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INVITUS INVITAM: A WINDOW ALLUSION IN SUETONIUS' TITUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Duncan E. Macrae
Duncan E. Macrae*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
*
duncan.macrae@uc.edu
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Extract

Berenicen statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.

As for Berenice, he immediately dismissed her from the city against his will, against her will. (Suet. Tit. 7.2)

Suetonius' laconic description of Titus' dismissal of his consort, the Herodian Berenice, after his accession to the Principate has attracted the attention of readers across the centuries. The biographer's use of polyptoton, invitus invitam, to describe the mental states of the Roman princeps and Judaean princess has been read as particularly moving. Perhaps most notably, Racine turned the emperor's banishment of his lover into the central dilemma of his tragedy Bérénice. At the start of his preface to the text of the play, the dramatist amalgamates this sentence with another from earlier in the chapter, retaining the striking repetition, ‘Titus reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam’. Racine claims that this account of the dismissal of Berenice provides appropriate subject matter for tragic poetry and, to support his case, he compares Virgil's treatment of the separation of Aeneas and Dido to the situation of Titus and Berenice. Suetonius is not normally read as a literarily sophisticated writer, but we should take a cue from Racine's response to this sentence. In this article, I argue that Suetonius himself chose to compare Titus and Berenice with Dido and Aeneas by an allusion in this sentence to Virgil's Aeneid and to Catullus' translation of the Coma Berenices. Within a rather matter-of-fact presentation of the relationship between the Flavian emperor and his Herodian consort, Suetonius evoked a more dramatic model.

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Shorter Notes
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The Classical Quarterly , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , May 2015 , pp. 415 - 418
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

Berenicen statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.

As for Berenice, he immediately dismissed her from the city against his will, against her will. (Suet. Tit. 7.2)

Suetonius' laconic description of Titus' dismissal of his consort, the Herodian Berenice, after his accession to the Principate has attracted the attention of readers across the centuries.Footnote 1 The biographer's use of polyptoton, invitus invitam, to describe the mental states of the Roman princeps and Judaean princess has been read as particularly moving. Perhaps most notably, Racine turned the emperor's banishment of his lover into the central dilemma of his tragedy Bérénice. At the start of his preface to the text of the play, the dramatist amalgamates this sentence with another from earlier in the chapter, retaining the striking repetition, ‘Titus reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur, statim ab Urbe dimisit invitus invitam’.Footnote 2 Racine claims that this account of the dismissal of Berenice provides appropriate subject matter for tragic poetry and, to support his case, he compares Virgil's treatment of the separation of Aeneas and Dido to the situation of Titus and Berenice.Footnote 3 Suetonius is not normally read as a literarily sophisticated writer, but we should take a cue from Racine's response to this sentence. In this article, I argue that Suetonius himself chose to compare Titus and Berenice with Dido and Aeneas by an allusion in this sentence to Virgil's Aeneid and to Catullus' translation of the Coma Berenices. Within a rather matter-of-fact presentation of the relationship between the Flavian emperor and his Herodian consort, Suetonius evoked a more dramatic model.

Aeneas' speech to the deceased Dido during his visit to the underworld includes one of Virgil's most discussed lines:

invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi
Against my will, queen, I left your shore. (Aen. 6.460)

As has long been recognized, this line alludes to Catullus' translation of Callimachus' Coma Berenices:

invita, o regina, tuo de vertice cessi,
invita …
Against my will, queen, I left your head,
against my will … (Catullus 66.39–40)

Scholars have debated the significance of the Virgilian allusion, which turns Catullus' mock-heroism into dark tragedy.Footnote 4 This is not the place to rekindle that literary-critical fire. Rather, I argue that the phrase invitus invitam at the end of Suetonius' sentence in the Titus is a previously unrecognized ‘window allusion’ to these Virgilian and Catullan lines.Footnote 5

The case for this Suetonian allusion to Virgil and Catullus can be made on both formal and contextual grounds. In formal terms, the word order, including the striking hyperbaton of Berenicen ... invitam, makes the repetition of invitus at the end of the sentence a marked phrase. The overall rarity of the figure of polyptoton in Suetonius' imperial biographies also marks this particular repetition.Footnote 6 The repetition itself is suggestive of the window allusion in three ways: Suetonius' polyptoton catches (1) Catullus' repetition of the word (invita ... invita), (2) the allusive repetition inherent in Virgil's reuse of the Catullan line and (3) the change of gender between the Catullan coma (invita) and the Virgilian Aeneas (invitus). In wider terms, Suetonius may be influenced by the tendency for repetition, including polyptoton, to mark allusion in Latin poetry.Footnote 7

The context also supports the probability that this phrase is an allusion to Catullus and Virgil. Suetonius combines the Catullan name with the Virgilian situation. There is an obvious homonymy between the Herodian Julia Berenice dismissed by Titus and the Ptolemaic Berenice II celebrated by Callimachus and Catullus. The general situation, as Racine noticed, recalls the relationship between Dido and Aeneas. In his speech to Dido in Aeneid 6, Aeneas claims that he was forced, unwillingly (invitus), to abandon his foreign royal consort in order to fulfil his Roman destiny. So too, according to Suetonius, Titus had broken from his foreign royal consort, explicitly called regina in Tit. 7.1, as part of his fulfilment of his Roman imperial duty.

The allusion helps explain the difference between Suetonius' account of the affair and that given by the other main source, Xiphilinus' excerption of Cassius Dio. According to Dio, Berenice visited Rome twice. She came first in 75 c.e. and lived with Titus on the Palatine, as if a wife, before popular opinion compelled the prince to send her away.Footnote 8 Then, after his accession in 79 c.e., she again (αὖθις) came to Rome, in vain.Footnote 9 Suetonius' account is, apparently, more straightforward: Berenice was part of Titus' coterie before his accession and was dismissed upon his assumption of supreme rule.Footnote 10 The difference between the two accounts has resulted in several different modern chronological reconstructions, mostly following Dio, with Suetonius' dismissal sometimes being interpreted as a second dismissal by Titus as emperor to match his earlier one as prince.Footnote 11 Rather than attempt to reconcile the two accounts, it seems preferable to understand Suetonius' reduction of the affair to a narrative of love (amor) interrupted by imperial rule (Roma) in terms of the Virgilian plot, in which Aeneas is diverted to Carthage until duty to Roman destiny intervenes. The allusion to Virgil (and Catullus) suggests that the single dismissal in the Titus is a literary conceit. The spatial logic is, admittedly, different: Aeneas departs from Dido's Carthage; Berenice is dismissed from Titus' Rome. Nevertheless, the literary allusion at Titus 7.2 can help us understand the difference between the two main accounts of Titus' reign.

This argument has consequences for our appreciation of the literary nature of Suetonius' imperial biographies. Tristan Power has recently pointed out reminiscenes of the Virgilian depiction of the death of Priam in the Tiberius and the Galba.Footnote 12 In the example discussed here, Suetonius shows an awareness not just of the Virgilian text, but also of the poet's appropriation of the Coma Berenices. Although Suetonius has tended to be left behind in the recent move to appreciate the literary nature of ancient historiography, these Virgilian and Catullan allusions encourage a re-evaluation of Suetonius as literary author. This new turn in Suetonian criticism would do well to consider Racine: the dramatist, who followed the biographer in casting Titus and Berenice as Aeneas and Dido, may have been particularly attuned to the poetics of Suetonius' Titus.

References

1 For the standard interpretations and historical context, see the commentaries on this passage: Price, H., C. Suetoniii Tranquilli De Vita Caesarum Liber VIII Divus Titus: An Edition with Parallel Passages and Notes (Menasha, WI, 1919)Google Scholar, 43; Mooney, G.W., C. Suetoni Tranquilli De Vita Caesarum Libri VII–VIII: With Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Dublin, 1930)Google Scholar, 486; Martinet, H., C. Suetonius Tranquillus Divus Titus Kommentar (Königstein, 1981)Google Scholar, 74. Luck, G., ‘Über Suetons “Divus Titus”’, RhM 107 (1964), 63–75Google Scholar, at 67, places this sentence in the laudatory thematic programme of the biography.

2 Racine combines propterque insignem reginae Berenices amorem, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur (Tit. 7.1) with the sentence quoted at the head of the paper. For the programmatic significance of the combination (which is not attributed to Suetonius by Racine), see Schröder, V., ‘Re-writing history for the early modern stage: Racine's Roman tragedies’, in Feldherr, A. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians (Cambridge, 2009), 380–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Mooney (n. 1), 486, Victor Hugo used this sentence to interpret the five acts of Racine's drama: Act i Titus, Act ii reginam Berenicen, Act iii invitus, Act iv invitam, Act v dimisit.

3 Racine, J., Œuvres Complètes I: Théâtre – Poésie (ed. Forestier, G.) (Paris, 1999)Google Scholar, 450: ‘Cette action est très fameuse dans l'Histoire et je l'ai trouvée très propre pour le Théâtre par la violence des passions qu'elle y pouvait exciter. En effet nous n'avons rien de plus touchant dans tous les poètes que la séparation d’Énée et de Didon dans Virgile. Et qui doute que ce qui a pu fournir assez de matière pour tout un chant d'un Poème héroïque, où l'action dure plusieurs jours, ne puisse suffire pour le sujet d'une Tragédie? Il est vrai que je n'ai point poussé Bérénice jusqu'à se tuer, comme Didon, parce que Bérénice n'ayant pas ici avec Titus les derniers engagements que Didon avait avec Énée, elle n'est pas obligée, comme elle, de renoncer à la vie. A cela près, le dernier adieu qu'elle dit à Titus, et l'effort qu'elle se fait pour s'en séparer n'est pas le moins tragique de la pièce; et j'ose dire qu'il renouvelle assez bien dans le cœur des Spectateurs l'émotion que le reste y avait pu exciter.' For Dido as the model of Berenice in Racine's drama, see Mueller, M., ‘The truest daughter of Dido: Racine's Bérénice’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 1 (1974), 201–17.Google Scholar

4 The allusion has been discussed frequently. See Griffith, R. Drew, ‘Catullus' Coma Berenices and Aeneas' farewell to Dido’, TAPhA 125 (1995), 47–59Google Scholar and Wills, J., ‘Divided allusion: Virgil and the Coma Berenices’, HSCPh 98 (1998), 277–305Google Scholar for recent analysis and earlier bibliography on the specific allusion between Aen. 6.460 and Catullus 66.39. The Callimachean original of Catullus 66.39 is lost. These particular lines are only part of a much more complicated engagement with Callimachus' Coma and Catullus 66 in the Aeneid, as has been demonstrated by recent work by Konstan, D., ‘A pun in Virgil's Aeneid (4.492–3)?’, CPh 95 (2000), 74–6Google Scholar and Reed, J.D., ‘Another Greek pun in the Aeneid’, Mnemosyne 61 (2008), 300–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 On ‘window allusion’ or ‘window reference’, see Thomas, R.F., ‘Virgil's Georgics and the art of reference’, HSCPh 90 (1986), 188–9Google Scholar. Price and Martinet (n. 1) as commentators on this sentence note the polyptoton, but not the possibility of an allusion to Virgil or Catullus.

6 Other uses of polyptoton in Suetonius: Aug. 29.5: multa a multis tunc extructa sunt; Tib. 2.1: multa multorum Claudiorum egregia merita (extant); Tit. 8.1: quam si eadem isdem et ipsi dedissent. For the figure of polyptoton in Suetonius, see Freund, J.W., De C. Suetonii Tranquilli usu atque genere dicendi (Berlin, 1901), 25–6.Google Scholar

7 Wills, J., Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford, 1996), esp. 225–31.Google Scholar

8 Cass. Dio 66.15.4: Βερενίκη δὲ ἰσχυρῶς τε ἤνθει καὶ διὰ τοῦτο καὶ ἐς τὴν Ῥώμην μετὰ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ Ἀγρίππα ἦλθε· καὶ ὁ μὲν στρατηγικῶν τιμῶν ἠξιώθη, ἡ δὲ ἐν τῷ παλατίῳ ᾤκησε καὶ τῷ Τίτῳ συνεγίγνετο. προσεδόκα δὲ γαμηθήσεσθαι αὐτῷ, καὶ πάντα ἤδη ὡς καὶ γυνὴ αὐτοῦ οὖσα ἐποίει, ὥστ' ἐκεῖνον δυσχεραίνοντας τοὺς Ῥωμαίους ἐπὶ τούτοις αἰσθόμενον ἀποπέμψασθαι αὐτήν.

9 Cass. Dio 66.18.1: ἀλλὰ χρηστὸς καίπερ ἐπιβουλευθεὶς καὶ σώφρων καίτοι καὶ τῆς Βερενίκης ἐς Ῥώμην αὖθις ἐλθούσης ἐγένετο.

10 Suet. Tit. 7: nec minus libido [sc. suspecta erat] propter exoletorum et spadonum greges propterque insignem reginae Berenices amorem, cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur ... Berenicen statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam.

11 Crook, J.A., ‘Titus and Berenice’, AJPh 72 (1951), 162–75Google Scholar, followed by Rogers, P., ‘Titus, Berenice and Mucianus’, Historia 29 (1980), 86–95Google Scholar, at 94, reconstructs two visits to Rome by Berenice and two dismissals, one before accession and another after Vespasian's death; Braund, D.C., ‘Berenice in Rome’, Historia 33 (1984), 120–3Google Scholar suggests two visits, but only one dismissal, right after Titus' accession; A. Keaveney and Madden, J., ‘Berenice at Rome’, MH 60 (2003), 39–43Google Scholar prefer to follow Suetonius alone and reconstruct a single visit and dismissal.

12 Power, T.J., ‘Priam and Pompey in Suetonius' Galba’, CQ 57 (2007), 792–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar (also raising the possibility of a ‘window allusion’ to Asinius Pollio's lost account of Pompey's death); id., ‘Pyrrhus and Priam in Suetonius' Tiberius’ CQ 62 (2012), 430–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar