Allison
Zhou
Professor
Carrico, GSI: Jerilyn Sambrooke
Rhetoric
103A
30
November 2016
The Circle: Sentence, Paragraph, Biography, Dynasty
In paragraph 6 of “The Life of
Caligula” by Suetonius, the figure of an enclosed, circular syntactical
structure is made manifest in the epigraph “safe is Rome, safe too our country,
for Germanicus is safe” (411). Beginning and ending with the sentence with the word
“safe” suggests that the sentence is a closed and bracketed off, independent textual
unit in itself. The repetition of “safe,” where the sentence begins where it
ends, and ends where it begins reinforces a sense of circularity and enclosedness—that
Rome itself is a complete, discrete haven of safety due to its association with
Germanicus and safety in a circular chain. The figurings and various re-figurings
of the circular structure, that at once signifies beginning and ending,
completion and confinement, functions to exemplify the circularity and
repetition embedded within the structure of individual lives, biographical
writings, and the vicious Caesarian dynasty.
In paragraph 1 of the piece, both the
birth and death of Germanicus’ political career is articulated and contained
within a single paragraph. The paragraph opens: “Germanicus, father of Gaius
Caesar, son of Drusus and the younger Antonia, after being adopted by his
paternal uncle Tiberius, held the quaestorship five years before the legal age
and passed directly to the consulship” (405). The start of Germanicus’
political career is conveyed in the first sentence, only to meet its end in the
fourth sentence where it is reported that he “died of a lingering illness at
Antioch, in the thirty-fourth year of his age” (405). Here, the paragraph that
contains both the start and demise of Germanicus’ life in close
proximity functions to render his life a complete circle with a beginning and
an inevitable end, a self-enclosed totality in itself. The figure of the circle
serves to gesture at the mortality, and transience of human lives—that human
lives are incontestably finite, self-contained, temporalities. The figure of
the circular structure also gets expanded to span a whole paragraph.
Next, historical biographies—the literary
representation of lives that are already inherently circular, also assume an
extended circular structure. If Suetonius’ aim was to write an account of
Caligula’s life, then it is also an endeavor to write about births, beginnings,
ends, and deaths—which necessarily accords the form of the historical biography
the structure of a circular narrative. Because Suetonius resolved to recount
the the birth of Caligula “’who was born in the camp and reared ‘mid the arms
of his country’” (414), he must also include the death of Caligula: “he lived
twenty-nine years and ruled three years, ten months and eight days” (496) for
his biography to representationally encircle Caligula’s life in a complete,
cohesive account. Even Caligula, the Caesar who led a life of such debauchery
and splendid glory and pomp cannot escape the logic of the circle which imposes
a beginning and an end. The circular structure of individual life is in
confluence with the circular structure of biographies. The figure of the
circular structure gets expanded to the length of an entire text, with its circularity
and enclosedness delineated over the course of the text.
Moreover, Suetonius also employs the
figure of the circle, a figure that at once connotes vicious repetition but
also inevitable demise—to argue that Caesarian dynastic rule has been nothing
but a circular, static, unproductive, repetition, and that it must meet its
ultimate demise. Suetonius informs that after Caligula’s death, “men further
observed and commented on the fact that all the Caesars whose forename was
Gaius perished by the sword, beginning with the one who was slain in the times
of Cinna” (497). By highlighting the fact that all the Gaius Caesars died a common
death by sword, Suetonius demonstrates the circularity of the lineage of Gaius
Caesars who have continually reproduced the regimes and fates of their fathers
and grandfathers before them. However, precisely because Caesarian rule is
circular and repetitive, members of the Roman populace “proposed that the
memory of the Caesars be done away with and their temples destroyed” (497). Suetonius
figures the Caesarian dynasty as a circle in order to suggest that the dynasty
will bring about its own end.
