Politics and Philosophy at Rome: Collected Papers by Miriam T. Griffin (review)

Although 45 of the 50 pieces collected in this vast volume were already available in print, the editor, Catalina Balmaceda, has given readers new vistas onto the work of this foremost Roman historian, who died just prior to the book's publication. For while Miriam Griffin addressed some of her main areas of interest in the big monographs Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Oxford 1976, rev. ed. 1992), Nero: The End of a Dynasty (London 1984), and Seneca on Society: A Guide to De Beneficiis (Oxford 2013), and in the pair of volumes co-edited with Jonathan Barnes entitled Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman Society (vol. 1, Oxford 1989; vol. 2, Oxford 1997), it is only when we see her numerous shorter writings together that we can begin to appreciate the coherency of her work in other areas, too—as well as certain pervasive aspects of her method, her versatility as a writer for different audiences, and above all, her tenacious, career-long inquiry into the influence of philosophy on politics at Rome and her consistently sober (and sobering) conclusions.

The book's arrangement into parts orients the reader in relation to Griffin's career, but also in relation to broader areas of focus: pieces are arranged chronologically within each grouping, but each main part (I. "Roman History," divided into "Republican History" and "Imperial History;" II. "Roman Historiography;" III. "Philosophy and Politics") begins with a piece that is general enough to serve as a kind of introduction, and Part II is broken down further into "Published Papers," "Unpublished Lectures," and "Occasional Pieces"—including a concise op-ed co-written with Jasper Griffin comparing royal-family behaviors after the deaths of Princess Diana and Germanicus ("Show Us You Care, Ma'am"). Several pieces concerned with Nero or Seneca offer useful companions to the monographs, but a far greater number point to the monographs Griffin never wrote. Or did she? One could be forgiven for glimpsing here several virtual whole books on further authors, most notably Cicero and Tacitus, as well as on other major themes (with further discoveries facilitated by the volume's serviceable subject index and index of "persons and deities"). Take epistolography, for example: we find here studies of theme and function in the correspondences of Cicero ("Philosophical Badinage in Cicero's Letters to his Friends," "From Aristotle to Atticus: Cicero and Matius on Friendship"), Seneca ("Seneca's Pedagogic Strategy: Letters and De Beneficiis"), Pliny ("Pliny's Letters: Between History and E-mail"), and Fronto and Marcus Aurelius ("The Prince and his Tutor: Candour and Affection"), as well as explorations of the genre overall ("Symptoms and Sympathy in Latin Letter-writing"); taken together, these studies teach us volumes about letter-exchange among Roman intellectuals as well as the kinds of evidentiary power—and evidentiary limitations—they present to the master historian. In her "Author's Note" to the volume, Griffin acknowledges (with characteristic modesty) the central role of "prosopography and epigraphy" (vii) in her work, and in several pieces here she demonstrates these methods in a self-conscious and instructive way—as, for example, where she compares surviving narratives by ancient historians with recently discovered inscriptions that provide sometimes conflicting evidence of the same events (e.g., "The Lyons Tablet and Tacitean Hindsight," and two pieces for different audiences on the senatus consultum on Cn. Calpurnius Piso: "The Senate's Story" and "Writing History: The Senate vs. Tacitus").

Another methodological leitmotif of the volume involves Griffin's teacher and mentor Sir Ronald Syme: we can read here not only her moving obituary but also a profile of his predilections (e.g., "'Lifting the Mask': Syme on Ficitional History"). I found that the volume also threw into relief one of Griffin's less explicitly advertised methods, namely her desire to juxtapose thinkers (her favorite preposition seems to have been "and") as a heuristic tool for comparing ideas or comparing historical...