The Head Rots First

Done with the secondary sources: Benario’s Introduction, Dorey’s edited collection, and Mellor’s Tacitus. Syme’s magisterial two-volume work will have to wait until next summer, although I might do some JSTOR work within the next week or two, depending on how much time I find. I’ll say, though, that if you have any interest in ancient Rome, Tacitus is a wonderful read: his style glitters, especially (for English readers) in the Church and Broadribb translation, which only begins to capture the historian’s beautifully pointed brevity.

And Tacitus suits my left melancholia, writing of a time when “truth was regarded as treasonous” (Mellor 92). There are, certainly, truisms: “The lasting lesson of the Dialogue is that art and society are intertwined, and both depend on the structure of political life. It is a lesson that cultural critics have revived with great enthusiasm in our own time” (Mellor 19). Furthermore, “In our age of ‘disinformation,’ secrecy hardly seems extraordinary. Tiberius’s unforthcoming silence at meetings of the Senate is a form of control popular among Renaissance princes and modern business tycoons. Tyrants from political dictators to football coaches prefer to instill insecurity through control of information and calculated ambiguity” (Mellor 92). This, to me, seems a lesson that applies as well to the writings of Lawrence Lessig as it does to those of the proponents of composition’s critical pedagogy.

Mellor remarks that “Tacitus’s account of the first century of the Empire makes it clear that ‘private profit is preferred to the public interest.'” (59) We gain our words capital and capitalism from the Latin caput, capitis. It means “head”. We seem to have largely forgotten the Roman proverb that Of the fish, the head rots first.