01 - Metaphor and Microcosm: The Body and the State at the Dawn of Empire in Rome and China

Han Chinese texts allude to a conceptual model of macrocosm and microcosm, in which elements at different scales, from the body to the household to the city to the empire to the cosmos map onto each other. This system, expounded by Lewis (2006) among others, has already been compared with Roman imperial models of space by Chen (2020). In this paper I historicize the comparison, analysing the model's development in both Rome and China, to show that in both cases it is a development particular to the period of consolidation of territorial empire. My work moves back and forth between the Chinese and the Roman texts, drawing inspiration from interpretations of each to flesh out our understanding of the other. During the Roman Republic, the res publica was often compared to a body (Walters 2020). Yet this comparison falls short of a microcosm-macrocosm metaphor, resisting extension into a full sequence of scales: Livy's Menenius Agrippa talks of a res publica as body that requires cooperation between disparate parts, not an ordered unity comparable with the dance of the cosmos. I analyse texts from Cicero and Manilius to show how the metaphor gradually begins to include a larger correspondence with the world or the cosmos, though the macrocosm/microcosm element remains hedged and limited until its full flowering in imperial authors like Aelius Aristides. Similarly, I follow Sivin (1995) in comparing Confucian (C6-5) texts including the Classic of Filial Piety and Qin and Eastern Han (C3-2) texts such as Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals to show that the fully developed system of macrocosm and microcosm which maps body to empire is a late addition to the tradition. For both cultures, the full expression of the metaphor is a product of empire. In the earlier Roman examples, the res publica is not like a body ruled by the mind or the cosmos ruled by Jupiter, but a multipolar Republic. It is only when a princeps becomes the centre of the res publica that it can appear as a rung on the conceptual scale from body to cosmos; and in the same mental shift, in both Rome and China, the state itself becomes better-defined as it is territorialized and equated with empire, coterminous with the world and centred on the capital and the emperor. For the developed Chinese case, Lewis sees this mental model as making an essentially political claim naturalizing world empire and the emperor's place in it. The same applies to Rome; but by examining its historical development, I show that it is a new model, one historically linked to the consolidation of territorial empire in both cases; and that it requires not only a new conception of the state, but also a new conception of the body.

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Presenters

Amy Russell, Brown University

  SCS-28