III. The Death of Horatia

Livy’s description of the duel presents two diametrically opposed vantage points on the unfolding action, that of the victorious Romans who identify with the eventual killer of Curiatius and that of the Albans who identify with the victim. It is nationality alone that determines which of these irreconcilable perspectives each spectator adopts. There is obviously no question of a pro-Curiatius faction among the Roman troops. Thus the act of watching becomes a communal exercise that makes the experiences of all the spectators uniform, so that the entire nation responds as one individual, a unity that corresponds to the “wholeness” of the one man who represents them on the field. Not only does civic identity alone determine loyalty but it incorporates and harmonizes with the individual’s other motivations. When the last Horatius kills the Curiatii, he is both benefiting his patria and avenging his brothers; there is no distinction between what he owes the state and what he owes his family. The sequel to Horatius’s victory reverses all of these tendencies. Again, an alternative perspective on an act of violence is introduced, but no longer can the opposite viewpoint be relegated to those outside the patria. Moreover, this discrepancy in response results precisely from the spectator’s inability to adopt a national, as opposed to personal, perspective.

As Horatius enters the city bearing the triple spoils of the defeated Albans, his sister, who, we are now told, was betrothed to one of the Curiatii, begins to mourn and tear her hair. Her brother immediately kills her, with the cry, “Away to your betrothed with your untimely love, forgetful of your brothers living and dead, forgetful of your patria”(1.26.4). Livy’s narrative focuses the discrepancy between Horatia’s response and that of the “nation” on the interpretation of a visual sign. Horatius carries before him the weapons of the defeated triplets as spolia to commemorate his victory on behalf of the nation and thus to anchor his personal accomplishment in the history of the Roman people. Among the trophies is Curiatius’s paludamentum, a soldier’s cloak, which as a military garment was an appropriate spoil of victory. Horatia however recognizes the cloak as one that she, like a good Roman wife, has woven with her own hands.^[57] As the public celebrates the victory of her brother, Horatia alone pronounces the name of Curiatius.^[58]

Initially, the conflict between Horatius and Horatia seems based exclusively on an opposition between family and state, which in turn depends on gender difference: the woman views the event only in terms of family connections and personal affection, while the all-male army champions the national perspective. But the actions and attitudes of neither character allow themselves to be so neatly characterized. Horatius’s own act of killing his sister violates both the laws of the state and the structure of authority within the family: it is only the father who possesses the legal right of life and death over Horatia. Conversely, the exclamation with which Horatius accompanies his deadly blow refuses to cede the realm of the family to his sister. In killing the Curiatii, he was avenging his brothers, whereas Horatia is equally disloyal to family and state. Moreover, as Georges Dumézil points out, by casting Horatia’s behavior as shamelessness,^[59] Horatius makes it the moral responsibility of the male members of the family to punish her, even if such behavior is technically illegal.^[60]

Horatia’s rejection of her brothers out of loyalty to her future husband expresses a potential conflict for any Roman bride at the moment when she moves from the family of her brothers into the patria potestas of her father-in-law; in this respect too, her actions can be understood as illustrating tensions that lie exclusively within the family sphere.^[61] Indeed, the very site of the murder bears an association with this critical moment in a girl’s life. The tigillum sororium, which according to Livy’s narrative will be established to commemorate Horatius’s purification after the murder of his sister, is actually named for the temple of Juno Sororia, whose cult title derives from the verb sororiare, used to describe the swelling of a girl’s breast at puberty.^[62] And puberty for most Roman women coincided with marriage.

But just as both Horatia and her brother are impelled by their differing familial allegiances, so too at the national level the schism between them reflects not an opposition between “family” and “state” but an internal contradiction within the logic of patriotism itself. Although devotion to the patria must eventually take precedence over family loyalty, patriotism arises out of the very love of wives and children that it eventually supplants. So in the preface to Livy’s second book, he describes how the national unity of the Romans took time to develop, because it was only very gradually that a wandering people was sufficiently united by their affection for wives and children and love for the “place itself” (2.1.5).^[63] A practical example of how such unity can be forged from family bonds emerged in Livy’s account of the famous rape of the Sabine women. In the midst of the Sabines’ retaliation, their daughters intercede on behalf of their new husbands, the Romans, and the two peoples merge rather than becoming enemies.^[64] Horatia occupies exactly the same mediating position between the Romans and Albans. She thus represents those more intimate ties that engender patriotism and serves as a reminder of an alternative means of bringing about the unity of the two peoples, which in this case is implicitly rejected. Paradoxically her brother can only demonstrate his fully developed patriotism by killing her.^[65]

By presenting the Curiatii as potentially linked to their rivals by ties of kinship, Horatia’s presence in the narrative challenges the radical differentiation between the Alban and Roman champions that was won by the duel. The Curiatii are no longer defined exclusively as “other,” foreign enemies, against whom violence is legitimate. Livy articulates this challenge by presenting it as an alternative spectacle, which “interferes” with the reception of Horatius’s victory both by contemporaries within the narrative and by his own audience. As Solodow has shown, the description of Horatius’s slaughter of his sister contains several echoes of his killing of the last Curiatius.^[66] In neither case does the victim offer any resistance, and Horatius accompanies each killing with a pithy exclamation imposing a meaning on the death.^[67] The verb used for the killing of Horatia, transfigit (1.26.3), is a cognate of defigit (1.25.12), which describes the death of Curiatius. References to Horatius’s ferocitas also draw together the two scenes.^[68] The response of the Romans to the killing of Horatia explicitly juxtaposes the two actions. “The deed seemed appalling [atrox] to patricians and plebeians, but his honor, still fresh, blocked out the act” (sed recens meritum facto obstabat [1.26.5]). The word obstabat suggests that Horatius’s honor, on visual display in the form of the spolia he bears, literally obstructs the viewer’s contact with the scene of the murder. Horatius’s father will use precisely the same device to persuade the people to spare his son. He points to the visual signs of Horatius’s public victory the Pila Horatia,^[69] and at the same time conjures up the image of his ovation, almost returning to the very instant before Horatia herself blocks (obvia [1.26.2]) her brother’s progress.^[70] The same doubling of visual signs is preserved for posterity, not only by Livy’s narrative, but in the more tangible form of the sepulcra with which Livy ends each half of his account. The three sepulcra of the Curiatii remain on the battlefield on the Roman side “separated in space just as the battle was fought,” but there is also a tomb for Horatia, similarly placed at the spot where she fell, the Porta Capena, at the entrance to the city (1.26.14).

But what can such a careful articulation of opposite viewpoints tell us about the functioning of Livy’s text? Dumézil, who also argues that the killing of Horatia forms a necessary complement to the duel, finds analogues for such structural ambivalence about the warrior’s role in an array of myths from other Indo-European cultures. The god Indra, for example, in Indian myth establishes cosmic order by slaying the demon Vṛtra and a three-headed monster. However, Vṛtra and the monster are also Brahmans, and thus their persons are inviolate and Indra must be punished for Brahmanicide. In a similar way, Horatius becomes at once the savior of the state and a murderer.^[71] Dumézil was interested in the myth itself and necessarily treats Livy’s narrative only as a means to its recovery. Solodow, who argues that the ambiguous treatment of the episode is unique to Livy and represents his individual development of the historical tradition, dismisses Dumézil’s analysis precisely for failing to take into account Livy’s originality. Here I want to suggest that the antitheses in Livy’s account of Horatius, whatever they may tell us about the historian’s personal views, correspond to a larger structure of oppositions in Roman religious institutions, one that can elucidate not the distant origins of the Horatius legend but the contemporary significance of Livy’s text.

Livy’s narrative itself offers a model for understanding its complexities. Between the speech of Mettius Fufetius and the beginning of the duel, there is a detailed description of the sacrifice that confirms the treaty between Romans and Albans (1.24.3–9). Far from being a mere antiquarian diversion, the account of the Fetial sacrifice sketches a set of relationships among its various participants that anticipates the tensions that will arise later in the episode.^[72] Like the mythical narratives studied by Dumézil, sacrifice possesses an inherently contradictory structure, in the sense that it suspends its audience between an identification with the one who performs the sacrifice and with his victim. The establishment of a sacrificial paradigm behind the narrative also anchors Livy’s text to a central socio-religious institution that became a particular focus of interest in the Augustan period precisely because of its intrinsic, practical connections to the issues of unification and alienation.

Livy’s description of the treaty ritual by which the Albans and Romans bind themselves to honor the outcome of the duel is the fullest that survives for this procedure.^[73] The ceremony begins with an elaborate dialogue in which the Fetial priest first asks the king for authority to strike the treaty. When the king grants it, the Fetial then demands the sagmina, a sacred piece of sod kept on the Capitoline. After another affirmative response, the priest asks to be made a messenger of the Roman people. The king approves, and the priest touches the head and hair of a certain Sp. Fusius with the sacred sod, making him pater patratus, the man who will actually perform the sacrifice and proclaim the treaty. The pater patratus recites the terms and then “strikes” the treaty by sacrificing a pig with a prayer to Jupiter to strike the Roman people, should they ever violate their promise, just as he strikes the pig.^[74]

The first parts of the ceremony emphasize the hierarchical transference of authority from the king to his individual executor. The language of request and command (repeated archaic imperatives, posco, iubeo) punctuates the king’s empowerment of the pater patratus. Correspondingly, the gesture of touching the pater patratus with the sagmina literally places him in contact with a piece of living earth that has been ritually transferred from the highest, most sacred, and militarily most powerful point in the city.^[75] At the same time that these rituals set the bearers of power apart from the other members of the community, they also enable them to act as representatives of the entire Roman people. The king himself first demonstrates his ability to speak on behalf of the populus Romanus in his prayer that his action be accomplished “without fraud on my part or on that of the Roman people” (quod sine fraude mea populique Romani Quiritium fiat [1.24.5]). This is spoken in response to the Fetial’s own request that he himself be made a “royal messenger of the Roman people” (regius nuntius populi Romani) and his companions “vessels” (vasa [1.24.5]). The pater patratus in turn speaks on behalf of the entire people in agreeing to the treaty. The sacrifice of the pig represents the culmination of the unification of the power of the Roman people in the pater patratus; not only is he able to speak for the entire people, he enables them to strike with one hand.

But the violence effected by its representative is simultaneously reflected back on the community. If the Romans should ever violate the treaty, the striking of the pig, accomplished through their own surrogate, will become the fate of the people as a whole. Hence for the treaty to be effective, it is necessary for the Roman audience to identify not only with their representative, the pater patratus, but also with the victim; they must be able to visualize his death as their own. Both priest and victim are therefore marked out as surrogates for the community of spectators.

This doubling of the surrogates, made explicit in a treaty sacrifice where the spectators are compelled to see the victim’s death as their own, is by no means anomalous. Other sacrificial practices also establish a ritual link between sacrificer and victim that sets them apart from the other participants. Both were differentiated by their costume and adornments, the priest with his veiled head, and religious insignia, the victim adorned with fillets and garlands. In particular, the red color frequently worn by priests provided a visual link with the blood of the victim.^[76] Moreover, both priest and victim were required to possess certain attributes of the god to whom the sacrifice was offered.^[77] A final point of resemblance, which has particular relevance for Livy’s text, is the purity required of both priest and victims.^[78] The victim was not only to be free from all blemishes but never to have drawn the plow; priests had to wash their hands ritually and could not participate in sacrifices if there had been a death in the family.

A glance back from the account of the treaty ritual to the larger narrative of the duel in which it is embedded reveals similarities in both function and procedure that suggest that the Fetial sacrifice can be taken as the complement or even the template for the workings of the duel. Not only is the treaty ritual instrumental in fulfilling Mettius Fufetius’s goal of containing violence by compelling the Romans to abide by the outcome of the battle of surrogates, but the sacrifice itself operates by channeling violence, which is conceptually projected against the whole people, onto just one victim. “Strike the Roman people,” the pater patratus asks Jupiter, “just as I strike this pig.” Correspondingly, as the duel itself approaches its decisive moment, images of sacrifice supplant those of combat. If Livy’s goal had been simply to provide a gripping military narrative, we might have predicted that the battle with the last Alban would be the most closely fought of all. But Livy defuses any such expectations by making the outcome a fait accompli; indeed, he removes all possibility of viewing the final encounter as a military event with the explicit statement that it was “not a battle.”^[79] Rather than submerging Curiatius’s death in the suspense of a duel, with the audience wondering which of the two will prevail, Livy isolates and focuses attention on the act of killing itself. Moreover, the gesture of preceding the final blow with a speech recalls the action of the pater patratus, who makes his prayer at the precise moment before he slays the victim.^[80] And when Horatius speaks of “giving” (dedi, dabo) the Albans either to the souls of his brothers or for the victory of the Romans, he is using the language of a sacrificial offering.

The Horatii, appointed to use force against the enemy on behalf of the state or conversely to be killed as substitutes for the entire army, bring together in their own persons the roles of pater patratus and sacrificial victim. Like that of the pater patratus, their designation as champions takes place through the intervention of the king.^[81] But the triplets also possess the most crucial characteristic of the sacrificial victim; they consent to meet death of their own free will.^[82] Finally, this pattern of resemblances also offers a new significance for Livy’s emphasis on the whole (integer [1.25.7]) and untouched (intactus [1.25.11]) condition of the last Horatius.^[83] This freedom from blemish approximates both the ritual purity of the presiding priest at a sacrifice and the perfection of the sacrificial victim himself, whose health and suitability are tested before the ceremony begins.^[84]

The progress of the narrative from Fetial ritual, to duel, to murder, and finally to punishment, builds upon the essential incompleteness and instability of any sacrificial act. Each act of violence both unites and divides the communities, both controls and perpetuates violence. Thus we see the duel from the perspective of Romans and Albans, and even the unity of the Roman “point of view” breaks down when Horatia refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of Curiatius as a victim. The ambiguity is only reduplicated when the conqueror of the Albans now slays a victim who is indisputably a member of the community, thereby superimposing an improper “sacrifice” upon the image of his victory. This imbalance can only be corrected by yet another use of controlled violence, which inevitably reproduces the same tensions. The king, to whom Horatius is brought for trial (1.26.5), correspondingly acts in a way that both emphasizes scrupulous adherence to established procedures and defers responsibility for the death of Horatius. In accordance with an ancient law, which Livy quotes, duumviri are appointed to pass judgment on Horatius.^[85] Thus, just as in the treaty sacrifice that preceded the duel, the king’s role in the proceedings is only to empower agents, not to act himself. The reason Livy gives for the appointment of duumvirs is itself instructive; Tullus wishes to avoid being the source (auctor) of a judgment that will be displeasing to the crowd—in other words, to avoid being perceived as the killer of someone with whom the crowd identifies.

After having appeared as the champion who strikes down the Curiatii on behalf of the Roman people, and then as an “impure sacrificer,” Horatius by the sentence of the duumvirs is made a victim.^[86] An appeal to the people (provocatio) and a moving entreaty by his father avert his actual death. However, this entreaty gains its effect by essentially enacting the spectacle of Horatius’s execution. After legitimizing the death of Horatia, and pointing to the spoils won by his son as victorious surrogate for the patria, the elder Horatius then constructs a scene of execution, in which his son can only be an object of sympathy. “Go lictor bind the hands that, once armed, bore imperium for the Roman people. Go veil the head of the liberator of this city” (1.26.11). This attention to the various parts of Horatius’s body, following the formula of the sentence of execution, constitutes a kind of dismemberment of the individual whose “integrity” was the key to the nation’s triumph. Correspondingly, Horatius also defines the audience who watch the dismemberment of the victim by calling it “a spectacle too hideous for even Alban eyes to bear.” Thus again the spectacle of the execution is imagined as an inversion of the triumphant duel. Romans watching the execution of Horatius would be adopting the perspective of Albans.

In his defense, Horatius’s father also restores the balance between state and family by reconstructing the patriotic argument that the state holds the family and individual in a protective embrace. He complements the display of his son’s victory spoils by putting his arms around him, and by making the famous appeal to sympathy for a father’s love so well known in later judicial practice.^[87] The people’s acceptance of the elder Horatius’s plea for the larger entity to protect the smaller therefore reverses the political implications of the killing of Horatia. Here the state acts to preserve the individual on behalf of the family; there the individual had been killed on behalf of the state precisely for upholding the perspective of family. At the same time that the elder Horatius’s speech thus reconciles family and national perspectives, he simultaneously reestablishes the autonomy of the family within the state and the father’s authority within the family, which had also been overturned by his son’s unjustified killing of his sister, by granting that act a retroactive legitimacy. Horatius begins by claiming that he judges (iudicare) that his daughter was killed justly (iure); if this were not so, he would have exercised his prerogative as father (patrio iure) by punishing his son (1.26.9).

But even the sparing of Horatius offers no resolution; a further human death is avoided but the caedes manifesta of Horatia still requires expiation. Father and son are ordered to perform sacrifices to expiate the crime, and these sacrifices have been undertaken from then on by the Horatian gens. Each “sacrificial” act described in the text has been subject to infinite revision, as the perspective oscillates constantly between slayer and victim, and has consequently provoked another act of violence as a response. The institution of an expiatory ritual undertaken by the Horatii both perpetuates and regulates this sacrificial chain by providing for an infinite series of repetitions that bridges the gap between the past and the present, as well as between the historical text and the world of actual ritual practice. Moreover, these ritual enactments are explicitly and recognizably sacrifices in a way that, other than the Fetial treaty, the historical events are not. In the latter case, actual human deaths were related in a manner that recapitulated and emphasized the dynamics of sacrifice; in the former, the level of violence is reduced by the substitution of animal victims for humans. Thus the narrative moves from the ritual of the Fetial sacrifice, which provides the interpretative model for the scenes that follow, to real and unmediated violence, and finally back again to the ritual in which these historical events can be continually reenacted.

The simultaneous conversion of ritual into history and of history into ritual invites us to reevaluate the moral and social function of Livy’s narrative. Any attempt to distinguish between “good” and “bad” violence or to distill the moral of moderation from the episode’s complexity misses the point that Horatius’s killing of his sister is less a counterweight to his victory than a revision or repetition of it, which emerges as an inseparable aspect of the same act.^[88] The alternate perspectives articulated in the episode are not just difficult to resolve but intrinsically unresolvable. Nor does the audience in the text really attempt to resolve them; rather their gaze shifts between the two equally compelling but irreconcilable images of Horatius’s victory and his crime. But the text’s allusions to sacrificial ritual, by moving us beyond the purely literary plane, offer a framework for interpreting these oppositions that does not allow them to congeal into mere ambiguity. As discussed further in the next section, such tensions are an intrinsic part of the structure and syntax of sacrificial ritual. And far from preventing sacrifice from fulfilling its social function, the juxtaposition of irreconcilable perspectives lies at the heart of its unifying power. Livy’s technique of articulating these oppositions through the perspectives of actual spectators thus approximates for his audience the effect of being present at the sacrificial procedures prescribed by the people, which at once absolve Horatius from guilt and perpetuate the memory of his crime.^[89]

These sacrifices still took place into the Augustan era. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in concluding his narrative of Horatius, tells us that the Romans regarded the place where the expiation took place as sacred, and that sacrifices were still performed there (Ant. Rom. 3.22.8). What is more, the ritual complex surrounding the tigillum sororium addresses the same range of social issues as Livy’s narrative of the Horatii: the distinctions between insider and outsider, gender divisions, and the tensions involved in the integration of the individual into the citizen body. For, although the Horatian aition of the ritual necessarily portrays its function as primarily expiatory, the monument of the tigillum sororium also possessed associations with rites of passage.^[90] The beam was surrounded on one side by the altar of Juno Sororia, whose cult title suggests a link with a girl’s entry into adulthood, and on the other by the altar of Janus Curiatius. Janus’s double aspect made him particularly a god of endings and beginnings, and the cult of Janus Curiatius has been connected with a boy’s admission into a curia, one of the political subdivisions of the citizen body.^[91] Not only does passing under the beam literally constitute an entry into the city, but it also symbolizes the moment when an individual ceases to exist solely as a member of the family and becomes a member of the state. Thus, like the lustratio with which we began, this ritual too unites the consolidation of membership in a community with the establishment of a spatial boundary.^[92]