The Romans called their polity SPQR – Senatus populusque romanus, the Roman Senate and people – but the acronym does not encompass the forms of leadership or domination under which they lived for much of their imaginary and recorded history. Because Latin writers lacked a natural term for what the king, Consul, or Caesar was doing that no-one else was, the history of Roman political life is partly a history of what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls “the Other’s desire.” The alienation of Roman politics from the Latin language seems, paradoxically, to have led to the duration of the Roman state and, fortunately, to several hundred years of intellectual and cultural ferment.
This First Friday Lecture was supported by the Class Gift given by the 2023 graduates of the Basic Program.
