Divine Fury (7 page)

It was only later, in fact, in Aristotle’s
Poetics
, written in the middle of the fourth century
BCE
, that one finds an explicit, if still tentative, distinction between natural endowment and inspiration. There Aristotle briefly contrasts poetry written as a “happy gift of nature” with that conceived through a “strain of madness” of the sort that lifts one “out of his proper self.” And though he does not elaborate on the difference, it is safe to say that Aristotle was more comfortable with possessors of natural talent than with men possessed. His matter-of-fact mind tended to eschew the sort of soaring flights of ecstasy that characterized the divine fury, and he was also forthright in his assumption that human natures were differently formed. The souls of women were manifestly inferior to those of men, he believed, and nature had shaped many individuals to be “natural” slaves. What Plato presented as a useful fiction—that some minds were constitutionally different from others—Aristotle held to be a simple truth. At the very least, an outstanding man must be that—a man—born free and with a soul amenable to the kind of training that could make for true greatness and virtue.
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Yet notwithstanding these basic differences of temperament and outlook, Aristotle left behind a theory that could accommodate elements of his master’s teachings: the possessor of natural talent might still be conceived as a man possessed. True, Aristotle himself did not write the
critical text in question, the
Problemata
, or
Problems
, though it was assumed until recently that he had. The work is representative nonetheless of an “Aristotelian” tradition of great influence regarding matters of the mind.
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The
Problems
is a collection of ruminations on perplexing questions of “science,” such as why some women are bald or some men hairy. And Book 30 opens by inquiring, “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious [melancholy] temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? . . .” The assumption and point of departure—that men of eminence across various fields share what we would describe as a common physiological makeup—reflects not only a belief in a natural or inherent disposition to excellence, but also the influence of a broader tradition of medical speculation that was evolving at the same time that Aristotle and his students were active. Best expressed in the writings of the ancient physician Hippocrates (c. 460–377
BCE
) and later systematized by Galen (c. 130–200 CE), this tradition set forth the powerful humoral theory of the body, which explained the operation of the human constitution according to the interactions of four vital fluids, or humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, the latter rendered in Greek
melan
(black) +
chole
(bile), or, in Latin,
atra bilis
. In healthy individuals, these humors were thought to flow in harmony and balance. But a disequilibrium could strongly affect mood, creating (in names we retain to the present day) phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholy types. The latter were thought to be particularly prone to anxiety, sadness, and morbid delusions, and so those born with a superabundance of black bile were at risk for a variety of afflictions. But as the author of the
Problems
maintains, such individuals were also comparatively rare, and when black bile was present in just the right proportions and at just the right temperature, it could have extraordinary effects, inducing states of “frenzy and possession” like that which gripped “the Sibyls and soothsayers and all inspired persons.” Conducive to prophetic powers, a melancholy temperament could likewise spur imagination, poetic invention, and mental prowess of various kinds. Ajax and Heracles were men of this type, along with “many others of the heroes,” “most of the poets,” and philosophical giants on the order of Plato and, not least, Socrates.
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And so the
Problems
provided a quasi-scientific account of the nature of eminent men, explaining how certain individuals were inherently predisposed to greatness. But it did so while at the same time affirming key
aspects of Plato’s theory of possession. Those of a particular constitution were susceptible to states that closely resembled the
furor divinus
, privy to ecstatic visions and prophetic flights. Reaffirming a connection to mental instability and even madness, the
Problems
offered grounds for thinking of the possessor as possessed, of the man of natural talents as specially inspired, just as Plato’s own theory provided grounds for thinking of the possessed as a possessor, with the anointed figure of Socrates attended by the strange demon that was his exalted mind. The two main perspectives on human mental prowess to emerge from Greek antiquity were thus mutually reinforcing to a considerable extent, together consolidating a view of the godlike individual who was at once divinely anointed and potentially dangerous and unstable in his special election: a man who was more than man, but who could also be less. As Roman interpreters incorporated these accounts into their own understandings of human nature and special possession, the collective picture of that special something that attended men of eminence emerged in even more vivid terms.

L
ISTEN ONCE AGAIN
to the poets, this time of Rome, who sing also of man and what sets him apart. Tibullus, in the first century
BCE
, writes of paying homage to his
genius
—the god of his birth—with unmixed wine, cakes soaked in honey, incense, dancing, and games. For Ovid, the usual kinds of honors include propitious prayers and fine words, together with cakes and

a white robe hanging from my shoulders
,

a smoking altar garlanded with chaplets
,

grains of incense snapping in the holy fire. . .
.

Horace celebrates the
genius
of a friend by throwing a great party on his “natal day.” A “full bottle of old wine from the Alban Hills” is set aside for the occasion, and garlands are prepared:

The household is getting ready; the silver is polished
,

The cups and flagons gleam; the household altar
,

Adorned with leaves, is ready, awaiting the offerings
,

Everyone hurries
.

All those who have attended a birthday celebration or the feast of a patron saint will know something of this elemental excitement, the festive commemoration that attends birth and being in the world. They also will have participated, however unwittingly, in the last remnants
of a once flourishing pagan rite. For what Ovid describes as the
festum geniale
, the annual ritual and sacrifice to one’s
genius
, is the distant ancestor of the birthday party. The cake that now features so centrally there was once a primary offering, along with flowers and wine. Even the wish that we make as we close our eyes to blow out the candles recalls the prayer once offered before the flicker of the altar. An act of homage and sacrifice to
genius
.
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The word is Latin, spelled precisely as it is in the subtitle of this book, though its modern meanings only faintly recall the ancient ones. And yet the Roman rumination on what this power was, who it attended, and how it might express itself closely tracked the Greek discussion of the
daimonic
forces that moved through human beings. To inquire after a person’s
genius
was to ask what kind of man he was, what nature he might possess, or what force might possess him, connecting him to the gods.

Genius
, from the Latin verb
gigno, gignere
, meant to generate, father, beget. Its cognates are abundant, multiplying in words like
gens
(people or clan),
genus
(birth, descent, race), and our own “gene” and “genital,” from whence all else derives.
Genius
, a begetter, one who begets.
Genius
, the father of us all. The origins are obscure. The oldest surviving literary references to
genius
are from the Roman playwright Plautus, who describes, in the third century
BCE
, an aging miser who, upon the theft of his gold, regrets pleasures never spent. “I have cheated myself, my soul (
animus
) and my
genius
,” the character pines, like many before him and many since. Elsewhere, Plautus’s comic personae speak of making war on
genius
by starving it of food and sex. But “to indulge one’s genius” (
indulgere genio
) would also become, if it was not already, a common Latin idiom, meaning “to yield to passion,” to indulge in the good things of life. “Indulge the genius, let us seize the sweet things of life” (“Indulge genio, carpamus dulcia”), advises the first-century Roman satirist Persius. The idiom would remain in use until at least the sixteenth century, when Erasmus saw fit to include it in his
Adagia
, a vast annotated compendium of Latin and Greek proverbs.
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But if to feed one’s
genius
was to give it sustenance and sex—and to deny it, to deny natural desires—what was this
genius
itself? Plautus’s invocation of the word gestures to meanings now covered over by time. Yet this much is clear:
genius
from its earliest origins was power—an elemental “life force,” in one classicist’s description, a “ubiquitous divine power penetrating the world of appearances,” in the words of another.
Genius
was energy, a sacred presence akin to what the Romans called
numen
, the aura of a god, or the
mana
of animistic cultures, strange
spirits and forces of nature. In the Roman case, however, the power of
genius
seems always to have been linked to generation. And so there are indications, stretching all the way back to the time of the Etruscans in the eighth century
BCE
, of a connection between this propagating life force and the phallus, the Etruscans’ lord and giver of life. The Romans associated it in art with the horn of plenty and the snake, both symbols of reproductive capacity. The horn, with its undulating shaft, was a ubiquitous sexual metaphor in its own right, and of course still is (Are you feeling horny?). And even more plainly, the serpent, close to the ground and all things that rise from it, was seductive by virtue of its shape alone: it is an archetypal symbol of fecundity and procreation in many ancient cultures.
³⁴

In early Italian religion, probably preceding even the founding of the Roman Republic at the end of the sixth century
BCE
, the snake appears to have served as a totem of
genius
, a sacred creature that watched over the family and clan, embodying its reproductive power and guarding its lands. It is revealing that two of Rome’s greatest chroniclers, Plutarch and Livy, took pains centuries later to comment on the persistence of the legend of the begetting of Alexander the Great by an immense serpent-
genius
. A snake, Livy reports, was often seen in the bed chambers of Olympia, Alexander’s mother, and evidently possessed her. Livy’s successor, Suetonius, recounts a similar tale, telling of the magical serpentine origins of the emperor Augustus. Following his reptilian conception, a serpent-shaped mark appears on the body of Augustus’s mother, Attia, and in the requisite time—ten months in Suetonius’s reckoning by the lunar calendar—the future emperor is born as young Octavian, his genius engendered by
genius
.
³⁵

An enduring symbol of reproductive power, the snake was also closely associated, as these examples suggest, with the space in which that power was transmitted. Romans would eventually come to see the
genius loci
, or “genius of the place” as inhabiting a great variety of spaces, from mountain springs to military barracks to entire cities. But if all such places could have their presiding spirits, the original haunt of the snake was the bounded property of the clan’s paterfamilias: the earliest dwelling of
genius
was the home. It seems to have been considered early on as one of a number of minor household deities and protectors, including Vesta, the goddess of the hearth; the Penates, the spirits of the storeroom; and the Lares, the gods of the homestead. Even more specifically, the power of the
genius
gathered about the
lectus genialis
, the marital bed, which served as a magical site of generation. It was here, at the point of procreation, where the clan and the family were conceived—where its “genes”
were passed from one “generation” to the next—that the sacred power of
genius
revealed itself and was fully disclosed.
³⁶

Just how and when, precisely, the free-flowing life-force of the early Italian
genius
became a personal spirit and individual protector of the sort invoked by Ovid and Horace is not altogether clear, though it is easy enough to imagine the general progression: a power initially associated with procreation, and believed to course through the body of the paterfamilias, was gradually envisioned not just as the divine energy of the one who maintained the family, but as divinity itself, accompanying, watching over, and protecting all men from the moment of their birth. What we do know is that by the late second century
BCE
, and probably well before, the personal life-force invoked by Plautus with the coming of the word had been transformed into a personal protector, a guardian and tutelary spirit. It is altogether revealing of the early sexual connection that this
genius
was considered by Romans as exclusively a guardian of men. Even when the concept was extended from the patriarch and his dominions to other corporations and places, the
genius
retained a strongly gendered sense, conceived as the originating principle of the institution, the founding father and enduring source of its “life” that preserved continuity over time. Such instances only reaffirmed the active male character of
genius
, an association that would long outlive the Roman cult.
³⁷