Uptight Romans Cuts Why did Seneca get so bent out of shape because Maecenas failed to hitch up his

tunic properly? He seems positively fulminating . . . and at a man who has been dead for close to sixty years (Sen. Ep. 114.2).1 Quomodo Maecenas vixerit notius est, quam ut narrari nunc debeat, quomodo ambulaverit, quam delicatus fuerit, quam cupierit videri, quam vitia sua latere noluerit. Quid ergo? Non oratio eius aeque soluta est quam ipse discinctus? Non tam insignita illius verba sunt quam cultus, quam comitatus, quam domus, quam uxor ? Magni vir ingenii fuerat, si illud egisset via rectiore, si non vitasset intellegi, si non etiam in oratione difflueret. How Maecenas lived is too well known to need to be told here: how he walked, how effeminate he was, how he longed to be looked at, how he had no wish to hide his vices.2 Well, then. Is not his language as loose as he was slovenly (unbelted)? Are not his words as marked as his dress, his retinue, his house, his wife? He could have been a man of great talent, if he had gone about it in straightforward way, if he had not avoided being understood, if he had not leaked3 everywhere in his speech. We do not need Barthes (1983) to tell us that fashion is a system, and examples of how items of clothing can be reified as status markers are all around us: white collar, blue collar, the suits, a bit of skirt, a big girls blouse, the pants in the family. And the Romans are a particularly conspicuous example of homo hierarchicus (Dumont 1976, 1980; Appadurai 1986). Despite a limited wardrobe, every Roman male went about with his exact social standingand net worth draped around his body for all to see (Sebesta and Bonfante 1994).

So a genuine, Latin, etymological case of habitus, not just a way of dressing but of carrying oneself (Mauss 1936: 175, 186 = 1993; Bourdieu 1977: 72-95). Maecenas is performing gender (Butler 1990: 25 = 1999: 35); the problem is according to Senecahes performing it all wrong. Summer's old commentary on Senena (1910: 198) neatly sums up the message that Maecenas was sending: "Habitual nglig was very incorrect . . . Irregularities of this kind marked a man as idle, effeminate, or fastit is often hard to distinguish the various shades." This is a relatively famous passage and one of the starting points for Buffons constantly renewed argument that le style cest lhomme mme.4 But clearly, something more is going on than merely a failure to observe a dress code, more than a dislike of someones prose style. Something about Maecenas not drawing his tunic in tight with a belt seems to drive Seneca mad. The effeminate Maecenas has been well examined by Richlin (1983/1992: 4-5), Williams (2010: 162-3) and others, but I think we can say more about it and use Senecas diatribe to open up part of the Roman gender system and see what lies within. To answer this question, we need first to take an excursion into the realms of anthropological theory and then back by way of some curious paths in a Latin semantic and semiotic field.5 I want to sketch out a couple of broad ideas and illustrate them with only a few examples. I am using the word field in Victor Turners sense of the abstract cultural domains where paradigms are formulated, established, and come into conflict. Such paradigms consist of sets of rules from which many kinds of

sequences of social actions may be generated but which further specify what sequences must be excluded (1974: 17).

Cf. Cic. Tusc. 5.47.

Seneca uses similar language about Mamercus Scaurus (Ben. 4.31.3-5). By this point, diffluo is almost a technical term of style: Rhet. Her. 4.16, Gell. 1.15.1, Sen.

Tranq. 17.4.
4

, . Cicero (Tusc. 5. 47) attributes it to Socrates. For some helpful surveys of anthropology of the body, see Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987;

Lock 1992; Halliburton 2002; Joyce 2005; Turner 2008; Mascia-Lees 2011. Rescent collections with a focus on Greece and Rome include Hopkins and Wyke 2005, Fgen and Lee 2009.