Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse

CHAPTER 7. Cleopatra and the Politics of Gendered Ethnicity

CHAPTER 7 In the previous chapter I outlined how Roman identity in the Aeneid is defined by juxtaposing Aeneas to a series of female figures whose ethnicity is intertwined with their womanhood and sometimes even with their emotional life. The discursive strategy that links gender and ethnicity in these figures is also operative in Roman representations of Cleopatra. In fact, Cleopatra probably contributed greatly to restructuring Roman belief systems with regard to ethnicity and gender and the relationship between them. In Augustan representations of the battle ofActium, Cleopatra 's womanhood was exploited along with the fact that she was queen of Egypt in order to suggest the foreignness of Antony's forces. Depicting Cleopatra meant articulating both the anomaly she represented as a woman with political power, as well as her orientalism. As a result, Roman political discourse defined Romanness against the backdrop of its own representation of a real-life powerful foreign woman. In a way, these Augustan representations of Cleopatra form the birth of the Western discourse of orientalism. Cleopatra not only helped shape the discursive structures that articulated the ancient self, but also helped lay the foundations for a discourse the Western world employed in various guises throughout history to define itselP The Aeneidplayed a pivotal role in giving such weight to Roman representations of Cleopatra. Not only does it represent the battle ofActium, but I will show in this chapter that Vergil's Dido owes much to both the real and the Roman discursive Cleopatra. 177 Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self Hence, the link between gender and ethnicity that we have observed in the Aeneid(and especially in the Dido episode) as an integral part ofthe poem's articulation of Romanness and of the self must be understood within the politics ofgender and ethnicity in the Augustan discourse about Cleopatra. I use the term discourse deliberately here to avoid a problem surrounding Augustan representations of Cleopatra. As we will see, the most articulate of these representations are found in poetry, and the picture that emerges from these poetic accounts is in some aspects so uniform and at the same time so unhistorical that it suggests dependence from a preexisting discourse such as an official party line or political propaganda.2 There are two problems with approaching the texts in this way. The first problem with this approach is that most evidence for such propaganda comes precisely from the poems that are assumed to reflect or respond to the propaganda. The second problem is that a distanced, critical poetic response to propaganda is the only interpretation of these poems that prevents modern critics from condemning them as embarrassingly opportunistic , politically reprehensible, and therefore bad poetry. As a partial solution to these two problems we should forgo the search for propaganda in these poems and instead view them as part of a public Roman discourse about Cleopatra. The Augustan poets who wrote about Cleopatra surely did so within the context of public opinions of society at large about the current political situation, but there is no need to assume that they wrote either under coercion or in opposition to it. Whatever their intentions, or indeed those of Augustus and other political leaders, may have been, the poets present us with a rich, varied, and at times contradictory tapestry of images of Cleopatra and opinions about her. This poetic discourse about Cleopatra can be useful in gaining a better understanding of the ideological underpinnings ofVergil's representation of Dido. The most potent use of the discursive Cleopatra in the Aeneidis found in the Dido episode, but it is also the most complicated. Therefore, before I explore how Dido participates in Roman discourse about Cleopatra, I will review some of the most important aspects of that discursive Cleopatra in the Aeneid and in other Augustan poets. ~ VERGIL'S ACTIUM Vergil's Actium is a founding text for the Western discourse oforientalism.3 The text ofVergil's Actium polarizes the two opponents in the battle into representations ofWest and East.4 1t does so without regard for the histor- Cleopatra and the Politics ofGendered Ethnicity 179 ical distortions inherent in such an enterprise. The historical distortions are particularly apparent in the depiction ofAntony's forces: hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis, victor ab Auroraepopulis et litore rubro, Aegyptum virisque Orientis et ultima secum Bactra vehit, sequiturque (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx. (Aen. 8.685-88) [On this side is...