I. Enargeia and the Political Function of Spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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