Over the first hundred years of the principate, people lumped together as the "opposition" shared the same kind of background in any one generation, though it was a slightly different one at different times. They were alert to the same ideas, under the same dark skies, a close group. On the periphery stood men of views and courage similar but not so extreme: Curiatius Maternus or Pliny; at the heart, someone like Thrasea Paetus. It was their receptions and banquets that emperors feared, where, after the slaves had left the room, voices got lower and zeal hotter for revolution, for "new things," in the usual phrase, novae res. Here too was where men praised old things: the Republic, Brutus, and the ancestral way of life, mos maiorum.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, April 05, 2025
The Opposition
Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 41: