IV. The Duel of the Younger Torquatus

These earlier narratives form the background for the younger Torquatus’s encounter with his Latin challenger (8.7). Together, they have defined a double tradition that binds each individual champion to the collective authority of the state through contact with magistrates and gods and to a pattern of successful behavior extending through time, of which his own action provides but one manifestation. In conforming to the demands exerted by the political hierarchy and the weight of historical precedent, the individual becomes an instrument for disseminating the influence of each tradition, and this provides both the means and the significance of his victory. As we have seen, the younger Torquatus’s duel occurs in a context that puts at risk both the historical supremacy of the Romans over the Latins and the privileged connection to the larger power of the gods upon which that supremacy depends. Yet Torquatus, far from asking the consul, his father, for permission to fight, ignores his specific instructions that no Roman is to engage the enemy without orders. Had Torquatus lost his duel, the outcome could therefore have been easily explained and would have possessed an educative value as an illustration of what happens when soldiers fight without permission. But the outcome of this encounter turns out to be far more dangerous for the authority structure of the state and even calls into question the value of the historical tradition: Torquatus wins despite the fact that he is fighting without authorization. Thus his very victory, far from affirming the superiority of Roman over Latin, as he had hoped, can be read as a justification of the Latins’ position: there is no power beyond force, and the idea that Rome’s dominance has any kind of external guarantee from the gods is a sham; therefore it is only right that the Latins, who have shared equally in Rome’s victories, should also have a share of imperium.

Torquatus’s son belongs to a cavalry squadron sent out to reconnoiter. A band of Tusculan cavalry meets and recognizes them, and the leader of this band, Geminus Maecius, taunts the Romans. The young Torquatus responds by an appeal to both axes of authority, the hierarchical and the historical, in his assertion of the superiority of Rome. He claims that Roman victory will be assured by the presence of Jupiter along with the armies of the consuls, and, as his father had before him (8.5.10), invokes the battle of Lake Regillus as a historical precedent for the victory of the Romans over the Latins: “The consular armies will be here in time, and with them will be Jupiter himself, a witness of the treaties you have violated, who has even more power. If you had more than enough of us at the battle of Lake Regillus, this encounter too will curb your taste for doing battle with us.”^[79] But having correctly recognized the sources of Roman power, Torquatus then makes a mistake. Maecius challenges, “Do you wish then, until the day when you move your armies for the great attempt, to fight with me yourself in order that the outcome of our battle make clear by how much the Latin knight excels the Roman?”^[80] And Torquatus, “moved by anger or shame or the ineluctable power of fate” (8.7.8), accepts.

The duel that the young Torquatus fights under these circumstances is very different in character from that of his father:

Thus forgetful of the command of his father [imperii patrii] and the order of the consuls, he is driven headlong into a contest where it did not matter much whether he conquered or was conquered. When the other riders had withdrawn, as if at a spectacle, they drove their horses against one another in the area of empty field that lay between them. As they clashed with their opposed weapons, the spear of Manlius flew over his opponent’s helmet; Maecius’s glided over the neck of Manlius’s horse. On the second charge, when Manlius rose first to deliver his blow, he planted his missile between the ears of the Latin’s horse. Feeling his wound, the horse reared up and shook his head with such force that he unseated his rider, whom, while he leaned upon his shield and spear and was raising himself from a bad fall, Manlius stabbed through the throat so hard that the spear came out through his ribs and pinned him to the ground. Gathering up the spoils and returning to his fellows, he headed straight for the camp, accompanied by his rejoicing squadron, and to his father’s tent, uncertain of his fate and destiny, whether he deserved punishment or praise.

Here, too, the fight takes the form of a spectaculum, yet unlike his father’s battle with the Gaul, it is a spectaculum entirely without consequences, a mere spectacle. Since Torquatus fights entirely alone, without contact with the imperium of the magistrate or the aid of the gods, his victory will prove nothing about the real sources of Roman power, it can only be meaningless. As opposed to the reserve and discipline of his father, which stood as a foil to the extravagant display of his opponent, the son appears from the first as out of control, “driven headlong” to battle rather than choosing it; the errant casts of the combatants and panic of the stricken horse aptly represent the absence of any restraining influence. Correspondingly, the narrative itself is constructed as a flamboyant pastiche of Homeric elements; the repeated throws, wounded horse, and the anatomic specificity in the description of the final blow all suggest the world of epic.^[81] What is missing from this narrative, apart from the description of the “rejoicing squadron,” is any reference to the effect the duel possesses upon its spectators.

Unlike his father, this Torquatus does not limit himself to a single token of victory but gathers spoils from his fallen opponent. The youth’s enthusiasm for spolia, of the sort that were frequently displayed on the façades of the houses of the nobility,^[82] aptly connects the misplaced interest in insubstantial visual signs illustrated in the account of the duel to a flawed conception of the relationship between family glory and the needs of the res publica. Pointing to the spolia, the young man tells his father that he chose to engage in combat in order to live up to the precedent of his own earlier duel, “so that all would say that I was truly born of your stock” (8.7.13). Torquatus’s mistake is not so much to have placed his desire to exalt himself and his gens above obedience to the orders of the consul as to have failed to realize that there simply ought to be no difference between the demands of family and patria. This was one of the lessons of his father’s duel, where the dictator’s formal command to fight served to fuse duty to the family with patriotism. Torquatus was to be of “outstanding pietas toward father and fatherland.” By winning his duel, he had earned both praise from the dictator and an honorific cognomen. The unity of the authority of family and state ought to have been especially clear to the young Manlius, since the consul whom he should have obeyed and the father whose example he wished emulate were one and the same person.

The speech in which the consul sentences his son to death for disobedience elucidates the relationship between the misinterpretation of visual signs and the breakdown in the patterns of order upon which the survival of the state depends:

Since, Titus Manlius, you have respected neither the imperium of the consul nor the supremacy of your father, and have fought against the enemy contrary to orders and outside of your position, and, as much as you could, eroded that military discipline by which the Roman state has stood until this day, and have led me into the necessity of neglecting either my own interest or that of the res publica, we shall be afflicted by our fault rather than the nation pay the penalty for our sins. We shall be a severe exemplum but a healthy one for the youth [triste exemplum sed in posterum salubre iuventuti erimus]. I am indeed moved by the natural love of fathers for their children and by the appearance you give of virtue deceived by a false image of honor, but since the imperia of the consuls must be either sanctified by your blood or be henceforward violated with impunity, I would think that not even you, if you have any drop of my blood, would deny that you must restore through your punishment the military discipline that has been compromised by your error—go, lictor, tie him to the stake!

His son was lured into fighting this battle by a “false image” (vana imago) of glory (8.7.18), which finds a corollary in the sight of the spolia with which the consul has just been confronted. In participating in the duel, however, his son was not just a victim of deception; through the excitement aroused by the combat and his own use of signs to commemorate his victory, he has helped perpetuate the “empty image of glory” responsible for his own mistake. He himself has become in his father’s words a “specimen”(8.7.18). Thus in contrast to Valerius Corvus, the sight of whose victory served to communicate the power of the gods responsible for his success to all the spectators of the duel, the young Torquatus has set in motion a sequence of visual signs that, if left unchecked, is in danger of deceiving those who witnessed it and drawing them away from the disciplina that links them to the imperium of the state. Another of the dangerous consequences of the youth’s action afflicts the father himself. By assuming that the chance to win glory for his family justified disobedience to orders, his son had created an opposition between the service of family and state. His disobedience compels his father in turn to choose between personal interests and affections and the demands of public duty. By presenting the punishment of his son as something that his family’s tradition of obedience requires, and by compelling the young man himself to acquiesce in the principle that necessitates his death on the basis of heredity, the consul attempts to make the execution a sight that will paradoxically restore the alignment between family honor and the interest of the nation.

To correct his son’s error, the consul produces another spectacle, the young champion’s execution, to be witnessed by precisely the same audience who exalted in his success. This spectacle ought to put on display all the personal and national qualities conspicuously absent in the duel itself. Personal fortitude, family honor, and the authorization of the consul unite in an image which will restore and “sanctify” (sancienda [8.7.19]) that bond between each individual and the power of the state that is the secret of Roman difference. Unlike the empty and ultimately insignificant duel, the execution will take its place within the “official” tradition of Roman history, recalling one of the founding acts of the res publica, Brutus’s execution of his sons: it will be a salubre exemplum, designed not just for its immediate audience but to provide a model for the future as well.

We are forced to speak about what the spectacle of the execution ought to reveal rather than what it does reveal because Livy avoids describing the actual moment of Manlius’s execution and allows his audience to see it only as it is reflected in the eyes of those who watch it:

All were stunned [exanimati] by such a ruthless command and were silenced by fear rather than moderation, just as if each one saw the ax prepared for him. And so they stood in silence rooted to the spot [defixi], their senses, as it were, overwhelmed by astonishment. Suddenly after the blood poured forth from the victim’s neck, their voices rose in such an unrestrained cry that they held back neither from mourning nor from curses, and the youth, covered with his spoils, was given a funeral with all possible marks of the favor of his fellow soldiers and burnt on a pyre built up outside the camp. And “Manlian imperia”were not only terrifying in the present but served as a cruel example for the future [exempli etiam triste in posteritatem]. But nevertheless the very ruthlessness of the punishment made the soldiers more obedient to their leader, and since guards and watches and the stationings were conducted with greater care, this severity was beneficial in the final battle.

The very absence of narrative specificity about the execution itself creates an opposition between this scene and the duel, with its carefully descriptive detail. The technique provides a corollary to the absence of external signs with which Torquatus had confronted the merely visual magnificence of the Gaul. But if the spectacle itself has vanished from Livy’s text, the decision to describe the spectators rather than the action shifts the emphasis of the scene to the effect of spectacle. Nowhere in Livy’s text is the sympathy that develops between audience and the object of spectacle more clearly evoked. So strongly do the spectator’s identify themselves with Manlius that they actually seem to take his place as victim; they see the axes raised against them. As in the other spectacles discussed, the audience take on the characteristics of their surrogate. He is deprived of life; they, too, are exanimati. During the very time when the victim is immobilized by being bound to the stake, they are described as “rooted to the spot” (defixi). As such, the young men who had before identified only with the victor of the duel come to resemble the posture of the defeated, whom Manlius pinned to the ground (adfixit [8.7.11]) with his spear.

Livy’s emphasis on the horror experienced by Manlius’s fellow soldiers has been read as an implicit criticism of the consul’s severity. Torquatus, in contrast to his fellow consul Decius, mistakes cruelty and extremism for duty, and the fact that the youth of Rome will never be reconciled to his authority, even going so far as to spurn his triumph,^[83] seems to suggest that the execution has failed to be anything other than an exercise in violence.^[84] But nothing in the text leads us to look for compromise or reconciliation. The consul predicts that the exemplum he produces will be both triste and salubre, and indeed it is the very cruelty of the penalty that is the key to its effectiveness. As Livy puts it, the atrocitas of the punishment makes the soldiers more obedient. The consul’s remedy relies upon the same mechanism of sympathetic contact by which the influence of imperium communicates itself in duels and devotiones. The punishment of the victim here becomes the punishment of the audience who, having identified with his success in the duel, now experience his execution as their own. If we, Livy’s audience, have rejoiced in Manlius’s success without perceiving its illegality, then the exemplum is as much for us as for the soldiers who were actually present. Thus it is by recreating the full impact of the spectacle on those who witness it that Livy most effectively communicates the influence of the exemplum through his text.

The execution therefore, rather than harmonizing the social and ethical tensions resulting from Manlius’s disobedience, necessarily articulates them with the greatest clarity. For this reason, even in the midst of the consul’s exemplum a rival spectacle is produced, which enshrines an image of precisely the values that have necessitated the punishment. Manlius’s comrades immediately give the victim a funeral where the tokens of victory, the spolia that occasioned his death, are again placed on triumphant display in such a way as almost to conceal the corpse itself and allow the youth’s glorious accomplishments to obliterate the traces left by his punishment.^[85] Like the burial of an epic hero, the scene concludes with the construction of a pyre, a monument in this case both to the son’s glory and the father’s cruelty. The episode therefore generates a double historical legacy; the image of the young man’s victory and the consul’s cruelty are infixed in the disciplinary exemplum he produces. Yet by ensuring that the exemplum continues to be felt as triste, they also preserve it as salubre.

The execution of Manlius is not the only such doubled spectacle that appears in Livy’s text. In the next chapter, we shall see that similar scenes occur precisely in contexts that require Roman society to redefine itself by simultaneously excluding outsiders and cementing new bonds of loyalty between insiders. These spectacles perform the same “initiatory” function as the execution of Manlius, which is designed to restore the soldiery to obedience to the imperium of the consul. A clue to the nature of these spectacles is to be found in the remark of a later historian, Valerius Maximus, that the young Manlius perished in modum hostiae, “like a sacrificial victim.”^[86]