II. Political Authority and the Representation of the Past in the Latin Historiographic Tradition

In the preceding section, I argued that Livy treats the techniques of enargeia developed and described by Greek and Latin rhetoricians not as stylistic ends in themselves but as the means of integrating his work into the sequence of public acts it records. By reproducing the events of the past in a form that allows his audience to respond to them as spectators, the historian appropriates a crucial medium of political participation in Roman culture; in so doing, he makes his text not only “transparent” but “conspicuous,” a monument to be gazed upon. This section seeks to show how Livy’s use of vision to define the place of his text within the civic structures of the state relates to earlier Roman traditions governing the political functions of historical representations.

From its earliest introduction to Rome in the late third century B.C.E., writing history was a political activity. Many of the earliest Roman historians were important public figures in their own right. Fabius Pictor, the first Roman to practice the genre, belonged to one of the most ancient and distinguished families in the state, was the son and nephew of consuls, and himself served as a legate to the Delphic oracle during the Second Punic War.^[54] M. Porcius Cato, whose Origines recounted the foundation legends of Rome and other Italian cities and gave an account of Roman history after 264, could not boast such ancestry, but his political career was among the most spectacular of his era. Indeed, of all the historians of the third and second century B.C.E., there is only one, L. Cassius Himena, for whom we cannot attest senatorial status.^[55] Not only did the historians themselves often occupy a high place in the political order, but their works too seem to have had largely political aims. In some cases, narratives of both early history and, particularly, recent events could provide a context for the self-glorification and denigration of rivals, which was also an important motive for the political activity of the Roman nobilis.^[56] Nowhere is this aspect of early historiography glimpsed more clearly than in Cato’s Origines, the last third of which describes recent events in which he himself played a major role and includes long excerpts from his often intensely partisan speeches.^[57] On a somewhat higher level, the earliest extensive statement of purpose we possess by a Roman historian speaks explicitly of the value of history in terms of its ability to motivate political activity. Writing around the beginning of the first century B.C.E., Sempronius Asellio criticizes the genre of annalistic history on the grounds that mere records of events “can in no way inspire men to be readier to defend the res publica nor slower to act wrongly.”^[58]

The link between performing public actions and recording them emerges even more clearly if we broaden the focus of the discussion to include not only literary history but visual representations of res gestae.^[59] As a means of preserving the memory of events—a monumentum—written history could be classed together with the paintings, statues, and dedications that created a visible record of a military victory or other great deed.^[60] The complementarity between these two kinds of monumenta, and their shared hortatory function, emerges especially in Pliny the Elder’s idealized reconstruction of the home of the Republican noble:

In the atria of our ancestors, these were the things to be wondered at: not the statues of foreign craftsmen; not bronzes or marbles; wax models of faces were set out, each on its own stand, so that there might be likenesses [imagines] to accompany the funeral of members of the clan, and whenever anyone died, every member of the family [totus familiae populus] who had ever existed was at hand [aderat]. The genealogical connections between them were traced by lines that interconnected the painted images. The libraries were filled with books and the records of what they had done in their magistracies [monumentis rerum in magistratu gestarum]. Outside the house and around the threshold were other images of those great souls [animorum ingentium imagines]; mounted spolia taken from the enemy. These it was forbidden for any buyer to take down: The houses continued to triumph even when their owners had changed. This was a great incentive; since the houses every day would reproach an unwarlike owner that he had entered into the triumph of another.

In this passage, the written histories that record ancestral accomplishments function together with the funerary masks in the atrium and the spolia mounted on the façade of the house to form an integrated system of signs. The shared purpose of all these species of monumenta is to make manifest the “great spirits” of the home’s previous noble inhabitants. The cumulative “presence” of these ancestors cannot but inspire anyone who enters into the physical space defined by this network of images^[61] to emulate their conduct himself. This space in turn takes the form of a perpetual public spectacle, first a funeral, then a triumph, into which the observer is inevitably drawn. The alternative to equaling the achievements memorialized in the domus is to enter into someone else’s triumph, presumably in the role of captive.

Like the memorials in the domus, the memorials erected in temples and public spaces throughout the city also reveal the functional interdependence between performing great acts and recording them. In the very process of preserving the memory of res gestae, these memorials themselves influenced the course of public life in ways similar to the effects produced by written history. Such monumenta were by no means the anonymously bestowed gifts of a grateful nation; on the contrary, as the means by which accomplishments were converted into status, the creation and preservation of memorials belonged to the men whose deeds they celebrated. The personal connection of the performer of an action to the artifacts that recorded or, in the case of historical painting, represented it was stressed in a number of ways.^[62] Most dramatically, after the fall of Carthage in 146 B.C.E., L. Hostilius Mancinus put on display in the Forum a painted map of the captured city containing depictions of the final battles, in which he himself was prominently shown as the first to break through the enemy defenses. What is more, Mancinus personally stood beside the painting to explain and describe his role in events, thus earning the enmity of the commanding general, Scipio Aemilianus, but winning himself a consulate.^[63]

The continuities between act and commemoration also emerge from the dedicatory inscriptions that accompanied these memorials, which record not only the victory but the erection of the monumentum itself. In 174 B.C.E., the consul Ti. Sempronius Gracchus, after earning a triumph for his campaigns in Sardinia, erected a map of that island in the temple of Mater Matuta, on which were painted representations of his battles. The following inscription appeared with the map:

Under the imperium and auspicium of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, consul, the legion and army of the Roman people subdued Sardinia. In this province, over eighty thousand of the enemy were killed or captured. When the public business was successfully [felicissime] conducted, the [allies] freed, and the tributes restored, he brought back the army safe, intact, and full of booty. Triumphing for the second time, he entered the city of Rome. On account of this, he dedicated this map to Jupiter.^[64]

While the final phrase was a customary way of closing such a dedication,^[65] the self-referentiality of the inscription has a further significance. The creation of the artifact that places the successful campaign on display itself becomes a part of the action it records, the necessary final element in Sempronius’s command. And indeed this narrative pattern is not just a feature of inscriptions; Livy himself often structures accounts of a military campaign in a similar way, concluding with the erection of the memorial or dedication of the spolia that record it.^[66]

The larger political function of these monumenta was connected in turn with the public spectacles through which the artifacts themselves entered the civic space of the res publica. In Pliny’s description of the domus, the hortatory power of imagines derived in great part from their ability to reproduce in the mind of the viewer the public ceremonies in which they were displayed, funerals and triumphs. And it is as visual components of these two rituals that most works of art were initially represented at Rome.^[67] Not only maps and narrative tableaux, but spolia, which also constituted monumenta, and foreign works of art that came to Rome as booty formed a part of the spectacle of the triumph.

This triumphal context in turn allows us to define more precisely how such visual monumenta acted upon the citizen body and to perceive that their civic function extended beyond the communication of information about distant events and even the simple glorification of the triumphator. Zinserling, whose treatment of the development of Roman historical painting especially emphasizes its connection to the triumph, argues from the connotations of enargeia, the word Polybius uses to describe the visual aspect of triumphs, that these representations themselves exerted a “dynamic” influence on the citizens who beheld them. The paintings presented in a triumph inspired their audiences not just through their informational content but through the exposure they offered to the authority and power of the triumphator.^[68] This notion accords well with Versnel’s later interpretation of the triumph as a whole as an opportunity for the city itself to reappropriate the good fortune (felicitas) manifested in the military success the triumphator had won. As we saw in the previous section, the other visual components of the triumph, the red face of the general and his distinctive attire, even as they made the person of the general more conspicuous, also served both to denote and to project the imperium and auspicium responsible for the successes that the triumph celebrated. Within this framework, the representation of the act celebrated by the triumph, through various forms of monumenta, comes to approximate as closely as possible the direct experience of the act itself;^[69] both are effects of the power born by the triumphator.^[70]