II. Duels

In spite of the juxtaposition of the stories of Decius and the younger Torquatus in book 8, and the shared willingness of those involved to give up their lives for their country, any intrinsic similarity between duels and devotiones seems to be ruled out by their different outcomes. The devotus is expected to die in battle, while the youth sent out to fight the enemy champion is expected to win. Nevertheless, Livy’s narratives of the two types of actions share the same general structure. Prior to the duel itself, the young Roman combatant must be given permission to fight by his commanding officer.^[35] In each of the two successful duels, this is none other than a magistrate with imperium, a dictator in Torquatus’s case, a consul in Corvus’s. So too a citizen can only be devoted by a consul, dictator, or praetor (8.10.11). After their respective performances, both the living champion and the dead devotus are reincorporated into the group by being praised and held up as inspiring examples, again by the commander.^[36] The way that the actions of the magistrate frame the exploits of both champion and devotus emphasizes the importance of contact in each procedure as the means that allow the individual to act effectively on the state’s behalf. Correspondingly, in Livy’s account of the duels of Torquatus and Corvus, each champion, like the two Decii, becomes a kind of surrogate for the Roman people as a whole. Their victories not only bring them individual glory but predict, or indeed determine, the outcome of the conflict between Gauls and Romans. Their success acts to validate Rome’s intrinsic might and renders the Romans who witness it fiercer and more active; the defeat of each Gaul has an equivalently demoralizing effect on his fellows. When the first Gaul is killed by T. Manlius, fear is said to have rendered the entire army of Gauls motionless (defixerat) while the Romans are made alacres (7.10.12). The defeat of Corvus’s Gaul similarly determines in advance the outcome of the battle in which it occurs.^[37] Thus the effect of the duel as spectacle, to invest each side with the attributes displayed by their surrogate, reproduces the combined result of the devotio. The difference is that in a devotio, the devotus plays a double role, acting as surrogate for the victorious Romans and at the same time “infecting” the enemy with death through his own destruction. In the case of the duel, this double function is split in half. Each side produces its own champion, so that victory can belong entirely to the Roman and death need befall only the Gallic combatant.

Livy’s treatments of the exploits of Torquatus and Corvus give us important clues about the particular concerns of his narrative, because we can compare them to parallel accounts from other annalists, which survive as excerpts in the text of the second-century antiquarian Aulus Gellius. The fragment recording the duel of Torquatus is especially valuable: it is directly attributed to the first century B.C.E. historian Claudius Quadrigarius, and close verbal resemblances make it likely that Livy modeled his account on it directly.^[38] It would thus provide the only point in the first ten books where we can compare Livy’s treatment of an event verbatim with that of one of his “sources.” The Corvus narrative is more difficult to use.^[39] Gellius does not attribute it directly to Quadrigarius, as we would expect, since this author was one of his particular favorites,^[40] and probably reaches him only through having been previously excerpted, and in some measure recast, by another compiler.^[41] Comparisons between both sets of parallel versions reveal that the crucial elements of Livy’s construction of the duels—the role of the commander as the one who both enables the young Roman to fight and later praises his victory, and the corresponding influence the duel acquires over the outcome of the larger conflict between Gauls and Romans—were not indispensable components of a fixed narrative tradition. Claudius Quadrigarius makes no mention of Torquatus’s request for the dictator’s permission to accept the Gaul’s challenge, a moment Livy accentuates by including the dictator’s exhortation in direct speech. The “annalistic” treatment of Corvus’s duel does state that the tribune asked the consul’s permission but leaves out the later speech of the consul urging his soldiers to “imitate” their champion. Neither account implies that the duel has any greater consequence than to win glory and a new cognomen for its victor.^[42]

The full significance of Livy’s reformulation of the duel can best be viewed against the background of the varied cultural associations that the institution of dueling possessed in the Late Republic. Stephen Oakley has demonstrated the frequency and importance of single combat in Roman military practice and made clear that such duels cannot be regarded simply as a response to foreign challenges.^[43] Oakley collects over thirty examples of single combats and suggests that during the peak period of the Middle Republic, such combats could have happened as frequently as once a year.^[44] The evidence he compiles, together with the wealth of parallels adduced from other cultures, make it possible to trace the variety of connotations the practice acquired within Roman culture.

One of the tendencies that emerges from Oakley’s analysis is the link between participation in single combat and the competition for power and prestige within the Roman aristocracy. Both Manlius Torquatus and Valerius Corvus rise to the highest positions at Rome. More than that, their exploits yield the honorific surnames (cognomina) that will distinguish their respective families throughout their history. Indeed, it has been suggested that the story of Valerius Corvus arose as a response to the glorification of the hero of the Manlii.^[45] At the same time, Oakley points out that the Romans were unique among ancient cultures in their attempt to circumscribe the personal glory won through single combat by emphasizing that the champions accepted challenges only with the permission of their commanding officer.^[46] For our purposes, though, the stress on disciplina is best treated as only one of many possible ways of interpreting single combat rather than as an overarching Roman cultural strategy for regulating individual ambition. It is possible to imagine a version of the Torquatus story designed solely to commemorate the young man’s heroism and prowess. In fact, such a version survives in the account of Claudius Quadrigarius.^[47]

A brief survey of the accounts of duels fought in the decades surrounding the Social Wars, a period when the traditional models of aristocratic authority were being tested by the rise of Marius, reveals that the practice could be subjected to a variety of competing interpretations and had in fact become a significant locus for demonstrating or debunking the importance of noble ancestry. Thus L. Opimius, presumably connected with the consul responsible for the destruction of Gaius Gracchus, is reported to have fought a duel with one of the Cimbri.^[48] The anti-Sullan hero Sertorius similarly challenged the soft aristocrat Metellus Pius to a duel. Unlike Opimius, Metellus refused and was derided by his troops.^[49] During the same war in which Opimius accepted the chance to distinguish himself through single combat, Marius himself was said to have been challenged to a duel by a Teuton and to have ostentatiously rejected that challenge in a manner that parodied the entire institution. “When a Teuton challenged him and demanded that he advance, Marius responded that if he wanted to die, he could go hang himself. After the Teuton insisted, Marius placed before him a gladiator of contemptible stature and almost worn out with age and told his challenger that if he beat the gladiator, he himself would fight the winner.”^[50]

By the time Livy came to write his own versions of the duels of Torquatus and Corvus, the practice of single combat itself seems to have all but died out. With the exception of an encounter during the Jewish war,^[51] the last recorded instance of single combat took place during Caesar’s Spanish campaign of 45 B.C.E.^[52] But the decline of the actual practice of single combat does not mark the end of its cultural significance; in addition to Livy’s narratives, the statue of Valerius Corvus, complete with crow, erected in the Forum of Augustus testifies to the importance that these episodes assumed during the early Principate.^[53]

How then are we to understand Livy’s representations of single combat, particularly his interest in the relationship between the young champion and his commanding officer, in this context? We can rule out any idea that Livy was sending a crude message about the new political reality by subordinating the accomplishment of the individual champion to the superior authority of the magistrate. The explicit moral function of these episodes, both in Livy’s text and in the Augustan Forum, was not to check ambition but rather to inspire imitation; Corvus is held up as a model of behavior whom his consul instructs the other Roman soldiers to emulate. The innovation of Livy is not to have wrested dueling itself away from the surviving nobiles as a means of personal advancement, but, like Augustus in his Forum, to have taken control of the stories told about these events, converting them from self-glorifying family narratives to paradigms of patriotic action that had broader, national application. We shall see that even within the story of Torquatus, Livy signals the transition from family glory to the interest of Rome as a whole as the motive that impels the youth to accept the Gaul’s challenge. The motif of the commander’s permission therefore has nothing to do with limiting individual accomplishment; on the contrary, contact with the collective power of the state in the person of the magistrate is what enables the individual to be successful and allows him to act not just on his own but as a true representative of the entire state. It thus gives his victory a historical significance it would not otherwise have possessed.

Another aspect of dueling facilitates Livy’s translation of single combat from a manifestation of individual or familial prowess to a sign of the broader superiority of the Roman state over its opponents: the idea that single combat had a quasi-judicial function and served to resolve disputes by legitimating the claims of the victor.^[54] We have already seen on a larger scale how the victory of the Romans over their enemies itself validates their motives; the gods would not have aided them unless their cause was just. Nicolaus of Damascus attests the existence among Italian peoples of a form of trial by combat to resolve disputes between individuals: “Whenever the Umbrians have a dispute against one another, having armed themselves, they fight as if in a war, and those who slaughter their opponents are thought to have made the juster claim.”^[55] A similar principle has been discovered in archaic Roman judicial procedures like the vindicatio, an ancient form of judgment to determine ownership of slaves or moveables that required both disputants formally to state their claim in the presence of witnesses while simultaneously touching the slave in question with a rod.^[56] After this, the magistrate compels both parties to release the slave and to state the basis of their claim. Even the response to this question is standardized. The claimants offer no other proof than the simple fact of having performed the rite (ius feci). As Gernet points out, in this case, not only do actions have a ritualized, linguistic function but the words themselves have a palpable physical effect. The performance of the act of vindicatio is the prerequisite for decision. The right of ownership is obtained not by offering a compelling account of the past but by participating in the present encounter.

In addition to their own physical resources, participants in a trial by combat can invoke the aid of the gods themselves by oaths, which Gernet interprets as originally serving simply as a means of engaging the divine powers in support of one’s claim.^[57] Whoever wins the duel will now have his right affirmed by the gods who have given him victory. Something similar is accomplished in Livy’s account of Torquatus’s duel when the consul, in giving the combatant permission to fight, also invokes the aid of the gods on his behalf. This action, almost a consecration of Torquatus, in addition to providing him with greater resources to fight, necessarily raises the stakes of the competition and assures that a victory will be attributed not just to the might he inherits from his ancestors but to the power of the Roman gods.