1. Vision and Authority in Livy’s Narrative

In the preface to his History of Rome, Livy imagines his work as a visual artifact subject to the gaze of its readers:

hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod vites.

This in particular is healthy and profitable in the knowledge of history, to behold specimens of every sort of example set forth in a conspicuous monument; thence you may choose which models to imitate for yourself and your res publica, and which, corrupt in their beginnings and corrupt in their outcomes, to avoid.

Livy here identifies the process of seeing as fundamental to the beneficial effects his narrative will exert upon his readers, both as individuals and as members of society.^[1] The emphasis on visual communication resides not only in the concept of the monument itself, and in the verb intueri, “to look upon,” but also in the adjective inlustris, both “transparent” and “luminous,” which characterizes the monumentum. Besides serving as an object of contemplation, Livy’s monumentum places itself at the center of a chain of visual images linking the past to the present and future; the conspicuous monument offers representations of past actions, which its viewers in turn reproduce through imitation—or obliterate from the public life of the state through avoidance.

The visual language of the preface appears again in the brief introduction to the second pentad of the historian’s narrative. In contrast to the subject matter of the first pentad, “things obscured by great age, as if seen from a distance” (6.1.2), the following books will present foreign and domestic events that are both “clearer and more certain” (6.1.3). Here Livy represents himself as literally exposing the events of the past to the gaze of the viewers (exponentur), and the intellectual process of learning about the past can be mapped directly onto the act of seeing. Things that are little known are “in the dark”; as information becomes more certain, events become “brighter.” The metaphorical shift from temporal to spatial distance again reinforces the notion of the text itself as a monument.^[2] As would be the case with a visual narrative, all past events coexist in the same space; it is simply that some are obscured because of the perspective from which they are viewed.^[3] Finally, the references to vision are once more complemented by notions of civic renewal and by the imagery of agricultural fertility. The motion from darkness to light corresponds to the refoundation of the city after its destruction by the Gauls, an event through which the city is said to be “reborn from the roots, more prosperously [laetius] and more productively [feracius].” So, too, in the preface, the capacity it gives its audience to gaze on the events of the past is what makes history both health-giving (salubre) and fruitful (frugiferum).

What does it mean for the historian to define his work as something to be seen? How does the process of vision allow his text to accomplish the social aims that it sets out for itself? The desire to make the reader or hearer “see” the events described in a literary work appears to be above all a stylistic choice; and, as we shall consider, ancient rhetorical treatises discuss the effects of narrative in precisely these terms. But as Livy presents it in the preface, the importance of vision in the reception of his narrative relates particularly to his work’s political function. By imitating the visual images that they behold in Livy’s monumentum, his readers reproduce them in the conduct of their own public lives. This process offers one example of how vision provides the means through which the historian’s literary representation of Rome’s past becomes a part of the political life of the Republic in the present.^[4] So, too, in portraying crucial events of the Roman past as spectacles, Livy assimilates the audience’s experience of his text to their experience of the actual spectacles, such as sacrifices and public assemblies (contiones), through which so much of the political and religious life of the Roman state was conducted. By combining close readings of particular episodes with a consideration of the social functions of spectacle in Roman culture, this study aims to show how the narrative strategies that Livy adopts to engage the gaze of his audience allow his text to reproduce the political effects of the events described and thus to act upon the society of his own time.

The first section of this chapter discusses the literary background to Livy’s description of his text as a visual image and shows how models of the political function of spectacle can enhance ancient conceptions of how a text “makes its audience see.” The next task is to situate Livy’s appropriation of the political potential of spectacle within the tradition of Roman historiography: among all the Latin literary genres, history particularly served as a means of communicating political influence, but, as his preface makes clear, Livy himself is unable to compete with other historians in terms of civic status. By making his narrative a visual image transparent to the cumulative power of the Roman past, therefore, Livy confers upon his text the social authority that he personally lacks. In addition to competing against other written histories, Livy’s emphasis on vision as the medium through which his text communicates invites us to measure his work against other forms of public display that also presented a visible image of the Roman past. The third section of this chapter accordingly considers how Livy’s interest in visual communication forms part of a larger discourse about the “power of images” in Augustan culture.

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.

Earlier in this section we noted a contrast between Thucydides’ promise of “a clear view” of events and Livy’s description of his work as an inlustre monumentum. Where the Greek historian suggests that his audience will be able to “see through” his text to the events it describes, in Livy’s case the text itself, as a monumentum, also becomes an object of the audience’s gaze. The analysis of Licinius Crassus’s profectio helps clarify the significance of the distinction. The scene of the consul’s departure forms part of the content of Livy’s history; it is one of the exempla the monument contains, and indeed it possesses what the preface signals as a central characteristic of exempla, reproducibility. The regularity of the ritual pattern ensures that this scene will continue to be imitated. But at the same time, in its capacity to call to its audience’s mind earlier events, it performs the function of a monumentum.^[30] As this exemplum itself functions as a monumentum, so too Livy’s monumentum itself can become an exemplum. The narrative takes its place in the sequence of public acts it records, eliding the boundaries between the representation and the event represented, and so becomes inlustre in a double sense: both “making the audience see,” the rhetorical definition of an inlustris style, and brilliant or luminous in itself.^[31]

If, as the previous analysis suggests, one effect of the visual element in Livy’s narrative is to allow him to locate his representation of the past within the set of spectacles and performances through which the actual civic life of the state was conducted, then an examination of the role such spectacles played in Roman culture can in turn provide a new way of understanding the terms in which the historian’s text communicated with its audience. By spectacle I refer not only to the shows of the circus and arena, the specialized definition of the Latin spectaculum, but to the external, visible component of all rituals and public acts. The English word spectacle, with its connotations of diversion and artificiality, and of the passivity of the spectator in the face of the production of the star or impresario, conveys neither the range of the phenomenon nor the reciprocity it involves. It was through seeing and being seen that the social relationships of watcher and watched were realized and the status of each defined.^[32] The morning ritual of the Roman noble (nobilis) gives some sense of the omnipresence of spectacle as a way of articulating the structure of civic bonds in the Roman state. The senator’s daily journey from his home to the Forum can be mapped as a series of spectacles before ever-widening audiences, each of which affirmed his place in a social hierarchy. Every morning, the nobilis would be greeted in the atrium of his home, whose decoration itself provided visible signs of his importance,^[33] by his clients, dependents, and supporters, who could be distinguished among themselves by their costume and adornment. After the ritual greeting, this crowd would accompany its benefactor to the Forum; in the course of this journey, the number and status of these followers in turn provided an unmistakable marker of the extent of their patron’s power and influence.^[34]

As the importance of visual display as a mechanism for social communication at Rome has become the focus of increasing scholarly interest, new methodologies have challenged long-standing assumptions about the political functions of spectacle. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon represented the difference in the quality of Roman political life under the tetrarchy from what it had been under Augustus by contrasting the relationship between power and public display under the two regimes:

Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation; but it must be confessed that of the two comedies the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter. It was the aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world.^[35]

The notion that Augustus’s public presentation of himself was crafted primarily to conceal the true nature of his power has a long heritage, going back ultimately to Tacitus’s continual exposure of the incompatibility between the authoritarian nature of the principate and the Republican language in which it described itself. In the twentieth century, Sir Ronald Syme has treated Augustus’s use of public display with a similar skepticism; triumphs and religious festivals are primarily instruments of propaganda, treated together with literature and the arts as a medium for “organizing public opinion.”^[36] This way of conceptualizing the function of visual display imposes a double separation between political power and its public manifestation. Not only do the visible signs produced by the emperor become a barrier between the public and the authority of its ruler, but spectacle itself is reduced to the status of an image, almost always opposed to the “realities” of power.

But it is also possible to assign a more important political role to spectacle than the dissemination of a prefabricated “public image.” Clifford Geertz, for example, describes public displays where the ruler appears before his subjects as occasions on which political power is not so much “staged” as enacted. Geertz’s formulation begins with the conception of charisma, developed by Weber and Shils, as the authority individuals acquire from their connection to “the active centers of the social order,” the “loci of serious acts…where [a society’s] leading ideas come together with its leading institutions to create an arena in which the events that most vitally affect its members lives take place.”^[37] The public insignia adopted by the ruler, the visible manifestations of power that function to demarcate “the center as center,” thus create rather than simply reflect his authority. As Geertz puts it, “the easy distinction between the trappings of rule and its substance become less sharp, even less real; what counts is the manner in which, a bit like mass and energy, they are transformed into each other.”^[38]

Geertz applied his model of the political efficacy of ceremony and ritual to the practices of a variety of societies in a variety of eras; the value of such an approach for the interpretation of classical culture specifically was demonstrated by Price’s treatment of the political role of imperial cult in Asia Minor. Price rejects attempts to use ritual as a tool for the recovery of the religious and political beliefs of its practitioners, a mere window to a set of opinions and dogma that make up the “realities” of ancient religion.^[39] Rather, for Price, it is the observable and public dimensions of cult, “the processions and the temples, the sacrifices and the images,” that constitute the primary aspect of ancient religious experience. Ritual becomes the space where “collective representations” of the power relations within a community are generated and expressed. “Ritual,” as Price puts it, echoing a phrase of Geertz’s, “is what there was.”^[40]

The spectacles surrounding the exercise of power in the Roman city itself, where political authority always possessed a strong religious component, particularly lend themselves to this kind of analysis. Not only were the political leaders of the state also in large measure responsible for the conduct of religious ceremonies, but the very person of the ruler possessed a capacity, very like the quality Geertz defines as charisma, to connect those who came in contact with them to the state’s “active centers.” Over fifty years ago, the Dutch scholar Hendrik Wagenvoort argued that the Romans conceptualized many kinds of power, from the might of the gods to the authority of a consul to the biological forces of reproduction, as physical substances transmitted through contact. While we need not accept Wagenvoort’s reconstruction of a precise “physics of power” based on the literal translation of the terms in which the Romans describe authority^[41]—much less his attempt to historicize the resulting set of beliefs by positing them as a primitive stratum of Roman religious thought—his work has immense value as a description of the language and rites through which authority was defined and as a demonstration of the symbolic importance of contact in Roman culture.

The ritual of the triumph provides a compelling demonstration of how Roman spectacles could create a context where power was at once recognized and manifested through the influence that the presence of the ruler exerted upon the community. The right of the returning commander to celebrate a triumph depended not only on the magnitude and importance of the victory but on the quality of the authority he possessed. A triumph could only be awarded to the person under whose imperium and auspicium the victory had been won.^[42] These two concepts, referring respectively to the ability to command citizens and to take the auspices, together define the power of the highest Roman magistrates. As a result of these criteria, every triumph necessarily becomes an affirmation, not just of the success won by a particular commander, but of the divine and human bases upon which supreme authority in the state rests.

The means by which the triumph expressed these meanings were primarily visual; the triumph was above all a spectacle. Polybius, in the earliest surviving description of triumphs, defines them for his Greek audience as ceremonies “through which the sight [enargeia] of the deeds that he has accomplished was set before the eyes of the citizens by the general.”^[43] A number of unmistakable visible markers distinguished the person of the general as he made his way from the porta triumphalis, a special gate opened only for the occasion of a triumph, to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline. He rode in a four-horse chariot, a laurel wreath on his head; his clothing, an embroidered tunic and purple toga, was of an opulence usually reserved for divine images. Most arrestingly, his face was painted a bright red, again a characteristic that made him resemble the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus toward which he was progressing.^[44] But the visual distinctiveness of the triumphator had more than simply an honorific function. The similarities between the person of the triumphing general and the images of the gods suggest that the triumphator himself made immanent in his own person the divine power that underpinned his victory. Moreover, H. S. Versnel has argued that the triumphator’s attributes, particularly his crown and the red color of his face, were particular signs of the magical qualities possessed by the triumphing general himself, and that the triumph as a whole provided the occasion on which the energy demonstrated by victory, above all, his felicitas, was recirculated back into the state.^[45]

This conception of the political function of spectacle at Rome has important implications for our understanding of the visual dimension of Livy’s own work. In presenting a scene like the profectio of Licinius Crassus as a spectacle, where the responses of the contemporary spectators described in the narrative provide a model for the reader’s experience of the event, and in the larger assertion in the preface that the entire history acts on its audience through being gazed upon, Livy not only draws a parallel between his text and the public spectacles of the state but makes his own narrative the medium through which these spectacles reach a new audience. If, far from being simple representations of political power, public spectacles were “what there was,” in the sense that they provided the context where such power was constructed and actualized, then by linking his representation of the past to these visual manifestations of authority, Livy situates his work at the active center of Roman civic life.

But could a work of literature integrate itself so directly into the processes by which real political power was created? Two recent treatments of other Roman texts provide parallels for this phenomenon, and in both cases it is the technique of reproducing visual images through narrative that furnishes the link between the text and contemporary political discourse. Sabine MacCormack has argued that the increasing interest in ecphrasis among Late Roman panegyrists, at the expense of the catalogues of virtues prescribed by rhetoricians like Menander Rhetor, represents a convergence between the effects produced by oratory and by the visual elements of the ceremony in which it was performed. “Seen in this light, the panegyric will not merely reflect a visual and ceremonial setting…; the panegyric will itself be seen to have drawn its cogency from the context in which it was delivered.”^[46] While MacCormack does not refer to Geertz, and her work predates Price’s, she too describes the “splendid theatre” of Late Antique ceremonial not as simple propaganda but as providing the occasions where political concepts were articulated and negotiated.

But besides the distance in time, an important difference separates the practices of the panegyrists from that of Livy: the panegyrists’ works were actually performed as a part of the vivid ceremonial whose visual component they attempt to appropriate; in the case of Livy’s History, the “spectacles” with which he aligns his work are themselves the creations of his narrative. The reader cannot necessarily raise his eyes from the text to find an immediate visual corollary for the scenes the historian describes. Ann Vasaly’s study of Cicero’s use of enargeia demonstrates how even purely literary representations of visual scenes can approximate the effect produced by direct visual contact.

Vasaly begins by analyzing the contribution setting or ambiance can make to the rhetorical effectiveness of a Ciceronian oration. By directing the gaze of his listeners to various aspects of the scene before them, Cicero uses the historical and cultural associations of these visual markers to influence and inspire his audience. Beyond furnishing another compelling example of the active role that visual contact played in Roman political life, Vasaly’s analysis of Cicero’s practice has a double relevance for an investigation of Livy’s use of spectacle. First, she demonstrates that the “power of places” is as much made as found. The orator himself chooses among the various possible associations of a place or scene, and even generates new ones, to impose or construct the precise meaning he requires. In the same way, as we have already seen in the treatment of the profectio, Livy’s narrative creates and shapes the significance of the scenes it describes, even as it uses them to enhance its own impact on its audience. Second, Vasaly shows that scenes and images produced solely through the orator’s description of them can exercise the same rhetorical functions as the visual signs actually present before the audience’s eyes. While the distinction between images produced by real objects and “empty appearances” was crucial in many ancient theories of perception, as Vasaly shows, the emotional effects of the two could be described in similar terms, especially by rhetoricians.^[47] Indeed, Quintilian argues that the mind’s ability to respond to the images of absent things as if they were present underlies the effectiveness of enargeia, “by which things seem not so much to be said as to be shown; and our emotions are aroused no differently than if we were actually present at an event.”^[48]

Like the festivals and performances of the Augustan regime, Livy’s History too has been regarded as an epiphenomenon of Augustus’s power. Syme treats Livy’s work, together with those of Vergil and Horace, as propaganda for the new regime; it is described in the same terms, and in the same chapter, as the princeps’s use of public spectacles to organize public opinion.^[49] Later, in a fuller treatment of the historian’s attitudes, Syme conceded that Livy’s support of the new regime was sincere and honestly come by, but still concludes by describing the historian as an “improving publicist.”^[50] Others have presented opposite opinions, some going so far as to describe Livy as a covert or indeed overt opponent of Augustus; but they still define the political dimension of Livy’s history with reference to Augustus’s power.^[51] Augustus’s authority in this view becomes the reality that Livy’s text can only praise or blame, enhance or distort. More recently, scholars have emphasized the capacity of Livy’s text to act autonomously.^[52] As C. S. Kraus puts it, “the historian’s project parallels/rivals Augustus’ own building of a new Rome via (re)construction of its past.…But a shared project does not necessarily mean a lack of independence.”^[53] Livy’s strategy of making his own work a “spectacle” provides a mechanism by which his text can participate directly in the political life of the state, not only through the meanings it conveys, but through the experience it makes available to its audience; it is thus that Livy’s narrative generates its own auctoritas.

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 images^[61] 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]

This analysis of the functions of physical monumenta has demonstrated the extent to which placing res gestae on display itself constituted a component of political activity within the civic traditions of Rome. But if these visual monuments share with written accounts of the past the aim of intervening directly in public events, the terms in which the two forms of monumenta participated in political discourse were necessarily quite different. In the case of physical memorials, their very locations, in temples and public spaces and on the façades of the houses of the politically powerful, established their connections to the centers of civic life. Inscriptions recording the dedicator’s name and office and the occasion of the dedication further enhanced both a monument’s authenticity and its authority. But the links that bound literary records of the past to the realm of public acts were more varied and usually less direct. As we have seen, often they derived from the public status of the historian himself. Or the written text itself could approximate the form of an actual inscription. The genre of annalistic history, where the material was arranged by year and the presentation of each year’s events began with a quasi-formulaic record of officeholders and religious prodigies, furnishes an example.^[71] Although this way of organizing a historical narrative was in fact greatly influenced by Greek models of local history,^[72] its success at Rome derived from its perceived connections to the tabulae dealbatae, the official records of events, which the Pontifex Maximus would present on whitewashed wooden boards affixed to his official residence.^[73]

Perhaps it is no coincidence that their personal circumstances compelled both Livy and Sallust, whom later generations would regard as the classic pair of Latin historians to set against Herodotus and Thucydides, to define the political aspect of their historiographic work in particularly innovative ways. Sallust had, like many earlier historians, been a magistrate and a member of the Senate, a high degree of political success for someone whose origins were in the local aristocracy of an Italian municipium. But his public life had been marred by scandal; he was expelled from the Senate in 50 B.C.E. and later, after the restoration of his career by Caesar, prosecuted for extorting money from the African province he governed on a scale remarkable even by Late Republican standards. What is more, while charges of corruption and sexual excess formed an almost inescapable component of Roman political invective, they were particularly at odds with the emphasis on morality in Sallust’s works.^[74]

Faced with this discrepancy between his public reputation and the authorial persona he wished to adopt, Sallust chose in writing his histories neither to emphasize his actual status as a senator nor, perhaps more surprisingly, simply to remove himself from his narrative as completely, as his model, Thucydides, had. On the contrary, in both the Catiline and the Jugurtha, Sallust draws attention to his withdrawal from politics and makes his abandonment of a political career itself a function of the larger decline of Roman public morality that his works chronicle: “As a young man, I, like many others was at first born by my zeal into public life; but many things were against me there. In place of modesty, restraint, and virtue, there flourished shamelessness, bribery, and greed” (Cat. 3.3).^[75] Correspondingly, Sallust constructs a complex picture of the public aspect of his work as a historian by at once playing on and revising the traditional association between performing and recording res gestae. In the Catiline, Sallust presents the writing of history as an alternative means of accomplishing the aims that originally drove him into politics, the attainment of glory (even if less accrues to the historian than to the one whose deeds he narrates) and service to the res publica.^[76] Indeed, he makes clear in the Jugurtha that given the current state of the Republic, the activities of the historian, even if they are regarded as a leisure activity, are the better way of benefiting the state.^[77] Through a parallel inversion, Sallust sets the public utility of his own history against the system of preserving memory through imagines that was the prerogative of the nobility. It is the memory of deeds, such as the historian provides, not the wax image itself, that inspires.^[78]

If Sallust attained high rank and then withdrew from it, the little we know of Livy’s life suggests that his social status was largely that of an outsider; he certainly never held public office.^[79] Like many other literary figures of his era, he was born not in Rome but in one of the large cities of northern Italy, in Livy’s case, Padua. And, unlike Vergil, Livy seems to have maintained strong connections to his native city and to have died in the place where he was born.^[80] Nor do we hear of a network of friends in the capital of the sort that helped other Augustan literary figures to establish themselves. What gloria Livy possessed seems to have come exclusively from his literary accomplishments, as did his connection with the imperial family, which dated from relatively late in his career.^[81]

Two pieces of anecdotal evidence further suggest how Livy’s lack of status could affect the reception of his history. A passage in the Suda, an encyclopedic work of the Byzantine period, preserves an anecdote contrasting Livy’s public readings with those of another historian, named Cornutus. Cornutus was both wealthy and without an heir; therefore his recitationes were always crowded. “Only a few men came to hear Livy; but they were those who found some profit in the beauty of his soul and in the eloquence of his teaching.”^[82] In this highly moralized tale, the imbalance of wealth that makes it impossible for Livy to win a wide audience is corrected by the workings of time, so that in the end it is Livy who possesses the “great name,” while Cornutus is forgotten.^[83] Another, better-known anecdote again shows how Livy’s personal background could be used against his work. Asinius Pollio, himself a writer of history, who like Cato and several of the other early historians had also reached the highest political office, claimed to detect “a Paduan quality” (patavinitas) in Livy’s work. What exactly Pollio meant by this “Paduanity” is uncertain.^[84] The contexts in which the remark is reported suggest that the reference is primarily to style and diction, but it is striking that Quintilian himself, our source for Pollio’s criticism, cannot give any examples of irregularities and indeed seems somewhat surprised by the charge against a man whose eloquence he particularly admired.^[85] Whatever its precise reference, the point of the comment is clearly to disparage Livy precisely on grounds of his origins.^[86]

In a manner analogous to Sallust, although with very different aims, Livy deliberately raises the issue of his personal status in the preface of his history and uses it as a means of crafting the place his work will occupy in the res publica. In the second sentence, Livy implicitly draws attention to the fact that he is not a member of the nobility and at the same time rejects the traditional aristocratic motive of glory as the reward he expects for his labor:

However it turns out [i.e., whatever the ultimate success of his work], it will still be a pleasure that I myself, as befits a man [pro virili parte], took some thought for the memory of the deeds of the chief people of the earth, and if, in such a great crowd of writers, my fame will be in darkness, let me be consoled by the nobility and greatness of those who block out my name.^[87]

Correspondingly, he adopts a posture of extreme diffidence in the face of the task he has set for himself. Not only does he not know whether his work will be worth the trouble of producing it; if he did know, he would not dare to say (nec, si sciam, dicere ausim, praef. 1).^[88] But while emphasizing his personal lack of status and confidence in comparison to other historians, Livy simultaneously also magnifies both the scope and the authoritative character of the work he intends to produce. In the first sentence, he defines his goal as “producing a complete record of the deeds of the Roman people.” The verb Livy uses here, perscribere, is also used of the written record that gave legitimacy to senatorial decrees.^[89] Next, he proclaims that “it will be a pleasure…to have taken thought for the memory of the deeds of the chief people of the earth.” “To take thought for,” consuluisse, is the act of a senator, a magistrate, a consul. These opening sentences raise precisely the question of how it is possible for someone in Livy’s position to act in this fashion.

The solution, I suggest, involves Livy’s definition of his work as a monumentum. Livy’s rejection of personal glory^[90] has been regarded as disingenuous^[91]—his eventual success would come to exemplify how much glory could in fact be won from literature^[92]—but the modesty of his personal ambitions serves rather as a foil to the claims he makes for his work itself. The very phrase he uses for this history, inlustre monumentum, precisely answers the imagery of the earlier passage.^[93] Livy’s fame is in darkness, but his work is inlustre, not only in the light but also a source of light. His own nomen, as if on an inscription, is blocked out by those of others; his text, though, is not just an inscription but a whole monumentum. The effect of this strategy is to distinguish as much as possible the significance and public role of the work itself from his own personal status. The preface begins with a flurry of self-reference.^[94] But as the text proceeds, the author himself progressively retreats from it, rarely intruding his own persona into the narrative.^[95] And it is precisely the visual qualities of the monumentum that facilitate this procedure—by deflecting the reader’s gaze toward the monument of his work, he renders his own person invisible and increasingly irrelevant as the monumentum itself exerts its beneficial effects on the audience.

The implications of Livy’s creation of his narrative as a monumentum can be clarified by contrasting it with the relationship Sallust establishes between his text and the visual monuments of the aristocracy in the Jugurtha. As we have seen, Sallust decouples the hortatory and mnemonic function of such images from the physical presence of the images themselves. It is memory that is important, not the wax statue; this distinction relates in turn to his exaltation of the soul, the image of which survives in the record of deeds, over the body, depicted by the physical imago. Far from linking his narrative to the power of visual images, therefore, Sallust suggests that his own history offers a superior way of preserving memory.^[96] Livy’s technique is the opposite. His text becomes the monument, providing at once a record of deeds and the visual sign through which memory is made present.

It was precisely the intrinsic connection between the representation of an act and the act itself, upon which a consul or dictator would rely for the effectiveness of his visual displays, that made it possible for Livy, who possessed no such authority in his own right, to produce his inlustre monumentum. Just as the visual image of a Roman victory displayed at a triumph could simulate for its audience the effect of being present at the battle itself, and thus expose them to the power and authority manifested in the triumphator’s victory, so Livy’s own representations of the past, whatever his own personal position, gained authority from the very deeds and men they depict. His text summons up, like the visual signs Pliny describes in the homes of the nobiles, “images of great souls.”

Two examples will demonstrate how Livy’s narrative can approximate, and indeed substitute for, physical monumenta actually erected by victorious generals. The first involves the inscribed map of Sardinia erected by Ti. Sempronius Gracchus in 174 B.C.E. As I argued before, the inscription on the map portrays the erection of the dedication itself as a product of the consul’s authority, extending and completing the act of conquest it records by placing it on display. This inscription is quoted directly in Livy’s text (41.28.8–10)—and indeed only survives because Livy transmits it; Livy’s narrative thus continues the same sequence of actions and provides the means by which the consul’s representation of his victory reaches an even wider audience.

In the previous case, it was through the words of the inscription that Livy established the connection between the consul’s monumentum and his narrative. Another example shows how he achieves the same effect through the vivid description of the scene depicted on the monument. In 214 B.C.E., another Ti. Sempronius Gracchus led an army consisting of slaves into battle against a Carthaginian force at Beneventum. Attempting to inspire his troops to fight bravely, he promised freedom to anyone who brought back the severed head of an enemy. The device almost caused disaster; the attack bogged down as the slaves labored to decapitate their victims and “heads took the place of swords” (24.15.5) in the hands of his bravest troops. Gracchus immediately ordered the soldiers to drop the heads they were carrying, and victory swiftly followed. The consul rewarded his troops for their valor by granting them liberty en masse, and the proclamation was celebrated by a feast at Beneventum:

At the gates all the Beneventans had poured out in a crowd; they greeted the soldiers, congratulated them, and offered them hospitality. Preparations for banqueting were present in the forecourt of each home. They invited the soldiers to participate and begged Gracchus to allow the soldiers to feast with them. Gracchus agreed on condition that the feasts were held in public, outside the doors of the houses. Everything was carried outside. The former slaves celebrated clad in their caps of liberty or with their heads wreathed in white wool, some reclining, others standing, who both served and ate. The event was deemed significant enough that Gracchus, after he returned to Rome, ordered an image [simulacrum] of the festive day to be painted in the temple of Liberty. [24.16.16–19]

Livy’s narrative here allows for the precise visual reconstruction of the scene; it clearly describes the setting, gestures, and sequence of actions. What is more, the few pictorial details included, the liberty caps and white fillets of the freed slaves, focus attention on the act of liberation that gave the event its political significance. Indeed, it has been suggested that Livy’s account of the scene draws precisely on the painting in the temple of Liberty dedicated by the consul.^[97]

It is possible that Livy did make use of the painting as a source for his account, but the text nowhere signals this dependence.^[98] Rather, the juxtaposition of Livy’s pictorialized account of the episode with the record of the consul’s dedication suggests the equivalence of the two representations. Like the painting in the temple of Libertas, Livy’s narrative constructs its own visual image of the scene at Beneventum, reproducing the sight of the victory celebration even for those who had never seen the consul’s dedication. And, indeed, by so greatly expanding the audience to whom the image was made available, Livy’s narrative provided an even more effective means of “broadcasting” the event than the painting.^[99] The consul wished the celebratory banquets to be held in the open, outside the houses of the Beneventans. Yet the painting at Rome that publicized the scene was located inside the temple (in aede Libertatis vs. in…fores). Livy’s narrative exposes the painting itself.

Livy’s attempt to make his narrative a monumentum by at once recording res gestae and providing a visual representation that makes them “present” shares its aim with two roughly contemporary historical productions, both of which approximated the actual forms of physical monumenta by adding a visual element even more directly to their text. M. Terentius Varro issued a collection of seven hundred portraits of great men both Greek and Roman, each accompanied by a verse epigram and a brief prose account of his achievements. In this way, Varro became, in the words of Pliny, “the inventor of a benefit to be envied by the gods, since he not only bestowed immortality, but extended it throughout the world, so that [the men depicted] might be able to be manifest [praesentes] everywhere like gods” (HN 35.11). While Pliny speaks of the service Varro rendered to his subjects, by the same device his book itself acquires importance as the medium through which the “presence” of these figures is transmitted. Cicero’s friend Atticus also composed a work that becomes a graphic approximation of the imagines of men who “excelled the other Romans in greatness and the honor of their deeds” (Nep. Att. 18.5–6). Again, verse inscriptions recording deeds and offices accompany the visual representation of each figure in a form resembling the combination of portrait statue and inscription used in Roman public monuments.^[100]

But the activities of Augustus himself offer the most important and obvious parallel for Livy’s historiographic project. Perhaps never before had the interdependence between political authority and the representation of res gestae been so manifest in Roman public life as it was to become during the reign of the first princeps. Velleius Paterculus would conclude his account of the blessings of Augustus’s reign by stressing precisely the relationship between the exercise of imperium and instruction through exempla.^[101] “The best princeps makes his citizens act rightly by acting, and though he is the greatest in power [imperio], he is greater still as an example.”^[102] The connection between this statement and the system of representation revealed by the monumenta of the Republic is clear. The leader’s actions provide an image or pattern that benefits the Republic by providing a model for imitation, and this process in turn becomes a crucial component of how the emperor “acts,” how his authority exerts itself on the res publica. Augustus himself highlights his role as producer of exempla in his own record of his accomplishments: “By carrying new laws, I have recalled many ancestral exempla that were falling into disuse, and I myself have handed down exempla of many things to be imitated by those who come later” (Res gestae 8). Here Augustus defines his role as producer of exempla in two ways; he both recovers and reproduces exempla from the past and offers new exempla himself. The similarities to Livy’s own work, which also benefits the Republic by reproducing exempla for imitation and thus takes its place in the sequence of actions it records, are clear.

These similarities become even more striking when we realize that Augustus’s claim to have produced exempla also forms part of his monumentum: his res gestae were inscribed on bronze columns erected in front of his mausoleum. It is above all in the visual monuments of Augustus’s reign that the reciprocity between his imperium and his role of making the past present appears most distinctively. The princeps’s most explicit display of exemplary figures from the past was to be found in the Forum surrounding the temple of Mars Ultor, vowed after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius in 42 B.C.E. and finally completed forty years later.^[103] Above the colonnade along the left side of the Forum, Augustus placed statues of all the men “who had made the power of the Roman people, from something very small, the greatest in the world,” accompanied by inscriptions identifying each and summarizing his accomplishments.^[104] The criterion for selection closely resembled the terms in which Livy describes the core subject matter of his own history: “I ask that each reader for himself direct his mind keenly to the following things: what were the customs, through which men and by what arts at home and at war imperium was born and grew.”^[105] For Augustus, this display of exempla, however much it may have provided models of conduct to be emulated by future generations, served also to define and justify his own authority: in an edict, Augustus proclaimed that he had devised this program “so that against the [standard] of these men, as if an exemplar, both he himself while he lived and the principes of coming ages would be measured by the citizens.”^[106] But if these men provided the norms through which Augustus’s own imperium was to be defined and measured, the program makes equally clear that it is only through Augustus’s accomplishments that this inspiring display is made possible. Not only was the Forum explicitly built on Augustus’s private land, but the entire complex functioned to commemorate his own acts, above all the victory at Philippi in which the killers of Julius Caesar were defeated.

So, too, in the case of Augustus’s own res gestae, the inscription that records the emperor’s accomplishments is set in an architectural context designed to provide visual manifestations of the magnitude of Augustus’s imperium. As Nicolet has shown, the geographical detail of the central portions of the res gestae that define the parameters of Rome’s power complements the elaborate cosmological symbolism of physical monument of which it was a part.^[107] Both the mausoleum of Augustus itself and the Ara Pacis were dominated by a gigantic sundial, which served to locate Augustus’s accomplishments within a symbolic representation of the extent of the cosmos in space and time.^[108] It is this elaborate complex that provides the monumentum for which the res gestae are the inscription; indeed, symbolically, it is the entire imperium Romanum that offers the defining visual corollary to Augustus’s text. Augustus was therefore able to inscribe his text on an actual physical monument of enormous size and complexity, whose visual component manifested the magnitude of his own auctoritas. Livy’s text must act as its own monumentum, but the scope of the visual signs that accompany his text bears comparison with the symbolic claims that would later be made by the princeps himself. All of Roman history provides the content of Livy’s “unmeasurable opus” (immensi operis, praef. 4).

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.

Notes