Scipio’s downfall is superficially surprising: the charges were obviously invented, although he was not helped by his own arrogance. The disgrace and death in humiliating retirement of a successful, patriotic general seems a display of petty ingratitude. But in the Roman Republic, no individual, however gifted and successful, must be allowed to become too wealthy from booty or too politically powerful. The main agent of his disgrace (two phases, 187, 184), was Cato. Livy’s narrative is gripping but confused. Polybius treated the troubles of the Scipio brothers only as part of an anecdotal obituary. In 187, Cato put up two tribunes to demand an account of the money which Lucius received from Antiochus as part-payment of war indemnity. Publius, the real target, angrily tore up the account book which could have cleared him. He himself was prosecuted (184). It never came to trial. He died at his Campanian villa (183).

This chapter examines Coetzee’s creative and scholarly engagements with literary style, beginning with his earliest novel Dusklands and moving across his corpus to track his complexly evolving use of style’s emotional, ethical, and political affordances. Apparently distinct, even diverging impulses – one embracing grace and euphony, the other committing to verbal thrift and minimalism – coalesce across Coetzee’s career, soliciting complicated affective responses from his readers to the inflections and connotations of novelistic discourse. It is critically tempting see Coetzee as a kind of stern gatekeeper of formal restraint: a writer who shuns the consolations of style and who forestalls the pleasures his readers might take in elegantly wrought language, by investing instead in a kind of syntactic austerity and bareness. In practice, however, his fiction doesn’t always behave in this manner, as beautifully paced, rhetorically supple sequences from Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Schooldays of Jesus attest.