Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature by Victoria Emma Pagán (review)

Victoria Pagán’s recent book builds on her earlier work, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History.¹ In that book, she considered five conspiracies and the main literary account of each. Here she turns her attention to the concept of “conspiracy theory” (hereafter CT) in selected Roman authors; the book developed out of her participation at a general conference on that topic in 2006. She has chosen to focus specifically on three authors: Juvenal, Tacitus and Suetonius. That is not to say that other writers are ignored: Cicero and Sallust, along with Terence, all make substantial appearances. There is a very tight focus here, for reasons that have more to do with chronology than any other criteria: the three authors who are the focus of the main chapters were writing under Trajan and Hadrian, and it is in particular the latter emperor that she sees as pivotal to understanding the way each of these authors makes use of CT.

The introductory chapter (“From Conspiracy to Conspiracy Theory”) looks at definitions of CT. Pagán notes that there has been a flourishing of scholarship in the past 20 years on the topic and her goal is to apply this to Latin literature to try and glean the ways that the chosen authors drew on the idea of CT. The basic premise is that, for CT to exist, there need to be two components: secrecy and a group mentality. Further, there are three groups most commonly associated with CT in the Roman period: women, slaves and foreigners. There is much here for anyone interested in CT, but the use of comparative examples from the United States is not completely convincing—after all, in a democracy, it is possible both for people to engage in CT without risk and for others to mock those who do. But the Roman world under the emperors was very different and examples from regions under tyrannical rule would have been more apt, though it is possible that such information was not available.

Chapter 1 (“Conspiracy Theory in Action”) is divided into four sections: Cicero’s use of CT in his speech against Verres and the concept of CT in Terence’s Hecyra are joined by two sections dealing with slave rebellions in the republic. While the intended audience is never made clear, the amount of narrative throughout not only this chapter but all the others as well is rather surprising. In providing such detailed accounts, Pagán sometimes loses sight of the purpose of the book; there is very little analysis in this chapter, in fact, only about half a page at the very end, where the threads are drawn together. This is unfortunate, since that short summary highlights some intriguing ways of viewing CT in this literature.

Chapter 2 (“Juvenal and Blame”) for this reviewer is the weakest of the focused chapters. The difficulty comes from the nature of satire itself: it is a genre that lends itself to CT, since the purpose is to make fun of those who might harbour such fears. There are several examples chosen from a wide range of Juvenal’s satires, but they do not always work that well and again, the lack of analysis is troubling. It is sometimes hard to see CT at work here at all.

Chapter 3 (“Tacitus and Punishment”) takes a long time to get to the CT aspect of the author’s work and there is some repetition here of earlier material (e.g., on the Catilinarian conspiracy). The only incident from Tacitus that is considered is the murder of Pedanius Secundus (Ann. 14.42–45); indeed, much of this chapter is not on the work of the selected author, which is odd. Furthermore, the absence of certain conspiracies in the Annals is puzzling; for example, given that women are one of the “scapegoat” groups identified in the opening chapter, to ignore the way in which Tacitus represents the [End...