5. The Alternative of Drama

The preceding three chapters have attempted to show that Livy’s interest in visual contact and the vivid reproduction of the visual impressions experienced by spectators within his narrative provides a means by which his text can transfer the state-building and socializing effects of Roman public spectacles to its own audience. In chapter 2, in particular, I argued that Livy deploys traditional definitions of history as a literary genre to signal how his own text goes beyond them to participate simultaneously in the system of communication through which Rome’s political leaders manifested their authority to the citizen body. Now I want to reverse the perspective and examine not how Livy uses the political capacity of his history to define his place among other historians but rather how Livy’s status as a historian differentiates the “spectacles” his own text offers from other, less beneficial, forms of visual display. This issue relates to larger questions about the efficacy of visual communication within the cultural environment of Augustan Rome, where, according to the analysis of Paul Zanker, a superabundance of contradictory signs necessitated the reconstruction of a coherent and legible visual landscape, and where it was especially the historical associations of monuments, the link they offered to the Roman past, that gave them significance and meaning. This chapter focuses on the relationship between Livy’s history and drama, another literary genre whose aim is to produce spectacle, not through vivid description but through direct mimesis of actions, and that has often been regarded as the source of many of the historian’s narrative tendencies. I argue that far from claiming the drama as a model for the way he presents Roman history, Livy consistently depicts the theater as antithetical to his narrative in its aims and effects. While based on a traditional opposition between history and drama as literary genres, this attitude to drama takes on a particular significance in light of the ambiguous place that dramatic performances occupied in the political and religious life of the Roman state. Livy exploits Roman cultural constructions of the drama as a socially pernicious and fundamentally alien form of spectacle to highlight by contrast the salutary potential of his own history and its direct link to the centers of Roman power.

Many features of Livy’s presentation have been described as dramatic and seen as legacies of those Hellenistic historians who, it is argued, attempted to appropriate the effects of tragedy for their historical narratives.^[1] Two qualities of Livy’s narrative in particular have been connected with the historian’s desire to approximate the effects of drama. The first, as we have seen, is the emphasis on enargeia itself, the clarity of description that enables the historian’s audience to “see” the narrated action. Second, Livy tends to build his material into discrete episodes that not only possess the “beginnings,” “middles,” and “ends” Aristotle demanded of a dramatic plot,^[2] but also unfold in a series of “scenes,” each taking place in a specific and readily imaginable setting.^[3] Indeed, scholars have attempted to recover the existence of otherwise lost Roman historical dramas based solely on the arrangement of Livy’s narrative.^[4]

While such devices may well ultimately derive from tragic practice, Livy’s adoption of them by no means implies that he wished his own work to be perceived as an attempt to present Roman history as a dramatic spectacle.^[5] Every analysis of the influence of such historians as Duris and Phylarchus on Livy has rightly been accompanied by important qualifications. Erich Burck’s account of Livian enargeia makes clear how comparatively restrained Livy’s descriptions are. Yes, Livy always makes his audience aware of an action’s setting, but these settings are rarely painted with the kind of particularizing detail found in other historians.^[6] The death of Lucretia, for example, takes place within a private house, and indeed in her cubiculum (1.58.6) but that is all Livy tells us.^[7] The result is that the scenes Livy describe mostly take place in a narrow range of highly regularized settings, private house (domus), battlefield, senate house (curia), forum, assembly space (comitium). Together, these typical settings come to define a simplified symbolic geography within which the entire course of Roman history can be mapped. Every senatorial debate or political assembly thus recalls all its predecessors and facilitates the comparisons through time that make each individual event but one facet of a larger tradition. Also, since the settings Livy chooses were still very much a part of the civic life of contemporary Romans, they constantly reiterate the continuities between the past described in his History and the lived experience of its readers.

More fundamentally, any borrowing of “dramatic” techniques on Livy’s part must be balanced against the historian’s direct insistence on the difference between history and drama. We saw in chapter 2 the complex use Livy makes of the conventional distinction between poet and historian at once to signal his awareness of the strictures imposed by the historiographic tradition and to exempt himself from them. A similar ambiguity, with reference specifically to the drama, emerges in a disclaimer Livy makes to justify his inclusion of an improbable episode said to have occurred during the fall of Veii: “In matters of such antiquity, I am content that some events like the truth are accepted as true; it is not worthwhile to affirm or refute these things, which are more fit for the ostentation of the stage, which delights in marvels, than for credibility.”^[8] Thus even when Livy incorporates material that he himself defines as appropriate to the stage, he still insists on the generic distinction between history and drama.

The tension detectable in Livy’s remark itself possesses a long heritage in Greek theories of historiography. As F. W. Walbank has suggested, Aristotle’s famous distinction between history and poetry, especially dramatic poetry, was necessary precisely because the genres were intrinsically so comparable.^[9] The boundary between the mythical material that generally provided the subject of tragedy and historical events was never a precise one,^[10] and the prominence of “tragic” reversals in Herodotus and Thucydides has prompted comparisons between the techniques of the two historians and the practices of the contemporary stage.^[11] So, too, in the Hellenistic period, attempts to differentiate tragedy and history coexist with and result from many historians’ systematic use of the compositional methods of tragedy to increase the impact of their own histories.^[12] Thus the most extensive contrast between the two genres was articulated in the highly polemical context of Polybius’s attack on Phylarchus: tragedy aims at the immediate distraction and pleasure of spectators; therefore verisimilitude, the ability to seem real, is its most important quality. History by contrast aims to instruct “lovers of knowledge” and profit them for all time. This can only be accomplished by presenting the truth.^[13] Again, the necessity for Polybius to assert a fundamental difference between two genres testifies to the effectiveness of Phylarchus’s “tragic” presentation of events.

Yet in Livy’s case, the opposition between history and drama must also be read as part of a larger antithesis operative throughout the work between effective and ineffective visual signs. The stage “rejoicing in ostentation” bears a relationship to historical representation similar to that between the imported statues castigated by the elder Cato and the terra-cotta images of the Roman gods, where again the superficial attractiveness of a foreign tradition stands in contrast to a system of signs whose power derives not from their appearance per se but from their place within the larger authority structures of the Roman state. The dramatic elements I have described may, as is commonly suggested, have made Livy’s History more enjoyable,^[14] but they also raise the danger that his text will become simply an attractive imitation of the Roman past, rather than providing the reader with direct access to it. In scenes like the account of the battle of Aquilonia or the duel between Torquatus and the Gaul, the military victory of the Romans results from and demonstrates their ability to use spectacle as a unifying and empowering force, in contrast to the distracting spectacles produced by their foreign challengers. Here, too, the visual displays of Rome’s defeated opponents are described in terms that, as we shall see, recall Livy’s attitude to drama. The resulting role of drama, as a foil to the tradition of representation in which Livy’s history partakes, in turn recalls the place of the theater within the structure of actual Roman political and religious institutions, which we shall now consider.

I. The Stage and the State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Dramatic Digression (7.2)

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

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

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

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

As even a cursory reading will show, Livy’s excursus is anything but straightforward. Over two centuries of literary history are packed into slightly over a page of the author’s most obscure prose. The general tendency of his account emerges clearly enough: the drama grew from small but respectable beginnings to a form of madness. But almost every detail of the process has raised a host of questions.^[65] Nor does Livy’s presentation of drama as an institution that has undergone a progressive process of decline accord well with his desire to characterize even the first ludi scaenici as a fiasco and a religious failure, although the inconsistency itself reveals the strength of Livy’s animus against the theater. Finally, the question of Livy’s sources and the degree to which he reworked them is also difficult to resolve, since all earlier accounts of the history of the theater have to be reconstructed from writers who postdate Livy.^[66] But even if the excursus is derived largely from Varro, as J. H. Waszink argues, the very decision to include such a digression, and the clear connection between the history of drama and Livy’s larger conception of the decline of Rome sketched in the preface^[67] testify to the importance that the theater as an institution held for Livy and invite a closer analysis of the role the digression plays within his text.

Like Varro in the Antiquitates rerum divinarum, Livy initially presents drama as a religious institution, here introduced as a response to a crisis in the pax deorum. However, despite its religious role, Livy emphasizes the drama’s foreign character. It is a res peregrina, particularly anomalous in regard to Rome’s military traditions. The first performers are Etruscan, and Livy’s inclusion of the derivation of the word for actor from that language further reinforces the alien character of the institution. If Waszink is right that in Varro’s account the tradition of exchanging jokes in verse predated the importation of Etruscan actors, then Livy’s seems to have here reworked his material to make the origins of drama appear exclusively foreign.^[68] As the excursus goes on, the drama becomes alien in other respects as well. The progressive professionalization of the theater gives the dramatic performances themselves an importance independent of their social and religious context. As Livy says, what had been a ludus, a word that recalls both the public festivals that provided the occasion for the drama and the jesting of the indigenous Roman youths,^[69] became an ars, a craft or profession. Correspondingly, the practitioners of this ars are now excluded from a place in the citizen body, and the youth turn to another medium for their jokes that has not been “polluted” by actors. Indeed, the very shape of Livy’s excursus contributes to the impression that as the drama becomes increasingly autonomous, it becomes increasingly a distracting and disconnected phenomenon. The account begins with the description of the theater as a religious practice connected to a certain moment in the history of the state but becomes more and more concerned with the technical and formal innovations that give the institution a history in its own right.^[70]

The most sweeping rejection of the mature drama comes in the final sentence of the excursus and is couched in the now familiar language of health and healing: the contemporary drama is an insania, a madness or disease. Beyond the implicit contrast with the “healthy” genre of history itself, an allusion made more emphatic by the other references to the themes of Livy’s preface that accompany it, the metaphor bears an additional relevance in this context. Since the drama was imported originally to cure a pestilence, the description of drama as an insania itself points out the extent to which the practice has failed to fulfill the social and religious function for which it was designed. Again literary polemic merges with the criticism of drama’s failure as a civic institution. The unhealthiness of drama is no longer a metaphor, it can be demonstrated by the practical effect the drama has had upon the state.

The antithesis between history and the drama implied in the comparison to an insania is heightened by the formal structure through which Livy fits the digression into the fabric of his work. Significantly, this structure also hinges on the word insania, which recalls the morbum that provides the occasion for the beginning of the digression (7.2.3) and will be the focus of the narrative proper when it resumes in the first sentence of the next chapter (7.3.1). The resulting ring composition strongly demarcates the excursus from the flow of the narrative. What is more, since the digression is set at the beginning of the year, it is directly juxtaposed to the annalistic formulae that link the course of Livy’s narrative to the continuity of the Roman state itself (7.2.1 and 7.3.3). This elaborate pattern of framing and contrast may indeed be seen as a narrative equivalent to the contemporary tendency to segregate the space of actual dramatic performances and to contrast them with the hierarchized displays of Roman order in the stands.

Similarly, Livy’s text frames the institution of drama by shaping its history as an example of the larger pattern of decline that the whole of his narrative elucidates. If this use of drama to reflect the decline of the state itself should seem inconsistent with the aim of constituting drama as alien and distinct from the larger processes of history, it may be that the problem is precisely that Roman history, in the period of its unhealthiness, has become analogous to drama. The degeneration of Rome as a whole can be understood as a failure to maintain the boundaries that exclude the foreignness and luxury associated with the drama from the state. Avaritia, it must be remembered, also came to Rome from abroad, as did the conquered spoils that nourished it.^[71] By insisting on the distinctions that define the drama as alien, and at the same time linking it with the characteristics of Rome in its decadence, Livy thus reveals how far the Roman state itself has fallen away from its ideal form. He simultaneously exploits the negative connotations of drama to reestablish a set of oppositions between traditional and alien practices through which the causes of Rome’s decline can be seen as foreign excrescences to be excised from the state, just as the drama is institutionally contained. We shall see later in this chapter that other historical moments when native traditions have ceased to be operative are also characterized as dramatic intrusions into Roman history.

Even at its “healthy beginning” in 364 B.C.E., drama was clearly not the “appeasement” (placamen) that the gods required. Not only does the plague not die down as a result of the performances, but the while the first drama is being performed, the Tiber bursts from its banks and floods the circus (7.3.2). Indeed, the outcome of this experiment, and the description of drama as an insania, suggest that far from the theater being a remedy for pestilence, the pestilence should rather be read as an omen predicting the coming of drama and perhaps of the future insania of the state that drama mirrors in turn. Thus it is significant that the practice that finally cures this plague possesses features that point to the social value of history itself and its privileged connection to the public life of the state:

When the quest for piacula had worn out their minds as much as the sickness had their bodies, it is said to have been recalled through the memory of the elders that a pestilence was once ended by a nail driven by a dictator. Influenced by this religious scruple the Senate ordered a dictator to be appointed for the purpose of driving this nail.…There is an old law, written in archaic words and letters, requiring the praetor maximus to drive a nail on the Ides of September; this law was attached to the right side of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus where there is a shrine of Minerva. Since letters were rare in those days, they say that this nail served as a record of the number of years and that the law itself was dedicated in the temple of Minerva because numbers were Minerva’s invention.—Cincius, an author attentive to such records, confirms that at Volsinii too there are nails fixed in the side of the temple of Nortia, an Etruscan goddess, to mark the passage of years.—The consul M. Horatius dedicated the temple of Jupiter in the year after the expulsion of the kings; the sacred rite of driving the nail was transferred from the consuls to the dictators because their imperium was greater. The custom had then been interrupted, but the matter seemed worthy of the appointment of a dictator.

The ritual to which the Romans turn after the failure of drama thus has a double connection with the history of the state. First, historical memory provides the means through which the ritual that cures the plague is recovered. Hence the whole episode provides a simple example of the practical utility of preserving knowledge of the past. But at the same time, the ritual practice itself, as opposed to the nova res of drama, constitutes a tradition whose history is coextensive with that of the Republic^[72] and has as its ultimate purpose nothing other than the production and display of a historical record that makes such knowledge possible.

The continuity between the nail driving as a ritual act and the “text” that results from it, the nails that in place of letters mark the passage of years, is an important feature of Livy’s account. As opposed to drama, whose performers are excluded from participation in the politics of the state, this ritual cannot be separated from the exercise of political authority. It is the responsibility of a magistrate, indeed, of the magistrate who possesses maius imperium (7.3.8), and its history as an institution chronicles the transmission of power within the state. Thus the historical tradition in the narrow sense, the preservation of a record of the past, results directly from the continual reenactment of the forms and practices that constitute Roman public life. Here, in fact, the production of such a record becomes the ultimate goal of the magistrate’s performance.

This interdependence between written records of the past and the very institutions and practices they record may explain the attention Livy draws to his own use of sources within the passage. In contrast to the account of the origins of drama, where much controversy has arisen because Livy cites no authorities for the information he presents, this passage places great emphasis on the sources of the historian’s knowledge. The primary evidence for the practice of driving nails is preserved through an inscription; the Etruscan parallel derives from Cincius Alimentus. The citations here may partly be explained by Livy’s desire to increase his own credibility in what may have been a controversial discussion,^[73] but they also make it possible to trace a line of succession linking Livy’s own text to the ritual he describes. This is particularly true of the inscription recording the ancient law. The text of the inscription provides Livy’s historical source, but the inscription itself, as a monument affixed to the side of the same temple where the dictator drove the nails,^[74] seems to have directly taken over the place and function of the record left by the ritual.^[75]

The contrast Livy draws in his excursus between the alien insania of drama and the practice that eventually cures the plague raises issues that emerge again a few chapters later in the account of the duel between Torquatus and the Gaul. Chapter 3 demonstrated that the victory over the Gaul resulted directly from the Romans’ ability to use spectacles to connect their individual champion to the collective power of the state, while the gestures and threats of the Gaul remained an insignificant distraction. We can now see that much of the language used to describe the behavior of the Gaul recalls the description of drama, while the rituals that precede and follow the Romans’ victory share the most important characteristics of the nail-driving rite. The first point Livy made about the drama in his excursus was that it was a particularly strange institution for a military people.^[76] Since there is no greater proof of the propriety and social utility of any practice than its ability to procure military victory, the association here established between “acting” and the actions of a defeated contestant in single combat provides a particularly powerful confirmation of Livy’s rejection of drama and locates it within a larger opposition between effective and ineffective modes of visual contact.

The costume of the Gaul, a colorful cloak and embossed golden armor, exemplifies the same kind of luxurious ostentation as some Late Republican theatrical productions, where the actors were dressed in cloth of gold.^[77] The three elements of the Gaul’s performance that Livy uses to differentiate his behavior from the Roman’s are cantus (“song”), exsultatio (“dancing up and down”), and armorum agitatio vana (“the pointless shaking of weapons” [7.10.8]). The term cantus is not strictly appropriate to the Gaul, who has only spoken and stuck out his tongue, but it is a component of dramatic performance and is explicitly mentioned as such by Livy.^[78]Exsultatio recalls praesultat,^[79] which is used by Manlius to describe the conduct of the Gaul before the Roman lines. Both words are related to salto, applied to the dancing of the first Etruscan performers at Rome.^[80]Agitatio in this context is perhaps colored by its relationship to ago and actus, the voces propriae for theatrical performance.^[81]

The Romans receive their champion with praise and congratulations. “Among those jesting with certain crude jokes in military fashion, almost in the manner of carmina, the cognomen Torquatus was heard” (7.10.13). The language in which this exchange is described, inter carminum prope modo incondita quaedam militariter ioculantes, recalls the amateur performances of the Roman youths, which Livy’s account has specifically set apart from the ars ludicra, inconditis inter se iocularia fundentes versibus.^[82] This jesting served to reinforce the connection between Manlius and his community that had earlier ensured his victory and now gave it meaning. Moreover, this ritual is the means by which the cognomen Torquatus is established, a historical marker by which the memory of the exploit is preserved. Thus in contrast to the Gaul’s decontextualized dance, socially disconnected and militarily useless, the Roman performance, within the tradition specifically associated with the military and cut off from the formal drama, manages both to be socially integrating and to serve as a vehicle for the preservation of Torquatus’s deed as an exemplum.

III. Tragedy and the Tarquins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Sacrifice and the Restoration of the Res Publica

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

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

The events that provide the context for the rape similarly epitomize the regime’s failure to distinguish properly between public and private and show how the resulting inversions serve to degrade, both ethically and politically, each individual Roman citizen. The Romans are at war with Ardea, but it is a war that is being fought for the most un-Roman motive of personal gain (1.57.1).^[100] The king wishes both to recover the private wealth that he has expended in the adornment of the city and to use the spoils to reconcile the sentiments, or as Livy puts it, to corrupt the animi,^[101] of the people, who feel that they have been forced to perform the work of slaves in undertaking the king’s building projects. The concatenation of bribery, corruption, foreign spoils, and enslavement that results from Tarquin’s failure to keep public and private resources separate^[102] anticipates the later effects of luxury on the state and has the political consequence of dividing the population into masters and slaves.^[103]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Verginia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appendix: Tanaquil and the Accession of Servius Tullius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes