Power is power -- but must it be fame?

Thinking about the Caesars, I turned to the Ohio State History Department’s e-magazine Origins. I found there an interesting essay about Caesar Augustus which was published in August (appropriately enough).

My favorite quote about the life of Augustus is: “This story is usually told and appreciated like a power fantasy.” The author goes on to equate Augustus with power and to suggest that we exult in the positive aspects of his reign — fabulous wealth! artistic achievements! public works! glory and more glory! — without remembering the human tragedy, anguish, and poverty that accompanied them.

In other words, the man, and the biography of the man, obscure (some of the) historical circumstances around him.

Surely in part that is due to Plutarch and Suetonius?

I suppose I am looking forward to the religious turn my biography course is about to take. How will all the questions we’ve asked so far about life writing look different when we are no longer considering political figures? Or will the “saints” be political too, in their own way?

George Eliot has been quoted as saying that “a biography by a writer has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives of the writer as well as his hero” [quoted in Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 131].

Of course, all biographers are writers, and here Eliot is showing her prejudice. We have been trying to think about the writers behind the biographies written by Plutarch and Suetonius — the men themselves, their motivations, their lives; trying to discern these not just through introductory materials but through their writings: how they organize the material, what emphases they make, to what extent they themselves intrude into their narratives.

Reading anonymous “saints’ lives” will be a different experience. Because, of course, neither the writers nor the subjects are as interested in power as a politician, a philosopher, or a king. But they are all focused on fame and on defining what the trappings of fame might be.

Comments

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