Luxuria: A Short History

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter provides a history of the term and concept of luxuria from the origin of Latin literature (Cato the Elder) to the late first century ce (Pliny the Elder, Quintilian), with a specific section on sumptuary laws. The analysis is conducted through a close reading of several passages, with attention to each author’s peculiarities, to the specifics of certain periods (e.g. the Augustan Age), and to literary genres, especially historiography and satire. Besides the pervasiveness of some commonplaces, which are particularly frequent in historiography (luxuria as a vice came from the East, expressed in banquets, linked to greed and waste of money, and as a cause of fatal decline), and of some recurrent historical examples (Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Apicius, and so on), some other conclusions can also be drawn: satire generally avoids this term, even if dealing with the subject, in that it is more focused on the phenomenology of vices than on labelling them; poetry, and especially Augustan poetry, does not talk about luxuria, which was a compromising subject if considered in light of the emperor’s propaganda; epic poetry ignores it, with the exception of Lucan, whose moralistic concern shows affinities with historiography.