I. Enargeia and the Political Function of Spectacle

The visual language Livy uses to describe his work recurs with particular frequency in ancient estimations of the historian.5 Quintilian, for example describes the “bright clarity” (clarissimus candor [Inst. 10.1.101]) of Livy’s narrative, suggesting a style that is both revealing and brilliant. For Tacitus, Livy is “especially illustrious both for his style and his accuracy” (eloquentiae ac fidei praeclarus in primis [Ann. 4.34]).6 While the similarity of these descriptions may suggest that Livy’s ancient readers found visual terms especially applicable to the effect produced by his text, it also makes clear how deeply embedded visual imagery was in ancient conceptions of narrative style. Greek and Roman rhetorical treatises frequently described the aim of making an audience seem to see directly the events described in a literary work, a stylistic quality they designated as enargeia in Greek and in Latin as demonstratio, illustratio, evidentia, or sub oculos subiectio (placing beneath the eyes).7 The author of the first century B.C.E. Rhetorica ad Herrenium, to take a Latin example, defines demonstratio as “the expression of things in words in such a way that an affair seems to be taking place and the subject to be present before the eyes.”8 The very adjective inlustris, which Livy uses to characterize the visual properties of his monumentum, appears as a technical term for a type of style that “sets events almost before the eyes” of its audience.9 Indeed, Cicero had used a phrase very similar to Livy’s conception of an inlustre monumentum to describe the combination of pure latinity and tasteful rhetorical ornamentation in Caesar’s Commentarii: “It seems,” he wrote, “as if he had placed a well-painted picture in a good light.”10

As Cicero’s comment suggests, the comparison of a literary narrative to a visual representation had a particular significance for historiography. In the next century, Plutarch would declare that the best historian is the one who makes his narrative an image, as though it were a painting.11 Although Plutarch has Thucydides specifically in mind here, many very different historians share the aim of approximating the visual representation of events, and the particular contribution vision makes to the reception of a historical narrative could be understood in a variety of ways. Plutarch thinks primarily in terms of an emotional arousal of the readers that enables them to share in the experiences of those actually present at the events described, and also enhances their pleasure. For Polybius, by contrast, vision serves largely as a tool of intellectual investigation. His history presents the rise of Rome as a vast spectacle in which the entire network of causes governing human action stand revealed.12 Finally, the issue of the credibility and accuracy of the historian’s account of the past is also at stake in the conception of history as a “visible” reconstruction of events.13 The ideal source of information was autopsy: Herodotus privileges seeing over hearing as a means of gathering data, and Thucydides promises to build his narrative from his own personal experiences and from the scrupulous investigation of the accounts of eyewitnesses.14 In turn, he presents his own audience with a “clear vision” of both past and future.15 This offer of a visual experience is all the more striking since ancient texts were primarily intended to be heard rather than read.16

Thus Livy’s description of his work as an inlustre monumentum not only reveals the influence of general rhetorical conceptions of style; it can also be read as a complex statement of purpose aligning his work with several strands of the historiographic tradition that employed vision as a model for the audience’s reception of the historian’s text. Like Polybius, who ties the intellectual value of his history to its inclusivity by promising to bring all aspects of Fortune’s activity under the audience’s gaze (ὑπὸ μῖαν σύνοψιν, 1.4.1), Livy stresses the comprehensiveness of his monumentum, which not only covers the totality of Roman history, but contains every sort of exemplum. Livy’s claim that his text constitutes a monumentum also serves to raise expectations about the accuracy of its depiction of the past, as Miles has recently shown. Earlier in the preface, Livy contrasts monumenta, which offer unmediated evidence about the past, with the oral transmission of information through “legends” (fabulae). The direct and reliable transmission of evidence through monumenta is associated with the genre of history itself, while fabulae are explicitly described as poetic.17 Livy’s presentation of his own text as a monumentum, therefore, not only locates his work squarely in the “accurate” tradition of historiography; it also seems to place the audience directly in the presence of those very pieces of visual evidence upon which his account is based. At first, Livy’s suggestion of the transparency of his narrative seems comparable to Thucydides’ use of vision to elide the levels of representation that separate his audience from the objective reality described and to place them in the position of the historian himself, evaluating the evidence before his own eyes.18 There is, however, an important difference in Livy’s statement, which diametrically reverses the Thucydidean model: it is not the events themselves that Livy sets before the eyes of his audience, but the visible traces that they have left behind. Since one of the meanings of inlustris is “transparent,” a glimpse of actual events presumably does emerge from the monumentum, but the intrusion of the monumentum shifts Livy’s emphasis from the direct perception of the past to the tradition itself, the process of transmission through which the “vision” of the past is preserved.

When we turn from Livy’s explicit reference to his work as a visible monumentum to his creation of visually explicit scenes in the narrative itself, the historian’s use of “spectacular” effects has traditionally been attributed to a desire to stimulate the emotions of his audience. Far from enhancing the credibility of his narrative, elaborate set pieces like the account of the fall of Alba Longa (1.29) or of the scene in Rome following the announcement of Hannibal’s victory at Lake Trasimene (21.7), in which Livy combines an attention to the precise sensory components of the scene, such as the dust cloud rising over Alba, with a description of the extreme emotions of those actually present, have suggested that Livy’s was drawn away from his historiographical duties by “allure of dramatic techniques.”19 Since the pioneering treatment of Livy’s narrative art by Erich Burck, this tendency in Livian narration has been derived from a movement, identified with certain Hellenistic historians, to claim for historiography the psychological effects that Aristotle associated with tragedy.20 The key terms for characterizing these historians come from their rival Polybius, who insisted on a fundamental opposition between the purposes of tragedy and history: “Tragedy aims to astonish [ἐκπλῆξαι] and divert [ψυχαγωγῆσαι] its audience for the present through the most persuasive words; history to teach and persuade those who love wisdom for all time by means of true deeds and speeches” (Pol. 2.56.11).21

The very fact that Polybius’s attempt to differentiate between tragedy and history occurs in an overtly polemical context actually points to the degree of similarity between the two genres (see ch. 5 below).22 So, too, the deployment of vivid narrative to stimulate the emotions of the audience, which critics of the “tragic historians” define as mere sensationalism, is not incompatible with the evidentiary use of enargeia by Thucydides as a means of making the hearer a witness of events. Nor should we necessarily class vivid narration among the devices history uses to “delight” rather than “profit” its audience. The charge that a historian employs narrative vividness meretriciously to enhance the immediate appeal of his own text rather than as a means of bringing his audience closer to the experience of real events seems, in the Hellenistic period at least, a commonplace of historical criticism. Thus Polybius compares Timaeus, whose knowledge of events derives exclusively from books, to a painter working only with “stuffed bags” and whose sketches therefore fail to convey the “vividness [ἐμφάσις] and actuality [ἐνεργεία] of real animals [τῶν ἀληθινῶν ζώων]” (Pol. 12.25h.3). But Timaeus himself uses the same appeal to the reality of his own representations to differentiate his work from that of rhetoricians: “the difference between history and epideictic oratory is as great as the difference between real buildings and furniture and scene-painting” (Pol. 12.28a.1). In both cases, the production of mere images is contrasted with the ability to manifest the things themselves. The language of visual representation again forms a crucial part of history’s claim to transcend the status of a secondhand reflection of reality. Nor is it impossible that some of the so-called tragic historians conceived of mimesis in these terms.23 Even what might be regarded simply as an appeal to the audience’s emotions can perhaps form a part of this process.24 To return to Plutarch’s account of Thucydidean ecphrases, the ability to reconstruct the emotional experience of the spectators is valued as a means of bridging the distance between present and past.

This more positive evaluation of how the historian uses enargeia, not simply for “thrills and chills,”25 but as part of a larger attempt to make his narrative approximate as nearly as possible the experience of “true” events has also been justly applied to Livy. Thus P. G. Walsh, for all that he regards Livy’s vivid reconstruction of visual and emotional effects as “unscientific history,” rightly interprets such descriptions as attempts “to communicate with the minds of the men of the past, to relive the mental and emotional experiences felt.”26 But consideration of a scene in which Livy himself comments on the power of visual communication suggests that in his case, there is yet another dimension to enargeia’s capacity to make the past present. Within this passage, describing the profectio or ritual departure of the consul P. Licinius Crassus from Rome at the start of his campaign against Perseus of Macedon in 171 B.C.E., the process of vision plays a very precise role in communicating the social and political authority of the consul to the spectators and thus reinforcing the bond that links them to the collective power of the state:

It happened that during those days the consul P. Licinius, after offering vows on the Capitoline, set forth from the city in the costume of a general. This event is always [conducted] with great dignity and majesty, but it especially attracts eyes and minds when they follow a consul setting forth against a great enemy distinguished by his prowess or his fortune. For not only the performance of duty draws the crowd but also their enthusiasm for the spectacle, that they might see their leader, to whose power [imperium] and planning [consilium] they have entrusted the protection of the Republic itself. Then there enters their minds the reckoning of the contingencies of war, how uncertain is the outcome of fortune, and how impartial is Mars, what disasters have come about through the ignorance and rashness of the leaders, and yet what advantages have been the result of foresight and valor. What man knew which was the intellect and which the fortune of the consul they were sending to war? Would they soon see him in his triumph, ascending the Capitolium with his victorious troops to the same gods from whom he was setting out, or would they offer this pleasure to their enemies?27

Livy’s analysis of the spectators’ reactions to the sight of their consul demonstrates how the act of watching modulates from the fulfillment of a “desire to see” (studium spectaculi) to a form of civic participation. The spectacle of the consul’s profectio provides a representation of the Republic in microcosm; the consul’s progress takes him from the physical and religious center of the city, the Capitolium, where he has just attempted through his prayers to engage the power of the gods on the state’s behalf, to its periphery and the distant battlefield, where, if he has been successful, that power will manifest itself in Roman victory. The ability to cross these boundaries is not universally granted to all citizens; the consul’s power to negotiate with the gods and to conduct battle both derive from his position as magistrate. The profectio, and its anticipated counterpart, the triumph, mark the moments when the bearer of this authority is present in the city itself. The citizens’ glimpse of the consul provides their link to the totality of the state, the summa res publica, that he is entrusted to defend.

But the dimensions of the summa res publica are temporal as well as spatial. Together with providing a connection to the physical boundaries of the state and exposure to the divine sources of its collective power, the sight of the consul also brings the spectators into contact with Rome’s past and future. The profectio prompts its audience to remember the entire series of past consuls who have marched off to war with the same ceremony, and to anticipate yet a further ceremony when the consul they now watch descending the Capitol will reascend it in his triumph. The prospect of past and future that emerges hardly constitutes a string of uninterrupted successes.28 In both cases, the antithetical possibilities of victory and disaster are equally present. In fact, the sight of the consul opens up to the gaze of the citizens precisely the same vista that Livy’s monumentum provides to the audience who gaze upon it, with its stark alternatives of exempla to be imitated and avoided. And as that monumentum provided for the reproduction of the exempla it contained, so the spectacle of the profectio situates itself precisely at the point where one of the past alternatives it recalls is on the verge of being actualized.

Livy’s narrative of the profectio suggests that the actual civic spectacle produced by the consul provides both a parallel for and a complement to the historian’s own task of representing the past. It is a parallel first in the sense that the spectators experience the profectio in terms that recall the readers’ experience of Livy’s history as constructed in the preface. But the expansion of the spectators’ reflections to include the past and future generates a further sense of slippage between the two audiences. Livy’s contemporary audience has a place in the same continuum of events recalled by the profectio, their own future and past can be mapped by the same series of victories and defeats—the very events that provide the annalistic structure of Livy’s narrative. Both audiences therefore share an identical temporal perspective relative to the spectacle they observe, and this in turn further unites the experiences of reader and spectator.29

The complementary nature of the relationship between the historian and the consul mirrors the interaction between historical information and visual display within the narrative. It is the spectacle of the consul’s appearance that serves as the cue for historical reflection. On the other hand, without the context provided by history, the spectacle itself would lose a good portion of its meaning. For the historian, the reproduction of the spectacle provides in the fullest sense the connection between past and present that I have suggested is a central function of the historian’s use of enargeia, a chance to make his audience’s experience approximate those of their ancestors. At the same time, the religious and political associations of the spectacle he describes enhance and amplify his own narrative; the historical content of the spectacle of the profectio provides a model for how Livy’s own representation of the past can be integrated into the center of the civic life of the actual state. But if the historian attempts to set his own representation of the past within the socially authoritative context of public spectacle, the passage simultaneously suggests that the significance of these spectacles depends in turn on just the kind of knowledge that his history provides.

II. Political Authority and the Representation of the Past in the Latin Historiographic Tradition

In the preceding section, I argued that Livy treats the techniques of enargeia developed and described by Greek and Latin rhetoricians not as stylistic ends in themselves but as the means of integrating his work into the sequence of public acts it records. By reproducing the events of the past in a form that allows his audience to respond to them as spectators, the historian appropriates a crucial medium of political participation in Roman culture; in so doing, he makes his text not only “transparent” but “conspicuous,” a monument to be gazed upon. This section seeks to show how Livy’s use of vision to define the place of his text within the civic structures of the state relates to earlier Roman traditions governing the political functions of historical representations.

From its earliest introduction to Rome in the late third century B.C.E., writing history was a political activity. Many of the earliest Roman historians were important public figures in their own right. Fabius Pictor, the first Roman to practice the genre, belonged to one of the most ancient and distinguished families in the state, was the son and nephew of consuls, and himself served as a legate to the Delphic oracle during the Second Punic War.54 M. Porcius Cato, whose Origines recounted the foundation legends of Rome and other Italian cities and gave an account of Roman history after 264, could not boast such ancestry, but his political career was among the most spectacular of his era. Indeed, of all the historians of the third and second century B.C.E., there is only one, L. Cassius Himena, for whom we cannot attest senatorial status.55 Not only did the historians themselves often occupy a high place in the political order, but their works too seem to have had largely political aims. In some cases, narratives of both early history and, particularly, recent events could provide a context for the self-glorification and denigration of rivals, which was also an important motive for the political activity of the Roman nobilis.56 Nowhere is this aspect of early historiography glimpsed more clearly than in Cato’s Origines, the last third of which describes recent events in which he himself played a major role and includes long excerpts from his often intensely partisan speeches.57 On a somewhat higher level, the earliest extensive statement of purpose we possess by a Roman historian speaks explicitly of the value of history in terms of its ability to motivate political activity. Writing around the beginning of the first century B.C.E., Sempronius Asellio criticizes the genre of annalistic history on the grounds that mere records of events “can in no way inspire men to be readier to defend the res publica nor slower to act wrongly.”58

The link between performing public actions and recording them emerges even more clearly if we broaden the focus of the discussion to include not only literary history but visual representations of res gestae.59 As a means of preserving the memory of events—a monumentum—written history could be classed together with the paintings, statues, and dedications that created a visible record of a military victory or other great deed.60 The complementarity between these two kinds of monumenta, and their shared hortatory function, emerges especially in Pliny the Elder’s idealized reconstruction of the home of the Republican noble:

In the atria of our ancestors, these were the things to be wondered at: not the statues of foreign craftsmen; not bronzes or marbles; wax models of faces were set out, each on its own stand, so that there might be likenesses [imagines] to accompany the funeral of members of the clan, and whenever anyone died, every member of the family [totus familiae populus] who had ever existed was at hand [aderat]. The genealogical connections between them were traced by lines that interconnected the painted images. The libraries were filled with books and the records of what they had done in their magistracies [monumentis rerum in magistratu gestarum]. Outside the house and around the threshold were other images of those great souls [animorum ingentium imagines]; mounted spolia taken from the enemy. These it was forbidden for any buyer to take down: The houses continued to triumph even when their owners had changed. This was a great incentive; since the houses every day would reproach an unwarlike owner that he had entered into the triumph of another.

In this passage, the written histories that record ancestral accomplishments function together with the funerary masks in the atrium and the spolia mounted on the façade of the house to form an integrated system of signs. The shared purpose of all these species of monumenta is to make manifest the “great spirits” of the home’s previous noble inhabitants. The cumulative “presence” of these ancestors cannot but inspire anyone who enters into the physical space defined by this network of images61 to emulate their conduct himself. This space in turn takes the form of a perpetual public spectacle, first a funeral, then a triumph, into which the observer is inevitably drawn. The alternative to equaling the achievements memorialized in the domus is to enter into someone else’s triumph, presumably in the role of captive.

Like the memorials in the domus, the memorials erected in temples and public spaces throughout the city also reveal the functional interdependence between performing great acts and recording them. In the very process of preserving the memory of res gestae, these memorials themselves influenced the course of public life in ways similar to the effects produced by written history. Such monumenta were by no means the anonymously bestowed gifts of a grateful nation; on the contrary, as the means by which accomplishments were converted into status, the creation and preservation of memorials belonged to the men whose deeds they celebrated. The personal connection of the performer of an action to the artifacts that recorded or, in the case of historical painting, represented it was stressed in a number of ways.62 Most dramatically, after the fall of Carthage in 146 B.C.E., L. Hostilius Mancinus put on display in the Forum a painted map of the captured city containing depictions of the final battles, in which he himself was prominently shown as the first to break through the enemy defenses. What is more, Mancinus personally stood beside the painting to explain and describe his role in events, thus earning the enmity of the commanding general, Scipio Aemilianus, but winning himself a consulate.63

The continuities between act and commemoration also emerge from the dedicatory inscriptions that accompanied these memorials, which record not only the victory but the erection of the monumentum itself. In 174 B.C.E., the consul Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, after earning a triumph for his campaigns in Sardinia, erected a map of that island in the temple of Mater Matuta, on which were painted representations of his battles. The following inscription appeared with the map:

Under the imperium and auspicium of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, consul, the legion and army of the Roman people subdued Sardinia. In this province, over eighty thousand of the enemy were killed or captured. When the public business was successfully [felicissime] conducted, the [allies] freed, and the tributes restored, he brought back the army safe, intact, and full of booty. Triumphing for the second time, he entered the city of Rome. On account of this, he dedicated this map to Jupiter.64

While the final phrase was a customary way of closing such a dedication,65 the self-referentiality of the inscription has a further significance. The creation of the artifact that places the successful campaign on display itself becomes a part of the action it records, the necessary final element in Sempronius’s command. And indeed this narrative pattern is not just a feature of inscriptions; Livy himself often structures accounts of a military campaign in a similar way, concluding with the erection of the memorial or dedication of the spolia that record it.66

The larger political function of these monumenta was connected in turn with the public spectacles through which the artifacts themselves entered the civic space of the res publica. In Pliny’s description of the domus, the hortatory power of imagines derived in great part from their ability to reproduce in the mind of the viewer the public ceremonies in which they were displayed, funerals and triumphs. And it is as visual components of these two rituals that most works of art were initially represented at Rome.67 Not only maps and narrative tableaux, but spolia, which also constituted monumenta, and foreign works of art that came to Rome as booty formed a part of the spectacle of the triumph.

This triumphal context in turn allows us to define more precisely how such visual monumenta acted upon the citizen body and to perceive that their civic function extended beyond the communication of information about distant events and even the simple glorification of the triumphator. Zinserling, whose treatment of the development of Roman historical painting especially emphasizes its connection to the triumph, argues from the connotations of enargeia, the word Polybius uses to describe the visual aspect of triumphs, that these representations themselves exerted a “dynamic” influence on the citizens who beheld them. The paintings presented in a triumph inspired their audiences not just through their informational content but through the exposure they offered to the authority and power of the triumphator.68 This notion accords well with Versnel’s later interpretation of the triumph as a whole as an opportunity for the city itself to reappropriate the good fortune (felicitas) manifested in the military success the triumphator had won. As we saw in the previous section, the other visual components of the triumph, the red face of the general and his distinctive attire, even as they made the person of the general more conspicuous, also served both to denote and to project the imperium and auspicium responsible for the successes that the triumph celebrated. Within this framework, the representation of the act celebrated by the triumph, through various forms of monumenta, comes to approximate as closely as possible the direct experience of the act itself;69 both are effects of the power born by the triumphator.70

III. Avarice, Vision, and Restoration

In a Roman sacred grove, it was forbidden to cut away the deadwood. Paul Veyne imagines the visual impression that must have been produced by such a grove, where each decaying branch was festooned with the dedications erected by generation after generation: “One could see something almost unknown to us, a forest where the straight and living trees were less frequent than the twisted and fallen trunks and where the dead branches created an almost impenetrable undergrowth.”109 This image aptly conveys the spectacle the monumenta erected through the centuries of the Republic must have made of Rome before its Augustan reconstruction. Ancient shrines fallen into decay were crammed with moldering spolia, fading paintings, and unreadable inscriptions. Not only were the memorials of the past becoming obscure and unrecognizable, but huge tracts of the ancient city had been transformed by the potentates of the Late Republic, each of whom in succession attempted to devise a visual equivalent for the grandiosity of his accomplishments, and each of whom brought to the task the vast wealth obtained through conquest.110 The magnificent gardens of Lucullus, which from their position on the height of the Pincian would have dominated the northern half of the city, stood in gaudy contrast to the most sacred public buildings on the Capitoline.111 Each of these monuments in turn offered its own competing narrative of Roman history, culminating in the deeds of a Sulla, a Pompey, or a Caesar. The bewilderment of the Romans of the Late Republic in this forest of monumenta appears from the terms in which Cicero praises the antiquarian researches of Marcus Terentius Varro: “We were wandering about in our own city like strangers [hospites] and your books led us back home so that we might know at last who and where we were.”112

Paul Zanker presents the creation of a coherent system of visual communication out of this disorder of competing signs as one of the major accomplishments, not just of Augustan art, but of the Augustan era. His book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus traces the processes by which the reconstruction of decaying monuments, the modification of the Hellenistic visual idioms of the Late Republic, and the reconfiguration of the urban landscape all combined to create “a whole new method of visual communication,”113 which in turn provided an effective medium for conveying and constructing a shared political ideology.114 At the same time, Zanker emphatically rejects describing this transformation in visual media as mere propaganda, imposed from the top down. Rather, he insists on the “power of images” to shape and determine the way in which the regime itself was defined. Thus, while Zanker does not refer to Geertz’s work, his approach dovetails well with the anthropologist’s assertions about the interdependence between political power and its ceremonial attributes. Zanker’s demonstration of the political centrality of visual communication in Augustan Rome also makes clear how Livy’s own interest in vision not only reflected contemporary concerns but also allowed his text to participate in the civic regeneration of the state with particular efficacy.

Historical knowledge was doubly implicated in the creation of the urban landscape as a set of legible visual signs: it served as the “content” of the individual monuments, each of which recalled a particular event, and in turn imbued the monuments themselves with significance. Thus history, in the sense of an awareness of the past, was at once imperiled by the confusion of the system of visual communication at Rome and a crucial instrument in its restoration. It was ignorance of Roman history and traditions that stripped the ancient monuments of their significance and led to their neglect. For Varro, to recover knowledge about the ancestral religious practices of the Romans was tantamount to preserving the cults themselves from ruin.115 Correspondingly, the decay and obliteration of the visual traces of antiquity meant the disappearance of the network of signs that ought to have preserved knowledge and memory. The process, of course, had a moral dimension as well. The invisibility of ancestral customs meant the loss of the influence they might have exerted on the present. So, too, in religious terms, the fading of traditional piety and the corresponding distance between contemporary Rome and the divine guarantors of its success found a visual corollary in the “images of the gods fouled by black smoke.”116 Viewed in this way, Augustus’s interests in moral reform, the physical reconstruction of the city, and the representation of the past form not just complementary but inseparable facets of the same program.

A corresponding interdependence between producing a visual representation of the past and the moral renewal of the state underpins Livy’s definition of his work as an inlustre monumentum. But not only does Livy explicitly connect the viewing of this monument with his history’s capacity to benefit the state, his particular diagnosis of the causes of the decline of the res publica gives a special significance to the method he has chosen to “heal” it. The final paragraph of Livy’s preface makes emphatically clear that the historian views the destructive forces endangering Rome as the products of wealth and the desires it brings:

Either my love for the task I have undertaken deceives me or no res publica has ever been greater, or more sacred, or richer in good examples; nor have avarice and luxury immigrated so late into any state; nor has there been a place where so much honor was awarded for so long to poverty and frugality. In addition, by how much there was a lack of substance, by so much was there less desire; recently riches have brought in avarice, and overflowing pleasures, and lust.117

The anxieties about the influence of wealth expressed here are by no means peculiar to Livy. The danger of riches forms a common topos in Latin literature.118 So, too, the identification of avarice as an important factor in Rome’s decline had a long tradition in Latin historiography, and, together with ambition, avarice figures prominently in Sallust’s account of Rome’s moral and political decay.119 But as G. B. Miles has demonstrated, Livy’s exclusive concentration on avaritia here, at the expense of both ambitio and that other traditional rationale for explaining the phenomenon, the absence of a significant foreign threat enforcing internal unity, would have appeared distinctive, especially in contrast to Sallust’s position.120 This focus on avaritia in turn serves to define and emphasize the social function of Livy’s own history: for the danger of avaritia resides in its erosion, not only of the values and institutions of the Roman past, but of the very processes of historical communication by which the memory and influence of that past are perpetuated.

The res publica that avaritia “invaded”121 already possessed its own kind of wealth, which distinguished it from all other states: no republic was richer in good examples (bonis exemplis ditior [praef. 11]). The particular currency of the old Republic therefore has a special connection to Livy’s own history, which, as an inlustre monumentum, makes these exempla visible and so allows them to be reproduced again in the public conduct of its audience. Avaritia contaminates the state through an opposite but equivalent mimetic process. It is not greed that has drawn foreign riches to Rome but the presence of foreign wealth that has engendered greed and luxuriousness.122 The absence of wealth was the absence of cupiditas, a word used consistently of appetites for things that are inappropriate or illegal.123 The resistance that avaritia offers to the reception of his own text was already hinted at earlier in the preface when Livy remarked that his audience was likely to be less interested in his account of the first phases of Roman history. These portions of his narrative, he says, will offer his readers less voluptas, one of the passions imported by foreign wealth, and they “will hasten to new things.”124 We shall often find this aversion to the old and pursuit of the new, sometimes coupled with the foreign, in Livy’s condemnation of those figures whose disconnection from past traditions has imperiled the state.125 Moreover, because of the ambiguity of the words haec nova, the eagerness of his audience for recent events becomes indistinguishable from the attraction of new or foreign things. And their haste in pursuit of the new means that their own reading of the history mimics the rush with which the Republic itself hurtles toward collapse.126

In Pliny’s description of the ancient home of the nobilis, we have already seen an equivalent description of the effects of wealth and the threat that it poses to communication with the past. The ornamentation of the traditional domus consisted entirely of monumenta, works that recorded, indeed, made manifest, the ancestral deeds of the home’s previous inhabitants. The “value” of these works derived from what they represented, not from the material out of which they were made.127 They had no price, and indeed provided continuity in the face of monetary exchange: even if the house were sold, these works could not be removed. As these ancestral images exert a strong moral influence on the viewer and thus serve to perpetuate the system of cultural values that they record, so the use of monetary value as the sole criterion for which works of art are esteemed introduces a corresponding cycle of corruption, which both results from and affects the visual arts. When portraits are valued only for their price, rather than for their capacity to depict both the bodies and the minds of specific individuals, they lack precisely the kind of inspiration offered by ancestral imagines. Because the owners of these portraits themselves will never accomplish any deed that will make their own features worth preserving, “laziness,” as Pliny says, in turn “has destroyed the arts.”128

Not only does the interference avaritia offers to the reception of Livy’s monumentum mirror the dangers that wealth posed to actual physical monuments, but within Livy’s text, the opposition between history and avaritia takes the form of a competition between two systems of visual signs, or two ways of reading the same signs. Indeed, Livy himself provides a passage that Zanker uses as evidence for an awareness of the tension between visible images that communicate the power of the state and merely superficial magnificence, a speech placed in the mouth of the Elder Cato and set in 195 B.C.E., just at the period when Rome’s greatest victories in the east were beginning.129 For our purposes, the passage is important not only because it reveals Livy’s interest in larger anxieties about the visual effects of luxury but also because it does so in an explicitly programmatic context: as part of a debate about avaritia and luxuria, which, as T. J. Luce has shown, recalls precisely the language of Livy’s preface:130

As the fortune of the Republic grows better and more blessed every day—now we have already crossed into Greece and Asia and dragged back the treasures of kings stuffed with all the enticements of desire—so I fear all the more lest those things have taken us captive rather than we them. Trust me, those statues brought from Syracuse are perilous to the city. Already I have heard too many men praising and wondering at the ornaments of Corinth and Athens and laughing at the terra-cotta antefixes of the Roman gods. I prefer the latter, the propitious gods, and so I hope they will be if we leave them in their places.

Here avaritia and luxuria take a concrete and visible form as royal treasures and Greek statues, which, as “enticements” (libidinum illecebris), set in motion a destructive cycle of desires.131 The language in which Cato describes these foreign treasures correlates the march of avaritia with two other dangers. First, the statues themselves are the bearers of an inimical energy. They are perilous (infesta), and the images that they have displaced are specifically sacred images whose veneration is essential to maintain contact between the state and the gods. But at the same time as these ornamenta break the visual link between the Roman spectator and the sources of Rome’s imperium, they also overturn the historical record of that imperium. The statues, brought to the city as spolia, are not just waging war on Rome, they have also reversed their commemorative function. No longer recording a Roman victory, they appear to have taken Rome captive. In these respects, the effect of the statues, as Cato describes it, contrasts precisely with that of such visual monumenta as the inscribed map erected by Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, with which, as I have suggested, Livy aligns his text. There, as we saw, the mnemonic function of the image, as a record of Roman victory, went together with a capacity to manifest the imperium and auspicium by which the victory had been won.

Cato suggests that the foreign images of the Greeks seem to have taken Rome captive. It is the one time in Rome’s history when the city actually was taken captive, the Gallic invasion described in book 5, that provides Livy with his most extensive opportunity to depict the dangers of avaritia and the remedies that historical memory can offer. Book 5, at the end of the first published pentad, is perhaps the most elaborately patterned unit in the historian’s work, and it can be read as a microcosm of the entire course of Roman history.132 Rome’s greatest foreign success to date, the conquest of Veii, led immediately to her greatest danger, the attack by the Gauls. The central issue in the book has sometimes been taken to be religious propriety, but as Miles has demonstrated, avaritia is at least as important a theme.133 As in Cato’s speech, it is the seductive power of wealth that motivates the Romans’ neglect of their gods.134 Camillus’s dedication of one-tenth of the spolia of Veii to Apollo alienates the people and contributes to his banishment (5.23.8–11). Although the vow is fulfilled, the avarice of the Romans here appears as a force that hinders their performance of their duties to the gods and thus prepares for the loss of divine support that leads to the sack. The danger posed by the success at Veii again takes the form of a distracting visual image that threatens to draw the Romans away from the native traditions that secured their victory. The opulence of Veii—which, Livy emphasizes, is within sight of Rome—leads the Romans to contemplate abandoning their own city (5.24.5). As with the threat posed by the eastern spolia, the result of succumbing to this temptation would be to reverse the situations of conqueror and conquered.135

This threatened transposition of conqueror and conquered prepares for the victory of the Gauls, where, as Livy puts it, the superior Roman and the inferior Gaul seem to have changed places.136 When the Gauls enter the abandoned city, their perceptions of it, or rather their failure to perceive the significance of the images they are exposed to, makes their experience comparable to that of the Roman who has lost the ability to read the monuments around him. In both cases, the breakdown in visual comprehension has the same cause, avaritia. The Gauls are only interested in plunder and therefore perceive each object only in terms of its material value, its superficial magnificence. Camillus will say of them explicitly that they have been rendered blind by avarice, caeci avaritia (5.51.10).

Since from the beginning of Livy’s text, avaritia has been personified as a foreign immigrant, which causes the Romans themselves to adopt the values of their defeated opponents, it is doubly appropriate that he should conjure up the effects of avaritia by making his own audience see the city through the eyes of foreigners. And of all foreign nations, the ethnographic tradition has made the Gauls particularly fitting representatives of the consequences of avarice.137 Their well-known extravagance and love of pleasure become, in Caesar’s Commentarii, one of the sources of their weakness; they are “softened” by the enticements of civilization.138 The image of the individual Gaul as a creature of vast size ultimately undone by his own bulk is also not inapposite for the task of representing the danger of avaritia,139 which derives from too much success and makes the Republic collapse under its own weight. Livy elsewhere characterizes the Gauls in terms of a similar failure to produce or interpret visual signs effectively, particularly in the pair of duels they fight against Roman champions in book 7 (analyzed in detail in ch. 4). The first Gaul sports a magnificent set of golden armor, which proves utterly ineffective against Manlius Torquatus’s might (7.10). The next duel illustrates the corollary phenomenon: the Gauls’ blindness to truly powerful signs. Here a sign from the gods, in the form of a persistent crow, literally blinds another Gaul by pecking at his eyes (7.26).

The Gauls’ distinctly un-Roman response to visual signs appears especially clearly in their encounter with the aged senators who have agreed to remain in the unprotected city in order to preserve food for the fighting men in the citadel (5.41). The senators await the Gauls arrayed in their insignia of office and seated on ivory stools in their atria. The Gauls are disconcerted by the sight and have a presentiment of the majesty of the senators’ adornment, which initially causes them to treat the old men like gods. But ultimately, as outsiders, the Gauls respond only to appearance; like the Romans Cato describes, they are enthralled by the visual splendor of what are really infesta signa. Indeed, the Gauls turn to the senators as if they were statues, ad eos velut simulacra versi (5.41.9). One Gaul continues to treat the old Senator M. Papirius as though he were merely an image by reaching out to stroke his beard, an act that elicits a rap from Papirius’s ivory staff and thus precipitates the massacre of all the senators.

A Roman audience ought to read the senators’ appearance very differently. The insignia in which they array themselves not only possess a memorializing function, recalling the magistracies the old men have held,140 they are also precisely the visible signs through which authority is displayed in Roman public spectacles. In fact, Livy specifies that this is the same clothing as would be worn by a triumphator, or by someone conducting a religious procession.141 What is more, the senators’ appearance is also twice described as augusta, a word that is not only cognate with auctoritas, but that Wagenvoort has shown is particularly associated with the transfer of power through contactus.142 Therefore, while the mere appearance of the old men does not, as the Gauls’ think, make them gods, their insignia do form a bridge to the collective power of the Roman gods, but only for those whose vision is historically informed.

The desolation that greets the Romans returning to their city contrasts utterly with the bewildering and enticing array of visual images encountered by the Gauls. For those whose perspective depends on surfaces, the landscape seems void of meaning or value, and the people again contemplate abandoning Rome for Veii. Camillus’s second salvation of his patria consists in reeducating the vision of his fellow citizens in order to restore the possibility of contact with the divine power that resides uniquely in Rome, even in the absence of the visible signs of this power. Camillus accomplishes this task of constructing an evidens numen (5.51.4), preeminently by showing the Romans their city. From the beginning of his great speech, he continually challenges his audience to look upon the city and perceive it as something more than “surfaces and roofing stones” (5.54.2). His speech is filled with literal and metaphorical references to vision and with commands to the audience to direct their gaze to certain aspects of the landscape.143 In the last sentences of his peroration, the demonstrative adverb hic, “here,” recurs at the beginning of three successive clauses.144 This anaphora could be interpreted simply as an emphatic device used to stress the overall point of Camillus’s argument: “Here at Rome [i.e., and not at Veii] is the Capitoline,” and so on. At the same time, hic can be taken as strongly deictic, actually directing Camillus’s listeners’ eyes to the places he describes: the Capitoline, the temple of Vesta, and the like. This final coalescence of argument and demonstration perfectly captures the active role that visual display takes on in Camillus’s oration: to show is to persuade.145

But Camillus’s use of vision in this speech, as a way of restoring his audience’s contact with the religious power latent in Rome’s physical landscape, also involves the recollection of past events. Each monumentum becomes literally that: the reminder of an event or sign, such as the shields of Mars falling from the sky or the discovery of a human head on the Capitol. And it is the memory of these events that in turn generates the bond between his audience and the physical place itself.146 Above all, Camillus employs a narrative of the recent past, the very events that Livy himself has just described in book 5, as an argument for maintaining continuity with both the site of the Roman city and the traditions that it records.147

Ultimately, just as in the passage of Livy’s preface with which we began, Camillus treats the past itself, cast in an annalistic framework, as a landscape, which his audience is instructed to gaze upon, intuemini horum deinceps annorum vel secundas res vel adversas (5.51.5). Camillus’s account of recent years draws out the significance of the historian’s own narrative, highlighting the role of the divine in human affairs. Livy’s text is itself thus revealed as a medium that facilitates contact between its audience and the powers responsible for Rome’s success.148 It is the existence of such a system of communication that here literally preserves the endangered city from abandonment and converts its landscape in turn into a repository of historical memory.

The relevance of the issues raised at the conclusion of the first pentad to the preoccupations of Rome in Livy’s day hardly needs to be stressed. The position of Camillus’s restoration of the city, both within Livy’s narrative at the end of the first pentad, and within the course of the city’s history, at the halfway point between Rome’s original foundation in 753 B.C.E. and 27 B.C.E., when the princeps took on the title of Augustus, roughly the time when the first portion of the History was published,149 makes the parallels between past and present almost inescapable.150 The necessity for the reconstruction of Rome, the narrow escape from the danger that Rome herself would be supplanted by a foreign capital—here, Veii; in the rhetoric of the 30’s, Alexandria—and above all the insistence that the physical restoration of Rome is inextricably bound up with the restoration of her religious and moral traditions, all speak directly to contemporary concerns that Augustus had and would address in the years after Actium.151 Indeed, Livy has often been assumed to have tailored his portrayal of Camillus to recall the princeps himself, whether as a means of celebrating Augustus’s achievements, or of rousing him to action and proposing an exemplum upon which he, like the other readers of the History, might model his own behavior.152 The titles Livy uses to describe Camillus, above all the term conditor,153 which the historian also applies to Augustus,154 particularly establish a parallel between this figure and the princeps.

But the attention directed to Camillus’s perceived resemblances to Augustus has tended to overshadow his function as a model for Livy’s own activity, which is at least equally important. In his discussion of the word conditor (founder), Miles points out that it could also be applied to a writer. For Miles, the historian’s contributions to the refoundation of the city consist in “endorsing” Augustus’s activities, creating support for them among his audience, and, most important, emphasizing the importance of adhering to tradition, even in so potentially radical an act as refounding Rome.155 I suggest that Camillus’s actions demonstrate how a historian can do even more. Camillus’s great speech, with its many allusions to the program of Livy’s own History, makes clear how putting the past on display itself constitutes a political act, which here effects the preservation of precisely the traditions it recalls. Indeed, it is Camillus’s representation of the city that Livy’s narrative highlights, not its physical rebuilding, which takes up only a few sentences (5.55.2–5). His use of vision as a means of restoring contact between his audience and the power of their religious and political institutions cannot be separated from the preservation of historical memory, nor, in a larger sense, from the perpetuation of Roman history as an ongoing sequence of actions.

I. The Battle of Aquilonia (10.38–41)

The battle of Aquilonia, one of a series of decisive engagements fought against the Samnites in the 290’s, provides a particularly good opportunity to study the link between military success and the control over appearances. Both its position at the end of the first decade and the elaboration of Livy’s account, which stretches for four long chapters, signal the special importance of this episode. The victory is made the first event of its year, and Livy recasts the conventional annalistic formula to highlight its significance.15 “The next year there was a consul insignis [a distinguished or conspicuous consul (Papirius Cursor)]…a huge battle and a victory over the Samnites such as no one, except the consul’s father, had ever won before.” The historian also singles out the visual splendor of the Samnite forces as one of the episode’s distinguishing features.16 The particular appearance of the Samnites in the battle results from an elaborately described initiation ritual, an ancient practice that had brought victory a hundred and thirty years before in the capture of Capua and was therefore resuscitated by one of the Samnite priests, who had discovered it in an old linen text.17 Thus Livy’s introductory comments already emphasize the role of appearances in the coming battle and treat the spectacle offered by the Samnites as guaranteed both by religious authority and historical precedent. The battle however will determine which historical tradition is to govern the meaning of the spectacle the Samnites produce. A Samnite victory would affirm the propriety of their conduct at Capua and the power of their gods, while Papirius’s victory could be read as a repetition of his father’s success, which was won, as Livy mentions, against Samnites whose appearance was the same (10.38.2).

But the appearance of the Samnite legion had more than symbolic value. It was the result of a ceremony that had itself used appearances (apparatus [10.38.8]) to generate fear. Each soldier was led individually into a linen enclosure, where he was confronted by the sight of slaughtered sacrificial victims and centurions menacingly drawing their swords. He was then told that if he would not swear an oath not to desert himself and to kill anyone he saw deserting, he would be killed immediately.18 The appearance of the legion itself, which Livy describes with the same word, apparatus, operated on those exposed to it in a similar way to the sacrificial “apparatus” that confronted each Samnite soldier, inspiring fear in the enemy and enforcing solidarity within the legion itself. For the Romans, the soldiers’ strange appearance would be disconcerting, and for the initiated Samnites, it would be a constant reminder of the fearsome consequences of desertion.19 At the same time, their insignia also put Samnite history directly on display, since these troops were now visually identical to the victors at Capua. Indeed, if the manuscript reading linteo lecto in 10.38.6 is accepted,20 then the name “linen” legion recalls at once religious ritual of initiation in the linen enclosure and the “linen” of the historical text from which it had been recovered.

If the apparatus of the Samnite legion can be read as an attempt to translate religious and historical authority into a physical force, the Roman consul, Papirius Cursor, counters its influence by questioning the efficacy of mere ornaments in his pre-battle speech: “He said much about the present appearance of the enemy,21 an empty façade without effect on the outcome: for crests do not make wounds, a Roman javelin passes through gilded and painted shields, and a battle line gleaming with brightness, when the work is done with iron, grows bloody” (10.39.11–13).

The Roman spear and the iron of battle become instruments for demonstrating the worthlessness of Samnite appearances. Papirius’s attempt to reduce the Samnite battle array to “mere appearance” also involves reinterpreting the religious rituals that for the Samnites give their insignia meaning. The Roman pronounces these rituals unquestionably corrupt and emphasizes precisely that aspect of them most antithetical to correct sacrificial practice, the mixing of human and animal blood. The soldier initiated in such a ceremony is not set apart in the way the Samnites hope; rather, he is accursed, a devotus, whom the angry gods cannot help but punish. And far from binding the soldiery more closely, the fear produced by the ritual will dissolve all social bonds, so that the enemy soldier will “fear simultaneously the gods, his citizens, and the enemy.”

Papirius complements his dismissal of Samnite ritual by juxtaposing a set of Roman rituals and spectacles that do have validity. Not only is the Samnite initiation ritual impious, but the Samnites have also violated their treaty with the Romans, thus ensuring that the gods who witnessed it will also be working against them. So too the Samnite finery, so useless on the battlefield, will be given meaning when incorporated into the context of Roman spectacles:

Once a golden and silver Samnite army was slaughtered by his father, and those ornaments were more honorable as spolia for the conquering enemy than as arms for the Samnites themselves. Perhaps it has been granted to his name and his family to be leaders against the greatest efforts of the Samnite and to bring back spoils that will be conspicuous22 even in the adornment of public places.

The display of Samnite weapons in Roman public spaces, where they serve not to make Samnite warriors stand out in battle but to enhance the nobility of the Roman gens responsible for their defeat, also implies that it will be the Roman rather than the Samnite historical tradition that fixes the meaning of the weapons as signs. Rather than recalling the battle in which the Samnites defeated the Etruscans, for the Romans, the Samnite apparatus refers only to the Roman victory won by the consul’s father.

The consul’s battle speech itself becomes a kind of spectaculum, which affects its audience in the way that the Samnites had hoped their initiation ceremony would, by creating a unifying and inspiring bond among its spectators.23 In place of Samnite terror, ardor is the operative force among the Romans. The battle speech sets up a reciprocal transfer of ardor between soldiers and leader, which Livy emphasizes through chiasmus: Dux militum, miles ducis ardorem spectabat (“The leader gazed upon the soldiers’ ardor, the soldiers the leader’s” [10.40.3]). The very act of watching, spectabat, becomes a channel for this communication of energy. Livy describes how this ardor affects each type of man from highest to lowest. Thus as opposed to the corrupt ritual that isolates the Samnite soldiery both from their peers and from the gods,24 the Roman contio creates a common link between the various levels in the Roman camp.25

The outcome of the battle itself turns out to depend very much on the consequences of the pre-battle spectacles orchestrated by the leaders on each side. As the fighting begins, the crucial difference between the two forces is the condition of their animi,26 and the emotional state of each army results directly from the spectacles to which they have been exposed. Romans march into battle full of anger, confidence, and ardor, all of which Livy connects with the effect of the consul’s pre-battle speech.27 The Samnites on the other hand are kept in place only by the constraining fear resulting from the oath they have sworn. At the moment when the Samnite troops themselves are a spectaculum, they see only the terrifying scene of the sacrifice. And although this vision accomplishes its intended purpose—it keeps the Samnites from fleeing—nevertheless it has a paralyzing effect far different from the alacrity and zeal that result from the consul’s exhortations. Livy describes the Samnites as bound by chains (10.41.3), a common but telling metaphor. But while the “unequal spirits” of the two sides already give a huge advantage to the Romans, the winning momentum of the enemy progressively reinforces the Samnites’ despair. In the end, the Samnites do eventually break ranks and desert: “Then, already conquered by the force of gods and men, the linen cohorts were overwhelmed; sworn and unsworn desert equally, nor do they fear any one except the enemy” (10.41.10). Thus the Roman victory successfully obliterates the social effects of the Samnite spectacle; the mutual fear evaporates, and the distinctions that the Samnite ritual sought to impose are lost. Correspondingly, the Roman success ensures that the alternative spectacle anticipated by Papirius will actually come to pass: the Samnite weapons are indeed displayed in triumph and decorate the temples of the Romans and their allies.28

The Romans’ victory thus results from the energizing power of the consul’s speech, and at the same time, the victory itself provides the “touchstone” Papirius’s required, which would affirm his own claims about the significance and validity of the Samnite spectacles. But what is the relationship between Livy’s text, as a permanent record of the battle, and the consul’s interpretation of the Samnite spectacle? Looking again at the historian’s description of the Samnites’ demoralization, we find many verbal echoes of Papirius’s predictions: “In everyone’s eyes was all the equipment for the occult rite, armed priests, the slaughter of animals mixed with that of men and the altars spattered with blood both holy and accursed.”29 The scene that appears before them is simply an expansion of the consul’s brief account of the sacrifice: qui nefando sacro mixta hominum pecudum caede respersus. The pollution that results from the mixing of human and animal blood is the central image in both sentences, and the words sacrum, nefandum, respersus, and the phrase hominum pecudumque are repeated from the consul’s description (10.39.16). Again, when the slaughtered Samnites are described as “dazed by fear of gods and men” (deorum hominumque attonitos metu [10.41.4]), Papirius’s assertion that they would “fear gods, citizens, and enemies together” (uno tempore deos, cives, hostes metuat [10.39.17]) is verified.

Given what we know of Livy’s working methods, we can safely assign priority to Livy himself, not the historical Papirius Cursor, in determining the details and interpretation of the battle as they are presented here. That is to say, Livy has composed or redeveloped the consul’s speech to reinforce his own themes30 rather than tailoring his narrative to reflect the emphases of some preexisting account of Papirius’s speech, much less any actual speech delivered by the consul on that occasion.31 However, if we consider not the mechanisms by which the text was produced but the effect of Livy’s presentation on the reader absorbed in the narrative, the relationship between the consul and historian is reversed. It is the figure of Papirius Cursor whose speech appears to impose a pattern and meaning on the events that follow, and the historian’s narrative, in reproducing precisely the details the consul predicted, seems both to affirm Papirius’s interpretation and consequently to be determined by it.

Papirius’s response to the Samnites’ battle array is not the only context in which the consul’s powers as an interpreter and presenter of signs prove decisive. Within the same episode, Livy highlights two other consular acts, which, although they seem to belong to very different spheres, ultimately rely upon the same ability to regulate appearances. The first is a purely strategic maneuver orchestrated during the course of the battle. The consul orders that servants riding pack mules be interspersed with a cavalry squadron. As the squadron charges into sight, the servants drag brambles behind the mules to stir up dust and give the impression that Roman reinforcements have arrived: “In front, the weapons and standards shone through the turbid light; behind a thicker and higher dust cloud gave the appearance [speciem] of horsemen leading a body of troops and deceived not only the Samnites but the Romans themselves” (10.31.6). This false species, designed to fool both sides in the battle, thus provides a Roman parallel to the Samnites’ use of appearances. And the Roman consul not only produces the spectacle; again he interprets it for the spectators: “The consul confirmed their mistaken impression, shouting among the first standards, so that his voice would reach even the enemy, that Cominium had fallen, and that this victorious colleague was coming” (10.41.7). Here, if anywhere, is a vana species, but such is the authority of the consul that even this mere appearance, unlike the Samnite species, has the power to affect the real outcome of the battle decisively. And although there are, of course, no reinforcements, the town of Cominium nevertheless does in fact fall to the Romans in a simultaneous engagement, so as to suggest a correlation between even the consul’s false claims and the “real” course of events recorded by the historian.

More complex is Papirius’s role as an interpreter of omens. So great is the eagerness for battle aroused by the consul’s speech that when the sacred chickens refuse to eat, a very bad omen, one of their keepers lies to the consul and reports that the auspicia were favorable. Later, the consul’s nephew, a “young man born before the learning that rejects the gods” (10.40.10), finds out about this deception and reports it to his uncle. Papirius, however, although praising his nephew’s concern, dismisses his warning. “If the attendant present at the omens announces anything false, he takes the religious responsibility on his own head; to me it was announced that the “grain danced,” an outstanding auspicium for the Roman people and army” (10.40.11). The consul then orders that the chicken keepers be placed in front of the standards. Before the battle proper begins, the guilty chicken keeper is struck by an errant javelin, which for the consul confirms that the gods are aiding the Romans.

Livy’s explicit commendation of the young Papirius’s behavior helps highlight the contrast between Roman piety and the illegitimate Samnite practices.32 But the real emphasis of the episode is less on the power of the gods per se, or even on traditional piety, than on the role of the consul as the one who fixes and disseminates divine messages. Even if the omens were unfavorable, the mere fact that the consul apprehends them as favorable determines that they are favorable for the army. The consul is made laetus, a word often used of those inspired by exposure to divine or human authority, by the report and communicates his encouragement directly to the troops by announcing that they will fight with the gods as auctores, and giving the sign for battle.33

Despite what may seem an excessively pragmatic approach to the auspices, neither the historian nor the consul display any skepticism about the existence or efficacy of the gods. Papirius’s attitude differs greatly from that of the infamous P. Clodius Pulcher, who, while commander of a Roman fleet, ordered the abstemious chickens to be drowned and consequently sailed into a disastrous defeat.34 Nor in this episode are the gods regarded simply as useful fictions who behave exactly as the consul claims they do. On the contrary, the consul insists on the absolute propriety of his conduct,35 and the quasi-legalistic formula with which he explains his decision to his nephew reinforces the impression that he is scrupulously adhering to the established procedures.36 Again, the effect is to stress the interdependence between the power of the gods and the authority of the consul who procures and interprets it on behalf of his troops. Livy’s narrative seems calibrated to represent the congruence of human and divine power rather than to establish the priority of one over the other. The consul’s success rests on his correct handling of religious matters; at the same time his victory provides the surest sign of divine action. This relationship is played out again just after the guilty chicken keeper is killed. The consul proclaims that this event is yet another favorable omen demonstrating the gods’ support of the Romans. And his interpretation is immediately affirmed by yet another sign, the cry of a crow. Papirius, again made laetus by a new augurium, once more affirming the presence of the gods, orders that the sign for battle be given and the clamor be raised. Ultimately, the sign for battle sounded at the consul’s command (signa canere) is made to seem like another reiteration, or even extension, of the miraculous voice of the crow (corvus occinuit [10.40.14]).

Livy’s account of the battle of Aquilonia thus provides almost a catalogue of the techniques of a successful Roman commander, inspirational rhetoric, scrupulous piety, and clever strategy, and relates them all to an underlying capacity to construct credible and effective representations. These representations are the means Papirius uses to accomplish the “enlivening” of his troops that Wagenvoort gives as the fundamental function of imperium. In turn, the power unleashed by the consul against the enemy ultimately confirms his portrayal of the Samnite ritual as disastrous and impious, proves his own ability to manipulate images effectively, and justifies his handling of the auspices. But Papirius’s role as a giver of empowering signs is not confined to the course of the battle; the Roman victory itself, as a manifestation of the collective power of the state, acquires its own significance and power to inspire. The news of the victory had “increased the laetitia”of another Roman army (10.44.1), a phrase that recalls the effect of the favorable omens on Papirius, and the reports of the consul and his colleague are heard with laetitia in the political assemblies at Rome (10.45.1). Papirius’s triumph places the entire populus in contact with the visible signs of their success. Livy describes the triumph as insignis, the same term he had used in his initial account of Papirius’s magistracy. The troops themselves are similarly insignes on account of their decorations; the military honors won by the troops are conspectae, and the Samnite spolia, which proved so worthless as insignia in the battlefield, are gazed upon (inspectata) by the Romans. Finally, as he had predicted, Papirius perpetuates the influence of the spolia by placing them on permanent display in the temple of Quirinus.

II. Ad Deos Auctores: Imperium and the “Existence” of the Gods

The preceding analysis of Livy’s narrative of the battle of Aquilonia has made clear how the exercise of imperium by a Roman commander at once operated through the representation and interpretation of signs and events and offered a mechanism for establishing the validity of these interpretations. What is more, this truth-making function of imperium is inseparable from its political effectiveness. The representations produced by the imperator, whether we regard them simply as rhetorical and military strategies, or as offering a form of contactus with superhuman sources of power, function to inspire their audiences and thus are instrumental in securing victory. This success in turn establishes the legitimacy of the imperator’s actions and the “truth” of his interpretations. Assertions about divine agency are doubly involved in this system. To engage the support of the gods and to make that support evident to his troops was one of the chief tasks of the imperator. In return, the claims that the gods themselves have favored the Romans give the victory its significance and provide a superhuman affirmation of the privileged position of Rome’s imperium in relation to that of her enemies.

The narrative of the battle of Aquilonia also showed the extent to which Livy’s own presentation of the battle links itself to the representations produced by the imperator. The consul’s pre-battle statements about the piety of the Romans and the impiety of the Samnites appear to fix the terms in which Livy frames the events of the battle and the interpretation he gives them. As the victory itself becomes another manifestation of Roman imperium, Livy’s own account of it takes its place in the series of inspirational signs produced through the agency of the consul. Given the important role that claims about the gods play in Papirius’s success, the relationship between the historian and the imperator would seem to motivate the way in which Livy himself portrays the supernatural in this episode. To treat the imperator’s pre-battle assertions about the gods or his manipulations of divine signs as mere ruses or fabrications would not only have distanced his own representation of the battle from that produced by Papirius; it would also have stripped the victory of much of its historical meaning.

But these were not the only constraints governing Livy’s treatment of the supernatural. One of the characteristics that crucially distinguished history from other forms of narrative in Greek and Roman rhetorical theory was that it included only what was “true” and rigorously excluded the “fabulous” or “mythical.”37 Supernatural events as such lay outside the province of historian.38 Livy’s own awareness of this distinction is signaled in his preface, where he declares that the legends of Rome’s founding are more appropriate for fabulae than for history. And here too the particular story that he singles out to demonstrate his point involves miraculous divine intervention in human affairs, Mars’ fathering of Romulus.39 For Livy to attribute events to superhuman causes, therefore, was to violate one of the historiographic norms that he explicitly calls attention to in his preface. Thus the historian’s portrayal of divine action becomes an issue that brings into play two contrasting sets of expectations, one deriving from the conventions that defined history as a literary genre, the other from the representations of the Roman imperatores who also function as predecessors and “sources” for Livy’s narrative. Yet I want to argue that Livy’s treatment of the divine, variable though it is, by no means represents an incoherent response to two contradictory sets of narrative aims. On the contrary, precisely because of the potential contradictions they involve, such passages provide the historian with an opportunity to draw his audience’s attention to the conflicting claims of both traditions of representation and correspondingly to differentiate his own treatment of the supernatural from that of his literary predecessors.

In the case of Papirius, Livy never calls into question the consul’s interpretation of the gods’ will. While the historian does not presume to represent the divinities directly, throughout the account of the battle, he never casts doubt on their reality or their support of the Romans. In fact, so eager is he to establish the independent existence of the gods that he appends a story to explain why they change the auspices. In the middle of the battle, Papirius vows to pour a libation to the gods before drinking wine himself. The gods are pleased by his vow and so come to favor his victory.40 This implies that the gods’ will, made manifest in the auspices, has an independent existence, and that the divinities have not become favorable simply because the consul proclaims them so. Such a treatment of the gods doubly reinforces the validity of the consul’s claims: the gods do provide an absolute, superhuman reservoir of power, which justifies Rome’s conduct, and the consul in turn offers a unique and reliable means of access to that power.

Yet Livy’s acceptance of Papirius’s pronouncements in this episode by no means exemplifies a consistent practice. In his account of the religious reforms of Numa Pompilius, he dismisses the king’s story that the goddess Egeria directly instructed him about the proper ritual forms as a fabrication.41 In book 26, Rome’s future savior Scipio Africanus also bolsters his authority among the people through claims about the gods, which Livy again identifies as fictions:

For Scipio was not only remarkable for his true virtues [veris virtutibus], but from his youth on, he was also disposed to put them on display [in ostentationem earum compositus] through a certain art, arguing many things among the multitude as warnings sent through nocturnal visions or put in his mind by divine intervention, either because he himself possessed a mind shackled by some superstition or in order that his own commands [imperia] and advice be followed without delay, as if sent by some oracle.

An example of such deceptions occurs in Scipio’s first speech to his troops:

Recently the immortal gods, guardians of Roman imperium, on whose authority [qui fuere auctores] all the centuries ordered that imperium be given to me, these same gods have portended even through nocturnal visions that all things will be successful [laeta] and prosperous.

However, Livy’s exposure of the public statements of Numa and Scipio as false neither in any way discredits either figure nor diminishes the value of the actions endorsed by their fictive claims: Numa’s reforms established the religious institutions under which the Roman state achieved its empire, and Scipio’s election provides the turning point in the Second Punic War.

The variations in Livy’s treatment of the supernatural have prompted highly contrasting portrayals of Livy’s own attitudes toward religion. Some have emphasized passages where Livy seems to introduce accounts of divine action into his narrative without qualification and so depicted Livy as possessing either a religious or a credulous cast of mind.42 For others, Livy is primarily a rationalist following in the skeptical tradition of his historiographic predecessors.43 The historian’s insistence on the utility and validity of religious practices, coupled with his explicit presentation of the divine tales used to legitimize these practices as false, allows for another alternative. The idea that the statesman will use such deceptions for the greater good of his society has a long lineage in ancient philosophy, emerging most famously as Plato’s “noble lie.”44 Livy’s portrait of Numa using the gods as a source of fear to exert a check on the Romans’ behavior has been connected with the theory, put forth in the Sisyphus of Kritias,45 that the gods were originally invented by the first lawgiver for that purpose. (Livy does not go so far as to suggest that the gods themselves do not exist, however, and neither does their constraining influence work in the same way.)46 This type of religious outlook, it has been argued, would have much to recommend it in the intellectual climate of Late Republican Rome, where a pragmatic and patriotic respect for traditional religious forms came into conflict with a new intellectual skepticism.47

A new and more sophisticated approach views Livy’s treatment of the supernatural less as an expression of his own personal beliefs than as a literary device. David Levene has recently suggested that by explicitly questioning miraculous stories about the gods, Livy was demonstrating the kind of rational critical intellect expected of a historian.48 Levene’s assertion is particularly born out by the frequency with which Livy ties statements about the supernatural to the question of what material appropriately belongs in a historical narrative. Numa’s meeting with Egeria would be a miraculum, and therefore by its nature unsuitable for history. Similarly, Scipio’s pretended visions are explicitly contrasted with his “true” virtues. So too one of Livy’s most direct and intriguing statements about his own religious attitudes occurs in the context of defending his practice of recording prodigy lists:

I am not unaware that because the portents of the gods are now commonly believed to be worthless, prodigies are no longer announced anymore, nor are they recorded in annales. Yet somehow, as I write about the past, my mind becomes old-fashioned, and a certain religious scruple prevents me from regarding the prodigies that those most provident men thought had to be acknowledged publicly as unworthy of including in my annales.49

This passage juxtaposes two attitudes toward prodigies. A skepticism directly associated with contemporary historical practices50 contrasts with the perspective of the historical figures whom Livy describes. What is more, the historian presents his own anomalous decision to include this material as an effect of the influence that those figures exert upon him as he writes. The record he produces results directly from their recognition of the prodigies’ validity. In consequence, his annales come to mirror the annales in which prodigies were officially collected. Again, Livy’s treatment of religious material becomes a defining feature of his distinctive historical method, a method that reproduces and revives the practices of the religious authorities within his narrative.

Among Livy’s predecessors, Polybius in particular made a skeptical attitude toward the gods a defining characteristic of his own historical method and applied this approach decisively to the study of Roman traditions. Indeed, Livy’s presentations of both Numa’s religious innovations and Scipio’s pretended visions reflect Polybian concerns, and the latter seems explicitly to allude to Polybius’s treatment of the same event. Polybius’s interpretation of Roman religious institutions strongly resembles the attitude Livy takes toward Numa’s reforms: he praises the Romans for their handling of religious matters, but treats them from an entirely pragmatic and political perspective. Superstition has been carefully cultivated by the Romans as a check on illegal or seditious behavior.51 Polybius moreover identifies this view of Roman religion as his own particular contribution and thus uses the discussion as an occasion to distinguish his work from that of his rivals. To others, the Roman emphasis on religious pageantry might seem inexplicable, but he can make sense of it.52 With his remarks about Scipio, we can be certain that Livy is responding to Polybius, who makes a similar comment in the same context, and in this case too the Greek historian’s interpretation has a polemical edge: Polybius criticizes earlier writers who accepted Scipio’s tales of divine apparitions uncritically; he on the other hand regards them as proof of Scipio’s political astuteness, a quality in his eyes more significant than divine favor.53

But if Livy’s skeptical statements about Scipio and Numa’s claims recall Polybian attitudes, he also employs these episodes to differentiate his own approach from his predecessor’s. Alongside the inheritance from Hellenistic historiography, Livy draws attention to other forces that shape his narrative. In the cases of both Numa and Scipio, he links the publication of these stories about the gods, whose fictive nature he himself emphasizes, to the means by which each figure gains or exercises imperium. Furthermore, Livy reports both claims in contexts that encourage an identification between the voices of the king or consul and that of the text’s narrator. As in the treatment of Papirius Cursor at the battle of Aquilonia, the authority figures within the text provide a model for and confirmation of the historian’s own representation of the past.

In Numa’s case, the falsehood the king uses to justify his religious innovations detracts neither from their social effectiveness nor from the historian’s own endorsement of their importance. The general purpose ascribed to the king’s reforms, to prevent the “animi of the Romans, which fear of the enemy and military discipline had held in check, from growing lax [luxuriarent] through peace” (1.19.4), suggests that the religious program introduced by the king operates as a substitute for the inspirational displays of imperium we have seen on the battlefield. Livy encourages the comparison again in his final summary of Numa’s reign: “So two kings in succession, each in their own way, one in war, one in peace, both increased the state [auxerunt civitatem]” (1.21.6). Here Romulus’s conquests and Numa’s institutions parallel one another in their effects, and the verb auxerunt connects both with the transmission of energy through contactus.54 Thus Numa’s whole religious program, which his false stories about the gods help to justify, becomes a central means by which he exercises imperium.

Despite the historian’s reference to the “rude and unsophisticated multitude” of Numa’s day, Livy’s presentation of the king’s reforms also emphasizes both explicitly and implicitly the continuing impact of his institutions, however distant in time, upon contemporary Rome. He reminds his audience that the doors of the temple of Janus were closed by Augustus after the battle of Actium for only the second time since Numa’s reign.55 But Augustus is not the only contemporary figure recalled in the account of Numa’s religious reforms. The moral purpose Livy ascribes to the king’s program, with its emphasis on luxuria and the dangers of decline through otium, echoes his own analysis of the ills that beset the Rome of his own day.56 In Livy’s preface, the progress of luxuria and its attendant vice, avaritia, figures as an index of the nation’s decline (praef. 11) and results specifically from the failure of disciplina (praef. 9). Alongside the similarity between the moral preoccupations of king and historian, the king’s perception of Rome’s dangers results from an understanding of the state’s historical development that would have been very familiar to Livy’s audience, the idea that the absence of an external enemy encourages internal dissolution. So too the means by which Numa exerts his influence resemble the efficacy of the historical text: the king becomes an exemplum “upon whose mores men molded themselves,”57 just as Livy offers his own readers exempla for imitation.

Like Numa’s, Scipio’s claims about the gods also function directly in the exercise of his imperium;58 indeed they are first reported in the narrative of the election in which that imperium is won. The context in which the consul makes these claims in his own voice, the first pre-battle speech of his command, also demonstrates with particular clarity the connection between the historian’s narrative and the imperator’s presentation of events. The length, occasion, and structural position of this speech within the third decade all mark it out as especially significant. In many respects, it signals the turning point not just of the Spanish campaign but of the entire Second Punic War. That war began five books before when the Carthaginian forces crossed the Ebro; now Scipio stands on the banks of the same river urging Roman troops to cross in the opposite direction as a prelude to the capture of a city named Carthage, Carthago Nova, the center of Punic power in Spain. The long oration that Livy has Scipio deliver goes far beyond the simple exhortation Polybius composes for him on this occasion.59 The new consul offers nothing less than a résumé of the entire course of the war, in essence, a summary of Livy’s narrative of it up to this point, to emphasize that they are at the decisive point of the conflict. “This lot has been given us by some fate, that in all great wars we conquer when we ourselves have been conquered.”60 Scipio’s observation, in addition to inspiring the troops who go on to actualize the predicted reversal, simultaneously illuminates a pattern in Livy’s own account of the war, and one that in turn clarifies the relationship of the Second Punic War as a whole to earlier events in Roman history. Moreover, both his position as consul and his unique personal experience of all Rome’s disasters give a particular authority to Scipio’s narrative and, by extension, to the historian’s.61 Again a claim about the gods that, after the historian’s own exposure of Scipio’s falsification of supernatural signs at 26.19.4, Livy’s audience cannot but regard as suspect occurs at a point where the interdependence between the imperator and the historian appears most clearly.

The beginning of Scipio’s campaign in Spain provides an especially appropriate occasion for confronting the problem of how the historian should treat the gods, since Polybius made his account of this event a showpiece of uncompromising rationalism. The novus imperator’s first address to the troops points out what the full consequences of Livy’s adopting such a position would be. For Scipio’s use of the gods here cannot be written off as a simple political trick designed to win the crowd’s support; his entire account of the war abounds in references to supernatural causes. To discredit them or treat them as mere rhetorical maneuvers would thus deprive Rome’s greatest defeats and victories of much of their religious dimension. But in the course of the speech, the Polybian position receives an important qualification, one that Livy chooses to place in the mouth of Scipio himself. After referring to nocturnal visions and other divine messages promising Roman victory, Scipio then shifts to arguments based on strategic considerations: “My mind too, my greatest “prophet” [vates] up to now, foretells that Spain is ours.…Reason, which does not deceive [ratio haud fallax], supports the same conclusion that the mind on its own divines [mens…divinat].” Although these sentences function primarily as a bridge from one well-worn rhetorical topos to another, they also give Scipio a chance to offer his own response to the historiographic debate set up by Polybius about his religious attitudes. By claiming his animus as his greatest vates, Scipio is not quite coming down on the side of ratio; rather, he obliterates the conflict between reason and superstition. Both ways of looking at the world work together to establish his point and enhance his credibility.

Livy’s treatment of the lunar eclipse that occurred just before the battle of Pydna similarly attempts to reconcile ratio and religion by attributing a supernatural quality to what in another context might have been described simply as a clever leadership strategy (44.37.5ff.). The military tribune, C. Sulpicius Galus, renowned for his knowledge,62 warns the Romans beforehand that the eclipse will occur. He informs them that an eclipse is a natural event, predictable according to certain laws, and thus not a sign from the gods. The Romans therefore are not frightened by the eclipse, but the Macedonians, who have no warning, are terrified and believe that the phenomenon portends the fall of the Macedonian dynasty. But if the eclipse has been stripped of its supernatural character, the knowledge by which Galus averts the portent itself seems “almost divine.”63 Again, it is instructive to contrast Livy’s treatment with those of his predecessors. Polybius has the Romans simply inspired by the portent, whereas the Macedonians are discouraged by it; such foolish superstitions prove the moral that “many trivial things are a part of warfare.”64 Cicero uses the episode in the De re publica to illustrate the utility of knowledge even of subjects like astronomy to the statesman. Thus he necessarily highlights Galus’s intervention and the decisive role played by his ratio in averting disaster. But here too ratio is placed in opposition to religion; the measure of Galus’s accomplishment is that he “thrust away fear and empty religious scruples from troubled men.”65 The synthesis between scientific knowledge and religion suggested by Livy’s description of Galus’s sapientia as “almost divine” is missing from the passage, however much the historian’s overall conception may owe to Cicero’s own attempts to harmonize scientific and supernatural authority in texts like the Somnium Scipionis.66

An emphasis on the inseparability of divine and human causation, by which even events explicable in purely human terms take on a divine dimension, provides one means by which Livy can adopt a historian’s analytical perspective without undercutting the claims to divine favor that the figures in the narrative themselves use to exercise power and interpret their actions. Even if Scipio’s statements about the gods result only from his own cleverness, that does not imply that he does not have their backing. The mind can be a prophet too, and wisdom can become divine. But beyond its expediency, this way of representing causation reflects an overlap of powers inherent in imperium itself. Livy’s treatment of Papirius’s actions at the battle of Aquilonia revealed the parallels between his strategic abilities and his handling of divine affairs. Both depend on the consul’s ability to control what counts as true for his troops. And in the moments before the battle, the miraculous voice of the crow, which prompts the consul to give the order for battle, signals the continuity between divine and human action. On such occasions, it becomes impossible to separate the contributions of gods and men, both aspects of the imperator’s power are equally involved. Even if a battle is won purely through stratagem or trickery, the victory itself is a proof of divine cooperation. No Roman ever won a battle against the will of the gods.

But the fundamental discrepancy between the two modes of representing the past in which Livy’s text shares cannot be removed simply by positing a divine aspect to human actions. The first law of historiography, as Cicero proclaimed, was “neither to include anything false nor exclude anything true,”67 and as we have seen one of the defining characteristics of history as a genre is that the events it describes are true. But truth or falsehood is not a useful criterion for evaluating the representations produced by the imperator. Rather, it is the ability of the commander to mobilize all the energies of a society, whether those derive from the gods or from individual virtus, that determines his success or failure. On these terms, Papirius’s false staging of the arrival of Roman reinforcements is indistinguishable from his statements about the gods. It is the potency of the imperator’s representations, revealed in the victories or defeats they engender, that enables them to count as truth. Perhaps the best way to regard Livy’s skeptical statements about the gods is to say that rather than attempting to reconcile the tasks of imperator and traditional historian, they actually point out the fundamental incompatibility between the two. By showing that the social significance of the magistrate’s claims is independent of traditional historical questions of truth and falsehood, Livy moves the statements of a Scipio or a Numa beyond the range of skeptical inquiry. At the same time, Livy’s treatment of these episodes highlights the role of the imperator as representer and the ability of imperium to make such representations meaningful, to make them count as history, independent of their truth or falsehood. In doing so, he offers his audience another model for understanding his own work, and links his representations of the past to a different set of auctores than written sources.

Livy’s own preface lends support to such an interpretation. Again, he uses stories about the gods, essential to Roman legend but incompatible with the genre of history, to introduce what amounts to a programmatic statement instructing the reader how to approach his text:

Those things recorded about the time before the founding of the city and about its founding that are more suited to poetic legends than to the incorruptible monuments of history, I intend neither to affirm nor refute. This pardon is given to antiquity in order that by mixing human and divine things, it might make the origins of cities more august [augustiora]; and if it ought to be granted to any people to consecrate its origins, and to carry them back to divine creators [auctores], such martial glory belongs to the Roman people, so that when they claim Mars as their own parent and the father of their founder, the human races will tolerate this with equanimity as they tolerate our imperium. But I do not consider it very important how these and similar tales are regarded and evaluated; rather, let each reader pay keen attention to the following things: what the life and customs were, through what men and by what arts, at home and abroad, our imperium was both created and increased.

This dense and much studied passage has generated a number of readings.68 I want to start by observing that the issue raised by early historical traditions, whether tales about the gods are to be affirmed or refuted, is precisely the one introduced by the claims of Numa and Scipio. Again Livy begins by reasserting the generic distinctions that ought to exclude such legends from a history. Yet here too this statement serves as much to differentiate his work from traditional models of writing history as to profess his allegiance to them. Livy is not promising to exclude these stories; on the contrary he is justifying their inclusion. We might expect a Polybius, by contrast, to be very interested in refuting and rejecting “poetic” material.69

But Livy makes clear that the tales that ought to be excluded from history for generic reasons possess value and gain acceptance on different grounds. As in his accounts of Numa and Scipio, Livy introduces a system of representation based on imperium operating alongside conventional historiography. Here the right to claim divine ancestry depends not on the literal truth of such stories but on military success, just as it is military success that allows Papirius Cursor to establish a monument recording divine favor at the battle of Aquilonia by dedicating the captured spolia. The language used to describe the influence of such stories additionally recalls the processes by which imperium itself is transmitted. Legends that the gods are the Romans’ auctores make the origins of the city augustiora. Both the noun auctor, here used to mean parent,70 and the adjective augustus derive from the verb augeo, to increase. Wagenvoort has shown that this verb can be used to signify the “increase” in power conferred upon a king or consul at his inauguration and that he in turn uses to inspire or empower the rest of the state.71 The tales about divine parentage may be pure fictions, from a historian’s point of view, but even fictional gods can be auctores in the sense that they contribute to the city’s cumulative auctoritas.72 The word auctor acquires an additional level of meaning in this context: since auctor is also the term Livy uses to describe his historical “source,” its use here underlines the connections between the transmissions of authority and of historical data implicit in the rest of the sentence. Paradoxically, even made-up gods can affirm their own existence.

But if Livy is using this passage to delineate what we might call an alternative system of transmitting information, one grounded in imperium rather than the traditional heuristic devices of literary history, then how does Livy position his own historical text in relation to that system? At first he seems to diminish its importance in favor of a more conventional historiographic program of tracing the moral and institutional factors that contributed to the growth and subsequent decline of the state. These legendary stories have their place and are not worth refuting, but the reader should focus his attention on men and customs. Yet even once we return to subject matter less problematic for a historian, the language in which Livy described the legends that gain credence only because of Rome’s imperium still echoes here. Imperium is explicitly mentioned as Livy’s subject, and although it is an imperium that results from human factors rather than the divine parentage of Romulus, nevertheless when Livy speaks of the “birth” (partum) and “growth” (auctum) of this imperium, the historical processes of Rome’s development recall the legendary role of Mars becoming auctor of the Roman people by fathering Romulus.73 What is more, when Livy asks his reader to move beyond questions of the truth or falsehood of stories about the gods in order to concentrate on the ethical underpinnings of imperium, he is constructing a response to his own text that mirrors the way in which he himself responds to the representations of Numa Pompilius.

The possibility of an analogy between the roles of historian and wielder of imperium emerges yet again at the end of the preface when Livy once more highlights the traditional definitions of history as a literary genre. “If we possessed the same custom that the poets do, we would rather begin with good omens [sc. rather than complaints] and prayers to the gods and goddesses, that they might give a favorable outcome to those laying the beginnings of such a great labor.”74 But it was not only poets who began great works with invocations of the gods.75 The omens, vows, and prayers with which he would like to begin his history recall the inauguration ritual by which a magistrate received his imperium, or the way he secures the support of the gods for a military campaign before he departs from the city through the ritual profectio described in chapter 1. In this way, the beginnings of his text, like those of the city itself, are to be magnified through the favor of the gods.76 Yet does Livy actually invoke the gods here? The location of this passage, at the end of the preface, is certainly an appropriate place for such a gesture.77 Nevertheless, the sentence remains counterfactual: this is what Livy would do if the conventions of history were like those of poetry, which of course they are not.78 Thus here too Livy explicitly proclaims his adherence to the conventions of historiography, but he does so in a way that simultaneously introduces the possibility of another set of practices and models for his work and so ultimately raises the question of which category his opus belongs in.

III. Camillus the Historian

Livy’s location of his text within the tradition of inspiring and renewing the power of the state exemplified by the speeches and representations of Rome’s political leaders aims to provide a link to “real” centers of authority that give his work a special status, different from that of other literary accounts of the past. But his connections to that tradition depend entirely upon his own representations of it. Livy held no office; his records of events were not “official” in the sense that tablets posted by the Pontifex Maximus would have been. If Livy’s interpretation of the battle of Aquilonia, for example, is confirmed by the consul Papirius’s pre-battle speech, if the very act of narrating the battle seems to continue the consul’s own efforts to establish permanent reminders of his success, it is because Livy himself has composed his speeches and recorded his dedication of the spolia. And if Livy’s text is in competition with other literary accounts of the same events, the verisimilitude with which he can represent Papirius himself endorsing his own version will also contribute to his authority as a historian. But this very circularity only furnishes another point of comparison between Livy and the military leaders he describes. They also had to rely on nothing other than their own representations to construct for their audiences an image of the unseen forces whose “presence” guaranteed victory. The treatment of the defeat of the Gauls at the end of book 5 reveals even more clearly how Livy uses the figures within his narrative as “sources” who lend their own authority to his version of events. It thus provides a concluding illustration of the unique symbiosis between Livy’s text and the historical tradition it records.

The defeat at the battle of the Allia had been one of those moments when the connections between the Roman army and the power of the gods was disastrously broken. In contrast to the battle of Aquilonia, where human and divine resources were all portrayed as working in harmony to ensure Roman victory so that the roles of divine aid and simple strategy could not be disentangled, here a breakdown occurs at every level from the gods down to the individual soldier who deserts his post because he thinks of his own family apart from the interests of the state.79 The gods, already alienated by a Roman violation of the ius gentium, are not invoked; nor are the auspices even taken prior to the battle. And it is the Gallic chieftain rather than the Roman leaders who devises a successful military strategy.80 Like the Samnites prior to their own defeat, the Romans in this situation are overwhelmed by “fear” (pavor) and “forgetfulness” (oblivio). As Livy stresses repeatedly, all the distinctions that set the Romans apart from their enemies have been obliterated. Even before the capture of the city, the Romans have ceased to be Romans.81

Camillus’s restoration of the Roman state thus begins well before his famous speech with the reestablishment of that nexus of contacts to divine and human authority that makes the Romans what they are. When he miraculously leads his troops into the Forum at the very instant when the Romans have just weighed out the gold to ransom their city, the combination of deorum opes humanaque consilia (5.49.5) that brings about the Roman victory signals the negation of the battle of the Allia. Livy’s narrative focuses on how Camillus as dictator uses the resources of the imperator to bring about the reversal. By ordering his soldiers to fight “holding before their eyes the shrines of the gods, their families, and the soil of the patria” (5.49.3), Camillus creates for each of his soldiers a visual link to the totality of the Roman state.

Camillus’s role as the one who restores the lines of contact by which Rome again becomes Roman82 stands out all the more clearly since the formerly exiled dictator himself had to be personally restored to membership in the Roman state.83 Livy describes how, after the army at Veii has voted to summon Camillus from exile to take over command, a young soldier volunteers to float down the Tiber, climb the besieged Capitolium and have Camillus officially recalled and proclaimed dictator by the Senate. Prior to receiving word of his appointment, according to the version Livy prefers to believe,84 Camillus would not even leave his place of exile. This elaborate procedure is inspired by more than an impractical concern for propriety. The young soldier’s journey and the subsequent embassy to Camillus establish a physical link between the dictator and the Capitolium, the “seat of the gods” (sedes deorum [5.39.12]), which complements his official establishment as a magistrate.

But at the same time that Camillus reverses the fortunes of the state, he also works an equally dramatic transformation on Livy’s own narrative. The sack of Rome by the Gauls was one of the most momentous events in early Roman history, and among the most controversial, with many competing versions.85 According to some surviving accounts, there was no last-minute rescue by Camillus, and the Gauls withdrew after accepting a ransom payment from the Romans.86 Polybius has a Gallic chieftain of the mid third century B.C.E. boasting that his tribe had occupied Rome for seven months and returned home “with their spoils.”87 This is the story that Livy is in the process of telling, has indeed already completed,88 at the end of chapter 48 when the dictator’s dramatic arrival and victory negate that version of events. The issue raised by the Gauls after Camillus’s arrival is precisely the same as the question raised by the existence of conflicting historical traditions, whether the Romans were ransomed. The Gauls, of course, assert that the treaty has already been fulfilled, but their claim is doubly rendered invalid by Camillus’s imperium. Not only does the defeat itself demonstrate the true power of the Roman people and its gods and lead to the recapture of the gold that has been paid out, but Camillus also introduces a constitutional argument to prove that the treaty was never actually valid. Once Camillus has been appointed dictator, his imperium supersedes that of the lesser magistrates who negotiated the surrender.89 Thus at the same time that he mobilizes the forces of gods and men to liberate the Rome from the Gauls, he is also “rewriting history” by invalidating in his own voice rival versions of the liberation of Rome. The authority of Livy’s representation of the past, his emphatic denial that the Romans were ever ransomed, rests on the imperium of Camillus himself.

In fact, the historical tradition is all that was ever at stake in Camillus’s raid. The resources of “gods and men” are not mobilized to save the city, for Rome is already out of danger. Rather, Camillus acts to ensure that the Romans will not “survive by having been ransomed” (5.49.1). The ransoming of the city, which Livy calls a res foedissima (5.48.9), would have left the defeat at Allia stand as a proof of Rome’s powerlessness against the Gauls. Their state, a people “soon about to rule over nations” (5.48.8), would have been preserved not by an overwhelming demonstration of invincible military might and divine favor, but by mere wealth. Hence Camillus orders his troops to save the city by “iron not by gold” (5.49.3). Camillus fights to determine how Rome’s liberation from the Gauls will be remembered, and Livy by recording the version of events established by his victory, becomes the means by which this end is accomplished, by which the dictator’s claims will reach all future readers of his history. His text is as essential to Camillus’s imperium as that imperium is to his text.

I. Devotio

Devotio is a drastic measure in which a magistrate with imperium, consul, dictator, or praetor, to prevent imminent defeat, consecrates one individual, who thus takes upon himself the impurities of the entire state. This individual then charges into the midst of the enemy, presumably to his death, and by this act ensures their destruction. In fact, we know of only three instances of devotio in Roman history, and in each of them, the individual whom the magistrate consecrates is himself. Furthermore, all three consuls were members of the same family: the first is P. Decius Mus, consul at the battle of Veseris (8.9ff.); his son follows his example at the battle of Sentinum in 295 (10.28–9). The case of his son is somewhat problematic: Cicero tells us that he offered his life in the same way against Pyrrhus at the battle of Asculum,10 and a fragment of Ennius has been taken to describe the same event.11 However, the summary of the relevant book of Livy makes no mention of it, and the consular Fasti indicate that this Decius was alive some ten years later.12 Cassius Dio records an extraordinary story in relation to this event that demonstrates the triumph of Greek cunning over Roman religiosity: When Pyrrhus’s troops themselves fear that Decius might perform a devotio, the king makes inquiries about the ritual and instructs his soldiers that no one dressed in the special garb of the devotus is to be harmed.13 He then sends a message to Decius, letting him know that any attempt to devote himself will be fruitless.

Livy himself provides the fullest account of the procedure for devotio. Both Decii request the assistance of the Pontifex Maximus, who prescribes the proper gestures and the exact words of the prayer. At the command of the pontifex, the consul dons the toga praetexta, the purple-bordered toga worn by magistrates, and veils his head; sticking his hand up from beneath his toga, he touches his chin, and while standing upon a spear recites the prayer:

Ianus, Jupiter, father Mars, Quirinus, Bellona, Lares, Divi Novensiles, Di Indigetes, divinities who possess power over our troops and the enemy, Gods of the dead, I pray and beseech, I seek and bring prayers that you favor the might and victory of the Roman people and that you afflict the enemies of the Roman people with terror, fear, and death. As I have undertaken with words, so on behalf of the Republic of the Roman people, the army, legion, and auxiliaries of the Roman people, I devote the legions and auxiliaries of the enemy along with me to the Gods of the Dead and the Earth.

Having done this, the consul girds himself in the cinctus Gabinus, a way of wearing the toga drawn over the head that was used by magistrates with imperium in the performance of sacred rites,14 leaps on his horse and charges into the midst of battle. The enemy are afflicted with terror wherever the consul rides, and when eventually they kill him, their fate is sealed. The consul’s body is always buried under the thickest pile of weapons and corpses and so cannot be found until the next day.

How many of these details accurately reflect early Roman religious practice remains uncertain.15 The idea of charging a man or beast with the impurities of the people and sending it off to exert its destructive influence among the enemy possesses many analogues, from Hittite sacrificial practice to the legend of the Trojan horse.16 However, Versnel has argued that what has become the archetypal form of devotio actually evolved from the more widespread but somewhat less dramatic practice of invoking the gods’ power by making over to them the lives and property of the enemy.17 But whatever the actual authenticity of Livy’s description, the act clearly possesses a special significance for his text. The historian explicitly justifies his inclusion of the details of the ritual in terms that remind us of one of the cardinal aims of his history: he has preserved the tradition of an archaic Roman practice into an age when native religion has been supplanted by foreign rites.18 Indeed, the first step in the ritual itself draws attention to the importance of preserving traditions. The Decii would not have been able to perform their devotiones if they too had not had access to an equivalent record of the past through the memory of the pontifex. Thus when the second Decius devotes himself, the ritual prescribed by the pontifex presumably reproduces Livy’s account of his father’s devotio.19

Livy’s use of accounts of devotio to highlight his own role of giving access to the past relates to another important feature of the ritual itself: perhaps no other Roman practice reveals more clearly the importance of contact as the mechanism for the transmission of power. The role of contact is first apparent in the physical gestures by which the consul invokes the aid of the gods. The touching of the chin recalls the action with which an object is consecrated or made over to the gods.20 The spear on which the consul stands either embodies the god Mars,21 or perhaps, since it is placed on the earth, opens a bridge between the person of the consul and the underworld gods to whom he devotes himself.22 Between them, the two actions denote the twin sources of power that energize the entire state, the power of the gods and the collective power channeled through the person of the magistrate.

The performance as a whole has a contradictory effect on the consul himself. The devotus surrenders more than his life; through being rendered sacer, he loses his status as an individual member of the group.23 Thus the devotus’s charge into the midst of the enemy can denote his separation from the Roman host as much as his aggressive intention against the enemy. On the other hand, the gesture of contactus binds the individual even more closely to the whole. Not only does he become their substitute, the one whose death ensures the survival of the multitude;24 he takes upon himself all the religious impurities of the people, so that his death becomes an expiation for them. At the same time, he also assumes their power, becoming the instrument through which the wrath of the gods is brought to bear on the enemy. The devotus also makes himself a surrogate for the enemy, whose fate is bound to his own through the agency of sympathetic magic. Not only does the devotus actively terrify the enemy, but the death that he suffers ensures that they too will die.

After the initial ritualized contact charges the consul with both the power and the pollution of the entire state, contact emerges again as the mechanism by which these energies are disseminated among the enemy. Thus the younger Decius says that he will “touch the standards, weapons, and arms of the enemy with deadly curses.”25 The impact of the elder Decius, “like a piaculum sent from the heavens for all the anger of the gods,”26 can be understood in the same terms. He is initially described as bringing a pestis, or plague, among the enemy, and throughout the description, it is less the consul’s own actions than the superhuman influences he bears with him, terror and pavor (panic), that overwhelm the enemy. The progress of this fear, which sets in confusion the standards of the Latins and then “penetrates deeply throughout the entire army,” resembles the spread of a disease.27 The enemy “tremble as though stricken by a plague-bearing star.”28

But in the description of the elder Decius’s final charge, the very sight of the consul, in addition to physical contact or proximity, provides a medium through which he exerts his influence on both sides. The appearance of the consul, with his specially arranged toga, mounted on his horse in the midst of foot soldiers makes him strikingly conspicuous. Livy emphasizes that Decius was “seen by each army” (conspectus ab utraque acie [8.9.10]) and immediately draws attention to his visus, when he is described as “exalted beyond human appearance” (augustior humano visu [ibid.]). The simile of the “plague-bearing star” (8.9.12) further contributes to the pictorial vividness of Livy’s description of the consul’s charge and at the same time links the visual impression Decius produces directly to his destructive power. Even the devastation of the enemy, called evidentissimum, “most clear to see,” becomes a spectacle for the Roman troops, who immediately take on new vigor, “as if they were beginning a fresh battle with the sign just given.”29

That comparison of the consul’s charge to the signal to begin battle emphasizes the connection between the result of a devotio and the powers of imperium, a connection already apparent in the requirement that the devotio be performed by a magistrate with imperium. In fact, the entire ritual can be read as a means for projecting magisterial imperium in a particularly intensive and efficacious form. The twin aims of devotio signaled in the consul’s prayer, to render the Romans powerful and prosperous and to inflict destruction upon the enemy, represent precisely the function of all imperium.30 Papirius at the battle of Aquilonia accomplishes just the same thing. While Decius’s cry that “the aid of the gods is required” seems to suggest that the devotio procedure marks a movement beyond the standard resources of the commander, it should be remembered that there is a superhuman component in all magisterial authority. What the devotio does accomplish, however, is to heighten the immediacy with which the powers residing in the imperator are communicated. The person of the devotus becomes a particularly transparent manifestation of these powers. The transformations in his appearance all reveal the sources of Roman might.31 Thus his special way of girding the toga, cinctu Gabino, signifies that he possesses imperium;32 the term augustior applied to the visual impression made by the consul confirms this connection because of its association with the terms used to describe the “increase” in authority received by the consul at the moment when he enters his magistracy. Yet as we have seen, the devotus’s appearance does not simply represent or symbolize his authority; like the visible insignia displayed in a triumph, it provides the means through which this authority functions.

The role of the devotus as someone who manifests or communicates the power of the gods also explains another important feature in Livy’s accounts of both Decii. In each case, the devotio itself is predicted by an elaborate series of omens. Prior to the battle of Veseris, both consuls in their sleep behold the same vision “of a man larger and more exalted [augustior] than of human bearing, saying that from one side the general [imperator] and from the other the entire army was owed to the gods of the underworld, and [that] victory would belong to the people whose general devoted himself and the legions of the enemy” (8.6.9–10). This communication operates on two levels. First is the simple sending of a message, which is received by the consuls and finally acted upon when Decius devotes himself. But there is also an important connection between the visual aspect of the omen and the devotio: The vision of a figure “more august than human,” predicts precisely the appearance of the devotus himself. Thus the consul is not just obeying the orders of the gods; in his own person, he “broadcasts” the miraculous sight he has seen in the dream, rendering it visible to both armies. Here is another respect in which the devotus performs the traditional function of the imperator through more emphatic means, for as we saw in chapter 2, it is always the role of the general to represent the divine realm to his troops.

Before the battle of Sentinum, when the troops have been arranged for combat, a deer pursued by a wolf runs between the two battle lines. “The deer runs toward the Gauls and the wolf toward the Romans. The wolf is received within the ranks; the Gauls kill the deer. Then a Roman soldier proclaims, “Flight and slaughter have gone to that side where you see the sacred beast of Diana laid low; on this side the wolf of Mars, whole and untouched, reminds us of our martial heritage and of our founder” ”(10.27.8–9). The double aspect of the prodigy looks forward to the two components of the devotus’s prayer where again the “flight and slaughter” of the enemy complements the inspiration of the Romans. More than that, the prodigy also predicts the mechanism by which the devotio operates. The two animals become surrogates for each army, which in turn takes on the characteristics of their representative. When the deer is killed, the Gauls ensure that they will be similarly affected by caedes; the Romans recognize the wolf as victor, and so they too will be victorious.33

The willingness of the Decii to give up their lives in the service of the state has made their deaths virtual paradigms for Roman patriotism, and Livy’s account of them has an emphatically didactic function, revealed most clearly in the praise that each receives from his fellow consul.34 But the devotio ritual itself, which Livy describes in such detail, can also offer a new model for how the exemplary figures of the Decii affect the audiences they are designed to instruct. Imitation, after all, plays a crucial role in each narrative, as the enemy and the Romans both take on characteristics possessed by the Decii. The devotus, precisely by imitating the past, that is by properly performing the ceremony prescribed by the Pontifex Maximus, becomes an embodiment of the collective power of the state and, by projecting this power through his own person, confers it back to the army as a whole, rendering them victorious where before they were on the verge of defeat. Thus through a kind of sympathetic magic, founded on the possession of imperium, the Romans are made more like themselves. The social regeneration, for it is nothing less, accomplished by these devotiones, is made to depend upon direct contact with the centers of collective power. This explains why Livy uses his account of the first devotio ritual to cast his history as the means by which such “transmissions” can be preserved. Admittedly, the devotio offers an extreme case, where the powers of the imperator clearly operate through superhuman means. In the next section, we shall examine a seemingly less extraordinary genre of regularized performance, the series of duels in books 7 and 8, where the role of imperium and its link to the “education” of the individual can be understood in comparable terms.

II. Duels

In spite of the juxtaposition of the stories of Decius and the younger Torquatus in book 8, and the shared willingness of those involved to give up their lives for their country, any intrinsic similarity between duels and devotiones seems to be ruled out by their different outcomes. The devotus is expected to die in battle, while the youth sent out to fight the enemy champion is expected to win. Nevertheless, Livy’s narratives of the two types of actions share the same general structure. Prior to the duel itself, the young Roman combatant must be given permission to fight by his commanding officer.35 In each of the two successful duels, this is none other than a magistrate with imperium, a dictator in Torquatus’s case, a consul in Corvus’s. So too a citizen can only be devoted by a consul, dictator, or praetor (8.10.11). After their respective performances, both the living champion and the dead devotus are reincorporated into the group by being praised and held up as inspiring examples, again by the commander.36 The way that the actions of the magistrate frame the exploits of both champion and devotus emphasizes the importance of contact in each procedure as the means that allow the individual to act effectively on the state’s behalf. Correspondingly, in Livy’s account of the duels of Torquatus and Corvus, each champion, like the two Decii, becomes a kind of surrogate for the Roman people as a whole. Their victories not only bring them individual glory but predict, or indeed determine, the outcome of the conflict between Gauls and Romans. Their success acts to validate Rome’s intrinsic might and renders the Romans who witness it fiercer and more active; the defeat of each Gaul has an equivalently demoralizing effect on his fellows. When the first Gaul is killed by T. Manlius, fear is said to have rendered the entire army of Gauls motionless (defixerat) while the Romans are made alacres (7.10.12). The defeat of Corvus’s Gaul similarly determines in advance the outcome of the battle in which it occurs.37 Thus the effect of the duel as spectacle, to invest each side with the attributes displayed by their surrogate, reproduces the combined result of the devotio. The difference is that in a devotio, the devotus plays a double role, acting as surrogate for the victorious Romans and at the same time “infecting” the enemy with death through his own destruction. In the case of the duel, this double function is split in half. Each side produces its own champion, so that victory can belong entirely to the Roman and death need befall only the Gallic combatant.

Livy’s treatments of the exploits of Torquatus and Corvus give us important clues about the particular concerns of his narrative, because we can compare them to parallel accounts from other annalists, which survive as excerpts in the text of the second-century antiquarian Aulus Gellius. The fragment recording the duel of Torquatus is especially valuable: it is directly attributed to the first century B.C.E. historian Claudius Quadrigarius, and close verbal resemblances make it likely that Livy modeled his account on it directly.38 It would thus provide the only point in the first ten books where we can compare Livy’s treatment of an event verbatim with that of one of his “sources.” The Corvus narrative is more difficult to use.39 Gellius does not attribute it directly to Quadrigarius, as we would expect, since this author was one of his particular favorites,40 and probably reaches him only through having been previously excerpted, and in some measure recast, by another compiler.41 Comparisons between both sets of parallel versions reveal that the crucial elements of Livy’s construction of the duels—the role of the commander as the one who both enables the young Roman to fight and later praises his victory, and the corresponding influence the duel acquires over the outcome of the larger conflict between Gauls and Romans—were not indispensable components of a fixed narrative tradition. Claudius Quadrigarius makes no mention of Torquatus’s request for the dictator’s permission to accept the Gaul’s challenge, a moment Livy accentuates by including the dictator’s exhortation in direct speech. The “annalistic” treatment of Corvus’s duel does state that the tribune asked the consul’s permission but leaves out the later speech of the consul urging his soldiers to “imitate” their champion. Neither account implies that the duel has any greater consequence than to win glory and a new cognomen for its victor.42

The full significance of Livy’s reformulation of the duel can best be viewed against the background of the varied cultural associations that the institution of dueling possessed in the Late Republic. Stephen Oakley has demonstrated the frequency and importance of single combat in Roman military practice and made clear that such duels cannot be regarded simply as a response to foreign challenges.43 Oakley collects over thirty examples of single combats and suggests that during the peak period of the Middle Republic, such combats could have happened as frequently as once a year.44 The evidence he compiles, together with the wealth of parallels adduced from other cultures, make it possible to trace the variety of connotations the practice acquired within Roman culture.

One of the tendencies that emerges from Oakley’s analysis is the link between participation in single combat and the competition for power and prestige within the Roman aristocracy. Both Manlius Torquatus and Valerius Corvus rise to the highest positions at Rome. More than that, their exploits yield the honorific surnames (cognomina) that will distinguish their respective families throughout their history. Indeed, it has been suggested that the story of Valerius Corvus arose as a response to the glorification of the hero of the Manlii.45 At the same time, Oakley points out that the Romans were unique among ancient cultures in their attempt to circumscribe the personal glory won through single combat by emphasizing that the champions accepted challenges only with the permission of their commanding officer.46 For our purposes, though, the stress on disciplina is best treated as only one of many possible ways of interpreting single combat rather than as an overarching Roman cultural strategy for regulating individual ambition. It is possible to imagine a version of the Torquatus story designed solely to commemorate the young man’s heroism and prowess. In fact, such a version survives in the account of Claudius Quadrigarius.47

A brief survey of the accounts of duels fought in the decades surrounding the Social Wars, a period when the traditional models of aristocratic authority were being tested by the rise of Marius, reveals that the practice could be subjected to a variety of competing interpretations and had in fact become a significant locus for demonstrating or debunking the importance of noble ancestry. Thus L. Opimius, presumably connected with the consul responsible for the destruction of Gaius Gracchus, is reported to have fought a duel with one of the Cimbri.48 The anti-Sullan hero Sertorius similarly challenged the soft aristocrat Metellus Pius to a duel. Unlike Opimius, Metellus refused and was derided by his troops.49 During the same war in which Opimius accepted the chance to distinguish himself through single combat, Marius himself was said to have been challenged to a duel by a Teuton and to have ostentatiously rejected that challenge in a manner that parodied the entire institution. “When a Teuton challenged him and demanded that he advance, Marius responded that if he wanted to die, he could go hang himself. After the Teuton insisted, Marius placed before him a gladiator of contemptible stature and almost worn out with age and told his challenger that if he beat the gladiator, he himself would fight the winner.”50

By the time Livy came to write his own versions of the duels of Torquatus and Corvus, the practice of single combat itself seems to have all but died out. With the exception of an encounter during the Jewish war,51 the last recorded instance of single combat took place during Caesar’s Spanish campaign of 45 B.C.E. 52 But the decline of the actual practice of single combat does not mark the end of its cultural significance; in addition to Livy’s narratives, the statue of Valerius Corvus, complete with crow, erected in the Forum of Augustus testifies to the importance that these episodes assumed during the early Principate.53

How then are we to understand Livy’s representations of single combat, particularly his interest in the relationship between the young champion and his commanding officer, in this context? We can rule out any idea that Livy was sending a crude message about the new political reality by subordinating the accomplishment of the individual champion to the superior authority of the magistrate. The explicit moral function of these episodes, both in Livy’s text and in the Augustan Forum, was not to check ambition but rather to inspire imitation; Corvus is held up as a model of behavior whom his consul instructs the other Roman soldiers to emulate. The innovation of Livy is not to have wrested dueling itself away from the surviving nobiles as a means of personal advancement, but, like Augustus in his Forum, to have taken control of the stories told about these events, converting them from self-glorifying family narratives to paradigms of patriotic action that had broader, national application. We shall see that even within the story of Torquatus, Livy signals the transition from family glory to the interest of Rome as a whole as the motive that impels the youth to accept the Gaul’s challenge. The motif of the commander’s permission therefore has nothing to do with limiting individual accomplishment; on the contrary, contact with the collective power of the state in the person of the magistrate is what enables the individual to be successful and allows him to act not just on his own but as a true representative of the entire state. It thus gives his victory a historical significance it would not otherwise have possessed.

Another aspect of dueling facilitates Livy’s translation of single combat from a manifestation of individual or familial prowess to a sign of the broader superiority of the Roman state over its opponents: the idea that single combat had a quasi-judicial function and served to resolve disputes by legitimating the claims of the victor.54 We have already seen on a larger scale how the victory of the Romans over their enemies itself validates their motives; the gods would not have aided them unless their cause was just. Nicolaus of Damascus attests the existence among Italian peoples of a form of trial by combat to resolve disputes between individuals: “Whenever the Umbrians have a dispute against one another, having armed themselves, they fight as if in a war, and those who slaughter their opponents are thought to have made the juster claim.”55 A similar principle has been discovered in archaic Roman judicial procedures like the vindicatio, an ancient form of judgment to determine ownership of slaves or moveables that required both disputants formally to state their claim in the presence of witnesses while simultaneously touching the slave in question with a rod.56 After this, the magistrate compels both parties to release the slave and to state the basis of their claim. Even the response to this question is standardized. The claimants offer no other proof than the simple fact of having performed the rite (ius feci). As Gernet points out, in this case, not only do actions have a ritualized, linguistic function but the words themselves have a palpable physical effect. The performance of the act of vindicatio is the prerequisite for decision. The right of ownership is obtained not by offering a compelling account of the past but by participating in the present encounter.

In addition to their own physical resources, participants in a trial by combat can invoke the aid of the gods themselves by oaths, which Gernet interprets as originally serving simply as a means of engaging the divine powers in support of one’s claim.57 Whoever wins the duel will now have his right affirmed by the gods who have given him victory. Something similar is accomplished in Livy’s account of Torquatus’s duel when the consul, in giving the combatant permission to fight, also invokes the aid of the gods on his behalf. This action, almost a consecration of Torquatus, in addition to providing him with greater resources to fight, necessarily raises the stakes of the competition and assures that a victory will be attributed not just to the might he inherits from his ancestors but to the power of the Roman gods.

III. Torque and Crow

If the story of Valerius Corvus’s miraculous fight with the Gaul did originate as a doublet of the earlier duel of Torquatus, then it is remarkable that Livy has treated both episodes so fully given their temporal proximity to each other.58 The number of identical narrative elements (challenge, request for permission, the combat itself, aftermath) further reinforces the similarity between the two scenes, and Corvus himself refers to Torquatus as a precedent, again ensuring that we read the second duel with the first one in mind (7.26.2). Thus, far from treating it as a liability to be disguised, Livy has made this repetitiveness one of the crucial features of his presentation.59 Each scene emphasizes elements that complete the other narrative, so that the full meaning of both emerges only when they are taken together. While Torquatus’s duel highlights the power of men, Corvus’s victory results from the aid of the gods. In the Torquatus episode, the commander speaks in his own voice before the duel, emphasizing the moment when the champion requests permission to fight. In Corvus’s case, it is the complementary scene, where the consul praises the victor, in which the magistrate speaks.

At a deeper level, the exemplary function assumed by each champion explains the interdependence of the two scenes. Livy has transformed Quadrigarius’s narrative to stress the links between the individual achievement of Torquatus and the entire state. The momentum by which his deed becomes “public” reaches fulfillment when another youth, not a member of his own family, imitates his behavior. By this principle, no historical event is complete in itself, the great deeds of the past always demand to be renewed by being repeated in the future. Each of the two duels emphasizes one of the reciprocal aspects of this process of imitation.60 The Torquatus duel focuses on the production of a spectacle that both forges a link between the individual and the power of the group and “broadcasts” this power in a manner that has a transformative effect upon its spectators. The Corvus duel by contrast is about the reception of messages, the interpretation and reproduction of signs.

Comparisons between Livy’s description of the Torquatus duel and Quadrigarius’s frequently emphasize that Livy has paid greater attention to the visual impression created by the duel.61 The space in which the combat occurs is clearly delineated before the Gaul’s challenge almost in the manner of an ecphrasis.62 Livy presents the fight itself through the eyes of those looking on and correspondingly provides a greater variety of visual stimuli, like the embroidered clothing and gilded armor of the Gaul,63 for his audience.64 These changes are generally regarded as purely stylistic choices designed to make his narrative more vivid and dramatic. However, Livy’s interest in reproducing the visual impressions produced by the duel goes beyond the level of presentation; he explicitly draws attention to the “theatricality” of the scene in a manner that gives the question of spectacle a thematic importance within the episode.65 Not only does the appearance of each fighter provide crucial clues to the characteristics of the nation to which he belongs, with the boastful and avaricious Gaul ranged against the controlled and resolute Roman, but as in the battle of Aquilonia, the very manner in which each side makes use of visual communication becomes a criterion for distinguishing between them. In the Gaul’s case, the discrepancy between the appearance he gives and his actual effectiveness in combat betrays the same inability to produce meaningful visual signs that marked the Samnite “linen legion.” The Roman wins after moving past this outward appearance to the vulnerable body it conceals by “twisting himself between the Gaul’s arms and body.”66 The Gaul’s gold and finery is a pure distraction, and Torquatus’s decision to leave the splendid corpse of his opponent undispoiled with the exception of a single neckband, a choice that will surprise anyone familiar with the common result of duels in Greek epic, appears as an implicit rejection of mere appearance.67 In his description of the Roman, on the other hand, Livy faces the problem of making “visible” the absence of any purely visual characteristics. The Roman is physically unremarkable, average size, and his weapons are chosen for use rather than show. Correspondingly, Livy describes the Roman primarily in terms of his action and accomplishment; it is precisely the movement of the Roman that uproots the statuesque and largely immobile Gaul. At the same time, Livy’s description of the Roman provides an “image” of his inner qualities, his “heart full of courage and silent wrath.”68

For the Roman side, the process of watching itself takes on a particular dynamic property: it becomes a medium for an exchange of energy between the individual and the group that has the power to transform both. As we have seen, Livy alters the earlier account of the duel by introducing the idea that the two champions act as representatives for their entire peoples. It is the Gaul who introduces this theme by claiming that the duel with “the man whom Rome considers the bravest” will “show which race is better at war” (7.9.8). Torquatus, by contrast, betrays no awareness that the duel possesses any such national consequences; what he wants to put on display is the honor of his family.69 His request for the dictator’s permission to accept the challenge, beyond illustrating the value of disciplina per se, offers the means by which this essentially personal impulse acquires a larger importance. The dictator responds with the words, “Be successful in your virtue and piety toward your father and fatherland. Go forth and with the gods’ help render the Roman name unconquered.”70 The dictator’s command, by coupling father and fatherland, translates Torquatus’s action to one where family motives go hand in hand with patriotism. In proportion to the increase in the stakes of the combat, the dictator’s words also lend the youth greater resources with which to fight. The gods will be aiding him, and the expression macte virtute, translated above as “be successful,” although something of a formulaic phrase, may yet retain some of its original sacral meaning, “be filled, be increased.”71 The fashioning of Torquatus into a surrogate for the group as a whole is completed when his comrades all participate in arming him (7.10.5). Thus from the Roman perspective, the spectacle of the combat itself comes at the culmination of the process that binds the individual to the larger group. In return, by watching his victory, the Roman spectators are brought into contact with their collective might. Rendered alacres, they are freed from the immobility that marked the first stages of their conflict with the Gauls, and they too run forth from their posts, as originally Torquatus had,72 to retrace his journey toward the dictator. The Gaul by contrast stands resolutely alone; there is no mention at all of his fellows until the fear and astonishment engendered by their own response to the spectacle paralyzes them (7.10.12).

The properties that the process of watching possesses within the narrative in turn explain Livy’s own adoption of a visually vivid narrative style. By enabling his own audience to become spectators of the duel, he makes it possible for them to share in the exchange of energy experienced by the participants. Indeed, Livy’s narrative can go beyond the purely visual by directing the attention of the reader toward the inner qualities that the Roman does not put on display, his “heart full of courage.” The account of the duel differentiates between two possible modes of spectacle; the socially cohesive experience of the Romans stands in contrast to the meaningless and ineffectual display of the Gaul. How does Livy ensure that the “spectacle” he produces will not be taken as the stylistic equivalent of the Gaul’s performance, a purely decorative intrusion within the course of the larger narrative? The initial attitude the historian adopts toward the combat suggests that this is indeed how it is to be regarded. When Livy says that the encounter between the Torquatus and the Gaul was more of a spectacle than a battle, he himself seems to be detaching it from his narrative; it is a show, not a serious combat. Like the Gaul’s gesture of sticking out his tongue at the Roman, which Livy can only describe with the qualifying comment that such behavior is not worthy of forming part of his narrative yet has been recorded by his predecessors (7.10.5), it is an element that Livy must both include and somehow excise from his text. Again Torquatus’s adoption of the Gaul’s torque provides a model for Livy’s approach. This single Gallic artifact can acquire a Roman historical significance as a marker of the defeat of the people who produced it. Like the armor taken from the Samnite linen legion, its splendor must first be dimmed by blood. In the same way, Torquatus’s defeat of the Gaul gives his outrageous performance a place in Roman history precisely as a record of the failure of the quintessentially alien behavior of Rome’s opponents.

In the Corvus episode, the language of signs and revelation punctuates the narrative, just as the imagery of spectacle did the account of Torquatus. The crow that miraculously perches on the Roman’s helmet and helps him to defeat the Gaul is an “augurium sent from the sky.”73 As a result of this miraculous apparition, the human aspect of the duel is said to be made less insigne, marked or conspicuous (7.26.3). The same word had first been used to describe the Gaul, “conspicuous for his height and weapons.”74 But as the balance shifts from human resources to divine power, it is the Roman champion who after his victory becomes “conspicuous” because of the spoils of the defeated Gaul.75

But like all signs from the gods, the apparition of the crow must be acknowledged and accepted by the human to whom it is sent. In the version of the duel recorded by Gellius, the apparition of the crow is treated as nothing so formal as an augurium, but as the intrusion of “a certain divine power” (quaedam divina vis [NA 9.11.6]) that operates on its own. Livy by contrast emphasizes the role of the human tribune in receiving the divine message. At first, the crow is presented simply as a crow who alights on the Roman’s helmet. It is only once Corvus recognizes the crow as an augurium and formally entreats the goodwill of the god who sent it that the behavior of the crow becomes “miraculous” and it begins to fight on the Romans behalf. But the emphasis on the transmission of signs does not stop there. Once Corvus receives the sign from the gods, he becomes a sign himself. After the tribune has defeated the Gaul, the consul Camillus presents this victory to the soldiers as a token of divine benevolence and urges his soldiers to fight more confidently (7.26.7). The crow therefore becomes only the first miraculous sign, the influence of which is transmitted to ever-larger audiences. In acknowledging the crow as a sign, the tribune is made “joyous” (laetus [7.26.4], a word we have met before used to describe the recipient of a message from the gods). When the victory is interpreted for the soldiery, the same word is used of them and emphasized by anaphora.76

The pattern of resemblances traced here recalls the treatment of Decius’s devotio, where the consul becomes an image of a sign sent from the gods, and his “performance” in turn causes the spectators who witness it to take on his own characteristics. Indeed, by assuming the cognomen Corvus, the tribune himself becomes the “Crow.” The motif of resemblance in the Corvus narrative is explicitly emphasized by the consul himself in a manner that assimilates it to the process of imitation that provides the mechanism by which all historical events are meant to transform their audiences: the soldiers are told to “imitate him,”77 a phrase that looks back to the central purpose of Livy’s own history, to provide exempla for his readers to “imitate.”78 The parallel between the imitation of a historical example and the transmission of divine signs is confirmed when we recall that the initial impetus that drove Corvus to accept the Gaul’s challenge was his emulation of Torquatus. And once again, as in the narratives of the sack of Rome and of Torquatus’s duel, the Gaul, whose blindness to divine signs is graphically represented by the crow’s pecking at his eyes, serves as a foil to highlight the distinctively Roman ability to recognize and interpret such signs effectively.

IV. The Duel of the Younger Torquatus

These earlier narratives form the background for the younger Torquatus’s encounter with his Latin challenger (8.7). Together, they have defined a double tradition that binds each individual champion to the collective authority of the state through contact with magistrates and gods and to a pattern of successful behavior extending through time, of which his own action provides but one manifestation. In conforming to the demands exerted by the political hierarchy and the weight of historical precedent, the individual becomes an instrument for disseminating the influence of each tradition, and this provides both the means and the significance of his victory. As we have seen, the younger Torquatus’s duel occurs in a context that puts at risk both the historical supremacy of the Romans over the Latins and the privileged connection to the larger power of the gods upon which that supremacy depends. Yet Torquatus, far from asking the consul, his father, for permission to fight, ignores his specific instructions that no Roman is to engage the enemy without orders. Had Torquatus lost his duel, the outcome could therefore have been easily explained and would have possessed an educative value as an illustration of what happens when soldiers fight without permission. But the outcome of this encounter turns out to be far more dangerous for the authority structure of the state and even calls into question the value of the historical tradition: Torquatus wins despite the fact that he is fighting without authorization. Thus his very victory, far from affirming the superiority of Roman over Latin, as he had hoped, can be read as a justification of the Latins’ position: there is no power beyond force, and the idea that Rome’s dominance has any kind of external guarantee from the gods is a sham; therefore it is only right that the Latins, who have shared equally in Rome’s victories, should also have a share of imperium.

Torquatus’s son belongs to a cavalry squadron sent out to reconnoiter. A band of Tusculan cavalry meets and recognizes them, and the leader of this band, Geminus Maecius, taunts the Romans. The young Torquatus responds by an appeal to both axes of authority, the hierarchical and the historical, in his assertion of the superiority of Rome. He claims that Roman victory will be assured by the presence of Jupiter along with the armies of the consuls, and, as his father had before him (8.5.10), invokes the battle of Lake Regillus as a historical precedent for the victory of the Romans over the Latins: “The consular armies will be here in time, and with them will be Jupiter himself, a witness of the treaties you have violated, who has even more power. If you had more than enough of us at the battle of Lake Regillus, this encounter too will curb your taste for doing battle with us.”79 But having correctly recognized the sources of Roman power, Torquatus then makes a mistake. Maecius challenges, “Do you wish then, until the day when you move your armies for the great attempt, to fight with me yourself in order that the outcome of our battle make clear by how much the Latin knight excels the Roman?”80 And Torquatus, “moved by anger or shame or the ineluctable power of fate” (8.7.8), accepts.

The duel that the young Torquatus fights under these circumstances is very different in character from that of his father:

Thus forgetful of the command of his father [imperii patrii] and the order of the consuls, he is driven headlong into a contest where it did not matter much whether he conquered or was conquered. When the other riders had withdrawn, as if at a spectacle, they drove their horses against one another in the area of empty field that lay between them. As they clashed with their opposed weapons, the spear of Manlius flew over his opponent’s helmet; Maecius’s glided over the neck of Manlius’s horse. On the second charge, when Manlius rose first to deliver his blow, he planted his missile between the ears of the Latin’s horse. Feeling his wound, the horse reared up and shook his head with such force that he unseated his rider, whom, while he leaned upon his shield and spear and was raising himself from a bad fall, Manlius stabbed through the throat so hard that the spear came out through his ribs and pinned him to the ground. Gathering up the spoils and returning to his fellows, he headed straight for the camp, accompanied by his rejoicing squadron, and to his father’s tent, uncertain of his fate and destiny, whether he deserved punishment or praise.

Here, too, the fight takes the form of a spectaculum, yet unlike his father’s battle with the Gaul, it is a spectaculum entirely without consequences, a mere spectacle. Since Torquatus fights entirely alone, without contact with the imperium of the magistrate or the aid of the gods, his victory will prove nothing about the real sources of Roman power, it can only be meaningless. As opposed to the reserve and discipline of his father, which stood as a foil to the extravagant display of his opponent, the son appears from the first as out of control, “driven headlong” to battle rather than choosing it; the errant casts of the combatants and panic of the stricken horse aptly represent the absence of any restraining influence. Correspondingly, the narrative itself is constructed as a flamboyant pastiche of Homeric elements; the repeated throws, wounded horse, and the anatomic specificity in the description of the final blow all suggest the world of epic.81 What is missing from this narrative, apart from the description of the “rejoicing squadron,” is any reference to the effect the duel possesses upon its spectators.

Unlike his father, this Torquatus does not limit himself to a single token of victory but gathers spoils from his fallen opponent. The youth’s enthusiasm for spolia, of the sort that were frequently displayed on the façades of the houses of the nobility,82 aptly connects the misplaced interest in insubstantial visual signs illustrated in the account of the duel to a flawed conception of the relationship between family glory and the needs of the res publica. Pointing to the spolia, the young man tells his father that he chose to engage in combat in order to live up to the precedent of his own earlier duel, “so that all would say that I was truly born of your stock” (8.7.13). Torquatus’s mistake is not so much to have placed his desire to exalt himself and his gens above obedience to the orders of the consul as to have failed to realize that there simply ought to be no difference between the demands of family and patria. This was one of the lessons of his father’s duel, where the dictator’s formal command to fight served to fuse duty to the family with patriotism. Torquatus was to be of “outstanding pietas toward father and fatherland.” By winning his duel, he had earned both praise from the dictator and an honorific cognomen. The unity of the authority of family and state ought to have been especially clear to the young Manlius, since the consul whom he should have obeyed and the father whose example he wished emulate were one and the same person.

The speech in which the consul sentences his son to death for disobedience elucidates the relationship between the misinterpretation of visual signs and the breakdown in the patterns of order upon which the survival of the state depends:

Since, Titus Manlius, you have respected neither the imperium of the consul nor the supremacy of your father, and have fought against the enemy contrary to orders and outside of your position, and, as much as you could, eroded that military discipline by which the Roman state has stood until this day, and have led me into the necessity of neglecting either my own interest or that of the res publica, we shall be afflicted by our fault rather than the nation pay the penalty for our sins. We shall be a severe exemplum but a healthy one for the youth [triste exemplum sed in posterum salubre iuventuti erimus]. I am indeed moved by the natural love of fathers for their children and by the appearance you give of virtue deceived by a false image of honor, but since the imperia of the consuls must be either sanctified by your blood or be henceforward violated with impunity, I would think that not even you, if you have any drop of my blood, would deny that you must restore through your punishment the military discipline that has been compromised by your error—go, lictor, tie him to the stake!

His son was lured into fighting this battle by a “false image” (vana imago) of glory (8.7.18), which finds a corollary in the sight of the spolia with which the consul has just been confronted. In participating in the duel, however, his son was not just a victim of deception; through the excitement aroused by the combat and his own use of signs to commemorate his victory, he has helped perpetuate the “empty image of glory” responsible for his own mistake. He himself has become in his father’s words a “specimen”(8.7.18). Thus in contrast to Valerius Corvus, the sight of whose victory served to communicate the power of the gods responsible for his success to all the spectators of the duel, the young Torquatus has set in motion a sequence of visual signs that, if left unchecked, is in danger of deceiving those who witnessed it and drawing them away from the disciplina that links them to the imperium of the state. Another of the dangerous consequences of the youth’s action afflicts the father himself. By assuming that the chance to win glory for his family justified disobedience to orders, his son had created an opposition between the service of family and state. His disobedience compels his father in turn to choose between personal interests and affections and the demands of public duty. By presenting the punishment of his son as something that his family’s tradition of obedience requires, and by compelling the young man himself to acquiesce in the principle that necessitates his death on the basis of heredity, the consul attempts to make the execution a sight that will paradoxically restore the alignment between family honor and the interest of the nation.

To correct his son’s error, the consul produces another spectacle, the young champion’s execution, to be witnessed by precisely the same audience who exalted in his success. This spectacle ought to put on display all the personal and national qualities conspicuously absent in the duel itself. Personal fortitude, family honor, and the authorization of the consul unite in an image which will restore and “sanctify” (sancienda [8.7.19]) that bond between each individual and the power of the state that is the secret of Roman difference. Unlike the empty and ultimately insignificant duel, the execution will take its place within the “official” tradition of Roman history, recalling one of the founding acts of the res publica, Brutus’s execution of his sons: it will be a salubre exemplum, designed not just for its immediate audience but to provide a model for the future as well.

We are forced to speak about what the spectacle of the execution ought to reveal rather than what it does reveal because Livy avoids describing the actual moment of Manlius’s execution and allows his audience to see it only as it is reflected in the eyes of those who watch it:

All were stunned [exanimati] by such a ruthless command and were silenced by fear rather than moderation, just as if each one saw the ax prepared for him. And so they stood in silence rooted to the spot [defixi], their senses, as it were, overwhelmed by astonishment. Suddenly after the blood poured forth from the victim’s neck, their voices rose in such an unrestrained cry that they held back neither from mourning nor from curses, and the youth, covered with his spoils, was given a funeral with all possible marks of the favor of his fellow soldiers and burnt on a pyre built up outside the camp. And “Manlian imperia”were not only terrifying in the present but served as a cruel example for the future [exempli etiam triste in posteritatem]. But nevertheless the very ruthlessness of the punishment made the soldiers more obedient to their leader, and since guards and watches and the stationings were conducted with greater care, this severity was beneficial in the final battle.

The very absence of narrative specificity about the execution itself creates an opposition between this scene and the duel, with its carefully descriptive detail. The technique provides a corollary to the absence of external signs with which Torquatus had confronted the merely visual magnificence of the Gaul. But if the spectacle itself has vanished from Livy’s text, the decision to describe the spectators rather than the action shifts the emphasis of the scene to the effect of spectacle. Nowhere in Livy’s text is the sympathy that develops between audience and the object of spectacle more clearly evoked. So strongly do the spectator’s identify themselves with Manlius that they actually seem to take his place as victim; they see the axes raised against them. As in the other spectacles discussed, the audience take on the characteristics of their surrogate. He is deprived of life; they, too, are exanimati. During the very time when the victim is immobilized by being bound to the stake, they are described as “rooted to the spot” (defixi). As such, the young men who had before identified only with the victor of the duel come to resemble the posture of the defeated, whom Manlius pinned to the ground (adfixit [8.7.11]) with his spear.

Livy’s emphasis on the horror experienced by Manlius’s fellow soldiers has been read as an implicit criticism of the consul’s severity. Torquatus, in contrast to his fellow consul Decius, mistakes cruelty and extremism for duty, and the fact that the youth of Rome will never be reconciled to his authority, even going so far as to spurn his triumph,83 seems to suggest that the execution has failed to be anything other than an exercise in violence.84 But nothing in the text leads us to look for compromise or reconciliation. The consul predicts that the exemplum he produces will be both triste and salubre, and indeed it is the very cruelty of the penalty that is the key to its effectiveness. As Livy puts it, the atrocitas of the punishment makes the soldiers more obedient. The consul’s remedy relies upon the same mechanism of sympathetic contact by which the influence of imperium communicates itself in duels and devotiones. The punishment of the victim here becomes the punishment of the audience who, having identified with his success in the duel, now experience his execution as their own. If we, Livy’s audience, have rejoiced in Manlius’s success without perceiving its illegality, then the exemplum is as much for us as for the soldiers who were actually present. Thus it is by recreating the full impact of the spectacle on those who witness it that Livy most effectively communicates the influence of the exemplum through his text.

The execution therefore, rather than harmonizing the social and ethical tensions resulting from Manlius’s disobedience, necessarily articulates them with the greatest clarity. For this reason, even in the midst of the consul’s exemplum a rival spectacle is produced, which enshrines an image of precisely the values that have necessitated the punishment. Manlius’s comrades immediately give the victim a funeral where the tokens of victory, the spolia that occasioned his death, are again placed on triumphant display in such a way as almost to conceal the corpse itself and allow the youth’s glorious accomplishments to obliterate the traces left by his punishment.85 Like the burial of an epic hero, the scene concludes with the construction of a pyre, a monument in this case both to the son’s glory and the father’s cruelty. The episode therefore generates a double historical legacy; the image of the young man’s victory and the consul’s cruelty are infixed in the disciplinary exemplum he produces. Yet by ensuring that the exemplum continues to be felt as triste, they also preserve it as salubre.

The execution of Manlius is not the only such doubled spectacle that appears in Livy’s text. In the next chapter, we shall see that similar scenes occur precisely in contexts that require Roman society to redefine itself by simultaneously excluding outsiders and cementing new bonds of loyalty between insiders. These spectacles perform the same “initiatory” function as the execution of Manlius, which is designed to restore the soldiery to obedience to the imperium of the consul. A clue to the nature of these spectacles is to be found in the remark of a later historian, Valerius Maximus, that the young Manlius perished in modum hostiae, “like a sacrificial victim.”86

I. The Boundaries of the Patria

At Rome every five years, when the censors drew up their list of Roman citizens, the members of the state assembled on the Campus Martius, and a pig, sheep, and bull were led around them in a circle and then sacrificed. The same ritual performance, called a lustratio, was used to prepare an army for battle and to purify the weapons and trumpets before and after each campaign. In 28 B.C.E., after a lapse of forty-one years, Augustus restored the census, together with the performance of a lustratio, as a part of his renewal of Roman civic rituals after the end of the civil wars.9 Whatever proportion of Roman citizens had actually experienced such a lustration, the frequent depictions of the scene in art,10 its recurrence throughout the Roman religious calendar, and Augustus’s very interest in restoring it show how profoundly the performance was associated with the constitution of the civic body. The ritual’s structure both expresses and gives shape to the Roman conceptualization of what it means to become a citizen.

The lustratio used to be thought of primarily as a purificatory ritual and many attempts were made to connect it etymologically with the root that means cleanse.11 But as Versnel emphasizes, lustration rituals generally take place at the beginnings of enterprises rather than at their conclusions. The army is lustrated before, not after, a battle, when there is no blood guilt to be purged. In consequence, Versnel argues that in addition to its purifying or apotropaic elements, the act of lustratio also possessed a constitutive function, defining the group preparatory to collective action.12 Within the ritual, it is most obviously the gesture of encirclement by the procession of priests and victims that differentiates the group from the outside world. The exclusionary as well as inclusive nature of lustratio appears from the instructions that survive in an Umbrian inscription from the city of Gubbio, where the ceremony begins with the explicit and elaborate listing of foreign peoples who are commanded to depart.13 The second element of the lustratio, the sacrifice, may be rationalized as a gift to the gods for their protection of the lustrated body,14 but, as discussed more fully later in this chapter, sacrifice itself can function as a mechanism of social bonding and in this respect complements the constitutive function implied in the gesture of encirclement.

But the use of lustration, as of sacrifice, extends far beyond rituals involving the entire state. The earliest reference to lustration describes its application to a farmer’s field,15 and the combination of animals used in the procession suggests an agricultural origin. Moreover, its use was not limited to Rome; as we have seen, the most detailed description of lustration comes from an Umbrian city. Even the individual body was lustrated both nine days after birth (eight days for females) and nine days after death.16 In the case of the lustration of babies, the obvious protective function of the practice is once again coupled with a constitutive dimension. It is at the ceremony of the dies lustricus that the baby is given a name and thus acquires an identity.17 The multiplicity of possible lustrationes creates an image of each individual enclosed, not just within the magic circle of the state, but within any number of different rings, each of which define him as a member of a particular social entity, such as a local community or a particular family. At the smallest level, even the body emerges as microcosm of the whole.

A map of affiliations similar to the one suggested by these overlapping lustrationes also underlies discussions of conflicts of loyalties in Cicero’s ethical writings. Although his native town of Arpinum had obtained citizenship three generations before his birth, and he himself was even awarded the title of pater patriae for his services to Rome, Cicero is still at pains to define the relationship between his native place and the Roman res publica. As book 2 of the De legibus begins, Atticus is surprised to hear Cicero refer to Arpinum as his patria, and Cicero responds by asserting that “everyone from the towns has two patriae, one of nature, and one of citizenship.”18 Already the problem of terminology arises; Cicero must create the terms patria naturae, “natural fatherland,” and patria civitatis, “fatherland of citizenship,” to articulate the division of what had been a unitary idea. Ultimately, it is not the venerable opposition between nomos and phusis that justifies greater allegiance to the larger patria but the larger extent of the community. “It is necessary that the patria, where the name of res publica is a marker of our common citizenship, stand first in our affections; for which we ought to die and to which we ought to devote ourselves entirely and upon which as an altar we ought to set and as it were sacrifice all our goods.” In the De officiis, a much larger set of possible societies, extending all the way to the human species, is again sorted by size. The inner core is defined by the family, with the husband and wife at its center. The emotional bond within the family is based both on a natural desire for propagation19 and, at a further remove, on benevolentia and caritas arising from the sharing of monumenta maiorum, religious rites, and burial places.20 On the basis of this organization, it seems as though the nearer bond should predominate. Yet after apparently leading to this conclusion, at the climax of the whole discussion, Cicero says that no bond is carior or gravior than that which links us to the res publica.21 Here the order of rating these associations is suddenly reversed. In contrast to the centripetal tendency of the previous discussion, the Republic is now to be valued most highly precisely because it surrounds all other forms of community. “The one patria has embraced [complexa est] all the loves [caritates] of all.”22

But Cicero’s appeal to caritas as a motive for patriotism contains the kernel of a paradox that would recur frequently in Roman discussions of civic participation.23 It has been argued that the new allegiance to Rome presented no conflicts for the new citizens because it existed “on a different level” from the previous citizenship to the native state.24 In the sense that Roman citizenship supplemented rather than replaced municipal citizenship, it was not in direct competition with it. However in the De legibus, the distinction between “legal” citizenship and “natural” or affective citizenship does not imply a qualitative difference in the kind of bond that obtains between the citizen and his two patriae; it is on the same subjective scale of dearness or caritas that the more distant state must prevail over the smaller.25 And the reality of this conflict is revealed when Cicero immediately qualifies his ringing call for patriotism: “However, the patria that bore us is dear in almost the same way as that which receives us.”26 Thus Cicero’s formulation seems less a schematized resolution of this possible conflict of loyalties than a diagnosis of an abiding tension in the construction of each individual’s civic identity. Yet there is a still larger contradiction in this model of patriotism. It is not sufficient simply to serve the patria because we understand that it protects and enfolds those nearer groups like wife and family whom we love “naturally.” Cicero demands that we feel even greater love for the state than we do for other associations: we must, in other words, think of the Republic in the same terms in which we think of the family and even subordinate to this entity those nearer bonds on which patriotism itself is originally based.

The canonical images of Roman patriotism highlight the rejection of these “inner circles” for the interest of the state. Cincinnatus leaves his farm to become dictator; Brutus presides over the execution of his sons for treason; and Mucius Scaevola, in what is effectively a declaration of Roman citizenship,27 burns off his hand. Livy constructs the Cincinnatus episode, which is explicitly directed at those who prefer wealth to virtus (4.26.7), to emphasize particularly the passage into the public space, from which Cincinnatus’s farm is symbolically separated by the Tiber River. His famous gesture of putting on the toga recalls the assumption of the toga virilis by every youth as he entered manhood. And the procession that receives the dictator, after he has been carried across the Tiber “on a public ship,” recapitulates the transition: “Three sons went to meet him, next intimates and friends, then the majority of the Senate.”

Such exempla not only teach the subordination of the smaller unit in the interests of the larger state but also reinforce both the interdependency and the parallelism between family, state, and body. As we shall see in chapter 5, at the moment when Brutus puts the interest of the state ahead of his paternal feeling, his relationship to the patria is redefined as that between a father and his children. Other explicitly didactic moments of Livy’s early books similarly encourage a perception of the state not just as the protector of the family or body but as a family or body. For example, after a performance of the “Great Games,” the plebeian Titus Latinius receives a prophetic dream warning him that the city is in danger because the games have not been properly conducted (2.36).28 Before the spectacle began, a paterfamilias had had his slave killed in the arena. Latinius is afraid that he will be laughed at if he tells anyone about his dream and so disregards it. A few days later his son dies. When he hesitates even longer, his own body is stricken with disease. The event implies more than the interconnectedness of family and state; it suggests that the res publica is a family or body in macrocosm.29 The same point lies behind the famous parable of the belly and the limbs, which the patrician Menenius Agrippa tells to a group of plebeians who are trying to sever their bonds to the Rome and form a new city (2.32.8–12). When the limbs, or plebeians, begrudge food to the belly, which represents the patricians, they themselves begin to fail. Thus the inherent comparability of the state to the family or the body provides a constant resource for the generation of collective loyalty; plebeians blind to the functioning of the state as a whole can be made to perceive its indissolubility when projected onto the level of the body.30

Nor is this message directed only at controlling the lower classes; patricians as well as plebeians are inclined both to place concerns for their honor above the welfare of the state and to miss the integral connection between family and res publica. Thus the patrician rebel Coriolanus, in the scene that concludes the complex of episodes beginning with Latinius’s dream, abandons his attack on Rome when his mother makes him realize that by becoming an enemy to the state, he has also changed his relationship to his family.31 When Coriolanus attempts to embrace her, his mother asks whether she comes as a captive to a conqueror or as a mother to a son (2.40.6). The lurid possibility that Coriolanus’s mother might become his slave, and, as such, his concubine, reveals in the most powerful way the complete inversion of the structure of the familia.

One further demonstration of this pattern of interdependency from Livy’s second book suggests a more complex relationship between the entities of body and state (2.23). An old soldier who has been reduced to abject misery by debt slavery hurls himself into the middle of the Forum. Exhausted, he can only point to the scars he has earned in battle. When he finally begins to speak, he chronicles how public misfortunes and unjust economic practices have reduced him to misery. The exigencies of recent wars, raids, and the taxes required to maintain Rome’s military endeavors have forced him from his ancestral farm (ager paternus avitusque, 2.23.6), which, through the adjectives applied to it, becomes emblematic of the family as a whole. Finally, after having been cast into slavery, his misfortune, “as though a disease [velut tabem] reached his body” (2.23.6), in the form of the marks of the lash, which he then reveals to the crowd. The speech illustrates the predictable pattern. Evils afflicting the state work inward to destroy the family and waste the body until the body becomes a “text” where the health of the community can be clearly perceived. Indeed, this “text,” with its division between the honorable scars won in foreign wars and the shameful lash marks that testify to his domestic misfortunes, mirrors the traditional annalistic alternation between foreign and internal affairs employed in Livy’s own history.

A closer look at how Livy has structured his narrative suggests that the relationship between body and state serves as more than an intellectualized schema of similarities employed for solely didactic purposes. The impact of the state on the body can be thought of less as a series of causes and effects projected inward than as a kind of quasi-magical sympathy by which the body receives influences from the whole. Livy’s description of the interaction between the individual soldier and the crowd highlights a mutual exchange of energy affecting both the spectators and the object of their gaze. After hurling himself into the Forum, the old soldier seems able to take no further action. Indeed, he appears hardly human; the narrative breaks him down into his constituent parts, filthy clothes, a disgusting bodily condition, a long beard, and disheveled hair. This condition is explicitly stated to have “made his appearance wild.”32 That a capable human form slowly emerges from this image of impotence and subhumanity is largely due to the activity of the spectators themselves. By being recognized, the old man is given an identity and a past. Finally, he himself takes part in the process by pointing out his wounds, witnesses (testes) of his past public service.

As the presence of the crowd of onlookers reanimates the old soldier, they themselves begin to take on a coherent shape and purpose. At first, there is no mention of the number or organization of the onlookers. We become aware that there is in fact an audience only when the old man is recognized by someone (2.23.4). Yet as the soldier, now identifiable as such, becomes active and is about to speak, we are informed that a crowd, turba, has gathered and has come to approximate the form of a political assembly (prope modo contionis [2.23.5]). Moreover, after he finds a voice, the crowd too becomes articulate, responding with clamor to his revelations (2.23.7). Finally, the crowd breaks its bounds and aggressively invades the whole city.

In this case, the effect of the spectacle of the old soldiers is not to reunite the state but to create essentially an alternative state, which is only reconciled several years later by the parable of Menenius Agrippa. Nevertheless, the scene is important for our purposes because it recapitulates the concentric social groups by which an individual can be defined, and suggests the reciprocal interdependence among them. Moreover, it demonstrates the role of visual contact as the locus of exchange where this interdependence is brought into play and where the various “rings” influence one another. Both of these ideas play a large role in Livy’s depiction of the fusion of Alba and Rome.

II. The Horatii and Curiatii

The Roman victory over the Albans was practically bloodless even for the losers. There was no siege, and in place of a formal battle, both sides had agreed to let the contest between them be decided by the outcome of a combat between two sets of triplets. Thus when the Roman troops come to destroy Alba itself, they are confronted with a paradox; technically, the city has already fallen, but its appearance is unchanged:

There was none of the uproar and terror that usually belongs to captured cities, when after the gates have been broken down, the walls laid low by battering rams, and the citadel taken by force, the cries of the enemy and the rush of armed men through the city throw all things into confusion with fire and sword, but a sad calm and silent sorrow so cast down the spirits of all that they kept asking one another what they should leave behind and what they should take with them, their own judgment failing out of fear, and now they stood in the doorways, now they wandered aimlessly to look upon their homes for this last time.

Aeneas left Troy when it was already burning, but the Albans are suddenly forced to abandon both their city and their homes intact in order to make the journey to Rome. Although the Albans’ plight in one sense is the opposite of that of the Ciceronian persona, for whom the native place of Arpinum will continue to be a lingering alternative, Livy’s treatment of the scene emphasizes the moment when local ties are surrendered and the Albans become members of a new state, which, unlike the city they must renounce, is invisible.

But as the outcry of the knights ordering them to leave pressed in upon them and the crash of the buildings that were being destroyed on the edges of the city was heard and the dust rising from distant places had filled everything as if with a cloud, snatching up whatever they could, they went out leaving behind their household gods and the buildings where they were born and raised.

These Albans had not been present at the loss of the duel that ended the autonomy of their city, nor when their dictator had been torn apart by chariots for violating the treaty. They experience the fall of their state as a ring of destruction, which gradually closes in on each individual spectator, advancing from “the farthest parts of the city,” until, like a cloud, it blocks out the sight of their homes.33

Alba possesses a special relationship to Rome unlike any other enemy. Not only was it the “native patria”of the first Roman king, but many of Rome’s great families, including the Julii themselves, came to Rome only after its fall (1.30.1–2). By relating this detail just after the description of the sack of the city, Livy blurs the boundary between Roman and enemy. In becoming Romans, the Albans bind themselves to the imperium of the victorious city alone; Albans as a category cease to exist. But by the same token, it becomes impossible to demarcate the pathetic experiences that befall the Albans as something belonging to a distinct, enemy people.34 The Roman nation is as much a legacy of the destruction of Alba as of the victory of Rome. In fact, despite the destruction of its secular buildings, Alba continues to survive as a religious center, an eternally “absent” city.35 In this sense, Livy’s narrative of its destruction constitutes a challenge in perspective for his contemporary audience. If allegiance is strictly defined by citizenship, there is no question but that the audience will identify itself with the Romans; even the Albans themselves at the moment when their city is destroyed are technically Romans. But the claims of ancestry and heritage, the very factors that move the defeated Albans, resist a purely nationalist interpretation. The conflict between Rome and Alba, a quasi-legendary event, which on its own could not possibly inspire any strong feelings in the first century B.C.E., becomes a means of articulating and responding to one of the central crises of Livy’s day, the fault lines implicit in the construction of a Roman national identity.

However, the problem of distinguishing between Alba and Rome is not confined to Livy’s audience; it is explicitly addressed at the beginning of the historian’s account of the Alban war.36 Not only does Livy emphasize the similarities between the institutions and ancestry of the two peoples,37 but even the motives of the conflict are the same for both sides. “By chance it happened that Roman shepherds were plundering Alban land, and the Albans were plundering Roman land in turn.…Embassies were sent on each side at almost the same time” (1.22.3–4). And beyond the immediate causes of war, both sides are motivated by a similar desire for conflict. Tullus Hostilius, the new Roman king is eager for glory and also fears that the Romans have been debilitated by too long a period of peace. The Alban dictator emphasizes this point in his address to the Romans: “If the true cause of the war rather than its pretenses [speciosa dictu] must be declared, the desire for glory has driven two related and neighboring peoples to arms” (1.23.7). Such an admission, which the audience knows to be largely valid for the Roman side, seriously undercuts the logic of the “just war,” by which the Romans interpreted victories over their opponents as proof that their own claims for restitution were legitimate and their conduct of negotiations formally correct. Beyond that, as we saw in chapter 2, military success validates the society as a whole, from the physical prowess of its individual soldiers to the propriety of its political and religious practices, and ultimately to the historical tradition that gave rise to them. But since the Albans share the same institutions and history, the kinds of distinction that the Romans used to define a foreign enemy are rendered meaningless.38

The first attempt to establish a distinction between Roman and Alban consists of a trick involving the diplomatic procedures leading up to the declaration of war. Both sides had sent embassies demanding restitution simultaneously, but Tullus Hostilius puts off the Alban ambassadors with excessive hospitality until he is informed that the Roman claims have already been rejected by the Alban king. Therefore the Romans can legitimately (pie [1.22.4]) declare war. “Announce to your king,” Tullus tells the Albans, “that the Roman king calls upon the gods as witnesses of which people first rejected the embassy, so that they might exact all the losses of war against them” (1.22.7). This trickery may seem dubious or even impious, but the Romans expected their leaders to be clever manipulators in the dealings between men and gods.39 Not only will the king’s claim be confirmed by the eventual Roman victory, but his use of appearances to trick the Albans, particularly his sudden revelation to the ambassadors that they are being watched by the gods, foreshadows the other decisive moments in the conflict.

Mettius Fufetius, who has become leader of the Albans after the death of their king, explicitly poses the question of discrimination between the two peoples just as the two armies are on the verge of battle (1.23.7–9). He dismisses both sides’ claims about the responsibility for the conflict as mere pretenses (speciosa dictu) and exposes the true causes of the war as a mutual desire for power (cupido imperii). Given this shared ambition, the task, he says, is to “find a way to decide which people will rule the other without a great slaughter of either” (1.23.9). For the empire of the Etruscans, their common enemies, surrounds both peoples. In making this appeal to fear of a common enemy, Mettius employs the same argument that will be frequently used in resolving internal disunity at Rome, the exposure of an encircling Other whose presence defines the warring factions as allies.40 Mettius goes on to describe the relationship among the three peoples through the metaphor of a spectacle: “Be mindful…these two armies in battle will be a spectacle [for the Etruscans], so that they will attack conqueror and conquered together, weary and depleted” (Memor esto, iam cum signo pugnae dabis, has duas acies spectaculo [sc. Etruscis] fore ut fessos confectosque simul victorem ac victum adgrediantur [1.23.9]). The Etruscans will be able to watch unconcerned as the two armies weaken themselves to the point of being able to offer no resistance. The spectator, this model implies, detached from the action he observes, occupies a position of superiority and is able to gain from the conflict of those he watches without risk. This view of spectacle is of a piece with Mettius’s earlier dismissal of the demands of the ambassadors as “specious.” The Roman king, as we have seen, far from dismissing appearances as irrelevant, is eager to win his competition with the Albans even on the level of the speciosa. Thus the Romans’ belief in the efficacy and validity of appearances already appears as a crucial difference between the two peoples, and in fact the manipulation of appearances will play an ever-larger role in the subsequent contest.

The result of Mettius’s speech is that both sides agree to solve their dispute through a duel between two sets of triplets, the Horatii and Curiatii, whose outcome will decide “which people will rule which.” Initially, the Albans seem likely to prevail, as they kill the first two Romans and face the last with a three to one advantage. But finally the survivor manages to overcome all three of his opponents. The actions of the Horatii exemplify the conceptions of patriotism just analyzed. Like Mucius Scaevola and other exemplary figures, such as Torquatus and Corvus, the triplets agree to risk their own lives in the interest of their patria. Furthermore, the progressive isolation of the surviving Horatius, first from the state as a whole and then from his slaughtered brothers, draws attention precisely to the concentric levels of social affiliation out of which, according to the Ciceronian model, patriotism is built.41

But the Roman’s victory depends on drawing together the interests of family and state as well as placing them in the correct hierarchy. Thus when he kills the last Curiatius, Horatius cries that he “has given two [Albans] to the shades of his brothers, and now slays the third in order that the Romans shall rule the Albans.” In contrast, for the last Alban, the family loss keeps him from fighting effectively; he is “already defeated by the slaughter of his brothers.”42 Moreover Horatius’s very body takes on an important quality of the state as a whole, its indivisibility. Although his two brothers have been killed, Horatius is integer and is later described as intactum.43 This “wholeness” contrasts with the Albans’ disintegration at every level. The climax of the fight comes after the first two Romans have been killed and the Albans surround the survivor.44 Here Horatius makes the crucial decision to separate them by fleeing, a device that leaves an indelible visual trace in the three monuments of the dead Albans, “separated by intervals,” which Livy describes at the end of the battle (1.25.14). By separating his opponents, Horatius has moved from a contest between groups to one between individuals, where the integrity of his body can prevail over the wounded Albans.45

By agreeing to have their conflict settled by a duel while the rest of the armies simply look on, the Romans and Albans have effectively set up a spectacle very similar to that imagined by Mettius Fufetius. Both armies avoid mutual destruction by choosing surrogates to fight for them and participate only as spectators, free from danger. But unlike the hypothetical Etruscan spectators, the two armies are not disconnected from the fate of those they watch. As Livy describes the duel, he emphasizes the same set of reciprocal links between spectators and spectacle, crowd and individual, that we saw in the episode of the old soldier. Thus rather than distancing the watcher from the event, spectacle forms a bridge between the spectators and their champions by which the larger and smaller groups are brought into contact with one another. The crowds encourage and inspire their champions and in turn respond to their defeats and victories with an excitement or despair that makes them collectively mirror the attributes of the individual.

Livy’s account of the spectators’ anxiety as they watch the duel goes back to a very famous literary model, Thucydides’ description of the battle in the harbor of Syracuse, where the land armies can only look on as the naval combat decides their fate.46 But one crucial difference between the two narratives reveals Livy’s particular emphasis. Thucydides’ account focuses on the inability of each spectator to gain a clear understanding of the course of the battle as a whole because of the limited perspective from which he views it. Those who happen to see the Athenians winning are encouraged; those who see them being defeated are despondent. As a result, the experiences of the spectators, described in highly physical language, depend entirely on the emotions generated by their limited perceptions of events, rather than the influence of the complete events themselves. Even though Livy’s narrative of the duel has the combatants chase each other for great distances over uneven terrain, there is never a moment when they are out of sight of either army or where either side is in any doubt about who is who.47 Thus Livy has sacrificed strict verisimilitude in order to keep the link between spectators and spectacle unbroken.

The exchange between the spectator armies and the individual combatants, like that between the crowd and the soldier, impacts equally upon watcher and watched. At the simplest level, the armies inspire their champions by shouting encouragement, and conversely the successes or failures of the individuals inspire or distress the larger groups. But Livy’s vivid description lends these effects an air of physicality that suggests a more radical sympathy between crowd and individual: the responses of the spectator armies mimic the very combat that the duel was designed to prevent. The watching armies are “raised up, held suspended, in their mind they are stretched out48 toward the unpleasant spectacle.” When the battle begins, “mighty terror binds the spectators, and while hope is inclined on neither side, their voice and spiritus grow dull” (1.25.4). This sentence gives the effect of their anxiety not only an air of uniformity but also an almost anatomical specificity. The experiences of the group are thus described in terms applicable to a single individual.49 Moreover the dulling of the spectators’ spiritus mirrors precisely the experience of the dying Horatii, who are described with the cognate word exspirantes (1.25.5).50 Correspondingly, Livy describes the combatants as like a battle line (acies) bearing the courage (animi) of great armies (1.25.3). The few actors lose their individual identities and an awareness of their individual fates in assuming responsibility for the destiny of their cities. Conversely, each of the spectators must individually experience the physical effects suffered by the bodies that represent them.51

Livy also correlates the process of watching with the fulfillment of the purpose for which the duel was designed, to allow for a distinction to be made between the two peoples, “to decide which will rule [imperent] which” (1.23.9). The first five sentences of his description contain no proper nouns or adjectives, referring only to “each side” or simply “they.”52 At the beginning of the combat, not only do Albans and Romans share the same experiences, but the narrative makes it literally impossible for the audience to distinguish one side from the other. Correspondingly, Livy has already remarked that although he follows those who say that it was the Horatii who fought for Rome, there are other versions that call the Curiatii the Roman champions, an admission that further blurs the distinction between the two sides almost at the expense of the authority of his own narrative.53 The indifferentiability of the two sides persists until the instant when an action on the battlefield inclines the advantage toward one side. Two of the Horatii are quickly killed by the Albans. Thus an inequality is established, which is immediately registered both among the spectators, who necessarily respond differently, and in the narrative itself, where the terms Albani and Romani allow the reader to tell the two sides apart for the first time (1.25.5).

But the spectators’ responses do not just provide an index of difference recording the progress of the combat. After the Roman champion has won the victory by dispatching all three Albans himself, the two armies are described as burying their dead “with not at all the same spirits [nequaquam paribus animis], since one side has been enriched with authority [aucti imperio] and the other has lost its independence” (1.25.13). This description reflects the final exultation and despair that the two sides have respectively experienced as spectators and simultaneously shows that the larger purpose of the duel, the apportionment of imperium, has been accomplished. In other words, the duel has not just resolved the dispute in favor of the Romans; it has imposed a difference distinguishing them from the Albans.54 Just as the champions were inspired by them, the spectators have been empowered by visual contact with their champions. This is revealed by the phrase aucti imperio used of the Romans. As we have seen, Wagenvoort interprets imperium as the strengthening force communicated by a leader to his troops,55 and augeo is the proper verb for its transference.56 As in the case of Torquatus and Corvus, so too the champions here become the means for a reciprocal exchange of imperium. The Horatii and Curiatii are summoned to fight by their commanders (1.24.2) and receive the encouragement of their respective armies (1.25.1); in return the sight of Horatius’s victory in combat has increased the imperium of his entire people.

III. The Death of Horatia

Livy’s description of the duel presents two diametrically opposed vantage points on the unfolding action, that of the victorious Romans who identify with the eventual killer of Curiatius and that of the Albans who identify with the victim. It is nationality alone that determines which of these irreconcilable perspectives each spectator adopts. There is obviously no question of a pro-Curiatius faction among the Roman troops. Thus the act of watching becomes a communal exercise that makes the experiences of all the spectators uniform, so that the entire nation responds as one individual, a unity that corresponds to the “wholeness” of the one man who represents them on the field. Not only does civic identity alone determine loyalty but it incorporates and harmonizes with the individual’s other motivations. When the last Horatius kills the Curiatii, he is both benefiting his patria and avenging his brothers; there is no distinction between what he owes the state and what he owes his family. The sequel to Horatius’s victory reverses all of these tendencies. Again, an alternative perspective on an act of violence is introduced, but no longer can the opposite viewpoint be relegated to those outside the patria. Moreover, this discrepancy in response results precisely from the spectator’s inability to adopt a national, as opposed to personal, perspective.

As Horatius enters the city bearing the triple spoils of the defeated Albans, his sister, who, we are now told, was betrothed to one of the Curiatii, begins to mourn and tear her hair. Her brother immediately kills her, with the cry, “Away to your betrothed with your untimely love, forgetful of your brothers living and dead, forgetful of your patria”(1.26.4). Livy’s narrative focuses the discrepancy between Horatia’s response and that of the “nation” on the interpretation of a visual sign. Horatius carries before him the weapons of the defeated triplets as spolia to commemorate his victory on behalf of the nation and thus to anchor his personal accomplishment in the history of the Roman people. Among the trophies is Curiatius’s paludamentum, a soldier’s cloak, which as a military garment was an appropriate spoil of victory. Horatia however recognizes the cloak as one that she, like a good Roman wife, has woven with her own hands.57 As the public celebrates the victory of her brother, Horatia alone pronounces the name of Curiatius.58

Initially, the conflict between Horatius and Horatia seems based exclusively on an opposition between family and state, which in turn depends on gender difference: the woman views the event only in terms of family connections and personal affection, while the all-male army champions the national perspective. But the actions and attitudes of neither character allow themselves to be so neatly characterized. Horatius’s own act of killing his sister violates both the laws of the state and the structure of authority within the family: it is only the father who possesses the legal right of life and death over Horatia. Conversely, the exclamation with which Horatius accompanies his deadly blow refuses to cede the realm of the family to his sister. In killing the Curiatii, he was avenging his brothers, whereas Horatia is equally disloyal to family and state. Moreover, as Georges Dumézil points out, by casting Horatia’s behavior as shamelessness,59 Horatius makes it the moral responsibility of the male members of the family to punish her, even if such behavior is technically illegal.60

Horatia’s rejection of her brothers out of loyalty to her future husband expresses a potential conflict for any Roman bride at the moment when she moves from the family of her brothers into the patria potestas of her father-in-law; in this respect too, her actions can be understood as illustrating tensions that lie exclusively within the family sphere.61 Indeed, the very site of the murder bears an association with this critical moment in a girl’s life. The tigillum sororium, which according to Livy’s narrative will be established to commemorate Horatius’s purification after the murder of his sister, is actually named for the temple of Juno Sororia, whose cult title derives from the verb sororiare, used to describe the swelling of a girl’s breast at puberty.62 And puberty for most Roman women coincided with marriage.

But just as both Horatia and her brother are impelled by their differing familial allegiances, so too at the national level the schism between them reflects not an opposition between “family” and “state” but an internal contradiction within the logic of patriotism itself. Although devotion to the patria must eventually take precedence over family loyalty, patriotism arises out of the very love of wives and children that it eventually supplants. So in the preface to Livy’s second book, he describes how the national unity of the Romans took time to develop, because it was only very gradually that a wandering people was sufficiently united by their affection for wives and children and love for the “place itself” (2.1.5).63 A practical example of how such unity can be forged from family bonds emerged in Livy’s account of the famous rape of the Sabine women. In the midst of the Sabines’ retaliation, their daughters intercede on behalf of their new husbands, the Romans, and the two peoples merge rather than becoming enemies.64 Horatia occupies exactly the same mediating position between the Romans and Albans. She thus represents those more intimate ties that engender patriotism and serves as a reminder of an alternative means of bringing about the unity of the two peoples, which in this case is implicitly rejected. Paradoxically her brother can only demonstrate his fully developed patriotism by killing her.65

By presenting the Curiatii as potentially linked to their rivals by ties of kinship, Horatia’s presence in the narrative challenges the radical differentiation between the Alban and Roman champions that was won by the duel. The Curiatii are no longer defined exclusively as “other,” foreign enemies, against whom violence is legitimate. Livy articulates this challenge by presenting it as an alternative spectacle, which “interferes” with the reception of Horatius’s victory both by contemporaries within the narrative and by his own audience. As Solodow has shown, the description of Horatius’s slaughter of his sister contains several echoes of his killing of the last Curiatius.66 In neither case does the victim offer any resistance, and Horatius accompanies each killing with a pithy exclamation imposing a meaning on the death.67 The verb used for the killing of Horatia, transfigit (1.26.3), is a cognate of defigit (1.25.12), which describes the death of Curiatius. References to Horatius’s ferocitas also draw together the two scenes.68 The response of the Romans to the killing of Horatia explicitly juxtaposes the two actions. “The deed seemed appalling [atrox] to patricians and plebeians, but his honor, still fresh, blocked out the act” (sed recens meritum facto obstabat [1.26.5]). The word obstabat suggests that Horatius’s honor, on visual display in the form of the spolia he bears, literally obstructs the viewer’s contact with the scene of the murder. Horatius’s father will use precisely the same device to persuade the people to spare his son. He points to the visual signs of Horatius’s public victory the Pila Horatia,69 and at the same time conjures up the image of his ovation, almost returning to the very instant before Horatia herself blocks (obvia [1.26.2]) her brother’s progress.70 The same doubling of visual signs is preserved for posterity, not only by Livy’s narrative, but in the more tangible form of the sepulcra with which Livy ends each half of his account. The three sepulcra of the Curiatii remain on the battlefield on the Roman side “separated in space just as the battle was fought,” but there is also a tomb for Horatia, similarly placed at the spot where she fell, the Porta Capena, at the entrance to the city (1.26.14).

But what can such a careful articulation of opposite viewpoints tell us about the functioning of Livy’s text? Dumézil, who also argues that the killing of Horatia forms a necessary complement to the duel, finds analogues for such structural ambivalence about the warrior’s role in an array of myths from other Indo-European cultures. The god Indra, for example, in Indian myth establishes cosmic order by slaying the demon Vṛtra and a three-headed monster. However, Vṛtra and the monster are also Brahmans, and thus their persons are inviolate and Indra must be punished for Brahmanicide. In a similar way, Horatius becomes at once the savior of the state and a murderer.71 Dumézil was interested in the myth itself and necessarily treats Livy’s narrative only as a means to its recovery. Solodow, who argues that the ambiguous treatment of the episode is unique to Livy and represents his individual development of the historical tradition, dismisses Dumézil’s analysis precisely for failing to take into account Livy’s originality. Here I want to suggest that the antitheses in Livy’s account of Horatius, whatever they may tell us about the historian’s personal views, correspond to a larger structure of oppositions in Roman religious institutions, one that can elucidate not the distant origins of the Horatius legend but the contemporary significance of Livy’s text.

Livy’s narrative itself offers a model for understanding its complexities. Between the speech of Mettius Fufetius and the beginning of the duel, there is a detailed description of the sacrifice that confirms the treaty between Romans and Albans (1.24.3–9). Far from being a mere antiquarian diversion, the account of the Fetial sacrifice sketches a set of relationships among its various participants that anticipates the tensions that will arise later in the episode.72 Like the mythical narratives studied by Dumézil, sacrifice possesses an inherently contradictory structure, in the sense that it suspends its audience between an identification with the one who performs the sacrifice and with his victim. The establishment of a sacrificial paradigm behind the narrative also anchors Livy’s text to a central socio-religious institution that became a particular focus of interest in the Augustan period precisely because of its intrinsic, practical connections to the issues of unification and alienation.

Livy’s description of the treaty ritual by which the Albans and Romans bind themselves to honor the outcome of the duel is the fullest that survives for this procedure.73 The ceremony begins with an elaborate dialogue in which the Fetial priest first asks the king for authority to strike the treaty. When the king grants it, the Fetial then demands the sagmina, a sacred piece of sod kept on the Capitoline. After another affirmative response, the priest asks to be made a messenger of the Roman people. The king approves, and the priest touches the head and hair of a certain Sp. Fusius with the sacred sod, making him pater patratus, the man who will actually perform the sacrifice and proclaim the treaty. The pater patratus recites the terms and then “strikes” the treaty by sacrificing a pig with a prayer to Jupiter to strike the Roman people, should they ever violate their promise, just as he strikes the pig.74

The first parts of the ceremony emphasize the hierarchical transference of authority from the king to his individual executor. The language of request and command (repeated archaic imperatives, posco, iubeo) punctuates the king’s empowerment of the pater patratus. Correspondingly, the gesture of touching the pater patratus with the sagmina literally places him in contact with a piece of living earth that has been ritually transferred from the highest, most sacred, and militarily most powerful point in the city.75 At the same time that these rituals set the bearers of power apart from the other members of the community, they also enable them to act as representatives of the entire Roman people. The king himself first demonstrates his ability to speak on behalf of the populus Romanus in his prayer that his action be accomplished “without fraud on my part or on that of the Roman people” (quod sine fraude mea populique Romani Quiritium fiat [1.24.5]). This is spoken in response to the Fetial’s own request that he himself be made a “royal messenger of the Roman people” (regius nuntius populi Romani) and his companions “vessels” (vasa [1.24.5]). The pater patratus in turn speaks on behalf of the entire people in agreeing to the treaty. The sacrifice of the pig represents the culmination of the unification of the power of the Roman people in the pater patratus; not only is he able to speak for the entire people, he enables them to strike with one hand.

But the violence effected by its representative is simultaneously reflected back on the community. If the Romans should ever violate the treaty, the striking of the pig, accomplished through their own surrogate, will become the fate of the people as a whole. Hence for the treaty to be effective, it is necessary for the Roman audience to identify not only with their representative, the pater patratus, but also with the victim; they must be able to visualize his death as their own. Both priest and victim are therefore marked out as surrogates for the community of spectators.

This doubling of the surrogates, made explicit in a treaty sacrifice where the spectators are compelled to see the victim’s death as their own, is by no means anomalous. Other sacrificial practices also establish a ritual link between sacrificer and victim that sets them apart from the other participants. Both were differentiated by their costume and adornments, the priest with his veiled head, and religious insignia, the victim adorned with fillets and garlands. In particular, the red color frequently worn by priests provided a visual link with the blood of the victim.76 Moreover, both priest and victim were required to possess certain attributes of the god to whom the sacrifice was offered.77 A final point of resemblance, which has particular relevance for Livy’s text, is the purity required of both priest and victims.78 The victim was not only to be free from all blemishes but never to have drawn the plow; priests had to wash their hands ritually and could not participate in sacrifices if there had been a death in the family.

A glance back from the account of the treaty ritual to the larger narrative of the duel in which it is embedded reveals similarities in both function and procedure that suggest that the Fetial sacrifice can be taken as the complement or even the template for the workings of the duel. Not only is the treaty ritual instrumental in fulfilling Mettius Fufetius’s goal of containing violence by compelling the Romans to abide by the outcome of the battle of surrogates, but the sacrifice itself operates by channeling violence, which is conceptually projected against the whole people, onto just one victim. “Strike the Roman people,” the pater patratus asks Jupiter, “just as I strike this pig.” Correspondingly, as the duel itself approaches its decisive moment, images of sacrifice supplant those of combat. If Livy’s goal had been simply to provide a gripping military narrative, we might have predicted that the battle with the last Alban would be the most closely fought of all. But Livy defuses any such expectations by making the outcome a fait accompli; indeed, he removes all possibility of viewing the final encounter as a military event with the explicit statement that it was “not a battle.”79 Rather than submerging Curiatius’s death in the suspense of a duel, with the audience wondering which of the two will prevail, Livy isolates and focuses attention on the act of killing itself. Moreover, the gesture of preceding the final blow with a speech recalls the action of the pater patratus, who makes his prayer at the precise moment before he slays the victim.80 And when Horatius speaks of “giving” (dedi, dabo) the Albans either to the souls of his brothers or for the victory of the Romans, he is using the language of a sacrificial offering.

The Horatii, appointed to use force against the enemy on behalf of the state or conversely to be killed as substitutes for the entire army, bring together in their own persons the roles of pater patratus and sacrificial victim. Like that of the pater patratus, their designation as champions takes place through the intervention of the king.81 But the triplets also possess the most crucial characteristic of the sacrificial victim; they consent to meet death of their own free will.82 Finally, this pattern of resemblances also offers a new significance for Livy’s emphasis on the whole (integer [1.25.7]) and untouched (intactus [1.25.11]) condition of the last Horatius.83 This freedom from blemish approximates both the ritual purity of the presiding priest at a sacrifice and the perfection of the sacrificial victim himself, whose health and suitability are tested before the ceremony begins.84

The progress of the narrative from Fetial ritual, to duel, to murder, and finally to punishment, builds upon the essential incompleteness and instability of any sacrificial act. Each act of violence both unites and divides the communities, both controls and perpetuates violence. Thus we see the duel from the perspective of Romans and Albans, and even the unity of the Roman “point of view” breaks down when Horatia refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Curiatius as a victim. The ambiguity is only reduplicated when the conqueror of the Albans now slays a victim who is indisputably a member of the community, thereby superimposing an improper “sacrifice” upon the image of his victory. This imbalance can only be corrected by yet another use of controlled violence, which inevitably reproduces the same tensions. The king, to whom Horatius is brought for trial (1.26.5), correspondingly acts in a way that both emphasizes scrupulous adherence to established procedures and defers responsibility for the death of Horatius. In accordance with an ancient law, which Livy quotes, duumviri are appointed to pass judgment on Horatius.85 Thus, just as in the treaty sacrifice that preceded the duel, the king’s role in the proceedings is only to empower agents, not to act himself. The reason Livy gives for the appointment of duumvirs is itself instructive; Tullus wishes to avoid being the source (auctor) of a judgment that will be displeasing to the crowd—in other words, to avoid being perceived as the killer of someone with whom the crowd identifies.

After having appeared as the champion who strikes down the Curiatii on behalf of the Roman people, and then as an “impure sacrificer,” Horatius by the sentence of the duumvirs is made a victim.86 An appeal to the people (provocatio) and a moving entreaty by his father avert his actual death. However, this entreaty gains its effect by essentially enacting the spectacle of Horatius’s execution. After legitimizing the death of Horatia, and pointing to the spoils won by his son as victorious surrogate for the patria, the elder Horatius then constructs a scene of execution, in which his son can only be an object of sympathy. “Go lictor bind the hands that, once armed, bore imperium for the Roman people. Go veil the head of the liberator of this city” (1.26.11). This attention to the various parts of Horatius’s body, following the formula of the sentence of execution, constitutes a kind of dismemberment of the individual whose “integrity” was the key to the nation’s triumph. Correspondingly, Horatius also defines the audience who watch the dismemberment of the victim by calling it “a spectacle too hideous for even Alban eyes to bear.” Thus again the spectacle of the execution is imagined as an inversion of the triumphant duel. Romans watching the execution of Horatius would be adopting the perspective of Albans.

In his defense, Horatius’s father also restores the balance between state and family by reconstructing the patriotic argument that the state holds the family and individual in a protective embrace. He complements the display of his son’s victory spoils by putting his arms around him, and by making the famous appeal to sympathy for a father’s love so well known in later judicial practice.87 The people’s acceptance of the elder Horatius’s plea for the larger entity to protect the smaller therefore reverses the political implications of the killing of Horatia. Here the state acts to preserve the individual on behalf of the family; there the individual had been killed on behalf of the state precisely for upholding the perspective of family. At the same time that the elder Horatius’s speech thus reconciles family and national perspectives, he simultaneously reestablishes the autonomy of the family within the state and the father’s authority within the family, which had also been overturned by his son’s unjustified killing of his sister, by granting that act a retroactive legitimacy. Horatius begins by claiming that he judges (iudicare) that his daughter was killed justly (iure); if this were not so, he would have exercised his prerogative as father (patrio iure) by punishing his son (1.26.9).

But even the sparing of Horatius offers no resolution; a further human death is avoided but the caedes manifesta of Horatia still requires expiation. Father and son are ordered to perform sacrifices to expiate the crime, and these sacrifices have been undertaken from then on by the Horatian gens. Each “sacrificial” act described in the text has been subject to infinite revision, as the perspective oscillates constantly between slayer and victim, and has consequently provoked another act of violence as a response. The institution of an expiatory ritual undertaken by the Horatii both perpetuates and regulates this sacrificial chain by providing for an infinite series of repetitions that bridges the gap between the past and the present, as well as between the historical text and the world of actual ritual practice. Moreover, these ritual enactments are explicitly and recognizably sacrifices in a way that, other than the Fetial treaty, the historical events are not. In the latter case, actual human deaths were related in a manner that recapitulated and emphasized the dynamics of sacrifice; in the former, the level of violence is reduced by the substitution of animal victims for humans. Thus the narrative moves from the ritual of the Fetial sacrifice, which provides the interpretative model for the scenes that follow, to real and unmediated violence, and finally back again to the ritual in which these historical events can be continually reenacted.

The simultaneous conversion of ritual into history and of history into ritual invites us to reevaluate the moral and social function of Livy’s narrative. Any attempt to distinguish between “good” and “bad” violence or to distill the moral of moderation from the episode’s complexity misses the point that Horatius’s killing of his sister is less a counterweight to his victory than a revision or repetition of it, which emerges as an inseparable aspect of the same act.88 The alternate perspectives articulated in the episode are not just difficult to resolve but intrinsically unresolvable. Nor does the audience in the text really attempt to resolve them; rather their gaze shifts between the two equally compelling but irreconcilable images of Horatius’s victory and his crime. But the text’s allusions to sacrificial ritual, by moving us beyond the purely literary plane, offer a framework for interpreting these oppositions that does not allow them to congeal into mere ambiguity. As discussed further in the next section, such tensions are an intrinsic part of the structure and syntax of sacrificial ritual. And far from preventing sacrifice from fulfilling its social function, the juxtaposition of irreconcilable perspectives lies at the heart of its unifying power. Livy’s technique of articulating these oppositions through the perspectives of actual spectators thus approximates for his audience the effect of being present at the sacrificial procedures prescribed by the people, which at once absolve Horatius from guilt and perpetuate the memory of his crime.89

These sacrifices still took place into the Augustan era. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in concluding his narrative of Horatius, tells us that the Romans regarded the place where the expiation took place as sacred, and that sacrifices were still performed there (Ant. Rom. 3.22.8). What is more, the ritual complex surrounding the tigillum sororium addresses the same range of social issues as Livy’s narrative of the Horatii: the distinctions between insider and outsider, gender divisions, and the tensions involved in the integration of the individual into the citizen body. For, although the Horatian aition of the ritual necessarily portrays its function as primarily expiatory, the monument of the tigillum sororium also possessed associations with rites of passage.90 The beam was surrounded on one side by the altar of Juno Sororia, whose cult title suggests a link with a girl’s entry into adulthood, and on the other by the altar of Janus Curiatius. Janus’s double aspect made him particularly a god of endings and beginnings, and the cult of Janus Curiatius has been connected with a boy’s admission into a curia, one of the political subdivisions of the citizen body.91 Not only does passing under the beam literally constitute an entry into the city, but it also symbolizes the moment when an individual ceases to exist solely as a member of the family and becomes a member of the state. Thus, like the lustratio with which we began, this ritual too unites the consolidation of membership in a community with the establishment of a spatial boundary.92

IV. Sacrifice and Perspective

The initiatory aspect of Horatius’s purification ritual takes us back to the larger issues of the entire Alban episode, the movement of the individual toward full participation in a community of citizens. The decision to represent this process through the recreation of sacrificial ritual was not an isolated or arbitrary choice on Livy’s part. The very mechanisms of sacrifice, as Livy outlines them in his description of the Fetial ritual, inherently rely on the interaction between a larger group and an individual actor, whom we have seen paired with the sacrificial victim. Moreover the complexities in attitude and perspective that this double focus raises for the participants essentially reproduce the “patriotic paradox” discussed at the beginning of the chapter. On the one hand, the onlooker can respect the priest’s claim to represent the community as a whole and identify with the exactor of violence. The adoption of this perspective not only implies that the spectator defines himself as a member of the group that authorizes and benefits from the killing, but also introduces a seamless model of alignment between the individual priest and the larger community, in the sense that he is recognized as a symbolic agent of the whole. But this unification is bought at the expense of the death of the single victim, with whom the spectator is also asked to identify. Thus the alternative possibility exists of seeing the individual not as the one who manifests collective power of the community but as its victim.

The inherently paradoxical nature of sacrifice is a fundamental tenet of the theories of René Girard.93 In Girard’s view, sacrifice is primarily a social, rather than a religious, phenomenon. It arises out of a need to control violence rather than to communicate with supernatural forces.94 The processes of imitative desire constantly force the members of any society into competitions that tend toward violence. Since every act of violence generates an urge for retribution, without some check the accelerating cycle of violence would quickly destroy a society. Sacrifice short-circuits this cycle by directing all the violent impulses of the community against a single individual, whom Girard calls the surrogate victim.95 The actual sacrificial victim in turn substitutes for the surrogate victim,96 whose killing could result in the spread of violence through attempts at revenge. This sacrificial victim must be sufficiently similar to members of the community for the violence perpetrated upon him to be satisfying;97 at the same time, he must be from outside the community, so that his death will not provoke retribution. The nightmare vision for any society, called the sacrificial crisis, is indiscriminate killing, which comes into being when there are no internal distinctions to direct the flow of violence.98 This crisis is resolved through the reunification of the community by finding one victim against whom it can inflict violence unanimously. Thus sacrifice constitutes a kind of “good violence,” which must be radically distinguished from the uncontrollable violence that it so closely resembles.

Girard’s discussion of the social function of sacrifice touches upon Livy’s account of the fall of Alba at several points. The initial relationship between the Albans and Romans could well be described as Girard’s “mimetic rivalry.” As we have seen, Livy emphasizes that for both sides, the desire for imperium precedes any cause of war.99 And it is precisely to prevent this mutual desire from resolving itself through indiscriminate slaughter, in a war that, as Livy points out, would be most like a civil war, that Mettius Fufetius proposes the duel, which is in turn ratified by the treaty sacrifice. With Horatius’s murder of his sister, the violence previously exercised against a “legitimate” victim bursts its bounds. The very similarity between the two actions threatens to undermine any possibility of distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate killing. Again, sacrifice ritual is explicitly employed to restore this distinction (by not tolerating a caedes manifesta) while avoiding a further divisive death. Although the crisis Livy initially describes is an international as opposed to an internal one, the “otherness” of the Albans is highly problematic, and the ultimate result of the events described is the incorporation of the Albans into one Roman society. The ambiguous status of the Albans as both insiders and outsiders exactly recalls the position of any sacrificial participant, caught between his ties to the society that enacts the violence and his sympathy for the outsider who is its victim. And we shall see that it is as spectators at an act of violence that the Albans experience their final absorption into the imperium of the Romans.

In spite of the inherent doubleness of every aspect of the account of Horatius and the Albans, the sacrificial process in this case may be termed successful in the sense that the final union of the two peoples eventually takes place, and the tensions arising from each act of violence are ultimately controlled through displacement into ritual. But another episode in Livy shows an attempt to use violence for similar ends that fails on both counts. This rite is performed by Rome’s enemies the Samnites and appears in the context of Livy’s account of the battle of Aquilonia, where, as we have already discussed, the Samnites’ failure to create a unified military force serves as a foil to the efficacy of the Romans’ pre-battle spectacles. In the Samnite procedure, the ritual performance does not prevent the death of a human victim but actually precipitates it, and the result of the spectacle is only to fragment the unity of the participants. What is particularly interesting about Livy’s account of this episode is that the failure to maintain ritual propriety in this case manifests itself as a transformation of the perspective from which the spectator views the sacrifice.

Before the battle of Aquilonia, the Samnites prepare a special force that will not yield to the enemies’ attack but will fight, if necessary, to the last man (10.38.5ff.). An open space in the middle of the camp is enclosed by a linen barrier. After the Samnite leader and priests perform an ancient sacrifice, the best warriors are individually led into the enclosure. Here they are forced to swear an oath cursing themselves and their families if they should either flee from battle or refrain from killing anyone whom they see fleeing. Those who refuse to swear are killed immediately, providing a further incentive for the next subject to take the oath. After this process a legion, made conspicuous by special insignia, is constituted from the survivors.

The central passage is the description of the oath taking:

When the sacrifice was completed, the imperator ordered that all those most renowned for their deeds and ancestry to be summoned by a herald; they were led in one by one. Beyond the other trappings of sacrifice, which might throw the spirit into confusion with superstition, there were also altars in an area covered all around and victims slaughtered thereabout and centurions surrounding with drawn swords. Each is brought to the altar more as a victim than a participant in the sacrifice and is compelled by oath not to reveal what he has seen and heard there. They force him to swear with a grim incantation calling down destruction on his head and family and clan if he does not go into battle where the commanders lead, and if he either flees from the battle line himself or fails to kill forthwith anyone he sees fleeing. Some of the first who had refused to swear were butchered around the altars, and lying amid the carnage of the victims they served as warning to the others not to refuse.100

Even more explicitly than in the earlier episode, Livy portrays this ritual as an initiatory act designed to generate communal bonds; the process of viewing the sacrifice leads directly to the formation of a new group. But here all of the principles and procedures that give sacrifice its efficacy are reversed and overturned. The Fetial sacrifice required that the participant be able to imagine the victim’s death as the punishment of a prospective treaty breaker. But that possibility was juxtaposed with an identification with the sacrificer himself who spoke and acted for all the participants. Here that balance is thrown off as the individual’s ability to imagine himself as victim outweighs his sense of being a participant. He is threatened with his own death at the altar if he fails to swear the oath. The mitigating substitution of an animal victim for a human is also eliminated, and the mingling of animal and human corpses around the altar forms the final shocking element of Livy’s description.101 For Girard, the failure to maintain sacrificial distinctions between victim and participant led to the disintegration of the community into mutual violence. And indeed the legion constituted by the survivors of the initiation breaks apart out of mutual suspicion as each member “has before his eyes…the mixed slaughter of men and beasts and the altars splattered with blood pure and impure.”102

But the most powerful expression of the reversal of proper sacrificial practice comes through Livy’s emphasis on perspective and visual contact. From the beginning, the sight of the scene does not augment the animus of the viewer, as did the victory of Horatius, but throws it into confusion (perfundere [10.38.8]). The spectator, as he is led to the altar, is literally put in the place of the victim. And Livy’s own description, which follows the initiate’s gaze, recreates this perspective, focusing on the moment when the transition from participant to victim takes place. Thus the single sentence that describes the scene within the tent ends with the centurions “standing on both sides with drawn swords.” The position of the centurions and the part they play in the proceedings is initially ambiguous. They could be sacrificers whose swords are drawn against the victim; they could also be other oath takers, since, as we shall see, the gesture of holding out a drawn sword sometimes accompanies the swearing of an oath.103 But the participle circumstantes, “standing on both sides” or “surrounding,” has no expressed object; thus the final possibility, which will in fact be born out, is that the centurions surround not just the altar but the initiate himself, and their swords are drawn against him.

The shift from participant to victim is also correlated with the initiate’s progress toward the center of the linen enclosure that encompasses the altar. In the other accounts of spectacles that have been discussed, all of the spectators looked on together, and indeed this common gaze, particularly for the armies watching the duel of the Horatii, formed the basis of the new community. But here the individual, far from sharing the experience with his fellows, is shut off from them both by the linen barrier and by the pledge of secrecy. This physical separateness embodies the increasing social isolation that comes with the initiate’s sense of being the object of collective violence. In a lustratio, the victims are led around the boundaries of the community, inscribing its members within a magic circle. But in this case, it is the victims who are at the center, and the initiate’s motion inward traces the contraction of the group to which he belongs. The oath he swears, which is itself an instrument of further isolation, calls down destruction upon his head, his family, and his clan if he breaks it, thus demarcating the smaller groups from the state on whose behalf the oath is taken, just as it makes the swearer both the agent and the victim of internally directed violence.

A set of coins minted by the Italian rebels during the Social War depicts a scene almost identical to the sight that confronts the initiate in Livy’s account of the Samnite oath.104 Four men with drawn swords stand on either side of a sacrificial victim. Since the center of the rebellion lay among the Oscan speakers of the Apennines, it is quite plausible that the procedure shown on the coin is in fact analogous to that in book 10. But the significance of the image is radically different in the two representations. The Italian coins are undoubtedly emblems of unity, designed to reinforce solidarity among the peoples allied against Rome. The gesture of the drawn swords marks the soldiers as oath takers in a manner that relates their bond explicitly to sacrificial practice. The swords all point at the victim, making the soldiers all participate symbolically in the act of killing. This shared killing recapitulates the overall function of the oath itself, to forge the participants into a unified force capable of acting effectively against an outsider. The same intent also lay behind the Samnite ritual, but there the result was precisely the opposite, fragmentation and defeat.

The similarity of the two scenes also allows us to pinpoint the role of visual perspective in determining which of these radically different outcomes the experience of sacrifice will yield. In Livy, as we have seen, the tableau of the armed centurions around the victim is initially ambiguous, combining the possibilities of danger and comradeship. The crucial moment comes when the individual initiate is brought to the altar, for in this case the oath is taken not collectively but individually, and the oath taker affirms his pledge from the position of the sacrificial victim—literally, at the point of the swords. The viewer of the coin can experience no such transformation in perspective; anchored on the perimeter, he watches events from the position of the members of the groups who are bound by the oath.

Such collective oaths were not unknown in Rome itself. Livy tells us that prior to 216 B.C.E., troops from Rome’s allies bound themselves by a “voluntary treaty” (22.38.1–5). (The term for treaty is foedus, which was also used for the international treaty confirmed by sacrifice between the Romans and Albans.)105 Not only does the voluntary nature of this foedus contrast with the compulsion used by the Samnites, but the actual words of the oath, which Livy also records, differ from the content of the Samnite oath in a manner that corresponds to the inversion of the oath taker’s perspective. The Samnite oath both invokes destruction on the family and person of anyone who reveals it and obliges each soldier to kill his fellows if he sees them deserting. The result, as we have seen, is that each soldier imagines his comrades as his prospective killers, and at the crucial moment this internal fear proves stronger than fear of the enemy.106 It is the last clause that the coniuratio oath reverses by compelling the soldiers “not to depart for the sake of flight or fear nor to retreat from the ranks except to take or seek a weapon or to strike an enemy or to save a citizen.”107 Here not only is each soldier made his fellow’s savior, but the preservation of the life of the individual is given a higher priority even than the unity of the group.

These contrasting treatments of the oath-taking ceremony demonstrate how a single, simple image can contain a vast potential for either building a society or destroying it. In sacrifice, the violence that unites the group always threatens to break free of the restraints of ritual. The closer the rite approximates disaster, the more powerful is its effect. Moreover, the essential ambiguity of sacrificial ritual relates to two interdependent issues of the utmost importance in Augustan Rome; violence and the integration of the community. The fifty years of civil war that produced the Augustan state could be looked upon as a terrible but finite process whose end was Tota Italia, a new unity whose collective might would manifest itself in the conquest of foreign peoples, or else as the ultimate disintegration of that society at every level, an unending sequence of violence that divided families and cities and demanded the renunciation of home, friends, and even children in the service of an ever-shifting patria.108

The power of sacrifice to embody both of these visions of violence has to do with the multiplicity and pervasiveness of sacrificial imagery in Augustan literature, ritual, and art. In its positive aspect, sacrifice seems to promise the possibility of controlled violence directed outward and the clear definition of friend and enemy. Thus, for example, on the day Augustus entered Rome after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, the entire populace offered sacrifice.109 Extravagant sacrifices followed other foreign victories as well, culminating perhaps in the consecration of the Ara Pacis in 13 B.C.E., at which the establishment of peace would be celebrated annually.110 The suppression of internal threats, such as those of Cornelius Gallus,111 Murena, and Caepio also prompted sacrifices.112 Augustus himself became the center of the sacrificial spectacle in the Secular Games of 17 B.C.E. This three-day ceremony began with the princeps sacrificing nine ewes to the fates on behalf of the Roman people. Thereafter every day’s program commenced with Augustus and Agrippa presiding over sacrifices to Jupiter, Juno, and the children of Leto respectively.113

Nor did this interest in sacrifice manifest itself only in actual ritual practices. Artistic representations of Augustus in a variety of media from statues to coins increasingly depicted the emperor at the center of religious ceremonies, particularly as sacrificant.114 As Elsner has recently demonstrated in his interpretation of the Ara Pacis, perhaps the culmination of this pattern of imagery, such representations, far from simply denoting the abstract pietas of the emperor, served to recreate and reproduce the sacrificial experience, placing the viewer in the place of participant and making the emperor the focal point of the event.115 What is more, the diffusion of these images in Italy and the provinces provided a prototype for religious activity throughout the empire and helped create a network of cult practices grounded in the authority of Rome and of the princeps himself.116

But just as beneficial sacrifice confirmed the restoration of peace and harmony, the image of the corrupted sacrifice, where the boundaries that prevented excessive identification with the victim were violated, had an equal importance in the delineation of public enemies who threatened the social order. Catiline, for example, was accused of using human blood in the confirmation of an oath. There is a story that in 46 B.C.E., Caesar checked the excesses of his troops by having several soldiers sacrificed on the Campus Martius in the presence of the pontifices and the priest of Mars.117 Presumably, as Pontifex Maximus, he presided over the sacrifice. Similarly, Sextus Pompey’s close identification with Neptune was turned against him in a report that, dressed in a ceremonial blue robe, he had had men cast alive into the sea.118

The story of Octavian’s bloodthirsty revenge on the rebels led by L. Antonius at Perusia offers the most interesting demonstration of the political potency of sacrificial imagery during the civil wars. The so-called Arae Perusinae are among the most shocking crimes attributed to the young triumvir: “Lucius himself and some others were pardoned, but most of the senators and knights were killed. There is a story that they did not simply suffer death but that after having been tormented, three hundred knights and many senators…were sacrificed on an altar consecrated to Julius Caesar.”119 Clearly, the sacrificial setting of these executions springs from anti-Octavian propaganda,120 and the emphasis on the rank of the victims, which also appears in Suetonius’s version of the episode, reveals the audience toward which this fearsome picture was directed: senators and knights would here see themselves specifically selected as victims in an alien, and distinctly dynastic, sacrificial ritual presided over by the triumvir. However, the pro-Augustan version of the resolution of the Perusine conflict, which possibly derives from the emperor’s own memoirs,121 counters this image with another scene of sacrifice, again presided over by Octavian. While Octavian is offering sacrifice, the repentant Antonius approaches with his men:

[The rebel troops] saluted Caesar as imperator and stood separately where Caesar had placed them.…When he had finished the sacrifice, crowned in laurel, the symbol of victory, he sat before the tribunal and ordered them to lay down their arms where they stood. He then ordered the veterans [among the rebels] to draw near, apparently to reproach them for their ingratitude and to frighten them. It was already known that he was going to do this, and Caesar’s troops, either on purpose…or moved by their suffering, as if on behalf of their own relatives, breaking from their assigned position, ran towards Lucius’s men and embraced them as fellow soldiers. And they wept and entreated Caesar on behalf [of the rebels], and they did not stop weeping and embracing, with even the new recruits sharing in the sentiment. No longer was it possible to tell the troops apart nor to distinguish them.122

Here sacrifice serves not to demonstrate Octavian’s barbarousness and implacability but as the locus for political reunification. The terror of Octavian generated in tales of the Arae Perusina by depicting him as sacrificer and the rebels as victims, appears only to be assuaged by a greater sense of community, as the rebels, first kept at a distance, find themselves integrated into the body of participants. The sight of the imperator sacrificing melts away all difference, as we shall see that it is meant to do between Albans and Romans.

V. Sacrifice and Imperium

The emphasis on the social and political aspects of religious ritual that emerged in the preceding section will be recognizable to the student of Roman religion. Not only has the manipulation of religious practice for narrowly political ends been long studied, but on a much broader level the communal nature of so much of ancient religious practice has all but eroded the distinction between our categories of the civic and the religious.123 Nor were the Romans themselves oblivious to the “social” importance of religion as a means of building ties within a community. For Cicero, shared sacra constituted one of the ties that bind an individual to his natural patria.124

Within Livy’s own text, the most explicit description of the use of religious ritual to maintain the social order of the Roman state occurs just a few pages before the events that we have been describing, in the account of Numa Pompilius’s religious reforms discussed in chapter 2: after peace has been obtained with all the neighboring peoples, “lest the spirits [of the Romans], which the fear of the enemy and military discipline had held in check, grow soft in peace, first of all—a thing most effective for an inexperienced and, in those ages, unsophisticated people—he thought that fear of the gods must be cast upon them.”125 The terms used here provide a link between the rituals staged under Numa’s successor and the social ills that Livy himself treats. The metus deorum appears as an equivalent to military discipline; both the Fetial sacrifice and the subsequent execution of the Alban dictator Mettius Fufetius, like the failed Samnite ritual of book 10, take place on the battlefield and enforce a sense of collective identity, which can be measured in adherence to military discipline.126 At the same time, the specific problems that Numa addresses, luxuria and the debilitating effects of otium, are emphatically not those of the “rude and inexperienced” Romans of regal times but the preoccupations of the first century B.C.E. The discussion of the social utility of religious ritual thus occurs in a context where not only is the distinction between past and present deliberately blurred, but, as we saw in chapter 2, the activities of the king and the historian come to resemble one another. Indeed, the king employs religious ritual to perform precisely the same social function that he shares with the historian, to combat the effects of luxuria. This suggests that the reconstruction of sacrificial spectacle can be taken as one of the most important means by which the historian’s text directly assumes a political, state-building function.

Beyond its reminiscences of Numa’s procedure, Livy’s adoption of the sacrificial paradigm for staging the unification of the Albans and the Romans also means that he is communicating in the same medium of religious ritual that Augustus himself, who also appears in the earlier passage as an imitator of Numa, used to accomplish the restoration of the state. But how far is it justifiable to think that a literary text could operate on its readers in a manner resembling the way an actual sacrifice affected its participants? Obviously, Livy cannot distribute the sacrificial meats among his audience. Nor will he, like Augustus on the Ara Pacis, make himself the center of his audience’s attention as the focal point of the sacrificial experience. But visual contact, which has emerged as both a powerful medium for linking the participant to the event and a means of negotiating the antithetical potentials of sacrifice, can be reproduced for the audience of a literary text. If this reproduction achieves less vividness than in the visual arts, not to speak of the unmediated experience of sacrifice itself, perhaps it possesses greater precision since the attentions of the writer’s audience can be more strictly controlled.127

The overlap between the roles of king and historian suggested in Livy’s account of Numa reappears at one of the crucial moments in the process of incorporating the Albans, the execution of Mettius Fufetius. In spite of his pledge to abide by the outcome of the duel and place the Albans under the imperium of Rome, Mettius treacherously withdraws the Alban forces in the first battle in which he is asked for assistance and only rejoins the Romans when they are clearly victorious (1.27). Tullus punishes this betrayal by having the Alban leader tied to two chariots and torn apart (1.28). The scene in which this punishment takes place recapitulates many of the themes and tensions of the entire episode, from the initial deception of the Alban ambassadors to the deferred execution of Horatius, and offers an explicit, if complex, commentary on the educational functions of the historian and the civic leader.

The Albans’ denial of the reality of Rome’s imperium is bound up with their attitude to the role of the spectator; it was after all through the process of spectacle that this imperium was first established over them, and it will be through yet another spectacle that it is confirmed. As we have seen, throughout their dealings with the Romans, the Albans have been constantly at a disadvantage because of their assumption that the spectator is passive and detached from the event he watches, and a corollary belief that spectacle itself consists simply of empty display. These conceptions determined both the negligence with which they conducted their initial embassy to the Romans (1.23.5ff.) and the proposal that the dispute with the Romans be decided by a duel. The strategy the Albans employ in betraying the Romans again highlights this attitude to spectacle. By withdrawing to watch the battle rather than actually fighting, the Alban army becomes “a spectator of the competition” (spectator certaminis [1.28.1])—a position analogous to the one adopted at the battle of the Horatii and Curiatii—again out of the belief that as spectators, they will be free from danger.

As in his treatment of the original embassy that came to demand the restoration of stolen property, so too in preparing for the final spectacle of Mettius’s execution, the Roman king tricks the treacherous Albans with an outward show of friendship. He addresses them in a kindly way and summons them the next morning to a “lustral sacrifice” (1.28.1). When invited to the assembly by Tullus Hostilius, the Albans are eager to attend and take up the nearest positions because they are struck by the “novelty of hearing a Roman king address an assembly” (1.28.2). But their enthusiasm for “sight-seeing” enables the Roman legion to surround them physically, a gesture that reinforces the point that the Albans are not disconnected from the events they are watching but are as much subject to Tullus’s authority as the Roman troops.128 The physical incorporation of the Albans into the body of citizens is complemented by the sudden reversal of perspective experienced most completely by Mettius Fufetius himself, who thinks that he has come as a spectator but finds that his punishment is in fact the spectacle that the audience has assembled to watch.

The symbolic inclusion of the Albans within the Roman state serves as a visual sign of the real purpose of the ceremony the king has orchestrated, the final unification of Rome and Alba. “May it be good and blessed and fortunate for the Roman people and me and you, Albans; I intend to lead the whole Alban people to Rome, to give citizenship to the plebeians, to induct the nobles into the Senate, to make one city, one res publica; as once the Alban state was divided into two now let it recombine into one.”129 The sacral resonance of the first phrase, which recalls the language used in the Fetial ritual, reminds us of the performative quality of the king’s utterance and of the ceremony as a whole. Tullus’s language does not just describe his intention but accomplishes it even as the Romans and Albans are literally being brought together; just as in the Fetial ritual, his statement is a manifestation of his imperium.

The statement that simultaneously unmasks the king’s purpose and expresses his power occurs at just the moment when the true nature of the spectacle itself has been revealed by the actions of the armed centurions who have surrounded Mettius Fufetius. And the sight of his execution will be the central means by which the king effects the unification of his audience. Tullus had described the event that the Albans were to attend as a sacrificium lustrale.130 Not only does this expression establish the formal parallel between the execution and sacrifice; as Versnel has shown, the lustral sacrifice was, like all lustrationes, used precisely to establish a new unity among the group of participants.

The lustral sacrifice is but one of the ritual acts the execution recalls. The reason Tullus gives for killing Mettius is that he violated the foedus made with the Romans. The treaty ritual, as we recall, had invoked destruction on whoever failed to abide by it and thus predicts and determines the fate of the Alban. The language of the king duplicates the sacred expressions he used to empower the pater patratus, and other terms both in the king’s speech and the historian’s narrative allude to the earlier ceremony. When Tullus speaks of “trustworthiness and treaties” (fides ac foedera [1.28.9]), beyond the alliteration there is also a reference to one of the common etymologies of the word foedus, as a cognate to fides. Others thought that a foedus was so named because of the disgusting (foedus) ritual by which treaties were confirmed, and Livy makes that connection as well when he refers to the foeditas of Mettius’s end (1.28.11).131 In addition to the verbal echoes, the visual tableau Livy constructs by having the centurions encompass their victim recalls precisely the depictions of foedera on coins.

In the Fetial ritual, the violence of the sacrifice was an expression of the collective power of the state channeled through the king and his representatives. The unifying aspect of the spectacle derives from the alignment of the group of participants against the outsider or victim at whom this collective power is directed. Thus although the word imperium was not explicitly used in the Fetial ritual, the ceremony enacts the transmission of imperium, and it is precisely the imperium of the Roman king over the Albans that the ceremony of the execution is designed to establish. The link between imperium and sacrifice emerges again in Appian’s account of the reconciliation of Octavian and the mutineers at Perusia. The situation is strikingly similar to the one Livy describes; again, the two armies are brought together by watching a sacrifice. Octavian has kept his veterans apart, and after the sacrifice they draw near the rebels as though to punish them; suddenly, however, they embrace one another and the end result is that “it became impossible to distinguish between them.”132 Here the participation of the mutineers in the sacrifice over which Octavian presides is explicitly linked to their acceptance of his imperium. As they arrive, the troops proclaim Octavian imperator, and after the sacrifice he addresses them crowned with the laurel of victory.133

The execution of Mettius Fufetius also draws attention to the connection between the ritual performance of sacrifice and the presentation of a historical exemplum. In addition to pointing out the connections with the Fetial ritual and the general characterization of the execution as a sacrificium lustrale, Tullus emphasizes the educational function of his actions and expresses his consciousness of their historical significance by expanding the audience for his instruction from those immediately present to the entire “human race,” implicitly including any possible future violators. His punishment of Mettius is a “noteworthy demonstration” (insigne documentum [1.28.6]). Indeed, in its crudest form, the very manner in which the Alban is killed “illustrates” his crime: the division of his body manifests the earlier division of his spirit between the Romans and their enemies. In a larger sense his dismemberment emblematizes the division of loyalties experienced by all the Albans, who, as their king is dragged in diversum iter, are made “one” with the Romans. Later, Tullus says that he would apply his teaching to Mettius himself if his nature (ingenium) were not “incurable” (insanabile [1.28.9]). Both the references to documenta and the use of the metaphor of health replicate exactly the language in which Livy speaks of his own history in the preface. There, his text is made a source of documenta and as such is described as “healthful” (salubre). Not only do these echoes draw together the activities of king and historian, they also make clear the interdependence between sacrificial performance and historical instruction. The two aspects of Mettius’s death are made inseparable; his punishment (supplicium) is the means by which Mettius “teaches.”134

In all of the sacrificial spectacles we have examined, the socially beneficial aspects of the experience—here epitomized by the king’s interpretation of the execution as a moment of unification whose historical significance will be as a constant warning against betrayal—have been balanced by an opposing potential for social disintegration. As incipient Romans, the Albans must view Mettius as a foreign enemy and take part in his killing. So, too, in quelling a later mutiny, Scipio Africanus will require the mutineers to find the sight of their former commanders’ deaths a “joyous sight” (laetum spectaculum [28.29.8]).135 But like the victim’s at the Fetial sacrifice, Mettius’s death serves as a warning of what might happen to any other potential traitor. In particular, it is as a representative of the Alban people that Mettius is punished; he is made to bear the responsibility for their crime. Thus the construction of the spectacle equally demands the audience’s identification with the victim. The emotion that enforces the Albans’ obedience is nothing other than the “fear” (metus) that results from such an identification. It was “fear of the gods” (metus deorum) that Numa had foreseen as the constraining power of religio, yet here, as in the response of the Samnites at Aquilonia, fear is directed against more immediate representatives of the state. Moreover, this emotion has a truly unifying effect in the sense that it is “common” to all and obliterates any individual variations in perspective or response.136

The double vision required of the Albans is made particularly acute because an execution dispenses with the prescriptions that an actual sacrifice employs to control violence and to diffuse its most threatening aspects. In the Fetial sacrifice, the audience was asked to identify only with the death of a pig, which, however dramatic, has far less immediacy than the death of another human being, much less one’s former imperator. The relation between sacrifice and execution here precisely reverses the resolution achieved in the trial of Horatius.137 There, the establishment of a sacrificial ritual arose as an alternative to the death of a Horatius and as a means of controlling tensions that had led to murder. Here, the sacrifice of the pig is reenacted with a human victim. And just as the violence is no longer directed against an animal substitute, so too the role of surrogates in performing the killing is equally diminished. In the Fetial sacrifice, the victim was killed by a pater patratus appointed by the king, and the trial of Horatius was similarly conducted by surrogates, appointed precisely to protect the king from direct responsibility for the death of a man with whom the crowd sympathized. In the case of Mettius Fufetius, although Tullus does not drive the chariots himself, his role as the one who precipitates the execution is more immediately apparent.138

In Livy’s account of the execution, these irreconcilable tensions ultimately produce a divergence between the king and the historian as presenters of spectacle. Just at the moment when the chariots have been set into motion,139 Livy ceases simply narrating the execution and intervenes in his own voice. “All turned their eyes away from such a terrible spectacle. That was the first and last punishment among the Romans of a model [exemplum] too little mindful of human laws; in other cases, the Romans can glory in the fact that no other race has decreed milder penalties” (1.28.11). The very statement that the onlookers turn their eyes away, as it breaks the contact between the spectator and the punishment, also releases Livy’s own audience from the necessity of “seeing” the culmination of the execution. At this point, Livy himself reverts to the language of the preface, and by doing so emerges as a rival to the king in offering educational spectacles. Not only does he use the term exemplum, but he shows an awareness of the entire scope of Roman history as well, by setting the execution within the much wider context of all other punishments. Like every other “sacrificial” event that forms a part of this episode, the execution generates two antithetical responses. In the case of Horatius’s trial, these responses were articulated as two alternative visual perspectives, one of which focused on Horatius’s decora, the other on that which was foedum or atrox.140 Livy’s interruption of the spectacle of the execution introduces a comparable antithesis here. The historian takes control of the perspective of his audience, redirecting its gaze from the foeditas of Mettius’s death to a “glorious”141 vision of Rome’s past, one where the conflict between the demands of national identity and of “human laws” disappears.

Throughout the many scenes constituting the complex narrative of the union of Rome and Alba, Livy stresses the parallelism between the rituals and spectacles that accomplish the transition in the civic identity of the Albans and his own literary representation of events. The ambiguous position of the Albans themselves as members of the Roman state and as outsiders both mirrors the divergent possibilities of alienation and solidarity faced by any participant in the rituals by which citizenship and group membership were confirmed, and speaks to the crises in civic identity brought about by the transformations of Livy’s own era. When Tullus Hostilius claims that by bringing together Alba and Rome, he is in fact reunifying what had been in the past one city, the Albans find not only their state absorbed by Rome but their history as well. Rome’s past now encompasses Alba’s, just as Rome’s centurions surround her soldiers. This suggests a final point of resemblance between the experience of the Albans and Livy’s audience. The Albans attempt to watch the events staged for them by Tullus Hostilius with detachment and separation, but they constantly discover that they are profoundly affected by them, and it is this that prompts their becoming members of the Roman state. In the same way, Livy holds out the promise of detachment to his own audience as they read these episodes. Speaking against those who may feel little appetite for the events of the distant past, he claims that he personally “shall seek this reward for my labor, that I may avert my [eyes] from the sight of those evils that our age has seen through so many years” (praef. 5). The past seems to offer an alternative object of vision, which enables the historian to turn his eyes away from the present just as the Albans turn their eyes away from the execution of Mettius Fufetius. But, as we have seen, Livy uses the account even of the earliest times as a means not just of describing but of remedying the mala of the present. And Livy’s audience will find that they are no more detached from the historical monumenta that Livy presents than the Albans are from the spectacles of Tullus Hostilius. In adopting Rome’s past as their own, they will experience the same transition implied by the historian’s own choice of Aeneas over Antenor at the inception of his narrative.

I. The Stage and the State

The idea that Roman drama should be perceived as anything other than a public, officially sanctioned spectacle may seem surprising. Of all modes of literary production, drama is intrinsically among the most closely connected to the public life of the state as a whole. Not only did dramatic productions take place within the context of official civic festivals, but in the Late Republic, the theater offered the people a crucial opportunity for voicing their political sentiments, and politicians in turn used the production of plays to win popular support. Thus M. Junius Brutus attempted to have the Brutus of Accius, a historical drama celebrating the deeds of the regicide, produced at the Apollonian Games in 44 B.C.E., four months after his assassination of Caesar.15

However, despite the secure location of dramatic performances among the public events of the Roman state, the theater could also be defined as an institution deliberately isolated from the normal conduct of civic life.16 Although the games were part of an official calendar, they were nevertheless days on which normal public business was suspended. They may thus be considered as publicly controlled lapses in public participation, rather like the conception of otium, “time off,” which also has a recognized place in the rhythm of public life. So, too, the actors who performed in dramas were rigorously and emphatically excluded from membership in the res publica.17 Yet at the same time that they provide an opportunity for the suspension and inversion of traditional norms, such phenomena create a heightened awareness of the overarching structure of public authority that regulates the transgression of its own rules.18

The clearest example of how the theater increasingly became a locus for the manipulation of public opinion during the Late Republic was the frequent translation of the action and dialogue of the stage into a commentary on political affairs. Cicero records many occasions where a particularly pregnant line sparked a demonstration, and himself reaped the benefit of such a display when an actor, “who always took the best parts both in the Republic and on the stage,” converted his performance into a plea for Cicero’s recall.19 Such a phenomenon indeed suggests that the segregation between the stage and the res publica, if it ever existed, was breaking down, and that the stage was becoming, as Cicero elsewhere suggests, a vital arena for the expression of political views. But this development is by no means incompatible with a theoretical segregation of the stage from the state as a political entity. On the contrary, the politicization of theatrical performances, and the volatility and license of their audiences, through which the stage mounted an increasingly potent to challenge to official institutions, made it all the more important to insist on such a separation.20

Thus at virtually the same time that he was praising the artiste who had delivered him from exile, Cicero was also composing, in book 4 of the De re publica, a diagnosis of the dangers of just this kind of interpenetration between politics and the theater.21 Scipio, his interlocutor, praises an ancient Roman law that imposes the most extreme disjunction between the two realms: “Because the entire craft of the theater and the whole stage was held in such disrepute, they decreed that that whole type of men [i.e., actors] not only lacked the honor of the rest of the citizens but should even be removed from their tribe [i.e., made non-citizens] by the censor’s mark.”22 The complete isolation of all those connected with theatrical performances from the state is accomplished by the political authority of the censors. Scipio also beats back the attempts of drama to intervene directly in political life by openly criticizing public figures again by presenting it as a rival to the legitimate political authority of Rome’s magistrates. Even though Greek comedy often attacked men who were truly wicked (populares homines improbos), nevertheless it is the place of the censor to condemn them, not the poets.23 Similarly, it was inappropriate for Pericles, whose political status is described in terms with a very Roman ring,24 to be attacked on the stage. The Romans met the two-pronged threat of the theater—its propensity both to link itself directly to political institutions, and, in criticizing public figures, to usurp the authority of the magistrates—by forbidding any living man to be praised or blamed on the stage. “For we ought to consider our life liable to the judgments of magistrates, and to legal challenge, and we should not hear abuse except when it is sanctioned that it be possible to respond and to defend one’s self in a court of law.”25

It may be argued against this picture of a theoretical segregation between the stage and the political life of the state that there existed a whole genre of Roman drama, the fabula praetexta, devoted specifically to representing episodes from Roman history and even current public events.26 Nor was the praetexta an entirely obsolete form in the Late Republic. We have seen that the tyrannicide Brutus attempted to revive Accius’s Brutus in 44 B.C.E. And we know of a new praetexta, performed only in Spain but available in Rome as a text, by L. Cornelius Balbus to celebrate his own exploits.27 However, even during the golden age of Roman tragedy in the Middle Republic, praetextae were significantly less numerous than tragedies composed on Greek subjects. According to Hubert Zehnacker’s count, in the case of the four great tragedians Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, the titles of only seven praetextae survive, compared to eighty-three from other tragedies.28 What is more, these performances seem usually to have had the clear purpose of glorifying the deeds of the poet’s noble patron and his ancestors.29 Thus the fabula praetexta may best be regarded as a not entirely successful experiment in the iconography of power whose use in the service of private ambitions symptomatizes precisely the overt politicization of the drama that was at the root of Cicero’s concerns about the theater.30 Indeed, the two Late Republican performances of praetextae that I have mentioned had obvious propaganda value. Accius’s Brutus would have cast the most favorable possible light on the assassination of Caesar, and Balbus’s production is portrayed in extremely negative terms by Asinius Pollio, as a form of self-glorification that surpassed the efforts of Caesar himself.31

As Scipio in the De re publica stresses the dichotomy between the theater and Rome’s political institutions, so Varro in his Antiquitates rerum divinarum differentiates the theater from the state in terms of its portrayal of the gods. Varro distinguishes three forms of theology, which he calls the mythikon, the physikon, and the civile,32 associated with the poets, the philosophers, and the leaders of cities, respectively. These categories are by no means Varro’s own innovation; they reflect a well-established Greek division of the subject.33 What is most significant for us is that each of the three theologies was given a specific spatial sphere of operation. “The first theology [sc. the “mythical”] is most suited to the theater, the second [the “natural”] to the natural world, and the third [the “civil” or “political”] to the city.”34 Thus here too the theater appears as a realm separate and distinct from the civic space of the city as a whole.

Varro brings up the threefold division of theology in the first book of his treatise as a way of defining his own subject, which will be the civil religion,35 but his discussion of the genus mythikon possesses a moral charge of a piece with negative portrayals of the theater. In particular, his treatise suggests a link between the fears about the dangerous potential of images expressed by Livy’s Cato and the ideal of the political segregation of the theater emerges in the De re publica. While Varro recognizes that the theology of the state necessarily borrows elements from both of the other categories, he asserts that it should borrow more from the philosophers than the poets.36 One crucial distinction that Varro draws between the poet’s treatment of the gods and the state religion involves the use of representation. Roman religion was originally aniconic and Varro expresses the wish that it had remained so.37 The introduction of images (simulacra), whose fictive character suggests a connection with “poetic” theology, necessarily involved a misrepresentation of the gods, since it moved them away from the abstractions of the philosophers at the same time as it reversed earlier Roman traditions. While the poets’ anthropomorphization rendered the gods more easily apprehensible, it could also be connected with other ficta, such as descriptions of divine thievery, adultery, and periods of slavery to mortals, which Varro describes as “opposed to the dignity and nature of the immortal gods.”38 Though the substance of this remark goes back at least to Xenophanes,39 it is significant that Varro describes the errors of the poets partly in political terms. As the theater in the De re publica illegitimately attacks the political leaders of the state, so the “theology” Varro associates with the theater, as opposed to the city, violates the hierarchy imposed by the Roman structure of political authority where the gods, as superior in status, are possessors of a dignitas that deserves respect.40

But its connection with the mythical theology of the poets is not the only context in which the theater appears in Varro’s treatise. Since theatrical performances themselves constituted part of the cult practices of the state religion, they received their own book (book 10) in Varro’s study. We cannot say much about the content of this book based on the one fragment that survives, a reference to certain magistrates’ right to use canopies in the theater,41 but it is natural to assume that, as opposed to the many works in which he treated Roman drama from the perspective of the litteratus, here Varro was interested primarily in the rituals of the performance itself. If this is the case, then the treatment of theater in the work as a whole reinforces the contrast between the potentially subversive, or anomalous, content of the plays themselves and the officially sanctioned context of their performance.

The spatial arrangement of the theater itself reflects a similar tension between the drama on stage and the religious framework in which it was embedded. When in 55 B.C.E. Pompey erected Rome’s first permanent theater surmounted by a shrine to Venus Victrix, he attempted to avert criticism by claiming that his edifice was not actually a theater but a temple “at the base of which we have added rows of seats for spectacles.”42 However disingenuously this remark was made, it highlights how the orientation of the spaces in which dramatic performances took place reinforced the institutionalized “otherness” of the stage.43 As J. A. Hanson has shown, the religious context of ludi scaenici was, in every case we are able to judge, emphasized by the proximity of the temple of the god in whose honor the festival was held.44 But within the theater-temple complex, the stage at the bottom of the steps is set against the temple itself, exalted by its podium. The direction of the spectators’ gaze within this architectural space thus creates an opposition between watching plays and participating in other forms of religious ritual, especially sacrifice, at least as it was enacted in Pompey’s theater.45 This opposition also appears in the pompa or procession preceding the actual dramas, which Tertullian describes as leading “to the stage away from the temples and altars” (ad scaenam a templis et aris).46 During dramatic performances, the spectators turn their backs on the temple itself, literally to look down on the actors whose social rank was correspondingly low. The act of watching becomes a bond that unites all levels of Roman society, from the people to the gods, who are also present as spectators.47 By contrast, sacrifices were performed on the altar in front of the temple, so that the gaze of the spectators was directed up the steps toward the shrine of the god itself. The importance of this kind of visual contact during sacrifice can be discerned from Vitruvius’s discussion of the orientation of the cult statues within temples. The statue should always face west “so that those coming to the altar to sacrifice might look to the east and the statue in the temple…and these images might seem to rise up and gaze in turn upon those making supplication and sacrificing.”48

The decorations of the Roman stage itself reinforced the sense that it constituted an anomaly within the public spaces of the city. As the plays depicted actions that, in the vast majority of cases, took place outside Rome, usually in a markedly Greek milieu, and focused often on the domestic rather than the political lives of their protagonists, so each of the three genres of stage decoration described by Vitruvius defines a landscape antithetical to the civic context within which the festival itself took place. The comic stage depicted private buildings;49 the tragic, a distinctively royal palace;50 and satyric decoration created a non-urban landscape of trees, caves, and mountains. The stage buildings for the temporary theaters of the Republic were built anew every year and offered the magistrates in charge of their construction a chance to win prestige through the fabulous ostentation of the edifices they provided. As a result, the buildings themselves were connected with what was defined as an un-Roman emphasis on luxury and individual self-aggrandizement.51 Pliny’s outraged description of the stage buildings of Scaurus in 58 B.C.E. and Curio in 52 B.C.E. makes them emblems of all the vices that led to the fall of the Republic, especially the canonical two, luxuria and ambitio, and contrasts the decadent Romans willing to risk their lives for the thrill of riding around in Curio’s rotating theater with their ancestors who fell at Cannae.52 The case of Scaurus suggests another link between the displays on the stage and the private space of the domus. His scaena not only represented the luxury of tragic kings but emulated it with its gold, bronze, and, most remarkably, glass, and these splendid furnishings later became part of the decorations of Scaurus’s own house.

The foreignness of the stage was made all the more apparent by the careful arrangement of the spectators in the stands to create a contrasting display of the social hierarchy within the Roman state.53 Well before Augustus’s sweeping legislation, the place one occupied in the theater reflected one’s position in the state as a whole.54 (The use of the same Latin word ordo to designate both a row of seats and a social class makes the connection almost inevitable.)55 In even more fundamental ways, the conditions under which dramatic spectacles were watched served to highlight what made the Roman state unique. The very absence of a permanent theater, at a time when many less prosperous Italian cities already possessed one, not only signaled the Roman rejection of luxury, but also served as a reminder of the annual change in magistrates that crucially differentiated the Roman constitution from a regnum like those presented on the stage itself.56 When in 154 B.C.E. a permanent theater was begun by the censors, the consul P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica ordered construction stopped and had the building materials auctioned off.57 Valerius Maximus explains the resulting senatus consultum prohibiting “anyone from building theater seats in the city or within a mile of it or watching the ludi while seated, as a way of ensuring that the capacity for standing on their feet that distinguished the Roman gens might thus become more widely known.” 58

Augustus’s theater legislation, whatever its actual details,59 was certainly the most comprehensive and elaborate attempt yet to make seating arrangements at the theater a manifestation of the idealized structure of Roman society. His innovations can be read as an attempt to emphasize even more clearly the boundary between the stage and the state that we have been describing, and to use this distinction specifically to differentiate the restored society of Augustan Rome from the disorder of the Late Republic,60 with which, as we have seen, the excesses and turmoil of the theater were particularly associated. Not only does Augustus prescribe who sits where in the stands, and make the seating arrangements more visually striking by requiring all those seated in the central stands to wear their white togas;61 he also forbids anyone from the highest classes to appear on the stage itself.62 The importance of the radical separation between the stage and the stands in Augustan Rome is also revealed in the fate of the actor Pylades.63 When hissed at by one of the spectators, Pylades pointed to him from the stage, thus reversing the spectacular order by making the spectator himself an object of attention (conspicuum). For this the emperor banished him from Italy.

II. The Dramatic Digression (7.2)

Livy’s description of the first attempt to build a permanent theater in Rome was contained in his lost book 48. But the surviving summary preserves the argument used by the consul Nasica to prevent construction: a theater would not be beneficial and would harm the public character (inutile et nociturum publicis moribus [Per. 48]). Nasica’s objection does more than merely reflect the traditional fears about the dangers of the theater; the language in which those fears were expressed also recalls the defining characteristics of history as a literary genre.64 As we have seen, the usefulness of history, its ability to profit its readers, was fundamental to Polybius’s rejection of Phylarchus’s attempt to mix history and tragedy, and Livy’s preface describes his History as healthy (salubre), whereas the theater is harmful to public morals. This brief example shows how for Livy the double status of the theater as both a literary form and a pernicious social phenomenon made it particularly valuable as a vehicle for defining his own text. The Roman construction of the theater as a political space apart, which acquired a special significance in the wake of Augustus’s corrections of the transgressions of the Late Republic, meant that when Livy adopted the traditional literary dichotomy between history and drama, he was simultaneously asserting the place of his History in the “real” civic life of the Roman state. It is no accident therefore that the rejection of history’s rival genre is here backed by the authority of Rome’s highest magistrate. The purpose of this section is to show that Livy’s longest direct treatment of the theater as an institution, his excursus on the origin of drama in book 7, possesses a similar programmatic function. The opposition between history and drama developed in the excursus also informs Livy’s account of duel between Torquatus and the Gaul, where again two systems of representation are measured against each other in terms of their effect on their audiences.

I shall begin by quoting the passage itself, which occurs in the context of Livy’s highly annalistic presentation of the events of the year 364 B.C.E. near the beginning of book 7 (7.2):

During this and the succeeding year, when C. Sulpicius Peticus and C. Licinius Stolo were consuls, there was a pestilence. In the latter year, nothing was done worthy of memory except that, as an attempt to restore the pax deorum, a lectisternium was held for the third time since the founding of the city; and since the force of the plague was not relieved by human counsels or divine aid, when the minds of all had been overcome by superstition, even theatrical performances [ludi scaenici]—an unfamiliar thing for a warlike people; for the circus had until then been their only form of spectacle—are said to have been introduced among the other attempts to placate the wrath of the gods. However the institution was small at first, as almost all things are at the beginning, and essentially foreign [res peregrina]. Without any singing, without expressing the content of songs through gestures [sine imitandorum carminum actu], the players summoned from Etruria, leaping to the rhythm of the flute, produced not indecorous dances in the Etruscan manner. Then the youth began to imitate these players, while at the same time trading jests among themselves in crude verses; nor were their voices disconnected from their movements. So the institution was taken over and became established by being often performed. To the native actors, the name of histriones was given, since ister was the Etruscan word for player. These men no longer exchanged rough and impromptu jests like Fescennine verse, but performed saturae composed in meter with the song and choreography now written out to flute accompaniment.

After a number of years Livius Andronicus, who in place of saturae had first dared to introduce a play with a plot, likewise made another innovation. As all poets then did, he himself used to perform in his own dramas; when he had worn out his voice through frequent encores, having asked the permission of the audience, he is said to have stationed a slave boy in front of the flute player to sing for him and to have danced the song with a much more vigorous motion since he was not impeded by the use of his voice. From then on, all actors continued this practice, and only the dialogues were performed in their own voices. After the institution of the theater, because of this form of performing plays, grew distant from jokes and casual jesting and a game [ludus] had turned into a craft [ars], the youth began to exchange jokes stitched into verses in the old manner and left the performance of plays entirely to the histriones. Thence are derived the sketches [exodia] that are combined especially with Atellan farces. The youth kept to themselves this new type of performance, which they had taken from the Oscans, and did not allow it to be polluted by the histriones. And thus the provision remains that the performers of Atellan farces are not removed from their tribe and continue to perform military service on the grounds that they have no share in the craft of the theater [ars ludicra]. So the first origins of the drama deserve to be set among the small beginnings of other institutions so that it will be clear how from a healthy beginning, the drama has grown into a madness [insania] that would be scarcely tolerable in luxurious kingdoms.

III. Tragedy and the Tarquins

Rather than portraying the theater as an essentially “democratic” institution, as some scholars have interpreted it,83 Livy explicitly connects the excesses of dramatic performances with monarchy. The insania that the theater has become would be intolerable even in wealthy and luxurious kingdoms. The association between the drama and kingship makes sense on a number of levels. If dramatic performances can be taken as defining an antithesis to an idealized conception of Roman society, there was no institution more out of place in Rome than kingship. Indeed, the Roman tragic stage was, as we have seen, the representation of a royal palace, and the extravagant stage buildings of the Late Republic themselves became signs of the dangerous and improper pursuit of personal prestige by those who financed them. But for the historian, the regnum as archetype of a political system alien to the res publica could also be linked to a specific period in Roman history. While the first six kings of Rome receive a generally positive treatment as the originators of the public institutions that still defined the Roman state, the reign of the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, becomes in Livy’s text an anomalous interruption in the course of Roman history, a period when all the city’s political traditions are overturned, against which the newly founded Republic can be defined.84 Thus Tarquin’s regnum occupies a place in Livy’s narrative not unlike that of the theater in the public life of the state, and Livy develops this connection by framing his account of the last king’s reign with episodes explicitly described as dramas. The murder of Servius Tullius through which Tarquin gains the throne is a “tragic crime” (tragicum scelus), one of only two times the word “tragic” is used by Livy;85 the rape of Lucretia, the event that precipitates the founding of the Republic, results from a pastime devised by the king’s sons, described as a iuvenalis ludus (1.57.11), for which Livy employs both the setting and language of comedy.86

But a closer look at Livy’s condemnation of the insania of the theater suggests that the presentation of these events as dramas has a broader function within his text than to signify the corruption of Tarquin’s regime. The regnum Livy mentions in the passage from book 7 was not located on the stage; rather, it described the state in which unrestrained theatrical performances took place. The transgression of the restraints that ideally govern the theater means that the inversions that ought to be restricted to the stage have propagated themselves among the audience. So too the “dramas” in book 1 do not simply reflect the anomalies of Tarquin’s reign; they engender and perpetuate them. And as in book 7 the drama was contrasted with another ritual that healed “sickness” and put Rome’s legitimate political power on display, so here the creation of the Republic results from the production of other forms of visual display, which both reveal the failures of the regnum and reconstitute Roman society. Finally, it must also be remembered that the regna Livy evokes in book 7 are used to characterize not Rome’s ancient past but her present. So, too, we shall see that the particular social ills that the end of the regnum exemplifies relate directly to the contemporary issues of civic loyalty discussed in the preceding chapter, and the display that provides their remedy can again be connected with the healing ritual of sacrifice, the audience for which is now expanded to include Livy’s own readers.

A survey of the events that bring Tarquin to power will make clear both the social tendencies that differentiate this period in history and why drama as a form of spectacle should be particularly associated with them. Tullia, a daughter of Servius Tullius, was originally married to Arruns, a son of the previous king (1.46.4ff.). But when she perceives his ambition for power to be much less than her own, she contrives his death, as well as that of her sister, who was married to her husband’s more aggressive brother, L. Tarquinius. Having married Tarquinius herself, she goads her new husband to regain the throne that rightly belongs to him as the son of Tarquinius Priscus until, “inspired by womanly furies,”87 he initiates a conspiracy to seize power. He summons the Senate, occupies the throne, and delivers an attack against Servius as a slave who has revealed his origins by constantly favoring the lowest classes (1.47.8ff.). When Tullius himself arrives to challenge him, Tarquin grabs the aged king and hurls him down the steps of the curia. Tullia, who has just appeared in the forum itself to proclaim her husband king and been hustled away by him, finishes off her aged father as he gropes his way home by running him over with her wagon (1.48.1ff.). Thence “contaminated with the blood of her father,” she returns to her penates, whose anger ensures “that a similar ending will follow swiftly upon the evil beginning of the reign.”88

Livy’s portrayal of these events focuses especially on the interaction between the family and the state as two social entities. We have seen that for Cicero, the ability to place the state above the family as the object of loyalty and affection marked a crucial stage in the development of each individual’s civic identity. Livy historicizes this process by relating key events in the growth of the Roman state to the increase of patriotic feelings among its individual citizens. Thus his account of the founding of the Republic, for which Tarquin’s reign prepares, makes the transformation in Rome’s constitution inseparable from a revolution in the loyalties of the Romans themselves. Libertas would have been impossible had not “the love of wives and children and the dearness of the land itself,” generated a sense of communal loyalty by binding the animi of what had been a transitory population.89

But if affection within the family paves the way for full participation in the state for the other Romans, for the Tarquins, it has an opposite effect. It is the exhortations of his wife Tullia that lead Tarquin to overthrow the legitimate ruler, a sign both of the inversion of normal hierarchies within the family and of how this in turn leads to the privileging of family interest over public duty. Throughout the narrative, the dynastic ambitions of the Tarquins mean that they constantly overvalue the family against the state. Superbus justifies the deposition of Servius Tullius on the grounds that as the son of Tarquinius Priscus, he himself is the legitimate king: “He has occupied the throne of his father, and much better the king’s son be the heir to the kingdom than the king’s slave.”90 Not only does he define public status on the basis of domestic status, but in so doing, he reverses one of the great models of inclusion formulated under the monarchy, the adoption of Servius Tullius. The new king is as devoted to the interests of his sons as he was alive to his own prerogatives as filius.91 As a ruse to overcome the town of Gabii, Sextus Tarquinius pretends that his father the king has finally turned against his own family and forced him into exile, a lie that serves to underline the real closeness between father and son, who communicate with one another through secret signals, tacitis ambagibus (1.53.6), impenetrable to any outside observer. Thus the Tarquins, who like the other Romans originally came to the city as immigrants, fail to make the connection to the state that Livy describes as the fundamental prerequisite for the Republic. The contrast emerges most clearly when, after the first consul Brutus has executed his own sons for plotting against the Republic, the former king is described as an exile, wandering again among the cities of Etruria begging his allies “not to allow him to perish before their eyes with his adolescent sons.”92

The very same inversion in loyalties that keeps the Tarquins essentially foreign is also what give Livy’s depiction of the end of the regnum its distinctively tragic features. Since the more intimate bonds of family now determine the course of public affairs, Livy’s narrative is continually pulled away from the public spaces of the city into the private, unseen realms of the domus. Livy links the royal palace (regia) itself with the reign’s tragic nature: “for the Roman royal palace too brought forth an example of tragic crime” (tulit enim et Romana regia sceleris tragici exemplum [1.46.3]). The palace provides a powerful symbol of the family ambitions of the Tarquins, and as such it is especially contrasted to the senate house where the public deposition of Servius takes place. But at the same time, the regia also assumes the role of a tragic stage set, through which characters enter and exit. Tullia, contaminated with the blood of her father, returns to her penates (1.48.7); she does not emerge again in the narrative until the regime falls, when she is described “fleeing her home” as those who see her invoke the furies of her parents (1.59.13). Similarly, Tullia herself, as the driving force within the royal household, assumes a prominence unusual for women in historical narrative and becomes the center around which tragic imagery clusters. Phrases like muliebribus instinctus furiis, “inspired by womanly furies,” which make Tarquin seem like a fatally misguided Orestes, also point to the unnatural dominance of his wife within the familia.93

But not only do these tragic characteristics represent the nature of the regnum, the regnum itself comes into being as a result of them. The “tragic” scene that Tullia plays for Tarquin within the palace drives him toward his public crime as it converts him too into a tragic character. The bribery and the enticements that secure Tarquin’s position prior to his coup (1.47.7) can be read as the extension of this “tragic” influence outward, again through a series of secret meetings, so that the other “fathers of families” (patres gentium) become the servants of Tullia’s ambition. Thus the actions that Livy described as tragic generate a hidden network of intrigues that successively draw more and more people away from their duty to the state, until the res publica itself is subsumed under their influence.

The private ambitions that prompt Tarquin’s coup are cloaked behind the appearance of public legitimacy he creates. The final deposition of Tullius is deliberately portrayed as a public act. It takes place in the Senate and is preceded by an address in which Tarquin justifies his action on constitutional and political grounds: Tullius assumed the kingship without any of the customary procedures, as “a woman’s gift.”94 As king, he has proved himself an advocate of the lowest classes against the better. According to Tarquin, it is Tullius’s reign that has been the anomaly, and he, too, depicts the inversion of power within the state as the result of an overturning of the hierarchy within the family. The kingship of Servius, he suggests, constitutes an extended Saturnalia, when slaves are given the power of insulting their masters.95 His own usurpation will be the restoration of legitimate order and by throwing the king physically down the Senate steps, in inferiorem partem (1.48.3), he seems to signify that Servius has been returned to his proper place. These are the only actions of Tarquin’s that are accessible to public view, and taken on their own terms, they suggest that, if not perfectly justifiable, his attempt at least springs from recognizably political motives.96

There is however one publicly visible manifestation of the true nature of the new reign and of Tarquin’s display in the senate house. Tullia’s sudden appearance in the Forum can be read as a representation of the bursting out of private ambitions into the political centers of the state. Not only does Livy depict her decision to show herself as a result of shamelessness,97 but a similar direct intervention by women in the public life of the state is again portrayed as a violation of public decorum in the speech Cato delivers against the repeal of the lex Oppia (34.1.7ff.). There, too, that women should appear in such a manner in public was taken as evidence of the breakdown of male authority within the home.98 Appropriately for the role he is playing, Tarquin now gives the appearance of exercising authority over his wife by ordering her to depart. Yet the very language in which he does so betrays her influence. He employs the verb facessere, a rare and archaic word, which occurs most commonly in drama and appears only two other times in Livy, once in the context of the speech Tullia herself had given urging Tarquin to seize the throne.99

Tarquin’s appropriation of the public forms of legitimate authority in this scene gives a particular point to Livy’s explicit characterization of the preceding events as tragic. The mode the historian chooses for representing the preliminaries to the coup introduces a discrepancy between the perceptions of his readers and those of the audience for Tarquin’s actions. Tarquin is at pains to conceal the “dramatic” nature of what has happened, and hence when his wife, the inspiring fury, appears in public, he drives her away. For the audiences within the narrative, it is therefore impossible to perceive what is taking place as the intrusion of an anomalous regime, precisely because this “dramatic interlude” has usurped the forms and appearances of real government. It is only when Tarquin’s coup is staged as a drama, as Livy stages it for his readers, that it takes on the socially useful function of a negative exemplum, defining by contrast the proper conception of the res publica. Thus the deployment of allusions to tragedy within Livy’s text, far from being simply a problem of style, resembles the use of drama in Roman ritual as a carefully orchestrated antithesis to the civic framework in which it was embedded. Moreover, by so carefully delineating the overthrow of Servius Tullius as tragic, the historian counters precisely the elision of the boundary between the space of the dramatic performances and Roman public life that Tarquin strives to produce, and that also provided a constant source of anxiety in the case of actual theatrical spectacles. Significantly, the strategy that the historian here uses to isolate Tarquin’s reign within the course of his history has a close parallel in the new king’s own attempt to use the rhythms of religious ritual to depict the reign of his predecessor as a carnivalesque interruption of legitimate authority.

IV. Sacrifice and the Restoration of the Res Publica

When the Tarquins are finally driven from power, it is the result of an analogous process of publicizing the hidden crimes of the monarchy in a manner that makes their improper and profoundly un-Roman nature unmistakable. The exposure of the rape of Lucretia by Brutus, the first consul of the Republic, involves assimilating that crime to another mode of ritualized public spectacle, sacrifice. As drama reflects and reproduces the ethical misalignments that lead to Tarquin’s usurpation of power, so, as the preceding chapter illustrated, sacrifice exerts an opposing influence by creating a sense of community among its spectators. Thus Brutus’s display of the body of Lucretia, like his later execution of his own sons, forges the new conception of civic identity that Livy makes inseparable from the Roman res publica. And the historian, whose role in representing the monarchy had been to resist the king’s portrayal of events by exposing the “dramatic” origins of his reign, can again align his narrative with the public displays of an authentic magistrate.

The penates of the regia, outraged at Tullia’s actions, are said to have ensured that the untimely end of the king’s reign will be like its beginnings, and Livy’s narrative emphasizes this symmetry by again stressing the transgression of boundaries between public and private space involved in the rape of Lucretia. The regime symbolically began when Tullia shamelessly rode out of the regia into the spaces of public assembly. It will end when a man who ought to be with his fellows on the battlefield, enters a private house to violate a truly modest wife.

The events that provide the context for the rape similarly epitomize the regime’s failure to distinguish properly between public and private and show how the resulting inversions serve to degrade, both ethically and politically, each individual Roman citizen. The Romans are at war with Ardea, but it is a war that is being fought for the most un-Roman motive of personal gain (1.57.1).100 The king wishes both to recover the private wealth that he has expended in the adornment of the city and to use the spoils to reconcile the sentiments, or as Livy puts it, to corrupt the animi,101 of the people, who feel that they have been forced to perform the work of slaves in undertaking the king’s building projects. The concatenation of bribery, corruption, foreign spoils, and enslavement that results from Tarquin’s failure to keep public and private resources separate102 anticipates the later effects of luxury on the state and has the political consequence of dividing the population into masters and slaves.103

As the war with Ardea itself violates Roman military traditions, so the entertainment that precedes the rape takes place during a hiatus in military activity and promotes throughout an improper inversion of the domestic and military spheres: the soldiers’ camp becomes a place for diversion and entertainment; competitions are waged and victories won within the domus. At a drinking party, where the royal youth “while away their leisure” (otium)104 during the siege of Ardea, a “contest” (certamen) arises about whose wife possesses the best character, and as a way of deciding the winner they agree to visit the home of each unexpectedly to see how their wives are occupying themselves. The young men mount their horses and speed off to Rome, where they find the wives of the princes engaged in much the same activities that they themselves had been, extravagant drinking parties.105 Lucretia, the wife of the king’s nephew, Collatinus, by contrast, is discovered unimpeachably spinning wool at their home in Collatia. She therefore receives the “praise of winning the competition,”106 and her husband is proclaimed victor. However, the sight of both her beauty and her chastity “inspires”107 one of the princes, Sextus Tarquinius, with a desire to rape her. A few days later, he returns to Collatia, and, having been received as a guest, enters Lucretia’s bedroom that night with a drawn sword. When he finds her unfrightened by the fear of death, he finally “conquers”108 her by threatening to kill a male slave as well and place his corpse in her bed as though he had been her lover.

It is appropriate that Livy should again invoke drama when describing the activity that draws the young men away from their duty on the battlefield and into the private spaces of the domus. As R. M. Ogilvie has pointed out, the conception of a contest of wives has parallels in Roman comedy, and the entire ludus is punctuated with a banter that contains many expressions reminiscent of stage dialogue.109 Like the tragedy with which the reign began, the dramatic allusions here do more than characterize the anomalous nature of the young men’s actions; each of the characters is also made into a spectator, and the crime that follows is explicitly portrayed as a result of the act of watching. Rather than observing the kinds of military displays described in chapters 2 and 3 and so being inspired to fight more boldly, Sextus is impelled by the sight of Lucretia to penetrate further into the domus. Concomitantly, the paradigm of drama accentuates the social distinctions that also form the background to the youths’ actions. Lucretia herself is incorporated into the drama, and, given the Roman contempt for those who appeared on stage, the very fact of being put on display in this contest anticipates the lowering of status with which Sextus threatens her. So too the “praise” she wins and the castitas she manifests become, within the inverted world of the drama, an impetus only for her degradation. By contrast, at the scene of her death, Lucretia places herself on display but this time as an exemplum that will act to preserve the reputation for chastity, and hence the status, of Roman wives.110

It is the suicide of Lucretia that begins the process of publicization that converts her rape from a private outrage, as indeed Sextus’s crime would have been regarded prior to Augustus’s moral legislation, to the event that provokes a national revolution.111 Her violated body becomes the center of a new spectacle, whose audience gradually expands to include the entire res publica. Having invited her husband and father, each accompanied by one friend, to the house in Collatia, she kills herself in their presence after denouncing her rapist.112 Her corpse is carried out of the home and into the forum of the town of Collatia, where those who see it are “astonished by the indignitas of the action” (1.59.3). The next step is for Brutus to narrate her violation and death in Rome itself.

The events culminating in the rape had been accompanied by a progressive narrowing of the audience of spectators in a manner that reflects the exclusive and divisive civic structure obtaining under the monarchy. The initial audience for the certamen proposed at the banquet was already restricted to the kinsmen of the king,113 and when Sextus returns to Collatinus’s house, even they have been excluded. The first acts of the revolution thus reverse the narrative motion from public to private space that resulted from the ludus. What is more, the process of exposure can also be mapped against the concentric levels of social organization whose harmonization within one another is essential for the formation of the Republic. Collatia, the native town, or to use Cicero’s term the patria loci (De leg. 2.5), follows the family group and is succeeded in turn by Rome, center of the res publica itself.

The crucial moment in the transformation of the rape from a private to a public crime results from the intervention of a figure who is not a member of Lucretia’s immediate family, L. Junius Brutus.114 After Lucretia has stabbed herself, her relatives are consumed by grief, but Brutus “snatching the knife from the wound and holding it, still dripping with blood, before him, says, “By this blood, most pure [castissimum] before the royal injustice, I swear, and I make you gods my witnesses, to drive out with fire sword and whatever force I might, Tarquinius Superbus together with his criminal wife and children” ”(1.59.1). Both gesture and language begin the redefinition of Lucretia’s death by treating it as a sacrifice. An oath sworn by blood is rare in Roman religion,115 but where blood is used in ritual, it often derives from sacrificial victims or appears in a sacrificial context.116 And coniurationes were often confirmed through sacrifice.117 The word castissimum is also relevant here; although Lucretia, as a woman married only to one husband (univira), was sexually chaste, the adjective castus is also used for ritual purity. In fact, this is its customary meaning in Livy.118

In the preceding chapter, sacrifice was discussed in terms of the social bond it created among its spectators. Each sacrifice offers the spectator the double possibility of seeing himself either as part of the group that exacts the death of the victim or of sympathizing with the victim itself. While, as we saw, the two potentials are both inescapably present in every sacrificial scene, when the spectator’s identification with the victim becomes too overpowering, the sacrifice serves to alienate its audience from the larger group responsible for the killing. Brutus converts Lucretia’s death into just this kind of impure sacrifice. The observation that Lucretia’s blood is no longer castus introduces the motif of ritual impropriety. Similarly, Lucretia’s proclamation of her own innocence, “although I absolve myself from crime, I do not release myself from punishment” (ego me etsi peccato absolvo, supplicio non libero [1.58.10]) both increases the reader’s sympathy for her unjust suffering, and, from a sacrificial perspective, removes the supposition of the victim’s guilt, which, in Greek rituals like the Buphonia, justifies its killing.119

The sacrificial interpretation of Lucretia’s death thus becomes another means of representing the impropriety of her violation, but now in a medium that reveals its implications, not just for the domus, but for the state as a whole. It also creates a link between Livy’s narrative and actual Roman ritual, for it was an impure sacrifice that motivated the expulsion of the kings as it was reenacted every year at the festival of the regifugium. In this ceremony, which took place on February 24, the very date Ovid assigns for the rape of Lucretia, a surrogate for the king, the rex sacrorum, performs a sacrifice in the forum and immediately flees the area.120 H. H. Scullard, using the analogy of the Greek Buphonia, where the sacrificer is also forced to flee, assumes that the rex takes on himself the guilt of an impure sacrifice.121

The initial response to Brutus’s oath by Lucretia’s father and husband is to turn “from mourning to anger.”122 At every stage in the journey to Rome the spectacle, that Brutus produces or the narrative he delivers becomes an instrument for converting the personal grief of the spectators into an impetus for collective action. Thus the shift in civic identity that is required for the formation of the Republic results directly from Brutus’s representation of the Tarquins’ crime. The effects of the spectacle appear most clearly in the scene at Collatia. “Each lament for themselves the foul and violent deed of the prince. They are moved not only by the sorrows of her father, but also by Brutus, who chides them for their tears and ineffectual lamentation and recommends that they take up arms against those who have dared such hostile actions; this is what befits men and Romans.”123 Again, the change from an individual to a unified response to the rape parallels the witnesses’ shift from identifying primarily with the father to conceiving of themselves as Romans, and concomitantly viewing the Tarquins as public enemies (hostes).

If Lucretia’s death, as an image of impure sacrifice alienates its viewers from the regime responsible for her death, the beginning of the Republic by contrast offers other examples of collective action where the citizens band together to punish or expel transgressors. The expulsion of Collatinus, while not explicitly described as sacrificial, can profitably be understood according to the logic of sacrifice established in the Lucretia episode. Indeed, Livy links Collatinus’s banishment directly to Lucretia’s death by depicting it as an extension of the oath he swore by Lucretia’s blood (2.2.5).124 The other Tarquins were expelled by violence, but Collatinus is persuaded to go by Brutus. The first words of Brutus’s exhortation are “you, by your own will…” (hunc tu tua voluntate…[2.2.7]).125 Collatinus, rather than be subjected to violence must leave of his own will, in a manner that will absolve the state of any blame, just as the propriety of sacrificial ritual required that the victim meet death willingly.126

The moment that reveals most clearly how the social order of the Republic is articulated and propagated through sacrificial spectacle comes when Brutus presides over the execution of his two sons for plotting to restore the Tarquins.127 Again the crowd’s support of the punishment and acknowledgment of the victims’ guilt stands in contrast to the sympathy that had been aroused by the sight of Lucretia’s corpse. But as a confirmation of the new regime, this scene also answers the dramatic episode that began the reign of the last king. There, the supremacy of family connections over public institutions was revealed when the son deposed the slave who had become king. Here, Brutus complements the execution of his sons by granting libertas to the slave who alerted the consuls to their conspiracy. More important, if Tarquin concealed private ambitions behind the public role he was playing, the culmination of Livy’s account of the execution comes when Brutus’s feelings as a father are revealed through the performance of his duties, “with a father’s spirit shining forth amid the performance of his public duty” (eminente animo patrio inter publicae poenae ministerium [2.5.8]).

It is the balance revealed in the last sentence between the personal experience of Brutus and the civic role he performs that structures Livy’s account of the scene:

The traitors were condemned and the punishment exacted, a punishment more remarkable [conspectius] because the consulate imposed on a father the duty of taking retribution from his sons and fortune made the executor of the penalty the very man who would have been removed had he been a spectator. The youths stood bound at the stake but the children of the consul drew the eyes of all away from the other conspirators as if they were unknown.128 Men did not pity the punishment more than the crime by which it had been earned: that they, in that very year, should have taken it into their heads to betray to a once proud king and now dangerous exile the newly liberated patria, the pater who had liberated it, the office of the consulate, which originated from their own family, the patricians, the people, and the gods and men who composed the Roman state. The consuls took their places; the lictors were sent to exact the penalty. They strip the youths, lash them with rods, and strike them with the ax. During all this time the father, his face and countenance, were a spectacle for the crowd, as a father’s spirit shone forth amid the performance of his public duty.

Throughout the passage, brief, objective descriptions of the execution give rise to longer analyses of the responses of the spectators, which in turn seem to alternate between the anger they feel as citizens toward the traitors and the sympathy with which they regard the consul. As in the trial of Horatius, the tensions that arise in the feelings of the spectators produce a doubling of the spectacle itself, so that by the end of the passage the audience’s gaze has moved from the condemned to the face of their father. Livy’s description of the figure of Brutus generates a corresponding problem in perspective. Brutus is imagined at the beginning of the passage as a spectator, yet his presence makes the scene more “worthy of attention,” and by the end he has become the spectaculum. This shift between a subjective and objective role means that Brutus is at once the focus of attention and occupies the position of the other spectators. And it is by identifying themselves with the consul that his fellow citizens can perceive the tension between civic duty and private loss as their own.

Within the context of the narrative, the execution of Brutus’s sons, like the spectacles that surrounded the fall of Alba, takes on an initiatory function. The conflicts experienced by the spectators articulate precisely the shift in loyalties required for the formation of the Republic, where the new sense of national identity that is the prerequisite for libertas both depends on and supersedes natural affection for the family. So the spectacle in which the new civic order is confirmed does not mask or conceal these conflicts; on the contrary, it exposes them in a manner that requires every member of the audience to experience the duties of citizen and pater simultaneously. To signal the importance of the spectacle for the formation of citizens, the scene ends when the slave Vindicius is given both libertas and civitas.129

In conclusion, throughout this charged sequence of episodes, Livy contrasts drama and sacrifice as two media of political communication that activate antithetical processes within the Roman state. The covert ascendancy of the private and domestic ambitions of the Tarquins, which Livy associates with drama, continually results in the enslavement of Roman citizens both collectively and individually. The sacrificial rituals of the Republic bring about libertas by doubly publicizing personal experience: the private sufferings of Lucretia’s family and of Brutus himself are exposed to the public gaze and thus generate within each of their spectators the shared emotions that, as the preface to book 2 implies, become the basis of a new sense of national identity. Correspondingly, the shift from regnum to res publica brings about a different relationship between the historian’s own representation of events and the public displays through which each regime exercises its power. By directly depicting Tarquin’s reign as a series of dramatic episodes, Livy at once signals its discontinuity with the rest of Roman history and counters the king’s own pretenses of legitimacy. But even as the model of theatrical spectacle encourages readers to distance themselves from events that are designated as drama, the sacrifices that bring about the revolution require their audiences to identify with the objects of their gaze. So Livy’s account of Brutus’s execution of his sons enables his own readers to reconstruct precisely the experiences of the actual spectators and to end, as they do, with their attention focused on the animus patrius of Brutus, which the spectacle of the execution renders visible (2.5.8). Under the Republic, history becomes the medium through which the public displays that create libertas can be communicated to the reader.130

This congruence between Livy’s narrative and the public representations of the first consul receives confirmation when, as a culmination of the process of exposure that leads to the revolution, Livy depicts Brutus acting as a historian. After having displayed the body of Lucretia in the forum at Collatia, Brutus moves on to the Roman forum, where he delivers an oration that not only describes the rape of Lucretia but also refers to the murder of Servius Tullius, and even to the digging of the Cloaca Maxima (1.59.7–11). In other words, he recapitulates much of Livy’s own narrative. In fact, Livy says that Brutus recalled even more horrible deeds, which are difficult for the historian to relate.131 However, this difference in content, even the necessary distancing created by such an authorial aside, is less significant than Livy’s implication that at this moment Brutus’s action and his own are comparable.

V. Verginia

The general similarity between the episodes of Verginia and Lucretia needs no emphasis: once again, a tyrannical regime that has illegally taken power in Rome is brought down when one of its leaders, Appius Claudius, attempts the sexual violation of a freeborn woman, whose death becomes the act that mobilizes political resistance.132 But the thematic connections Livy’s treatment creates between the two events go beyond the similarity of their plots. Here, too, the issue of the illegitimate use of the forms of public authority for the pursuit of private ends structures the entire narrative and manifests itself in the spatial opposition between domus and forum. The political enslavement of the entire state to the regnum of Appius again reveals itself in an attack on the freeborn status of one individual Roman woman. Indeed, the procedure most directly involved in the attempts of Verginia’s father and betrothed to protect her is the vindicatio in libertatem, the origins of which go back to the execution of the sons of Brutus, where the new libertas of the nation was symbolized by the freeing of the loyal slave Vindicius. But for our purposes the most significant similarity is that once again Livy employs allusions to drama to characterize Appius’s attempt to use the façade of public authority against Verginia, while the liberation of the state is effected by the creation of a spectacle that here, even more explicitly than in the case of Lucretia, is depicted as an improper sacrifice. Thus this episode confirms the importance within Livy’s text of the opposition between drama, as the mechanism for usurpation and enslavement, and sacrifice, through which the traditional order is restored.

The episode begins when Appius Claudius, the most important of the decemviri, who have illegally remained in office by failing to hold the promised consular elections, is seized with desire for the plebeian maid Verginia.133 While her father is serving in the army, he instructs his cliens, M. Claudius, to lay public claim to the girl as his slave. Claudius seizes the girl on her way to school (ludus) and brings her to court, which is presided over by Appius himself (3.44.6ff.). In two separate scenes, Appius resists the appeals of Verginia’s betrothed, Icilius (3.45.4–11), and of her father (3.47), who has been hastily summoned from the camp. When Appius rejects his plea and awards Verginia to his client, Verginius pretends to acquiesce and with the decemvir’s permission withdraws for a moment with his daughter, whom he suddenly kills as the only way of securing her libertas (3.48.4–6). The horror of this event provokes a rebellion against the decemvirs, which is further enflamed when Verginius, still bearing his bloody dagger, tells his story to the army (3.50.2–10).

Explicit reference to the drama is made during the first trial scene when Appius’s client, by claiming that Verginia is his slave, is said to “act out a play that was known to the judge, since he himself was the author of its plot” (notam iudici fabulam petitor, quippe apud ipsum auctorem argumenti, peragit [3.44.9]). Terms suggesting dramatic performance permeate the language of the sentence. Fabula is the correct term for play, especially when it is “acted” (peragit), and argumentum, which can also suggest the legal “argument” M. Claudius is about to put forth, here designates primarily the “plot” of the drama Appius has composed.134 This designation of the trial as a drama has the further effect of accentuating how closely the events Livy describes resemble situations typical of the stage, particularly of Roman Comedy:135 Many of the central characters of the episode can be readily assimilated to standard comic roles. Verginia becomes the silent beloved, Icilius the adulescens amator, and Appius, described with the dramatic phrase amore amens,136 acts as the powerful rival. So, too, one of the central issues of comic plots, the connection between civic status and marriageability, also governs the action here.137 Icilius’s ability to make Verginia his wife depends on establishing that she is in fact freeborn, while the rival’s desire to make her his concubine requires that she be a slave.

Once again, however, the dramatic shaping of this episode cannot be explained simply as a stylistic choice, much less as an attempt to elide the differences between history and drama. Because this “drama” is being played out not on stage but in the law court, and the rival is himself the judge, the comic model breaks down. No means exist for the would-be husband to restore Verginia to her rightful status and bring about the resolution of conflicts between desire, family expectations, and social norms that the comic paradigm demands. Thus the allusions to comedy here introduce a set of expectations whose disastrous reversal ultimately reinforces the distinction between the spheres of drama and of the public actions that properly constitute the subject of history. If this were only a comedy, Verginia would undoubtedly be reunited with her family. But what is taking place here, as the “heroine’s” hideous death makes inescapably plain, is no ludus; this is not a fictive event distanced from its audience by the conventions of the stage, but a trial taking place in a real Roman courtroom and as such recorded in Livy’s text.

The imagery of role-playing and acting had previously been used to indicate Appius’s essential duplicity,138 but it also points to a central characteristic of Livy’s portrayal of the decemvirate, the discrepancy between appearance and reality created by the decemvirs’ illegal usurpation of the forms of public office. The decemvirs rule as if they were magistrates; they preside at trials and have the outward trappings of power. But once they have failed to hold consular elections and have exceeded the limits of their office, they cease to have any legitimate authority. Thus Livy describes them on the Ides of May, 449 B.C.E., the date when the new magistrates should have taken office, as “private citizens acting like decemvirs, yet with their courage for wielding power undiminished, and still wearing the insignia that gave the appearance of honor.”139 They are again designated as privati who have unjustly taken possession of the fasces by their opponent, M. Horatius Barbatus, who equates this situation with the end of libertas itself and the return of regium imperium (3.39.8). The real vacuum at the heart of the state is perhaps most chillingly revealed in a slightly earlier scene. After an invasion by the Sabines and Aequi, the decemvirs attempt to summon the Senate. But since they lack the constitutional authority to do this, the senators do not appear. “The people looked around for a senator in all parts of the Forum, but rarely recognized one; then they gazed upon the curia and the emptiness surrounding the decemvirs” (3.38.9).

But the precedent of the Tarquins suggests a further significance to the intrusion of dramatic elements in Livy’s account of the trial: not only have the appearances of power been deprived of their substance, they have been taken over to serve private ends. Just as Tarquin adopted the outward forms of political action to conceal the “tragic” impetus that inspired his coup, so here an event that appears to be a trial turns out to be a fabula. The inseparability between the processes of the trial and the dramatic “plot” concocted by Appius appears most clearly in Livy’s handling of the legal details of the case. Those who speak on behalf of Verginia demand that Appius not hand her over to the man who claims to be her master, “Lest her reputation be imperiled before the question of her status is decided” (3.44.12). Ogilvie points out that this plea for vindiciae secundum libertatem was impossible, since according to Roman law, minors in such a situation could only legally be handed over to their fathers, and Verginia’s father was away with the army. He assumes therefore that Livy has fallen into error through a misunderstanding of legal practice.140 However, precisely this legal issue is raised within the text by Appius Claudius himself. In fact, as the decemvir makes clear, the very law that forbids him to hand Verginia over to anyone except her father was one of the provisions that he himself had made in defense of the Romans’ libertas (3.45.1). Appius’s pursuit of Verginia therefore requires not that he disregard the laws of the state but that he scrupulously obey them. As a result, the furtherance of his own private aims becomes indistinguishable from the proper conduct of public business. He has, to paraphrase Livy’s words, “written the script for this performance” not only because he has cooked up the plot itself, but also because he has written the very laws that ensure its success.

The issues involved in the trial scene also activate the same larger conflict in ethical alignments as the events surrounding the creation of the Republic itself. In the crudest terms, Appius subordinates the res publica to the needs of his own body, but, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the civic bond requires not just a reversal of these priorities but an ability to think of the state in the same terms as one thinks of the family and even the body.141 The way Livy has portrayed Appius’s attempt on Verginia makes the sympathetic relationship between all these entities as clear as the episode of Latinius’s dream. Appius’s actions are at once an attack on collective libertas, the structure of the gens, and the integrity of his victim’s body. His “plot” requires that she lose her citizenship and her place in the family together with her chastity: M. Claudius is to claim that Verginia is a slave, not a freeborn citizen, and that she is in fact not her father’s daughter. The very name of the heroine makes the connection between sexual integrity and membership in the family inevitable. Ogilvie suggests that the name Verginia itself “was simply a hypostatization of virgo,”142 and Livy himself seems to reinforce this connection when he introduces Verginius as “father of the virgin” (pater virginis, L. Verginius [3.44.2]). Whatever this wordplay tells us about the historical tradition behind Livy’s account, it has the more immediate thematic significance of clarifying that once the maiden ceases to be a virgo, she ceases to be Verginia.143

The first attempt within the narrative to counter Appius’s plan relies on converting the “drama” of the trial into a different spectacle that will at once reveal the transgressive nature of Appius’s regime and make even more explicit how the overthrow of order within the state has a direct consequence for each individual citizen. The first trial scene ends when Icilius emerges into the Forum to challenge Appius’s decision. When the lictors attempt to drive him away, he delivers a speech that begins with the threat of revelation: “I shall have to be removed by the sword for you to keep in silence what you wish to be concealed.” The promised revelation takes two forms. First Icilius portrays the attack on Verginia in a way that makes clear how the outrage to the family is the inevitable consequence of the loss of political libertas. “Even if you have taken away the protection of the tribunate and the right of provocatio, still your lust has no power [literally, “kingship”] against our children and wives.”144 (Verginius himself in the second trial scene will go even further. Not only the Roman social structure is at risk but even the distinction that separates men from animals. “Is it your will to rush into mating in the manner of sheep and wild beasts?” he asks the decemvir.)145 At the same time, Icilius provokes a direct manifestation of Appius’s tyranny by forcing the decemvir to use the traditional emblems of magisterial power against him: “Call all of your colleagues and lictors; order the rods and axes to be prepared.…Vent your rage on our backs and necks, but let chastity at least be preserved.”146 The imagined scene of the symbols of Roman libertas being directed against the bodies of individual Roman citizens fighting for their wives and daughters is made all the more striking by the implied contrast with the actions of Brutus himself, the “fierce avenger of violated purity” (pudicitia),147 who unbound the fasces to punish his own sons. Livy points out the effectiveness of Icilius’s strategy by commenting on the crowd’s response. “The multitude was aroused, and a confrontation seemed inevitable.” Appius is, however, able to defuse the danger in a characteristic manner. He tries to portray Icilius’s complaint as a danger to public order, again maintaining the fiction that he is only behaving as a magistrate should. “Appius said that it was not a case of Icilius defending Verginia, but rather that a disorderly man, in pursuit of a tribunate, was looking for an opportunity to make trouble” (3.46.2).

The crisis, when it comes, will take the form of a scene very much like the spectacle that Icilius imagines. Appius, having ruled in favor of his cliens, does indeed employ his lictor to part the crowd with words that seem to echo Icilius’s challenge: “Go, lictor, remove the crowd and clear a path for a master to take possession of his property” (I, lictor submove turbam et da viam domino ad prehendendum mancipium [3.48.3]).148 Indeed, Livy says that he “thunders forth” this command, as though he were now taking on the role of Jupiter himself.149 But at the same time that Appius assumes the mantle of public authority most directly, the object against which this force is directed appears at her most powerless. The crowd moves apart to reveal Verginia “deserted, a prey [praeda] to injustice [iniuria].”150 As the pretense of legitimacy is denounced as iniuria, the description of Verginia as praeda recalls her father’s denunciation of the decemvir’s actions as reducing human beings to the level of beasts. The instant that she loses her libertas, she is at once reduced to the status of a foreign captive, or indeed, of an animal.

The sequel to Appius’s action, Verginius’s killing of his daughter, while formally cursing the decemvir and proclaiming her libertas, marks the point where the spectacle of impure sacrifice explicitly takes the place of the false trial. The knife with which the deed is performed has been snatched from a butcher shop and thus implies the mixing of human and animal blood that, as in the scene of the Samnite initiation ritual, serves as the most obvious sign of corrupted sacrifice.151 At a deeper level, it is the failure to maintain the boundaries that distinguish the victim from the sacrificer and the other participants that results in the breakdown of legitimate sacrifice. Such transgressions are doubly apparent here. The victim not only belongs to the same species as her killer; she is even a member of the same family. Thus the violations of sacrificial practice here replicate precisely the violations of the social order that resulted from the decemvir’s actions. The gens disintegrates, and the distinction between man and beast breaks down. What is more, the ritual corruption of Verginia’s death complements exactly the dynamics of the relationship between Verginia and the crowd of spectators when Appius first sends the lictor against her. There, too, the crowd identified closely with the victim; indeed, she was physically placed among them so that the violence threatened by the lictor was quite literally directed against them.152 This is just the kind of sympathy that the substitution of a nonhuman sacrificial victim was designed to moderate.

Livy is unique among ancient sources in describing the exact location where the death of Verginia took place: “near the temple of Venus Cloacina by the shops that are now called new” (3.48.5). The presence of a shrine is one of the details that contributes to the sacralization of the scene, but the cult associations of Venus Cloacina have a special relevance for the Verginia episode. Pliny derives the title Cloacina, not from sewer (cloaca), but from the ancient word for purification (cluere),153 and purification, under two seemingly contradictory circumstances, seems to have been this Venus’s particular function.154 The myrtle branch, one of the two cult images the goddess holds, is connected both with marriage and with the purification of a warrior stained with the blood of the battlefield. The link between the transition from an unmarried to a married state and the motion from war to peace was made in the aetiological legend that Pliny gives for the temple. This was said to be the place where the Romans and the Sabines, who had been preparing to do battle after the rape of the Sabine women, laid down there arms and purified themselves with myrtle. Thus the cultic associations of the shrine provide an ideal setting to reveal all of the transgressions involved in the Verginia story. Verginia is not a bride being prepared for marriage, but a maiden being killed to prevent her enslavement. Her father is not purified from the blood of the battlefield on his return to the city. On the contrary, he flees the city for the battlefield stained with the blood of his daughter. Even more important, the aetiological legend of the temple links the shrine to an episode in Roman history where marriage led directly to the formation of the larger social bonds through which the Roman state grew. As such, the rape of the Sabine women perfectly exemplifies the importance of “the love of wives and children,” which Livy in the preface to book 2 had claimed as one of the forces that ensured harmony within the newly liberated res publica. In this case, however, it is the violation of the marriage bond that reveals the disintegration of social order within the state, and correspondingly leads to an armed rebellion.

Ogilvie suggests that the story of Verginia might itself be regarded as the aetiological legend behind the cult.155 But as we have seen another, and far more appropriate, story already existed to account for its origins.156 What is more, Livy is the only author who explicitly mentions Verginia in connection with the shrine. Dionysius by contrast, whose account is in every way much more detailed than Livy’s, mentions only the Forum and the butcher’s shop.157 Thus, rather than simply reflecting an essential element in the story, the reference to the shrine of Venus Cloacina can be regarded as part of Livy’s use of Roman religious traditions as a context that throws into relief the anomalous and transgressive nature of the episode.

At the same time that Livy sets the episode against the background of ritual practice, he contextualizes it in another sense as well. The reference to the shops “that are now called new” allows his audience to locate the scene precisely within the landscape of the contemporary city. I suggest that both the allusions to cult and sacrifice and the geographic specificity of his description serve the same ends. Although the Forum has changed its aspect over the centuries since the decemvirate, the historian’s text overcomes temporal distance and makes the event he describes visible in the present. At the same time, the city itself, although it no longer preserves the exact configurations of its past, nevertheless gains a new series of historical associations. So the religious rituals that Livy uses as models for the construction of scenes like the death Verginia themselves create a visual link to the past. Each sacrifice or ritualized performance ideally reproduces an endless series of identical rituals extending backwards through time. The rex sacrorum who flees the Forum every year continually reenacts the exile of the Tarquins, at least for those who, like Livy’s audience, know the story. Indeed, Livy’s text incorporates both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of such occasions, at once providing the historical background that gives each performance meaning and, in the case of the sacrificial scenes examined in the preceding two chapters, shaping his record of the past to convey the immediate experience of ritual. By contrast, the decemvir Appius, by superimposing a fabula on the public procedures of the trial, disguises his actions as magistrate, making them inaccessible to the viewer, at the same time as he inverts the moral precedents that should govern them.

Appendix: Tanaquil and the Accession of Servius Tullius

If Tarquinius Superbus’s reign has an “end like its beginnings,” the same can also be said for the reign of Servius Tullius himself, since the circumstances of his deposition also recall the events that brought him to the throne. Then, too, it was within the domus of the previous king, Tarquinius Priscus, a region closed to public view, that the decisive actions occurred, and again it was a woman, Tanaquil, the king’s wife, who assumed an active role both in ensuring Servius’s succession and in mediating between the domus and the populus. In this appendix, I argue that the similarities between the situations of Servius and Superbus can be subject to two antithetical interpretations, which correspond to the profoundly ambivalent nature of Livy’s portrait of the kingship itself. On the one hand, it is possible to read the actions of Tanaquil, as indeed Superbus himself will do, as calling into question the legitimacy of Servius’s position: he received the throne through a “woman’s gift” (muliebre donum).158 In this case, Tullia’s actions will appear only as a more extreme and heinous version of what the earlier queen had done, and the entire reign of Servius, although infinitely more “constitutional” than Tarquin’s own regnum, will nevertheless form part of a larger pattern of degeneration, within which each reign appears to violate the proprieties of succession to a greater degree than its predecessor. On the other hand, the similarities between the conduct of Tanaquil and Tullia also throw into relief the important differences between their actions in a manner that reconfirms the impression that the reign of Tarquin, with its overprivileging of family concerns over public legitimacy, does indeed constitute an anomaly within the course of Roman history.

Livy’s narrative offers two possibilities for Servius’s origins. Initially, he is presented as the son of a slave, as Tarquin himself will later claim, but Livy almost immediately presents an alternate account of the king’s ancestry, to which, he says, he himself inclines: Servius’s mother was the wife of the chief (princeps) of the Latin town of Corniculum (1.39.5).159 When the town was captured by the Romans, she was recognized among the captives, and saved from slavery, by the Roman queen Tanaquil and gave birth to a son within the palace. Later, when this child was asleep within the palace, a miraculous fire burst out around his head, which only went out when he woke up. Again Tanaquil intervenes. Leading her husband to a secluded place, she interprets the omen of the flame for him: Servius is destined to be a “light” in doubtful times and to provide the “fuel” (materies) for great glory.160 As a result, Servius is raised as a liber and eventually becomes the king’s son-in-law.

Later, when Tarquinius Priscus has been mortally wounded by the jealous sons of Ancus Marcius, the king whom he himself succeeded, Tanaquil takes action again. She closes off the king’s house from the people who have been attracted by the disturbance and, although the king is in fact near death, proceeds to treat him, “as though there were some hope” (1.41.1) Meanwhile, Servius Tullius is summoned. Taking him by the right hand, Tanaquil begs him to avenge the king’s murder and delivers the following exhortation:

The kingdom belongs to you, Servius, if you are a man, and not to those who with alien hands have done this foul deed. Rouse yourself and take as leaders the gods who portended that this head would be famous by surrounding it with a divine fire. Now let that celestial flame rouse you: now wake up indeed. We, too, reigned, though only immigrants. Think of who you are, not whence you were born. If your wits are dazed by the suddenness of the event; then follow my advice.

With these deeply ambiguous words, Tanaquil can be seen as offering a precedent for Tullia’s later incitement of Tarquinius Superbus to overthrow her father. Tanaquil too seems motivated by dynastic considerations, the fear that her husband’s murderers will take the throne. And the phrase with which the speech ends, “follow my advice” (mea consilia sequere [1.41.3]) claims an unseemly degree of personal influence over Servius and contrasts with her earlier wish that Servius “follow the gods as leaders” (deosque duces sequere [ibid.]) Indeed, in the control she exerts over Tarquinius Superbus Tullia sees herself as emulating the example of Tanaquil, who, “though only a foreign woman, bestowed two kingships in succession, first upon her husband then upon her son-in-law” (1.47.6).

But Tullia’s reference to Tanaquil as a model for her own attempt to usurp public authority in the service of personal and dynastic motives also serves to remind the reader of the crucial differences between Tanaquil’s speech and the one she has just delivered. Tullia argues that Tarquin should reign by virtue precisely of his birth and heritage: “Your paternal penates, the imago of your father…and the nomen Tarquinius create and proclaim you king” (1.47.4). Tanaquil had made precisely the opposite point when she exhorted Tullius not to think of his origins but of “who he was.” So, too, while Tullia’s speech leads to the violent overthrow of the reigning king in favor of the heir of the previous dynasty, Tanaquil’s speech is aimed at foiling just such a plot. For Tanaquil, the demands of the domus are the same as those of the state, rather than opposed, as they are in Tullia’s promotion of her husband.

The gestures with which Tanaquil accompanies her address to Servius also suggest that Tanaquil acts not to disrupt but to preserve the continuity of legitimate public authority. The queen begins by taking Servius’s right hand, a gesture appropriate to the act of supplication, but one that also recalls the emphasis on hands and on physical contact that accompany the official inauguration of a new king, as Livy described it at the accession of Numa. During that procedure, the augur first holds the lituus in his right hand (1.18.7). Then, after marking out the grid of regiones for the taking of omens, he moves the lituus to his left hand and touches the king’s head with his right.161 The act of touching the head of the new king is further emphasized in the accompanying prayer to Jupiter, when the augur uses the phrase “Numa Pompilius whose head I hold.”162 Similarly, Tanaquil herself refers to the head of Servius Tullius, and the demonstrative pronoun hoc with which she describes his caput can suggest that she either points to his head or perhaps touches it.163 What is more, this mention of Servius Tullius’s head recalls the sign from the gods confirming Tullius’s accession, which Tanaquil herself had interpreted. Thus Tanaquil’s actions fulfill precisely the same functions as an inauguratio: she affirms through the interpretation of signs that the gods approve Servius and consequently proclaims him king.164

These recollections of the official ceremony by which a new king was inaugurated again allow two antithetical interpretations: Obviously, Tanaquil has no authority to act as augur, and so her performance can be read as an illegitimate substitute for the actual inauguratio, which Servius lacks. So too, in what can only be seen as a perversion of legitimate procedure, Tullia herself will attempt to “proclaim” Tarquinius Superbus king.165 Alternatively, Tanaquil’s actions, which prevent the usurpation of the throne by the king’s murderers, provide the only mechanism by which the will of the gods, as revealed in the omen of the sacred fire about Tullius’s head, can be revealed and actualized. Thus her private gesture of supplication takes on the form and function of a public inauguratio just as the oath Brutus exacts after the death of Lucretia converts a private misfortune into a public event and provides the basis for the oath with which each Roman consul would take office.

The same function of mediating between the public and the private that Tanaquil assumed when she noticed and interpreted the miraculous fire playing about the head of the servus Servius, emerges again in the most controversial of all Tanaquil’s actions: Although Tarquinius Priscus is already moribundus, Tanaquil gives an address before the people “from the window of the upper part of the house” in which she not only deceives them by claiming that the king is recovering but also pretends that he has empowered Servius to act as his representative. It is only after the authority of Servius is well established that the king’s death is revealed. Again Tanaquil’s presentation of herself to the populus offers both a precedent and a foil for the spectacle of Tullia before the senate house. Tanaquil’s claim to be acting as a representative of the king serves as a reminder that her deception of the people results only from her own initiative. Thus her public appearance here can be read, in the same way as the spectacle of Tullia before the senate house, as a sign of a woman’s usurpation of authority both within the state and within the home, figured by Tanaquil’s position in the “upper part” (superior pars) of the house.166 Correspondingly, the authority of Servius Tullius himself takes a form that initially resembles a tyranny; like Tarquinius Superbus later, Servius has to surround himself with an armed guard.167 Conversely, we have seen many examples where the construction of deceptive appearances resulted in the salvation of the state, and where the false impression given by an imperator or king was ultimately validated as true. So here the species put forward by Tanaquil, like the deceptive speech of Tullus Hostilius in the battle against the Albans, functions to encourage the Romans and to dishearten their enemies; the sons of Ancus, who are also fooled by her words and alarmed by the resulting authority of Servius Tullius, consequently go into exile (1.41.9). If Tanaquil herself lacks the imperium possessed by the king, nevertheless her claims are not only based on the omens sent by the gods but later affirmed in Servius Tullius’s first military campaign, where his “strength and fortune gleam” (enituit [1.42.3], a recollection of the literal gleam produced by the magic flame), and from which he returns to Rome proven to be king (haud dubius rex [ibid.]) by the destruction of the enemy.

The geographical specificity with which Livy describes the scene also provides a historical context within which Tanaquil’s actions appear in accord with Roman traditions. Curiously, Tarquinius Priscus is imagined as living not in the regia but in a house on the Palatine “by the temple of Jupiter Stator,” which was built by Romulus as a result of a vow Livy himself records (1.12.6).168 The associations of this divinity, who “stayed” the Roman’s flight after the Sabines had gained control of the citadel, make clear that Tanaquil’s speech similarly has the effect both of calming the crowd’s fears and defeating the conspiratorial sons of Ancus. But the circumstances in which the temple was vowed have a further relevance for Tanaquil’s situation. The Roman victory that followed after their halt on the Palatine marked the end of the conflict with the Sabines that began with the rape of the Sabine women. In the sequel to the victory, it is the Sabine women themselves who act as mediators between their fathers and husbands and bring about the unification of the two peoples and the beginning of the joint kingship of Romulus and Titus Tatius. Thus the events this monumentum records establish a precedent for the crucial intervention of women in public crises and for the incorporation of outsiders, like Servius Tullius, not only as members of the Roman state but even as rulers of it.169