I. The Boundaries of the Patria

At Rome every five years, when the censors drew up their list of Roman citizens, the members of the state assembled on the Campus Martius, and a pig, sheep, and bull were led around them in a circle and then sacrificed. The same ritual performance, called a lustratio, was used to prepare an army for battle and to purify the weapons and trumpets before and after each campaign. In 28 B.C.E., after a lapse of forty-one years, Augustus restored the census, together with the performance of a lustratio, as a part of his renewal of Roman civic rituals after the end of the civil wars.^[9] Whatever proportion of Roman citizens had actually experienced such a lustration, the frequent depictions of the scene in art,^[10] its recurrence throughout the Roman religious calendar, and Augustus’s very interest in restoring it show how profoundly the performance was associated with the constitution of the civic body. The ritual’s structure both expresses and gives shape to the Roman conceptualization of what it means to become a citizen.

The lustratio used to be thought of primarily as a purificatory ritual and many attempts were made to connect it etymologically with the root that means cleanse.^[11] But as Versnel emphasizes, lustration rituals generally take place at the beginnings of enterprises rather than at their conclusions. The army is lustrated before, not after, a battle, when there is no blood guilt to be purged. In consequence, Versnel argues that in addition to its purifying or apotropaic elements, the act of lustratio also possessed a constitutive function, defining the group preparatory to collective action.^[12] Within the ritual, it is most obviously the gesture of encirclement by the procession of priests and victims that differentiates the group from the outside world. The exclusionary as well as inclusive nature of lustratio appears from the instructions that survive in an Umbrian inscription from the city of Gubbio, where the ceremony begins with the explicit and elaborate listing of foreign peoples who are commanded to depart.^[13] The second element of the lustratio, the sacrifice, may be rationalized as a gift to the gods for their protection of the lustrated body,^[14] but, as discussed more fully later in this chapter, sacrifice itself can function as a mechanism of social bonding and in this respect complements the constitutive function implied in the gesture of encirclement.

But the use of lustration, as of sacrifice, extends far beyond rituals involving the entire state. The earliest reference to lustration describes its application to a farmer’s field,^[15] and the combination of animals used in the procession suggests an agricultural origin. Moreover, its use was not limited to Rome; as we have seen, the most detailed description of lustration comes from an Umbrian city. Even the individual body was lustrated both nine days after birth (eight days for females) and nine days after death.^[16] In the case of the lustration of babies, the obvious protective function of the practice is once again coupled with a constitutive dimension. It is at the ceremony of the dies lustricus that the baby is given a name and thus acquires an identity.^[17] The multiplicity of possible lustrationes creates an image of each individual enclosed, not just within the magic circle of the state, but within any number of different rings, each of which define him as a member of a particular social entity, such as a local community or a particular family. At the smallest level, even the body emerges as microcosm of the whole.

A map of affiliations similar to the one suggested by these overlapping lustrationes also underlies discussions of conflicts of loyalties in Cicero’s ethical writings. Although his native town of Arpinum had obtained citizenship three generations before his birth, and he himself was even awarded the title of pater patriae for his services to Rome, Cicero is still at pains to define the relationship between his native place and the Roman res publica. As book 2 of the De legibus begins, Atticus is surprised to hear Cicero refer to Arpinum as his patria, and Cicero responds by asserting that “everyone from the towns has two patriae, one of nature, and one of citizenship.”^[18] Already the problem of terminology arises; Cicero must create the terms patria naturae, “natural fatherland,” and patria civitatis, “fatherland of citizenship,” to articulate the division of what had been a unitary idea. Ultimately, it is not the venerable opposition between nomos and phusis that justifies greater allegiance to the larger patria but the larger extent of the community. “It is necessary that the patria, where the name of res publica is a marker of our common citizenship, stand first in our affections; for which we ought to die and to which we ought to devote ourselves entirely and upon which as an altar we ought to set and as it were sacrifice all our goods.” In the De officiis, a much larger set of possible societies, extending all the way to the human species, is again sorted by size. The inner core is defined by the family, with the husband and wife at its center. The emotional bond within the family is based both on a natural desire for propagation^[19] and, at a further remove, on benevolentia and caritas arising from the sharing of monumenta maiorum, religious rites, and burial places.^[20] On the basis of this organization, it seems as though the nearer bond should predominate. Yet after apparently leading to this conclusion, at the climax of the whole discussion, Cicero says that no bond is carior or gravior than that which links us to the res publica.^[21] Here the order of rating these associations is suddenly reversed. In contrast to the centripetal tendency of the previous discussion, the Republic is now to be valued most highly precisely because it surrounds all other forms of community. “The one patria has embraced [complexa est] all the loves [caritates] of all.”^[22]

But Cicero’s appeal to caritas as a motive for patriotism contains the kernel of a paradox that would recur frequently in Roman discussions of civic participation.^[23] It has been argued that the new allegiance to Rome presented no conflicts for the new citizens because it existed “on a different level” from the previous citizenship to the native state.^[24] In the sense that Roman citizenship supplemented rather than replaced municipal citizenship, it was not in direct competition with it. However in the De legibus, the distinction between “legal” citizenship and “natural” or affective citizenship does not imply a qualitative difference in the kind of bond that obtains between the citizen and his two patriae; it is on the same subjective scale of dearness or caritas that the more distant state must prevail over the smaller.^[25] And the reality of this conflict is revealed when Cicero immediately qualifies his ringing call for patriotism: “However, the patria that bore us is dear in almost the same way as that which receives us.”^[26] Thus Cicero’s formulation seems less a schematized resolution of this possible conflict of loyalties than a diagnosis of an abiding tension in the construction of each individual’s civic identity. Yet there is a still larger contradiction in this model of patriotism. It is not sufficient simply to serve the patria because we understand that it protects and enfolds those nearer groups like wife and family whom we love “naturally.” Cicero demands that we feel even greater love for the state than we do for other associations: we must, in other words, think of the Republic in the same terms in which we think of the family and even subordinate to this entity those nearer bonds on which patriotism itself is originally based.

The canonical images of Roman patriotism highlight the rejection of these “inner circles” for the interest of the state. Cincinnatus leaves his farm to become dictator; Brutus presides over the execution of his sons for treason; and Mucius Scaevola, in what is effectively a declaration of Roman citizenship,^[27] burns off his hand. Livy constructs the Cincinnatus episode, which is explicitly directed at those who prefer wealth to virtus (4.26.7), to emphasize particularly the passage into the public space, from which Cincinnatus’s farm is symbolically separated by the Tiber River. His famous gesture of putting on the toga recalls the assumption of the toga virilis by every youth as he entered manhood. And the procession that receives the dictator, after he has been carried across the Tiber “on a public ship,” recapitulates the transition: “Three sons went to meet him, next intimates and friends, then the majority of the Senate.”

Such exempla not only teach the subordination of the smaller unit in the interests of the larger state but also reinforce both the interdependency and the parallelism between family, state, and body. As we shall see in chapter 5, at the moment when Brutus puts the interest of the state ahead of his paternal feeling, his relationship to the patria is redefined as that between a father and his children. Other explicitly didactic moments of Livy’s early books similarly encourage a perception of the state not just as the protector of the family or body but as a family or body. For example, after a performance of the “Great Games,” the plebeian Titus Latinius receives a prophetic dream warning him that the city is in danger because the games have not been properly conducted (2.36).^[28] Before the spectacle began, a paterfamilias had had his slave killed in the arena. Latinius is afraid that he will be laughed at if he tells anyone about his dream and so disregards it. A few days later his son dies. When he hesitates even longer, his own body is stricken with disease. The event implies more than the interconnectedness of family and state; it suggests that the res publica is a family or body in macrocosm.^[29] The same point lies behind the famous parable of the belly and the limbs, which the patrician Menenius Agrippa tells to a group of plebeians who are trying to sever their bonds to the Rome and form a new city (2.32.8–12). When the limbs, or plebeians, begrudge food to the belly, which represents the patricians, they themselves begin to fail. Thus the inherent comparability of the state to the family or the body provides a constant resource for the generation of collective loyalty; plebeians blind to the functioning of the state as a whole can be made to perceive its indissolubility when projected onto the level of the body.^[30]

Nor is this message directed only at controlling the lower classes; patricians as well as plebeians are inclined both to place concerns for their honor above the welfare of the state and to miss the integral connection between family and res publica. Thus the patrician rebel Coriolanus, in the scene that concludes the complex of episodes beginning with Latinius’s dream, abandons his attack on Rome when his mother makes him realize that by becoming an enemy to the state, he has also changed his relationship to his family.^[31] When Coriolanus attempts to embrace her, his mother asks whether she comes as a captive to a conqueror or as a mother to a son (2.40.6). The lurid possibility that Coriolanus’s mother might become his slave, and, as such, his concubine, reveals in the most powerful way the complete inversion of the structure of the familia.

One further demonstration of this pattern of interdependency from Livy’s second book suggests a more complex relationship between the entities of body and state (2.23). An old soldier who has been reduced to abject misery by debt slavery hurls himself into the middle of the Forum. Exhausted, he can only point to the scars he has earned in battle. When he finally begins to speak, he chronicles how public misfortunes and unjust economic practices have reduced him to misery. The exigencies of recent wars, raids, and the taxes required to maintain Rome’s military endeavors have forced him from his ancestral farm (ager paternus avitusque, 2.23.6), which, through the adjectives applied to it, becomes emblematic of the family as a whole. Finally, after having been cast into slavery, his misfortune, “as though a disease [velut tabem] reached his body” (2.23.6), in the form of the marks of the lash, which he then reveals to the crowd. The speech illustrates the predictable pattern. Evils afflicting the state work inward to destroy the family and waste the body until the body becomes a “text” where the health of the community can be clearly perceived. Indeed, this “text,” with its division between the honorable scars won in foreign wars and the shameful lash marks that testify to his domestic misfortunes, mirrors the traditional annalistic alternation between foreign and internal affairs employed in Livy’s own history.

A closer look at how Livy has structured his narrative suggests that the relationship between body and state serves as more than an intellectualized schema of similarities employed for solely didactic purposes. The impact of the state on the body can be thought of less as a series of causes and effects projected inward than as a kind of quasi-magical sympathy by which the body receives influences from the whole. Livy’s description of the interaction between the individual soldier and the crowd highlights a mutual exchange of energy affecting both the spectators and the object of their gaze. After hurling himself into the Forum, the old soldier seems able to take no further action. Indeed, he appears hardly human; the narrative breaks him down into his constituent parts, filthy clothes, a disgusting bodily condition, a long beard, and disheveled hair. This condition is explicitly stated to have “made his appearance wild.”^[32] That a capable human form slowly emerges from this image of impotence and subhumanity is largely due to the activity of the spectators themselves. By being recognized, the old man is given an identity and a past. Finally, he himself takes part in the process by pointing out his wounds, witnesses (testes) of his past public service.

As the presence of the crowd of onlookers reanimates the old soldier, they themselves begin to take on a coherent shape and purpose. At first, there is no mention of the number or organization of the onlookers. We become aware that there is in fact an audience only when the old man is recognized by someone (2.23.4). Yet as the soldier, now identifiable as such, becomes active and is about to speak, we are informed that a crowd, turba, has gathered and has come to approximate the form of a political assembly (prope modo contionis [2.23.5]). Moreover, after he finds a voice, the crowd too becomes articulate, responding with clamor to his revelations (2.23.7). Finally, the crowd breaks its bounds and aggressively invades the whole city.

In this case, the effect of the spectacle of the old soldiers is not to reunite the state but to create essentially an alternative state, which is only reconciled several years later by the parable of Menenius Agrippa. Nevertheless, the scene is important for our purposes because it recapitulates the concentric social groups by which an individual can be defined, and suggests the reciprocal interdependence among them. Moreover, it demonstrates the role of visual contact as the locus of exchange where this interdependence is brought into play and where the various “rings” influence one another. Both of these ideas play a large role in Livy’s depiction of the fusion of Alba and Rome.