status: Published

This paper shows that Tacitus patterns his account of the civil war between Otho and Vitellius in Historiae 1–2 on Lucan's account of the conflict between Pompey and Caesar in the Bellum Civile. The characters involved, the setting of the decisive clash, and the sequence of events of the two conflicts are analogous. By emulating Lucan, Tacitus suggests that the civil war that he is recounting is the worst of all times, for both sides implicated in the conflict are potentially harmful for Rome.

Reviewed by: Cato the Younger: Life and Death at the End of the Roman Republic by Fred K. Drogula Katharina Volk Fred K. Drogula. Cato the Younger: Life and Death at the End of the Roman Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 350. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-19-086902-1. In this first modern scholarly biography of Cato the Younger in English, Fred K. Drogula sets out to recover “the real Cato” (8) from the legends that accrued to this Roman aristocrat after his spectacular suicide at Utica in 46 bce. How did a man who did not reach the consulship, did not lead an army against Rome’s enemies, and did not have at his disposal great wealth or the most elevated family connections come to play such an outsized role in the events that led to the collapse of the Republic? Drogula’s answer: by sheer will-power, single-minded stubbornness, and the successful creation of a persona dedicated to what Cato believed to be the true mos maiorum. Through eight chapters, Drogula provides a detailed narrative of Cato’s life, beginning with a discussion of his family (Cato the Elder looms large as a role model for his great-grandson) and early years, and then tracing his progress through the cursus honorum and mission to Cyprus to the tense build-up to the Civil War and final defeat and death. This is one of the most fascinating but also most complicated stretches of Roman history, and Drogula’s highly readable account, with its admirably clear explanations especially of the chaotic events of the 50’s, can serve as a helpful introduction to the period even for those not primarily interested in the author’s protagonist. From early on, Cato was dedicated to upholding the traditional rule of the senate, opposed extraordinary commands, and was furthermore—Drogula suggests (not, it seems to me, on the strongest evidence)—motivated by a personal feud with Julius Caesar. As a result, he succeeded in making himself, from the late 60’s onwards, the unofficial leader of a hyper-conservative faction within the senate; he worked first against the Triumvirate and later specifically against Caesar, remaining inflexibly opposed (to the chagrin of a realpolitiker like Cicero) to any compromises with those he believed operated outside the unwritten Roman constitution. This policy may have been intended to force Caesar back into the senatorial fold, but it spectacularly backfired in January 49 bce, when Caesar—fed up with senatorial stonewalling—crossed the Rubicon and started [End Page 504] the Civil War. Cato had not wanted war and was horrified at the shedding of Roman blood; even so, he stuck it out until the bitter end at Utica. Drogula is very good at analyzing Cato’s self-fashioning. The senator was known for his idiosyncratic behavior and even attire, walking around without a tunic under his toga or even without shoes. He showed great personal courage in the violent melees in which members of the Roman ruling class were increasingly likely to find themselves in the mid-first century, but could also be outlandishly rude even to his friends and allies. Drogula suggests that Cato actively endeavored to promote himself as “the archconservative in Rome” (3) and consequently adopted the simple garb and stern behavior that he believed reflected the mos maiorum at its purest. This persona was highly successful, making Cato into a recognizable figure and inspiring confidence in his incorruptibility (even if, as Drogula points out, Cato like any good Roman abetted favoritism and bribery when it involved his own family members). The shortcoming of Drogula’s book, in my opinion, is the author’s adamant refusal to allow for Cato’s attitudes and actions having been influenced by his philosophical views. It is Drogula’s explicit purpose to rescue his protagonist from the label of Stoic martyr, which was affixed to him soon after his death and became ever more significant under the Empire (a process that is traced in the book’s epilogue). Drogula is at pains to reiterate that Cato was a champion of republican tradition, not Stoic doctrine, concluding the book by stating, “In all...

Reviewed by: Writing and Power in the Roman World: Literacies and Material Culture by Hella Eckardt Joseph A. Howley Hella Eckardt. Writing and Power in the Roman World: Literacies and Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 268. $99.99. ISBN 978-1-108-41805-8. The survival of so much written literature defines Roman studies, but much of the infrastructure of ancient reading and writing eludes us in the material record, where organic matter like papyrus, wooden tablets, and reed pens only survive in unique conditions. It is fortuitous, then, that so many Roman inkwells—the sine qua non of writing with ink—were made of ceramic and metal. Until now, there has been no easy reference work, let alone an introduction, to the Roman inkwell. This volume is a welcome remedy to this situation, introducing its reader to these objects, summarizing capably the state of the art of their [End Page 226] excavation and study, and raising a number of questions about their significance for our understanding of literate activity in the Roman world. As often with books, the title may set its reader up for disappointment. Readers hoping for a comprehensive (and long overdue) update to W. V. Harris's Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, 1989) will find instead a work far more precise in focus, methodical in approach, and cautious in the scale of the claims it is prepared to make, but also essential for the next generation of thinking on this subject. The book derives from a survey of all known published (and, where the author could learn of them, unpublished) inkwells and things that might be inkwells from the Roman world. 490 specimens are described in an online catalog (https://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1039969) of well over 100 pages, cited frequently in the chapters on typology. There is much to learn from all this about Roman writing practices. My chief complaint is how much of that learning is left as an exercise for the reader. The book is tidily organized in three sections. The chapters of the first, taken singly or together, are admirable summaries of the state of the study of ancient literacy; on the practical logistics of ancient Roman writing on soft media; and on the social situation of Roman writing. The second section treats inkwells as objects, exploring their making, typologies, formal distinctions both aesthetic and functional, their functionality (in a chapter barely long or conclusive enough to earn the name), and their geographic distribution. The third section works through different social dimensions of Roman literacy—for example, the relationship between gender and literacy. Specialists will find that the first and third sections do little to move the needle on these topics, but that they are unparalleled in their mastery of the bibliography; upon reading them I swiftly added several items to the syllabus of an upcoming graduate seminar. In the middle section, non-archaeologist readers may struggle to keep up with the typologies; the third section, which attempts to cross-reference the known inkwells against the particular social categories that have interested historians of literacy, reaches few clear conclusions but offers a valuable number of illustrative tables. Inkwells are often found and depicted alongside other writing tools, namely styli and wax tablets. Though Eckardt is careful to note when they are found together, there is little discussion of this confluence's significance. It would be easy to suppose these media are substantively different in affordances and uses both; the evidence assembled here suggests a far more complicated picture. For example, relative concentrations of inkwells and tablets 1) within an urban context and 2) between urban and rural contexts invite, if not conclusions, then at least some specific hypotheses about when and how these media did and did not overlap; but the approach taken is simply to present the evidence and to leave such analysis to the reader. Notwithstanding numerous recent qualifications and complications, a "top-down" understanding of Roman literacy still prevails in the wider field, in which we use "literacy" as a shorthand term for Roman elites' own ideology of paideia. In addition to being an unprecedented resource on this important class of artifacts, Eckardt's...

Reviewed by: Laughter on the Fringes: The Reception of Old Comedy in the Imperial Greek World by Anna Peterson Eleni Bozia Anna Peterson. Laughter on the Fringes: The Reception of Old Comedy in the Imperial Greek World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x, 230. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-19-069709-9. Imperial Greek literature and its relationship with classical literary tradition have always been a source of contention in the scholarly community that tries to explain Imperial authors’ creatively classicizing tendencies. Peterson contributes to this scholarly debate with a study that focuses on the reception of Old Comedy in the Imperial Greek world, arguing for an eclectic and metalinguistic use that capitalizes on the multifaceted nature of Old Comedy and Imperial authorial ingenuity. The Introduction does a wonderful job of positioning Old Comedy within Imperial literature so as to clarify the difficulty of the task of strictly determining sources, but also to prepare the ground for a philological attempt to identify literary currents—implicit and explicit—without overestimating our ability to do so; Peterson thus justifies her focus on Aristophanic comedy. The first chapter on Plutarch presents his ambiguous and polymodal approach to Old Comedy. Peterson perceptively distinguishes his variegated authorial viewpoints and argues that in the Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander he distinguishes Menander as the representative of literary and social order and rejects Aristophanes, all the while reviving the old comedic agonistic motif. In the Parallel Lives, Plutarch is presented as embracing yet another aspect of Old Comedy, that of abusive humor, which he had previously dismissed. Peterson concludes that such treatments “express anxiety” but “do not mirror reality.” The author should consider here that this ambivalence could actually be part of Imperial reality. In the case of Aelius Aristides, Peterson encapsulates the author’s selective adoption of comedic elements in his defense of rhetoric. She emphasizes rightly that Aristides embraces comedic parabasis as a model for self-reflexivity but advises against the unchecked practice of comedy and the exposure of the public to it. This analysis offers a valuable insight into the afterlife of Old Comedy and the artistry of Imperial authors; but, still more importantly, the reader is furnished with a concrete background on the genre’s potential for recontextualization. [End Page 501] Also, the author’s analysis of whether Old Comedy was still performed informs her discussion of Aristides’ critical approach to Old Comedy, its multifaceted nature, and the distinction between its literary and its performative nature that in turn elucidates the differentiation between the Imperial masses and the literati. The analysis of Lucian in the ensuing two chapters does not disappoint. Peterson summarizes previous scholarly studies of Lucian and situates herself against the backdrop of Atticism, parody, imitation, and Promethean revival of the past. Her analysis of Lucian acknowledges his authorial mechanics that use, reuse, and ultimately reinvent literature. From a seemingly close imitation of Eupolis’s Demoi in Fisherman to his use of parabatic tropes in his prolaliae, Peterson fleshes out Lucian’s novel literary personality as one who resists the stigma of “novelty” by actually using and then weaponizing approved classical literature, thereby making the case for hybrid literary styles. Peterson’s analysis is undeniably thorough, but her attempt in chapter 3 to cover all the instances of Old Comedy in Lucian has also led to a lengthy section on intellectual biography (influenced by both comedy and Plato) that slightly loses sight of the main argument. The flow is also disrupted by “A Menandrian Interlude,” which looks into Alciphron. This section does indeed do credit to Peterson for her meticulous study of Imperial literature; but it nevertheless appears somewhat intrusive, as the sectional theme is not given an individual chapter, and the connections between Menander, Old Comedy, and Alciphron have in any case long been proven to be too generic to indicate a truly special relationship between them. Finally, fourth-century approaches to Old Comedy are shown by Peterson to be even more elusive. Libanius is presented as continuing the comedic tradition as a rhetorical maneuver and as a literary trope of autobiographical mastery and self-reflexivity. Peterson intuitively relates Old Comedy’s alternative reception as a stylistic model...

Reviewed by: Rome After Sulla by J. Alison Rosenblitt Anthony Smart J. Alison Rosenblitt. Rome After Sulla. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xiv, 219. $114.00. ISBN 978-1-4725-8057-3. In 63 bc an elderly senator was plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into the center of Roman political life. He was accused of perduellio, treason against the state. C. Rabirius was to be tried before duumviri perduellionis, a seemingly cruel process that would have allowed the urban praetor to elect two individuals in effect to sentence him to death. In his life of Caesar, Suetonius tells us quite clearly who was behind it, and why, painting it as little more than a political ploy. Cicero and Hortensius defended Rabirius, and Cicero’s Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo became a staple tool with which to teach future orators. This is the traditional interpretation of events, placing Rabirius as the unwitting and aged victim in the acerbic political infighting of the 60s bc. Rosenblitt opens her book with this example, and in so doing urges us not to follow blindly what has been written before, but instead to look anew at these familiar narratives and moments of the late Republic. In a rather provocative and unsettling allusion Rosenblitt joins together the trial of Rabirius with that of Edgar Ray Killen in 2005. Killen was a Klansman, a preacher, and the figure behind the murder of three civil rights activists on June 21 1964. This was during the Freedom Summer, and his case further involved collusion with local police and the mobilization of Klansmen in the area. Some 41 years separated the crime and the successful conviction (for manslaughter; not murder). Through this comparison, uncomfortable as it may be, we are forced to reckon with the crime that lies at the heart of the Rabirius case: the killing of the tribune L. Appuleius Saturninus in 100 bc. The parallel here lies not just in the mob violence, or the murder of those challenging power, but in the fact that both Rabirius and Killen were known to have been involved in, or behind, these attacks for many years before they faced justice. Would we be so willing to regard Rabirius as simply an aged senator prosecuted for contemporary political show if he was transposed from Rome to twentieth century Mississippi? And if the crime was not motivated by class but instead by race? This is a book that is unafraid to ask difficult questions of the late Republic, and to provide often nuanced explorations of the important moments and sources that shape our understanding of this period. At the core of the work is the argument that “Sulla’s settlement of Rome was never stable, and that the instability and insecurity of his settlement were felt almost immediately after he laid down formal power” (1). This is largely well developed and defended, and the use of Sallust as a guide to this world is excellent throughout. The book is divided into three sections. The first looks to 80–79 bc (“Negotiating the End of Sulla”; 17–44), with a detailed and in parts eloquent analysis of Cicero’s Pro Roscio. The careful investigation demonstrates how Roman society was still reeling from Sulla’s dominance, and from the terrible uncertainty surrounding the future of the Republic (chapter 2)—uncertainties reinforced by the ambiguity surrounding the families of those who had been proscribed (chapter 3). The second section turns to M. Aemilius Lepidus, and suggests a much greater importance to these events and the figure behind them (“Counter-revolution”; 45–92). The third section is arguably the strongest in the volume (“Sallust and the Political Culture of Rome After Sulla”; 93–140). Here, Rosenblitt focuses on Sallust’s Historiae, offering a persuasive interpretation of the writer, his work, and the instability and trauma still visible in Roman political culture. Every chapter in [End Page 109] this section is first-rate, guided by close analysis of the evidence, and an ability to place this against the diversely shifting narrative(s) of the late Republic. There are some issues in the book. The structure is not always as clear as needed to fully...

Reviewed by: Athenian Democracy at War by David M. Pritchard Roel Konijnendijk David M. Pritchard. Athenian Democracy at War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 287. $105.00. ISBN 978-1-108-42291-8. In this work, Pritchard brings together the fruits of fifteen years of research on Classical Athens. The result is a loose collection of chapters based on his earlier publications—some of them summarised, some reprinted, some substantially revised and brought up to date. The title expresses its general theme but should not be taken too literally. There is little discussion of military tactics or strategy and only the most cursory account of Athens' many wars. Pritchard's insistence that Greek land warfare was a ritualised contest (193-194) suggests that he has little interest in new interpretations of such matters. He explicitly distances himself from a version of Athenian history that rests on military determinism (22-27). Instead, his focus is on "war and society": the socio-political origins of armies, the status and values of warriors, and the place of warfare in Athenian cultural and political life. The studies of different forms of military service that take up the first half of the book are primarily concerned with social background, muster, and pay. After these, there is a chapter on attitudes to trireme crews, followed by multiple shorter chapters on state finance and the abstract association of sport with war. Since the origin of the work is in a range of other books and articles, there is no central argument or conclusion, and a great deal of overlap between chapters. There is much repetition of claims and phrases; Pritchard reminds the reader again and again of the meaning of relevant Greek words and of the abbreviations used for monetary values, despite the presence of a glossary at the end. But this repetition makes the book particularly useful as an introductory reference work, since it allows each chapter to be read in isolation. Under each heading, Pritchard lays out the ancient evidence in clear language—paying due attention to epigraphy as well as literary sources—and guides the reader through several modern controversies. Nearly every claim is backed by a footnote. The relevant scholarship is all there in the twenty-six page bibliography. Since there is no other monograph specifically devoted to the armed forces of Classical Athens, having all this material concentrated in one easily accessible place makes the book a valuable resource for both new and experienced students of the subject. If there is no new overarching thesis, there are nevertheless some themes that recur throughout the work. Pritchard repeatedly makes the points that democracy helped make Athens more successful in war; that Athenian wealth and military experimentation transformed Greek warfare; that Classical Athens spent many times more on war than on anything else; that the Athenians held their rowers in as high regard as their hoplites. Not all of these larger points (and many smaller ones) may be equally persuasive. For example, the argument that Old Comedy saw the hoplite as the default citizen warrior because it was "simply traditional" (120) seems facile, while the claim that Athenian sources had nothing bad to say about athletics (184-185) ignores the widespread notion that it was no good preparation for war. The work aligns itself with the more celebratory side of modern scholarship on Athenian democracy, and readers may question whether this ancient society is indeed "rightly revered" (4) for anything, or that its ability to wage war should be a further cause for admiration. But in such cases, this book will still serve as a useful point of departure for further debate. [End Page 374] Pritchard set himself the ambitious goal of producing an aid to future interdisciplinary comparative studies in ancient history and political science (19-22). Time will tell if he will succeed in that goal. But for students of Athenian democracy and Greek warfare in their own right, this is already a helpful contribution. Roel Konijnendijk Leiden University Copyright © 2020 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

Reviewed by: Gender and Body Language in Roman Art by Glenys Davies J. F. D. Frakes Glenys Davies. Gender and Body Language in Roman Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 357. $120.00. ISBN 978-0-521-84273-0. Asserting that modern studies of body language offer comparative support to an understanding of ancient gestural codes, and marshaling decades of theorization of how gesture and comportment together work to establish social configurations of identity, Glenys Davies promises here an analysis of how visual art in the Roman world made use of body language to express "status, and the relationship between status and gender" (1). The introduction quickly clarifies the author's methods and assumptions: that art from all Greek and Roman periods can be lumped together as evidence for Roman visual modes (she begins the discussion with a red-figure vase from 430 bce); that literary evidence is of primary value when interpreting visual evidence (she consults Cicero, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Quintilian, and Plutarch, among others, throughout); and that display context is irrelevant to how artworks communicated ideas of gender and status (the Barberini Faun, the Capitoline Seated Girl, some philosophers, and the Terme Ruler illustrate opening themes, with no discussion of placement and little acknowledgement of dating or replication). A case-study is then built upon Cancelleria Relief B, focusing on the gestural connections between its principal figures, that indulges in Jocelyn [End Page 364] Toynbee's reading (in The Flavian Reliefs from the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome [Oxford 1957]) of the scene's emotional subtext before signaling that Vespasian's gesture toward Domitian is unique and interpreting it remains problematic. What to make of this strange impasse is evidently up to each reader to decide—a difficult challenge considering there will not be any more images to consider for a good sixty pages. The first two chapters present the surviving ancient testimonies relevant to body language, each one devoted to a normative gender: first male, then female. About male comportment we read of exempla traditions, of oratorical training and performance, and of good manners. Themes include status display, imperial power, and the dangers to men of femininity. About female comportment we read of proofs of inferiority and weakness, of tendencies toward frivolity, and of matronly values and modesty. Veiling and clothing requirements follow, along with demonstrations of subordination, and some closing thoughts on the dangers to men of female masculinity, before we are promised an analysis of the representation of Roman women in art. How disappointing it was after all this to turn the page to chapter 3 (82) and discover the Vatican copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos. "The Standing Nude," so Davies argues, best illustrates the differentiated body languages of males and females on account of their opposed sexes being so visually evident, and before too many pages go by there appears the inevitable Naples Doryphoros. Although these famous statues are in fact Roman artworks, they are here treated as unproblematic exemplars of Greek Classical design, works that demonstrate (one assumes?) the timelessness of gendered gestural codes. The bibliography is thorough and responsible—one finds the support of Ridgway, Havelock, and Lefkowitz, among others—but the discussion fails to take us far beyond the luscious treatments of Andrew Stewart's Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1997). Beyond their status in elite culture, how do these opera nobilia inform us on the gestural attitudes of lived experience promised earlier? I fear it was a mistake to linger so long among elite male opinion and fetishized works of Classical culture, rather than jumping straightaway into well-documented viewing contexts from the Roman period. What might be said of these as Roman works? I think of Valentina di Napoli's recent study of displays in Roman Achaea of exactly these two statue types, the Knidia installed in baths and domestic contexts in small-scale formats while the Doryphorus was placed in civic settings on scales life-size or greater ("Looking at the Classical Past: Tradition, Identity, and Copies of Nobilia Opera in Roman Greece," in S. E. Alcock, M. Egri, and J. Frakes [eds.], Beyond Boundaries: Connecting Visual Cultures in the Provinces...

Reviewed by: Epicurean Ethics in Horace: The Psychology of Satire by Sergio Yona Kate Meng Brassel Sergio Yona. Epicurean Ethics in Horace: The Psychology of Satire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. ix, 348. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-878655-9. In this volume Sergio Yona argues that Horace's two books of Sermones present a consistent moral philosophy that coheres with Epicurean discourses of the Augustan period. Through close reference to the writings of Philodemus of Gadara, Yona shows how Epicurean theories of wealth, flattery, patronage, and frankness, as well as the pleasure calculus, operate across a sample of about two thirds of the Sermones. Impressive in its detailed approach, Epicurean Ethics in Horace contributes meaningfully to the ongoing work of incorporating the discoveries of Philodemus' library into the intellectual history of the period. A closer look at the philosopher and the satirist together provides a nuanced view of intergeneric (and even interdisciplinary) play in the period. This book should therefore draw the interest of scholars working on Philodemus as much as those working on Horatian satire. [End Page 230] Yona uses Philodemus to show that, in spite of his apparent contradictions and self-subversions, Horace the satirist does not wander eclectically from one critical pose to another, but rather stays rooted in specific Epicurean conversations. The major work of the first chapter establishes the range of themes in Philodemus' On Frank Criticism, On Property Management, and On Wealth, with which, Yona proposes, the satires are more or less directly engaged. Yona also reviews Philodemus' broader influence, a productive avenue of inquiry in volumes such as D. Armstrong et al. (eds.), Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (Austin 2004). Yona goes further by arguing in greater detail that the Epicurean ethical underpinning found in Philodemus' writings provides a full and coherent interpretive index for the satires' moral and social criticism. The second chapter argues broadly for methodological resemblances of the programmatic satires 1.1–3 to texts of Philodemus (and Lucretius). Like them, Horace uses diatribe persuasively while avoiding being overcome by his own rhetoric in the manner of their Stoic and Cynic competitors. In satire 1.1, the most important example, Horace executes an "expression" (78) of the type of advice that Philodemus provides in On Property Management in his presentation of the satire as an intimate discussion with Maecenas. The ongoing (because it is discomfiting) question of Horace's dependence on his patron is thus resolved by Epicurean approval of patronage in exchange for advice from a discerning friend. Chapter 3 argues that Horace next pauses to establish the credentials behind those diatribes. It is his Epicurean moral formation (1.4) that will further allow him to give ethical advice to Maecenas (1.6). The fourth chapter examines satires that deal with the question of flattery and candor (1.9 and 10; 2.1 and 5) through the lens of Philodemus' On Flattery. Horace's economic dependence on Maecenas through the gift of the Sabine farm is justified because it enables Horace's Epicurean withdrawal (2.6). Finally, chapter 5 interprets Damasippus (2.3) and Davus (2.7) as negative examples of what happens when the critic strays too far from proper Philodeman frankness and errs on the side of Stoic invective. Their missteps only throw into relief Horace's philosophically sounder character (and that of his stand-in Ofellus in 2.2). Yona successfully argues for Philodeman resonances throughout the Horatian satirical corpora. However, in making Horace so philosophically consistent, Yona runs the risk of rendering his satires somewhat humorless. For example, for Yona, satire 1.9 shows off Horace's character as straightforwardly superior to that of the "boor;" but such a reading might have the adverse effect of depriving the piece of what humor it does possess. It may not really be possible to present Horace's sense of humor while thoroughly demonstrating his philosophical coherence. Instead, Yona's work is a response to his observation that the Sermones' ethical core has fallen to the wayside of scholarly interest: scholarship of the 1990s and early 2000s so relied on persona theory that virtually nothing of the poet and his corpus remained. He therefore seeks...

This article offers an in-depth examination of Augustus' presentation of the people of Rome in his Res Gestae. Augustus was careful to craft an image of himself as the legitimate ruler of the Roman Empire which is illustrated by his precise use and intentional choice of words such as populus and plebs in certain passages in his testament. By continuing the established language of power he was clearly able to place himself within the traditions while simultaneously manipulating conventional political language into a mode of communication that served his own position of sole rule.