Correcting Rome with Rome

Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize, this chapter argues, uses a classicizing allusive technique to set different models of Rome against each other, so that each corrects the flaws or errors of the other. Vergilian refoundation counteracts Lucan’s perpetual civil war. Augustine’s Civitas Dei counteracts the fruitlessness of suicide and promises to bring closure to the perennial cycle of refoundation and collapse. But the Roman Church, for Hugo, has failed to live up to the promise of Christianity and classical Rome offers literature itself as the secular institution that will bring Hugo’s progressive vision to fruition. Quatrevingt-treize presents every model of Rome as flawed, but Roman models offer the very framework for combating the Roman inheritance. Could such a dialectical reception of Roman antiquity, this chapter asks, in fact be a “better” way—even the “right” way—to practice reception?