All Embracing But Underwhelming…

Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2004

p. 3 - ‘In the years following the assassination, the Zapruder film became the cornerstone of both the Warren Commission (the board of inquiry created by President Lyndon Johnson on November 29, 1963, to investigate the assassination and headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren) and its detractors. It was believed to be the most objective piece of evidence, capable of providing answers that plagued investigators. Yet, like the break of eighteen and a half minutes in the Nixon tapes, the Zapruder film too contains a significant gap. At the crucial moment of the assassination, the presidential limousine passed in front of a large street sign (now gone), reading Stemmons Freeway Key Right, which blocked Zapruder’s view. President Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and their wives disappeared from sight. Each frame of the film has been scrupulously examined in conjunction with other photographs and eyewitness testimony. At frame 207, the President is seen before the street sign, waving at the crowds. At frame 224 the limousine emerges from behind the street sign, and the president’s arms are raised to his neck. He is obviously
hit. In the time between frames 207 and 224 (no more than four seconds), in the space behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, an went occurred that will remain unknown. Forensics, ballistics, acoustics, optics: every available scientific method has been applied and reapplied to the evidence. Nevertheless, the street sign in the middle of the screen hides crucial information.’

p. 3-4 - ‘In both examples, the information needed to complete the story and to ensure the continuity of an accurate narrative, one that represents the historical event from beginning to end, cannot be recovered. The erasure of the tape and the disappearance of the limousine behind the sign cause a gap in our knowledge of the sequence of events. In the etymological sense, the evidence, with its root in the Latin verb videre, “to see,” is invisible. At these evidential blind spots, the historian, whose etymology is rooted in the Greek idein, “to see,” is compelled to conjecture about what really happened. In the absence of fact, the historical accounts of Watergate and the assassination of JFK are left to the Aristotelian devices of probability and necessity. I do not claim that if the eighteen and a half minutes of tape or the four seconds of film were available, then the clouds of conspiracy would dissipate and all chains of causation would be patently clear. But it is around the gaps in the Nixon tapes and the Zapruder film that debates about the details of the conspiracies
rage most fiercely. The better a historian is at negotiating these gaps, the more successful he or she is at creating a narrative that is likely to be accepted as the authoritative version, one that leaves little room for the skepticism, opinion, or imagination that can divide and thereby corrode society. A successful conspiracy narrative accounts for all the links in the chain of cause and effect and thereby contains fear and deters citizens from further unrest.’

p. 4 - ‘It is no doubt daring—and intentionally startling—to begin a book on conspiracy narratives in Roman history with a discussion of Watergate and the assassination of JFK, but these irresistible modern American events clearly illustrate the problem that compels this study. On the one hand, history is a forum in which to exhibit the deeds of men and women, so that they not fade into oblivion. But because conspiracy is a hidden, secret event, it resists—defies—exposition. In recording any conspiracy, important facts always remain in the shadows; to tell the tale of a conspiracy is to guess at a very great deal. So how does one reveal something that is deliberately kept secret? How does one speak with any authority on matters about which one knows little or nothing for certain? Of course, all historians face uncertainty and ignorance about their subject matter at some point. For all these reasons, I maintain that a conspiracy is an ideal circumstance in which to observe how a historian confronts the limits of knowledge.’

p. 89 - ‘My concern is the historian’s patent inability to claim authority over what he is narrating and the ways in which Roman historians produce narratives of historical events that, at their core, resist telling. Conspiracy requires silence. Often authors must negotiate silence because of ideological restrictions on what can be said safely.” But silence hinders a conspiracy narrative not only because of strictures imposed by a dominant ideology but also because of the limits imposed by the knowability of events. The symptomatic points in the text reveal a dialectic between the uncertainty of the event and the historian’s attempt to gain control over the uncertainty in order to narrate it. Such instances of uncertainty and indeterminacy provide opportunity to see how the author negotiates the difficulty, how he exerts rhetorical control over the text at the moment it becomes epistemologically intractable.’

p. 107-8 - ‘It is now evident that Roman attitudes towards conspiracy are largely concerned with the violation of boundaries (between public and private, male and female, free and slave). Yet, as the Pisonian conspiracy and the assassination of Caligula show, these attitudes are not always negative. While some conspiracies are indicative of failing morality, certain conspiracies are, morally speaking, good. Sometimes good citizens must join in secret with like-minded fellows to overthrow an oppressive government. There is no question as to the honorable motives of Chaerea and his fellow conspirators. Claudius admits as much; he sentences the assassins to death not because they were wrong but because conspirators—even when right-are never to be trusted. As conspiracy always raises the possibility of counterconspiracy, so conspiracy can be either reprehensible or honorable. The assassination of Julius Caesar, however, was not so easy to label; consensus remained in the distance. Sorting out the morality of a conspiracy (and thereby disengaging alternative moral interpretations) is the historian’s job; however, when it comes to judging the actions of Brutus and Cassius, the reader finds no leisure.’
(Conspiracies of good…0

p. 109 - ‘A conspiracy theory is characterized by an epistemological gap caused by the secrecy and silence that shroud the event.’

p. 126 - ‘In a society like ancient Rome, based on large-scale slave ownership, unequal relations of power and status, and the unequal distribution of wealth, conspiracy was doubtless far from the surface. By exaggerating the exceptionality of conspiracy, the historians were able to circumscribe its effects.’
(Perhaps a hunt towards our intution about CTS…)