III. Avarice, Vision, and Restoration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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