steps off her ship: “the satellite was sent and completed his com-mands” (missus peragit iussa satelles, Oct. 366). Once more, contextual parallels further the lexical ones as each satelles is sent to end the life of a Caesar’s enemy as soon as the opponent leaves his or her respective ship. In fact, the chorus elides completely any lapse of time that occurs between Nero’s failed attempt at matricide via shipwreck and his second, successful, attempt at executing her through a minion, a period of time described at great length in the extant historical tradition surrounding Agrippina’s death.37 Given that the playwright allows her death to be narrated twice within the brief scope of his play (309–76, 593–645), a need to compress the story does not seem a probable enough reason for the temporal elision.38 In fact, the chorus goes out of its way to emphasize the immediacy with which Agrippina is killed as she reaches shore: “[Nero] endures no delay to his crime” (patiturque moram sceleris nullam, 365), a detail that makes more sense if we understand that this death scene is filtered through Lucan’s Pompey.

Once these parallels are recognized, further Lucanean echoes resound throughout the play mutually reinforcing each other.39 The chorus


40 The idea that posterity will not believe the atrocities of civil war is a topos that extends back at least to Horace (Romanus eheu—posteri negabitis, Epod. 9.11). Neverthe-less, the similarity in context and in phrasing between the Octavia passage and Lucan’s adaptation of the Horatian theme reinforces the intertext for those who recognize it.

41 A fate Octavia will also see herself fulfilling at the play’s end. This verb choice is all the more striking if we think of the parallel death scene in Seneca’s Oedipus, to which some see the Octavia indebted (cf. Hind 1972 and Boyle 2008 on this passage). There, Jocasta also asked for her womb to be struck with the sword, but with quite different language (hunc, dextra, hunc pete / uterum capacem, qui virum et gnatos tulit, Oed. 1038–39). Tacitus records the anecdote, and he, too, uses a different verb of striking (iam in mortem centurioni ferrum destringenti protendens uterum “ventrem feri” exclamavit multisque vulneribus confecta est, Ann.14.8). Cf. also Dio 61.13.

calls Agrippina’s death “a monstrous crime that posterity will scarcely believe” ( facinus vix posteritas / tarde semper saecula credent, 359–60). Lucan similarly describes the effect of Pompey’s death as a tale which will maintain its infamy for all time: “with this reputation will posterity send Septimius into eternity” (qua posteritas in saecula mittet / Septimium fama, Luc. 8.608–9).40 Both passages also use the same three near syn-onyms to describe the crime in quick succession, as if one alone could not convey the horror (facinus, nefas, scelus: Oct. 359, 363–65; Luc. 8.604, 609–10). Each author calls his victim “cursed” or “tragically doomed” as they go to their death (infelix: Oct. 369, Luc. 8.525). Both tyrants behind the satellite’s actions are impious (impius: Oct. 363, Luc. 8.783) as they order a Roman to commit gruesome crimes against a fellow Roman for a Caesar’s benefit. While Pompey’s assassin buries his sword in his side, the general thinks his final words silently to himself: “[the assassin] buried his sword, and with no groan he [sc. Pompey] yielded to the blow and watched the crime . . . dying” (perfodit, nullo gemitu consensit ad ictum / respexitque nefas . . . moriens, Luc. 8.619–21). Agrippina, on the other hand, orders the men to bury their sword in her womb: “dying she says ‘strike here!’ . . . this voice mixed with her final groans” (moriens . . . “hic est fodiendus” ait . . . hanc vocem cum supremo mixtam gemitu, Oct. 368–74). The identical phrasing of moriens . . . gemitu only further highlights the contrast between Pompey’s silence (nullo gemitu) and Agrippina’s famous last words (supremo gemitu). Even the poet’s choice of verb (fodiendus) recalls Lucan’s vivid description of Pompey’s violent assassination (perfodit), as if Agrippina demands in her final words to share his fate.41

Behind the more pointed echoes of Lucan’s Pompeian death scene, an additional echo of civil war literature stands out at the start of the


42 I borrow the idea of intertextual “texturing” from Pelling 2010, 107, who describes Thucydides’ influence on the Greek historians of Roman civil war in these terms.

43 This phrase goes on to have a long afterlife in Roman narratives of civil strife. It appears in Seneca’s Oedipus to characterize the Theban women’s dismemberment of Pentheus (Oed. 444) and then again twice in Statius also in Theban contexts (Theb. 3.54 and 8.451).

44 Although the syntactical role of nefas differs in each poem, the similarity in language brings out further parallels in theme and circumstance. In his poem, Horace suggests that the Romans ought to sail off to a happier place, abandoning their cursed city. Unlike the sea voyage which Horace urges Romans to take, Agrippina’s sailing trip will not lead to a happy future. Epode 16 also locates the guilt of civil war within the Roman people as a whole (impia aetas, 9) and not with Caesar in particular; the chorus, however, has no doubt as to its own Caesar’s guilt (impius, Oct. 363).

45 Additional echoes of Horatian civil war poetry may also further texture the Agrippina ode. When the chorus goes on to describe Agrippina’s near-death sea voyage (Tyrrhenum . . . in aequor), Ferri 2003 notes an echo of the opening Horace’s Ode 4.15, a poem celebrating the princeps for rescuing the state from civil war (furor civilis, 4.15.17–18). Horace opens this poem in a recusatio stance, asserting that Apollo forbids him to sail Tyrrhenian waters with his proposed song of civil war (ne parva Tyrrhenum per aequor / vela darem, 4.15.3–4), and urges him instead to celebrate Augustus’ age of peaceful bounty. Agrippina, however, gets no such warning from the Julio-Claudians’ patron god, and thus blithely sets sail on the strife-ridden voyage that leads to her destruction.

narrative, further texturing the chorus’ language.42 The chorus opens its excursus on Agrippina’s murder by declaring that “these ages too have seen a great unspeakable crime” (haec quoque . . . videre nefas / saecula magnum, Oct. 309–10). Readers of Horace would hear in the chorus’ language an echo of one of the lyric poet’s most famous meditations on the dangers of civil war.43 In Epode 16, Horace laments that a second generation of Romans (impia aetas, 9; saecula, 65) grinds itself to dust and destroys the city which no foreign army has yet destroyed. If such strife continues, according to Horace, Rome will once again see what is forbidden to see (nefas videre, 14): its own general turning against fel-low citizens, as it recently experienced under Pompey and Caesar. The Roman people—the addressee of Horace’s public lament—must change their ways (and sail away) before it is too late. The Octavia’s chorus also addresses the Roman people (with whom it identifies) as a whole and, taking a similar moralizing and didactic stance, urges the wider Roman populace to change its ways before history repeats itself once more.44 Thus at the beginning of its narrative, the chorus’ language suggests that we remember Agrippina’s murder and its consequences in terms of how Horace remembers Rome’s earlier civil wars and their destruc-tive power, and that we learn from these memories before strife engulfs Rome yet again.45


46 The extended focus on the experience of women and their laments in the Octavia taps into a well-studied phenomenon in epic poetry in which female lamentation threatens the traditional masculine sphere of heroic glory by emphasizing the community’s suffering. Cf. Nugent 1992; Fantham 1999; Murnaghan 1999; Keith 2008, 241.

47 O’Gorman 2000, 122–43, argues that, in Tacitus’ Annals, the voice of imperial women subverts the master narrative of the imperial family as established by Augustus and his heirs and creates a powerful counter-voice and counter-memory. I see something similar at work in the Octavia.

48 For a case study on the complicated process of depicting the power and significance of Agrippina the Younger in the contemporary visual and literary tradition and the way in which the prominence of these women engendered the negative historical tradition that later developed around them, see Ginsburg 2006.

Through the cumulative weight of these various intertexts, any combination of which could have stood out to different audiences at dif-ferent times, the playwright textures the chorus’ narrative with language that urges us to see Agrippina’s death in terms of a Roman civil war narrative, and in particular the famous death of Pompey the Great. Thus Nero’s mother, too, becomes one more shadow of a great name within the text. Agrippina says as much when she reappears at the play’s center to forecast Nero’s fall: at the close of her emotional monologue, she wishes that Nero had died inside her womb, had descended to the underworld, and had seen his ancestors, “men of great name” (nominis magni viros, Oct. 641), whom Agrippina disappointed by producing such a monstrous Caesar. In the end, Agrippina’s biological potential as a mother—the potential that many celebrate in Octavia—becomes her undoing, as she bore the Caesar who destroys her.

While Octavia replays the end of Pompey’s life as he moves closer and closer to his final defeat, Agrippina completes the narrative by restag-ing Pompey’s death. Together the two Julio-Claudian victims of Nero become a new Pompey for a new, equally tumultuous era of imperial history. Perhaps even more significant, however, is that the two Pompeys in the various stages of civil war against Nero Caesar are not only his relatives but also imperial women.46 Thus the play imbues its reading of Rome’s strife-ridden past with the tension created by the dominant female presence in Julio-Claudian history.47 Under the Julio-Claudians, women began to play a more active role in the traditionally male arenas of politics and warfare, accompanying their husbands on campaigns and taking a strikingly public place in the dominant imagery of the period. In the literary-historical tradition of Julio-Claudian Rome, these women also take on active roles behind the scenes, scheming over the succession and maneuvering to have female rivals displaced from power.48 The Octavia


49 Schiesaro 2003, 35, similarly notes that within the strife between brothers in the Thyestes, Seneca “condenses the horrors of civil strife in the polarized contrast between two brothers.” Octavia’s gender, however, renders the play’s microcosm of civil war even more pointed than Seneca’s. I do not mean, of course, to suggest that women do not play significant roles in previous narratives of civil strife. One need only think of Livy’s Lucretia (1.57–60), the loyal and disloyal wives of the proscribed (e.g., Val. Max. 6.7.2–3), or Pom-pey’s wives (e.g., Luc. 3.1–35, 8.88–105), among other notable examples. The difference, I suggest, is that the Octavia poet writes a new type of civil war in which the leading, public, and active roles fall naturally to women. Their active role is not an aberration due to strife, nor are they temporarily taking on traditionally male roles as the women of, e.g., the pro-scription narratives often seem to be (cf. Jal 1963, 352–54; Hemelrijk 2004; Osgood 2006, 73 and 81–82). Rather, the narratives of strife are, in a sense, feminized by being rendered within the domestic spaces of imperial Rome. The house is not a microcosm of the state as it can be read in earlier narratives (e.g., Lucretia, the proscriptions), reflecting its virtues and vices; the house is the state, the seat of real power and thus real power struggles with catastrophic significance akin to the great battles of the late Republic. Recognizing this distinction is as important as recognizing the Octavia’s narrative models.

in a sense combines these two strands of representation of Julio-Claudian women—the public powerful persona and the private schemer—into one model, filtering it through the strife-ridden narratives of Roman civil war. Pompey, the Republican general par excellence, must now wage his civil wars within the domestic space of the imperial palace, against women and also as a woman.49

And yet, a crucial question remains: why Pompey? On the most basic level, the Octavia uses Pompey as an intertextual model to rescript the final years of Julio-Claudian history into an imperial-age reflection of the civil war that—in Lucanean retrospect, at least—first brought the dynasty to power. Such a reading, however, could have been accomplished through allusions to the civil war between Octavian and Antony which looms large in Nero’s memory of Augustus’ legacy elsewhere in the play (503–29). Nevertheless, the battle between Caesar and Pompey offers something that Octavian and Antony as models do not: the potential to look towards the violent deaths of both generals, given that Caesar met his own end within a few years of Pompey. Thus as we read Agrippina’s and Octavia’s tragedy in terms of Pompey’s, we may well begin to won-der if Nero is implicitly condemned to Caesar’s end. And indeed, if we look at how Nero is characterized throughout the play by himself and others, we can see that he, too, becomes an intertextual Caesar to answer the Pompey of Agrippina and Octavia. His Caesar, however, is not the triumphant victor of Pharsalus; he is instead Julius Caesar on the verge of his own historical tragedy.


50 Cf. Sen. NQ 7.17.2, 21.3–4, and 29.3; Plin. HN. 2.92; Suet. Ner. 36; Tac. Ann. 14.22.1.51 This interpretation is, of course, retrospective. For comets signaling the end of a

reign, especially in the post Julio-Claudian literary tradition, see Val. Flac. Arg. 6.608, Stat. Theb. 1.708, and Sil. Pun. 8.636–37. The Julio-Claudian dynasty had, in a sense, begun with the sidus Iulium and ends with a comet which foretold Nero’s fall. The family thus offered recent tangible proof of the significance of such portents for the post-Julio-Claudian age.

ON THE MODEL OF CAESAR: NERO, COLLECTIVE GUILT, AND ASSASSINATION

Given the Octavia’s intertextual modeling of its leading ladies on Pompey the Great, it hardly comes as a surprise that Nero Caesar is intertextually cast as Pompey’s enemy. A particularly notable example occurs early on when Octavia prays to Jupiter for Nero’s gruesome death (Oct. 227–37):

utinam nefandi principis dirum caputobruere flammis caelitum rector paret,qui saepe terras fulmine infesto quatitmentesque nostras ignibus terret sacris novisque monstris; vidimus caelo iubarardens cometen pandere infaustam facem,qua plaustra tardus noctis alterna viceregit Bootes, frigore Arctoo rigens:en ipse diro spiritu saevi ducis polluitur aether, gentibus clades novasminantur astra, quas regit dux impius.

Would that the ruler of the heavens would prepare to strike the savage head of this unspeakable emperor with flames, the ruler who often shakes the earth with hostile lightning and terrifies our minds with sacred fire and new monstrosities. We have seen a bright, blazing comet stretch its baleful torch in the sky, where slow Bootes rigid with Arctic frost rules in alternate turn: behold! The upper air is polluted by the dire breath of our savage leader, the stars threaten new disasters for the peoples which the impious leader rules.

Although she knows her wish is fruitless (utinam), Octavia finds hope in the fiery portent recently witnessed in Rome. In 60 C.E., a comet appeared in the sky that lasted up to six months.50 Given traditional associations of comets with a change in ruler, this particular comet came to be read in the post-Neronian tradition as one of the earliest signs of Nero’s immi-nent demise.51 Octavia’s description puts much emphasis on sight and autobiographical experience: she and Rome saw these things themselves,


52 Ramsey and Licht 1997, 135.53 For the role of portents in Roman civil war narrative and their moralizing implica-

tions, Jal 1963, 238–42, is still the best starting point. The most extensive study of Caesar’s comet in particular is Ramsey and Licht 1997, who analyze a wide range of literary, material, and scientific evidence for the comet and its significance.

54 For a similar intertextual conflation of Horatian and Vergilian material in the Thyestes, see Schiesaro 2003, 116.

55 The similarities were noted early. See Thomas 1988 and Mynors 1994 on Verg. G.1.501–2, Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 on Hor. O. 1.2.13.

56 While Horace does not explicitly comment on Caesar’s murder in this poem, his allusive engagement with Vergil and his representation of the Roman Tiber attacking Vesta’s monuments (Hor. O. 1.2.13–16) bring to mind the murder of Vesta’s priest by Roman hands.

and thus, in her opinion, they are in a position to interpret the portent’s significance. Nevertheless, the language of sight here (vidimus)—in this precise form and context—has wider significance that connects Octavia with the cultural memory of previous Romans who had themselves seen more famous portents surrounding the death of a Caesar.

Romans knew well that the appearance of a comet foretold dire events on the horizon, and particularly foreshadowed a change in rulers.52 At first it may seem as if Octavia merely invokes a commonplace topos which she then applies to her specific situation. Nevertheless, this reading does not account for the other prodigies on her list, nor her emphasis on the divine wrath involved. There is, however, in Julio-Claudian history a parallel event seared into the cultural memory of the Roman people which appears (at least in the textual tradition) very much like the events which Octavia describes. The assassination of Julius Caesar and the dramatic portents associated with this period—at times represented as occurring before, during, or after the assassination itself—earned a large literary tradition.53 In particular, the comet(s) that occurred and the civil wars that Caesar’s death reawakened became fundamentally intertwined in various catalogues of the chaotic period. Two accounts particularly seem to have influenced the later tradition: the end of Vergil’s Georgics 1 and Horace’s Ode 1.2.54 Even more significant for the Octavia passage is that these two texts seem themselves intertextually interdependent.

Critics have long recognized that Ode 1.2 looks back to the end of Georgics 1.55 Each passage deals with the aftermath of Caesar’s death and the civil wars that followed.56 More specifically, both passages suggest that the portents signal divine displeasure, and both connect them thematically with the guilt of civil war. Of crucial importance to the Octavia’s engage-ment with both passages is Horace’s echo of the very word through which Vergil describes the collective Roman witnesses to these dire events—a


57 Horace’s opening words—iam satis—also indicate his debt to Vergil who had similarly asserted that Rome had already paid enough for her ancestral crimes (satis iam pridem sanguine nostro / Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae, / iam pridem nobis caeli te regia, Caesar, / invidet, Verg. G. 1.501–3). Horace often uses his opening words to signal his literary model.

58 On the portents, their cultural significance, and their symbolic power in the literary tradition, see also Osgood 2006, 20–25.

59 For intertextual markers, or Alexandrian footnotes, see Hinds 1998, 1–5; Edmunds 2001, 156–57. Ovid also looks back to Horace and Vergil when, at the end of his Meta-morphoses, he describes how comets were often seen in the time around Caesar’s death, although he suggests that the portents were a warning prior to the murder. The form of the verb has changed, but the emphasis on Roman witnesses remains (saepe faces visae mediis ardere, 15.787).

word which Octavia will also use: vidimus (G. 1.472).57 Vergil’s catalogue emphasizes gruesome sights and Rome’s status as collective witness to images it cannot forget, beginning with vidimus at the catalogue’s open-ing.58 Horace returns to the themes and content of Vergil’s catalogue in a noticeable way. His intertextual reworking of Vergil, however, is most fully activated through the lyric poet’s marked redeployment of Vergilian language: both his appropriation of Vergil’s verb for sight in the same form at line beginning (vidimus, O. 1.13) and also his initial echo of Vergil’s assertion that Rome had atoned enough for its ancestral crimes (iam satis, 1.2.1; satis iam pridem, G. 1.501). Thus when Horace explains how Rome has seen such gruesome portents before, he not only looks back historically to the moments surrounding Caesar’s death and the civil war, but also looks back intertextually to Vergil’s account of these same portents, creating out of his repetition of otherwise unremarkable language an Alexandrian footnote: we Romans saw these portents, and we have seen a prior literary treatment as well.59 By using the same verb in the same form as both Vergil and Horace, the Octavia poet not only puts his leading lady in the tradition of Romans who have seen portents of strife in the past but also puts in her mouth the exact intertextual marker through which Horace looks to Vergil. Both passages become important for Octavia’s vengeful prayer, adding an additional layer to her hopes for Nero’s demise. I will examine each in turn.

The most striking parallel between Octavia’s prayer and Vergil’s Georgics is, of course, her appropriation of Vergil’s vidimus, bringing into Neronian Rome the collective witnesses of Caesar’s assassination and its aftermath: “how often did we see Etna boil over into the fields of the Cyclopes, flowing from her burst furnaces, hurling balls of fire and molten rocks” (quotiens Cyclopum effervere in agros / vidimus undantem ruptis


60 Cf. Boyle 2008 on the similarity of the introductions with vidimus.61 “At no other time fell more lightning from a serene sky, nor so often did dire

comets burn.” These comets do not seem connected to the sidus Iulium of Augustan public imagery, as they foretell instead dire civil war without a hint of optimism (Gurval 1997, 64).

62 For the influence of this passage, see the opening of Lucan’s BC with Roche 2009, 20–23. Lucan uses Vergil’s civil war excursus at the end of Georgics 1 to contaminate inter-textual echoes of the Aeneid and to create out of this conflict his own poetics. See also the use of Horace Ode 1.2 in Lucan’s first book (Roche 2009, 130).

fornacibus Aetnam, / flammarumque globos liquefactaque volvere saxa, G. 1.471–73).60 It is from this marked lexical echo that further thematic and linguistic parallels emerge. Both Vergil’s retrospective narrative and Octavia’s wish reflect on the death of a Caesar, and each notes the sig-nificance of comets in predicting such political upheaval (vidimus caelo iubar / ardens cometen pandere infaustam facem, Oct. 231–32; non alias caelo ceciderunt plura sereno / fulgura nec diri totiens arsere cometae, G. 1.487–88). The extended focus on divine fire’s destruction further links the passages.61 Octavia’s emphasis on how often Jupiter vents his wrath (saepe, Oct. 229) picks up on Vergil’s use of quotiens and totiens and also works, in a sense, as a further allusive marker that links the language of Octavia’s prayer both to the past historical moment and also to the liter-ary passages that hover intertextually behind her language. Nevertheless, while Vergil may have felt that “already long ago we paid enough with our blood for the crimes of Laomedon’s Troy” (satis iam pridem sanguine nostro / Laomedonteae luimus periuria Troiae, G. 1.501–2), Octavia would like to see the vengeance continue and wonders why Jupiter “ceases [hurl-ing lightning] with his right hand against one so guilty” (in tam nocentem dextra cur cessat [sc. Iuppiter] tua, Oct. 247). Vergil’s lines became one of the most influential passages on Caesar’s death and the subsequent civil wars for the later poetic tradition, and this literary legacy, too, makes Octavia’s language more marked:62 by their reappearance, the comets that burned at Caesar’s death give Octavia hope that Caesar’s heir might meet a similar fate.

Horace’s passage, too, lies behind Octavia’s language, and the shift in focus from Vergil’s narrative of chaos to Horace’s narrative of collective guilt is significant for our reading of Octavia’s curse. Like Vergil, Horace alludes to the prodigies surrounding Caesar’s death while contemplating the civil wars that follow. Unlike his model, however, Horace focuses more explicitly on the divine wrath of Jupiter and the Romans’ perception of this wrath as a punishment for their criminal guilt. Horace’s Jupiter hurls hail at the earth from his thunder-wielding


63 “Now already enough of snow and of dire hail has the father sent against the earth and having struck with his reddened hand the sacred citadels, he terrified the city, terrified its people.” Rubente dextera may allude to Jupiter’s role as thunderer.

64 A comparison of the ends of both passages, with their focus on triumphal imagery, is particularly instructive. Vergil’s charioteer (G. 1.510–14) has gained the power to stop Rome’s chaos (cf. O. 1.2.49–52), but the question remains as to how he will use it.

65 The idea of ancestral guilt is of course present in Vergil (e.g., G. 1.501–3), but Horace takes this idea and centers his poem on it, on the corresponding question of satiety and on the idea of vengeance as both punishment and curse for the Roman people.

hand and terrifies its people (iam satis terris nivis atque dirae / grandinis misit Pater et rubente / dextera sacras iaculatus arces / terruit urbem, / terruit gentis, O. 1.2.1–5), striking their sacred citadels with lightning.63 So, too, Octavia wishes that the king of heaven would destroy Nero, as she remembers in similar language how often Rome experienced the god’s wrath before. Her Jupiter “often shakes the land with his hostile lightning” (qui saepe terras fulmine infesto quatit, Oct. 229) and “terrifies our minds with sacred fire and new terrors” (mentesque nostras ignibus terret sacris / novisque monstris, 230–31), much as Horace’s Romans fear a coming apocalypse marked by Jove’s nova monstra (O. 1.2.6). As noted above, Octavia later wonders why, if Jove is capable of such destruction, he refuses to punish guilty Nero (in tam nocentem dextra cur cessat tua, Oct. 247), recalling in her language Horace’s emphasis on Jove’s baleful right hand (rubente dextera, O. 1.2.2–3). In fact, Octavia’s use of saepe (Oct. 229) seems now even more an intertextual marker that not only brings her language into contact with a previous instance of Jupiter’s wrath, but brings it into dialogue with Horace’s (and Vergil’s) literary reaction to Caesar’s death to which later poets so often return. For Octavia, enough is not enough: using saepe as a correction for iam satis, she suggests that only a continued cycle of vengeance will satisfy her.

One striking difference, however, remains between Horace’s rework-ing of Vergilian material and Vergil’s original poem that is significant for our reading of Octavia’s language. Instead of dwelling on the violent chaos and the role of the portents in creating this chaos, Horace focuses instead on how the collective guilt of the Roman people needs expia-tion and on how Augustus may deliver the state from its curse and begin the process.64 It is this understanding of Roman guilt and the need for its expiation—not as prominent in the Vergilian passage—that seems to attract the Octavia poet to Horace.65 Furthermore, while Vergil does not emphasize Jupiter’s role in the terror the Romans experience in the wake of Caesar’s death, both the Horatian poem and Octavia’s curse open with an image of vengeful Jupiter who strikes terror into the earthly mortals.


66 Note also where Octavia calls Nero a wicked princeps (nefandi principis dirum caput, 227), perhaps further distancing him from Augustus. There may also be an echo of Epod. 16.63–66 here (Iuppiter illa piae secrevit litora genti, / ut inquinavit aere tempus aureum / aere, dehinc ferro duravit saecula, quorum / piis secunda vate me datur fuga), which would draw the chorus’ melancholy ode into further dialogue with Horace’s apocalyptic poem. I am indebted to my anonymous referee for this point.

67 For the significance of Vergil’s Georgics to Lucan, see Roche 2009, 319, on this pas-sage. Roche also underscores the significance of Lucan’s debt to Ovid’s Met. 15.783–98—a

The targets of Jupiter’s wrath in both passages are fundamentally guilty in the eyes of Octavia and Horace and will thus suffer Jove’s punishment until that guilt is expiated. Theirs are no random portents, but rather the targeted vengeance of the king of the gods.

Octavia blends Vergil’s programmatic narrative on the portents of civil war and Caesar’s death into Horace’s image of Jovian vengeance upon human failing. Beginning with vidimus, her language weaves together two extremely influential and interrelated passages of earlier literature on the aftermath of Caesar’s death into one extended wish for Jove to vent his wrath once more. Octavia’s redeployment of Vergilian and Horatian material, however, does more than generically connect her wish for Nero’s future with Julius Caesar’s past. Rather, the playwright uses Horace’s notion of guilt to condemn Nero by association. The warnings Jupiter sent to the cursed Roman people in Horace’s poem and the fiery portents affecting the same people in Vergil’s passage are here directed as a curse against one man only: Caesar’s heir. In Horace and Vergil, civil war belongs to and is continued by the people and each poet looks to young Octavian/Augustus for a cure (hunc iuvenem, G. 1.500; princeps, O. 1.2.50). Nero, however, is not the new Augustus that Rome had wanted him to be, prepared to deliver the city from chaos and provide peaceful security. Rather, from Octavia’s perspective at least, Rome’s hereditary guilt rests with Augustus’ descendent alone who “stains with the vices of his character the name Augustus” (morumque vitiis nomen Augustum inquinat, Oct. 251).66

Beyond Horace and Vergil, an additional intertext in this passage draws another seminal moment from Caesar’s past into Octavia’s wish for Nero’s future while also importing Lucan’s Caesar into the drama as an answer to the dominant role that Lucan’s Bellum Civile plays in the drama’s reception of Pompey. As Lucan’s Caesar crosses the Rubicon and makes his way through a terrified Italy, a series of portents occurs which looks forward chronologically to the portents that historically sur-rounded his death and back literarily to the treatment of these portents by Lucan’s predecessors, Horace and Vergil.67 Thus Lucan retrojects the


passage which lurks behind Nero’s language below. Roche reads the transposition of the prodigies from Caesar’s death to his invasion of Italy as polemical: “the destruction of the dictator is replaced by the destruction of the republic and the implication is clearly that the greater perversion of natural order was Caesar’s invasion of his fatherland rather than his assassination.” See also Martindale 1976, 52.

68 Cf. the grove scene where Caesar wishes all the guilt to become his alone (credite me fecisse nefas, Luc. 3.437).

earlier poets’ portents to Caesar’s invasion of the patria, the moment when the Roman guilt of civil war becomes embodied by Caesar. His account includes now familiar fiery portents, the gods showing their anger with lightning, and—most significantly for our present passage—a comet flash-ing across the sky that portends the death of a monarch (Luc. 1.524–32):

superique minacesprodigiis terras inplerunt, aethera, pontum.ignota obscurae viderunt sidera noctesardentemque polum flammis caeloque volantesobliquas per inane faces crinemque timendisideris et terris mutantem regna cometen.fulgura fallaci micuerunt crebra sereno,et varias ignis denso dedit aere formas,nunc iaculum longo, nunc sparso lumine lampas.

And the menacing gods above filled the lands with their warnings, the heavens, the sea, and hazy nights saw stars unknown, the pole burning with fire, torches flying obliquely in the sky through the emptiness, and the lock of the star that must be feared and a comet changing kings on earth. Lightning flickered frequently in the sky feigning serenity, and its fire gave various shapes in the dense air, now a javelin with light extended, now torches with light scattered.

To Lucan, Caesar’s guilt in attacking his own country leads to the strife both in his life and after his death as described by Vergil and Horace, and by echoing this Lucanean passage, the Octavia attaches to Nero the inexpiable guilt that Lucan attaches to Caesar throughout his epic.68 Both Lucan and Octavia emphasize the language of vision, inspired by Vergil and Horace (vidimus, viderunt). Similarly, both focus on the fear that hostile gods inspire in earthly humans (caelitum rector . . . qui saepe terras . . . terret . . . minantur astra, Oct. 228–37; superique minaces . . . terras implerunt . . . timendi, Luc. 1.524–28); in both passages, it is as if the humans on earth can see the king of heaven hurling vengeance, an image perhaps borrowed from Horace in both places. The playwright weaves


69 No one seems to read Lucan’s comets in terms of Nero’s. Even if Lucan himself were not thinking of the comets of 60 C.E. when writing the first book of his BC, it seems likely that the passage would be interpreted thus as part of the epic’s reception by readers with knowledge of Nero’s fall.

70 The implications of Octavia’s allusive language for Nero’s Caesarean guilt and looming demise are not terribly surprising given the character’s wish to see Nero struck down. Nevertheless, however one reads the intertexts that lie behind her wish, the future seems equally bleak. The comets that appeared to Lucan’s Caesar ominously foretold not only his own death but also the civil wars and the death of countless Romans in the intervening years; the prodigies seen by Vergil and Horace led Rome into an even more brutal period of civil war than that which Caesar had initiated. Thus these portents not only suggest the death of a ruler and the transition of power but are also deeply connected to disastrous periods of Roman civil war. Octavia’s wish not only looks to the death of Nero but also implicitly condemns the Roman people to the gruesome civil strife of 69 C.E. Through her language, she herself is therefore implicated in the perpetuation of Roman civil strife under the empire.

into Octavia’s speech Lucan’s overblown use of four different terms for heavenly, vengeful fire (flammis . . . ignibus . . . ardens . . . facem in the Octavia; ardentem . . . flammis . . . faces . . . ignis in Lucan), further texturing her language with Lucan’s rhetorical stance.

Perhaps most significantly, Lucan’s account of Caesar at the Rubicon is the only one of these literary models to explicitly note that comets bode ill for those in power (terris mutantem regna cometen, Luc. 1.529), an important aspect of Octavia’s curse (vidimus caelo iubar / ardens cometen pandere infaustam facem, Oct. 231–32).69 As Octavia’s language looks back to Vergil’s and Horace’s accounts of the aftermath of Caesar’s death, it also recalls Lucan’s account of Caesar’s guilty rise to power. Thus through Octavia’s intertexts, the play alludes to two crucial moments in the cultural memory of Caesar. In doing so, her language further underscores both her wish that Nero will die and also the reasons why he deserves to die as Caesar did: like Lucan’s Caesar, Nero is guilty of harming his family, his people, and his country.70

Octavia is not the only Julio-Claudian whose language suggests that Nero will follow in Julius Caesar’s footsteps. The playwright also suggests that Nero himself reads his situation this way, and this fear dictates Nero’s actions throughout much of the play. Although his dia-logue with Seneca (440–532) focuses mostly on conflicting memories of Augustus, the memory of Julius Caesar also causes Nero demonstrable unease regarding his current domestic troubles. Caesar’s death at the height of his power and at the hands of his own people terrifies Nero, teaching him that Caesar’s famous clemency was a weak policy that led only to further civil strife (495–502). As “Brutus armed his hands for


71 For an extensive survey of the literary language and topoi commonly seen in Roman civil-war narratives, see the landmark study of Jal 1963, 257–488. See also, e.g., Keitel 1984 and Ganiban 2007, 33–38.

killing the general from whom he had safety” (Brutus in caedem ducis, / a quo salutem tulerat, armavit manus, 498–99), so Plautus, Sulla, and even Octavia arm men against Nero and will continue to do so as long as Nero lets them live (armat ministros sceleris in caedem meam, 466). To Nero, only fear and violence, such as that which Octavian brought upon his people, can control the mob (503–32). It is this desire to avoid Julius Caesar’s fate—a desire which Nero returns to explicitly and implicitly throughout the play—that encourages us to hunt for further allusions to Caesar, especially as Nero’s own citizens turn against him.

The threat of assassination looms especially large for Nero as revo-lution breaks out after his wedding to Poppaea. As he storms on stage, he curses his leniency, his soldiers’ sluggish response, and imagines the bloody landscape he will realize across Rome (820–30):

O lenta nimium militis nostri manuset ira patiens post nefas tantum mea,quod non cruor civilis accensas facesextinguit in nos, caede nec populi madetfunerea Roma, quae viros tales tulit!Admissa sed iam morte puniri parum est,graviora meruit impium plebis scelus.en illa, cui me civium subicit furor,suspecta coniunx et soror semper mihi,tandem dolori spiritum reddat meoiramque nostram sanguine extinguat suo.

Alas for the excessively slow hand of my soldiers and my anger too indulgent after such madness, because civil blood has not yet snuffed out the torches they lit against me, nor does funereal Rome yet drip with the blood of her people, Rome who bore such men! But already to be punished with allowed death is too little punishment, the impious crime of the mob has earned more severe punishment. Behold she who subjected me to the madness of my citizens, that wife and sister always suspect to me, finally let her repay my grief with her life and snuff out my anger with her blood.

Not only does this passage redeploy the generic vocabulary and images of civil war narratives, it also recalls a more specific moment of strife and bloodshed from earlier Julio-Claudian history and literature.71 Ovid similarly describes “Emathian Philippi once more made wet” with blood


72 Although the language seems commonplace, the combination of caede and ex(s)tin -guere occurs only here in Ovid and the Octavia. Later, Silius Italicus varies the phrasing in a passage also indebted to Ovid (Pun. 4.410–12). The context of imperial assassination attempts, however, is what most strengthens the echo.

during the chaos that follows Caesar’s assassination (Emathiique iterum madefient caede Philippi, Met. 15.824; cf. caede nec populi madet / funerea Roma, Oct. 823–24). While in Ovid’s passage blood covers not Italian but Emathian soil, the significance is that the blood is Roman and that it is spilled repeatedly in civil war: in the wake of Caesar’s murder, the soil upon which he had his greatest civil war victory (Pharsalus) runs once more with civil bloodshed. Of course, Ovid notes, there was a reason why Roman civil strife broke out again: certain Romans raised sinful swords against Caesar, murdering a man known for his clemency (Met. 15.776–870). Ovid’s treatment of Caesar’s murder and its aftermath lurks behind the language of Nero’s rant, suggesting intertextually that the reason for his violent reaction is in fact rooted in his earlier expressed fear of sharing Caesar’s fate.

A more precise echo of Ovid’s account of Caesar’s assassination quickly follows, suggesting a deeper connection between the two passages. Ovid’s Venus foresees and laments, “Do you see those wicked swords? Stop them, I beg you, and ward off the crime and do not extinguish the flames of Vesta with the blood of her priest!” (en acui sceleratos cernitis enses. / quos prohibete, precor, facinusque repellite neve / caede sacerdotis flammas exstinguite Vestae! 15.776–78). Nero borrows Venus’ language as he continues to curse against his would-be assassins: “but civil blood has not extinguished the torches lit against me, nor is funereal Rome wet with the blood of her people” (quod non cruor civilis accensas faces / exstinguit in nos, caede nec populi madet / funerea Roma, Oct. 822–24).72 Notably, however, he inverts Venus’ horror when he laments that the impious citizens—who threaten the life of their Caesar and his wife—have not yet extinguished the torches they raised against him with their blood. The fires of Vesta become the torches raised against Nero, while the murder of Caesar becomes the current threat against Nero’s life that will lead to his preemptive retaliation. Nero repeats this threat in similar language within a few lines, further reinforcing the Ovidian echo: “may they extinguish my anger with their own blood” (iramque nostram sanguine exstinguat suo, 830). The Octavia’s Nero, it seems, has learned from the fate of Ovid’s Caesar and will not make the mistake of offering clemency to his violent and ungrateful people (corrupta turba nec capit clementiam / ingrata nostram, 835–36). Instead they will suffer Caesar’s


73 In his earlier description of Caesar’s murder (Oct. 498–502) and in his intertextual engagement with Ovid’s Caesar, Nero elides the distinction typically seen in the Julio-Claudian literary-historical tradition between the people’s love of Caesar and the “wicked” senators. Nero retrojects onto Caesar’s murder his own current situation in which, at least from the Octavia’s perspective, the people and Senate are lumped into one broad category of those against him. This conflation of the senatorial and popular reactions to Nero is itself a product of the period after his fall when the tradition of “Nero the Monster” gained greater ground. During his lifetime, the people largely adored Nero and mourned his death for some time (Flower 2006, 198–99).

fate and, in Ovidian language, extinguish Nero’s fear of civil insurrection, conspiracy, and assassination by shedding their own blood.73 As the play’s language encourages us to read Nero through Julius Caesar, we see how eager he is to escape the trap into which his ancestor and intertextual model fell. Nero will win his civil war and will not suffer for holding perpetual tyrannical power in its wake. At least not yet.

CONCLUSION: REMEMBERING THE JULIO-CLAUDIANS AFTER 69 C.E.

As the Octavia restages a pivotal moment in Neronian history, it looks chronologically forward to the Julio-Claudians’ fall and literarily back-wards to the civil wars out of which the dynasty had first come to power. Over the course of the play, Octavia and Agrippina meet violent ends at the hands of the last Julio-Claudian emperor; while doing so, they suggest important parallels with the Republic’s last great military hero: Pompey the Great. Moreover, by modeling both Octavia and Agrippina on similar conglomerations of literary-historical exempla, the Octavia poet creates oppositions within his text that transcend the simple dichotomy of Nero vs. Octavia or even of Julians vs. Claudians. Rather, the play uses these characters and their allusive models to articulate battle narratives throughout Julio-Claudian history that generate and repeat themselves in iterative cycles from which the dynasty cannot escape.

Nero, too, is intertextually implicated as Julius Caesar in the civil strife of Rome’s violent past both through Octavia’s allusive language and through his own paranoid reflections on his ancestor’s demise. Pom-peys and Caesars lurk throughout the text, implicitly condemning the Julio-Claudians to replay semper idem the civil wars of the late Republic within the walls of their own palace. Thus the Octavia poet permanently divorces Neronian Rome and the history of the dynasty from imperial images of destiny and peace—pax et princeps—and instead attaches the


74 For the Octavia’s echoes of coin legends, see Kragelund 1982, 38–52; Ramage 1983, 206–14. For the play as part of early memory sanctions against Nero, see Flower 2006, 202–9. Nevertheless, not all are convinced by a dating to the years 68–71 C.E. In his recent groundbreaking commentary on the play, for example, Ferri 2003, 69–78, urges us to consider a much later date under Domitian on both literary and historical grounds.

75 Cf. the principate and its would-be emperors as a locus of civil war’s dangerous passions at Tac. Hist. 3.72.1 (furore principum excindi).

76 For a Galban date, see Barnes 1982; Kragelund 1982, 38–52, 1988, 1998, and 2005; Sullivan 1985, 71–72; Wiseman 2001; Flower 2006, 202–9. Kragelund 1982, 49, and Sullivan 1985, 71–72, however, also note that the early Flavian period is another likely candidate given the political ideologies at work in the play. For the early Vespasianic period, see Junge 1999, 199–200; Smith 2003, 418–25; Boyle 2008, xiv–xvi. Many, however, do not dif-ferentiate between the two, suggesting only that the Octavia is the product of the early years after Nero’s fall, e.g., Herington 1961, 29; Manuwald 2001, 337–39; Champlin 2003, 104; Fitch 2004b, 512–13. Given the current state of evidence, it is into this last camp that I fall: whether the Octavia was produced during Galba’s brief restoration of order after the revolt of Vindex or whether it is an early exemplar of Flavian poetry after the conclusion of the civil wars matters less to its interpretation than the suggestion that the playwright is a near-contemporary witness to Nero’s fall and its bloody aftermath.

Julio-Claudians to narratives of Roman strife. Perhaps as he looked back on Julio-Claudian history after the reawakening of civil war in 69 C.E., the playwright felt that bellum civile et princeps more naturally reflected Romans’ experience of their empire.

In fact, this intertextually generated synkrisis between Neronian Rome and the Republic’s civil wars may provide supporting evidence to current theories about the Octavia’s date. Over the past few decades, scholars have collected a wealth of evidence linking the Octavia to the long year of 69 C.E.: from its echoes of contemporary slogans to its reimagin-ing of Nero, the play seems to respond to the political struggles of this turbulent period in which several would-be dynasties sought to manipu-late the memory of the imperial family that came before.74 The Octavia may well be the earliest retrospective account of the Julio-Claudians to survive, and this makes it a crucial witness to a period in which Roman narratives of early imperial history were radically altered. No longer was imperial power a guarantee of peace; it became instead as much a catalyst for civil war as the political struggles of the Republic had been.75

Within this narrow window of 68–71 C.E., however, scholars are further divided between those who favor a date under Galba’s brief reign and those who prefer the early Flavian period.76 Given the close overlap of Galba’s and Vespasian’s political messaging, arguments have at times hinged on the perceived impact of the civil wars of 69 C.E. on the


77 Other arguments for a Galban date focus on (1) the unnamed praetorian prefect who may or may not correspond to Tigellinus (alive and protected in Galban Rome) and (2) the lack of any mention of Otho or his connections with Poppaea (Barnes 1982). Although striking, neither proves a Galban over early Vespasianic date given the history of both men in the Neronian period as well as in the chaos that followed. Moreover, in terms of theatrical patronage, the early Flavian period seems more likely to have fostered a renewal of theater-texts with its prominent patronage and restoration of theatrical spaces. Cf. Smith 2003, 426–27; Boyle 2008, xvi.

78 Kragelund, one of the earliest proponents of a Galban date, is the most forceful in this regard: “It seems a reasonable inference that such lack of awareness of what the post-Neronian future held in store reflects the outlook of a dramatist writing while the celebrations of the return of Libertas had not yet been marred by the advent of the Civil Wars” (2005, 70). Nevertheless, see Sullivan 1985, 71–72, who does not consider the Octavia necessarily pro-Galba or overly optimistic.

79 Tac. Hist. 1.50 and 2.38 with Joseph 2012, 53–67.80 Gallia 2011, 12–46, esp. 25–28.

play.77 Kragelund—one of the chief proponents of a Galban dating—has argued that the Octavia bears no trace of these brutal battles and that its wholehearted celebration of Nero’s fall seems inconsistent with an author who knew the extent of the damage to come.78 As I have argued, however, the play’s allusive strategies create a sustained engagement with the literary-historical memory of Republican civil wars and, in doing so, suggest important parallels between civil strife past and present. Rather than indicating a lack of awareness of the extent of the damage brought by 69 C.E., as Kragelund and others argue, this intertextual synkrisis hints at an author deeply familiar with the iterative civil wars following Nero’s fall. While this does not preclude the play’s composition under Galba (whose accession was hardly bloodless), it does call into question one important argument for preferring a Galban date to an early Flavian one.

Whether the Octavia is the product of Galba’s brief reign or the early years of Vespasian after the conclusion of the civil wars, the reawakening of civil war in 69 C.E. left an indelible mark on the Octavia poet who, like others after him, saw patterns between the bloody events he lived through and those that Roman cultural memory had already enshrined. To later authors, most notably Tacitus, the Year of the Four Emperors eerily replayed the civil wars at the Republic’s end, leaving Vespasian as a second Augustus tasked with bringing Rome back from the ashes.79 Moreover, contemporary would-be emperors elicited similar comparisons at the time. A coin of Vindex and Galba’s Spanish Rebellion deliberately frames revolution against Nero in terms of Brutus’ assassination of Caesar and the propaganda of the Liberators of 44 B.C.E.80 After the civil wars of 69 C.E., Vespasian also suggests further parallels between himself and


81 In fact, the play’s attack on Nero is more consistent with the Flavian period—in which the image of “Nero the Monster” was first solidified—than with the years 68–69 C.E. in which there was notable confusion as to how to handle his memory. See, e.g., Ramage 1983, 209–14; Levick 1999, 71–73; Ferri 2003, 9–11; Flower 2006, 208–9 and 230–32.

82 I would like to thank Shadi Bartsch, John Bodel, Jeri DeBrohun, and Jay Reed for their valuable advice during the development of this project. I owe further thanks to Caroline Bishop, Liz Gloyn, Darcy Krasne, and Isabel Köster for their feedback on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, I thank the editor and anonymous reviewers at AJP for their careful reading and incisive comments. The research for this project was supported through a Memoria Romana dissertation fellowship under the guidance of Karl Galinsky.

Augustus, especially concerning his restoration of peace after a period of political strife. Thus the Octavia’s engagement with Republican strife seems markedly consistent with the historical narratives that developed out of 69 C.E. and the early Flavian period.

The Octavia, however, is no panegyric to a new emperor’s victory. Although Nero’s image as Rome’s new Julius Caesar certainly retrojects the blame for civil war’s recurrence onto the scaenicus imperator (Flavian historiography’s ultimate scapegoat), the play’s dominant notes are unease, fear, and a sense that Rome is forever condemned to civil strife no matter its political structure.81 If the Julio-Claudians themselves replayed within the palace walls the chaos of the late Republic, what reason is there to believe that Rome’s next imperial dynasty would fare better? This, I believe, is the message of the play’s final line: as Octavia sails off to her death, the chorus of Roman citizens laments that Rome forever revels in the blood of its own citizens (civis gaudet Roma cruore, Oct. 982). For an audience who has just lived through Nero’s tyranny and the brutal civil wars that followed, this line would ring all the more true.82

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

e-mail: [email protected]

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Wars More Than Civil: Memories of Pompey and Caesar in the Octavia

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