Bodies as behavior

Abstract

The Dinocrates-Alexander episode of book 2 supplies the reader with a complex heuristic for differentiating good architects from bad. Vitruvius claims to rely on his knowledge and writing in anticipation of his own success, whereas he attributes Dinocrates’ renown to an attractive bodily appearance. A close intertextual reading of the passage threaded through Livy 1 suggests that Alexander and Dinocrates violate the ideal architect–autocrat relationship. The manner in which one interprets the episode indicates whether one can distinguish altruism from ambitio and the like. Alexander’s appetitious reaction to Dinocrates and his body is further problematized by the latter’s nudity and evocation of Hercules and athletic victors. Discussions in the rhetorical handbooks indicate that arguments concerning a plaintiff’s or defendant’s bodily state can support arguments about his character. The handbooks seem to presume a widespread valorization of what the Greeks would call καλοκἀγαθία‎, but there is an implicit acknowledgment that beauty dissimulates vice. The athletic and/or gladiatorial body is therefore a particular locus of contestation and controversy, as Cicero’s (and Sallust’s) depictions of Catiline show. On the Greek side, writers as early as Tyrtaeus and Xenophanes had suggested that wisdom is better than strength. Isocrates frames the issue politically, and Vitruvius takes it one step further. Following the Roman handbooks that viewed the cultivation of bodily attributes (vs. the fortuitous possession of those attributes) as the primary signifier of character, Vitruvius suggests that athletes are ethically and politically bankrupt, while writers deserve triumphs and apotheosis. Archimedes, Socrates, and even Vitruvius himself provide counterexamples.