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

Cringeworthy? Really??

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RIP Randy Nolde

In everyone's life there is a teacher who motivated her to try harder, strive for more, reach beyond. Or in my case, a teacher who teased, goaded, poked, pried, laughed, lampooned, and somehow created an atmosphere where I was ready to work my tail off to make him proud. Randy Nolde, we will miss you. Mr. Nolde was my Russian teacher in high school. I first got to know him as a younger person -- the Russian Club Banquet was quite the event in my home town, and my grandmother used to take us regularly even before my sister enrolled in Russian language class. Every year, the high school cafeteria underwent a magical metamorphosis. Huge murals of scenes from Russia -- fantastic, colorful onion-domed churches, and young peasants reaping wheat, and Armenian maidens with long braids and colorful costumes -- hung all around the edges of the room. On the menu: chicken Kiev made by the cafeteria ladies, supplemented with cafeteria salad, but also khachapuri and piroshki made by the

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