Thesis abstract:

This thesis examines representations of bodily violence and body politic metaphors from the triumviral period of the 40s BCE to the end of Trajan’s Principate (117 CE). It aims to identify a change (or not) in the range of corporeal metaphors used to describe the state of the body politic in the early Principate. It is not confined to an analysis of a single text or texts, nor does it focus on a particular genre. Instead, the intention is to provide a comprehensive - though necessarily not exhaustive - analysis of a broad range of literary evidence for figurative representations of the body politic during the formation and early decades of Rome’s Principate. The focus is on literary representations of these metaphors, but epigraphic and archaeological evidence are included occasionally as appropriate. Through six key themes it considers: violence inflicted by the emperor and upon the emperor’s body; violence against the rest of the populace, including the bodies of citizen males, females, children and, where applicable, enslaved and foreign bodies; and the relationship between the violence imposed on, and perpetrated by, these two parties – the emperor and the people. These various themes include detailed case studies of tyranny, appetites of violence, exemplary punishment, and the health of the emperor and the body politic. They consider both individual and collective violence and situate the metaphorical violence within the broader socio-political context of conflict and post-conflict periods in Rome’s early imperial history. Many of these themes have been considered before in isolation or in the context of broader studies. This thesis is an attempt to draw these themes together to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of triumviral and imperial corporeal metaphors. It draws upon metaphors in a variety of texts but aims to focus most closely on material that has previously been overlooked in discussions of body politic metaphors. It builds upon a range of recent scholarship on body politic metaphors and studies on figurative and corporeal language in various key texts, especially Bartsch (2014), Gardner (2019), McClellan (2019), and Walters (2020).