Pagan humanitas in the imperial age : from Pliny the Younger to Symmachus

Abstract

This thesis investigates one of the most polysemic Latin words I know of, humanitas, and, subordinately, the adjective from which it derives, humanus. While the first chapter briefly retraces the history of humanitas from its origins, the thesis as a whole focuses on the uses of these two words in the most important pagan literary texts from the Trajanic (late first century CE) to the Theodosian age (late fourth century CE). My aim is to explore the extent to which the different meanings usually attributed to humanitas by dictionaries (roughly ‘human nature’, ‘education and culture’, ‘philanthropy’) are much more nuanced and in ever-evolving relation with one another, and how the use of humanitas by some authors often performs clear rhetorical and/or ideological strategies. My thesis is therefore not only a lexicographical study, but pays careful attention to the wider historical and cultural contexts in which humanitas was used. In this respect, the study of the evolution of the word provides new and interesting insight into wider issues of authorship, political and social changes, as well as ideological appropriations. More specifically, the use of humanitas reveals the ways in which Roman authors considered themes that were at the core of their conception of culture and civilisation, such as the relationship between being learned and behaving morally, the ideas of moral nobility and clemency, the notion that a value concept can distinguish a category of men from another, or even an historical period from another. These themes, which remain central to later periods—from the Middle Ages to the present day—are crucial to understanding how a civilisation constructed itself and changed over time