Preface and Acknowledgments

In his own preface Livy professed not to care whether his personal fame remained “in darkness” provided that his work helped preserve the “memory of the deeds of the world’s preeminent nation.” Both aspects of his statement have proven prophetic in ways that not even the historian could have imagined. Because of the accidents of transmission, our knowledge of Roman history owes more to Livy than to any other single author. Although only a fraction of his work remains, 35 out of an original 142 books, his narrative is to the Early and Middle Roman Republic what Herodotus and Thucydides combined are to Fifth-Century Greece. Yet the quantity of irreplaceable historical data Livy provides has inevitably determined how his work has been read. The information he gives us is so valuable, and so tantalizing, that it has tended to overshadow, not only Livy’s reputation as a historian, but also the very narrative through which it reaches us. We want to know where he gets his material, whether it is accurate, whether the image he creates of the Roman past matches the “facts.” As often as not, Livy’s own work has seemed to impede rather than facilitate a process of investigation that necessarily strives to move beyond it, to use the text as a means of recovering lost sources, and ultimately to gain access to the historical reality that all these texts describe. This book forms part of a now growing tradition of scholarship that aims to redress the balance by illuminating, if not Livy himself, then what he calls the “monument” he has produced.

For this reason, I start from a number of premises that may frustrate those whose interest in Livy is primarily as a “source.” Above all, I resist imposing a dichotomy between the historical content of Livy’s work and its literary form, treating the former as “raw material” and restricting the scope of literary investigation to the “shape” Livy gives what the preexisting historical tradition provided him with. I do this not because I deny that Livy’s choices as a writer were in many ways conditioned by his source material and by the expectation that what a historian reports is in some senses true—although in what senses and within what limits is an issue that Livy, like any historian, will have to negotiate with his reader. Rather, given my goal of developing and exploring the significance of scenes and episodes in the context of Livy’s narrative, questions of sources and of the historian’s originality become less relevant than tracing connections that give his choices meaning within this larger whole. For my purposes, even if the “content” of Livy’s narrative of an episode, even some of the language itself, derives from an earlier source, the task of interpreting its significance in Livy’s text still remains.

If this effort to view Livy’s text synchronically, rather than as but one stage in the development of the story of Rome’s past, risks isolating his narrative from its historical context, my focus on the themes of vision and spectacle will locate the historian’s work squarely within the political and cultural discourses of his own place and time. An interest in producing a vivid visual impression of the climactic moments of his narrative has always figured among the most striking features of Livy’s style. But the use of visual display as a medium of persuasion and civic communication, both by the figures Livy describes and by the artists and political leaders of Augustan Rome, opens up broader possibilities for interpreting what might otherwise be regarded as a purely stylistic choice. By applying techniques and theories developed to analyze the social functions of political spectacle to the close reading of specific episodes, I offer here a new way of understanding the relationship between Livy’s “History” as a literary work and the historical processes it describes. This in turn leads to a new awareness of how his representation of Rome’s past could have acted upon the Augustan present. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that Livy’s narrative claimed a much more dynamic role in shaping the civic and political life of his era than other models of literary reception might allow.

My selection of material requires one final caveat. Even the surviving portions of Livy’s work are vast and were the product, quite possibly, of decades of labor. During this time, as David Levene has recently demonstrated, the historian’s methods and indeed his conception of his task would necessarily have evolved. To treat all the visual elements even in a very restricted portion of Livy’s narrative in the detail my project requires would exceed the scope of this book. Nor have I attempted to trace a chronological progression in Livy’s use of such narrative devices. Rather, I have concentrated my analysis on a few episodes, mostly but not exclusively from the early books, that highlight processes of visual communication and their political impact. Among these scenes, however, are three whose placement in Livy’s text, at the conclusion of his first book, first pentad, and first decade, marks them out as especially important: the rape of Lucretia and the expulsion of the Tarquins, Camillus’s salvation of Rome after the Gallic invasion, and the defeat of the Samnites at the battle of Aquilonia. The significance and intrinsic interest of the passages I focus on will thus, I hope, compensate for the absence of a more comprehensive treatment.

The completion of what, measured in years if not in pages, has been a long project gives me at last the pleasure of thanking the many friends and scholars who have helped me along the way. Foremost among them are the three supervisors of the dissertation from which this book eventually grew, Erich Gruen, Tom Habinek, and Tom Rosenmeyer. Long after that dissertation was safely entombed in the archives of the University of California at Berkeley, their advice and encouragement have guided my labors, even as the examples of their own work reminded me how far I had to go. During the process of writing the book itself, drafts and the disiecta membra of drafts were generously read by T. J. Luce, Richard Saller, Chris Kraus, and Christian Wolff. Ann Vasaly and the anonymous reader for the University of California Press reviewed a preliminary version of this book with tremendous care and thoughtfulness, and their counsel has profoundly influenced its final form. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jim Zetzel, who, in the middle of a busy semester, took the time to read the whole manuscript and offer decisive, yet tactful, recommendations for its improvement. It goes without saying that none of these scholars will approve everything that may meet their eyes in the following pages, but I hope that each will recognize ways in which his or her contributions have made this a better book than it would otherwise have been.

A fellowship from the American Academy at Rome provided the time and resources to develop the first stirrings of the ideas that led to this work. The process of converting these ideas into a dissertation was made much easier by a Lulu Blumberg Fellowship from the Classics Department at Berkeley. Mary Lamprech, Cindy Fulton, Peter Dreyer, and the University of California Press have helped me greatly in negotiating the final phases of converting manuscript to book.

Without the encouragement and tolerance of my wife, Deborah Steiner, this book would possibly never have been written; without her advice and editing, I am certain, it would never be read. The dedication expresses but a fraction of what I owe her.