Diocletian Blobb

[Dave Monroe]

"'But why spare an insufferable ass like Diocletian
Blobb?'
   "'You can spot a mouth like that a mile off,' Bortz
said.  'Even in the cold, even with your blood-lust
up.  If I wanted word to get to England, to sort of
pave the way, I should think he's perfect.  Trystero
enjoyed counter-evolution in those days.  Look at
England, the king about to lose his head.  A set-up.'"
(Lot 49, Ch. 6, p. 158)

>From Charles Hollander, "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA:
Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49," Pynchon
Notes 40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997): 61-106 ...

"But Lot 49 itself suggests the analogy between the
crisis in mid-sixties America and a crisis in Roman
history by giving us, late in the novel, Dr.
Diocletian Blobb.  Why bring in this name after all
that has gone on before?  Diocletian was a Roman
emperor (284-305 CE) whose reign marked a change in
government.  Under Diocletian, local autonomy
disappered, the taxing system compulsorily tied the
country people to the land, the Seante became weak and
ineffective, the army grew much larger and stronger,
and the mercantile class was taxed to the limit. 
Diocletian established a military dictatorship.  With
the dissolution of any semblance of republican
government, there were no theoretical or practical
checks on the emperor.  When Diocletian's scheme for
price stabilization failed, the empire went into a
long political and economic decline from which it
never recovered.  Could Pynchon see the gap between
wealthy insiders and what used to be called the
American middle class ..." (pp. 99-100)


>From Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch
of the Postal System (Trans. Kevin Repp.  Stanford,
CA: Stanford UP, 1999), Ch. 1, "An Epoch of the Postal
System," pp. 4-19 ...

   "It was in this form that the Persian Empire came
to the Romans.  After Persian communications
technology was adopted, first by the Seleucids and
then by Alexander the Great, its Egyptian version
finally provided Augustus with a model for the cursus
publicus--that is, for a postal system that served to
transmit the imperiums of imperial oraculums and
military communications, as well as to transport
high-level functionaries.  As the name itself
indicates, the use of the cursus publicus was reserved
exclusively for the emperor and the provincial
givernors.  And even these officils had to present a
certificate issued by the emperor or the praetorian
prefect (later also by the magister officium) in order
to gain access to the medium of the empire.  'People'
did not communicate through teh potal system; on the
contrary, the postal system communicated through
people, who had to perform angarias, that is,
compulsory services or liturgies for the maintenance
of the postal system.  In order to curb extensive
corruption in th imperial postal system, which alwasy
was tantamount to conspiracy against the empire,
Diocletian created an imperial secret service, the
scola agentum in rebus, and placed the postal
administration under its authority.  Eventually, under
Theodosius and Honorius, the use of the postal system
by private persons was even punished by death.  Since
the network of the cursus publicus was coextensive
with the orbis terrarum, banishment to Pontus meant
being transported beyond the limes of the world for
Ovid.  While the Tristia are laments over the loss of
postal connections, the Epistulae ex Ponto use the
medium of literature to decry the catastrophe in the
postal system.
   "Postal systems are instrumenta regni."  (pp. 6-7)

Siegert's book was first published in German as ...

Siegert, Bernhard.  Relais: Geschicke der Literatur
   als Epoche der Post, 1751-1913.  Berlin: Brinkmann
   und Bose, 1999.

http://141.20.150.7/aesthetic/bsiegert.htm


>From Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (6 vols., 1776-88) ...

"The nine Books of Pontical Epistles, which Ovid
composed during the seven first years of his
melancholy exile, possess, besides the merit of
elegance, a double value. They exhibit a picture of
the human mind under very singular circumstances; and
they contain many curious observations, which no
Roman, except Ovid, could have had an opportunity of
making."

Cited in ...

Richmond, John.  "The Latter Days of a Love Poet:
   Ovid in Exile."  Classics Ireland, Vol. 2 (1995):
   97-120.

http://www.ucd.ie/~classics/95/Richmond95.html

And for Gibbon, see ...

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pcraddoc/dfgib/dfbutlis.htm

>From E.J. Kenney, "Introduction" to Ovid, Sorrows of
an Exile (Trans. A.D. Melville.  New York: Oxford UP,
1995), pp. xiii-xxix ...

"Ovid, banished in disgrace by his emperor at the age
of 51 ....   The duration of his exile was at the
pleasure of Augustus, an ageing and irritable autocrat
whom he had somehow managed to give bitter personal
offence.  Hence, it would seem, the choice of a place
of exile: ... a barbarized Greek colony on the
farthest confines of the Roman dominion.  Tomius, now
Constanta in Romania ....  In one respect Augustine's
sentence had been lenient: Ovid was not legally exiled
but 'relegated', hence not deprived in property or
citizenship.  Otherwise it meant the loss of
everything that had made life worth living, the
brilliant cosmopolitan society of Rome.  Ahead lay
nothing but solitude, boredom, discomfort, and
danger--a living death.

"What had Ovid done to deserve this?  The secret has
been well kept, and all we know is what he chose to
tell us in his poetry.  It is perhaps natural to
assume that the real cause of the offence was what he
calls his indiscretion (error), an involuntary
involvement in some scandal intimately affecting the
imperial house.  The other count against him, a poem
(carmen), the Ars Amatoria, looks at first sight like
a pretext ....  True, Ovid had in it administered more
than one pinprick to official Augustan myths, but can
Augustine really thought it so subversive of
contemporary morals ... to deserve such draconian
punishment?" (p. xiv)

>From Ovid, Tristia (A.D. 9-11) ...

Parve--nec invideo--sine me, liber, ibis in urbem,
  ei mihi, quo domino non licet ire tuo!
vade, sed incultus, qualem decet exulis esse;
  infelix habitum temporis huius habe. (I.i.1-4)

[...]

cetera turba palam titulos ostendet apertos,
  et sua detecta nomina fronte geret;
tres procul obscura latitantes parte videbis,--
  sic quoque, quod nemo nescit, amare docent.
hos tu vel fugias, vel, si satis oris habebis,
  Oedipodas facito Telegonsque voces.
deque tribus, moneo, si qua est tibi cura parentis,
  ne quemquam, quamvis ipse docebit, ames.
(I.i.109-16)

That is ...

You'll go, my little book--I feel no envy--
  Without me to the City where, alas,
Your master may not go.  Go, but be shabby
  As suits an exile's book.

[...] 

The others will display their titles clearly,
  Each name uncovered on the front above.
Three, you'll see, hide far-off in a dark corner--
  Even so they teach (what all know) how to love.
These you will shun, or call them Oedipus or
  Telegonus, if you can be so bold.
And of these three, I warn, if you respect your
  Parent, love none, though how to love he's told.

Latin courtesy of ...

Ovid. Tristia and Ex Ponto.  2nd ed., rev.
   Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler.  Rev. G.P. Goold.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996 [1988, 1924].

But I opted for the English trans. in ...

Ovid.  Sorrows of an Exile.  Trans.
   A.D. Melville.  New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Verse vs. prose.  See also online ...

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/fld/CLASSICS/ovid.tristia.html

http://www.fotomr.uni-marburg.de/ovidserv/Text/chp/ovid.tristia.html

But to continue ...
   
In the Loeb (Harvard) ed., it is noted of Oedipus and
Telegonus (the son of Odysseus by Circe) that "Both
were parricides, and so, like Ovid's book, destroyed
the author of their being" (p. 11, n. 2).  The Oxford 
further notes that they were "(unwitting) parricides,"
adding that, here, "Ovid's books are now figured as
his children" (p. 118, n. 114).  And back to Hollander
...

"Was Pynchon, too, on the list of the proscribed?  We
may never know.  He did sign a full-page anti-war ad,
along with hundreds of other well-respected people
opposed to the escalating war, in the New York Review
of Books (15 Feb. 1969: 9).  Natalie Robins has
documented that Thomas R. Pynchon, Jr., was on the
FBI's Index, a list of people known to be unfriendly
to governmnt policies on whom the FBI kept active
dossiers.  Pynchon's name appears among hundreds of
'Writers, Editors, Agents, and Publishres Indexed by
the FBI because they signed Civil Rights and/or
Anti-war Protests during the 1960s" ([Robins, p.]
411).  Enemies lists, Chaos, Cointelpro, Shamrock,
Minaret; mail openings, telephone taps, direct
surveillance, breaking and enetring, and stealing
files: it appeared American politics could get no
worse.  Pynchon had already opted to live as a
stranger in his own strange land." (Hollander, p. 63)

Hollander is here citing ...

Robins, Natalie.  Alien Ink: The FBI's War on
   Freedom of Expression.  New York: Morrow, 1992.

Okay ...

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