Stop and Smell the Romans: Odor in Roman Literature.

smell;sense perception;Latin literature;Roman culture;Classical Studies;Humanities;Classical Studies

Allen, KateSchultz, Celia E ;

University of Michigan

关键词: smell;    sense perception;    Latin literature;    Roman culture;    Classical Studies;    Humanities;    Classical Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/116729/ktallen_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this dissertation, I examine the role of smell in Latin literature. Looking specifically at Roman comedy, epic, and epigram, I demonstrate both how smells function as literary devices and how these texts reveal particularly Roman ways of thinking about the power and meaning of scents.My first chapter treats the connection between odor and identity, illustrated in the comedies of Plautus (late 3rd-early 2nd century BC). Like masks and costume, smell provides information about character and role and is an important element of comic role-play and identity-switching. Interestingly, however, characters who use smell to improve or alter themselves frequently fail; instead they draw attention to the disparity between their true identity and the role they are trying to assume. In Chapter 2, I examine how Latin epic, which chronicles both heroic quests and civil discord, links disgust at foul odors to anxieties about death by emphasizing odor’s ability to cross boundaries and spread contagion. These qualities suggest the threat of death, the shame of dying unheroically, the distinction between plague and war death, and the injustice suffered by the unburied. Moreover, olfactory signs of civil strife recall the lingering stain of civil war in the Roman collective memory, as well as the impossibility of determining a single guilty party in civil war. In my third chapter, Martial’s Epigrams (1st century AD) combine an interest in olfactory identity and contagion. While Martial highlights the scents of his literary subjects, these odors simultaneously pose a threat to the poet’s persona, whose exposure to an array of questionable scents threatens his bodily integrity and poetic and moral authority. Additionally, I suggest that odor mirrors qualities of Martial’s poems themselves: short-lived but enduring, insignificant but powerful, truthful (so Martial claims) yet frequently open to (mis)interpretation. Through his poems about smell, Martial teaches his audience not only how to read his epigrams, but even how to become critics themselves.As a literary study which accounts for the cultural significance of smell, this dissertation highlights the importance of odors in literature while simultaneously shedding light on Roman ideas about disgust, contagion, identity, and the body.