2. Historian and Imperator

In chapter 1, Livy’s account of P. Licinius Crassus’s profectio in 171 B.C.E. furnished an example of how the historian’s representation of the past embeds itself in the system of spectacles that facilitated the exercise of political authority within the Roman state. The consul’s procession from the temples on the Capitoline to the gates of the city provided a prompt for its spectators to reflect on the series of past magistrates who had made the same journey. But an interesting tension emerges between the substance of the spectators’ reflections and the nature of the ceremony that provoked them. The rituals that the consul had just performed on the Capitol, according to the logic of Roman public religion, ought to influence the outcome of the consul’s campaign. Yet in this case, when the spectators consider the factors that determine military success or failure, ritual propriety never enters their calculations.^[1] Their concerns center on the uncertainty of fortune and the mental qualities of the commander:

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?^[2]

To be sure, this discrepancy can be explained in a number of ways. An insistence on the correct observance of religious practices before a military campaign is by no means inconsistent with a requirement that the commander himself possess experience, courage, and, indeed, good fortune (felicitas).^[3] Nor, as many recent studies of ancient religion have stressed, does the pious participation in religious ritual necessitate “belief” in a particular mechanism of divine agency.^[4] But the manner in which Livy has chosen to represent the crowd’s reflections possesses a significance that goes beyond questions of skepticism and belief on the part of either the audience described or the historian. For besides the allusion to the positive and negative exempla his own history promises to present, Livy’s description of the crowd’s thoughts recalls precisely the terms in which Cicero says a historian ought to explain the causes of events: “When outcomes are described [the proper arrangement of material necessitates] that all the causes be explained, whether they derive from chance, or wisdom, or rashness”(De or. 2.63). Livy’s emphasis on fortune is also important in this regard, since the concept of fortune played an especially important role in the systems of causality that many influential Greek historians, preeminently Polybius, invoked in the claims they made for the value of their works.^[5] Thus Livy’s treatment of the profectio stresses his text’s participation in two systems of representation, the civic spectacles through which the political and religious authority of the state are made visible to the citizens, and the traditions of literary history developed and described by his predecessors. This chapter explores how Livy constructs the relationship between these two systems.

Previously, I suggested that acts of representation played a fundamental role in the exercise of supreme magisterial authority at Rome. Not only could the person of a triumphing general, for example, function as a “light bulb,” relaying the powers responsible for the Romans’ success through his very appearance, but the visual depictions of victory produced by the triumphator possessed a similar dynamic potential. But this is not the unique respect in which an imperator’s power operated through the images and appearances he projected. Additionally, a consul or magistrate could act as an interpreter for his subjects, regulating their perceptions of the world around them and constructing an image of reality that came to count as real. The religious aspect of the magistrate’s authority, his auspicium, demonstrates this facet of his power most clearly.^[6] It was the magistrate who possessed the right to ask the gods for signs regarding the propriety of public endeavors and to relay those signs to the public. In the case of the ritualized consultation of the gods (auguria impetrativa), what counted was not the signs themselves but how they were reported to the magistrate.^[7] So too signs sent unilaterally by the gods outside the context of formal consultations (auguria oblativa) only acquired validity when they were either seen by the magistrate or accepted by him.^[8] We shall see that in practice this gave the consul or dictator a wide authority to disregard or invalidate unfavorable omens on technical grounds.^[9] Most dramatically, the consul M. Claudius Marcellus used to ride into battle in a closed litter lest he observe any unfavorable lightning flashes that would require him to postpone the engagement.^[10] Whether such signs actually occur is irrelevant; they only count as omens if Marcellus observes them. Provided he wins. A military defeat could act as a prodigy, pointing out some irregularity in the conduct of religious ritual on the part of the Romans or their commander.^[11]

His auspicium thus gave the magistrate some discretion in representing the will of the gods, and victory in battle affirmed that his interpretation was legitimate. Other seemingly unrelated dimensions of a magistrate’s command can be understood according to the same logic, particularly the pre-battle exhortation, which offers the historian a special opportunity to highlight the commander’s capacities as leader. In cataloguing the forces that guarantee a Roman victory, the general puts forward a particular interpretation of the world around him. The Romans are brave and confident; the enemy, desperate and demoralized cowards. The gods are favorable to us; hostile to them. Often these arguments amount to a comprehensive representation of the universe and its history demonstrating how everything from the landscape of the battlefield, to the power of the gods, to the ancestral virtus of the state is working together on the Romans’ behalf.^[12] If the general’s representation is persuasive, it can provide a powerful, often decisive, impetus for the army to fight bravely. But the general’s speech also raises the stakes for the coming battle by putting this inspiring image of the world at risk. Victory affirms not just the propriety of the Romans’ cause in this particular war but their claims about the power of the gods, the legitimacy of their political structure, and, not least, the continuing validity of the historical exempla the general invokes. Defeat calls these claims into question or at least suggests that for some reason the Romans have lost the ability properly to engage the forces that should aid them.

Although the power or imperium of a consul or dictator, possessed a civil as well as military dimension, as Mommsen asserts, “military command formed the defining core of the power of the highest magistrates, and was formally inseparable from it.”^[13] And it is in the military sphere that the commander’s ability to control appearances is best observed. The success or failure of magisterial command receives an objective demonstration on the battlefield in the victory or defeat of the Romans. Indeed, it was military success that affirmed a commander’s right to be called an imperator, a wielder of imperium.^[14] Furthermore, battle also had an important heuristic function for the Romans. Each side mobilized various forces to guarantee the legitimacy of its claims. Every international treaty imposed a religious obligation on its adherents, and the gods who served as witnesses to a treaty were frequently called upon to punish its violators. Since these forces would not cooperate with those whose claims were false, every demonstration of military superiority necessarily also established the winning side’s version of events. This interdependency between power and truth, something much more sophisticated than what we now mean by the adage “might makes right,” has clear implications for the construction of Livy’s narrative. If the battlefield was where competing interpretations of events were tested against one another, then the history that Livy reports is that which the cumulative victories of all Roman commanders had established as correct. And since the techniques the commander used to mobilize the resources of gods and men were those that had been established as valid by his predecessors’ successes, whether we mean the ritual formulas to which the gods had always responded or the skillful use of exempla to inspire the troops on that day to emulate the courage of their ancestors, each success depended to some extent on the general’s own ability to recreate the past.

I. The Battle of Aquilonia (10.38–41)

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

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

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

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

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

Once a golden and silver Samnite army was slaughtered by his father, and those ornaments were more honorable as spolia for the conquering enemy than as arms for the Samnites themselves. Perhaps it has been granted to his name and his family to be leaders against the greatest efforts of the Samnite and to bring back spoils that will be conspicuous^[22] even in the adornment of public places.

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

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

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

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

Given what we know of Livy’s working methods, we can safely assign priority to Livy himself, not the historical Papirius Cursor, in determining the details and interpretation of the battle as they are presented here. That is to say, Livy has composed or redeveloped the consul’s speech to reinforce his own themes^[30] rather than tailoring his narrative to reflect the emphases of some preexisting account of Papirius’s speech, much less any actual speech delivered by the consul on that occasion.^[31] However, if we consider not the mechanisms by which the text was produced but the effect of Livy’s presentation on the reader absorbed in the narrative, the relationship between the consul and historian is reversed. It is the figure of Papirius Cursor whose speech appears to impose a pattern and meaning on the events that follow, and the historian’s narrative, in reproducing precisely the details the consul predicted, seems both to affirm Papirius’s interpretation and consequently to be determined by it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This passage juxtaposes two attitudes toward prodigies. A skepticism directly associated with contemporary historical practices^[50] contrasts with the perspective of the historical figures whom Livy describes. What is more, the historian presents his own anomalous decision to include this material as an effect of the influence that those figures exert upon him as he writes. The record he produces results directly from their recognition of the prodigies’ validity. In consequence, his annales come to mirror the annales in which prodigies were officially collected. Again, Livy’s treatment of religious material becomes a defining feature of his distinctive historical method, a method that reproduces and revives the practices of the religious authorities within his narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Camillus the Historian

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

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

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

Camillus’s role as the one who restores the lines of contact by which Rome again becomes Roman^[82] stands out all the more clearly since the formerly exiled dictator himself had to be personally restored to membership in the Roman state.^[83] Livy describes how, after the army at Veii has voted to summon Camillus from exile to take over command, a young soldier volunteers to float down the Tiber, climb the besieged Capitolium and have Camillus officially recalled and proclaimed dictator by the Senate. Prior to receiving word of his appointment, according to the version Livy prefers to believe,^[84] Camillus would not even leave his place of exile. This elaborate procedure is inspired by more than an impractical concern for propriety. The young soldier’s journey and the subsequent embassy to Camillus establish a physical link between the dictator and the Capitolium, the “seat of the gods” (sedes deorum [5.39.12]), which complements his official establishment as a magistrate.

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

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

Notes