Cultural Memory in Republican and Augustan Rome 1009327755, 9781009327756

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CULTURAL MEMORY IN RE PUBLICAN A N D AU GU S T A N RO M E

Cultural memory is a framework which elucidates the relationship between the past and the present: essentially, why, how, and with what results certain pieces of information are remembered. This volume brings together distinguished classicists from a variety of sub-disciplines to explore cultural memory in the Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus. It provides an excellent and accessible starting point for readers who are new to the intersection between cultural memory theory and ancient Rome, whilst also appealing to the seasoned scholar. The chapters delve deep into memory theory, going beyond the canonical texts of Jan Assmann and Pierre Nora and pushing their terminology towards Basu’s dispositifs, Roller’s intersignifications, Langlands’ sites of exemplarity, and Erll’s horizons. This innovative framework enables a fresh analysis of both fragmentary texts and archaeological phenomena not discussed elsewhere. MARTIN T. DINTER is Reader in Latin Literature and Language at King’s College London. He is the author of Anatomizing Civil War: Studies in Lucan’s Epic Technique (2012) and co-editor of A Companion to the Neronian Age (2013), three volumes entitled Reading Roman Declamation with focus on Quintilian (2016), Calpurnius Flaccus (2018) and Seneca the Elder (2020) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy (Cambridge, 2019). CHARLES GUÉRIN is Professor of Latin Literature at Sorbonne Université, Paris. He has published monographs on the rhetorical notion of persona (2009, 2011) and on witness testimony in the Roman courts of the first century BC (La Voix de la verité, 2015), and several volumes on ancient rhetoric, oratory, declamation, and literature. He serves on the executive committee of L’Année Philologique.

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CULTURAL MEMORY IN REPUBLICAN AND AUGUSTAN ROME edited by MARTIN T. DINTER King’s College London

CHARLES GUÉRIN Sorbonne Université

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009327756 doi: 10.1017/9781009327749 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress isbn 978-1-009-32775-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1

page viii ix xvi

Introduction: What is Cultural Memory?

1

Martin T. Dinter

part i writing cultural memory

21

2 War and Cultural Memory at the Beginnings of Latin Literature

23

Thomas Biggs

3 Creating Roman Memories of Plautus

42

Anthony Corbeill

4 Comedy and Its Pasts

61

Martin T. Dinter

5 Semper Manebit: Poetry and Cultural Memory Theory in Cicero’s De Legibus

80

Joshua Hartman

6 Varro and the Re-foundation of Roman Cultural Memory Through Genealogy and Humanitas

97

Irene Leonardis

7 Cultural Memory, from Monument to Poem: The Case of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus in the Augustan Poets

115

Bénédicte Delignon

8 Monumenta and the Fallibility of Memory in the Odes Samuel Beckelhymer

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Contents

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9 Constructing Cultural Memory in Ovid’s Fasti: The Case of Servius Tullius and Fortuna Darja Šterbenc Erker

151

part ii politicising cultural memory

167

10 Sulla’s Dictatorship Rei Publicae Constituendae and Roman Republican Cultural Memory

169

Alexandra Eckert

11 Remembering Differently: The Exemplarity of Populares as a Site of Ideological Contest in Late Republican Oratory

183

Evan Jewell

12 Cultural Memory and Political Change in the Public Speech of the Late Roman Republic

203

Catherine Steel

13 Remembering M. Brutus: From Mixed and Hostile Perspectives 218 Kathryn Tempest

14 The Making of an Exemplum: Cato’s Road to Uticensis in Roman Cultural Memory

239

Mark Thorne

part iii building cultural memory

259

15 Sites of Exemplarity and the Challenge of Accessing the Cultural Memory of the Republic

261

Rebecca Langlands

16 The Festival of the Lupercalia as a Vehicle of Cultural Memory in the Roman Republic

281

Krešimir Vuković

17 Inscriptions on the Capitoline: Epigraphy and Cultural Memory in Livy

294

Morgan E. Palmer

18 Cultural Memory and the Role of the Architect in Vitruvius’ De Architectura Edwin Shaw

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part iv locating cultural memory

331

19 Exchanging Memories: Coins, Conquest, and Resistance in Roman Iberia

333

Alyson M. Roy

20 Cicero and Clodius Together: The Porta Romana Inscriptions of Roman Ostia As Cultural Memory

355

Christer Bruun

21 Augustan Cultural Memories in Roman Athens

375

Muriel Moser

22 Different Pasts: Using and Constructing Memory in Augustan Carthage and Corinth

394

Günther Schörner

Bibliography Index Locorum Index

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413 466 472

Figures

6.1 A possible scheme for the Varronian ‘descent’ of language page 111 and history 19.1 A silver victoriatus (RRC 96/1) struck in 211 BC at the Roman 334 mint in Iberia. 19.2 A silver denarius (RRC 234/1), struck in 137 BC by the 343 moneyer Tiberius Veturius. 19.3 A map of the major pre-Roman and Roman towns of the 346 Iberian Peninsula, drawn by Ricardo Vela Rabago. 19.4 A bronze coin (RPC I, 51.) minted at Ebora (Evora, Portugal) 352 in the Augustan period. 20.1 Reconstruction of the Porta Romana. 356 20.2 The two inscriptions decorating the Porta Romana. 357 20.3 Dante Vaglieri’s reconstruction of the text of the Porta 358 Romana dating to c. 1910. 20.4 The reconstruction of the two inscriptions belonging to the 359 Porta Romana by Lothar Wickert in the Supplement volume of CIL XIV at no. 4707 (1934). 21.1 Reconstruction of the statue monument of L. Cassius 377 Longinus (drawing by Julia Ochmann). 21.2 Facsimile of the pedestal of a statue of Hegelochos, re-used as 378 a public honorary statue for L. Cassius Longinus. 22.1 Carthage: the Punic (===) and Roman (—) street system 398 overlaid. The thick lines (—) are contour lines. 22.2 Carthage: Roman Byrsa (first phase). 400 22.3 Corinth: Sketch plan of the forum area c. 30 BC. 403 22.4 Corinth: The Forum area in later Augustan/Iulio-Claudian 405 times.

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Contributors

samuel beckelhymer is Lecturer at the University of California–Los Angeles. His research focuses on the social history of language and writing in the ancient world broadly, and more narrowly on the traditions of language study, philology, grammar and linguistic thought in both technical and literary writing, especially the ways in which Latin authors adopted and adapted Greek modes of understanding, discussing and describing language. His current monograph project is an expansion of his doctoral thesis and considers the persistent expression of philological and linguistic interests in the poetry of the Republic and Early Empire and its intersections with the tradition of the Roman ars grammatica. thomas biggs is Lecturer in Latin at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on Roman literature and culture. He is particularly interested in Latin epic and historiography, fragmentary texts, literary theory and the Classics, the cultures of the Middle Republic, and Rome’s complex relationship with Carthage. He is the author of Poetics of the First Punic War (University of Michigan Press, 2020) and co-editor of The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Among numerous other projects, he is currently preparing a monograph on Plautus’ Poenulus, a study of Cybele and Attis in Roman poetry, and a commentary on Book 6 of Silius Italicus’ Punica. christer bruun is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto. After acquiring his PhD from the University of Helsinki and spending a postdoctoral year at Wolfson College, Oxford, he arrived in Toronto in 1994. Working broadly on Roman social and cultural history, he has a special interest in epigraphic studies. A corresponding member of the Societas Scientiarum Fennica and the DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut), he has spent time at the University of Cologne as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as a member; further stints of ix

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teaching and research were spent at the University of Odense and Durham University; from 1997 to 2000 he was the Director of the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae in Rome. Bruun is the author of some 130 scholarly articles and several books; next, he will publish a monograph on civic identities at Roman Ostia with Oxford University Press. anthony corbeill, Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, is author of Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 1996), Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press, 2004) and Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press, 2015). His philological and stylistic commentary on Cicero’s De haruspicum responsis will appear in 2023 with Oxford University Press. be´ ne´ dicte delignon is Professor of Latin language and literature at Paris Nanterre University and a member of the research team ArScAnTHEMAM (Textes, Histoire et Monuments, de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge, UMR 7041). A specialist in the Augustan period, she is particularly interested in the interactions of poetry with its historical, political and cultural contexts. She has co-edited several collective works, including Le poète irrévérencieux, modèles hellénistiques et réalités romaines (B. Delignon and Y. Roman (eds.), De Boccard, 2009); Le poète lyrique dans la cité antique: les Odes d’Horace au miroir de la poésie grecque archaïque (B. Delignon, N. Le Meur and O. Thévenaz (eds.), De Boccard, 2016). She is also the author of two monographs on Horace: Les Satires d’Horace et la comédie gréco-latine: une poétique de l’ambiguïté (Peeters, 2006) and La morale de l’amour dans les Odes d’Horace: poésie, philosophie et politique (S.U.P., 2019) which has won the FrançoisMillepierres award of the Académie française. martin t. dinter, PhD (Cambridge), is Reader in Latin Literature and Language at King’s College London. He is author of Anatomizing Civil War: Studies in Lucan’s Epic Technique (University of Michgan Press, 2012), co-editor of A Companion to the Neronian Age (Wiley, 2013), three volumes entitled Reading Roman Declamation with focus on Quintilian (De Gruyter, 2016), Calpurnius Flaccus (De Gruyter, 2018) and Seneca the Elder (Oxford University Press, 2020) and a special issue of the Trends in Classics Journal (11.1) on intermediality (2019), as well as editor of the Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is currently preparing a monograph on Cato the Elder, a volume on Roman cultural

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memory under the Empire as well as an annotated online edition with translation of José Rodrigues de Melo’s De rusticis Brasiliae rebus. alexandra eckert is currently pursuing a research project on the tension between democracy and oligarchy in fifth-century Athens at the University of Göttingen. Her second area of interest is the late Roman Republic, specifically the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix. In her monograph Lucius Cornelius Sulla in der antiken Erinnerung (de Gruyter, 2016), she employs the concepts of cultural memory and cultural trauma to investigate the far-reaching impact of Sulla’s deeds on the late Roman Republic and the Imperial Period. She is the editor of Sulla: Politics and Reception (de Gruyter, 2019, co-editor Alexander Thein). Alexandra Eckert received her PhD in ancient history from the University of Halle-Wittenberg. She was a lecturer at the University of Oldenburg and a visiting research fellow at both King’s College London (spring 2018) and University College Dublin (2018/19). She spent the academic year 2019/20 as a junior fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald. darja sˇ terbenc erker is Visiting Professor of Roman Literature at the University of Ljubljana and is also currently a DFG-funded research fellow with a project on Suetonius at the Humboldt University Berlin. She has published numerous articles on ancient Roman religion and literature and on women and gender in ancient Rome. Moreover, she is author of a monograph on the roles of Roman women in ‘Greek’ rituals, Religiöse Rollen römischer Frauen in “griechischen” Ritualen (Steiner, 2013), sole editor of a volume on women and gender in ancient literature, Gender Studies in den Altertumswissenschaften: Frauenbild im Wandel (WVT, 2015) and co-editor (with G. Schörner) of a volume on communicating religion, Medien religiöser Kommunikation (Steiner, 2008). Her most recent monograph on Ambiguity and Religion in Ovid’s Fasti has been published as Mnemosyne supplement by Brill in 2022. charles gue´ rin is Professor of Latin Literature at Sorbonne University. He is the author of two volumes on ancient rhetoric: Persona. L’élaboration d’une notion rhétorique au 1er siècle av. J.-C.: Antécédents grecs et première rhétorique latine (Vrin, 2009) and Persona. L’élaboration d’une notion rhétorique au 1 er siècle av. J.-C.: Théorisation cicéronienne de la persona oratoire (Vrin, 2011). In 2015, he published a monograph on witnesses and testimony in Republican Rome, La Voix de la vérité: Témoin et témoignage dans les tribunaux romains du premier siècle avant J.-C. (Les Belles Lettres, 2015), which received the Georges Perrot prize,

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awarded by the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He has recently co-edited Reading Roman Declamation: Seneca the Elder (Oxford University Press, 2020). joshua hartman is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College. He received his PhD in 2016 from the University of Washington and has held positions at the University of Waterloo and Kalamazoo College. His research focuses on the relationship between literature and memory, especially during late antiquity. He is currently working on the monographic adaptation of his dissertation, Poetry and Cultural Memory in Late Antiquity. He has published articles on late antique literature, Roman cultural memory and classical reception in Latin America. evan jewell is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University– Camden. He has previously published on Ciceronian oratory and exemplarity, Roman colonisation and displacement, the emperor Nero and concepts of Roman youth. He is currently at work on his monograph, Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire (149 BCE–68 CE). He is coeditor with Elena Isayev of Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present (Special Issue, Humanities). rebecca langlands is Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (edited with Kate Fisher, Oxford University Press 2015), Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (2018) and Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235: Cross-Cultural Interactions (edited with Alice König and James Uden, Cambridge University Press, 2020). She is also founder and director of the award-winning Sex & History project, which develops innovative sex education resources based on historical materials. irene leonardis is Humboldt Junior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Potsdam. After studying at Pavia with Elisa Romano, in 2016 she earned her PhD from the University of Roma Tre and the Université Paris VIII with an Italo-French cotutelle under the direction of Mario De Nonno and Claudia Moatti. Her main interests are intellectual life, cultural history and politics in late Republican Rome as well as the study of Latin lexicography and literature in fragments. She has published various articles as well as a monograph entitled Varrone, unus scilicet antiquorum hominum: senso del passato e pratica antiquaria (Edipuglia, 2019), which studies the antiquarian Varro as key figure for understanding Roman cultural memory and anthropology. Her current

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research focuses on the role of language and metaphors for the construction of a discourse of the crisis at the end of the Roman Republic as well as its political and cultural implications. muriel moser is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at GoetheUniversity Frankfurt. Her research focuses on the political and cultural history of the Graeco-Roman world from 100 BC to AD 400. She is currently working on a monograph on memory and politics in the city of Athens in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial periods. Her publications include Emperor and Senators in the Reign of Constantius II: Maintaining Imperial Rule Between Rome and Constantinople in the Fourth Century AD (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a themed volume of Antiquité Tardive called Imperial Presence in Late Antique Rome (2nd–7th Centuries AD) (coedited with M. McEvoy, Brepols, 2017) as well as Strategies of Remembering in Greece under Rome (100 BC–100 AD) (co-edited with T. M. Dijkstra, I. N. I Kuin and D. Weidgenannt, Sidestone Press 2017). morgan e. palmer is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a member of the programme faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on Roman history and religion, Latin literature and epigraphy, and women in antiquity. Her article ‘Inscriptional Intermediality in Livy’ (Trends in Classics (11.1) 2019) applies intermedial theory to analyse Livy’s references to historic epigraphic monuments. She has also published ‘A Blight on the Pax Augusta: The Robigalia in Ovid‘s Fasti’ (Classical World (111.4) 2018) which draws upon literary and epigraphic evidence to examine Ovid’s feminine characterisation of the Roman agricultural deity Robigo. Palmer has presented several papers on the Vestal Virgins at international conferences, and her most recent publication ‘Time and Eternity: The Vestal Virgins and the Crisis of the Third Century’ (TAPA (150.2) 2020) discusses the heightened significance of the theme of time and eternity during the third-century crisis focusing on the inscriptions honouring Vestal Virgins. alyson roy is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Idaho. Her research focuses on the Roman Republic, particularly visual culture. Her forthcoming book with the University of Texas Press analyses the development, circulation and consumption of conquest imagery in Roman provinces. Her research reflects on how the Romans expressed and reified their cultural values to both their peers and those they conquered in material form, and how local peoples

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confronted, adapted and consumed Roman visual culture in the late Republic and early Empire. Her other works include analysis of the diffusion of visual stereotypes about Gallic peoples and how this imagery became central to Roman narratives of conquest and subjugation. gu¨ nther scho¨ rner studied classical archaeology, ancient history, prehistory, early Christian archaeology and art history at the University of Erlangen. From 1993 till 2010 he worked at the University of Jena in the Department of Classics. From 2010 until 2011 he was Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University Erlangen–Nürnberg, and since 2011 he has held the chair of Classical Archaeology (with focus on Roman Archaeology) at the University of Vienna. His research is focused on religious studies, especially rituals and their visualisation in the Roman Empire, studies on the material culture of the rural populations of the Roman Empire and studies on cultural change following the incorporation in the Roman Empire more generally. He is the author and editor of more than ten monographs and has published numerous articles. He has carried out fieldwork in Austria, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Turkey. edwin shaw is Lecturer in Roman History and Ancient Languages at the University of Bristol, where he has taught since receiving his PhD from University College London in 2015. He is the author of Sallust and the Fall of the Republic: Historiography and Intellectual Life at Rome (Brill, 2022), as well as articles on Sallust and other subjects. His research interests are in Roman history and Latin prose literature, particularly historiography and adjacent genres; his current project explores the theme of empire in fragmentary Republican historiography. catherine steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches Roman history and Latin literature. Her research deals with the political history of the Roman Republic, particularly its last decades, and the writings and career of Cicero. She is the author of The End of the Roman Republic, 146–44 BC: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and edited the Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She held a European Research Council Starting Grant (2012–17) ‘The Fragments of Republican Roman Oratory’ and is currently developing a new project on the Roman Republican Senate.

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kathryn tempest is Reader in Roman History and Latin Literature at the University of Roehampton. Her research concentrates on the literature, history and political life of the late Roman Republic, with particular interests in oratory and rhetoric, all aspects of Cicero and ancient letters. She is the author of Cicero: Politics and Persuasion in Ancient Rome (Bloomsbury, 2011), Hellenistic Oratory: Continuity and Change (Oxford University Press, 2013), which she co-edited with Christos Kremmydas, and Brutus: The Noble Conspirator (Yale University Press, 2017). She has also published articles on, among other things, Cicero’s speeches, Pliny’s letters and the Greek letters attributed to Marcus Brutus. mark thorne is a specialist in Lucan and Roman cultural memory, particularly on Cato and the transition from Republic to Principate. He taught on the faculty of Luther College until they eliminated their Classics department during the pandemic, leading him to switch careers to the field of software development; he now works as a cloud engineer for the Boeing Company. He has recently co-edited with Laura Zientek the volume Lucan’s Imperial World: The Bellum Civile in Its Contemporary Contexts (Bloomsbury, 2020). kresˇ imir vukovic´ is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research focuses on Latin literature, Roman religion, environmental history and IndoEuropean studies. After completing a doctoral thesis on the Lupercalia and teaching at the University of Oxford, he held a fellowship at the British School at Rome where he began work on his current project on the river Tiber. He has published a number of articles on Vergil, Ovid and Roman religion as well as the monograph Wolves of Rome: The Lupercalia from Roman and Comparative Perspectives (de Gruyter, 2023).

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Acknowledgements

The chapters in this volume were selected from those originally presented at conferences held at King’s College London in autumn 2016, the Université Paris Est Creteil-Val-de-Marne (UPEC) in summer 2017 and the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in summer 2018. These events have been generously supported by King’s College London, UPEC, USP, CAPES and FAPESP. Special thanks in the name of the co-organisers and all participants are due to Marcos Martinho from USP whose travails and organisational skills made the third event possible – gratiam tibi agimus. The present book is the first in a series of two edited volumes that showcase current research in Memory Studies under the heading ‘Roman Cultural Memory’. A volume on ‘Cultural Memory under the Empire’ will be published in 2024. We would also like to thank the editorial team at Cambridge University Press and Michael Sharp in particular, as well as the Press’s anonymous readers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. Thanks are due to Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko for kindly granting us permission to use Mark Rothko’s Tentacles of Memory (1945–6) as the cover image. Dr Theodora Bruun and Ricardo Vela Rabago have provided invaluable help in providing high-resolution drawings for the contributions by Christer Bruun and Alyson M. Roy. Professor Fausto Zevi and Professor Ralf Krumeich as well as the Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques have kindly granted permission to reprint illustrations. A number of King’s College undergraduate research fellows have assisted with polishing the English of some contributions (Hermione Dowling and Celeste Foo), formatting the volume bibliography (Harriet Layland and Juulia Tumanoff) as well as compiling the index locorum (Jaylen Simons) and rerum (Rithusa Rathiyakumar) – many thanks to this brilliant team. Astrid Khoo has been most helpful throughout the entire editing process – to her we owe the greatest debt of gratitude.

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chapter 1

Introduction: What is Cultural Memory? Martin T. Dinter

Cultural memory theory is a framework which elucidates the relationship between the past and the present. At its most basic level, it explains why, how, and with what results certain pieces of information are remembered. Despite its origins in historiographical scholarship, however, in recent years cultural memory has been applied with increasing frequency to the study of the Classics, most notably in Gowing’s (2005) and Gallia’s (2012) exploration of memory under the Principate as well as the edited volumes by Galinsky (2014), (2016a), and (2016b). As the organisers of the ‘Roman Cultural Memory’ project, we are glad to count ourselves part of this emerging wave. We held three conferences to promote intersections between memory theory and Classics research, the first in November 2016 at King’s College London, the second in June 2017 at the Université Paris-Est Créteil, and the third in March 2018 at the University of São Paulo. With few exceptions, the chapters in the volume, which concern cultural memory in Republican and Augustan Rome, initially took shape as papers during the former two conferences; the fruits of the latter event will be compiled into a separate volume entitled ‘Cultural Memory under the Empire’. While organising these conferences, we were most often asked ‘What is cultural memory?’ After initially directing enquirers to guidebooks on this topic, foremost among them the magisterial Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook edited by Erll and Nünning (2008), we soon found that there is a gulf between reading about cultural memory theory and actively applying its concepts to the Classics. Although we believe that the contributions in this book successfully bridge that gulf, we nevertheless understand the necessity of explaining, in brief and easy-to-follow terms, what cultural memory can mean to Classicists. In what follows, therefore, we will outline the major developments making up this theoretical framework. We had begun by defining cultural memory in terms of remembering ‘certain pieces of information’. Maurice Halbwachs, whose scholarship acts 1

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as a precursor to cultural memory studies, emphasises that these ‘pieces’ are preserved beyond the individual level: entire societies typically share a ‘collective memory’.1 Distinguishing between these two types of memory proves simple: as Paul Ricoeur notes, memories attributed to one person – ‘my memory’ – are classified as ‘personal’ memories, while those belonging to a group – ‘our memory’ – are considered ‘collective’.2 As Halbwachs observes, however, for the scholar of memory demarcating ‘memory’ from ‘history’ is equally crucial: the former allows us to reconstruct the past as a lived experience, while the latter presents the past in a less ‘natural’ and more abstract way.3 History is a list of dates, names, and events, but memory is the experience of these very deeds and personalities, which, when recalled, evokes residual emotions. Halbwachs’ theory of ‘collective memory’ laid the conceptual foundations for ‘cultural memory’ in three key ways. First, by defining shared memory as the product of experience rather than inheritance,4 he shifted discourse on memory out of its previous biological framework and into a cultural one.5 In addition, by asserting that personal experiences coalesce into memories shared by entire communities, he highlighted that ‘every individual memory constitutes itself in communication with others’.6 Finally, by emphasising the role of physical objects in evoking shared memories, he highlighted that recall is typically triggered by the presence of symbolic stimuli. In short, collective memory (a) can be deliberately constructed, (b) is organised within social networks, and (c) perpetuates itself through meaningful artefacts. These tenets (a, b, c) were integrated by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann into the earliest definition of ‘cultural memory’. He perceived cultural memory as a deliberately constructed memory (a), which is not only centred around a myth dictating the identity of the community (b) but also transmitted by ‘specialists’ through relevant artefacts (c).7 When transferring this framework from Ancient Egypt to a Roman context a prominent example of a cultural memory is the idea that Rome was founded by descendants of Aeneas. This narrative was indeed consciously constructed through representations ranging from a 47 BC denarius, which features Julius Caesar’s profile on one side and the image of Aeneas carrying Anchises on the other,8 to Virgil’s epic Aeneid. This memory is moreover fundamental to the martial aspect of Rome’s national identity, for it enabled the Romans to 1 4 5

See Halbwachs (1925). 2 Ricoeur (2000) 152–63. 3 Halbwachs (1950) 118. Other twentieth-century scholars such as Jung (1954) conceived of memory as a heritable trait which could be passed down genetically. Assmann (1988) 9. 6 Assmann (1988) 10. 7 Assmann (1992) 56. 8 BMC/RR.31.

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claim descent from the famed warriors of Troy. Details associated with the main memory were also constantly re-enacted throughout antiquity in rituals performed by ‘specialists’, most notably the Pontifex Maximus, who guarded the Di Penates. These statuettes, moulded to resemble two youths (Dion. Hal. 1.68), were said to have been the very objects transported by Aeneas during his flight from Troy,9 and so their careful conservation served as a constant reminder of Rome’s origin. Assmann also defined cultural memory on the basis of what it is not; its antithesis is ‘communicative memory’, which is informal instead of deliberate, short-term (three or four generations) instead of long-term, and based on personal experiences which everyone in the community transmits instead of selected specialists.10 Indeed, while communicative memory relates to the transmission of memories in everyday life through orality, cultural memory refers to objectified and institutionalised memories that can be stored, transferred, and reincorporated through ‘focused speech’ from one generation to the next. The most straightforward way in which these memories can be passed down is through texts, which when read and interpreted as a canon, form a mémoire volontaire (‘chosen’ or ‘voluntary’ memory).11 By thus emphasising written material, Assmann echoes Konrad Ehlich’s definition of a text as a wiederaufgenommenen Mitteilung (‘message taken up again later’) which gains meaning from its wider context or zerdehnter Situation (‘extended situation’).12 While all chapters in this volume acknowledge this framework, contributions such as those of Steel and Thorne break new ground by articulating the interface and overlap between cultural and communicative memory in Rome. The significance of this overlap is highlighted by Astrid Erll who offers a corrective in viewing ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory – as Jan and Aleida Assmann define these terms – not as a simple dichotomy but rather as two mental frames for thinking about the past, for ‘in a given historical context, the same event can become simultaneously an object of the Cultural Memory and of the communicative memory’.13 She goes on to locate the real distinction not in terms of chronological distance but as a mode of how a community conceives of an event at any given moment as ‘near horizon’ (communicative memory) or ‘distant horizon’ (cultural memory). The former frames the past in a more personal way, whereas 9 10 11

This episode is related at Verg. Aen. 3.147–50. On the Pontifex Maximus and the public Di Penates see Lott (2004) 87. On the differences between cultural and communicative memory see Assmann (2008). Assmann (1992) 4. 12 On these terms see Ehlich (2007) 11. 13 Erll (2011) 31.

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the latter frames the past event more as a shared part of foundational history for a group’s identity.14 Working alongside her spouse Jan Assmann, Aleida Assmann, a scholar of literature, similarly drew attention to the permanent character of texts. The cultural memory accumulating within them forms a ‘memory reservoir’ (Speichergedächtnis).15 Part of this reservoir is drained out into a ‘functional memory’ (Funktionsgedächtnis) and circulated within societies in accordance with present necessities.16 Both of these types of memory make up ‘cultural memory’, which does not only derive from a ‘stored’ symbolic heritage, but also relies on functionalised media which transport cultural knowledge within societies.17 These media are not limited to texts, but include rites, monuments, celebrations, objects, sacred scriptures, and other mnemonic triggers which call up the meanings of the past. Pierre Nora had provided the foundation for these ‘mnemonic triggers’ by defining lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’).18 Nora himself built upon Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln, a concept denoting visual symbols in Western European art which evoke emotional responses.19 However, his sites of memory are more broadly defined: despite their name, they do not only include images or monumental locations but also historical figures, dates, texts, and even actions. In an ancient Roman context, possible sites of memory pertaining to Julius Caesar’s assassination would therefore include Brutus, the Ides of March, Suetonius’ account of the deed, and making sacrifice at the Temple of Divus Iulius. Not unlike Halbwachs’ collective memories, these sites apply on a societal level; Nora originally explained his concept through examples relevant to the French nation, such as the burial of Sartre and the pilgrimage of Lourdes.20 Moreover, just as Halbwachs underscored the difference between ‘memory’ and ‘history’, Nora emphasises: Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long 14 15 18 19 20

Erll (2011) 32. See in particular the discussion of Thorne in this volume who takes up Erll’s framework. Assmann (1995) 177. 16 Assmann (1995) 183–5. 17 Assmann and Assmann (1994) 120. For a full exposition of the lieux de mémoire see Nora (1984–92). Warburg (1932) contains the relevant thesis on Botticelli, first published as a dissertation in 1893. As a result, Nora’s theory on ‘sites of memory’ has been criticised for its nation-centeredness; see Ho Tai (2001).

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dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. (Nora (1989) 8)

Nora’s sites of memory should nevertheless be clearly distinguished from Halbwachs’ collective memory. Sites of memory are primarily of relevance in societies where widespread milieux de mémoire (‘environments of memory’) no longer exist.21 For example, after Rome’s first century BC civil wars the political and social matrix of the ‘Republic’ had been replaced by that of the ‘Principate’ and so few people could personally share in its collective memory. Sites of memory therefore act as ‘artificial placeholders’ for collective memories which no longer exist.22 As Lewis (1988) demonstrates, a Roman citizen who had travelled up the Via Caecilia to Amiternum would have been confronted with inscriptions commemorating Catiline. In these artefacts he would recognise the historical significance of the defunct Republic, but not feel the same emotions which one of Cicero’s audience members, being part of a world in which the collective memory of the Republic was still extant, felt upon listening to his prosecution. This narrative of decline is, however, the key weakness of Nora’s approach, for it presupposes that older ‘authentic’ memories are more desirable than newfound identities. As Nora laments, globalised and democratised societies are particularly dissociated from their pasts: the ‘ancient bond of identity’ has been broken as technological advancements ‘accelerate’.23 Recent scholars tend to criticise Nora’s monolithic view of memory. James Fentress and Chris Wickham suggest that there is no such thing as a ‘standard past’; instead, communities deliberately form ‘oikotypes’ for themselves by deciding which accounts of the past are acceptable and which are not.24 Moreover, Nora’s idea of memory as shared by entire nations is reductionist, since even within nations small-scale subdivisions tend to generate ‘vernacular memories’.25 These perspectives on the past are derived from their creators’ first-hand experience, which often differs from that of society at large; it is not difficult to imagine, for example, that the foreigners expelled by Augustus during the grain shortage would have had a different opinion of their treatment than the Roman majority as embodied by Suetonius, who praises this act as conducive to public welfare 21 22

23

Nora (1989) 7. Erll (2011) 23. Sites of memory are one of the most frequently discussed and queried concepts in this volume. See (amongst others) Dinter, Delignon, Beckelhymer, Hartman, Palmer, Roy, and Schörner. Langlands pushes into new territory by mapping sites of exemplarity. Nora (1989) 8. 24 Fentress and Wickham (1992) 7. 25 Bodnar (1992) 13–14.

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(Suet. Aug. 42.1–3). Similarly, Ann Rigney suggests that in addition to the narrative of ‘plenitude and loss’ in which memories are resurrected from the past and ‘lost’ or ‘hidden’ memories are recovered, we should also employ a social- constructivist model that takes as its starting point the idea that memories of a shared past are collectively constructed and reconstructed in the present.26 In so doing, she rejects the false dichotomy which Nora promotes between ‘real’ and ‘false’ memory, instead embracing the diverse types of memory – cultural, communicative, vernacular – in interaction.27 As these discussions highlight, moreover, scholars are relatively unconcerned with ‘why’ or ‘with what results’ certain types of memory come into being. The general consensus supports Jan Assmann’s assertion that the key function and effect of cultural memory is the concretion of identity.28 Current debate in the field instead centres upon how cultural memory is organised. Building on Assmann’s concept of ‘fixed points’, which refer to specific events around which cultural memory anchors itself, Laura Basu suggests that memory is also stabilised through historical figures, who for this reason are termed dispositifs (‘apparatuses’).29 From an ancient perspective, Cato the Elder constitutes one such dispositif ; he serves as the human embodiment of Roman identity by espousing its values of conservatism, wisdom, and erudition. Astrid Erll shifts the focus away from memory as an intra-societal phenomenon, opting instead to focus on ‘developments of transcultural memory’ which transcend belief systems as well as temporal and spatial imaginaries.30 She indicates that the legend of Homer has become a ‘mnemohistory’ which contributes not only to the identity of a restricted group of ‘Hellenes’, as in antiquity, but also to that of Western civilisation in general.31 In so doing, she responds to the scholarship of Alain Gowing, who defines ‘mnemohistory’ as a subset of memory which relies primarily on textual evidence.32 Debates on the how of cultural memory have yielded further theories on the methods by which it perpetuates itself. Along with Rigney, Erll highlights the role of different media as vehicles for representing past events over and over again, thus transmitting cultural memories across generations. A further vehicle is exemplarity which Roller has described as 26 27 28 29 30

Rigney (2005) 13–14. See Eckert and Steel amongst others on this volume on the blurring of the boundaries between cultural and communicative memory in Roman culture. Assmann (1992) 16. Basu (2012) 1–18. See Vuković’s discussion in this volume and also Hartman. Erll (2018b) 276. 31 Erll (2018b) 277. 32 Gowing (2005) 7.

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a cultural phenomenon encompassing a particular set of social practices, beliefs, values and symbols. Exemplarity manifest in four stages: (1) an initial historical action that is performed before a witnessing audience; (2) an evaluation in which the action is judged an example (either positively or negatively) by the primary audience; (3) commemoration in which the action is recalled as a monument (either verbal or physical) by a later audience; and (4) norm setting, whereby later audiences accept (or reinscribe) the deed as a paradigm of proper or improper behaviour according to the Roman mos maiorum.33 Nevertheless, exemplarity can also be a cultural arena for contesting values, norms, and axiological-deontological discourses in general. Thus the term ‘perpetuation’ which I use above is always itself disputatious and founded in sociopolitical powerplay, and constitutes a diversionary occlusion of agency and domination. An exemplum as such is a commemorative medium that presents the past in the form of stories that are short, morally charged, and memorable, allowing them to be easily retold. A representative example is the story of Mucius Scaevola, who plunged his hand into a fire to demonstrate Roman courage to the Etruscan king Porsenna. This tale, first told in the textual medium by Livy (2.3–13), was converted into two different media during the early modern period. It was depicted in painting form by Peter Paul Rubens and his apprentice Anthony Van Dyck in the early seventeenth century, and also rendered in the medium of music by Francesco Cavalli, who wrote the opera Muzio Scevola in 1665. Remediations of these very remediations then occurred: a group of three composers wrote a different version of Muzio Scevola in the early eighteenth century, and a nineteenthcentury craftsman reproduced Rubens’ and Van Dyck’s painting as an engraving. Cultural memory is therefore perpetuated in the form of ideas recycled and reinterpreted across different media; as Erll and Rigney observe, ‘The concept of remediation is highly pertinent to cultural memory studies. Just as there is no cultural memory prior to mediation there is no mediation without remediation: all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics’ (Erll and Rigney (2009) 4). Langlands applies remediation to ‘sites of exemplarity’, a term she has developed from the phrase ‘sites of memory’. She distinguishes a site of 33

Roller (2018) 4–8. For exempla as elements of cultural memory, see also Hölkeskamp (2004) 169–98. Langlands (2018) 16–46 offers a broader, ethical definition of exempla and highlights the variability of the moral categories on display which allows for situation ethics, the situational sensitivity necessary to judge correctly and act morally (112–27). See also the discussions of exemplarity of Jewell, Langlands, Hartman, Tempest, and Thorne in this volume.

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exemplarity from its individual mediations or retellings (‘exempla’). Each new telling that derives from a site of exemplarity which she defines as an amorphous repository of sedimented cultural knowledge about an exemplary figure and deed, lodged partly in texts and monuments and partly in people’s minds, thus constitutes a remediation in that it reinserts this knowledge into a medium in which others can access it.34 She also recognises that remediation changes the force of the knowledge that it reinserts whether knowingly, deliberately, despite denial, exploitatively, or otherwise: to blank such change of import is the engine of all brands of conservatism. Thus keeping a prayer form literally exactly as it was a millennium ago ensures that it means, indeed must mean, something vastly different now. Accordingly, if cultural memory (and possibly even cultural memory studies) aim to provide a stable, unchanging, and even eternal foundational model for societies, then we should not forget that they define their societies and their discipline as adherence to and promulgation of conservatism. If we unblock the analysis that sees all representations as primarily versions, that is toujours déjà variations without-an-original, we come to understand that Vitruvius’ own intervention, to cite but one example, his claim to systematize, codify, and fix, itself necessarily unseats fixity, displaces codification, and challenges systematization. We thus come to appreciate the politics which arise from dissentient, divergent, cultural memories. Focus on different vectors of transmission for cultural memory is emblematic of the current Zeitgeist of cultural memory studies. Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp does not only draw attention to the sequential transfer of memory phenomena from one medium to another but explores how multiple co-existing representations interact through ‘intersignification’.35 To return to our original example of the Di Penates: the emotions which Romans experienced upon viewing public rituals did not exclusively derive from reading about history, viewing frescoes of Aeneas carrying them to Rome from Troy, or hearing hymns about these gods’ powers, but from their cumulative experience of these different representations. In Hölkeskamp’s words, ‘rituals and performances . . . [give] new and renewed meaning to monuments’.36 Indeed, ‘spaces’ themselves play a crucial role in passing down cultural memory: just as Aleida Assmann identifies the ‘rebirth’ of 34 35 36

Langlands (2018) 166–86. See amongst others Biggs, Hartman, Langlands, Moser, Palmer, and Thorne in this volume. Hölkeskamp (2018) 422–3. Roller (2013) has coined the term ‘intersignification’. See the discussions of Biggs, Shaw, and Moser in this volume. Hölkeskamp (2018) 465.

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the Jewish people after the Holocaust as a product of Israel’s existence, we would attribute the recovery of Rome after the internal wars of the Late Republic not to individual ‘sites of memory’, ‘fixed points’, or dispositifs, but rather to the survival of the res publica – the ‘human core’ of Roman-ness which remained even after the political system had changed.37 As this summary highlights, cultural memory theory is at heart a discussion on the relationship between the past and the present. As mentioned above, its scholars seek to answer why, with what results, and especially how cultural memory is transmitted so as to provide a ‘stable, unchanging, and even eternal’ foundational model for societies.38 This means that cultural memory is characterised, to some degree, by internal oppositions: it is a mutable phenomenon but transmits ideas which are meant to be permanent, is experienced by individuals but is fundamentally collective in nature, and fuelled by commemoration but shaped by deliberate choices to omit or distort certain aspects of the past.39 Nevertheless, these complexities only add to the flexibility of cultural memory theory as a methodological framework and ensure its enduring appeal. Contributors have thus embraced the complexity of cultural memory theory and truly engaged with the framework by challenging its tenets. Indeed, this compilation does not simply place cultural memory and the Classics side by side, but rather integrates the two. The volume’s focus has allowed us to examine in detail the particularities of how the Roman Republic and the Principate of Augustus negotiate cultural memory. We have been able incorporate post-Assmann advances in memory theory into a series of theoretically aware case studies, many of which break new ground and provide fresh directions for the field of memory and at the same time highlight the intricacies at the heart of Roman culture. While Classics in general can hardly be accused of media-blindness one of the virtues of the volume is that it allows us to think deeply about the media by which cultural memory is transmitted. Contributions query not only how a monument becomes a site of memory (Delignon), how poetry becomes monument (Beckelhymer), and how memories of an idealised past are restored by antiquarians (Leonardis) in the cultural centre Rome. They also look further afield outside Rome (Bruun), in the provinces and margins to illustrate how monuments could be re-used (Moser), re-built (Schörner), and re-coined (Roy). In this vein, remediation emerges as one of the most prominent and fruitful approaches throughout this volume (Biggs, Hartman, Langlands, 37

Cf. Assmann (2018) 287–300.

38

Russell (2018) 178.

39

Flower (2006) 2.

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Moser, Palmer, Thorne). In addition, applying concepts such as Basu’s dispositif, to aspects central to Romanness such as exemplarity (Langlands, Hartman, Tempest, Thorne), canon building (Corbeill, Dinter), and religious ritual (Vukovič) allows us to tease out the inherent conflicts and inconsistencies which keep cultural memory evolving. As mentioned above, ‘cultural’ and ‘communicative’ memory can exist side by side in ancient Rome and are not temporally stratified as Assmann’s framework posits. In regard to Sulla for example (Steel, Eckert) these different commemorative regimes can be tied to particular political stances. ‘Official’ memory is encoded in objective forms like laws, inscriptions, and monuments that tend towards the honorific, while ‘communicative’ forms of memorialisation go along with the victims and the defeated, at least for a while, as they are shut out of the official, objectified forms. However, in the long run, it is the anti-Sullan discourse that dominates the memorial space of the imperial age; as we will see even ‘seditious’ demagogues often received a second lease of life as ideological role models (Jewell). The boundaries between ‘cultural’ and ‘communicative’ memory are blurred even further in Rome where monuments may be erected for contemporary events and where later generations reinterpret and reconstruct the ancient monuments they find in order to make them make sense here and now (Beckelhymer). In a similar vein, in the age of Augustus, Ovid offers an irreverent, somewhat subversive re-presentation of key legends and events related to the reign of Servius Tullius and more or less overtly turns these reinterpretations into parallels for and comments on similar elements in Augustus’ self-mythologising (Šterbenc Erker). This shows how ancient legends sedimented in and transmitted via monuments can get written over and reinterpreted to meet the exigencies of the present – again, cultural memory is constructed of elements that can only be assembled and interpreted in the present, in the light of present understandings and concerns. After asking when exactly and how a specific location becomes a lieu de mémoire and what it means to be excluded from the cultural memory of Rome (Delignon), a remediation of the idea of the lieu de mémoire explores the relationship between an inscription that is reported in a literary text as being in a certain location and the actual inscription itself in that location (Palmer). Images on coins on the other hand present obvious selections and re-framings of legendary or historical events that serve political and social needs in the present (Roy). Here as in the exploration of aristocratic Roman urban memory culture or re-dedications outside the metropolis in Athens the past is always re-presented by the present to serve its

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current interests (Bruun, Moser). Since architecture itself (built structures in the urban environment) sediments and expresses cultural memory through its forms, technologies, decoration, and materials we explore the memory dynamics of the Roman re-founding of conquered, destroyed cities under their original names a century or more after their destruction (Schörner). Vitruvius’ text, on the other hand, outlining the discipline of architecture, also sediments and expresses cultural memory by its claim to systematise, codify, and fix a particular version or selection of the knowledge of the discipline (Shaw). Developing the framework of exemplarity a careful assessment of the variations and discrepancies in the Vibellius Taurea tradition explores how such variations are the product and indeed purpose of mediation and remediation (Langlands). This is complemented by tracking the varied and competing ways in which the tyrannicide M. Brutus was memorialized and recollected in the decades after the Ides of March and probing the creation of a ‘master narrative’ which was undertaken starting the day after the assassination and quickly overturned by alternatives; different framings or receptions ascribed virtus to Brutus, and different historical actors and writers laboured to put this quality into play relative to the idea of Brutus being a liberator, being a parricide who launched a new and more horrible stage of civil strife, or simply as a man of Stoic philosophical commitments (Tempest). Similarly, the very blurry boundary between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory in the construction of Cato after his death as a Stoic near-sage and unwavering opponent of Caesarism invites exploration which suggests repositioning these categories as potentially contemporaneous but ‘near horizon’ and ‘far horizon’ modes of memorialisation, rather than chronologically distinct and separated by a gap (Thorne). The present volume thus invites the reader to engage with cultural memory and to explore the various frameworks that have been proposed to explain its workings. Contributions have been grouped in four parts under the headings ‘Writing’, ‘Politicizing’, ‘Building’, and ‘Locating’ Cultural Memory. However, as becomes clear from the theoretical outline above as well as the short overviews of each chapter below the material presented here allows for a variety of reading strategies. Whilst the part on ‘Building Cultural Memory’ offers contributions which mainly centre on Rome and the part ‘Locating Cultural Memory’ contributions which showcase processes outside Rome and at the margins of the Roman Empire, both sections prominently feature contributions dealing with epigraphy (Palmer, Roy, Bruun, Moser). Similarly, the section ‘Writing Cultural Memory’ not only shows how writers from Naevius to Ovid

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already early on in Rome’s literary history started honing cultural memory but also how later readers of these texts constructed their cultural memory out of them. Vitruvius (Shaw) for thematic reasons features in the ‘Building Cultural Memory’ part but would be equally at home here. In the same way that ‘Writing Cultural Memory’ interlinks with the part on ‘Politicising Cultural Memory’ in that we for example re-encounter Cicero’s oeuvre and see how techniques showcased in the literature discussed in the first section play out in the political arena, the latter part connects with the following through chapters dealing with exemplarity (Thorne, Langlands). These parts are thus not meant to offer firm divisions but rather orientation for the benign reader who delves into cultural memory for the first time.

Part I Writing Cultural Memory Biggs explores the emergence of Latin epic and drama in the wake of the First Punic War (264–241 BC). Taking Naevius’ Bellum Punicum as a case study, he reads this foundational example of ‘postwar literature’ as integral to the reception of Rome’s first conflict with Carthage within Roman cultural memory. He also outlines several ‘sites of memory’ that encoded the war within Rome’s urban landscape, including the Tabula Valeria on the Curia Hostilia and the Temple of the Lares Permarini. The latter is shown to provide a unique window onto the reception and reuse of specific mediated memories of the First Punic War many years after its conclusion. These meditations on antiquity serve as springboards for a comparative reading of cultural memory theory as applicable to both third-century BC Rome and America during the Vietnam War. The interpretations offered in this chapter build upon fresh research and provide new perspectives on an elusive period in Roman cultural history that can only be glimpsed in fragmentary sources. Corbeill uses Plautus’ comic plays as a case study for delving deeper into the relationship between Latin drama and Roman cultural memory. He explores the reception of these works within antiquity, demonstrating that they were harnessed as linguistic exempla from the Imperial period onwards instead of performed as entertainment or even recognised as literary productions that were originally intended for the stage. In so doing, he identifies the key factors – ranging from elegant vocabulary to insights into Roman culture and subversions of genre – that rendered Plautine plays more attractive to later rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians than comparable works of Republican literature.

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Dinter argues that cultural memory is not restricted to individual works of art, literature, or architecture; on the contrary, it also applies to entire literary genres. Generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge, as ‘encyclopaedia’ or ‘museum’ of stocked culture, and can play an important role in absorbing and activating that memory. Accordingly, the genre of Roman comedy as well as each of Plautus’ and Terence’s plays should be read as deposits as well as triggers of Roman cultural memory. Since the very genre of Roman comedy itself teeters between established convention and radical innovation Dinter discusses the diverse ways through which Roman comedy engages with its pasts, situating each interaction within the framework of cultural memory theory. No figure is more closely tied to the Roman Republic than Cicero. Hartman refocuses attention on this figure by providing a memoryoriented reading of the opening to his De Legibus (‘On the Laws’). The initial conversation between Quintus Cicero and Atticus, who discuss an oak tree belonging to another of Cicero’s works, the Marius, epitomises Cicero’s approach to history and memory. Hyper-aware of the problems posed by creating permanent texts on mutable subjects such as rhetoric and politics Cicero articulates the connection between poetry, memory, and ‘invented traditions’. Through close scrutiny of the dialogue’s opening scene, Hartman reveals Cicero’s role as a memory theorist who interrogated his own position as a historical actor, while also reflecting more widely on the role of tradition, memory, and history in uniquely Roman contexts. This ‘culture’ was nevertheless just as labile as the individual memories of which it was composed. Leonardis highlights the ‘cultural crisis’ at the end of the Roman Republic: the elite class did not only lose political authority, but also found themselves unmoored in a society estranged from its own mores (‘traditions’). Antiquarians such as Varro therefore took it upon themselves to restore the cultural memories of an idealised past. Foremost among Varro’s approaches is a genealogical framework of linguistics and history, which casts mankind as an interrelated stirps (‘kin’). Within this model, artistic and literary legacies take the form of heritable traits which perpetuate themselves across generations, until a break in tradition – such as that experienced by late Republican Rome – causes gaps in humanitas, here defined as the sum total of human knowledge. Delignon explores how physical locations serve as ‘sites of memory’ by tracing literary depictions of the temple of Apollo Palatinus, erected by the emperor Augustus to commemorate his victory at Actium. In particular, she traces the ways in which Ovid, Propertius, Virgil, and Horace employ, interpret, and, in some cases, subvert the ideological significance of the

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original building and probes when exactly the temple became a site of memory imbued with a memory obligation. This case study is complemented by wider discussions on how cultural memory contributed to the formation of a Roman imperial identity. Beckelhymer reflects on the relationship between monumentality and cultural memory by comparing two Horatian odes, Hor. Carm. 1.2 and 3.30, both of which highlight the role of monumenta as not merely ‘monuments’ but also ‘instruments of reminding’. Moreover, he compares the poetic process described by Horace to the procedure of commemoration as described by memory theorists and evaluates their efficacy vis-à-vis physical artefacts. Ultimately, Horace’s poetry lives up to its monumentalising intent: it overcomes numerous challenges, including the fallibility of human recollection and the demise of the socio-religious institutions which it references, all to preserve the cultural memory of post–Civil War Rome. Šterbenc Erker further explores the role of cultural memory as a conduit between the mythic past and the Augustan present. She interprets the aetiology of the Fortuna temple on the Forum Boarium in Ovid’s Fasti as a literary bridge connecting Augustus to the mythical king Servius Tullius, the legendary founder of the temple. By portraying the divine genealogy of Augustus and Servius Tullius and emphasising their patronage by Fortuna, Ovid invests them with the traditional prerequisites for Roman kingship. The portrayal of both rulers is also richly comic. By exaggerating elements of Augustus’ self-presentation as a person cherished and protected by the goddess Fortuna the poet depicts Servius Tullius in an elegiac way as the lover of the goddess. Ovid freely re-interprets Rome’s cultural memory by alluding both to Augustus’ selffashioning through his claims to divine origins and to dynastic tensions within the imperial household. Servius’ daughter Tullia kills her father in the Fasti to attain his throne together with her husband. Her figure thus reminds the reader of the two Juliae, Augustus’ daughter (Julia Maior) and granddaughter (Julia Minor), who were accused of ‘adultery’, clearly a pretext for their involvement in the struggles over dynastic succession in the domus Augusta.

Part II Politicising Cultural Memory Eckert likewise explores the connections between power and remembrance by tracing the fall of the Republic from a cultural memory viewpoint. She begins by outlining the constitution of Republican Rome as described in

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theory by Cicero and Cato. She then demonstrates how these guidelines were overthrown in practice by Sulla, Caesar, and Augustus, who utilised the term res publica (‘Republic’) in political slogans so as to undermine the Republic and its memory instead of strengthening it. Indeed, by the end of the Republic the rank of dictator rei publicae constituendae – which originally meant ‘dictator for forming the Republic’ – was more often used to ‘deform’ that political system. In an oft-ignored passage of Cicero’s Lucullus (13–14), the titular character laments that seditiosi cives (‘seditious citizens’) tend to portray themselves as the ideological heirs of a group of supposed populares (‘popular leaders’) from the past. Taking the Lucullus as its starting point, this chapter re-examines what might be called the exemplary tradition of populares. While scholars have focused on the ‘martyrological’ aspects of these exempla as murdered politicians, the Lucullus points to the heterogeneity of their self-presentation. Jewell thus asserts that the memoria of populares was a locus of ideological contest and a crucial element in differentiating oneself in late Republican oratory. Furthermore, a re-reading of Cicero’s contional oratory in 63 BCE through the lens of his exempla (and lack thereof) demonstrates the ideological limits of Cicero’s contional selfpresentation in contradistinction to others who evidently went further, suggesting that Morstein-Marx’s notion of ‘ideological monotony’ in the contio requires revision. Steel similarly explores how Roman orators adopted historical examples in their speeches. She focuses on the technique of exemplarity, which was used from Sulla onwards to bridge the gap between Rome’s glorious past and its chaotic present: speakers evoked examples of good moral behaviour from their ancestors as didactic fables for an increasingly disordered world. In so doing, they crafted a collective memory characterised by symbolism and idealism. This romanticised past was ultimately used to drive up tensions surrounding controversial policies, not least the attempted elevation of the tribunate in 62 BC, which terminated in a violent clash between its supporters and opponents. Drawing on recent developments in cultural memory studies, and especially the discourse on as well as creation of exempla, Tempest uses the case study of Marcus Brutus to illustrate the dynamic practices involved in the act of remembrance. Following the trauma that set in after the Ides of March and the subsequent battles at Philippi, she demonstrates how the literature of the period, alongside media such as coins, inscriptions, and oral performances, reveal an intense struggle to control the memory of

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Brutus for future generations. In so doing, she shows that memory is not an unchanging legacy but rather an open resource for making shared stories about the past. Alongside the tradition that celebrated Brutus’ virtus and his ultimate act of self-sacrifice, this chapter shows how the image of Brutus and the temeritas of his crime continued to evolve and be evoked as part of a broader discourse in which the memory of Brutus was being debated in the post-Augustan age. Thorne explores the transformation within Roman cultural memory of Cato the Younger from living man to Republican martyr. In addition to considering the available textual evidence, he offers a much-needed focus on both the cultural tools available for commemoration as well as the crucial question of which groups had the most to gain – or the most to lose – in shaping how Cato would be remembered. One of the most significant early agents of memory was none other than Cato himself in his promotion of the ‘Cato brand’, but due attention is given to the crucial parts played by Cicero, Caesar, and Sallust. By examining the varying postmortem receptions (or mediations) of Cato that emerged directly after his suicide at Utica, Thorne sheds fuller light on how and why Cato attained the exalted status of Republican martyr and eternal opponent of Caesar(ism). In particular, he highlights the instrumental role played by Cicero’s Cato, whose positive depiction overtook that of Caesar’s vitriolic Anticato. The ‘memory war’ between these figures epitomises the inevitable tensions which arise whenever commemoration becomes entangled with competing political imperatives.

Part III

Building Cultural Memory

As in the two preceding chapters, Langlands takes exemplarity as her subject. She applies the concepts of ‘remediation’ and ‘sites of memory’ as developed in recent scholarship to explain some puzzling features of Roman exempla in Latin literature of the late Republic and early empire. These features include contested meaning, frequent uncertainty over basic details, and the evidence of the rupture and change that has taken place in many of the story traditions – even when they have continued to be well-known and thus might be expected to become ‘fixed’ in the literary record. Taking as a case study the intriguing exemplum of Vibellius Taurea (a bold native of the city of Capua who clashed with the Romans during the Second Punic War, variously viewed as loyal hero and arrogant villain), it argues that the moral complexity and conflicting traditions of such exempla are best understood as aspects of a single heterogeneous ‘site of exemplarity’ (by analogy

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with ‘site of memory’), with procreative ethical purpose. In Vibellius’s case, only brief references survive and we have little information about what his story meant to the ancients; the chapter concludes by suggesting that we should explore the possibility that such contestation played a fundamental role in the earlier Roman memory traditions too. Vukovič draws attention to rituals as vectors of cultural memory in his study of the Lupercalia. This event stems from mythological constructions of Rome’s past, for its participants undertook blood sacrifices at the Lupercal cave, a ‘site of memory’ where Romulus and Remus were allegedly found as infants. Moreover, since these youths flagellated passersby with animal-skin thongs in a fertility rite, the festival was imbued with themes of generational continuity and the future of the Roman people. For these reasons, the Lupercalia was a prime target for political exploitation: Caesar’s famous 44 BC celebration, during which he enacted a coronation ritual with Mark Antony, exemplifies the hijacking of historical customs by present contingencies. Apart from festivals, Rome’s rulers also perpetuated their power through monumental inscriptions. Among these are the Capitoline inscriptions, which Palmer investigates in terms of their commemoration in Livy’s History of Rome. She seeks to understand why Livy took such great pains to memorialise these inscriptions for posterity, even as Augustus was radically changing the epigraphic landscape in order to augment his imperial authority. In the process, she outlines the factors which feed into the Capitoline’s traditional status as a place of memory and determines the extent to which inscriptions can effectively preserve cultural memory. Shaw continues our exploration of Augustus’ building programme by examining how that leader ‘converted Rome from brick to marble’ (Suet. Aug. 29), via a contemporary response to the monumentalisation of Rome. The conceptualisation of monuments as memorials of the past in Vitruvius’ On Architecture serves as a gateway into understanding the Augustan emphasis on memory: Vitruvius’ work reflects contemporary ideas about the role of architecture as a site of memory, and advances ideas of his own about the significance of tradition and precedent in relation to architectural practice. Not unlike Cicero’s ideal orator, moreover, Vitruvius’ ideal architect is a figure best described using cultural memory theory, particularly Jan Assmann’s reflections on the ‘concretion of identity’. Indeed, On Architecture more generally acts as a microcosmic playingfield between text and memorialisation: it exemplifies how written treatises can be read as memorials for entire bodies of knowledge.

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Part IV

Locating Cultural Memory

While the art, architecture, and ritual discussed in Part III did much to enact Roman cultural memory on a large scale, Roy demonstrates that even coins – an everyday object – helped to disseminate Rome’s authority across conquered territories. The martial and triumphal imagery on these items, which were both monetary and monitory in function, reminded users from Greece to Celtiberia of the growing reach of Republican Rome. In addition, these numismatic representations of Roman power commemorated past conquests and warned against future rebellions, thus extending the Roman state not only geographically but also chronologically. Bruun discusses a remarkable inscription that once decorated the Porta Romana of Ostia, the principal entrance for travellers entering the harbour town from Rome. The text, only known since some twenty years ago, dates to the late Flavian period when the gate was restored by the Ostian authorities. It reveals that both Cicero as consul and, a few years later, his nemesis the tribune Clodius Pucher were involved in the building of the original gate, which was paid for by the Roman state. Since Clodius is thoroughly vilified in our historical sources, many of which derive from Cicero’s admittedly biased view, it is extraordinary to see his memory kept alive in public at Ostia in this way. There was no legal requirement to mention a past contribution by a Roman magistrate when commissioning the inscription commemorating the restoration. By inscribing Clodius’ name on the Porta Romana, the Ostian authorities tap into strains of cultural memory that have thus far escaped modern scholars. Arguably, the strong role played by professional associations (collegia and corpora) at Ostia explains why Clodius Pulcher was still remembered long after his death. The tribune of the people championed freedom of association in 58 BC, something most senators violently opposed. Moser’s chapter takes its readers into the public spaces of Roman Greece. In doing so, it fills up the lacunae which scholars have left in their eagerness to solely explore Augustus’ cultural significance through Rome and its wonders. It primarily focuses on honorary statues erected on the Athenian Acropolis dedicated to the senatorial grandees Lucius Cassius Longinus, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, and Paullus Fabius Maximus, and questions whether these statues harboured subversive meanings. Thereby, it determines the extent to which inscribed monuments and art reflect the complex political situation of the early empire and highlight the volatility of Augustan cultural memory outside Rome.

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In his comparative study of two Roman colonies renovated during the Augustan period, Carthage and Corinth, Schörner traces links between architecture, literature, and cultural memory. He highlights how the appropriation of ancient ‘Greek’ Corinthian traditions has been used for the re-creation of Corinth as Roman colony, and draws attention to the numerous rebirths of Carthage’s Byrsa Hill, which after its abandonment during the Second Punic War was first reanimated in textual form by Virgil (Aeneid 4) and then reconstructed in the material dimension as part of Augustus’ building programme. He concludes that Augustus practised a distinctive brand of memory politics which emphasised integration rather than dissolution: instead of suppressing earlier memories, he incorporated each city’s heritage into new sites of memory.

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part i

Writing Cultural Memory

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chapter 2

War and Cultural Memory at the Beginnings of Latin Literature Thomas Biggs

This chapter explores the mediation of experience in Middle Republican Rome. Mediation ‘facilitates the externalization of memories we produce in our minds . . . [and] through the internalization of mediated memories . . . we participate in collective memory’.1 In what follows, I will suggest that the First Punic War was the first event in Roman history to be mediated in certain ways that held the real potential to transmute lived experience and personal recollection, supplementing them, or even replacing them, with a different set of narratives that emerged from innovations in Roman artistic production. In Rome in the late third and early second centuries BC, especially in the years after Rome’s first war with Carthage, we encounter the first time that memories of conflict were tied to Latin poetry and public narrative art. Accordingly, this chapter will track the impact that these new memorial media made on Rome’s cultures of memory.2 While there is no doubt that the media of cultural memory were already transmitting the history of warfare at Rome for centuries by the 230s and 220s BC, the introduction of Latin literature as a tool for this task altered the landscape forever (and by literature I speak of genre-bound verbal art shaped on a Hellenic model). After all, as Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney remind us in 1 2

Erll (2018a) 309. The first two parts of this chapter revisit and expand upon material treated in Biggs 2017 and 2020a. The third part is a new case study. For the sake of convenience, we might categorize this era’s means of remembering war as a grey area located between Jan Assmann’s well-known communicative memory and cultural memory, but such distinctions only get us so far. Compare Assmann and Czaplicka (1995); Assmann (2011). For the intertwined nature of Roman long and short-term memory, consider Hölkeskamp (2006) 491: in Rome’s ‘memorial space’ the distinction that modern scholars like to draw between ‘communicative memory’, which is in the full sense of the concept ‘present in the present’ as it covers only two or three generations, and the ‘cultural memory,’ with its selective and stylized preservation of events of a more remote past, does not apply: in Rome, memories that a given generation shares by having lived through the same events merge imperceptibly with a kind of transgenerational memory that is made up of venerable myths, histories, and the exempla of the ancestors.

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a discussion of Maurice Halbwachs’ Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, ‘“media” of all sorts – spoken language, letters, books, photos, films – also provide frameworks for shaping both experience and memory. They do so in at least two, interconnected ways: as instruments for sense-making, they mediate between the individual and the world; as agents of networking, they mediate between individuals and groups’.3 Hence there is no social memory without media, and changes to influential media inevitably reshape memory. In the era of Latin’s first literature,4 several generations, those involved in Rome’s first conflict with Carthage and those that followed, could access for the first time the same concretized war narratives, thereby creating, I will suggest (Section 2.2), the potential for all memory to become what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’, a concept developed to understand the memories of the Holocaust. What is surprising about my use of the term for Romans of this era is that ‘postmemory’ is usually reserved for those in the generation after the event, yet I believe it is a meaningful descriptor for both participants and their progeny.5 ‘Prosthetic memory’, retooled from the analyses of Alison Landsberg, will play a supporting role alongside the writings of other theorists of memory and media.6 In the shadow of the First Punic War, the creation of newly fixed points of reference made Latin’s first literature and Rome’s first public art on historical themes prosthetics that could create for displaced figures the feeling of participation in events before their time or outside their experience. It also reshaped those with experiential memory. This generalization is misleading however, because there were no Roman master narratives. The patchwork view of the conflict that new media created was itself a contested space filled with the works of senators as well as non-citizen and formerly enslaved poets. In fact, Roman Republican memorial culture at large was defined by the interactions between a dizzying array of media, a ‘complex network of monuments, architecture, and other visual signs; rituals and festivals; rhetoric and other media of discourse in the broadest 3

4 5

6

Erll and Rigney (2009) 1. We might also consider Hölkeskamp’s application of the Geertzian web to the Republican mediascape: at Hölkeskamp (2018) 465 the list of media captures the period’s range. Compare Erll (2018a) 307: ‘media are very specific assemblages of semiotic, technological, and social aspects, which will mold available forms according to their specific affordances and restrictions; shape their messages while encoding them; and “never come alone” but, rather, are situated in complex constellations of pluri-and intermedial connection and filiation’. For the limitations of the word see Feeney (2016). On generation and generational memory, see Mannheim (1952); Edmunds and Turner (2002); Erll (2011) 56ff. On ‘intergenerational family memory’, with many relevant observations from German history, see von der Goltz (2011); see for a recent discussion with an eye on collective memory Corning and Schuman (2015). Hirsch (2012); Landsberg (1995) and (2004).

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sense of the concept as well as the “web” of “intermediality” in the shape of cross-references, interconnections, or “intersignifications”’.7 Significant additions to these other media of discourse are what concern us in this study. Most of my arguments will circulate around Naevius’ Bellum Punicum (Section 2.1), the first Latin epicizing poem to depict Roman affairs, and its impact on the memory of the war it narrates. In Section 2.3, I will consider the Temple of the Lares Permarini’s modes of preserving the past and its telling intermedial connections with Naevius’ epic.8

2.1

War, Cultural Memory, and a New Roman Mediascape

When Rome took to the sea in 264 BC in its first war with Carthage, there were no epic poems in Latin and no predetermined modes for commemorating the deeds of its heroes in what we now call ‘literature’. Although one can choose to accept the theatrical and performative pre-histories that scholars have proposed, the evidence is rather modest.9 The year of 240 is when Livius Andronicus is reported to have staged the first dramatic performances in Latin. Whatever truth there is in this tale,10 it serves well as a metonymy for the widespread cultural innovation of the period, all bound to the shifting physical and intellectual borders set in motion by the just-concluded First Punic War.11 Livius Andronicus also composed Latin’s first ‘epic’, the Odusia, a learned rendering of the Odyssey designed for the maritime world of the era. Potential audiences were made up of the same people who experienced the voyage to Sicily and North Africa during the war, a veritable Odyssean journey. The poem took the Saturnian, a Latin 7 8

Hölkeskamp (2016a) 170–1. The term ‘intersignification’ is Roller’s useful coinage. Compare Roller (2013) especially 120, 129–30. This chapter lacks space to explore the concept at length. For intermedial approaches, see Rajewsky (2002); Dinter (2013a) and Dinter (2013b) for epic; Faber 2018 for ekphrasis and Latin epic, who offers a useful summary of the concept (2018: 1): For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art.

9

10 11

See now Dinter and Reitz-Joosse (2019). Wiseman (1994) 1–22 with Flower (1995); Zorzetti (1990) and (1991). See also relevant discussion in Wiseman (2015). Important passages include Cic. Tusc. 4.2.3; Brut. 71–5; Varro apud Nonium 107– 8. See also Liv. 7.2; Val. Max. 2.4.4; Hor. Ep. 2.1.145–67; Gell. NA 17.21.42–9. Compare Habinek (1998) 34–69; Feeney (2005) and (2016); Goldberg (2005b); Manuwald (2011) 15–41 and 187–94; Cowan (2015). Feeney (2016).

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meter capable of conveying marked linguistic status, and imbued it with the cultural force of the Greek hexameter.12 The Bellum Punicum soon followed. Written supposedly late in life by Gnaeus Naevius, a First Punic War veteran,13 the poem narrates the deeds of his contemporaries, the journey of Aeneas and Romulus’ founding of Rome.14 Unlike examples of historical poetics in Greek, such as Aeschylus’ Persae, Choerilus’ Persika or Phrynichus’ Sack of Miletus, the belated and self-conscious qualities of Latin’s transformation into a producer of literature mark the potential impact of Naevius’ innovation as far more disruptive within Rome’s cultures of memory, advanced as they already were at this point. When Latin epic appeared, that is to say Latin’s first histories of Rome, the Romans were ‘not so much starting to write history as making a conscious decision about how history should be written’.15 The sheen of innovation in any new medium draws the eye of its consumer. In turn, its unprecedented appearance and the narrative it relates can merge into one memory-construct, inextricable and interdependent. After all, as Erll reminds us in a discussion of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘[w]e experience and remember with the help of paradigms that are part of our culture and that come to us via the reading of texts and the use of other media. Such paradigms seem to be represented in our minds as a largely unconscious reservoir of schemata’.16 If war enters cultural memory on specific terms, in the Naevian case on Homeric terms, it may lead consumers of that narrative to interpret subsequent events on the same grounds, drawing upon their newly reconfigured ‘largely unconscious reservoir of schemata’. We will ultimately dub this process pre-mediation. In Rome, one aspect of this new medium was its ability to elevate contemporary deeds to unrecognizable levels. This specific aspect of poetic innovation introduced a distorting schema. In the extant lines of the Bellum Punicum (cf. Blänsdorf et al. (2010) Fragments 3, 6, 23, 37, 39) consuls perform deeds on the same narrative plane as Homeric heroes. Aeneas and his companions escape the city of Troy in the same language 12 13 14

15 16

See for example discussion in Goldberg (1995); Sciarrino (2006) and (2011). Blänsdorf et al. (2010) F 2 (Gell. 17.21.45). Feeney (2016) 108 notes, ‘[a]s far as domesticating Greek poetic norms into Latin was concerned, Naevius had a predecessor in Livius Andronicus, but nobody had ever written a poem about Rome before’. As Christopher Smith recently put it in relation to the earliest Latin prose historians. See Smith (2016) 27. Erll (2018a) 306. Compare e.g. Fussell (1977) 2: ‘every beholder [of the war] carried with him a freight of largely unconscious paradigms or patterns of perception and interpretation which invited him to see and recall only what cultural conditioning had made him capable of seeing and recalling’ (quoted in Erll (2018a, 305)).

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a Roman commander conducts a military manoeuvre. The poetic features that elevate the tone of the work are also markedly consistent in all temporal realms suggesting through style a continuum not a disjuncture between Rome’s present and the deep past.17 Even the poem’s narrative structure underscores how intertwined and interdependent pre- and recent history were in the work. The simple fact that the narrative begins with the outbreak of the First Punic War and only then integrates the Fall of Troy and the founding of Rome though analepsis (flashback) underscores the linkage of these events, regardless of the temporal distance between them.18 Because of the poem’s use of analepsis to integrate the account of Rome’s rise into a story of the First Punic War, Carthage’s defeat was now essential to Rome’s existence. Such transformations must by their very nature obscure prior perspectives. The First Punic War was something else for Romans who now reread their own experience on these terms. The First Punic War was also something else for Romans of, say, 200 BC, a generation removed from the war, or for those who were just too young to serve in the 250s. This generation heard tales of combat from veterans upon their return and then learned of it through depictions in art and text.19 In this moment one catches a glimpse of the fine blurry line, a fictional construct itself, between collective experiences transferred primarily through communicative memory and those preserved through the media of cultural memory.20 The mediated gap between experience and active recall also introduces the potential for different accounts to proliferate from the same impetus.21 And in the case of Naevius’ epic, I have argued elsewhere (Biggs 2020a), the text inevitably, if not consciously, exploits this aspect of media and memory by embracing the distorting effect brought about by the presentation of recent events on epic terms. For an example of the intergenerational and multimedia dynamic of this moment, we can turn to public painting on historical topics, another innovative memorial medium that emerged during the First Punic War. 17 18 19 20

21

See treatment in Goldberg (1995) and especially (2010). On the epic’s structure see still Rowell (1947) and especially discussion ad loc in Barchiesi (1962). I am reminded of the title of a recent exhibition at the Imperial War Museums in London, ‘Real to Reel: A Century of War Movies’. Mannheim and his followers have constructed an idea of a ‘generation’ around the impact of a significant sociocultural event upon a group, usually made up of those in their lower teens to midtwenties. The First Punic War fits this paradigm. Yet the new literary permanence extends it beyond traditional parameters; cultural memory, especially in prosthetic contexts (see below Section 2.2), can impact multiple groupings with a similar set of experiences even if, historically speaking, they should be in distinct generations. Erll and Nünning (2008) 6–7.

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It was equally capable of spreading ‘secondhand smoke’, of (re/pre)mediating the memory of the conflict. One key work of art depicted Manius Valerius Messalla, consul in the second year of the war, 263 BC. Pliny records the most important details:22 But painting chiefly derived its rise to esteem at Rome, in my judgment, from Manius Valerius Maximus Messalla, who in the year 490 after the foundation of the city first showed a picture in public [qui princeps tabulam pictam proelii] on a side wall of the Curia Hostilia: the subject being the battle in Sicily in which he had defeated the Carthaginians and Hiero. (Pliny, NH, 35.22)

Neither Latin literature nor this painting emerged ex nihilo, but within Roman conceptions of their past, this is the picture that emerges.23 The Valerian painting – presenting recent deeds of Roman warfare on a wall of the Curia at the core of the city – was for Rome what the Stoa Poikile and its depictions of the Battle of Marathon and the fall of Troy were for Athens: a mode of centralized public display that transmuted lived, historical experience into the exemplary.24 The painting’s elevation and distortion of current affairs is akin to Naevius’ impact on the transmission of war in Rome’s cultures of memory. But this is not the end of the story. Valerius Messalla’s deeds were commemorated first in public on the side of the Curia and were only thereafter narrated by Naevius’ epic:25 Manius Valerius consul partem exerciti in expeditionem ducit. Manius Valerius, the consul, led part of the army on an expedition.

In this fragment one encounters the first extant passage of Latin poetry with a direct connection to a known work of narrative art, a key piece of the urban fabric that the poem’s initial audience would have known intimately. 22

23

24

25

Translation is adapted from Rackham (1952). Compare Pollitt (1966) 51. Pliny’s date of 264 is problematic. For the painting, Coarelli (1985) 53–9; for the Curia Hostilia see especially 33–6, 49–57. Whether or not the painting was actually the ‘first’ cannot be tested, but it certainly appears to have been the first on such a permanent, large and public scale. Hölkeskamp (2016b) 30 includes the painting in his discussion of prestige and elite self-representation though memorial practices. I discuss this painting on similar terms in Biggs 2017. Earlier representational painting on Roman martial themes in tombs and private contexts does little to undercut its cultural-historical significance. For possible battle scenes on C. Duilius’ Temple of Janus, see Roller (2013) 121. For the Stoa Poikile, see Rouveret (1987–89). Compare discussion of allegory and history (especially concerning the Persian and Punic wars in Augustan symbolism) in, e.g., Hardie (1989) and Feeney (1991). Blänsdorf et al. (2010) F 3. Translation is my own.

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Reading the epic scene as determined by the visual dimension of the painting offers up an early if not the earliest ‘intermedial’ moment in extant Latin verse. When hearing of Aeneas’ journey in the Bellum Punicum audiences might have called to mind Greek and Etruscan depictions long familiar in Latium, but when the epic gaze turned to Roman material, particularly to Messalla’s campaign, it was the Valerian painting that would have provided the visual template. The intermedial interaction goes on to shape memories of the war, which could now have consisted of personal recollections redefined by the words of Naevius and the imagery of the Curia. What does elude us, even if its influence is clear, are the exact formal contours the lost painting’s aesthetics would have imparted to Naevius’ epic and to the people of Rome. The origins of each work also create an important tension. The painting was a work of public art meant to glorify Rome and its central aristocratic figure (likely the patron of the work in some capacity, although senatorial approval was clearly needed).26 In contrast to the aristocratic painting, the Bellum Punicum was the poetic work of a Campanian – a non-elite, perhaps a citizen without the vote, hence not the traditional steward of commemorative power. Though the biographical tradition casts Naevius as comfortable enough to trash-talk the city’s elite, and his poem presents a relatively Romano-centric position, he was still an outsider artist, a migrant figure like the other multicultural poets of the period, the formerly enslaved Livius Andronicus, Plautus and later Ennius and the universal historian Polybius. One may wish to recall Ennius’ links to Fulvius Nobilior. At any rate, as Sander Goldberg remarks, ‘the Bellum Punicum had no patron’.27 These differing representations of Messalla’s deeds, although complementary in what clearly seems a depiction of positive accomplishment, introduce competing perspectives. One, elite and powerfully impressionable in the aesthetically over-determined presentation of the scene (whatever its actual appearance was, it was public and official); the other, the poem of a veteran, bound to semantic fluidity and the endless possibilities of poetic visualization but capable of subjecting the pictorial simultaneity of the painting to the modes of temporal development only possible in narrative literature.28 The political dimensions of public media and their power to shape memory sit at the core of the dynamic activated by 26 27 28

For other examples of the competitive use of public painting see Appian, Punic Wars 66; Livy 41.28.10. For status issues among early Latin authors, see Sciarrino (2011). Goldberg (1995) 33. See Holliday (2002) for the ways ancient narrative art can communicate.

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a comparative reading of these works of art. Consider the following episode, when L. Hostilius Mancinus is said to have supplemented a public painting of his deeds at the siege of Carthage (146 BC) with his own narrative of the events by directly channelling the aesthetics of the painting into his words:29 L. Hostilius Mancinus, who first broke into Carthage, committed a not dissimilar offence against Aemilianus by placing in the Forum [a painting depicting] the site of the city and his own assaults upon it, and also by being present himself and explaining the details to the onlooking public (for which affable behavior he was elected to the consulship in the next assembly).30 (Pliny, HN, 35.23)

Mancinus actively attempts to shape reception, to provide his eyewitness account of the exploits, the words for the image. In a sense, he also tries to prevent interpretation, to flatten individual response to the work of art by providing the master text. Perhaps most jarring is the fact that Mancinus steps into a role akin to Naevius here, creating a moment through performance, an opportunity, like that described by Landsberg in her definition of prosthetic memory. This new form of memory emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history . . . the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live.31

Despite the inherent limitations of Pliny’s descriptions of these two paintings, they offer posterity striking windows onto the potential interplay between memory, media and prosthesis in the production of meaning and political power during the Roman Middle Republic.32 Media’s transformative impact on warfare’s reception has formed the subject of numerous studies, for example, Jean Baudrillard’s famous critique of the Gulf War, which proposed that it existed within the realm of mediation (cheekily entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place).33 But in 29 31 32

33

See Rutledge (2012) 154 with bibliography. 30 Translation is adapted from Pollitt (1966). Landsberg (2004) 2. Indeed, the way scholarship conceptualizes the hic et nunc of ancient performance poetry, from Homer on, suggests a similar immediacy of contact between audiences and the performed narratives, the creation of history in the now. For example, consider Egbert Bakker’s Homeric involvement, visualization and ‘presence’ in Bakker (1993). Baudrillard (1995). For media and war with a less controversial agenda see Ramsay (2015) with bibliography.

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unpacking Naevius’ poem I can’t shake the fact that the Bellum Punicum’s war (its lower-case bellum) notionally has one author (unlike the Gulf War writ large, which was mediated by numerous news agencies and broadcast services). The Bellum Punicum’s war has one voice responsible for the shape of a mediated memory, a veteran whose decision to present the war as such could not have aligned fully with what he saw in Sicily (of course, it never could have). Consider William Batstone on this important aspect of the poem: ‘what is most remarkable about Naevius’ world is that Naevius himself took part in this war: Naevius, then, tells a story of himself that takes place in a hybrid world that exists only in his literary imagination’.34 In this case, it is the influence of the text that interests me, since it replicates in readers’ minds Naevius’ literary imagination and reconfigures the preexisting war story each reader possessed. Naevius becomes a form of collective memory. In the transmission of the work, the distinction between text and memory dissolves, and Naevius’ constructed account, an epically mediated veteran’s tale, as it is read or heard, becomes the war itself. Jean Baudrillard’s use of the simulacrum presents itself as a useful analogy at this point, the hyperreality that can substitute the signs of the real for the real, replace the real or refer to no reality whatsoever. I have considered these ways of describing the poem elsewhere in more detail (Biggs 2020a). Yet we might here turn to the more functional proposals of Astrid Erll, who suggests the explanatory power of ‘premediation’, namely how ‘media circulating in a given context provide schemata for future experience’. As she notes, ‘[premediation] is the effect of and the starting point for mediated memories’.35 Consider the Bellum Punicum’s potential to pre-mediate – beyond the use of a Homeric lens, the text does appear to distort in many other ways, to create a new reality for the war without referent in the ‘real’, and therefore to shape its specific capacity to premediate. It presents a gigantomachy that pits good against evil, a view that redefines well-known neighbours.36 The First Punic War, whatever it was, could have thus become something else indeed after Naevius transformed it into epic verse, even for those who had independent, eyewitness experiences with the war, including the work’s own author.37 It also could have 34 35 36 37

Batstone (2007) 546. Erll (2018a) 316. This is similar to what Paul Fussell had described in less precise terms. Compare Blänsdorf et al. (2010) F 8: Inerant signa expressa, quomodo Titani, / bicorpores Gigantes magnique Atlantes / Runcus ac Purpureus, filii Terras. Eyewitness testimony, though often flawed, is nevertheless a standard source of authority in ancient historiography. For Naevius as eyewitness, compare n. 13 above, and Suerbaum 1968; Biggs (2020a) and (2020b).

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offered a very specific way of perceiving Roman experience of Carthage in the future. What did the Hannibalic war look like through a Naevian lens? What impact might the circulation of distorting accounts of a shared past have had on Rome? Did the proliferation of such multiform vehicles for commemoration and transmission (epic, drama – keep in mind that fabula praetexta is a contemporary Naevian innovation as well – and new forms of visual art) create something like widespread false memory syndrome (FMS), exploiting or even indirectly discovering the foundational principle that outside forces can influence individual memory, that ‘all representations of the past draw on available media technologies, on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial aesthetics’?38 As Harriett Flower notes concerning deliberate attempts to modify memory, ‘they contribute to and interact with many other factors that shape human memory, causing it to produce its own, very particular narrative of the past’.39 On these terms, Naevius’ poem can be said to produce Romans whose view of the world was coloured by mediated ‘historical’ events masquerading as lived, personal memory – a collapse that blurs the boundaries between collective and individual, past and present.40 The Bellum Punicum is ‘a very particular narrative of the past’ produced by the forces described above, and it, in turn, shapes human memory. It engages in pre-mediation, causing audiences to produce their own narratives of the past, present and especially future coloured by the world of Latin epicizing verse. Consciously or not, they will draw upon this schema in future experiences. All memories are combinatory by nature, formed from first-hand experience, cultural memorial media and the paratexts of one’s life: photos or paintings that trigger personal recollection but fill in blanks; details of landscape long forgotten or unnoticed from the participant’s original vantage; oral histories that merge with one’s idea of their ‘own’ memory.41 Indeed, one of Maurice Halbwach’s principal insights was to stress how external forces always already shape individual memory. The interactive and ‘intersignificatory’ qualities of memory, which is at once individual while also constituting the collective, are defined by the 38 40

41

Erll and Rigney (2009) 4. 39 Flower (2006) 2. Gowing (2005) 10 notes that texts’ ability to create memory, ‘or, if you prefer, to fictionalise’, is what ‘renders them somewhat problematic as sources of historical information’. Of course, ‘no memory is ever purely individual, but always inherently shaped by collective contexts. From the people we live with and from the media we use, we acquire schemata which help us recall the past and encode new experience’. Erll (2008) 5. On photography and memory, see Hirsch (1997).

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mediascape wherein one is acculturated and through which one views the world. And it is at this point in the discussion that ‘Postmemory’ deserves consideration as a way of fine-tuning our view of mediation in the Middle Republic, of unpacking how a new form of verbal art can blur the boundaries between collective and individual, past and present.

2.2 Comparison We begin with a quotation from Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust: ‘The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second generation is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living connection’.42 Hoffman was born on 1 July 1945 and is a perfect example of the ‘hinge generation’. While the First Punic War shares little in comparable trauma to the systematized genocide of the Second World War, it was still Rome’s first overseas conflict, first world war, and its length and the loss of life was without parallel: its memory, its heroes and defeats, struck deep. Matthew Leigh has dealt with this well in his article on Rome’s ‘Maritime Moment’, a title which reminds us that it was at sea where Rome experienced the majority of its losses and greatest victories in the war.43 For those born after, those in Hoffman’s ‘era of memory’, or those in the ‘second generation’ the ‘generation after’, the way the war reached them was always already a product of intensive and multilayered mediation, what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘intergenerational acts of transfer’.44 The result of these mediations, the ‘secondhand smoke’, is well outlined by Hirsch: that descendants of victim survivors as well as of perpetrators and of bystanders who witnessed massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event.45

The latter point comes quite close to ‘Prosthetic Memory’.46 42 46

Hoffman (2004) xv. 43 Leigh (2010). 44 Hirsch (2012) 2. 45 Hirsch (2012) 3. For a radically different example, those who recall the 1990 film Total Recall, which was based on a Philip K. Dick novel, know well an extreme instance of prosthetic, implanted memory. Compare Landsberg (1995).

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The grounds for comparison between Republican Rome and postwar Europe are not always firm. But in many ways what Hirsch describes here and throughout her study sounds a lot like what scholars have already noted about Rome’s cultures of memory. Why live in a world populated by imagines, by funeral reenactments of the past, exempla of familial and collective ancestors, traditions, rituals, performances, endless lieux de mémoire, if not to somehow achieve a ‘connection’ that is ‘a form of memory’. And it is worth considering how Rome’s ‘generation after’ relate to Hirsch’s description, those of the Second Punic War and interwar period, those who had Naevius’ epic and the Valerian painting on the Curia to shape their acculturation (their very idea of the past), along with oral histories and other communicative means. Indeed, if Naevius composed his epic during the Hannibalic War, as many scholars believe, we must confess he has the outlook of a veteran shaped by the shifting tides of the ‘generation after’. His poem could thus help premediate renewed conflict with Carthage on the model of its predecessor war, one now indistinguishable from the content of heroic verse. Because of her upbringing in a world that was focused on the past and its retellings, Hirsch elsewhere wonders: ‘Why could I recall particular moments from my parents’ wartime lives in great detail and have only very few specific memories of my own childhood? . . . Why could I describe the streets, residences, and schools where they grew up . . . all moments and sites that preceded my birth . . . ?’47 We now arrive somewhere close to prosthesis.48 This is mediated memory capable of creating an imperceptible transference, a suturing. In our first case study, Naevius’ veteran’s tale, distorting history through Homeric elevation, added to the personal store of memories that Rome’s ‘generation after’ could draw upon in their own recollections. Their memory was now epicized, at least in part. Because of such mediations, the ‘generation after’ could feel as if they experienced the prior war. In fact, their experience of the Second Punic War, at times construed in its predecessor’s memorial forms, contributed to this conflation (see Section 2.3). In the suturing and distorted mediation enabled by Naevius’ epic war, we also witness the creation of a specific type of ‘national’ mythology and a specific type of memory, one that splits the past in ways that can subsist even if in great tension. As Erll and Nünning put it: 47 48

Hirsch (2012) 4. See Landsberg (2004). Her arguments are distinctly tailored to a world of mass media that lacks an exact ancient analogue.

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A war, for example, can be remembered as a mythic event (‘the war as apocalypse’), as part of political history (the First World War as ‘the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century’), as a traumatic experience (‘the horror of the trenches, the shells, the barrage of gunfire’, etc.), as an aspect of family history (‘the war my great-uncle served in’), as a focus of bitter contestation (‘the war which was waged by the old generation, by the fascists, by men’).49

It is perhaps telling, then, that Naevius’ epic successor, Quintus Ennius, in a famous proem/recusatio at the start of Annales 7 seemingly disavows the task of retelling the First Punic War:50 scripsere alii rem uorsibus quos olim Faunei uatesque canebant Others have written about the matter in verses (with) which once the Fauns and Vates used to sing. (Ennius Ann. 206–7)

The First Punic War is Naevius’ subject, the benchmark ‘epic history’ of Rome’s past, even if it is a work of fauns and prophets, the hallmarks of the outmoded Saturnian age. Ennius now writes in hexameters and offers a new vision of Roman history, a poetics that can premediate in new ways. Naevius is old news. Moreover, for Ennius, his epic’s First Punic War may also be a textual and generational ‘memory’ somewhere between personal and paternal, between private and that of one’s predecessors (i.e. the ‘literary’ collective). Before the Annales, Roman epic about Rome equals the First Punic War. It is the topic. It becomes a narrative event that itself represents Latin poetics as much as it is an event that actually occurred, an event living in the memories of at least a few surviving veterans of the war still around in Ennius’ day. On generational terms, and this point is a bit different but still complementary, consider Naevius’ veteran status in the First Punic War in contrast to Ennius, whose birthday of 239 is widely accepted – two years after the close of the war, one after Livius Andronicus’ innovations on stage at the Ludi Romani: the ‘generation after’ par excellence.

2.3

Premediation, Punic War, and the Temple of the Lares Permarini

The transferred memories of an epic have the potential to erase other less romanticized, less seductive takes on the past, including those dependent on personal recollection or reached through a more analytic, autoptic 49

Erll and Nünning (2008) 6–7 and Erll (2008) 7.

50

Translation is my own.

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historiographical mode.51 Indeed, epicizing verse likely carried with it a primary remembrance of the First Punic War for the hinge generation, for Ennius’ generation, and those after. In recording the war as Naevius did, in a sense, his poem erased it through mediation. The verse history claimed some of the power to define the war’s resonance in Roman ‘postmemory’. The war truly may have thenceforth become inextricable from Naevius’ mediation for all who experienced the new art form’s power, hence Ennius’ reactionary stance. Yet in the ‘generation after’ the war’s memorial force continued to play a prominent cultural role in other commemorative media as well. For this reason, I conclude the chapter by considering one site of remediation located outside of the Punic Wars proper. While it is not an exact instance of a repetition or remediation of the First Punic War, it is, I suggest, a moment where the First Punic War’s mediation this chapter has outlined can be seen premediating subsequent experience of war. I turn now to the Temple of the Lares Permarini in Rome (the Lares of sea-voyagers or the maritime Lares).52 In this monumental example, there are signs of continuity and disjuncture on display between generational uses of the mediated memories of the First Punic War (perhaps even of Naevius’ First Punic War). During his censorship in 179 BC, M. Aemilius Lepidus dedicated a Temple to the Lares Permarini.53 The Lares are gods of the house, ancestors, crossroads, and voyages; their specific marine dimensions are a bit of a mystery (more on that in a moment). L. Aemilius Regillus, his cousin, originally vowed this structure in 190 BC after the Battle of Myonessus against the navy of Antiochus III. This navy had been commanded by none less than Hannibal Barca until his defeat at Eurymedon during the very same campaign. Hannibal’s name thus hovers over the entire year’s naval war against the Seleucid Kingdom.54 The temple was a monument to naval victory over Antiochus, but Hannibal’s role may help transmute the conflict into a continuation of the Punic Wars. Aemilius Regillus also celebrated a naval triumph at Rome for the victory, an event that occurred seventy years after Gaius Duilius’ naval victory in the First Punic War against the Carthaginians, which led to the first naval triumph at Rome, the model and most famous exemplar for Regillus’ contemporary

51 52 53 54

Cf. Manuwald (2014) 220–1 on ‘fiction’ and historical epic; Gowing (2005) 10. Compare them with the Lares viales: cf. e.g. Plaut. Merc. 865. Muir (2011) 38. See now Flower (2017). Livy 40.52; cf. Fasti Antiates II 12/2.24. Cf. Coarelli LTUR III 174–5; Coarelli (1981) 38; Coarelli (1996) 258–68. See also Orlin (2016) 119–20 and Orlin (2002) 70. See discussion of the battle, with bibliography, in Murray (2012).

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achievement.55 It is the naval dimension that likely led to the Permarini aspect of the cultic site he set up in the first place. Scholars have identified two potential candidates for the temple among the extant architectural remains at Rome: Temple D at the Largo Argentina or one opposite the Crypta Balbi on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. Opinion is split.56 Livy describes the temple and an inscribed tablet above its doors:57 a plaque was affixed bearing the following inscription [supra ualuas templi tabula cum titulo hoc fixa est]: ‘To Lucius Aemilius, son of Marcus Aemilius for finishing a great war and subjugating kings [duello magno dirimendo, regibus subigendis], the source of obtaining peace under his auspices and command, and through his good fortune and leadership, the erstwhile undefeated fleet of King Antiochus was scattered, smashed, and routed between Ephesus and the islands of Samos and Chios, while Antiochus himself, and all his army, cavalry, and elephants looked on. And there on that day forty-two warships were captured with their entire crews. When that battle had been fought Antiochus and his realm . For that engagement he made a vow of a temple of the Lares of the sea.’ (Livy 40.52.4–7)

Beyond the likely but lost marine iconography of this temple for the maritime Lares, it is surely the tabula inscribed in verse above the temple doors that grabs our attention. In his treatise de metris, the Neronian poet Caesius Bassus cites the first line of the inscription as a Saturnian, a conclusion recent re-analysis of the Saturnian meter seems to support; Briscoe’s commentary on Livy suggests that ‘the obvious conclusion is that the whole inscription was in that metre’.58 There are also features of the Latin throughout the text that display tendencies of mid-Republican poetics (Naevian poetics to be specific), a dynamic well discussed by 55

56 57

58

There do not appear to have been any naval triumphs celebrated during the Second Punic War; the first conflict remained the most viable exemplary model and could help premediate the recent conflict on a Punic paradigm. Cf. Flower (2017) 95: ‘Regillus could have presented his accomplishments as being in this proud tradition.’ On the naval triumph and its vicissitudes up through the Augustan age, see discussion in Dart and Vervaet 2011 and 2016. The Fasti Triumphales record eleven naval triumphs between that of Duilius over Carthage in 260 and Gnaeus Octavius over Perseus’ fleet in 167. A second naval triumph in 188 over Antiochus’ fleets emphasizes the spike in the practice’s prominence in 189–188. Only after Naulochus and Actium would naval victory monuments and triumphs return to such prominence in public commemorative culture at Rome. For discussion of the temple and its location see Zevi (1997); Popkin (2016) 52–4, 64, 187–8; Davies (2017) 84, 154, 171–2; Flower (2017) 91–102. Text is Briscoe (1991). Translation is adapted from Yardley (2000). Cf. Macr. Sat. 1.10.10. See Morstein-Marx (2004) 106 n. 173 for a survey of similar dedications. For the temple and its inscription, see also Goldberg (1995) 77–79 and (2010) 172–73; Morgan (2010) 286–300. Briscoe (2008) 551. For discussion, see Mercado (2012) 226.

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Sander Goldberg.59 The inscription thus evokes modes of representation central to the First Punic War’s literary transmission – Saturnian aesthetics, the characteristics of the epics of Andronicus and Naevius. The inscription views recent naval battle through Naevian schemata. Even the choice of the completely new Lares Permarini may relate to this angle. Some scholars connect these Lares to the Great Gods of Samothrace, divine figures who played a role in the Aeneas legend: might Naevius’ innovative joining of literary ‘Aeneid’ and Roman naval war against Carthage have paved the way for such a conjunction?60 Yet the temple and its Saturnian verse exist within a moment of transition. Composed and erected quite some time after the Bellum Punicum, they hit the scene just as the hexametric Homerizing innovations of Ennius’ Annales were taking shape. Recall how dismissively Ennius superficially treated the First Punic War and the Naevian aesthetic in the proem to Annals 7.61 Indeed, Ennius’ so-called patron Fulvius Nobilior built the Aedes for Hercules Musarum, a near contemporary temple, whose own potential role at the close of Ennius’ Annales (as the poetic setting for the text’s planned original climax) – not to mention its parallel ‘Hellenizing’ aesthetic – could be said to stand in contrast to certain aspects of the Aedes for the Lares Permarini. Regillus and Nobilior were both censors in 179, so competition among the nobiles is by no means irrelevant in unpacking the dedicatory and reception contexts of these structures, as Penelope Davies does well in her recent book.62 While one of the temples sometimes identified as that for the Lares Permarini was certainly a grand Hellenistic structure on architectural terms, the Maritime Lares themselves look a bit more like, for example, L. Cornelius Scipio’s Tempestates, weather gods to whom he famously dedicated a temple during the First Punic War in return for a safe journey home by sea (way back in 259 BC, likely marking 59 60

61

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Goldberg (1995) 78. Although Naevius’ narrative of Aeneas’ journey is fragmentary, Coarelli’s remark that the Lares Permarini of this temple may be an interpretatio Romana of the Samothracian Cabeiri ‘collegati alla leggenda di Enea’ suggests the possible influence of Latin’s first and only ‘Aeneid’ at this point (LTUR III 175). For the Lares in Naevius’ other writings see Naevius Tunicularia 101 (Fest. 230m). If any conflation between Lares and Penates occurred in Naevius’ epic, as in Vergil’s Aeneid, certain ritual actions performed by Anchises in the Bellum Punicum may also be relevant: cf. Blänsdorf et al. (2010) F 25. Consider how Propertius ‘summarizes Ennius’ Annales’ at 3.33.11: Hannibalemque Lares Romana sede fugantes. Goldschmidt (2013) 141–2 notes that ‘the Lares are probably a Propertian metaphor rather than an Ennian reality’. While this is likely, the prominence of maritime Lares in the second century and the more clearly attested role for Penates in the epics of Naevius and Ennius suggest that it is not impossible for the Annales to have depicted the Lares as such. At any rate, when read through Regillus’ temple, at Myonnesus the Lares get their revenge on (Ennius’) Hannibal. Davies (2017).

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the first time they were worshipped at Rome).63 Which is to say, the Maritime Lares, or rather, a good bit of the entire semiotic system of the temple looks like a throwback. Modes of commemorating the last great naval victories against Carthage must have recommended themselves when seas were again purpled with blood during Rome’s foreign wars. Nevertheless, activating memories of Duilius’ First Punic War naval triumph, Scipio’s once novel Tempestates, and Saturnian, epicizing visions of war with Carthage, all represent a memorial mode seemingly out of synch with the Hellenizing, trendy aesthetics of the mid-second century. The verse inscription on the tabula above the Lares’ temple doors can also be compared with interesting result to the extant inscription celebrating the first naval triumph of the First Punic War, that of Gaius Duilius (CIL I2.25). Although we lack space to dig into the highly problematic text, the quantification of spoils, verbal action in asyndeton stressing conquest, archaizing morphology and attention to focalization and perspective in depicting the moment of the enemy’s defeat in battle, are only a few strong points of overlap between this text and that on Regillus’ temple. One would be justified in concluding that the temple combines the epigraphic mode of recording battle against the Carthaginian ‘Other’ with Naevius’ Saturnian epic vision, thereby realizing the intermedial technique that essentially gives shape to Roman historical literature writ large. Now, if the (or at least a) key point behind aristocratic display in the Mid-Republic is self-promotion and conversion of one’s name into an eternal facet of Rome’s history, the Lares’ verse inscription must strike us as a bit behind the times.64 Saturnians commemorating Roman naval victory, especially against a fleet with links to a famed Carthaginian commander, would have looked backward rather than forward for authorization and for the referents required to construct their cultural meaning, that is to say, to create a context for mediating memory among viewers of the structure.65 This temple, then, is a curious point of generational divide and continuity. It may even, I suggest, reflect the 63 64 65

Vowed during a storm and perhaps even depicted in the Bellum Punicum. Cf. CIL 12.9 = 6.12897 (ILS 3); Cic. Nat. D. 3.51; Ov. Fast. 6.193–194. See sources and discussion in Pietilä-Castrén (1987). The Scipionic tombs, however, complicate any easy chronology for the aesthetic value of meter and poetic commemoration in elite contexts during the Middle Republic. We should compare the second century BC verses of Porcius Licinius, themselves engaged in a generational vision of aesthetic value and its transformation: (Porcius fr. 1 Courtney = Gell. Noct. 17.21.44).

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premediated experience of war against Hannibal on Naevian terms (the way perpetual Punic War would have looked in the light of the poetic Bellum Punicum). But others were no longer perceiving contemporary experience through the same lens. What is the overall effect? On one reading of the temple and its text, the Seleucid fleet becomes Carthaginian.66 The intermedial play layers narratives of west-east conflict onto each other as first set out by Naevius’ construal of the First Punic War as a gigantic struggle between Rome and a barbarous enemy. Myonessus becomes Mylae (260 BC) or the Aegates Islands (241 BC), Rome’s first naval triumph and final major naval victory of the First Punic War; Regillus becomes a Duilius or Lutatius, the respective Roman commanders at those encounters; all of these, in turn, take on the colouring of the Persian Wars and even the Trojan War itself (Troy is not so far away from the location of the Seleucid War battle). Rome’s victory at Myonessus is thus elevated through the Lares Permarini and through the temple’s evocation of earlier Saturnian modes of commemoration to the same status as the great naval victories of the First Punic War.67 Several extant mentions of the inscription suggest it was a relatively successful entry into the city’s commemorative mediascape. A copy was even erected above the door of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline! The Temple of the Lares Permarini thus demonstrates how the First Punic War continued to play a key role in the mediation of war, casting a shadow over acts of commemoration at the forefront of the politics of cultural memory at Rome. But it represents a last gasp in Roman culture for the unique conjunction of naval victory and the power of Saturnian verse.

*****

This chapter has provided some theoretical perspectives on the mediation of war at Rome during the moment its transmission was tied to new, innovative mechanisms of cultural memory, such as Latin poetry and public narrative art. The topic remains in need of further study, since these pages could only accommodate preliminary remarks and case studies. While recollection of past conflicts may have had dramatic transmission at 66 67

Ironically, Rome’s fleet at Myonnesus actually contained ships supplied by Carthage in support of the war effort. Cf. Dart and Vervaet (2011) 273. Similarly, divine forces guided Regillus, like Aeneas, as he sailed the same seas off the coast of Turkey. And he honored them with an Aedes, as Scipio did for the Tempestates during the First Punic War.

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Rome before the late third century and cultural memory, in the form of inscriptions, art, and private archives, certainly far predates Naevius, the era of the First Punic War witnessed a boom in certain media that remained prominent and popular thereafter. These poems, paintings, temples, and inscriptions allowed for a novel mediation of collective wartime experience, especially for those in the ‘generation after’ the First Punic War.

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chapter 3

Creating Roman Memories of Plautus Anthony Corbeill

While researching the significance of the various ways in which Latin speakers interpreted the phenomenon of grammatical gender, I spent a substantial amount of time examining ancient Roman scholars, in particular the Latin grammarians.1 Even a cursory reading of the accounts that these scholars have compiled about the masculine, feminine, and neuter soon reveals how they credit different poets with varying degrees of authority in the use and treatment of grammatical gender, even when that treatment may seem inconsequential to modern eyes. As one might expect, the grammarians regularly consider Vergil’s linguistic finesse indisputable, whereas they deem other poets, Lucan for example, to possess ‘lesser authority’ (minor . . . auctoritas).2 Evaluative remarks such as these prompted me to wonder what characteristics were thought to constitute the ‘poetic authority’ that informed scholars from antiquity in the evaluation and ranking of poets and whether these criteria affected the ways in which poetry was read and evaluated by ancient readers other than grammarians and other scholars. The ultimate question is whether these methods should affect how we in turn assess Latin poetry. In this chapter I intend to consider these questions from the beginning, with our earliest full corpus of texts from Latin literature, the plays of Plautus. As will be clear from these preliminary remarks, I will not be looking at cultural memory in Plautus, but at cultural memory of Plautus, at the ways in which his corpus of plays was largely stripped of its original performative context to become a set of texts by which later scholars could answer questions linguistic and then cultural, questions that it is fair to assume did not concern Plautus at all.3 As I note below in my discussion of Jan Assmann, the cultural memory of Plautus comes to constitute, during 1 3

Corbeill (2015). 2 Serv. Georg. 2.288 (minor . . . est Lucani . . . auctoritas); Kaster (1978) 197–9. For cultural memory in Plautus and Roman Comedy in general, see Dinter in this volume. For the life of comedy from Cicero to Juvenal, see Hanses (2020).

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the transmission of the text of the plays, a malleable feature that subsequent ancient scholars and grammarians are able to shape for their own ends. Plautus is a popular author in the rich scholarly tradition of ancient Latin grammar and lexicography. Among Republican poets, only Terence surpasses him in the frequency with which his text is cited, and he is by far the most commonly quoted author in ancient texts that treat word meanings. For example, the second-century lexicographer Sextus Pompeius Festus, in his epitome of Verrius Flaccus’s De verborum significatu from the Augustan age, refers to Plautus ten times more often than Terence (200 versus 20 citations in the extant portions), while in Nonius Marcellus the ratio is 635 to 220.4 In the first seven volumes of Keil’s Grammatici Latini, containing a range of texts from late antiquity, Plautus is not quite as dominant, presumably because of the widespread adoption of Terence as a teaching text; he nevertheless occupies about 3.5 pages of Keil’s Index Locorum by contrast with Terence’s 7 pages. The notion that comic dramas, originally conceived for ephemeral occasions, could come to embody greater linguistic authority than the seemingly more ‘writerly’ works of poets such as Ennius or Lucretius aligns with Sander Goldberg’s recent efforts to restore for comedy its rightful place in the history of Latin literature: ‘The assumption that comedy was experienced primarily as a performed art and looked to a popular rather than cultured aesthetic . . . has diminished sensitivity to the range of [its] cultural and poetic influences.’5 Goldberg supports this assertion with a convincing discussion of the places in which Plautus’s text contributed comic motifs, and influenced stylistic issues like metrical practice, in such diverse non-dramatic genres as lyric, oratory, and epistolography. I would like to extend the analysis of Plautus’s influence beyond literary tropes and techniques to broader cultural issues, considering in particular the perspective that he offered to scholars in antiquity regarding the nature of the Latin language. Jan Assmann has remarked on the prevalent role that oral texts, composed for communal occasions, play in the formation of cultural memory. In his 1992 book on cultural memory and early civilisation, he devotes a chapter to the significance of oral poetry, particularly epic and drama, in 4

5

Numbers from Jocelyn (1964) 280–1, who also includes statistics on the Vergilian scholia (Ter. 199x, Plaut. 118, Enn. 107), Priscian (Ter. 500x, Plaut. 270, Enn. 60), and Macrobius (Plaut. 9x, Lucr. 37x, Ter. never). Goldberg (2005a) 113; for some correctives to Goldberg’s claims about performance, see Feeney (2006); Hanses (2020) 33–122. For a compact and selective survey of Plautine influence on literature up through Jerome see Ferri (2014).

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the construction of cultural identity among the Greeks.6 Assmann’s assessment of the transformation of these oral texts via the work of Alexandrian scholars provides a neat comparative model for my own analysis. He concludes that in the Greek world ‘the great tradition of foundational cultural texts was removed from the realm of ceremonial communication . . . and was transposed into the new institutional, educational framework of an international . . . society’.7 For Rome, it is impossible to judge from extant evidence the precise impetus that led to the preservation during the Republic of so many plays both written by Plautus and ascribed to Plautus – more than 130 – or what led Varro in the first century BCE to labour at whittling that mass down to the still canonical collection of twenty-one plays.8 As we shall see, however, there does seem to have existed some perception of Plautine comedy as a ‘foundational cultural text’ once it was removed from its original ceremonial context and had become a subject for independent study, as we quickly see the oral performance of Plautus no longer occupying primary importance in assessing his significance among the later scholarly elite that constituted his reading audience. In fact, in removing Plautus’s text from its original performative context, it comes to evoke additional cultural memories at different periods among different readers. I have used the term ‘reading audience’ deliberately, since I do not intend to confront the issue of how often Plautus’s plays were restaged after their original performance. For the Republican period, there is well-known and seemingly unambiguous evidence for encore presentations in the midsecond century BCE: a section of Bacchides, for instance, attests to repeat performances of Epidicus during the playwright’s lifetime (213–15) and, famously, the prologue to Casina describes a restaging that occurred in the generation after that play’s debut (11–15). For the later Republic it is debatable to what extent performances were regular, even in the face of evidence such as Cicero’s reference to Quintus Roscius acting the part of the pimp in Plautus’s Pseudolus (Q. Rosc. 20, 50). Goldberg, in the work from which I quoted earlier, has raised serious objections to seeing Plautus as regularly performed during the Republic and beyond, but Hanses has responded with a formidable phalanx of arguments that serve to support Horace’s seemingly unambiguous evidence for performance and to demonstrate the likelihood of the staging of early Roman drama all the way through to the first century 6 7 8

J. Assmann (2011) 234–75. J. Assmann (2011) 254 (the word ‘Hellenistic’ occupies the second ellipsis). Gell. 3.3.3 notes that Varro considered plays beyond these twenty-one to be Plautine as well.

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CE.9 Fortunately, this issue need not detain us given one important characteristic of the ancient scholarly discussions that are my sources. Elements of stagecraft, or even an awareness that Plautus’s texts originated as scripts for drama, almost never receive comment in considerations of the playwright. Instead, focus fixes upon language, on issues of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. As a result, I will be following Goldberg’s ancillary contention (with which Hanses does not take issue) that with the middle to late Republic scholarly attention became more concerned with the Plautine scripts rather than with their on-stage manifestations. It is this phenomenon of Plautus’s cultural memory, namely his reification into a set of texts, that allows later writers to treat his plays as fossilised evidence for the state of the Latin language and of Roman culture during the early second century BCE. We may now return to how this circumstance contributes to the commemoration of Plautus. In his essay on ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, Assmann provides six characteristics of what he calls ‘cultural memory’ that map neatly onto my investigation of the relationship between the text of Plautus and its use by scholars and grammarians of subsequent centuries.10 I introduce the categories here in order to offer a guide to my analysis, but I will return to them more fully at the end of this chapter and consider ways in which these categories should be adapted to fit the Roman context. First, Assmann notes that cultural memory works to preserve knowledge. (2) Second, the preservation of that knowledge is not static, but exhibits what he calls the capacity to reconstruct, that is, to apply that knowledge to contemporary needs. (3) and (4) The third and fourth characteristics identified by Assmann are illustrated best by the post-Varronian grammarians, namely the transmission of cultural memory and its institutional organisation. Grammarians, constituting a self-conscious body of scholars, provide the continuity that facilitates the transmission of Plautus’s cultural meanings. (1)

9

10

Hanses (2020) 33–122; note, however, the earlier work of Blänsdorf (1974), who notes references to the reading (as opposed to performance) of plays and the lack of explicit references to dramatic production. Note, too, the contention of Parker (1996) 590 that the immense number of plays attributed to Plautus would seem to indicate that ‘there had been no tradition of continuous performance after the author’s death’. Taylor (1937) and Richlin (2014) 220 consider opportunities for restaging outside the city of Rome. J. Assmann (1995) 129–33.

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anthony corbeill This process of transmission in turn creates Assmann’s fifth trait, a system of values intended to educate, civilise, and humanise, as well as his . . . sixth and final point. It will become clear in the course of my discussion how, in effecting more acceptable speech norms, the task of the grammarian betrays a self-reflexivity in using the work of previous grammarians to show the grammatical tradition’s ‘preoccupation with its own social system’.11

As a set of foundational texts, the Plautine corpus in fact created many ‘cultural memories’. I will now review quickly a piece of familiar testimony from Plautus’s biography, since it reveals a cultural memory distinct both in its origin and in its purpose from the type upon which I will ultimately concentrate. Aulus Gellius cites Varro as his authority that Plautus, having lost his money in trade, was reduced to turning a mill at a bakery and that he wrote at least three plays under these conditions.12 Richlin has recently offered a reconsideration of the sources for this story as part of her argument that the comoedia palliata was performed principally for audiences comprised of the socially and economically disadvantaged of ancient Rome.13 She observes that the ancient biographies of not just Plautus, but all our earliest dramatists, from Livius Andronicus to Terence, ‘strongly suggest low-class origins’ for each writer.14 Richlin then goes on to note how such origins help make each author into a type of folk hero for audiences, in particular if these origin stories derive, as most think that Plautus’s do, not from any independent source, but simply from an extrapolation of the situation of characters within his text. Richlin notes: ‘If the plays somehow made people make these stories up, it is significant that this is the kind of story the plays produced, and that this is what a fan base wanted to think.’15 In terms of cultural memory, therefore, Richlin imagines the Roman audience reconstructing a poet’s life from his text, which reconstruction then provides a plausible interpretation of that text. This is the sort of circular intentionality in which we as readers have always 11 12 13 14 15

J. Assmann (1995) 132. Gell. 3.3.14; the best assessment of Plautus’s alleged biography remains Leo (1895) 54–76. This claim runs counter to the argument that underlies the book-length treatment of Fontaine (2010). Richlin (2014) 211. Richlin (2014) 212. A second-century CE remark in Minucius Felix’s Octavius would seem to support Richlin’s case for Plautus’s followers being identified with the non-elite, where an interlocutor is mocked as homo Plautinae prosapiae, ut pistorum praecipuus, ita postremus philosophorum (‘A person of Plautine stock–outstanding among the bakers, but the basest of philosophers’; 14.1).

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engaged up through the present, as part of the process of making literature somehow applicable to our own lives. Richlin’s claims are hardly conclusive of course; one could use the same biographical data to support McCarthy’s opposite argument for Plautus’s principal audience belonging to the Roman elite, who identify with the depiction of slaves on-stage.16 But what I find significant is that the grammarians never allude to this biographical tradition. This is not surprising, however, once we consider that the cultural memories constructed by these writers necessitate that Plautus must occupy a prominent position, both intellectually and socially, that does not allow for humble origins. I intend to explore three distinct areas in which Plautus’s text initiates the creation of new cultural memories for the Romans. The discussion will be principally chronological. First, I will trace the evidence for how the study of Plautus’s text developed independently, away from considerations of performance, as scholars turn to the written text in an attempt to establish a canonical set of plays. Second, I will show how the establishment of this canon leads to the justification for its very existence, as Plautus becomes increasingly credited with a purity of language that may seem at odds with his subject matter. Third, I will offer a selection of remarks made by Roman scholars from the period of Late Antiquity, who see in Plautus’s use of language evidence for his authority in the early development of Latin as a literary language and who seem to conceive of him as an authority on Roman culture more broadly. Finally, I will close with Servius’s perception of Plautus as capable of wielding literary influence over Vergil. In a catalogue of six scholars working on the Plautine corpus in the century following the playwright’s death, Gellius notes that the tragedian Lucius Accius compiled lists of several Plautine comedies that he had deemed not genuine. Although it is unclear what factors influenced Accius’s decisions, Gellius’s stated preference for Varro’s approach – relying upon Plautus’s language to judge authenticity – would seem to indicate that Accius and the other five scholars listed relied upon different sets of criteria, independent of each play’s style and diction.17 And yet Gellius’s implication seems to represent an emphasis misplaced in order to make 16 17

McCarthy (2004); Richlin (2014) 179–80 and passim addresses McCarthy’s claims. Gell. 3.3.2: ‘…ipsi Plauto moribusque ingenii atque linguae eius. hac enim iudicii norma Varronem quoque usum videmus’ (‘We see that Varro also used as his standard of judgment Plautus himself, his characteristic genius and language’). Volcacius Sedigitus, perhaps from the late second century BCE, ranks Plautus second among a group of ten comic playwrights. Gellius, our source, does not provide his criteria (Gell. 15.24; cf. Jocelyn (1993) 123). Goldberg (2005a) 79 conjectures that Volcacius was considering ‘traditional stage qualities’.

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a rhetorical point, or to credit Varro inaccurately with an original scholarly approach. For evidence independent of Gellius shows that at least two of the remaining five scholars on his list – Aelius Stilo and Servius Clodius – used a scientific method similar to Varro’s, while predating him by at least a generation. Quintilian relates a famous quotation from Aelius Stilo, preserved by Varro, that ‘if the Muses wished to speak Latin, they would have adopted the language of Plautus’.18 While this encomium would lead one to suspect that Stilo had a sense of what constituted the sermo Plautinus, there is not enough in the remark to pinpoint the exact nature of his study of the poet. The situation changed in 1960, when Stanley Bonner published a short note on the grammatical text De Notis, a treatise from some time in the late eighth century AD that seems ultimately to derive from a lost work of Suetonius.19 This treatise offers a concise account of the critical signs used by Alexandrian scholars to annotate manuscripts and of how their Roman successors adopted these signs.20 In his note Bonner offers an ingenious and convincing interpretation of a particularly corrupt sentence to show that Romans used these marks in annotating the works of Roman comedians and that, alongside Varro, two other scholars known to have engaged in this activity were none other than Aelius Stilo himself and his son-in-law Servius Clodius. I cite here the obelised text as it appears in Keil’s Grammatici Latini, followed by Bonner’s emendation and my translation of the emended text: (Keil) his solis in adnotationibus Ennii Lucilii et historicorum usi sunt † varrus hennius haelius . . . (Bonner) his solis in adnotationibus Ennii Lucilii et historicorum usi sunt Varro Servius Aelius . . . (Varro, Servius, Aelius used only these [signs] in annotating Ennius, Lucilius, and the playwrights.)21

(Not. Suet. Gramm. VII 534, 4–6)

Since the critical marks used by these scholars, such as the obelus, were intended to distinguish genuine from spurious verses, it would seem all but certain that Servius Clodius and Aelius Stilo were engaged at least partly in 18 19 20 21

Quint. Inst. 10.1.99: licet Varro Musas, Aeli Stilonis sententia, Plautino dicat sermone locuturas fuisse si Latine loqui vellent. Bergk (1884) 1: 591–4, followed by Zetzel (1981) 14–17. Jocelyn (1985) 159, after a thorough analysis of the text, opts unpersuasively for non-Suetonian origins. Not. Suet. Gramm. VII 533–36. For the date, see Bonner (1960) 356 and n. 5. For historici meaning ‘playwrights’, see Bonner (1960) 355–7; cf. ThLL VI, 3 2842, 11 (W. Schmid).

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the close study of Plautine language. That this undoubtedly applies to Clodius is confirmed by Cicero’s praise of him as ‘a most learned man’ who had his ears so attuned through attention to poetic style and constant reading ‘that he had no trouble saying “This verse is not Plautine, and this one is”.’22 Active engagement with the diction of Plautus, then, dates at the latest to the first quarter of the first century BC. This concern for determining the authenticity of the Plautine corpus continues in the next generation with the investigations of Varro. But once the canon has been established in the form that it retains up to the present, scholarship takes a new turn with Varro, as Plautus becomes a rich source for philological investigations that are independent of any interest in drama. Plautus is cited more than sixty times in the extant books of Varro’s De lingua Latina, in striking contrast with the mere three mentions of Terence. The vast majority of the Plautine citations are used either to support Varro’s etymologies, or to provide examples of unusual words, with matters of orthography and syntax each receiving only a single mention. For Varro, Plautus’s authority does not derive from some perception of his insight into language or literature, but simply from his status as the representative of an earlier stage of Latin. In other words, Plautus is treated as a relic and ancient witness, but not as an innovator. With Cicero, once again notions of authenticity are taken for granted as he turns to those aspects of Plautus that one would expect to appeal to a master of rhetoric and oratory. Nevertheless, despite such expectations, those characteristics of Plautine style that Cicero most admires can occasion surprise. Unlike Varro, who exhibits special interest in the archaic and unusual, Cicero concentrates on those aspects more applicable to persuasion, in particular on Plautus’s ability ‘to delight’ his listeners (delectare). In praising Plautus’s humour, Cicero does not simply idolise the past, since Plautus’s contemporary, the comic playwright Caecilius, invites criticism in a letter to Atticus as a ‘poor example of Latin style’, and elsewhere he groups Caecilius with Pacuvius as two authors who ‘speak poorly’.23 It is particularly significant, then, that Cicero distinguishes Plautus’s sense of humour (iocandi genus) with his choicest epithets – elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum (‘elegant, sophisticated, clever, witty’) – noting that Plautine wit compares favourably not only with that of Attic comedy but 22

23

Cic. Fam. 9.16.4: ‘Servius, . . . quem litteratissimum fuisse iudico, facile diceret: ‘hic versus Plauti non est, hic est.’ All references to Clodius’s scholarship ‘are certainly or probably concerned with Plautus’ (Kaster (1995) 71). Cic. Att. 7.3.10: ‘malus . . . auctor Latinitatis’; Cic. Brut. 258 male locutos.

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also with the wit displayed by Socrates.24 This unexpected view of Plautus, as characterised by a gentle way of speaking, was anticipated in De oratore by Cicero’s interlocutor Crassus, who uses the highest degree of praise in comparing Plautus’s speech, pronunciation, and enunciation with that of his own mother-in-law.25 This new thread of cultural memory, reconfiguring Plautine wit and language as mild and pleasing, continues in the later rhetorical tradition, surfacing next when the younger Pliny characterises the elegant letters written by a woman as prose versions of Plautus and Terence.26 Five hundred years later the praise comes full circle, as we read Macrobius equating the eloquence and humour of Plautus with that of Cicero himself.27 In addition to his gentle sense of humour and colloquial elegance, Cicero recognises in Plautus a third quality not typically associated with the playwright: the comic text as a repository of wisdom. In a letter to Marcus Brutus in April 43 Cicero gives his addressee advice on how best to conduct a civil war and then, apparently thinking that Brutus will opt not to take his advice, he quotes a line from Plautus’s Trinummus: mihi quidem aetas acta ferme est; tua istuc refert maxime (Trin. 319: ‘My life is pretty much over; it’s yours that matters most’). One can only wonder how easy it would have been for Plautus to have suffered the fate of Publilius Syrus, with his energy and wit devolving into a series of home-spun adages like this. And in fact there do exist in later Christian writers a few more examples of this drive to make Plautus a source for moral maxims.28 But let’s return to words. The other main attraction of Plautus continues Varro’s fascination with vocabulary. I have already mentioned how Festus, in his epitome of Verrius Flaccus, cites Plautus ten times as often as he does Terence. This interest reaches its zenith with the archaising tendencies of Marcus Cornelius Fronto in the mid-second century CE. Fronto cites Plautus more than forty times and alludes to him several dozen more, while Terence is never explicitly mentioned. Fronto not only compares 24 25 27

28

Cic. Off. 1.104; Blänsdorf (1974) 152–6 discusses Cicero’s estimation of Plautus’s Latinity. Cic. de Or. 3.45. 26 Plin. Ep. 1.16.6. Macr. Sat. 2.1.10: ‘et iam primum animadverto duos quos eloquentissimos antiqua aetas tulit, comicum Plautum et oratorem Tullium, eos ambos etiam ad iocorum venustatem ceteris praestitisse’ (‘First of all, I take note that the two most eloquent men that antiquity has produced, the comic playwright Plautus and the orator Cicero, surpassed everyone in the grace of their jokes as well’); see too Macrobius’s contemporary Rufinus, Apol. adv. Hier. 2.13: ‘totus Plautinae et Tullianae cupis eloquentiae sectator videri’ (‘You wish to be seen as a devoted student of Plautus’s and Cicero’s eloquence’); cf. Diom. Gramm. I 382, 15–16, describing Plautus as one of those authors ‘quibus eloquentiae et elegantiae tributa est opinio’ (‘who has earned a reputation for eloquence and elegance’). Lact. Div. Inst. 5.12.11, 6.11.8; cf. Hier. Adv. Iovin. 1.1.

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Plautus with other ancients for his exquisite word choice (Front. p. 56, 22: verba industriosius quaerendi), putting him second only to Ennius among the poets, but he also offers him to his pupil Marcus Aurelius as a tool by which the young Marcus can polish his prose style.29 This emerging pre-eminence of Plautus – both as representative of an elegant Latin style and as a source of exquisitely appropriate word usage – gradually comes to endow him with his status as an authority on language more generally. Traces of this development can be found already in Gellius, in a context where he refers to Plautus as ‘most careful in Latin vocabulary’ (verborum Latinorum elegantissimus).30 This phrase would seem to allude to the qualities of Plautine vocabulary that caused authors such as Fronto to admire him. And yet the sentence within which Gellius uses this epithet does not involve word usage. Rather, Plautine refinement is here used to justify an unusual use of syntax in a speech of Cicero delivered a century after Plautus had written, a point that Gellius buttresses further through arguments from euphony. Gellius is almost certainly incorrect here in his interpretation of Cicero’s text, which involves the construction esse in being construed with the accusative rather than the ablative.31 But accuracy is irrelevant to my point. What is of interest is that the text of Plautus – carefully established over the four centuries before Gellius is writing – now has the permanence and authority to emend the text of no less a master of prose than Cicero. This broadened understanding of Plautus as an authority on language does not extend, however, to interpretations of culture – or at least not yet. In another portion of the Noctes Atticae, Gellius indicates that this lack of interest in finding in Plautus anything more than archaic vocabulary and diction reflects an active resistance on the part of his own contemporary grammarians concerning the violation of disciplinary boundaries. He relates a telling anecdote of how one anonymous grammarian exhibits a self-conscious concern with language and literature to the exclusion of any more extensive interest in culture. Gellius had consulted this scholar to ask him about the meaning of the phrase ex iure manum consertum, an expression that originates in the archaic process of symbolically laying the 29

30 31

Front. p. 227, 11 = de Fer. Als. 3.1.6: ‘te Plauto expolires’ (‘You would use Plautus to polish your style’); Fronto proceeds in this same letter to use unusual words from Plautus, a practice he employs elsewhere (p. 153, 14–15). Hout (1988) cites numerous uncredited allusions to Plautus throughout his testimonia. Gell. 1.7.17; for the interpretation of the phrase see Krostenko (2001) 115. Gellius cites Plaut. Amph. 180 (in mentem fuit) to argue for the reading in . . . fuisse potestatem at Cic. Manil. 33. For the idiom (which in fact requires an adverb absent in Cicero), see Löfstedt (1911) 171–4.

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hands on an object in an action of legal self-help.32 In response to Gellius’s query, the grammarian asserts that, since this expression does not occur in Vergil, Plautus, or Ennius, he does not feel the responsibility to give an answer. He bluntly defines his professional obligation as follows: ‘I teach grammar; I don’t give advice on law.’33 When Gellius replies with a quotation that illustrates Ennius’s familiarity with this phrase, the grammarian continues in his resistance, asserting that Ennius must have learned it not from his reading of literature, but from a legal expert (iuris consultus). While I cannot claim that this grammarian’s narrow focus will have been typical of all members of his profession in the second century CE, and while this account has clear satirical intent, for Gellius’s anecdote to have point it must represent a widespread conception of the grammarians’ perception of their proper purview.34 And in fact, when we do find scholars from previous centuries using Plautus as an exponent of his own contemporary culture, the evidence is investigated not in a spirit of pure historical inquiry, but once again chiefly to prove the authenticity of a given line from a play. Of particular interest in this context is a debate over the history of bread baking alluded to by the Elder Pliny. The principal, if not sole, motivation for the debate, which Pliny characterises as arousing ‘a great controversy among the learned’, is to support Plautine authorship of a line from Aulularia.35 The preceding discussion makes clear that grammarians and scholars through the second century CE did not neglect the study of Plautus. For the following generations of scholars, however, whom Robert Kaster has memorably termed the ‘guardians of language’, the focus of concern is not the establishment of a reliable text, nor do they care about stage action, despite its centrality to an appreciation of his comic skill.36 Moreover, with the exception of comic commentaries such as that of Donatus on Terence, these scholars are also not concerned with Plautus’s Greek models – in fact, any memory of Greek precedent is largely erased.37 On the contrary, for 32 33 34 35

36

37

For these origins, see Corbeill (2005) 157–66. Gell. 20.10.2: ‘rem enim doceo grammaticam, non ius respondeo’. For Gellius’s skepticism about grammatici see Howley 2018: 221–6. Plin. Nat. 18.107 (‘magna . . . concertatione eruditorum’). Modern scholarship is itself in disagreement over what Pliny means in this passage; see ThLL II 710, 65–74 (O. Hey). Pliny also cites Plautus as an authority on wine (14.92–93), on Venus as guardian of gardens (19.50), and on puppies as ritual food (29.58). Fraenkel (2007) 79: ‘The spoken word serves only as a support for the burlesque pantomime, which at such points is the essential thing’; see Hanses (2020) 26–8 for the study in antiquity of Plautus as a written text. Needless to say, they are also largely unaware of the many puns on Greek discussed in Fontaine (2010); for this erasure of cultural memory, see Fontaine (2010) 255.

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these late grammarians Plautus’s text has become a springboard for wider speculations about Latin language and Roman culture. I should add here a point that will be well known to those even slightly familiar with the ancient grammarians and commentators to whom I now turn. Their remarks, many of which can be disarmingly charming, are in equal measure often blatantly inaccurate by our own standards, and their literary interpretations can verge on the absurd. But for my purposes, it does not matter whether what these scholars assert about Plautus’s diction and syntax is accurate or not. I instead want to show the significance lying behind those features of his language that they choose to highlight. What follows, then, is a selection from the relatively rare instances when a grammarian offers hints about what he thinks of Plautus as an ‘authority’. Of the several hundred extant references to Plautus that occur in these authors, most are simply bare glosses on word meanings or comments on odd syntax and morphology. Nevertheless, occasionally these references contain something of more than antiquarian interest, implying as they do an interplay between Plautus and contemporary literary or cultural concerns.38 I begin with Evanthius, a commentator on Terence from the first half of the fourth century. Evanthius mentions in his extant opening remarks about drama that Plautus often adds points that are obscure or that ‘require an historical investigation’; as a result, he writes, Plautus offers challenges that do not exist for the commentator on Terence.39 In other words, though separated from Terence by less than one generation, Plautus has gained the reputation of being deliberately recherché. The observations that Evanthius then offers are typical of his conservative critique: Terence observes recognised boundaries of genre in contrast with Plautus, who can slip into tragic mode; Terence never has an actor address the audience, with which one can contrast Plautus’s frequent instances of playful metatheatre. We seem to be witnessing here part of the process by which Terence becomes canonised as a school text, and the attendant mystification of the increasingly more scholar-friendly Plautus. This separation between the two playwrights is particularly marked in the scholarly exploitation of their texts for unusual grammatical gender. In the many compendia of unusual noun genders produced by the 38 39

These scholars of course value other authors for different reasons; I restrict myself here to Plautus. Evanth. de Com. 3.6: ‘adde, quod nihil abstrusum ab eo [sc. Terentio] ponitur, aut quod ab historicis requirendum sit, quod saepius Plautus facit et eo est obscurior in pluribus locis’; Kaster (1988) 278–9 reviews what little survives of Evanthius. Historici is not to be construed here as ‘playwright’ as at Not. Suet. Gramm. VII 534, 4–6 (discussed above).

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grammarians, examples from Terence rarely surface, whereas the text of Plautus provides upwards of fifty instances that the lexical and grammatical corpora repeat numerous times more.40 It is tempting for the modern scholar to go blithely along reading these lists as comparable to primers in modern languages, warning Latin learners of places where they are likely to make mistakes in gender. But then one encounters unusual claims about the relative power that a poet can have over language. For example, Servius considers Plautus, along with Vergil, to have authority in the use of grammatical gender that is superior to later poets such as Lucan, and even to early prose writers such as Gaius Gracchus.41 One particularly striking notice appears in Priscian’s Institutio. The author is commenting on the masculine use of nuptus at Casina 859, employed here by Plautus instead of the expected feminine form nupta (‘bride’). I cite in full his odd note, together with a translation: sunt enim quaedam non solum in uerbis, sed etiam in aliis partibus orationis, quae significationis causa dici non debent, ut, si uelimus masculinum dicere ab eo quod est nupta nuptus uel a puerpera puerperus, oppugnat ipsa rerum natura propter significationem, quae solis accidit feminis, nisi figura uel auctoritas intercedat: figura, ut si dicam: ‘bonus animus uxoris mihi nuptus est’ pro ‘bonum animum habens uxor mihi nupta est;’ auctoritas, ut Plautus in Casina: ‘libet Charinum quid agat scire nouum nuptum,’ pro maritum. (There are certain things that ought not be uttered because of their meaning, and this applies not only to verbs but to other parts of speech. For example, if we were to make the word ‘bride’ (nupta) or ‘childbearer’ (puerpera) a masculine noun, nature herself rebels because of the meaning, which is applicable to only women, unless some sort of trope or authority intervenes. It’s a trope to say ‘The good spirit of my wife is my man-bride (nuptus)’ instead of ‘a wife who has a good spirit is my bride’; Plautus provides an example of authority [when he says ‘man-bride’] instead of ‘husband’ in his Casina: ‘I’d like to know what the new “man-bride” (nuptus) Charinus is doing.’ ) (Prisc. Gramm. II 370. 1–10)

Priscian deems the participle nuptus – meaning, oxymoronically, ‘male bride’ – as one of those words ‘that ought not to be uttered because of their meaning’.42 Priscian seems not to care that the Plautine context makes clear that the unusual gender provides an obvious joke, since it describes 40 41 42

Corbeill (2015) 48, n. 20; Adams (2013) 392–419; the catalogue in Hodgman (1902) lists eighty-one examples. Serv. Georg. 2.288; for details see Kaster (1978) 197–9. Prisc. Gramm. II 370, 3–4: ‘quae significationis causa dici non debent’.

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a man dressed secretly as a female bride, in a scene concluding with farcically obscene jokes about cucumbers. Instead, Priscian explicitly tells his readers that the expression here is not a figure of speech (figura). Rather, Priscian unexpectedly asserts that the authority of Plautus in this area is even greater ‘than nature herself ’ – ipsa rerum natura. So even when playful, Plautus’s linguistic innovations become reinterpreted by the scholarly tradition in ways that seek to make sense of the past. The signified of the hermaphroditic noun nuptus – masculine in both sex and gender while apparently semantically female – is able to exist in the world of Plautus because he has the authority to create his own conception of nature. That ancient scholars should conceive of any poet, much less Plautus, as possessing enough linguistic prowess to transcend nature may seem difficult to accept. In an analogous way, however, the lexicographer Nonius Marcellus, writing a century or so before Priscian, uses Plautus to support another area of ancient scholarship that attempts to interpret the present by reconstructing the past, namely the practice of etymology. It is especially intriguing – and paradoxical – that in the example from Nonius the evidence of Plautus serves to confirm an etymology on an occasion when Plautus does not even use the word that is under investigation. Nonius attempts to explain the etymology of the feminine participle enixae (‘giving birth’): sed elegantior intellectus . . . quod vinculis quibusdam periculi, quibus inplicarentur, fuerint exsolutae: nexum enim dicimus aptum et conligatum. Plautus in Amphitryone id probat dicens: ‘uno ut labore exsolveret aerumnas duas.’ But a more elegant interpretation is . . . that [these women] have been freed from dangerous bonds that held them; for we speak of a bond [nexum] as fastened and joined together. Plautus approves of this in Amphitruo when he writes ‘so that she might resolve two hardships with one labor.’ (Non. p. 57, 15–19)

Nonius offers two hypotheses for the etymology. First, he says, it could derive from the name of the Roman goddesses called Nixae, who assist women in labour as they struggle to give birth (for which the Latin verb is nitor).43 In the above quotation, however, Nonius rejects this explanation, preferring to derive the term from the notion of escaping from a binding, as represented by the Latin noun nexum. He cites in support of this interpretation, which he calls ‘more elegant’, a line from Plautus’s Amphitryo 43

For these deities see Wissowa (1897–1902).

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describing how Jupiter ensured that Alcmena would give birth to her two sons simultaneously ‘so that she might resolve two hardships with one labor’ (Amph. 488: ‘uno ut labore exsolveret aerumnas duas’). A modern scholar cannot help but notice a seemingly critical flaw in Nonius’s logic: the Plautine verse that he quotes does not contain the noun under discussion, that is, nexum. Apparently, Nonius imagines Plautus to have an awareness of this etymology and so he does not need to include specific details.44 For Nonius makes clear that it is not he who is making the inference from the passage, but that it is Plautus himself who ‘approves of’ (probat) Nonius’s preferred alternative interpretation. In both these areas, then, in explaining grammatical gender and in supporting word origins, a manufactured cultural memory transforms Plautus from being simply a comic text dating to the past. While it is patently true that ‘literature is culture’s memory’,45 the ancient scholarly tradition on Plautus makes clear that the mis-remembering of literature plays a role as well, in allowing a culture’s memory to be recirculated and reinterpreted in ways that surely would have struck even Plautus as foreign. Once Plautus can be perceived as an authority with access to the earliest stages of language, thereby providing later scholars with insight into the mysteries of grammatical gender and etymology, it is only natural that this facility in Latin should make him an imagined model for writers that follow him. As a result, commentators are happy to see intertextual links that would escape the notice of even the most diligent twenty-first-century classicist. Servius, the fourth-century commentator on Vergil’s Aeneid as well as a prominent grammarian, cites Plautus over one hundred times. As with scholars that had preceded him, most of these citations treat odd vocabulary or syntax. I will therefore restrict myself here to those three notes that call attention to a new aspect of Plautus: the ways in which he exerts influence over the poetics of Vergil. Each of these conjectures about Plautine poetic influence strikes the modern reader as highly unusual, which only serves to underscore the increased power wielded by the cultural memory of Plautus. In the first passage, Servius portrays Plautus as a literary precedent for Vergil’s use of an unusual grammatical gender. His lemma is a passage from the fourth Georgic in which Vergil uses the noun imbrex (‘roof tile’). Since Vergil does not use a modifier with this noun, its gender is unclear from the context. Why then does Servius say that we should follow Plautus and 44 45

Corbeill (2015) 35 discusses another example of Nonius’s seemingly perplexing logic regarding word origins. Lachmann (2008) 301.

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consider its gender here to be feminine?46 Servius does not elaborate on his motivation for writing this note, and it is possible that the simple mention of the noun prompts him to remind his students of the appropriate gender that they should use in their daily conversation about imbrices, a noun whose gender did in fact fluctuate throughout Latin antiquity.47 But I would suggest that something more complex is at play, namely, that Plautus’s literary authority allows Servius to assume that Vergil – who is a polymath in the eyes of this commentator – would be thinking of the older playwright, even when it is impossible to determine what gender Vergil may have had in mind while composing this line. To test this hypothesis, my second example looks at the morphology of adjectives. In commenting on Vergil’s use in Aeneid 3 of the phrase terra hospita – ‘receptive land’ – Servius remarks that Vergil formed the feminine adjective as hospita, instead of the expected hospes, incorrectly (usurpative).48 He then cites Lucan for hospes as the preferred feminine form. But further consideration leads him to remark that ‘it’s no wonder that Vergil used the form inaccurately, since even Plautus used the form paupera [sc. instead of pauper for the feminine]’.49 Once again, Servius, and hypothetically Vergil, finds in Plautine precedent a sufficient explanation – and justification – for the irregular Vergilian usage. My final example finds Servius explicitly ascribing to Vergil conscious imitation of a specific passage of Plautus. In a familiar incident from book one of the Aeneid, Neptune addresses the winds that have been let loose by Aeolus and refers to their cave as ‘enormous rocks, your home’ (Aen. 1.140–41: ‘immania saxa, / vestras . . . domos’). Among Servius’s comments on these lines is the assertion that Vergil owed his use of this type of apposition to Plautus. Servius cites the Plautine phrase in an apparent misquotation as ‘unless perhaps you have broken out of the prison, your home’ (‘nisi forte carcerem aliquando effregistis vestram domum’).50 And yet the accuracy 46

47 49

50

Serv. Georg. 4.296: ‘melius tamen secundum Plautum “haec imbrex” dicimus, namque ait “fregisti imbrices meas, dum te dignam sectaris simiam”’ (‘Following Plautus, it is better for us to use “imbrex” [‘roof tile’] in the feminine gender, since he wrote “you broke my tiles [feminine] while you pursued a monkey who was worthy of yourself”’); cf. Plaut. Miles 504–5. 48 ThLL VII, 1 425, 73–80 (W. Ehlers). For usurpative see Schad (2007) 429. Serv. Aen. 3.539: ‘nec mirum abusum esse Vergilium, cum et Plautus “paupera” dixerit’ (for this sense of abutor compare Schad (2007) 7). Prisc. Gramm. II 152, 8–10 cites the phrase ‘paupera haec res est’ from Vidularia. For a modern explanation of hospita see Horsfall (2006) 288–9. Serv. Aen. 1.140: ‘quod autem dixit “saxa immania, vestras domos” de Pseudulo Plauti tractum est, ubi ait “nisi forte carcerem aliquando effregistis vestram domum”’ (for traho indicating poetic source among the grammarians see Schad (2007) 403–4). The nearest approximation to this quotation in extant portions of Plautus is at Pseud. 1172, where Ballio says ‘An etiam umquam ille expugnavit carcerem, patriam tuam?’ (‘Did that man also ever capture the prison that is your homeland?’).

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of the citation is irrelevant here. What is significant is that Plautus has reached the status in Servius’s eyes of being able to supply poetic figures to the epic poet Vergil. With these final three examples we seem to have reached the ultimate stage in the creation of Plautus’s cultural memory: from a storehouse for archaic usage, to someone with an uncanny knowledge of Latin, to a model for Vergilian poetics.

3.1

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to reconsider from the perspective of the preceding discussion the six characteristics that Jan Assmann sees as constituting cultural memory: (1)

(2)

(3) and (4)

Cultural memory works to preserve knowledge. Beginning from the second-century BCE Roman scholars worked on collecting, and securing the authenticity of, the Plautine corpus, using connoisseurship in judging his particular use of language. The object of this step was to create a stable body of texts. With this act of preserving knowledge of Plautus, and creating a literary canon, arose the capacity to reconstruct, that is, to use the text for reasons other than those for which that text was originally intended. This step constitutes the principal aim of this essay, to demonstrate the sorts of areas in which Plautus’s texts were thought to have the ability to reconstitute authentic cultural memories. Here we have seen how that reconstitution is often unlikely to have represented the original purposes that informed Plautus’s writing of his plays. The post-Varronian grammarians best represent the third and fourth characteristics identified by Assmann, namely the transmission of cultural memory and its institutional organisation. As scholars commenting on teaching texts, and often as teachers themselves, the work of these grammarians transforms the meaning of ‘Plautus’ from a set of staged performances to a restricted group of isolated lines that they pass down among their students. As part of an institutional process overseeing the transmission of a newly constructed idea of Plautus, the grammarians act out what Assmann and Czaplicka (1995: 131) term the ‘specialization of the bearers of cultural memory’, thus deciding what is and is not remembered.

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(5) Fifth, this process of transmission in turn creates a system of values intended to educate, civilise, and humanise, as the grammarians use their reconstructed versions of Plautus to teach appropriate means of Latin expression and to better understand Latin literature. As Erll observes, part of the interplay that defines cultural memory consists of going beyond narrative and an author’s intentionality in order to use literature as a way of making sense of the past.51 The final instances in my chapter showed Plautus’s authority being used in areas that he certainly could not have foreseen. (6) Sixth and last, in effecting more acceptable speech norms, the task of the grammarian betrays a self-reflexivity in using the work of previous grammarians to show its ‘preoccupation with its own social system’. The tralatitious character of the late-antique grammarians is obvious, as we see the same examples passed down, with the same explanations, over the course of centuries. For the vast majority of these writers, Plautus is no longer represented by the canon of plays that had so carefully been recomposed in the centuries immediately following his death, but by an increasingly limited corpus of lines that illustrate grammatical principles. Much as the mimes of Publilius Syrus moved from performance texts in the first century BCE to a series of decontextualised sententious platitudes in the following generations, so too does any staged memory of Plautus eventually become forgotten. While broadly complementing Assmann’s schema, this survey of reactions to Plautus has also demonstrated features that are peculiar to the Roman tradition. To begin with, the written accounts preserved in the scholarly tradition neglect almost entirely the original, performative aspect of the plays. Here Plautus’s reception differs from that of Terence, where commentators such as Donatus seek to reconstruct the original dramatic action, even down to details of gesture and tone of voice. The most intriguing discovery that arises from this survey, however, is of the various ways in which the commemorations of Plautus change depending upon a particular era and audience, much as Erll has shown in her analysis of the multiple receptions of Homer’s Odyssey throughout the western tradition.52 In the case of Plautus, this scattered development occurred within a monolingual society, where disparate groups manufacture from the Plautine heritage different ‘functional memories’ that arose from close 51

Erll (2008) 2.

52

Erll (2018b).

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linguistic study, as they by turns create a literary canon, garner a collection of archaisms, and recognise instances of stylistic elegance and epigrammatic wisdom.53 Plautus’s accumulated linguistic and stylistic relevance culminates in the phenomena outlined in the final portion of this essay, as late-antique scholars elevate the playwright to the status of a precursor in whom even Vergil found literary inspiration. It is here that we leave Plautus, whose now fixed corpus has mutated from opportunities for ephemeral performance into a cultural landmark worthy of emulation by students of language, rhetoric, and literature. No longer staged, no longer funny, no longer a self-consciously absurd exploitative experimenter with the Latin language, Plautus has entered a canon to which he would doubtless not have wished to belong. 53

For the concept of ‘functional memory’ versus ‘storage memory’, see A. Assmann (2011a), esp. 127–9.

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chapter 4

Comedy and Its Pasts Martin T. Dinter

4.1

Introduction

Roman comedies transcend the isolated pockets of time in which they are set. Their characters have histories, and their plots are influenced by past events. The audience peers into these with voyeuristic curiosity, as does Periphanes, the senex (‘old man’) of Plautus’ Epidicus: ‘It would be good if people had mirrors . . . they could then think about how they lived their lives long ago in their youth’ (Plaut. Ep. 382–7). The suspense of comedy lies, however, in the vagueness of these very histories; if the figures of the Epidicus had truly possessed ‘mirrors’, Periphanes would have instantly recognised the slave-musician Telestis as his daughter and there would be no narrative to speak of. The complex relationship which comedy holds with its pasts is therefore advantageous to the audience, who derive no little laughter from watching comic characters grapple with their histories. This exchange between past and present events extends beyond comic narratives. The very genre of Roman comedy itself teeters between established convention and radical innovation. It derives numerous tropes from Atellan farce, mime, and New Comedy, but some of the most characteristic features of Roman comedy – most notably the servus callidus (‘cunning slave’) stock character – are unique to it. Similarly, comedy is selfreferential in that specific narrative structures, tropes, and jokes recur across texts, thus providing opportunities for metatextual play. What is more, the language of Plautus’ and Terence’s plays is infused with allusions to the past. At times, these take the form of subtle variations in time markers and tenses, while elsewhere characters play with the verbs meminisse and recordari (both meaning ‘to remember’) or emphasise the noun memoria (‘memory’). In what follows, therefore, I will discuss the diverse ways through which Roman comedy engages with its pasts, situating each interaction within the framework of cultural memory theory. 61

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4.2

Generic Memory

Cultural memory is often identified with isolated objects, most commonly monuments, cultural works, and even food: Assmann cites the recollections which Proust experienced upon tasting madeleines as examples of cultural memory.1 Similarly, Nora identifies specific locations such as the cemetery of Père-Lachaise and the battlefield of Douaumont as crucial ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) for the French nation.2 However, these instances must not imply that cultural memory is restricted to individual works of art, literature, or architecture; on the contrary, it also applies to entire literary genres.3 As the contributions to Van Gorp and MusarraSchroeder demonstrate generic repertoires may be regarded as bodies of shared knowledge, as ‘encyclopaedia’ or ‘museum’ of stocked culture, and can play an important role in absorbing and activating that memory. Accordingly, the genre of Roman comedy as well as each of Plautus’ and Terence’s plays should be read as deposits as well as triggers of Roman cultural memory.4 However, we should not expect to identify so-called ‘pure facts of memory’ in classical literature, since it ‘reconstructs’ past motifs instead of ‘reproducing’ them.5 Comic playwrights often alter character types, stock scenes, and plotlines. However, these changes are not always unintentional, and often serve narratological agendas. The care with which elements from other genres are adapted into the collective memory of Roman comedy is best illustrated by its character types. Most figures in Roman comedy are derived from the four stock types of Atellan farce. Bucco, the glutton, thus finds his parallel in the comic parasitus (‘parasite’), most notably Artotrogus in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Terence’s eponymous Phormio.6 Both of these characters are indeed defined by their appetites; ‘Artotrogus’ is formed from the words for ‘bread’ (ἄρτος) and ‘to gnaw’ (τρώγω), while Phormio proudly declares, ‘They don’t want to feed a man with an appetite like mine’ (Ter. Phorm. 335). The Roman parasitus, however, is far more than a mere Latinisation of the Atellan Bucco. The very term parasitus, calqued from the Greek παράσιτος, means 1 3 4 5

6

Assmann (2008) 111. 2 Nora (1989) 23. For a survey of ‘genres as repositories of cultural memory’ see Van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder (2000). See e.g. Corbeill in this volume and Hanses (2020). Assmann (2001) 25, following Halbwachs (1925) 189: ‘Memory cannot preserve the past as such, only those recollections subsist that in every period society, working within its present-day frameworks, can reconstruct.’ On Bucco as glutton see Butler (1972) 75.

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‘one who eats at the table of (lit. alongside) another’; hence, the comic parasite does not merely have a prodigious appetite, but must fill that appetite by sponging off another character.7 His behaviour provides opportunities for social satire because it mirrors the social networks of Plautus’ and Terence’s Rome: ‘the parasitus . . . was felt to be a useful tool to criticise certain aspects of the Roman patron-client system’.8 That the parasitus had become a real-world social concern in the late Republic and early Empire is moreover evident from this character’s frequent recurrence in literature, from Cato the Elder’s De Agricultura (5.4) to Horace’s Sermones 1.9 and Petronius’ Satyricon, in the latter of which the main characters, Encolpius and Giton, are professional parasiti: despite being ‘bruised and sore’, they hurry to the baths upon hearing that Trimalchio, ‘a very rich man who has a clock and uniformed trumpeter in his dining room’, will be hosting them for dinner that day (Petr. Sat. 26).9 These instances highlight that the figure of the parasitus is not simply a ‘misremembered’ shadow of Bucco; rather, comic playwrights modified a key attribute from that Atellan character, adding sycophancy to the original trait of gluttony so as to poke fun at a contemporary phenomenon and allow for a rich reception of that very character in Roman literature. The other three stock characters of Atellan farce are likewise transformed for Roman audiences.10 Maccus the clown finds a counterpart in Plautus’ Pyrgopolynices, the titular ‘braggart soldier’ (Miles gloriosus), as both are defined by their exaggerated arrogance; unlike the deformed Maccus, however, Pyrgopolynices revels in his sexuality, declaring ‘Venus loves me’ (Plaut. Mil. 985). We can easily imagine an abundance of Pyrgopolynices-like veterans in the late Republic; in the second century BC, the Roman army maintained 75,000 men, each of whom served an average of six years during which they were amply exposed to the machismo of barracks culture.11 As with the parasitus, therefore, Plautus’ reworking of Maccus allows him to mock real-world behaviours.12 To state that the ‘braggart soldier’ type is derived directly from Atellan farce is, however, problematic. Menandrian comedy also features several such characters, ranging from Bias in the Kolax to Polemon in the 7 9 10 11 12

8 For this etymology see Wilton-Godberfforde (2017) 133. Francese (2007) 102. On the social reality of the parasitus see Richlin (2017) 73. For descriptions of these characters see Pieczonka (2016). Sage (2013) 234. Plautus and Terence were active in the first half of the second century BC, between the Second and Third Punic Wars; the Rome they inhabited was therefore heavily militarised. The theme of soldiers acquiring bad habits – including womanising and bragging – from their military service is a mainstay of late Republican literature; Cicero’s Antony is the epitome of such a career soldier (see throughout Cic. Phil. 2).

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Perikeiromene, who are themselves derived from the alazon (‘braggart’) stock character of Greek Old Comedy, such as the sophists in Aristophanes’ Clouds, as well as Protagoras in Eupolis’ Kolakes K-A 157.13 These multiple origins underscore the complexity of creating new generic memories, which rarely arise from a single model but typically incorporate various precedents. Memory theorists describe this web using the term ‘relationality’, entailing an ‘ongoing connectivity among diverse elements, which creates meaningful structures and at the same time transforms all elements involved’.14 The ‘element’ of the Atellan character Dossennus, a crafty cook, thus combines with the ‘element’ of prostitution from both Greek and Roman comedy so as to produce ‘pimp’ (leno) or ‘madam’ (lena) characters.15 Terence’s Sannio thus revels in both his criminality and duplicity: ‘I’m a pimp, I admit it, the bane of all young men, a perjurer, a plague’ (Ter. Ad. 186–7). By explicitly drawing attention to his role as ‘pimp’, he draws upon the generic memory of that stock character: the audience forms expectations for Sannio’s actions based on their knowledge of previous lenones.16 Similarly, unlike their Atellan predecessor Pappus – who is a ‘mostly unsuccessful’ old man – the patriarchs of Plautine and Terentian comedy possess authority as ‘father figures’ (patres familias).17 The honour accorded to these characters reflects the Roman patria potestas (‘paternal power’), a sociolegal tenet which accorded fathers the power of life or death over their children.18 To reflect their power, jokes at the expense of patres familias never progress too far. In Plautus’ Asinaria, while the young master Argyrippus must physically carry a slave on his back, his father Demaenetus receives only verbal mockery by characters of high status such as Artemona, the family matriarch (Plaut. Asin. 701–11; 865–7).19 Significantly, the most recognisable stock character of Roman comedy – the servus callidus (‘cunning slave’) – has no counterpart in Atellan farce. He is easily distinguished from other characters through physical peculiarities, 13

14 15 16 17 19

On these instances see McDowell (1990) 289, who defines an alazon as ‘a man who holds an official position or professes expertise which, he claims, makes him superior to other men; he exploits it, normally in speech, to obtain profit, power, or reputation; but what he says is actually false or useless’. Erll (2018b) 278–9. On the prominence of prostitute characters in both the Greek and Roman comic traditions see Feltovich (2015) 134–5. As Marshall (2006) 139 observes, Atellan characters ‘constitute an element in the “cultural literacy” of the average Roman theatregoer’. On Pappus’ ineffectual ambition see Hurbánková (2010) 76. 18 Saller (1994) 103. See Dinter (2020) on the hierarchy of mockery in Plautus’ Asinaria.

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such as the ‘quivering eyebrow’ which Pseudolus attributes to himself and which would have been depicted upon the actor’s mask (Pseud. 107).20 Moreover, servi callidi have distinctive purposes and behavioural patterns: their propensity for ‘weaving (and unweaving) all the plot’s intrigues’ is exemplified by Plautus’ Libanus, who tries to recoup his master’s money through an elaborate charade involving another slave, Leonida (Plaut. Asin. 371–431).21 While this craftiness might call Dossennus-type characters to mind, unlike antagonistic ‘cooks’ and ‘pimps’, the servus callidus is always on the protagonist’s side: Libanus commits fraud not for himself but for his master, who needs twenty minae to buy his mistress (359–69).22 Hence, even though servi callidi fit into the system of stock-characters which Atellan farce lends to Roman comedy, their specific attributes of cunning mixed with benevolence are unique to the latter genre. Another pattern concerning slave depiction, the servus currens (‘running slave’) routine, has its roots in mime. The exaggerated movements of that art form translate into the physical comedy of this topos, which involves a slave rushing about while under orders. During his attempt to wring money out of his master, Periphanes, Epidicus assigns himself this role in a metatheatrical aside: ‘Like this pretend that you’ve been looking for the chap throughout the whole city’ (Plaut. Ep. 195). He thus acts out the typical movements of a servus currens, putting on an ‘exhausted’ posture, speaking in a ‘hoarse’ voice, and feigning breathlessness: ‘Wait, wait, let me catch some breath, please’ (200–5). As this passage highlights, even though there is no specific scene in mime which serves as a clear model for this routine, its combination of improvisation and corporal expression is characteristic of the mimetic genre as a whole.23 What is more, that Epidicus can transform into a servus currens simply by making the expected gestures highlights the strong memory tradition which this trope possesses within the genre of Roman comedy.24 The siege in Terence’s Eunuchus likewise derives its humour from onstage movement. The military formations which the soldier Thraso barks 20

21 22 23 24

The design of this mask is debated; Marshall (2006) 134–5 suggests that the mask simply depicted one raised eyebrow, which the actor would ‘quiver’ by moving his face about, whereas Slater (2000) 99–100 suggests that actors wore ‘mechanical eyebrows’. Telò (2019) 49. Similarly, Syrus in Ter. Heaut. helps his young master, Clitipho, to purchase the courtesan Bacchis (327–8). Hurbánková (2010) 70. Petrone (1983) 19 thus highlights the metatextual potential of the servus currens routine, which is a ‘manifesta auto-parodia’ (‘clear self-parody’).

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out to followers create an amusing contrast, since he imposes them upon an ‘unsoldierly’ group composed of slaves, bandits and a eunuch: ‘Donax, in the centre of the line with your crowbar. You, Simalio, on the left wing. You, Syriscus, on the right . . .’ (Ter. Eun. 774–5). That motley crew’s failed attempt to position themselves according to these instructions results in further slapstick humour. A verbal tug-of-war, which is easily reimagined as a physical battle onstage, breaks out over a currently enslaved Athenian girl: ‘Give Pamphila back? You lay hands on her? Of all the –!’ (797). Similarly, the actor playing Gnatho, one of Thraso’s slaves, would have gesticulated wildly while threatening his opponent Chremes, Pamphila’s brother: ‘I’ll bash your brains out, if you don’t go away’ (790–5). As with the servus currens routine, this scene has no direct parallel in mime. However, its ‘remarkably vigorous’ stage movement corresponds to ancient descriptions of that genre, which was so dependent on physical comedy that actors competed in their stage-vomiting skills: ‘In a farce called “Laureolus,” in which the chief actor falls as he is making his escape and vomits blood, several understudies so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency that the stage swam in blood’ (Suet. Calig. 57).25 As with Atellan farce, however, the specific memory relationship between Italian mime and Roman comedy remains blurry. Goldberg points out that many of the aspects conventionally associated with mime – such as ‘fast-moving slapstick’ – are also present in Greek New Comedy, which may therefore have served as a more immediate inspiration for Roman comedy.26 Thraso’s failed siege of Pamphila’s house is thus not only derived from mime, but also from Diphilus’ The Soldier (also titled The Eunuch and The Wall-Takers), of which the main character is also a braggart soldier, most likely Demetrius of Phaleron, and in which a military raid likewise goes wrong.27 The similarities between Greek New Comedy and Roman Comedy indeed deserve further elaboration. These genres share numerous plot similarities; to name but one example, Menander’s The Double Deceiver thus serves as the source for Plautus’ Bacchides. Both plays include a scene where the young protagonist – Sostratos in the former and Mnesilochus in the latter – returns previously swindled money to his father (Men. DE 59–63; 25

26 27

On the vigour of Ter. Eun. 771–816, see Panayotakis (2005) 19; on Laureolus Bartsch (1994) 52. Cf. Mart. De Spect. 9, which describes a criminal being executed through crucifixion during another mime-performance of Laureolus. Goldberg (1982–83) 318. Cf. Csapo (1987), who suggests that the servus currens derives from Greek New Comedy rather than mime. Edmonds (1957) 100–1. On Demetrius as the inspiration for The Soldier see Lape (2004) 62.

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Plaut. Bacch. 524–5).28 As I have emphasised throughout this chapter, however, Plautus does not simply ‘recollect’ elements of Menander’s play. On the contrary, he adapts the money subplot to address the specific challenges posed by Roman performance conventions. Menander was able to occupy the stage during Sostratos’ and his father’s journey to retrieve the money using a now-lost choral interlude.29 However, as Roman acting troupes did not contain choruses, Plautus cut out the on-stage interaction between father and son, instead having Mnesilochus return the money offstage in the space of four verses, spoken by the auxiliary character Pistoclerus (526–29). Batstone suggests that Mnesilochus’ quick interaction with his father – so much briefer than the parallel encounter in Menander’s play – does not merely result from stagecraft necessities, but also reflects ‘a typical Plautine disinterest in the sentimental family values of New Comedy’.30 By treating well-established scenes differently than previous comedians did, therefore, Plautus reveals a unique comic ideology. In the language of cultural memory, such an act of self-expression takes place when ‘individual memory’ (Plautus’ idiosyncratic treatment of family ties) asserts itself against ‘socially agreed memory within a defined context’, as represented in this case by the Menandrian model for father-son interactions.31 Understanding the clashes between these types of memory thus enables us to distinguish individual playwrights’ tendencies from those of the wider generic tradition. In addition, Plautus’ treatment of the aforementioned scene reaffirms what we have observed about the complexity of memory transmission.32 Roman comedians did not receive their New Comedy models as monolithic slabs of theatre, but rather as what Basu terms dispositifs: ‘heterogeneous elements within a system, and the relationships between them, which produce a particular “tendency”’.33 In the aforementioned passage, Plautus thus links the same elements together as Menander did – a young man, money to be returned – but adds a unique twist to the ‘tendency’ of this plot component by replacing the chorus with Pistoclerus. As we have seen, moreover, the need for this twist partially derives from generic memory, that is, the convention that Roman plays do not contain choruses. This concept of shifting conventions is key to Assmann’s system of memory, in which traditions both preserve cultural memory and are themselves shaped by it.34 28 29 30 33

On the relationship between these plays see Traill (2008) 92–3. Men. DE 64, as reconstructed and interpreted by Arnott (1979) 158–9. Batstone (2005) 38–9. 31 Bommas (2011c) 94. 32 See n. 16 in this chapter. Basu (2012) 4. 34 Assmann (2006a) 8.

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Apart from Atellan farce, mime, and Greek New Comedy, the Roman tradition of Fescennine verse also makes its way into comic texts. This verse genre consists of insults often performed at weddings: ‘Let the sharptongued Fescennine verses pour their festive abuse’ (Sen. Med. 113). While they were often ‘improvised and responsive’, Macrobius’ reference to Fescennini written by the emperor Augustus suggests that they were also scripted to some extent (Macr. Sat. 2.24.21). Their rude humour manifests in Roman comedy as strings of insults: Chremes in The Self-Tormentor tells his son ‘You’re a useless, good-for-nothing, two-faced, profligate, debauched reprobate’ (Ter. Heaut. 1033–4). The trochaic septenarii of Fescennine verse also appears as the second most common metre in Roman comedy behind iambic senarii, taking up approximately 40.9 per cent of Plautus’ verses and 22 per cent of Terence’s.35 This interplay between Fescennine verse and Roman comedy gains significance from their coexistence within the ‘memory environment’ of Latin literature.36 The former genre did not merely inspire the latter, but was in turn kept fresh within the popular consciousness by comic performances drawing on Fescennine language and metre. Both genres thus combined in order to create an ‘ensemble of texts’ which defined Roman poetry as a separate category from their Greek (New Comedy) and native Italian (Atellan farce, mime) predecessors.37 The generic memory of Roman comedy does not solely arise from its relationships to other literary genres. The sociocultural reminiscences which recur throughout Plautine and Terentian plays also form part of the collective memory of comic characters. These recollections often take the form of allusions to the Roman mos maiorum (‘traditions of our forefathers’). To name but one example, the pedagogue in Plautus’ Bacchides, Lydus, laments that educational standards have fallen: ‘In the olden days a man would hold an office by popular vote before ceasing to obey his tutor. But at present, before a boy is seven years old, if you lay a hand on him, he immediately cracks the tutor’s head with his tablet’ (Plaut. Bacch. 439–42). On the surface, this comparison appears to be little more than a hyperbolic assertion of nostalgia; Lydus’ comparison is absurd, for the minimum age to hold a major office around Plautus’ and Terence’s lifetimes was thirty-six, far older than any boy would have been expected to obey his tutor.38 When read more closely, however, Lydus’ complaint strikes at a major social concern in Plautus’ day: the idea that Rome was 35 38

Barrios-Lech (2016) 159; Moore (2012) 387. 36 Nora (1989) 7. 37 Hölkeskamp (2014) 67. I refer here to the Lex Villia annalis, a set of several legislative amendments. According to this law the three most important offices, the aedileship, praetorship, and consulship, had minimum age limits of 36, 39, and 42 respectively (Evans and Kleijwegt (1992)).

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experiencing a moral decline due to the encroachment of Greek cultural forces.39 This was considered to be such a hot-button issue that contemporary politicians took extreme steps to safeguard what they viewed as Rome’s heritage against Hellenic influences; foremost among these politicians was Cato the Elder, who expelled the Athenian philosopher Carneades from Rome to prevent him from charming the city’s youth (Plut. Cat. Mai. 22). The tensions between the ‘olden days’ and ‘present’ which Lydus emphasises therefore highlight the potential of the comic genre to mediate between idealised pasts and contemporary realities. What is more, Lydus’ train of thought belongs to the generic memory of comedy because it is a leitmotif within that genre: the opposition between past rectitude and present decadence is echoed by numerous other characters, ranging from Plautus’ Megaronides – who laments the ‘excessive plague of wickedness which has attacked good morals’ (‘nam hic nimium morbus mores invasit bonos’, Plaut. Trin. 27) – to Demea and Micio in Terence’s Adelphoe, who respectively epitomise the old/strict and new/liberal styles of parenting (Ter. Ad. 984–96). As these instances highlight, Roman comedy shines a spotlight on its related genres and ideologies by distilling their salient characteristics. In so doing, comedy makes itself crucial to the transmission of these phenomena, which it moves out of the ‘functional memory’ of its Roman audience – which consists of transient elements such as rituals and beliefs – and into their ‘stored memory’.40 At the same time, however, Republican audiences would have been reminded of traditional literary forms and moral laws upon watching the aforementioned scenes, and in recalling these past phenomena might have called up their own memories of watching farce or being disciplined by their tutors. These personal confrontations with the past ensure that memories do not grow obsolete in ‘storage’, but constantly ‘enter into connections, configurations, [and] compositions of meaning’.41 By means of this dual process, therefore, Roman comedy contributes to both the storage and the functional memories of its audience.

4.3

Intertextual Memory

Roman comedy does not, however, describe the past for the sole purpose of transmitting heritage. Intertextual allusions to stock plotlines and jokes are also crucial to Plautus’ and Terence’s comic technique. Meta-references, in 39 40

See Leonardis in this volume on antiquarianism as a reaction to the perceived moral decay of this period. See Erll and Young, (2011) 34–7 on Assmann and Assmann (1994). 41 A. Assmann (2011) 33.

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which comic characters invite the audience to ‘fill in’ scenes based on their knowledge of other plays, encourage interactivity; recurring narrative patterns likewise enable comedy fans to guess at the plot and generate laughs by foiling these expectations. In a similar vein, the sexual jokes of Roman comedy derive humour from intertextual and sociocultural memory. The Pseudolus frequently signposts its comic intertexts and as such is Plautus’ ‘most aggressively metatheatrical play’.42 The eponymous protagonist advertises his status as servus callidus by characterising himself as wily: ‘I’m announcing to the whole people, to all my friends and acquaintances, that they should be on their guard against me today and that they shouldn’t trust me’ (Plaut. Pseud. 126–8). Having hinted at the deception to come, he invites spectators to imagine the details of that scheme for themselves: ‘I’ll let you know in good time. I don’t want it to be repeated twice over, our plays are quite long enough as it is’ (388–9).43 The audience is thus prompted to call up their memories of previous comic plots – as encapsulated by the phrase ‘our plays’ – and to predict Pseudolus’ behaviour based on these intertexts. Although arranging Roman comedies in chronological order proves tricky, and so we cannot infer what intertexts the premiere audience would have recalled, in the later Republic, they would likely have found parallels for Pseudolus in Libanus (Plaut. Asin.) and Syrus (Ter. Heaut.).44 However, Plautus humorously subverts any predictions the audience might make about Pseudolus by revealing that he is not quite as crafty as he claims. Unlike his fellow servi callidi, he initially finds himself without a viable plan: ‘Where to start weaving your web of deceit, or how to bring that design to completion?’ (399–405). His helplessness is comic because it clashes with the audience’s ideal of a servus callidus. This is not to say that Pseudolus lacks intelligence. On the contrary, his metatextual references to ‘our plays’, ‘weaving’, and ‘design’ hint that his momentary disorientation does not stem from a lack of plans, but rather from their overabundance: ‘Pseudolus overstates his predicament here in that an abundance of New Comedy plots are available to him, as he wishes to stress the need for novelty and freshness, both for actors and playwrights’.45 42 43

44 45

Christenson (2019) 137. Moore (1998) 101 emphasises the entertaining effect of Pseudolus’ invitation: ‘All this concern with time in general, and with the pace of performance in particular, is . . . flattering to the audience. The actors state sincerely that no matter how much fun material playwright and performers add, they must keep the play moving to keep the audience entertained.’ Schutter (1952) provides a widely accepted chronological list of Plautine works, but as Slater’s (2000) re-dating of the Curculio and Trinummus highlights, this sequence is far from settled (175). Christenson (2019) 138.

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While Pseudolus alludes explicitly to his intertextual models, other comedies rely on implicit connections to shared plotlines. Adventures stemming from mistaken identity are particularly popular in Roman comedy; Plautus’ Amphitryo features a scene where Sosia, a servant, meets the god Mercury who has morphed into his form. Their confrontation establishes a model for further scenes of comic anagnorisis (‘recognition’), consisting of two main elements.46 Such passages always contain a stichomythic exchange, during which the characters involved ‘fight’ for both lines of dialogue and their identities. Often, a physical fight also occurs, thus providing an opportunity for physical comedy: mercury: Quoius es? sosia: Amphitruonis, inquam, Sosia. mercury: Ergo istoc magis, quia uaniloquo’s, uapulabis: ego sum, non tu, Sosia. (mercury: Whose slave are you? sosia: I’m Amphitruo’s Sosia, I’m telling you. mercury: Well then, all the more you’ll get a thrashing all the more because you’re an airbag: I am Sosia, not you. [hits him again]) (Plaut. Amph. 378–89)

Scenes involving mistaken identity are also inherently tied to the past because characters battling over identities frequently appeal to memories and historical events as a way to justify their claims. In cases where two characters are both trying to adopt a single identity, this leads to the construction of an ‘alternate’ history distinct from true events: sosia: What, the hell! Aren’t I Amphitruo’s slave Sosia? Didn’t our ship come here from Port Persicus this night, the one that brought me here? Didn’t my master send me here? Aren’t I standing in front of our house now? Haven’t I a lamp in my hand? Aren’t I speaking, aren’t I awake? Didn’t this man here beat me up with his fists just now? Yes, he did: my jaws are still hurting, dear me. Then why am I hesitating and why don’t I go into our house? ... mercury: No, you lied about everything you just said: I am Amphitruo’s Sosia: this night we set sail from Port Persicus; we’ve seized the city where King Pterela reigned, we’ve conquered the Teloboian legions by force of arms, and Amphitruo himself has killed King Pterela in battle. (Plaut. Amph. 403–15)

46

On this scene as a manifestation of anagnorisis – a term more often applied to tragedy – see Cave (1988) 79.

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The parallel sequence of ideas in Sosia’s and Mercury’s speeches exemplify this construction. Sosia’s assertion of his selfhood can be divided into three stages. He first identifies himself using conventional ‘social identification labels’, which for a Roman slave means the name of his owner (‘Amphitruo’s slave’) and his own name (‘Sosia’).47 He then calls upon a specific past experience as a means of proving his existence: ‘Didn’t our ship come from Port Persicus this night . . . ?’ The implication is that this experience proves his tie to Amphitruo, who was, as the pronoun ‘our’ indicates, on the same vessel. By incorporating this journey into his selfdefinition, Sosia enacts, on the individual level, a process which cultural memory theorists have observed on the societal scale: the concretion of identity. As Assmann observes with relation to objectivised culture, ‘a group bases its consciousness of unity and specificity upon this knowledge and derives formative and normative impulses from it, which allows the group to reproduce its identity’.48 While Sosia cannot be said to have a ‘culture’, he likewise uses a verifiable experience – the voyage he shared with his master from Port Persicus – as a reference point for reconstructing his identity. His reference to a previous beating (‘Didn’t he beat me up just now?’) fulfils much the same purpose: his memory of that negative experience is vital, so he claims, to his ‘Sosia-ness’. In the final segment of his monologue, Sosia moves out of the past and into the present: ‘Haven’t I a lamp in my hand? Aren’t I speaking?’ On the one hand, these rhetorical questions provide opportunities for performance: we can easily imagine Sosia holding up a prop-lamp and inflecting his voice to emphasise the word ‘speaking’. On the other, they highlight the link between experience and memory; even when he does not rely on past recollections, Sosia interprets his current actions (‘speaking’) and perceptions (the sight and weight of the lamp in his hand) as incontrovertible evidence that he is Sosia. Mercury attacks Sosia’s assertion of identity by refuting each of these ideas. He invalidates Sosia’s assumption that ‘speaking’ constitutes proof of identity by suggesting that he did not speak the truth: ‘No, you lied about everything you just said.’ Mercury then claims Sosia’s identity markers – master’s name and personal name – for himself: ‘I am Amphitruo’s Sosia.’ He adds credence to this assertion by presenting it as 47

48

Brink (1997) 455: ‘A name is a kind of social identification label, and a name may be part of one’s selfidentification, tied to one’s persona . . . slaves often had names of both these two categories: one name or “social identification label” given by the owner and another (or several) name(s) used by the slave and by friends and relatives in a close social context.’ Assmann (1995) 128.

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a factual statement (‘I am . . . ’) in contrast to Sosia’s question (‘Aren’t I . . . ?’).49 Scholars working with cultural memory tend to emphasise the authority which names confer;50 as Mercury demonstrates, however, names are far from perfect markers of identity. Two people or places might well share the same name, and names are easily exploited for propagandistic or otherwise misleading purposes. The stand-out example of such exploitation in a late Republican context is Sulla’s adoption of the Greek nickname ἐπαφρόδιτος (‘beloved by Aphrodite’) and the Latin agnomen Felix. Both of these epithets imply a relationship with Venus – of patronage or even of descent – which is just as unverifiable as Mercury’s claim that he, too, is ‘Amphitruo’s Sosia’.51 Having disproved Sosia’s self-identification by discounting his actions and usurping his name, Mercury goes as far as to adopt Sosia’s past. By echoing the information that Sosia and Amphitruo had travelled from Port Persicus and presenting it as his own experience – ‘this night we set sail’ – Mercury lends support to his claim of ‘Sosia-ness’. He is not only Sosia in the present moment, but, so he suggests, has always been Sosia. He compounds the effect of this claim by adding specific details which demonstrate his exclusive knowledge of Sosia’s past: the seizure of King Pterela’s city, the conquest of the Teloboian legions, and Amphitruo’s role in killing Pterela in battle. He speaks of these acts in the first-person plural, as if recalling his own participation in them.52 Mercury’s hijacking of Sosia’s memories is effective because, as we have seen, specific personal experiences are of value in identity formation. His rewriting of Sosia’s past also mirrors the memory phenomenon of alternate history, during which – as in this case – past events are (mis-)appropriated to modify present perceptions.53 The plot device of mistaken identity plays out, along extremely similar lines, in numerous comedies. The central problem in the Menaechmi stems from misrecognitions of two twins, Menaechmus of Syracuse and Menaechmus of Epidamnus, who find themselves in Epidamus at the same time.54 Terence tends away from the trope of identical doubles and more towards children who have assumed new identities after being 49

50 51 52 53 54

As Christenson (2000) 217 notes, moreover, the construction of Mercury’s assertion emphasises his legitimacy as Sosia: ‘Mercury reverses the usual word order in this expression (cf. [Plaut. Amph.] 148, 378, 394, 403), which normally puts master before slave.’ Seeber (2005) 153. Eckert (2016a) 43–86 outlines the implications and ancient receptions of Sulla’s nicknames. Plaut. Amph. 413–14: expugnavimus . . . cepimus. On alternate history and cultural memory see Rosenfeld (2002). Plaut. Men.; the magisterial commentaries of this play are Gratwick (1993) and Christenson (2010).

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separated from their parents: to name but one example, in the Heauton Timoroumenos, Antiphila, presented as the child of a weaving-woman, turns out to be the long-lost daughter of the house after her birthmother recognises the ring she is wearing.55 This latter anagnorisis derives its logic from the same considerations which govern Mercury’s and Sosia’s battle for identity: the ring is a reminder, or in cultural memory terms a ‘site of memory’ evoking Antiphila’s birth and later abandonment.56 These past events, once recalled, are then used to confirm her identity as ‘Sostrata’s daughter’ in the present. The humour of Roman comedy likewise demonstrates ties between the past and the present. One such connection entails situating scenes into their intertextual history. The anatomical jokes in Plautus’ plays feed off each other. In the Rudens, the slave Sceparnio asks the prostitute Ampelisca what business she has by a well, to which she replies, ‘A sensible person would be able to see what I want from my equipment’ (Plaut. Rud. 428). Sceparnio repeats her words but colours them with sexual significance: ‘A sensible person would be able to see what I want from my equipment too’ (429). In Ampelisca’s case, ornatus (‘equipment’) refers to her water-jug; in Sceparnio’s case it refers to his phallus. This double entendre also features prominently in the Casina, where Olympio confesses that he had laid his hand on a piece of ‘equipment’ – which he and Pardalisca variously theorise to have been a ‘sword’, ‘radish’, and ‘cucumber’ – during a sexual encounter with his bride Casina, who is actually the male slave Chalinus in disguise (Plaut. Cas. 907–11).57 These scenes are not mutually dependent, for an audience perceives the humour of each episode without knowledge of the other. However, for scholars of Roman comedy these scenes present an intriguing parallel. What is essentially the same joke, the comparison between a penis and some type of ‘equipment’, ‘tool’, or phallic inanimate object, is played very differently in the Rudens and the Casina. In the former play, Sceparnio’s reference to his ‘equipment’ serves as proof of his virility; in the latter, Olympio’s sexual misadventure with Chalinus instead carries emasculating connotations. Another contrast arises when comparing the power which 55 56

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Ter. Heaut. 614–15. On identity confusions in this play see Traill (2008) 122–3. On the concept of ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire) see Nora (1989), who suggests that such ‘sites’ are only necessary because wider ‘environments of memory’ have been lost. This observation applies to Antiphila’s case; the wider apparatus denoting her as the daughter of the house – such as her name, her clothing, and her relationship with her birth parents – have been lost because she was exposed as an infant. Hence, her mother Sostrata must rely on the limited memories encapsulated by the ring in order to affirm her identity. On this passage see Dinter (2020).

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their female interlocutors wield; Ampelisca is forced into a defensive stance by Sceparnio’s aggressive flirting, to the extent that she must beg him for access to the well (‘Why do you begrudge me water, please?’, Plaut. Rud. 434), but Pardalisca takes an active role in Olympio’s humiliation, goading him on with questions until he admits that what he touched ‘was no vegetable’ (Plaut. Cas. 912–14). The fruitfulness of this comparison highlights that anatomical jokes are part of the collective memory of Roman comedy, a genre which, as we have seen, possesses its own ‘shared thesaurus of formulas and motifs’.58 To understand these motifs and the variations imposed upon them in different plays, we must position them within the memory tradition whence they originate. Hence, while it is not necessary to have heard one to laugh at the other, to understand the true purpose of Sceparnio’s joke within the Rudens, it is rewarding to read it alongside Olympio’s dialogue, and vice versa. Another connection between the ‘then’ and ‘now’ links the sociocultural history of Rome to comic plays, which inhabit the present as literary artefacts. Anatomical jokes were not created and performed in a vacuum; on the contrary, as Williams observes, For their humour to be successful, playwrights must have been responding to beliefs and prejudices found among their audiences. Thus we can ask: What was funny to the Romans in the area of sexual behaviour, and what was not? The characters in comedy might well represent extremes, and the jokes might be outrageous, but in order for them to have raised a laugh, they must in the end have been an exaggeration of real phenomena. (Williams (2010) 287)

To name but one example, Sceparnio’s emphasis on his ‘equipment’ might reflect Roman connotations concerning penis size. The cartoonish machismo with which Sceparnio implies that his ‘equipment’ is plainly visible under clothing – and therefore most likely sizeable – calls to mind statues of Priapus, which were endowed with conspicuous phalluses (e.g. LIMC 8.2, plates 680–94), and descriptions of that god in the Carmina Priapea.59 These portrayals signalled that Priapus was both virile and unattractive, 58 59

Godzich (1994) 79 elaborates on the connection between motifs and collective memory. Richlin (1992) 58: One minatory figure stands at the center of the whole complex of Roman sexual humor; he will be represented here by the god Priapus. The general stance of this figure is that of a threatening male. He is anxious to defend himself by adducing his strength, virility, and (in general) all traits that are considered normal – and this is the appeal of the joke teller to his audience, as if both are confirming and checking with each other that they are all right, despite the existence of abnormalities in other people. Hence the central persona or protagonist or narrator is a strong male of extreme virility, occasionally even ithyphallic (as in the Priapic poems).

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qualities which Plautus’ audience may well have transferred onto Sceparnio and which add to the grotesque humour of his attempt to seduce Ampelisca. To take up Williams’ phrasing, therefore, Sceparnio is the ‘exaggeration’ of a very familiar ‘type’ – the well-endowed lecher – and so derives his comedic value from his correspondence with that particular sociocultural memory, which was itself transmitted in ancient Rome through the ‘intertexts’ of Priapic statuary and hymns.

4.4

Intratextual Memory

The generic and intertextual pasts of Roman comedy manifest in the language of that genre. These linguistic allusions are often intratextual in that they relate specifically to events within self-contained narratives, and can be divided into three categories: time markers such as olim (‘once upon a time’ or ‘previously’), monologues recounting previous occurrences using sequences of past tenses, and the use of lemmata which denote memory, in particular the noun memoria (‘memory’) and the verb meminisse ‘to remember’.60 Time markers both emphasise and extricate the past in Roman comedy. They are frequently present in prologues where character motivations must be compressed into a few verses of back-story. This tendency is exemplified by the speech of the god Auxilium (‘Help’) in the Cistellaria, who uses time markers eight times in thirty lines while explaining a convoluted sequence of events (Plaut. Cist. 158–89).61 Demipho raped Phanostrata ‘in the middle of the night’ (multa nocte, 159), who gave birth to a girl ‘in the tenth month following that’ (decumo post mense, 163), but Demipho ‘then’ (tum, 173) married another woman; ‘after’ (postquam, 176) he had married Phanostrata whom he had ‘previously’ (olim, 178) raped, however, he was told of his daughter, whom he ‘immediately’ (extemplo, 182) sought. A slave was called in to identify a prostitute whom he had ‘once’ (olim, 186) seen taking the abandoned infant, a task which catalyses the action of the play, and to which Auxilium promises his help in the present time, which he demarcates using the time marker ‘now’ (nunc, 188). On the one hand, these signposts draw attention to the importance of memory in the plot: as the above monologue indicates, the reason for Demipho’s quest for his daughter is Phanostrata’s memory that they had 60 61

For an overview of meminisse in comic language see Karakasis (2005) 154; on olim ibid. 174–5, memoria 182–3. On Auxilium’s speech as a ‘delayed prologue’ see Connors (2016) 276.

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produced an infant together, whom she had exposed to die. However, Phanostrata’s failure to remember exactly who had taken the infant also lies at the root of the conflict and necessitates the involvement of Lampadiscus, Phanostrata’s slave, who had been placed in charge of the exposure and thus witnessed her infant’s retrieval by a procuress. The Cistellaria thus rests upon the dual processes of remembering and forgetting, and Plautus constantly reminds the reader of this intratextual backbone through timerelated language. Apart from feeding into the underlying motivations and wider themes of the plot, the time markers in Auxilium’s speech also serve a narratological function, for they segment what would – in undivided form – have been a hopelessly convoluted sequence of events. Language pertaining to the past and present is therefore integral to the functioning of the comic text, especially given its performative character: audiences would not have been able to check the script for the pre-story, and so it was in Plautus’ best interests to present that information to them as lucidly as possible.62 Auxilium’s speech is not only organised by time markers, but also by its complex sequence of tenses. The three verses which describe how Lampadiscus is trying to recall the prostitute who took the infant girl goes through three tenses and two moods: operam usque assiduo seruos dat, si possiet meretricem illam inuenire quam olim tollere, quom ipse exponebat, ex insidiis uiderat. (Now the slave is incessantly giving his attention to this task, to see if he can find that prostitute whom he’d once seen from his hiding place pick up the girl when he had exposed her.) (Plaut. Cist. 185–7)

The present tense dat breaks away from the past tenses which dominate the earlier segment of Auxilium’s speech (e.g. ‘commigravit . . . compresserat’ (‘he moved . . . he had raped’, 177–8), and thus serves to transition the narrative from back-story to current conflict. The subjunctive possiet (for Classical Latin possit) is grammatically ‘present’, but highlights a possibility in the future, namely the successful locating of Demipho’s daughter. The third verse then moves back into the past, describing various moments during the exposure process: both the continuous act of abandoning the infant, as indicated by the imperfect exponebat, and the isolated moment in 62

As Hartkamp (2004) points out, moreover, Auxilium’s speech comes as a ‘second prologue’ to rescue the plot after a less structured speech by the procuress (Plaut. Cist. 120–48); it is therefore designed not just to clarify the plot, but also to clear up any misunderstandings which may have arisen from the procuress’ version of events.

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which Lampadiscus catches sight of the prostitute (now procuress), as encapsulated by the verb viderat. These quick changes of tense are crucial to Plautus’ expository technique, which is best described as one of ‘enfolding’; he introduces two new elements – Lampadiscus’ quest and his ultimate goal – but then wraps them back into the narrative by repeating two nuggets of information which the audience already knows from vv. 180–4, namely that Lampadiscus was the slave who exposed the child and also saw the person who took her away. This method of presenting information ensures clarity, which as we have observed is the aim of comic prologues, while mimicking the natural process of recollection. In memory theory, this process does not occur in a vacuum, but takes place when memories are triggered by external pieces of information: ‘[It] is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’.63 The constant switches from past to present which Plautus conveys through varying tenses thus re-enact ‘recollection’ onstage. Thus far, we have discussed ways in which comic playwrights hint at the past. Explicit mentions of memory are, however, also used to emphasise this theme. Terence’s Andria serves as a case in point. In this play, the word memoria is used twice in a positive context, first when the freedman Sosia demonstrates his gratitude for his ex-master by stating that he ‘keeps fresh the memory [of his manumission]’ (‘in memoria habeo’, 40) and again when the slave Davus asks his fellow slave Mysis for her ‘ever-ready memory and cunning’ (‘exprompta memoria et astutia’, 723). In both of these cases, memoria transcends simple ‘recollection’, but denotes awareness either of a particular situation or prudence more generally. These favourable connotations are transferred onto the verb meminisse, which is used affirmatively: at the end of the play Pamphilus, the young man in love, assures his loyal friend Charinus of a share in his good fortune by pronouncing a single word: memini (‘I remember [you]’). As with the aforementioned instances of memoria, here Pamphilus does not claim to ‘have a memory’ of Charinus but rather to care for him. The frequent repetition of memor-root words foreshadows the dénouement in which memory plays a major role: a deus ex machina occurs when Crito, a stranger from Andros, suddenly arrives to inform the protagonists about their long-forgotten familial ties (Ter. An. 919–45). What is more, the consistent references to ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ create opportunities for intratextual parallels: as we have seen, Sosia begins 63

Halbwachs (1925) 38.

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the play by articulating his gratitude through a declaration of memory, and Pamphilus ends it with a similar expression. The effectiveness of this exchange relies on the reader’s ability to remember what had been spoken at the beginning of the play; hence, by book-ending the Andria with memory formulae Terence creates an interactive experience for his audience, who must use their own memories to construct a unified narrative.

4.5 Conclusion Roman comedy constantly finds itself in search for lost time: generic, intertextual, and intratextual memory mingle within its narratives and influence the behaviour of its characters. The stock types and tropes of Roman comedy stretch far backward into Atellan farce, mime, New Comedy, and Fescennine verse, comic plays interact with each other through metatextual and self-referential humour, and even within works the theme of memory – and words which evoke ‘remembering’ – are never far from the surface, especially when viewed through the periscope of cultural memory theory. In a nod to these phenomena, I have titled this chapter ‘Comedy and its Pasts’; Plautine and Terentian comedy is indeed a genre which does not provide a single interpretation of memory, but which challenges its audiences to think about how sociocultural history, intertextual conventions, and narrative backstories each influence stage action as well as dialogue.

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chapter 5

Semper Manebit: Poetry and Cultural Memory Theory in Cicero’s De Legibus Joshua Hartman

Unlike Cicero the orator, philosopher, and celebrated opponent of tyrants, Cicero the poet died a relatively speedy death and left an uncontested legacy. Cicero’s poetic activity earned little mention after his death, and, except for a more holistic assessment from Plutarch, was typically discussed only to be mocked or wished away.1 Regardless of its literary value, I suggest that Cicero understood his poetry as a means to influence and codify memory, and that discussions of his poetry led him to intuit concepts relevant to modern memory studies. To demonstrate this, I turn to Cicero’s De Legibus, a fragmentary dialogue from the late 50s BCE.2 Although the work’s central concerns are legal and political philosophy, it opens with a discussion of a scene from Cicero’s Marius, alongside consideration of Cicero’s potential to write history. Because of this, scholarly treatments that eschew philosophical and legal approaches often examine questions of genre and historical writing.3 I suggest that the 1

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Plutarch records that Cicero’s poetry was originally well-regarded but fell into disrepute due to the innovations of his successors (Vit. Cic. 2.3–4). The most enduring source of negative criticism is likely Juvenal’s tenth satire, but Tacitus and Quintilian also present the poems as embarrassing pieces that were regrettably published (Dial. 21.6; Inst. 11.1.24). Among modern assessments, Clausen (1986) represents a crucial reorientation of the scholarly consensus on Cicero’s poetry. Similarly, Goldberg (1995) constitutes an attempt to understand Cicero in context, although it still bears signs of the negative impressions of Cicero’s poems that dominated the conversation before it. See also the incorporation of the poetic works into Steel (2005), and the relatively favorable assessment of Gee (2013). The dialogue’s date is uncertain, but widely accepted consensus places it in the late 50s (see e.g. Rawson (1991); Dyck (2004); Van der Blom (2010); Woodman (2012)). For concise overviews of the dating see Rawson (1991): 125–9 and Dyck (2004): 5–7. For the most robust collection of scholarly hypotheses, see Marinone and Malaspina’s Cronologia Ciceroniana at www.tulliana.eu/ephemerides/ frames.htm. The dialogue was probably incomplete and never published by Cicero (Rawson (1991): 129–31; Dyck (2004): 7–12). E.g. Woodman (2012); Dolganov (2008), esp. 27–30; Fox (2007): 141–4; Shackleton-Bailey (1983): 241–2; Rawson (1972): 41. See Rawson (1972) for the De Legibus as a valuable source for Cicero’s own research interests in Roman history (37–8). Although brief, Henderson’s treatment of the scene recognizes its memorializing potential (2004: 166–8, esp. 168).

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dialogue’s generic reflections also introduce a conversation about memory and reveal a Ciceronian intuition about the operation of cultural memory and its difference from history.4 While some scholars have proposed abandoning this distinction in favor of understanding both memory and history as different modes of remembering,5 I argue that Cicero recognized them as distinct categories and that, therefore, the difference between memory and history existed on the Roman intellectual landscape alongside concepts like lieux de mémoire and invented tradition.

5.1

Invented Traditions, Lieux de Mémoire, and the De Legibus

atticus: Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur, saepe a me lectus in Mario: sin manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim est sane vetus. quintus: Manet vero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. Sata enim est ingenio. Nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae versu seminari potest. a: Quo tandem modo, Quinte? Aut quale est istuc quod poetae serunt? Mihi enim videris fratrem laudando suffragari tibi. q: Sit ita sane; verum tamen, dum Latinae loquentur litterae, quercus huic loco non deerit quae Mariana dicatur . . . a: I recognize that grove and the oak tree of the people of Arpinum: I have read about them often in the Marius. If that oak tree survives, this is surely it; it’s certainly old enough. q: It survives, Atticus, and it will always survive. Its roots are in the imagination. No farmer’s cultivation can preserve a tree as long as one sown in a poet’s verse. a: How so, Quintus? What sort of thing do poets sow? In praising your brother, I suspect that you are looking for praise for yourself. q: Be that as it may, as long as Latin literature has a voice, there will always be an oak at this spot called Marius’ . . .6 (Cic. Leg. 1.1)

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The term cultural memory was popularized by Jan and Aleida Assmann. Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992; English translation 2011) has been influential for its investigation of the concept in ancient civilizations. Assmann’s most concise definition of the term is “the handing down of meaning” that occurs at the confluence of other types of memory (2011: 6–7). For example, participation in a ritual practice that commemorates a historical event, a painting depicting that event, and a conversation about that event each represent contributions to cultural memory. See also Erll (2008), 1–7. See Erll (2008), 1–14, esp. 7. 6 All translations of the De Legibus are taken from Zetzel (1999).

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This conversation between Quintus Cicero and Atticus introduces the De Legibus. It is arresting in its abruptness – reminiscent of a dialogic commentary like the Saturnalia – since it proceeds so rapidly to introduce and discuss literature.7 Unlike Macrobius’ work, however, the De Legibus is not devoted to a discussion of a single poem, nor does that poem form the whole of Atticus’ concern. While the precise circumstances remain unclear, the dialogue’s first speaker clearly wonders whether he has wandered into a location that likewise appears in the Marius. Modern scholars must work to restrain their jealousy at Atticus’ situation, since he has a native of the place (and a relative of the author) available to help him investigate. After he begins asking questions, however, Atticus’ circumstances become markedly less enviable: His partner in conversation responds by asserting that the tree is simultaneously the genuine site and a complete fiction. Moreover, Quintus elaborates the belief that the tree will be perpetually reinvented by the inhabitants of Arpinum for as long as Cicero’s poem is read. The tree represents a tradition that evokes both the memory of Cicero and Marius, even though it may be planted or “invented,” contrasted by Quintus to a “genuine” tree that has been cultivated by a farmer.8 Quintus’ agricultural metaphor should not be underestimated: the tree, whether physical or literary, has the potential to grow if it is given the proper care (cultus). Long after it becomes plausible for any living tree to date back to the time of Marius, Arpinum’s native son and famous general, its citizens will insist that that tree really is as old as they say. In so doing, they will validate the narrative associated with the site, and impose their version of events on both compatriots and outsiders. Quintus’ reply suggests an understanding of the modern concept of “invented tradition,” or a conscious cultural innovation imposed in order to reinforce aspects of the culture that groups within it find important. The term comes from the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, and was originally used in their investigation of tradition’s role in resisting the rising power of 7

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The abrupt and immediate transition to a discussion of Cicero’s poetry at the beginning of the dialogue seems forced, but the introduction to the De Legibus has been praised for how skillfully it imitates a meandering conversation (for an overview of studies that emphasize this dimension of the introductory scene, see Krebs (2009)). Krebs also remarks that the desultory nature of the initial conversation permits the discussion of various topics that he perceives as disparate: the nature of poetry versus history, the nature of fabulae, the leisure afforded to Cicero and his literary production, etc. (2009: 91). In contrast to this approach, I treat the discussion as a relatively unified progression of thought, providing insight into Cicero’s decision to pursue another work of philosophy rather than history. Woodman’s interpretation is similar, and he also introduces persuasive arguments about the composition of the conversation that indicate links between these topics (e.g., 2012: 5). For the fusion of Cicero’s memory with Marius’, see Henderson (2004): 168.

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European nation-states.9 Commenting on this body of work, Richard Terdiman provides both concise summary and further elaboration: The tartans, kilt, and the bagpipe of Scotland turned out to be, if not pure inventions, then at least conscious cultural impositions around which Highlanders could rally after the union with England. In France, the most venerable organized ritual of national celebration – Bastille Day – dates only from 1880. These practices seem to inhere in our expectations of the world. Their recency then astonishes us because we have been induced to forget their greenness.10

It is impossible to know exactly what the quercus Mariana meant to the citizens of Arpinum, and we cannot know if it ever existed before Cicero wrote about it.11 Nevertheless, it must have some memory value, as Quintus announces that it will never be forgotten (Leg. 1.1). Quintus anticipates the necessary invention of a site within the grove, even if the present quercus Mariana is destroyed by age or storms. He is confident enough to repeat this claim at both the beginning and end of his reply to Atticus (Leg.1.2). Furthermore, his response provides insight into the processes of cultural memory that surround the tree: q: Sit ita sane; verum tamen, dum Latinae loquentur litterae, quercus huic loco non deerit quae Mariana dicatur, eaque, ut ait Scaeuola de fratris mei Mario, ‘canescet saeclis innumerabilibus’; nisi forte Athenae tuae sempiternam in arce oleam tenere potuerunt, aut quam Homericus Vlixes Deli se proceram et teneram palmam vidisse dixit, hodie monstrant eandem, multaque alia multis locis diutius commemoratione manent quam natura stare potuerunt. Quare ‘glandifera’ illa ‘quercus’, ex qua olim evolauit ‘nuntia fulva Iouis, miranda visa figura,’ nunc sit haec; sed cum eam tempestas vetustasue consumpserit, tamen erit his in locis quercus quam Marianam quercum vocent. a: Non dubito id quidem. Sed haec iam non ex te, Quinte, quaero, verum ex ipso poeta, tuine versus hanc quercum severint, an ita factum de Mario ut scribis acceperis? q: Be that as it may, as long as Latin literature has a voice, there will always be an oak at this spot called Marius’, and as Scaevola says about my brother’s Marius, ‘it will grow old for countless generations.’ But perhaps you think that your beloved Athens has been able to keep the olive tree on the Acropolis alive forever, or that the palm that they show today on Delos is the same as the tall and slender tree that Homer’s Ulysses says that he saw there: many other things in many places last longer in recollection than they 9 11

Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983). 10 Terdiman (1993) 36. Woodman suggests that the quercus Mariana is a wholly Ciceronian invention (2012: 3–5), a possibility also admitted by Dolganov (2008: 31). Kenter believed that it predated Cicero (1972: 17).

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could in nature. And so let us assume that this ‘acorn-bearing’ oak is the same as the one from which once flew off ‘the tawny messenger of Jove, seen in wondrous shape.’ But whenever a storm or old age destroys it, there will still be in this spot an oak which they will call Marius’ oak. a: Of that I have no doubt, but my question is not for you, Quintus, but for the poet himself: was it your verses that planted this oak, or was your account of what happened to Marius based on something you had learned?12 (Cic. Leg. 1.2)

Quintus offers Atticus confirmation and doubt at the same time. His original response, the plausible manet vero, is immediately challenged by the impossible semper manebit. The dialogue consistently presents Atticus as one who is interested in what happened (factum); his curiosity proceeds from uncertainty about whether a tree, already depicted as ancient in the Marius, could survive into his own time (Leg.1.1: etenim est sane vetus). Thus, Quintus corroborates Atticus’ assumptions only to challenge them. Dyck observes that when Quintus repeats Atticus’ manet, he transfers it from the physical to the literary plane, but this is problematic given Quintus’ insistence on the presence of the physical tree as he concludes his remarks.13 Instead, Quintus explains that the tree’s presence no longer depends on any physical aspect, but on the will to remember. He suggests that this willingness will be engendered by poetry, not only though the comment about the connection between literature and the site (dum Latinae loquentur litterae), but through frequent quotations of poetry itself. His poetic references suggest not only the longevity of the quercus Mariana (canescet . . .), but also the memory of the site (glandifera quercus) alongside what will be remembered there (nuntia fulva Iovis . . .). I propose further interpretations of these quotations later, but I focus here on how Quintus’ response details the creation of a memory tradition while indicating poetry’s role in its genesis. It is likewise crucial to recognize what this response to Atticus does not do. Quintus provides no straightforward answer, but simply refuses to untangle the problem that Atticus confronts. From the moment Atticus 12

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Woodman (2012), at 3 remarks that this moment marks a ring composition and brings this part of the conversation to a close, citing a correspondence between Atticus: “si manet illa quercus, haec est profecto” (Cic. Leg. 1.1) and Quintus: “Quare glandifera’ illa ‘quercus’ . . . nunc sit haec” (Cic. Leg. 1.2.) Dyck (2004): 59. Woodman observes that Atticus’ primary concern is whether the oak before him is the same tree described in the Marius (2012: 3). The reader is given very little opportunity to determine Atticus’ intention or concern, however, since he asks only one (implicit) question before Quintus’ response dramatically alters the conversation’s direction.

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sees the tree, he cannot separate its literary and physical manifestations. Quintus exhibits neither eagerness to help him nor concern for his distress, but Atticus’ helplessness in the face of his predicament lends itself to a dialogic confrontation of the problems of history, memory, tradition and their intersection. Atticus models an approach to tensions that all consumers of past narratives must confront, namely conflict between two different modes of investigation: fact-driven and tradition-driven. Quintus’ response forces aporia at the beginning rather than the end of a dialogue, and he proceeds to frame the conversation in ways that make it difficult for Atticus to continue to demand a factual account (a goal that Marcus Cicero will reinforce once he begins speaking). I attribute Quintus’ guarded response to his participation in the community at Arpinum, contrasted with Atticus’ clear lack thereof. The opening scene of the De Legibus powerfully invokes issues of local identity alongside the idea that communities can define themselves through sites of memory and attendant traditions. For example, Atticus first defines the tree as the Arpinatium quercus. Even though he is an outsider, he recognizes that the tree may hold meaning for the group he thinks of as the Arpinates. Notably, Quintus delivers a similar insight when he responds to the nearly Athenian Atticus with the observation that Athens venerates a tree that is equally dubious in age (Leg.1.2). The performance of in-group and outgroup leaves its mark on the terminology used by each character. For Atticus, the oak is the Arpinatium quercus, but Quintus consistently refers to it as the quercus Mariana (1.2).14 Quintus’ term for the Athenian olive, sempiterna in arce olea, may reflect the usage of an outsider rather than a group member.15 Nevertheless, Quintus’ use of the possessive tuae Athenae places Atticus’ participation in a community – and in that community’s potentially fictive traditions – into sharp relief.16 While Atticus may be eager to find “the facts” at Arpinum, he may be less eager to apply such critical scrutiny to a tradition that holds greater personal relevance. 14

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Dyck suggests a proverbial status for the term, like the quercus Dodonaea (2004: 56–7). Woodman notes the terminological difference, but neither proposes a reason for the divergence nor mentions the possibility of a corporate identity (2012: 3). The Athenians remained amusingly laconic about the olive tree. Pausanias records that they have “Nothing to say except that it was the testimony the goddess produced when she contended for their land” (Paus. 1.27.2; Jones 1918 trans.). Most extant references to the tree occur in context, so that ἐλάα alone suffices. Neither Euripides, Apollodorus, nor Pliny the Elder provide another name for the tree (Erechtheus; Bibl. 3.14; NH 16.89). Notably, Pausanias’ work alone reflects an actual conversation with Athenians about the olive tree. He confirms, moreover, that people with whom he spoke connected the tree to a tradition that they wanted to remember. Henderson also interpreted this tuae as indicative of Atticus’ membership in the Athenian community, translating this phrase as “your home, Athens.” See Henderson (2004): 166–7.

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The quercus Mariana is surely meaningful to Quintus, and perhaps, as Atticus’ terminology indicates, to all the Arpinates. While it deals with a figure from Roman history, the oak’s contribution to identity is specific rather than universal. Atticus does not understand the quercus in the same way as the Arpinates, and these differing perspectives indicate the tree’s function as a “site of memory,” what Pierre Nora has called lieux de mémoire. Nora proposed that certain places – broadly defined to include sites, texts, and behaviors – can reinforce narratives and strengthen identities provided that the will to remember still exists in the society using such lieux.17 Nora characterizes “the most fundamental purpose” of these lieux as obstructing the process of forgetting, and, in their obstruction, simultaneously “arresting the progress of history.”18 Accordingly, they inhibit the development of “history” and allow memory to dominate the narrative instead. Thus, Nora contrasts true lieux de mémoire with lieux d’histoire: Lieux de mémoire are created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. To begin with, there must be a will to remember. If we were to abandon this criterion, we would quickly drift into admitting virtually everything as worthy of remembrance . . . Without the intention to remember, lieux de mémoire would be indistinguishable from lieux d’histoire.19

The introductory scene of the De Legibus opens on this crossroads between history and memory, while Atticus and Quintus each represent a different approach to the past. Quintus asserts an Arpinate will to remember that the reader finds juxtaposed to Atticus’ desire to understand “what happened.” Unable to find answers that satisfy his sense of history, Atticus turns from Quintus to Marcus Cicero, whose responses provide further proof of the author’s understanding of the distinction between memory and history.

5.2 Problematizing an Ancient Lieu de Mémoire It would be possible to understand the conversation between Quintus and Atticus purely in terms of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, albeit with qualification from competing theories, such Jan Assmann’s ideas of cultural memory.20 The opening conversation may read as a contest between a fact-obsessed Atticus and a memory-focused Quintus, and, therefore, a validation of 17 20

Nora (1989): 12, 18–19. 18 Nora (1989): 19. 19 Nora (1989): 19. Assmann’s chief difference from Nora is the suggestion that cultural memory resides in an absolute, inaccessible past, chronologically situated before the invention of writing (see Assmann (2011): 27, 34–9).

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Nora’s statement that lieux de mémoire can “arrest the progress of history.” While I maintain that this idea is operative in antiquity and prefer lieu de mémoire or its English translation to rival terminology,21 I recognize that Nora’s conceptual framework requires further definition of “history” and its “progress.” In order to develop a better understanding of memory and lieux de mémoire as obstacles to historical pressure, I turn to the anthropologist and theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot.22 Trouillot’s 1995 book, Silencing the Past, treats the production of history and the creation of gaps in historical narratives. Nora’s statement that lieux de mémoire can “arrest the progress of history” is poetic and thought-provoking, but it is also vague. It is Trouillot, therefore, who facilitates my understanding of history as a process that can be arrested, articulating four stages essential to historical production: The moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); The moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).23

Trouillot also saw this process as a simultaneous negotiation of power. He acknowledges that silences are necessary for any narrative, but notes that silences reflect power imbalances. Reading the De Legibus through Trouillot and Nora reveals Ciceronian reflections on the production of history, its relationship to memory, and poetry’s potential to resist the pressures and attendant transfer of power that accompany historical production. Following his interrogation of an evasive Quintus, Atticus seeks definitive answers from Marcus Cicero. Their exchange permits dialogic exploration of how history is made, by whom, and how lieux de mémoire can obstruct this process. This new conversation builds upon Quintus’ responses, and is likewise marked by the promise of an answer that falls short of Atticus’ expectations: 21 22

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For the rival term, dispositif, rooted in Foucauldian and Deleuzian theory, see Basu (2012): 2–7. Langlands (2018), while influenced by Basu, uses the phrase “site of memory.” Trouillot’s work has rarely entered the memory studies literature, especially within Classics, but its potential has been recognized by scholars working on collective memory, particularly Jeffrey Olick and his collaborators (see Olick and Robbins (1998): 124; Olick et al. (2011)). Trouillot (1995): 26. Notably, Trouillot’s presentation of the fourth phase shows signs of potential disagreement with Nora regarding the nature of history/histoire, further complicated by the fact that Nora’s use of the term seems inconsistent. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nora conceived of memory as a potential obstacle to history, and that these lieux were identifiable as obstacles of this kind. By creating a dialogue with Trouillot, I am able to more clearly articulate my own interpretation of what it means to “arrest” history in its development.

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a: . . . tuine versus hanc quercum severint, an ita factum de Mario ut scribis acceperis? m: Respondebo tibi equidem, sed non ante quam mihi tu responderis, Attice: certene non longe a tuis aedibus, inambulans post excessum suum, Romulus Proculo Iulio dixerit se deum esse et Quirinum vocari, templumque sibi dedicari in eo loco iusserit? Et verumne sit Athenis non longe item a tua illa antiqua domo Orithyiam Aquilo sustulerit? sic enim est traditum. a: Quorsum tandem {aut cur} ista quaeris? m: Nihil sane, nisi ne nimis diligenter inquiras in ea quae isto modo memoriae sint prodita. a: Atqui multa quaeruntur in Mario fictane an vera sint; et a nonnullis, quod et in recenti memoria et Arpinati homine versere, veritas a te postulatur. m: Et mehercule ego me cupio non mendacem putari, sed tamen ‘nonnulli’ isti, Tite noster, faciunt imperite, qui in isto periculo non ut a poeta sed ut a teste veritatem exigant, nec dubito quin idem et cum Egeria conlocutum Numam et ab aquila Tarquinio apicem impositum putent. q: Intellego te, frater, alias in historia leges obseruandas putare, alias in poemate. a: Was it your verses that planted this oak, or was your account of what happened to Marius based on something you had learned? m: I will give you an answer, Atticus, but not before you give me one: is it true that it was not far from your house that Romulus took a stroll after his death and told Proculus Iulius that he was a god and was named Quirinus, and ordered a temple to be dedicated to himself on that spot? And is it true that in Athens, not far from your former home, the North Wind picked up Orithyia? – That is what they say. a: What is your point? Why do you ask? m: Only that you should not be too particular in your researches into things that are handed down in stories of this kind. a: But people are curious about the truth or falsehood of many things in the Marius, and since you are dealing with recent events and a man from Arpinum, they expect the truth from you. m: I certainly don’t want to be considered a liar, but those people, Titus, behave ignorantly in such circumstances, in looking for the truth of a witness when examining a poet. No doubt these same people think that Numa had conversations with Egeria and that an eagle placed the priest’s cap on Tarquin’s head. q: I gather, brother, that you think there are different rules to be observed in a poem, from those that apply to history. (Cic. Leg. 1.3–5)

Marcus resumes Quintus’ argument and directly states what his brother merely implies. Quintus suggests Atticus’ connection to Athens (tuae Athenae), but Marcus presents undeniable evidence: Atticus owns (or owned) a house

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there.24 Atticus’ houses in Athens and Rome provide proof of his membership in those communities, but he is in neither city.25 The production of history has its geographical contingencies, and it is not the same at Arpinum and Rome. Atticus appears prepared to reject an Arpinate tradition, but Cicero implicitly asks whether he would do the same at Rome or Athens. When Atticus wonders why Cicero questioned him about Quirinus’ return to earth and Orithyia’s rape, he learns that it was done to prevent him from interfering with tradition. Cicero insists on blocking Atticus’ attempt to turn a matter of memory (quae memoria sunt prodita) into a factum. Fact/source creation is the first step in Trouillot’s process of historical production and Cicero resists the attempt – by Atticus and the other interested parties he names (nonnulli) – to turn the Marius into a source and its narratives into facts. Furthermore, he denies the influence of other factors, such as the recency of events or his own insight into Arpinate affairs, that might otherwise pressure him into confirming or denying the Marius as a source. As long as this process remains incomplete, there is considerably more room for the Marius to influence narratives without becoming an authority, simultaneously creating space for local narrators to continue to tell the stories that they find meaningful. The De Legibus dramatizes these tensions as two citizens of Arpinum (Quintus and Marcus) discuss an event meaningful to their local history with Atticus, an outsider native to Rome itself. Marcus’ remarks suggest the importance of preserving power for local narratives and narrators, and we may observe one such narrator in operation by returning to the exchange between Atticus and Quintus. Cicero’s brother defends himself by mentioning the Athenian olive, but he also stages a reading of the Marius (and with it the site of the quercus Mariana). Before he attempts to bind literary and spatial memory for his partner in the dialogue by proclaiming, “Let this now be it!,” the nunc sit haec of Leg. 1.2, he delivers two quotations from the Marius that focus on a particular moment: Fragment 15, “glandifera . . . quercus,” and Fragment 16, “Nuntia fulva Iovis, miranda visa figura.”26 The former refers to the tree itself, and the latter depicts the most important event said to have happened there – the portent of the eagle. Whether this refers to Marius’ childhood discovery of an eagle’s nest or the adult Marius’ interpretation of an ominous

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He may have owned it and sold it before the action of the dialogue. Antiqua may mean “former” (OLD s.v. antiquus 3), or it may indicate actual age. For Ciceronian evidence of the wider belief that home-ownership was tantamount to community participation see De Dom. 78.101. The fragments are numbered following Courtney (2003).

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confrontation between an eagle and a snake is unclear, but precision on this point is unnecessary.27 Since data are limited, precise pronouncements on the traditions of Marius contemporary with Cicero’s epic and the De Legibus remain impossible. The modern landscape of possibilities is surely different, however, due to centuries of historical perspective as well as later ancient reflections (e.g., Lucan). It is difficult for modern readers to remember the return of Marius without the bloodshed of Sullan conflict, but the Ciceronian spin on matters is somewhat different. While I do not mean to imply that problematic parts of the Marian legacy were willfully ignored, the quercus Mariana seems to engender the memory of a Marius at the height of his potential, regardless of which portent was associated with the tree. Consider Marius Fr. 17 9–13: Hanc ubi praepetibus pinnis lapsuque volantem Conspexit Marius, divini numinis augur, Faustaque signa suae laudis reditusque notavit, Partibus intonuit caeli pater ipse sinistris Sic aquilae clarum firmavit Iuppiter omen. When Marius, reader of divine intentions, observed Her flying with her feathered wings aloft And marked the favorable signs of rehabilitation and return. On the left the father of heaven himself thundered. Thus Jupiter declared the eagle’s omen true.28 (Cic. Marius Fr. 17.9–13)

This version of events, filled with favorable omens, praise, and redemption may provide a better idea of the Arpinate memories that surround the quercus Mariana. Such a reading also provides further purchase on Nora’s suggestion that lieux de mémoire arrest the progress of history. The Marius of Cicero and the quercus Mariana do not stand as monuments to the historical figure Marius in all his dimensions, but to a “Marius.” This constructed figure represents a citizen of Arpinum on the cusp of greatness. Furthermore, the suggestion that these lines be read alongside the quercus Mariana is not mere speculation, but a plausible ancient “remediation” of 27

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Dyck favors identification with the portent involving the nest (2004: 54), an extension of observations made by Jean Soubiran. Soubiran believed that Frs. 15 and 16 (Soubiran Fr. 1 and 2) were separate from Fr. 17 (Soubiran Fr. 3). Identification with the portent of the eagle and snake may be preferable, however, as “nuntia fulva Iovis, miranda visa figura” seems to indicate the presence of a single (adult) eagle. Since Marius is supposed to have caught the eagle’s nest in his cloak as it fell, it seems unlikely that a mother eagle would be present (Vit.Mar. 36.5). For identification of the scene in Fr. 15 and 16 with the snake and eagle portent, see Burgersdijk and van Waarden (2010): 15. Translation adapted from Goldberg (1995).

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this memory, or its transfer from literary medium to the conversation with Atticus, leading ultimately to an association of the memory with the quercus Mariana itself.29 While Quintus stops short of delivering a speech which precisely links the tree to these Ciceronian verses, such a speech is feasible, and Quintus envisions hundreds of similar acts of remediation (centered around readings or discussions of the Marius) when he explains that the longevity of the Marian oak is coterminous with that of Latin literature. In contrast to the Ciceros, the outsider Atticus has no reason (in Nora’s terms, no will) to remember a locally relevant “Marius” at Arpinum. He does not perceive the same level of risk in fact creation that his Arpinate interlocutors may. By excepting the quercus Mariana from the challenges posed by Atticus’ question “an ita factum . . . ?” Marcus and Quintus preserve a different landscape of possibilities for the tree as a site of memory, and for the memory of Marius more generally.

5.3

Cicero, Plato, and Memory

When Atticus asks Marcus to speak authoritatively on the content of the Marius, the two characters find themselves awkwardly reprising a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, a work that surely inspired the opening scene of the De Legibus.30 In the Platonic dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus also debate the location of a fabulous traditional event – the rape of Orithyia: ΦΑΙ. Εἰπέ μοι, ὦ Σώκρατες, οὐκ ἐνθένδε μέντοι ποθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ Ἰλισοῦ λέγεται ὁ Βορέας τὴν Ὠρείθυιαν ἁρπάσαι; ΣΩ. Λέγεται γάρ. ΦΑΙ. Ἆρ’ οὖν ἐνθένδε; χαρίεντα γοῦν καὶ καθαρὰ καὶ διαφανῆ τὰ ὑδάτια φαίνεται, καὶ ἐπιτήδεια κόραις παίζειν παρ’ αὐτά. ΣΩ. Οὔκ, ἀλλὰ κάτωθεν ὅσον δύ’ ἢ τρία στάδια, ᾗ πρὸς τὸ ἐν Ἄγρας διαβαίνομεν· καί πού τίς ἐστι βωμὸς αὐτόθι Βορέου. ΦΑΙ. Οὐ πάνυ νενόηκα· ἀλλ’ εἰπὲ πρὸς Διός, ὦ Σώκρατες, σὺ τοῦτο τὸ μυθολόγημα πείθῃ ἀληθὲς εἶναι; 29

30

Remediation is a concept of the media scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999). They describe the process as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (1999: 273), what Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney describe as “the mediation of mediation” (see Erll and Rigney 2008: 3). For the role of remediation in the creation of sites of memory, including ancient sites, see Langlands (2018): 174–205. Benardete also remarks on these similarities, although with a considerably different interpretation (1987: 298). Similarly, Dolganov interprets the scene as exhibiting a surface similarity to the Phaedrus, but ultimately treats an entirely different subject (poetry), rather than seeing both dialogues as problematizing the relationship between literature (poetry) and memory (2008: 23–4; 31–2).

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ph: Tell me, Socrates, is it not from some place along here by the Ilissus that Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia? s: Yes, that is the story. ph: Well, is it from here? The streamlet looks very pretty and pure and clear and fit for girls to play by. s: No, the place is about two or three furlongs farther down, where you cross over to the precinct of Agra; and there is an altar of Boreas somewhere thereabouts. ph: I have never noticed it. But, for Heaven’s sake, Socrates, tell me; do you (Plat. Phdr. 229 c–d) believe this tale is true?31

Like Atticus, Phaedrus is prompted to wonder if some suitable aspect of the physical location makes it a likely place for the traditional event. In contrast to the interlocutors of the De Legibus, however, Socrates has no problem declaring that the site of Orithyia’s rape is elsewhere. Presumably, he knows of a spot that others have collectively determined to be traditional, as he mentions an altar of Boreas there. This conversation concludes when Socrates explains that inquiry into the veracity of such traditions is a fool’s errand, especially when one’s intellectual resources could be invested in the more worthwhile task of self-discovery (229d). Atticus’ situation differs markedly from that of Phaedrus. In the De Legibus, the traditional site of the Marian oak is not known, and Atticus only knows to look for it because he has read about it. Cicero’s dialogue reframes one of the fundamental questions of the Phaedrus while adding a Roman swerve: How does writing affect memory, and is its effect good or bad (cf. Phdr. 274 c–275 c)? It is no longer individual memory that is under scrutiny, but the collective. Atticus has only arrived at his questions because of writing. He has never been to Arpinum, but his previous contact with literature about the town has primed him to look for the famous site.32 But it is likewise clear that he has doubts: he may suspect that Cicero has fabricated everything (including the tree), but is certainly skeptical about the fabulous events associated with the site. Writing has caused this problem for him, and it presents an enduring obstacle. He can neither corroborate the memory alongside the Ciceros nor engage in fact creation and the production of history. Reading the Marius has made Atticus curious about the site and circumstances of a legendary event, but it has also made the inhabitants of the place more likely to “remember” the event according to an inherently biased written account.

31

Translation by Fowler (1914).

32

De Leg. 2.1–5.

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The Phaedrus briefly discusses tradition and its invention as Socrates deconstructs Phaedrus’ musing, but Atticus’ inquiry is rebuffed in a different way, and is satisfied neither by dialogic conversation nor written account. It is no coincidence that Marcus sideswipes the Phaedrus by mentioning the rape of Orithyia, and his mention of fabulous incidents in the life of Romulus, Numa, and Tarquin are equally deliberate. These stories represent foundational Roman traditions, but they also made their way into the canons of serious history – we know them all to be found in Livy – and they are often identified as fictions (1.16, 1.19, 1.34). These legendary references contribute to Cicero’s presentation of the poetic space as exempt from the pressures that attend historiography. Like the historian, the poet produces a narrative, but that narrative need not engage a process of fact or source creation. It may operate exclusively within the realm of memory and can reinforce traditions meaningful to the poet or to his community. Such poetry can incorporate invented traditions and lieux de mémoire to harness the potential inherent in events before they become history. By incorporating these references to the Phaedrus, Cicero offers an adjustment to Platonic construction of memory, inquiry, and their relationship to writing. In matters of philosophy, Socrates and Phaedrus conclude that a written text is as still as a statue, always delivering the same answer when asked, and that, therefore, conversation ought to be preferred (Phdr. 275d–277b). The De Legibus, confronting history rather than philosophy, reveals that written accounts have now come to affect the dialogic process. When caught – as Atticus is – between memory and history, both written and dialogic attempts at constructing the past can contaminate one another. Yet, as Cicero reprograms this Platonic scene, he also preserves some of the freedom that Socrates and Phaedrus hope to safeguard – the written account in question is not subject to the processes of historical production (a history), but is a poem exempt from them. This lack of restriction provides space for remediations of the kind that Quintus performs for Atticus, undiminished by the concessions to credibility that might otherwise color a historical account.33 33

It must be observed that the presence of such a legendary narrative or memory in a historical account is also a remediation, since it has been transferred to a written work within the genre of history. Those remediations, however, are often marked by the kind of apologetic remark seen at e.g. Livy 1.16, on the immortality of Romulus and his conversation with Proculus Iulius: “Mirum quantum illi viro nuntianti haec fides fuerit, quamque desiderium Romuli apud plebem exercitumque facta fide immortalitatis lenitum sit.” I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this piece for observing that Livy’s intention here may also have been to draw attention to the function of traditional narratives in times of social unrest, and that he may be prompting the reader to

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5.4 Conclusion Cicero’s concern for memory is well documented: His warnings to Caesar in the Pro Marcello and concern for the perpetuation of Tullia’s memory constitute two of the most famous cases, but the De Legibus demonstrates Cicero’s intellectual interest in memory as well as how individuals and entire communities influence it.34 The dialogue accommodates a discussion of memory well, as its conversational framing permits discursive treatment of various sites where memory is made – poetry, history, the quercus Mariana, and Cicero’s dialogue itself. The interlocutors work through the relationship between place, memory, and literature, leading first to Quintus’ dramatic remediation of the portent of the eagle and then culminating in Cicero’s pointed, post-Platonic rejection of Atticus’ attempt to create the facts and sources requisite for a history. The opening scenes of the De Legibus may still be understood as a reflection of Cicero’s philosophy of history,35 but his philosophy of poetry is likewise at stake alongside his approach to commemoration generally. The dialogue identifies the pressures that attend the production of history, such as the creation of sources and facts, while simultaneously highlighting poetry’s exemption from those pressures. Atticus, prompted by a written account and potential source, arrives at Arpinum looking for a historical site and asks the Arpinate Quintus Cicero if he has found it. Quintus’ response demonstrates that the problem lies with the question itself, since his brother’s poetry has ensured perpetual contamination of the two “sites.” The dialogue’s initial sections do not present poetry as a detour on the way to history proper, but a separate endeavor that could obviate historical writing. Quintus’ leges in historia may be the same as Trouillot’s processes of historical production. Fact identification and source production are necessities of writing history, but poetry need not observe those “laws.” Shortly after the quercus Mariana scene, the dialogue presents Cicero as someone supremely qualified to write Roman history – the opus oratorium maxime – while simultaneously revealing that Cicero had no immediate plans to write such a work.36 Woodman has observed that “since commemoration is the principal function of historiography, a poet of

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investigate who might benefit from such stories and, therefore, who might seek to ensure their reproduction. Marcell. 27–8. For Tullia’s shrine, see Att. Bks 12–13 passim. Att. 12.12 is particularly worthy of mention, as it proposes the island at Arpinum, near the villa where the De Legibus takes place, as a potential location for Tullia’s shrine. For a recent investigation of Tullia’s shrine and its relationship to memorialization of the Republic and Cicero’s place within it, see Martelli (2016). See Woodman (2012); Fox (2007). 36 For the phrase opus oratorium maxime, see Leg.1.5.

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Cicero’s accomplishment is the ideal writer of history: if a poet can ensure the longevity of something which he has invented, think what he can do for something that actually existed or happened!”37 These skills had hitherto been exercised in the service of small community, Arpinum, but they would also have a clear value at the national level. Furthermore, Cicero’s role on the national stage was significant, and there must have been pressure to shape his legacy by actively writing history, rather than waiting for history to be written about him.38 Woodman’s historiographically focused interpretation may be supplemented, however, or even supplanted, by the notion that the De Legibus constructs poetry as an alternative to historical writing, precisely because it permits commemoration as it evades the constraints that historical production demands. While the pressure on Cicero to write history may have been considerable, he did not submit to it. The De Legibus represents yet another work of Cicero’s that deals with questions of (political) philosophy, and its opening scene explains his decision to eschew historical writing once again. The introductory scene looks to other forms of commemoration that might render historical writing unnecessary. The quercus Mariana scene dramatizes the processes of remembrance and highlights the fact that there were similar lieux de memoire where Cicero’s memory could also be cultivated. In addition to his legacy as an orator, Cicero had already completed a poem on his own consulship, treating the most important events in which he took part.39 The poetic treatments of history in the Consulatus Suus could generate a memory of Cicero that would either stand beside treatments in histories, or find itself reproduced in those treatments as part of the collective memory. A dedicated community of readers can defend the construction of the past put forward in a poem, even as fact-finding critics attempt to create definitive (and static) accounts. Hence, perhaps, the difference in terminology that separates Quintus from Atticus at the beginning of the dialogue: Atticus has read the words of the Marius and 37 38

39

Woodman (2012): 12–16, esp. 15. As Fox observes regarding Leg.1.1–5, “the idea that retired statesmen write history that includes an element of self-commemoration was standard for historiography in the Republic” (2007: 143–4). Furthermore, Gowing observes that there may have been some competition over Cicero’s memory, as least judging from the evidence of a community of Sallustian readers (encompassing not only the Bellum Catilinae itself, but also the Pseudo-Sallustian invectives) and the lost life of Cicero by Cornelius Nepos (2013: 234–5). Cicero mentions the consular speeches as a potential site of his memory at Att. 2.1. See Gibson and Steel (2010): 122–4. In their treatment, they remark that “His explanation there [in the De Legibus] is that history requires a commitment of time which he cannot provide. One might speculate further on his reasons [for neglecting to write a history]” (124).

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seeks to make a historical judgement (“saepe a me lectus”), while Quintus suggests that the words themselves speak (“dum Latinae loquentur litterae, quercus huic loco non deerit quae Mariana dicatur”).40 As Cicero’s Platonic reprise suggests, a static account, (subject to the processes of historical production) may be read, but a poetic narrative liberated from those constraints may speak, and may continue to generate conversations, readings, and other remediations. 40

The personification of literary works and genres “speaking” is not unique to the De Legibus, and seems to be deployed by Cicero in order to indicate vibrant literary production or literary traditions that are still dynamic. See Brut. 19: conticuerunt tuae litterae, and Brut. 22: eloquentia obmutuit. The formulation litterae loquuntur / loquentur, seems to appear nowhere else, however. See also Stroup (2003), esp. 129–31.

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chapter 6

Varro and the Re-foundation of Roman Cultural Memory Through Genealogy and Humanitas Irene Leonardis*

6.1

The Crisis of Tradition: Losing Authority, Losing Memory

In the last two centuries BC, with the Republic limping towards its end, the cultivated ruling elite began to lose its moral and political authority.1 Its members not only held themselves responsible for the so-called crisis of tradition, but at the same time also conveyed the impression of a loss of memory, as if all Romans were suffering from some kind of amnesia or identity crisis.2 In particular, institutional figures such as pontiffs and augurs, who had preserved Rome’s memory throughout its history, were accused of neglecting their duties and, by extension, of allowing ancient practices and values to slowly disappear.3 Accordingly, Cicero and Varro, both perfect representatives of this elite, employed recurrent terms such as neglect (neglegentia/neglegere), involuntary abandon (amittere), oblivion (oblivio), vanishing of institutions (evanescere), and ignorance (ignoratio/ignorare) to describe this critical loss of information; they depicted the citizenry of Rome (civitas) as disoriented and estranged, incapable of sharing any common knowledge or values.4 In one of his Menippean satires (the Sexagessis), Varro even named this * 1

2 3

4

The author wishes to thank Martin Dinter for polishing the English of this chapter. As Wallace-Hadrill (1997) 11 observes, ‘An elite that attributes its position to its superior habits (mores), its trusteeship of ancestral values, and judges its success by its ability to inspire emulation (imitatio) fatally exposes its power when its monopoly of those values is questioned.’ Moatti (1997) 30–54 expounds this concept of crisis. The high priests (pontifices) were the keepers of Roman tradition (mos). Schiavone (2005) 54–66 underlines the importance of memory and oral ‘repetition’ and highlights their role in the birth of the concept of law (ius). E.g. Cic. Rep. 5.2: ‘Although the Republic, when it came to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colours, however, were already fading (euanescentem) with age, our own time not only has neglected (neglexit) to freshen it by renewing the original colours, but has not even taken the trouble to preserve its configuration and, so to speak, its general outlines. For what is now left of the ancient customs . . .? They have been, as we see, so completely buried in oblivion that they are not only no longer practised, but are already unknown (obliuione obsoletos uidemus, ut non modo non colantur, sed iam ignorentur).

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new Rome rutuba, a murky place where there is neither morality nor sense of dignity, a place which can no longer be recognised as a fatherland (patria).5 From their testimonies, we may deduce that Roman cultural memory, and therefore Roman identity, seemed to be at risk to Cicero and Varro. According to Jan Assmann’s definition, cultural memory – a type of collective memory – gives individuals the means to build their own identities and to affirm themselves as part of a group.6 Indeed, it constitutes a symbolic ‘heritage’ that relies on the knowledge of specialists and is essential for the creation of a system of values.7 This the Romans would have called the mores or mos maiorum.8 At the end of the Republic, an antiquarian trend developed so as to provide a cultural and political response to this crisis experienced by the traditional bearers of cultural meaning, whose authority was fading away.9 In this chapter, I will try to reconstruct the method adopted by the most learned of these antiquarians in his works, which now survive only in fragments, with particular focus on the monumental Antiquitates rerum humanarum et diuinarum (‘Antiquities of Divine and Human Things’). By presenting himself as a ‘re-founder’ (re-conditor) of Rome, Varro reveals that his intention is to ‘rebuild’ Roman cultural memory on

5

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7 8

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Accordingly, it occurs through our own faults and not by any accident, that we retain only the form of the commonwealth, but have long since lost (amisimus) its substance’ (trans. adapted from Clinton W. Keyes). Similarly, Varro Sat. Men. fr. 537 Astbury (Ταφὴ Μενίππου) = Non. de Comp. Doct. 672 Lindsay: Haec Numa Pompilius fieri si uideret, sciret suorum institutorum nec uolam nec uestigium apparere (‘If Numa Pompilius were to see this happening, he would know that there was no longer any trace of his institutions’). Varro Sat. Men. fr. 488 Ast. = Non. de Comp. Doct. 245.7 L.: Ergo tum Romae parce pureque pudentis / uixere. En patriam! Nunc sumus in rutuba, ‘So in Rome in those days they lived frugally, purely and modestly. That was the fatherland! Now we are in a deep mess.’ On this satire and the meaning of this rare word, rutuba (probably a ‘dark corrupted abyss’, that Varro connects to his contemporaries’ oblivion and ruin), see Leonardis (2014) and Del Giovane (2021), 215–9 For the concept of ‘cultural memory’ that implies the existence of a collective memory, see Assmann (1988). Erll and Nünning (2008), 4–5 underline how ‘the notions of “cultural” or “collective” memory proceed from an operative metaphor. The concept of “remembering” (a cognitive process which takes place in individual brains) is metaphorically transferred to the level of culture.’ As a result, we need ‘to differentiate between two levels on which culture and memory intersect: the individual and the collective or, more precisely, the level of the cognitive on the one hand, and the levels of the social and the medial on the other’. See also the overall Introduction to this volume. On the idea of a Roman cultural patrimony or heritage, see Moatti (2003a). On the concept of mos maiorum and its limits, see Blösel (2000), Bettini (2000) 241–92 and Humm (2017) who focuses also on censors and their task of upholding these values (regimen morum). Lundgreen (2017) examines Latin terms about custom, tradition and law (mos, consuetudo, ius, lex), pinpointing their unfixed use and interrelationship in ancient Rome, with an eye on modern issues. See Wallace-Hadrill (1997) 14: ‘It was now the antiquarian, by his laborious study of obscurely worded documents, and displaying the credentials of Greek academic learning, who “knew” what the “real” Roman tradition was. The “memory of good men”, as Varro put it, now started from books, not oral tradition. The noble priest and jurisprudent not only finds his authority subverted but is subjected to contumely as the man who has betrayed his own ancestors.’ See also Moatti (1988) 391 and (2003b).

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a different ground so that this renewed memory can once more be accepted as authoritative.10

6.2 Tracing Roman Tradition: Varro’s Cultural Genealogy of Human Kin In many societies as well as in Rome, cultural memory, though pertaining to ancient past and mythical origins, ‘works by reconstructing, that is, it always relates its knowledge to an actual and contemporary situation’.11 The lack of trusted specialised figures for Roman cultural memory combined with the broadening of Roman territory and possessions not only caused the truthfulness of Roman tradition itself to be questioned, but also casted doubt on the very origins of Rome and of human history in general.12 We could say that in Rome, the often denounced oblivion did not merely cover Roman traditions and ritual meaning but expanded backward into the primitive age. Varro seems to have reflected on this issue and even to have proposed a possible solution. In a much-cited fragment of his De gente populi Romani (‘On the Roman People’), the past is segmented into three periods (interualla temporis): the first is called tempus adelon (lit. ‘unclear age’) the second mythicon (‘mythic’), and the last historicon (‘historical’).13 Here, he clearly states that the memory of the primitive era is lost, for the tempus adelon is an unknown and unintelligible time. It began with the beginning of human life and ended with the first deluge, the latter of which constitutes the first event of the mythical era: Nunc uero id interuallum temporis tractabo, quod ἱστορικόν Varro appellat. Hic enim tria discrimina temporum esse tradit: primum ab hominum principio ad cataclysmum priorem, quod propter ignorantiam uocatur ἄδηλον, secundum a cataclysmo priore ad olympiadem primam, quod, quia multa in eo fabulosa referuntur, μυθικόν nominatur, tertium a prima olympiade ad nos, quod dicitur ἱστορικόν, quia res in eo gestae ueris historiis continentur. . . . De tertio autem tempore fuit quidem aliqua inter auctores dissensio in sex septemue tantum modo annis uersata. Sed hoc quodcumque caliginis Varro discussit, et pro cetera sua sagacitate nunc diuersarum ciuitatium conferens tempora, nunc defectus eorumque 10

11

My work follows in the wake of Peglau (2003) who first adopts the definition of ‘re-founder’ (re-conditor). It is true that Varro presented himself in various forms and versions (see Volk 2020), and that he often adopted an open or, rather, ambiguous position (see my comments in Leonardis (2019) 18-23 and Leonardis (2022) 314-9). However, I cannot agree with Leah Kronenberg (2017), who portrays Varro's antiquarian monumenta as aimed at the destruction of religious authority and its parody. Assmann (1995) 130. 12 Moatti (1997) 125–31. 13 Cf. Feeney (2007a) 73–85.

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irene leonardis interualla retro dinumerans eruit uerum lucemque ostendit, per quam numerus certus non annorum modo, sed et dierum perspici possit. Now I will deal with that interval of time that Varro calls historicon. Indeed, he points out that time is divided into three periods. The first stretched from the beginning of humankind till the first flood and is called adelon for little is known of it. The second is from the first flood till the first Olympic games and is named mythicon, for from this period many events celebrated in stories are reported. The third, from the first Olympic games up until now, is called historicon, since the events which happened in this interval are reported in truthful historical accounts. . . . However, there was a certain disagreement among the authors concerning the third period, regarding only six or seven years. But Varro dispelled this small fog of ignorance. Indeed, thanks to his usual sagacity and his comparison of the chronologies of different populations on the one hand, and on the other, his counting back the number of eclipses and their intervals, he dug out the truth and shed light on it, so that one may know with certainty not only the number of years, but even of the days. (Cens. Nat. 21.1–5 = Varro De gente p. R. fr. 1 Frac.)

Our source for the fragment, the third-century grammarian Censorinus, highlights how Varro established his dates: he is said to have counted backwards (retro dinumerans) in order to figure out when the third era had begun, ultimately concluding that it should be dated to after the first Olympiad (776 BC). Through this phrase, Censorinus in all probability suggests that Varro’s antiquarian method consists of ‘tracing-back’. Such a method appears to have been employed also in the Antiquitates, or at least in the section about religion (res diuinae), if we trust the testimony of the Christian author Tertullian (second to third century AD): Elegi ad compendium Varronis opera, qui, rerum diuinarum ex omnibus retro digestis commentatus, idoneum se nobis scopum posuit. I have chosen as a compendium [scil. of Roman religion] Varro’s works, since he, having discussed the divine matters of all those things expounded in reverse, made himself a suitable target for us. (Tert. Nat. 2.1.41)

Here, perhaps recalling Varro’s own words, Tertullian affirms that this work comments on the whole body of ancient material regarding religious practices and beliefs (rerum diuinarum ex omnibus) and that this corpus had been collected and put in order by the author, who ‘traced backwards’ while completing this task (retro digestis). More precisely, this ‘tracing-back’ method ultimately seems to consist of a genealogical reconstruction. We should bear in mind that, according to Assmann, ‘genealogy’, by connecting ancient to recent events without rifts

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or ruptures, ‘traces historical ancestors in order to establish political legitimacy or a collective cultural memory’.14 As for Varro’s method, its particularities suggest that while applying the broad concept of genealogy to that of history, he also employs a cultural genealogy which pertains to humanity as a whole. Indeed, Rome in the first century BC was no longer a mere city (urbs): its limits were now conceived as nearly the limits of the globe (orbis terrarum).15 Accordingly, the most learned and most famous antiquarian had to use a genealogical method through which he could reacquire authority not only for himself but also for the memory reconstructed in his works. This innovative form of cultural memory, though still grounded in Rome and on its traditions, aims to achieve universal recognition by tracing Roman culture back to primeval times. Let us consider some evidence which might confirm this hypothesis. To begin with, it is highly probable that Varro considered humanity as part of a unique kin (stirps), descended from an original family (gens). A fragment of the Menippean satire entitled Prometheus Liber (‘The Free Prometheus’) suggests this: humanae quandam gentem stirpis concoquit, frigus calore atque umore aritudinem miscet . . .16 [Nature] prepares a certain family of the human kin, it mixes the cold with the hot and the moisture with the dryness. (Varro Sat. Men. fr. 428 Ast. = Prometheus Liber)

This conceptualisation and representation of humanity in terms of familial ‘descent’ is also perceptible in a passage from Varro’s Rerum rusticarum libri or Res rusticae (‘On Farming’): Igitur, inquam, et homines et pecudes cum semper fuisse sit necesse natura – siue enim aliquod fuit principium generandi animalium, ut putaui Thales Milesius et Zeno Citieus, siue contra principium horum extitit nullum, ut credidit Pythagoras Samius et Aristoteles Stagerites – necesse est humanae uitae a summa memoria gradatim descendisse ad hanc 14 15 16

Assmann (1992) 50. Indeed Plin. Nat. 14.1 sees in this enlargement of the city of Rome the main cause of the loss of tradition. See also Nicolet (1988) 51–3; Moatti (1997) 95. The subject of the two verbs would have probably been Natura or something similar. For an interpretation of this fragment and its possible position in the context of the satire see Cèbe (1996) 1777. Contra Courtney (2003) 34, who considers Prometheus the subject and finds here a reference to the medical doctrine of humours.

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irene leonardis aetatem, ut scribit Dicaearchus, et summum gradum fuisse naturalem, cum uiuerent homines ex his rebus, quae inuiolata ultro ferret terra, ex hac uita in secundam descendisse pastoriciam . . .. Tertio denique gradu a uita pastorali ad agri culturam descenderunt, in qua ex duobus gradibus superioribus retinuerunt multa, et quo descenderant, ibi processerunt longe, dum ad nos peruenirent. As it is a necessity of nature that people and flocks have always existed (whether there was an original generating principle of animals, as Thales of Miletus and Zeno of Citium thought, or, on the contrary, as was the view of Pythagoras of Samos and of Aristotle of Stagira, there was no point of beginning for them), it is a necessity that from the remotest memory of human life they have come down, as Dicaearchus teaches, step by step to our age, and that the most distant period was that state of nature in which man lived on those products which the virgin earth brought forth of her own accord; they descended from this stage into the second, the pastoral . . .. Then by a third stage men went from the pastoral life down to that of the tiller of the soil; in this stage where they had come down they retained much of the former two stages, and after reaching it they went far before reaching our stage.17 (Varro R.R. 2.1.3–5 = Dicaearchus fr. 48 Wehrli)

Here Varro quotes Dicaearchus of Messina’s theory of human history,18 which, although now lost, undoubtedly consisted of three phases or lifestyles (uitae): the first one is primitive and natural, the second nomadic and pastoral, and the last sedentary and agricultural. If we take Porphyry (third century AD) – the only other source for the reconstruction of Dicaearchus’ lost theory – into account, we notice that he speaks of ‘lifestyles’ (bioi) rather than phases. As this comparison indicates, Varro reworks Dicaearchus’ model by incorporating the verb ‘to descend’ (descendere) and by employing the images of steps or degrees of kinship (gradus).19 Elsewhere, Varro indeed uses the noun gradus in this sense, most notably in his De gradibus, ‘On Relatives’.20 Therefore, he succeeds in revising Dicaearchus’ model so as to represent humanity both as a species metaphorically walking down ‘the staircase of time’ and as a unique family whose descendants are all linked by degrees of kinship.21 17 18

19

20 21

Trans. by Hooper and Ash (1934) with some modifications in italics. The peripatetic Dicaearchus is the author of a lost ‘biography of the Greek nation’ (βίος Ἑλλάδος), probably the model for Varro’s De vita populi Romani and, partially, also for the De gente populi Romani. See Wehrli (1968); Ax (2000); Fortenbaugh and Schütrumpf (2001). Porph. De abstinentia ab esu animalium 4.2.1–9 = Dicaearchus fr. 49 Wehrli. The vocabulary and the metaphorical images of the ‘degrees of kinship’ are discussed by Bettini (2009) 13–15 and now also by Buccheri (2017). Just one fragment survives in Serv. Aen. 5.412. The perception of time as a vertical staircase or ladder is a cross-cultural phenomenon: for a general introduction to this cognitive metaphor, see Zerubavel (2003) 14–18. Varro seems to combine two metaphorical maps of time, the vertical one (up-and-down) and the horizontal (back-to-front), by

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What is more, Varro’s De gente populi Romani has been read as more or less a genealogy tracing Rome’s ancestors within its distant past (antiquitas).22 Varro probably conceived this genealogy along cultural lines, since it pertains to the customs that the Romans had acquired from other populations (gentes) by imitation, as this fragment clearly indicates: Maiores enim nostri sedentes epulabantur quem morem a Laconibus habuerunt et Cretensibus, ut Varro docet in libris de gente populi Romani, in quibus dicit, quid a quaque traxerint gente per imitationem. Our ancestors used to have dinner seated. They adopted this custom from the Spartans and from the Cretans, as Varro shows in the books De gente populi Romani, where he states what habit they had borrowed by imitation from which population. (Varro De gente p. R. fr. 37 Frac. = Serv. Aen. 7.176)

A further piece of evidence suggesting that Varro designed a cultural genealogy is found in Servius’ commentary (fourth century AD) on the Aeneid, which informs us of the religious connection between Rome and Samothrace, the location of one of the most ancient mystery cults. Dii penates a Samothracia sublati ab Aenea in Italiam aduecti sunt, unde Samothraces cognati Romanorum esse dicuntur. The gods Penates taken from Samothrace had been carried to Italy by Aeneas. For this reason it is said that Romans and Samothracians are relatives. (Serv. Aen. 3, 12 = Varro Ant. RD 15, app. Cardauns)

This passage probably derives from Varro’s writings; Cardauns placed it in the appendix to the fifteenth book of Varro’s Res diuinae (‘Divine Matters’). It closely echoes Varro’s theory about the transfer of the Penates’ cult to Rome: these ancestral gods were originally brought by Dardanus, the forefather of the founder of Troy, from Samothrace to Troy, and later carried by Aeneas from Phrygia to Italy. This cultural link therefore joins Rome and Samothrace as relatives (cognatae), that is, as members of a single cultural kinship.23

22

representing humankind as going down (descendere) and at the same time going forward (procedere). These were both present in Roman culture in the form of the familiar ‘family trees’ (stemmata) representing one’s ancestors (maiores) in a downward progression from the most ancient to the most recent or in the funeral parade (pompa funebris) where the more ancient ancestral portraits (imagines maiorum) precede the more recent ones. For these representations and their anthropological meaning in Rome see Bettini (1986) 125–202. See Peter (1902); Fraccaro (1907) 70; Ax (2000) 358. 23 Van Nuffelen (2010).

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6.3

irene leonardis

Humanitas and Immanitas: Human Knowledge and Human Ignorance

In the remains of Varro’s antiquarian works, we have spotted the original concept of cultural genealogy.24 Indeed, although he, of course, did not discover the existence of human DNA, he nevertheless theorises the existence of a cultural ‘gene’ which enables scholars to trace the genealogy of mankind based on artistic and literary legacies. This idea is encapsulated within a small fragment of the introductory book to the Antiquitates rerum humanarum et diuinarum: Praxiteles, qui propter artificium egregium nemini est paulum modo humaniori ignotus Praxiteles, who, because of his surpassing art, is unknown to no one of any liberal culture.25

(Varro Ant. RH 1, fr. 1 Mirsch = Gell. 13.17.3 = Non. de Comp. Doct. 74 L.)

Ignorance is here presented as the opposite of humanitas, a hardly definable term which covers both biological and cultural ‘humanity’, since humanus means ‘human’ but also ‘what is best among humans’, such as cultivated knowledge or education, elegance, civilisation, philanthropy, and kindness.26 Varro assumes that anyone who is humanus – and thus belongs to this category – cannot possibly be unaware of the name of the sculptor, Praxiteles. We may question whether Varro consciously plays with these meanings in order to present the defining attribute of humanity as knowledge transmitted through tradition.27 The interpretation which Gellius (followed by Nonius) accords to this passage confirms this conclusion, for he assumes that humanitas here means learning (eruditio) and is a specific feature of humankind.28 Furthermore, it is likely that the notion of humanitas as ‘characteristic of mankind’ (humana stirps) took an important role in the original version of Varro’s most famous antiquarian work. Indeed, in all likelihood, the use of humanitas to mean human knowledge as opposed to divine wisdom plays a role in the subdivision of the 24

25 26

27 28

While the noun humanitas occurs in Varro’s works and fragments, I examine his concept of ‘immanitas’ (‘immensity beyond human knowledge’) through the occurrences of the adjective immanis, since the noun is never attested. Trans. by Rolfe (1927). The meaning of humanitas has been the subject of great debate during the last century: cf. Heinemann (1931); Haffter (1954); Schadewaldt (1973); Gildenhard (2011) 201–16; Veyne (1989); Lind (1994); Cancik (2014); Vesperini (2015). See also Leonardis (2018) that considers all the Varronian fragments and texts where the noun humanitas and the adjective humanus are attested. Gell. 13.17.1–17.4. See also Non. de Comp. Doct. 73–74 L.

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Antiquitates between ‘human matters’ (res humanae) and ‘divine matters’ (res diuinae).29 It seems evident that for Varro at least, humanitas consists of the knowledge preserved by human tradition. Intriguingly, he labels what is unknown and lacks tradition as ‘huge beyond human capacity’ (immanis). By contrasting the concepts of humanitas and immanitas, Varro draws attention to their relationship as polar opposites not only in his own mindset but within that of his contemporaries.30 Moreover, the term immanis denotes a boundless and monstrous quantity which is immediately perceived as immoderate and excessive since, unlike humanitas, it cannot be confined to a cultivated, ordered, and civilised space.31 This opposition between humanitas and immanitas can be inferred from some Varronian remarks. Speaking as a character in the second book of the dialogue on the Res rusticae, he presents Dicaearchus’ lost theory on the three phases of human history as true from a logical standpoint (necesse est).32 In the last book of the dialogue, there is another digression about the development of human lifestyles, to which Varro, as author of the dialogue, now refers directly and which he claims to be true on account of tradition, as highlighted by the expression ‘it was handed down’ (traditum est). Cum duae uitae traditae sint hominum, rustica et urbana, quidni, Pinni, dubium non est quin hae non solum loco discretae sint, sed etiam tempore diuersam originem habeant. Antiquior enim multo rustica, quod fuit tempus, cum rura colerent homines neque urbem haberent. Etenim uetustissimum oppidum cum sit traditum Graecum Boeotiae Thebae, quod rex Ogyges aedificarit, in agro Romano Roma, quam Romulus rex . . .. Thebae, quae ante cataclysmon Ogygi conditae dicuntur, eae tamen circiter duo milia annorum et centum sunt. Quod tempus si referas ad illud principium, quo agri coli sunt coepti atque in casis et tuguriis habitabant nec murus et porta quid esset sciebant, immani numero annorum urbanos agricolae praestant. Though there are traditionally two ways in which men live – one in the country, the other in the city – there is clearly no doubt, Pinnius, that these differ not merely in the matter of place but also in the time at which each had its beginning. Country life is much more ancient – I mean the time when people lived on the land and had no cities. For tradition has it that the oldest of all cities is a Greek one, Thebes in Boeotia, founded by King Ogygus; while 29 30 31

For reasons of space, I cannot further discuss here this aspect of Varro’s antiquarian project which I outline in Leonardis (2019) 145–8. See the examples given in Bettini (1978) 133–4. See also Leonardis 2022. For Varro’s wordplays, often used in his etymological investigations, see Collart (1954) 291–3. See Bettini (1978) 148–9. 32 See above on Varro R.R. 2.1.3–1.5.

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irene leonardis the oldest city on Roman territory is Rome, founded by King Romulus . . .. Thebes, however, which is said to have been founded before the deluge which takes its name from Ogygus, is some 2,100 years old. If, now, you compare this span of time with that early day when fields were first tilled, and men lived in huts and dugouts, and did not know what a wall or a gate was, farmers antedate city people by an enormous number of years.33 (Varro R.R. 3.1.1–5)

Here, Varro states that just two human lifestyles are known for certain: the country life (uita rustica) and the city life (uita urbana), with the former chronologically preceding the latter. By comparing this passage to his theory of the three periods of time, we may gather something more.34 At the moment of the first deluge, which is the cut-off point between the ‘unclear’ and ‘mythical’ eras, that is, between the tempus adelon and tempus mythicon, agriculture and the first city (Thebes) already existed; hence, both the country life and city life were already present beyond any doubt (dubium non est), as confirmed by both the mythological and historical traditions. The most significant point for our study, however, is the remark which Varro makes at end of the passage: although he claims to be sure that rural life precedes urban life, he admits that he cannot numerically define the gap of time between the rise of the two lifestyles, for it covers a vast number of years. Meaningfully, this gap is defined as ‘beyond human comprehension’ (immanis). In summary, it seems as if Varro had conceived humanitas and immanitas as opposites: while the former consists of traditions which are still part of human knowledge, that which begins to be forgotten – because it lacks tradition – enters the latter domain of immanitas. Humanitas is therefore the means by which human cultural memory can be reconstructed, whilst immanitas is the obstacle in the path of this reconstruction.

6.4 Genealogy of Words: Etymology As Remedy for Human Ignorance Words always store, albeit in enigmatic form, the memory of furthest antiquity. Since our words come from other words, which ultimately descend from the first human words, language maintains a tiny yet 33 34

Trans. adapted from Hooper and Ash (1934). The comparison is even more legitimate since Varro the author tended to reuse the same material in different works: cf. Münzer (1897), 142. I provide further evidence for the origin of both these theories from the De gente populi Romani in a forthcoming article ‘Reading Plato’s Laws to Understand Varro’s Antiquarianism. Possible New Evidence for Reconstructing the De Gente Populi Romani’, Hermes (forthcoming).

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unbreakable bond with the origins of mankind. Varro clearly represents language as a genealogy of words which are related, that is, linked by a family connection (cognatio).35 In particular, the following passage from the De lingua Latina (‘On the Latin Language’) makes explicit the comparison between human families and word families (stirpes): Declinatio inducta in sermones non solum Latinos, sed omnium hominum utili et necessaria de causa: nisi enim ita esset factum, neque dicere tantum numerum uerborum possemus (infinitae enim sunt naturae in quas ea declinantur) neque quae didicissemus, ex his, quae inter se rerum cognatio esset, appareret . . .. Ut in hominibus quaedam sunt agnationes ac gentilitates, sic in uerbis: ut enim ab emilio homines orti emilii ac gentiles, sic ab emilii nomine declinatae uoces in gentilitate nominali: ab eo enim, quod est impositum recto casu emilius, orta emilii, emilium, emilios, emiliorum et sic reliquae eiusdem quae sunt stirpis. Duo igitur omnino uerborum principia, impositio , alterum ut fons, alterum ut riuus. Impositicia nomina esse uoluerunt quam paucissima, quo citius ediscere possent, declinata quam plurima, quo facilius omnes quibus ad usum opus esset dicerent. Ad illud genus, quod prius, historia opus est: nisi discendendo enim aliter id non peruenit ad nos; ad reliquum genus, quod posterius, ars: ad quam opus est paucis praeceptis quae sunt breuia. Inflection has been introduced not only into Latin speech, but into the speech of all men, because it is useful and necessary; for if this system had not developed, we could not learn such a great number of words as we have learned – for the possible forms into which they are inflected are numerically unlimited – nor from those which we should have learned would it be clear what relationship existed between them so far as their meanings were concerned . . .. As among men there are certain kinships, some through the males, others through the clan, so there are among words. For as from an Aemilius were sprung the men named Aemilius, and the clanmembers of the name, so from the name of Aemilius were inflected the words in the noun-clan: for from that name which was imposed in the nominative case as Aemilius were made Aemilii, Aemilium, Aemilios, Aemiliorum, and in this way also all the other words which are of this same line. The origins of words are therefore two in number, and no more: imposition and inflection; the one is, as it were, the spring, the other the brook. Men have wished that imposed nouns should be as few as possible, that they might be able to learn them more quickly; but derivative nouns they have wished to be as numerous as possible, that they all might the more easily say those nouns which they needed to use. In connection with the first class, a historical narrative is necessary, for except by 35

Romano (2003) 113–14.

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irene leonardis descending such words do not reach us; for the other class, the second, a grammatical treatment is necessary, and for this there is need of a few brief maxims.36 (Varro Ling. 8.3–6)

The first words, which were created by ‘imposition’ (impositio), have necessarily come down from the ancient past to the present. However, here as in the previously discussed extract from the Rerum rusticarum libri, this verb not only alludes to the downward-bound movement of history, but also to the genealogical metaphor of kinship. Accordingly, Varro employs the verb ‘to descend’ (discendere/descendere) to describe a process which is both linguistic and historical.37 In this vein, Varro regards his etymological research as an ascent back to the past in four steps. In a famous and much-discussed passage from the fifth book of De lingua Latina, he speaks of a ‘fourth level of etymology’ (quartus gradus etymologiae) which hides the secret origins and thus the profound meaning of language: Nunc singulorum uerborum origines expediam, quorum quattuor explanandi gradus. Infimus [in] quo populus etiam uenit . . .. Secundus quo grammatica [d]escendit antiqua, quae ostendit, quemadmodum quodque poeta finxerit uerbum, quod confinxerit, quod declinarit . . .. Tertius gradus, quo philosophia ascendens peruenit atque ea quae in consuetudine communi essent aperire coepit . . .. Quartus, ubi est adytum et initia † regis †: quo si non perueniam * * * scientiam, at opinionem aucupabor . . .. Quodsi summum gradum non attigero, tamen secundum praeteribo, quod non solum ad Aristophanis lucernam, sed etiam ad Cleantis lucubraui. Now I shall set forth the origins of the individual words, for which there are four levels of explanation. The lowest is that to which even the common folk has come . . .. The second is that to which old-time grammar has mounted, which shows how the poet has made each word which he has fashioned and derived . . .. The third level is that to which philosophy ascended, and on arrival began to reveal the nature of those words which are in common use . . .. The fourth is that where the sanctuary is, and the mysteries of the † king †: if I shall not arrive at full knowledge there, at any rate I shall cast about for a conjecture . . .. But if I have not reached the highest level, I shall none the less go farther up than the second, because I have studied not only by the lamp of Aristophanes, but also by that of Cleanthes.38 (Varro Ling. 5.7–9) 36 37

38

Trans. by Kent (1938) with some modifications in italics. Piras (2017) suggested this aspect in relation to the last part of this passage. For Varro, of course, impositio is a linguistic phenomenon which is always active. Nevertheless, after being imposed, new words are passed on to subsequent generations of speakers. Trans. by Kent (1938) with some modifications in italics. Contrary to Piras’ reading I accept in the text the correction escendit proposed by Schioppius and adopted by Kent (1938) and Collart (1954).

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Although Varro admits that this fourth level and the knowledge hidden within are unattainable, he considers etymology worth studying, for it permits us to form an opinion on the meaning of words and thus even on that which is unknown due to a lack of tradition.39 Indeed, Varro sees etymology as the only remedy to oblivion and to the ignorance intrinsic to the limited nature of mankind, which can neither gather nor understand what is limitless (immanis). Varro references this idea explicitly while outlining the nature of the socalled primigenia uerba: Primigenia dicuntur uerba . . . quae non sunt ab aliquo uerbo, sed suas habent radices. Contra uerba declinata sunt, quae ab aliquo oriuntur . . .. Quare si quis primigeniorum uerborum origines ostenderit, si ea mille sunt, quingentum milium simplicium uerborum causas aperuerit una; sin nullius, tamen qui ab his reliqua orta ostenderit, satis dixerit de originibus uerborum, cum unde nata sint, principia erunt pauca, quae inde nata sint, innumerabilia. A quibus iisdem principiis antepositis praeuerbiis paucis immanis uerborum accedit numerus, quod praeuerbiis mutatis additis atque commutatis aliud atque aliud fit . . .. Quod si haec decem sola praeuerbia essent, quoniam ab uno uerbo declinationum quingenta discrimina fierent, his decemplicatis coniuncto praeuerbio ex uno quinque milia numero efficerent, ex mille ad quinquagies centum milia discrimina fieri possunt. Democritus, Ecurus, item alii qui infinita principia dixerunt, quae unde sint non dicunt, sed cuiusmodi sint, tamen faciunt magnum: quae ex [h]is constant in mundo, ostendunt. Quare si etymologus principia uerborum postulet mille, de quibus ratio ab se non poscatur, et reliqua ostendat, quod non postulat, tamen immanem uerborum expediat numerum. Primitive is the name applied to words . . . which are not from some other words, but have their own roots. On the other hand, derivative words are those which do develop from some other word . . .. Therefore, if someone had shown the origins of the primitive words, and if there are a thousand of them, he will have revealed at the same time the sources of five hundred thousand separate words; but if without showing the origin of a single primitive word, he has shown how the rest have developed from the primitives, he will have said quite enough about the origins of words, since the original elements from which the words are sprung are few and the words which have sprung from them are countless. . . . There are besides an enormous number of words derived from these same original elements by the addition of a few prefixes, because by the addition of prefixes with or without change a word is repeatedly transformed. But if

39

Contra see Piras (2017) 11–13. For a summary of interpretations of this passage see Piras (1998) 57–71; Lazzerini (2017). For the epistemological status of etymology and Varro’s probable debt to the academic Antiochus of Ascalon see Blank (2008).

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irene leonardis there were only these ten prefixes, from the thousand primitives five million different forms can be made inasmuch as from one word there are five hundred derivational forms and when these are multiplied by ten through union with a prefix five thousand different forms are produced out of one primitive. Democritus, Epicurus, and likewise others who have pronounced the original elements to be unlimited in number, though they do not tell us where the elements are from, but only what sort they are, still perform a great service: they show us the things which in the world consist of these elements. Therefore if the etymologist should postulate one thousand original elements of words, about which an interpretation is not to be asked of him, and show the nature of the rest, about which he does not make the postulation, the number of words which he would explain would still be enormous.40 (Varro Ling. 6.37–39)

In Varro’s view, new words constantly sprout like plants from the limited number of words chosen by the first men. Consequently, although derived from these ‘primitive words’, they now form an uncountable number (immanis numerus). Nevertheless, by proposing hypotheses and following a set of linguistic rules, the etymologist claims to be able to guess the meaning of an infinite number of words (immanis uerborum numerus). Varro here suggests that etymology can remedy human ignorance because it provides hints about that which lies in the domain of the unknown and uncountable (immanitas). Through etymological analysis, for example, the antiquarian may rediscover the meaning of ancient rites which had been lost before his time.41 Varro also explains the mysterious nature of many gods by referring to the etymology of their names.42 As such, he considers etymology the most effective antiquarian tool to rediscover what has been forgotten and, by extension, to recreate a continuity between the ancient past and recent events. In summary, language and human history are both represented by Varro as phenomena ‘descending the stair of time’, whereas antiquarianism attempts to climb back up by following the traces which have been left behind by lost traditions. This parallel movement is illustrated by Figure 6.1, encapsulating the scheme of Varro’s antiquarian project.

40 42

Trans. by Kent (1938). 41 See e.g. Varro’s explanation of the Lupercalia (Varro Ling. 6.13). Cf. e.g. Varro Ant. RD 16, fr. 250 Card. = Aug. Civ. 7.14.

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Varro and the Re-foundation of Roman Cultural Memory TRACING BACK THE ROMAN TRADITION: THE ANTIQUARIAN PROJECT (A POSSIBLE SCHEME)

adelon

• immanitas: human ignorance (cf. necesse est)

mythicon

• humanitas: human knowledge as mythical tradition (cf. dubium non est…traditum est)

I gradus

uita naturalis

II gradus

uita pastoralis

III gradus

uita rustica

uita rustica

historicon

• humanitas: human knowledge as historical tradition (cf. dubium non est…traditum est)

uita urbana

Etymology and antiquarianism trace back (ascendere)

Human kind and language (descendere)

Figure 6.1 A possible scheme for the Varronian ‘descent’ of language and history

6.5

Varro’s New Authority to Re-found Roman Cultural Memory

I would like to conclude this survey by considering some texts which imply that Varro wanted to present himself and to be recognised as a new cultural authority during a period of social and political upheaval. Indeed, in a fragment of the Antiquitates diuinae he claims to have discovered the obscure meaning of the ancient mysteries of Samothrace, unknown even to the Sai, the priests to whom this cult has been entrusted: [Varro] hinc [sc. Caeli et Terrae masculina et femina ui] etiam Samothracum nobilia mysteria . . . sic interpretatur eaque se, quae nec Sais nota sunt, scribendo expositurum eisque missurum quasi religiosissime pollicetur. (Dicit enim) se ibi multis indiciis collegisse in simulacris aliud significare caelum, aliud terram, aliud exempla rerum, quas Plato appellat ideas; caelum Iouem, terram Iunonem, ideas Mineruam (uult intellegi); caelum a quo fiat aliquid, terram de qua fiat, exemplum secundum quod fiat.43 So in the preceding book as well, Varro similarly explains the famous mysteries of Samothrace, and promises most solemnly that he will expound in writing matters unknown even to the Samothracians priests, and send them his exposition. For he says that in Samothrace he gathered many a proof that one of their statues signified the sky, another the earth and another the patterns of things which Plato calls ideas. He identifies the sky 43

Trans. by Green (1963) with modifications in italics. The correction of suis (‘to their own’) with Sais (‘to the Samothracians priests’) is a generally accepted conjecture by Wissowa (1887).

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irene leonardis with Jupiter, the earth with Juno and the ideas with Minerva – the sky by which a thing is made, the earth of which it is made, and the pattern according to which it is made. (Varro Ant. RD 15, fr. 206 Card. = Aug. Civ. 7.28)

Varro’s allegedly new authority depends on his ability to collect information (colligere), which he must then seek to understand (interpretari) and explain (exponere). Armed with these skills, he promises to perform a highly devout task (religiossissime) which consists of explaining the deep-seated causes of both Roman religion and that of its ancestor Samothrace. Through his original use of the tripartite theory of the gods (theologia tripartita), which mixes different treatments of the divine (mythical, philosophical, and institutional), Varro states that he has succeeded in rediscovering what was no longer known even by the priests who had been charged to preserve the secrets of their cult.44 Accordingly, the antiquarian claims to have provided a more useful service to Roman religion than the pontiffs, to whom he alludes by comparing himself to Metellus in what is probably the introductory section of the Antiquitates diuinae: . . . se timere ne pereant [sc. Dei], non incursu hostili, sed ciuium neglegentia, de qua illos uelut ruina liberari a se dicit et in memoria bonorum per eius modi libros recondi atque seruari utiliore cura, quam Metellus de incendio sacra Vestalia et Aeneas de Troiano excidio penates liberasse praedicatur.45 [He says in this very work that] he was alarmed for fear they would perish, not by an enemy’s invasion, but by the neglect of his fellow citizens. He says that in rescuing them from this downfall, and in storing and preserving them in the memory of good citizens by writing such books, he is performing a service more essential than the much renowned deeds of Metellus, who rescued the holy appurtenances of Vesta from the fire, and of Aeneas, who saved the Penates from the fall of Troy. (Varro Ant. RD 1, fr. 2a Card. = Aug. Civ. 6.2)

The reason why Varro speaks of a ‘more essential service’ (utilior cura) is clear. While the pontifex had physically rescued the cult image of Pallas Athena (palladium) from the burning temple of Vesta in 241 BC, Varro saved the Roman gods from perishing by explaining their allegorical meaning, clarifying their substantial identity in relation to the gods of other peoples, and by filling them with a renewed philosophical 44

45

For a survey of the researches on the concept of theologia tripartita until 1968 see Lieberg (1973). For the successive studies see especially Lehmann (1997) 193–225; Rüpke (2005); Rüpke (2012) 172–85. See also Leonardis (2017) 357–66 and Leonardis (2019) 180–209. For Varro’s civil theology see also Paparazzo 2021. Trans. by Green (1963).

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significance which could be universally and rationally accepted in the Roman state. In other words, Varro has preserved Roman tradition by means of reason: his use of allegory permits him to identify the Capitoline triad with the mysteries of Samothrace and ultimately with the natural elements which make up the universe (sky, earth, and ideas).46 Cicero famously praised Varro’s antiquarianism as revolutionary as it enabled Romans to rediscover their cultural identity.47 As we have seen, Varro indeed seems to respond to the widespread identity crisis of late Republican Rome using genealogy both in a cultural and etymological sense. Therefore, his works enabled the Romans to acknowledge themselves (agnoscere) as part of a unique family: as the Roman people (gens populi Romani), they were linked through humanitas to the other peoples (gentes) constituting the whole of mankind (stirps humana).48 This interpretation of Varro’s antiquarian project remains hypothetical, since his works are almost totally lost to us apart from scattered fragments. Nevertheless, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, the surviving evidence highlights Varro’s project to re-found a cultural memory for his fellow Roman citizens that could fit the growing boundaries of their state. Indeed, moving backwards from Roman tradition, he re-constructed a human cultural memory (humanitas), which belonged to the entire world conquered by Rome and legitimised the nascent Roman Empire by giving its members a unified identity.49 In order to invest this new cultural memory with a universal dimension, moreover, Varro presented the whole of humanity as a unique group or kinship by applying genealogy in a rational manner to human language and customs. Thereby he attempted to retrace a continuity between 46 47

48

49

On the increasing public preoccupation with reason towards the end of the Republic see Moatti (1997). Cic. Acad. 1.9: ‘Nam nos in nostra urbe peregrinantis errantisque tamquam hospites tui libri quasi domum reduxerunt ut possemus aliquando qui et ubi essemus agnoscere. Tu aetatem patriae, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum iura, tu sacerdotum, tu domesticam, tu publicam disciplinam, tu sedem regionum locorum, tu omnium diuinarum humanarumque rerum nomina, genera, officia, causas aperuisti’. (‘For we were wandering and straying about like visitors in our own city, and your books led us, so to speak, right home, and enabled us at last to realize who and where we were. You have revealed the age of our native city, the chronology of its history, the laws of its religion and its priesthood, its civil and its military institutions, the topography of its districts and its sites, the terminology, classification and moral and rational basis of all our religious and secular institutions’). Romano (2003) 106 underlines the connection between the verb agnoscere (‘to recognise’) and the process of anagnorisis, a ‘sudden recognition’ typical of comic and tragic plots which reveals the identity of a certain character. Woolf (1998) 54–67. On this new concept of humanitas, Varro based his own theory of the eternity of humankind (and thus possibly of Rome): see Leonardis (2020).

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Rome’s present and its past heritage, along with the traditions of the other civilisations now under its power, such as Greeks and Jews. In summary, by proposing his own ‘mnemohistory’ of Rome as the last step of human progress, Varro re-organised the memory reservoir (Speichergedächtnis) of the (often-incoherent and unintelligible) information contained in Rome’s vanishing tradition and also in foreign ones.50 Built on cultural and linguistic genealogy (= etymology), this new storage memory was structured rationally. Accordingly, it exuded more authority and could attempt, or at least pretend, to recover a Roman cultural memory even if only partially.51 In order to create a newer, more vivid – though arbitrary – memory of Rome (Erinnerung), the antiquarian remediated tradition.52 With tradition lacking a place in daily life due to the loss of traditional customs, and therefore no longer playing a role in communicative memory, Varro based tradition on and focused it through rationality once more. In so doing, Varro prepared the way for Augustus’ empire and now represents an essential step towards what has been termed the Roman Cultural Revolution.53 50

51

52

53

The concept of mnemohistory was advanced by Assmann (1992) and, recently, discussed in a transcultural perspective by Erll (2018b) 276. For the term Speichergedächtnis see the volume introduction with further references. Considering Varro a trustworthy historical source can be unwise, because mnemohistory, as Gowing (2005) 10 put it, consists in ‘the capacity of texts to create or establish memory – or, if you prefer, to fictionalise – that renders them somewhat problematic as sources of historical information. But the Roman view of historia and memoria inevitably leads to a refashioning of the meaning of the past, requiring authors to give it meaning in the present and decide not only what to remember but how it should be remembered’. For the distinction between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung see Assmann (1997). A definition of remediation is given by Bolter and Grusin (1999) 273 and means ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’. For some case studies, see also Erll and Rigney (2009a) as well as Biggs, Hartmann, Langlands, Thorne and Moser in this volume. In our case, the new ‘antiquarian media’ not only repeats Roman tradition, but also tries to explain it so as to refashion the prior media, which was mostly based on oral repetition. On this shift, see Leonardis (2019) 61–104. Indeed, Wallace-Hadrill (1997) 14 remarks that ‘in a massive and pervasive “restoration” of tradition defined by antiquarian learning, Augustus associates his authority with that of the antiquarians’ and that (22) ‘though it defined itself by reference to the past and to Republican tradition, the new Augustan cultural order was differently constructed and reproduced, by reason (ratio) not custom (consuetudo)’.

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chapter 7

Cultural Memory, from Monument to Poem: The Case of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus in the Augustan Poets Bénédicte Delignon*

In 36 BC, after the battle of Naulochus, Octavian decided to dedicate a temple to Apollo in memory of his victory over Sextus Pompeius and to have it built on the Palatine, on the spot where lightning had struck, which was taken to be a sign.1 The temple, however, would not be erected until 28 BC, after the battle of Actium, and would both commemorate Naulochus and Actium. Apollo was effectively linked to the battle of Actium: after his victory, Octavian restored the temple of Apollo at the entrance of the Ambracian Gulf; he also consecrated a sanctuary to Apollo on the site of his camp at Actium.2 The Temple of Apollo Palatinus and its representation in Augustan literature have been the object of many extensive studies which emphasize the edifice’s ideological value: Octavian wanted to make this temple the symbol of the re-founding of Rome after the civil wars and to make Apollo the new tutelary deity of the Vrbs.3 When commentators analyse poems from the Augustan period that mention the temple, they usually continue the same trajectory, showing how the poets appropriate the political discourse associated with Apollo Palatinus to a greater or lesser degree.4 * 1 2

3

4

The author wishes to thank Martin Dinter for polishing the English of this chapter. Suet., Aug. 29.4; Dio 49.15.5. On the temple and the sanctuary of Apollo at Actium, see Thucydides 1.29.3, Suetonius, Aug. 18.3, Dion 51.1. The sanctuary to Apollo was on the site of Nicopolis, a city built to commemorate the battle of Actium, where Octavian established the Actian games. See Gagé (1936) 50–8. On the dedication of the temple on the Palatine, see Suetonius, Aug. 29.4, Dion 49.15.5. Actius may have been the title of Apollo in the cult of the Palatine, but we cannot be certain. See Miller (2009) 190–4. Gagé (1955) 523–58, Sauron (1994) 502–10, Galinsky (1996), 213–24, Miller (2009) 185–254. See also Lugli (1946) 434–41, Loupiac (1999) 205–24, Pandey (2018) 83–134. For an image of this type of coin see ANS http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.1(2).aug.366 (accessed 14 July 2020). Some commentators consider that Propertius’ representations of the temple challenge this discourse. See in particular Bowditch (2009) 401–38, Pandey (2018) 92–108. On these readings and their limits, see below p. 120.

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Nevertheless, to say that Octavian chose to make the Palatine temple a political symbol is not quite the same as saying that he made it a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense of the term.5 For, indeed, a lieu de mémoire is a place that crystallises the collective memory of a social group at a given moment in its history. Did the Romans adhere to the temple’s symbolic value? Can the Temple of Apollo Palatinus be viewed as a lieu de mémoire? Does the notion of cultural memory have any relevance when applied to poetic representations of the temple? By addressing these questions, I will show what memory studies can offer classicists, even when applied to a well-explored subject, but also what problems they pose for the study of the ancient texts.

7.1

The Temple of Apollo Palatinus As Symbol of the Re-founding of Rome

Work by Jean Gagé, Gilles Sauron, Karl Galinsky, and John F. Miller has shown that Octavian was not just celebrating the victory at Actium with the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, but also imbued the building with a clear political interpretation: it marked the end of civil wars, a return to peace and piety and the restoration of a Roman golden age. Accordingly, numerous architectural and decorative elements in the temple serve this ideological purpose. The reproduction on the denarius of Antistius Vetus (RIC I2, p. 450, Aug. 366) gives us an idea of the statue of Apollo that occupied the centre of the temple’s area.6 The base is decorated with anchors and prows; the god holds a lyre in one hand and with the other extends an offering bowl over an altar. The symbolism is clear: standing on the spoils of Actium, the god is the guarantor of restored peace and pietas. What is more, the temple also featured a portico decorated with statues of the Danaids. The daughters of Danaus embody impiety because they married and killed their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. Moreover, two of them were called Cleopatra: Cleopatra, wife of Agenor and Cleopatra, wife of Hermus. Gilles Sauron reminds us that these names were very probably inscribed on the bases of the statues, as was the custom.7 The portico of the Danaids therefore alluded, explicitly as it were, to the victory at Actium 5

6 7

Nora (1984–92). We should, however, remember that Pierre Nora does not define lieu de mémoire exclusively in a material and topographical sense, but that a lieu de mémoire can among many other things also be a text, a symbol, or an abstraction. Gagé (1955) pl. VI; Miller (2009) 193. Sauron (1994) 503, cf. also the statues that decorated the Porticus of Pompey on the Field of Mars.

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and helped to establish the official version of the battle: Cleopatra, too, had married and then assassinated a member of her family, her half-brother, Ptolemy XIV; accordingly, the Danaids share with Cleopatra not only their Egyptian origin, but also their impiety; they embody the disorder and violence which the victory at Actium brought to an end. In addition, Gilles Sauron interprets the two ivory decorations on the temple doors along the same lines: one represents the siege of the sanctuary of Delphi by the Gauls, repulsed by the god himself, the other the massacre of the Niobids, who were disrespectful to Apollo’s mother. For Sauron, both episodes, the latter occurring in mythical times and the former in historical times, illustrate an impiety that has been punished.8 Classicists thus did not need to wait for memory studies to establish that the Temple of Apollo Palatinus represented a reconstructed version of the victory at Actium, that is its memory rather than its history. Cultural memory theorists, however, point out that reconstructing history only contributes to the emergence of a lieu de mémoire to the extent that a whole group adheres to it. This collective process, that Jan Assmann calls memory formation (‘Geformtheit’), leads to a memory obligation (‘Verbindlichkeit’): to belong to the group is necessarily to recognize the memorial value of the monument, which forms part of the collective identity.9 The challenges posed by memory studies are therefore the following: Did the Romans identify with the memories relayed by Octavian through the Palatine temple? And if so, are we able to reconstruct the different stages that the temple underwent to become a lieu de mémoire, that is to say the object of a memory obligation? Memory studies thus invite us to reread the poems to Apollo Palatinus with consideration for their diachronic development. By treating cultural memory not as a set of stable data, but rather as a collective process of acceptance of a particular view of the past, we are not simply using the poets to reconstitute the monument and its political function, or even to determine how ideologically significant references to it are. Instead, we are trying to understand to what extent the Romans gradually accepted the way the memory of Actium was represented and what role the poets played in this process.

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Sauron (1994) 502. See also Galinsky (1996) 219. Halbwachs (1925) and (1950) already established the social determination of memory. Among his six characteristics of collective memory, Assmann includes ‘Rekonstruktivität’, that is the capacity to reconstruct the past according to the norms and values of the group. See Assmann and Czaplicka (1995) 130–131. On ‘Geformtheit’, Assmann notes that memory can be formed by multiple media: not only writing but also pictorial images or ritual. See Assmann and Czaplicka (1995) 131–132.

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7.2 Poetic Representations of the Temple: Constructing a Lieu de Mémoire John F. Miller’s chapter on the poets’ representation of Apollo Palatinus is organized thematically.10 In contrast, by following a chronological order, I will cast light on how representations of the temple developed: in Augustan poetry, the edifice gradually becomes indissociable from its symbolic function. This process started with Propertius’ elegy 2.31, which was by all appearances composed in 28 BC and published in 25 or 24 BC.11 As it is very descriptive, it gives us a precious insight into how the temple was laid out and organized. However, 2.31 is an occasional rather than a commemorative poem: it speaks of the splendour of the edifice and its maiestas, and does not yet link it with the memory of Actium that Octavian intended to construct. The poet addresses a woman, presumably Cynthia although she is not named, and apologizes for being late because he wanted to attend the inauguration of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus. After this first line of introduction, the whole elegy is a description of the temple. Quaeris, cur ueniam tibi tardior? aurea Phoebi porticus a magno Caesare aperta fuit. tota erat in spatium Poenis digesta columnis, inter quas Danai femina turba senis. < ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... > < ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... > hic equidem Phoebo uisus mihi pulchrior ipso marmoreus tacita carmen hiare lyra; atque aram circum steterant armenta Myronis, quattuor, artificis uiuida signa, boues; tum medium claro surgebat marmore templum, uel patria Phoebo carius Ortygia. in quo Solis erat supra fastigia currus,

10

11

Miller (2009) 185–252. He does, however, discuss the composition and publication dates of various poems: the thirty years’ difference between Virgil and Ovid obviously had repercussions on how Apollo Palatinus is portrayed in their work. However, he does not follow a chronological order: Tristia 3.1, composed by Ovid during his exile and published around 9 or 10 AD, is discussed inbetween Aeneid 8, published in 19 BC, and the first book of Horace’s Odes, published in 23 BC. See Lyne (1998) 522–3 and Manuwald. (2006) 224–5, who base their dating on a reference to the submission of India and the Arabian expedition (Prop. 2.10.15–16) and a reference to the death of Cornelius Gallus (Prop. 2.34.91–92).

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et ualuae Libyci nobile dentis opus: altera deiectos Parnasi uertice Gallos, altera maerebat funera Tantalidos. deinde inter matrem deus ipse interque sororem Pythius in longa carmina ueste sonat.

(Prop. 2.31, ed. S. J. Heyworth (2007))

You ask why I came so late? Phoebus’s gold colonnade was opened today by mighty Caesar; such a great sight, adorned with columns from Carthage, and between them the crowd of old Danaus’s daughters. He seemed to me more beautiful than the true Phoebus, lips parted in marble song to a silent lyre. And, about the altar, stood four of Myron’s cattle, carved statues of oxen, true to life. There in the midst, the temple reared in bright marble, dearer to Phoebus than his Ortygian land. Right on the top were two chariots of the Sun, and the doors of Libyan ivory, beautifully done. One mourned the Gauls thrown from Parnassus’s peak, and the other the death, of Niobe, Tantalus’s daughter. Next the Pythian god himself was singing, in flowing robes, between his mother and sister. (Prop. Elegies. trans. A. S. Kline (2002))

Although Propertius describes highly symbolic elements, clearly he does not overly emphasize their meaning and does not mention at all the memorial narrative associated with the temple, the splendour of which he wants to praise more than anything else.12 Admittedly the description begins with the portico of the Danaids, however, that is because of the trajectory of the poem: soon the focus is on the interior and the poem progresses in tandem with the gaze of the poet as he advances from the exterior to the interior of the temple, showing it to Cynthia and to the reader. All he notes about the portico is its spectacular beauty: aurea, in a contre-rejet immediately followed by the god’s name, refers to the colour of the gilded tiles, but also expresses all the maiestas of the sacred edifice. Moreover, what impresses him about the Danaids is neither that they are Egyptian nor that two of them are called Cleopatra, but rather their sheer quantity. Likewise, the description of the temple doors does not dwell on the political value of the edifice. The Gauls driven off the heights of Parnassus were Brennus’ soldiers who besieged the sanctuary of Delphi 12

For this reason I remain unconvinced by Bowditch’s Foucauldian reading (2009) 401–38, which interprets this elegy, in connection with Prop. 2.32, as veiled criticism of the panoptic view of the imperial regime and its interference in private affairs. Hubbard’s interpretation (1984) 281–97, which argues that both poems highlight the role of looking, that is both the artistic and the erotic gaze, seems more accurate to me. In addition, I agree with John F. Miller that the whole description depends on the elegiac genre of which it is a part: the poet absolutely must justify being late if he does not want to incur the terrible wrath of his hard-hearted lover (dura puella); he dwells on the magnificence of the places, which alone can excuse his getting carried away and forgetting his mistress.

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during the Celts’ great expedition against Macedonia and Thessaly. But instead of mentioning the sanctuary of Delphi, the poet mentions Mount Parnassus, at the foot of which it is situated. This is significant as Mount Parnassus was the place where Apollo stayed when he was surrounded by the Muses, in other words, the place for Apollo as patron of poets. Indeed, the elegy does emphasize the fact that the Apollo of the Palatine temple is an Apollo Citharoedus: the lyre is mentioned in line 6. However, nothing is said about elements of the statue most directly related to the political value of the temple, such as the offering bowl or the prows on the base, even though they certainly highlighted the victory at Actium as establishing peace and pietas. Nandini Pandey recently interpreted this elegiac representation as a challenge to the political value Augustus intended the temple to project.13 She may be right to see Cynthia’s absence on the day of the dedication as a sign that this elegy rejects political celebration. Nevertheless, this absence may also have purely poetic motivations for it provides the poet with a pretext to compose an ekphrasis of the temple. Similarly, the personification of the doors that mourn the misfortune of the Gauls and Niobe can be understood as resisting the official discourse.14 In addition, it adapts the ekphrasis to elegiac complaint by underlining the fatal misfortune that befalls the impious who oppose Apollo. The poets cannot openly oppose Augustus. Therefore, to defend the idea of a resistance to the regime we must always assume a hidden, implicit meaning, in other words, make a hypothesis that cannot be verified. We might thus follow John F. Miller’s well-balanced conclusion that in elegy 2.31 ‘Propertius sidesteps rather than challenges the official message of Apollo’s new Roman temple’.15 What is more, three lessons – disconnected from political discourse – can be drawn from our representation of the Palatine temple. Elegy 2.31 first bears witness to the fact that the temple dedication had been an event sufficiently prominent for Propertius to echo it. Second, the focus on the building’s magnificence can be explained at least in part by the generic code of love elegy: the splendour of the temple is the only valid excuse the poet can give to a dura puella unwilling to tolerate his lateness. Finally, such a description thus proves that in 24 BC, terminus antequam for the publication of Book II, a poet could evoke the Temple of Apollo Palatinus without mentioning the victory of Actium and its political meaning. In other words, in 24 BC, the Palatine temple was not yet a lieu de mémoire associated with a memory obligation. This is confirmed by Horace’s ode 1.31. 13

Pandey (2018) 92–101.

14

See Pandey (2018) 100–1.

15

Miller (2009) 205.

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Book I of the Odes was published in 23 BC. It is difficult to determine with precision when Ode 1.31 was composed, but Horace wants it to sound like an occasional poem, a poem composed on the dedication day, at least in the first few lines, even if he does not, unlike Propertius, describe the temple: Quid dedicatum poscit Apollinem uates? quid orat, de patera nouum fundens liquorem? non opimae Sardiniae segetes feraces, non aestuosae grata Calabriae armenta, non aurum aut ebur Indicum, non rura quae Liris quieta mordet aqua taciturnus amnis. premant Calena falce quibus dedit fortuna uitem, diues et aureis mercator exsiccet culullis uina Syra reparata merce, dis carus ipsis, quippe ter et quater anno reuisens aequor Atlanticum inpune. me pascunt oliuae, me cichorea leuesque maluae. frui paratis et ualido mihi, Latoe, dones, et, precor, integra cum mente, nec turpem senectam degere nec cithara carentem.

(Hor., Carm. 1.31, ed. N. Rudd (2004))

What is the poet’s request to Apollo? What does he pray for as he pours out the wine from the bowl? Not for the rich harvests of fertile Sardinia, nor the herds, (they’re delightful), of sunlit Calabria, not for India’s gold or its ivory, nor fields our silent Liris’s stream carries away in the calm of its flow. Let those that Fortune allows prune the vines, with a Calenian knife, so rich merchants can drink their wine from a golden cup, wine they’ve purchased with Syrian goods,

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be´ ne´ dicte delignon who, dear to the gods, three or four times yearly, revisit the briny Atlantic, unscathed. I browse on olives, and chicory and simple mallow. Apollo, the son of Latona, let me enjoy what I have, and, healthy in body and mind, as I ask, live an old age not without honour, and one not lacking the art of the lyre. (Hor. The Odes. trans. A. S. Kline (2003))

Like Propertius, Horace does not allude to Actium or to the commemorative function of the temple. The poet addresses Apollo to ask that he might live simply, die young and always be able to play the lyre, that is, in Horatian language, to write poems. Here we have a sort of selfportrait of the poet, and the prayer could not be more personal, as John F. Miller demonstrated.16 Horace seems to be playing with a deceptive effect: he opens the ode as an occasional poem, but then forgets the Temple of Apollo Palatinus and addresses the god as patron of poets, glossing over both the religious and the political context. Unlike Propertius, Horace undoubtedly is not challenging the official discourse on the Palatine Temple: he is close to Augustus, who is praised in several odes of Book I.17 Thus, the lack of reference to the memorial function of the temple in ode 1.21 only shows that in 23 BC it is still quite possible, even for a poet as Horace, to celebrate its dedication without mentioning its political significance. The temple has not yet been closely connected with the celebration of Actium, it is not yet a lieu de mémoire related to a memory obligation.

7.3

Propertius, 4.6 and Ovid, Tr. 3.1: The Emergence of a Memory Obligation

In 16 BC, twelve years after the dedication of the temple and seven years after the publication of Horace’s Odes, Propertius’s elegy 4.6 brings the commemorative value of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus to 16 17

See Miller (2009) 221–6. The praise of Cleopatra’s bravery in Ode 1.37 does not indicate that Horace is challenging the official discourse on the victory of Actium, as suggested by Pandey (2018) 110–11: the praise of the vanquished is a topos to increase the glory of the victor. As such this portrayal of Cleopatra is a way of pointing to Antony as the only real offender, the effeminate and cowardly enemy, in contrast to the courageous queen of Egypt. This is entirely consistent with the official discourse.

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the fore.18 In fact, no sooner has the poet announced that he is going to celebrate the temple than he starts telling of the battle of Actium. He thereby reminds us that the edifice is a monumentum to the victory of Octavian. However, beyond that, he takes over the official version of the battle of Actium, that is history as Octavian wanted to rewrite it: Musa, Palatini referemus Apollinis aedem: res est, Calliope, digna fauore tuo. Caesaris in nomen ducuntur carmina: Caesar dum canitur, quaeso, Iuppiter ipse uaces. est Phoebi fugiens Athamana ad litora portus, qua sinus Ioniae murmura condit aquae; Actia Iuleae celebrant monumenta carinae; nautarum uotis non onerata uia est. huc mundi coiere manus; stetit aequore moles pinea; nec remis aequa fauebat auis: altera classis erat Teucro damnata Quirino pilaque femineae turpiter apta manu; hinc Augusta ratis, plenis Iouis omine uelis, signaque iam patriae uincere docta suae.

(Prop. 4.6.11–24, ed. S. J. Heyworth (2007))

Muse, we will speak of the Temple of Palatine Apollo: Calliope, the subject is worthy of your favour. The song is created in Caesar’s name: while Caesar’s sung, Jupiter, I beg you, yourself, to listen. There is a secluded harbour of Phoebus’ Athamanian coast, whose bay quiets the murmur of the Ionian Sea, Actium’s open water, remembering the Julian fleet, not a route demanding of sailors’ prayers. Here the world’s forces gathered: a weight of pine stood on the water, but fortune did not favour their oars alike. The enemy fleet was doomed by Trojan Quirinus, and the shameful javelins fit for a woman’s hand: there was Augustus’s ship, sails filled by Jupiter’s favour, standards now skilful in victory for their country. (trans. A. S. Kline (2008))

18

The year 16 BC is a terminus post quem for the publication of book 4 of Propertius. Giuseppe Lugli considers that elegy 4.6 was composed on the occasion of the dedication of the temple, therefore well before the composition of the other poems in book 4 (Lugli, 1946, 435). Butler and Barber on the other hand point out that the mention of the Sygambri at 4.6.77 certainly alludes to the defeat of Lollius and the presence of Augustus in Gaul in 16 BC (Butler and Barber (1933) 355–9). What is more, it is hard to see why Propertius would have waited for the publication of book 4 to include a poem composed in BC 28. In addition, the uplifting tone of 4.6 corresponds well with the new national spirit which characterizes book 4. That is why I agree with the great majority of commentators who consider that elegy 4.6 was composed well after the dedication of the temple. A publication date of 16 BC is generally accepted as it corresponds to both the anniversary of the dedication of the temple and the ludi quinquennales, associated with Apollo Palatinus.

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Antony is presented as the one who betrayed Rome in lines 19–20, as in Octavian’s official version; he did not want to be seen as the one who had restoked the fire of civil war and thus presented Antony as a foreign enemy come to attack Rome.19 Octavian also ensured that the victory at Actium was a victory for libertas; he portrayed Cleopatra as the woman who wanted to subjugate Rome after subjugating Antony, and contrasted the Roman res publica to oriental monarchy. Propertius takes up these representations. He stresses the way in which Cleopatra had reduced Antony to slavery and contrasts the liberty of the Romans, who fought for their country, with the servitude of the Egyptians, who fought because they were under the authority of a woman. As John F. Miller noted, the contrast with elegy 2.31 is striking: Propertius now reappropriates the memorial function of the Palatine Temple as intended by Augustus himself.20 However, the most glowing testimony to the emergence of a memory obligation seems to be given, paradoxically, by a poet excluded from memory, the Ovid of the Tristia. In the uade liber which opens Tristia 3, Ovid, exiled, sends his book to Rome, just as he would send a messenger. A few lines briefly summarize the book’s journey: paruit, et ducens ‘haec sunt fora Caesaris’ inquit; ‘haec est a sacris quae uia nomen habet; hic locus est Vestae, qui Pallada seruat et ignem; haec fuit antiqui regia parua Numae’. inde petens dextram, ‘porta est’ ait ‘ista Palati; hic Stator, hoc primum condita Roma loco est’.21

(Ov., Tr. 3.1.27–32; ed. J. B. Hall (1995))

He obeyed, and as he guided me, explained, ‘This is Caesar’s forum; this is the street named from the sacred rites. This is the place of Vesta guarding Pallas and the fire. Here was once the tiny palace of ancient Numa.’ Then turning to the right, ‘That’, he pointed out, ‘is the gate of the Palatium. Here is Stator; on this spot first was Rome founded’. (Ov. Tr. 3.1.27–32, trans. adapt. from A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (1988))

By casting his oeuvre (liber) as a foreigner whom his guide shows around town, Ovid manages to express his banished status even while celebrating the lieux de mémoire that make up the Roman identity; he recalls the Trojan origins of the Vrbs by mentioning the Palladium, the mythical 19 20 21

Dio 50.26.5, 50.28.3 Miller (2009) 217. Pandey (2018) 71–2 speculates that the excessive praise might reveal Propertius’ insincerity in elegy 4.6. Ov., Tr. 3.1.26–32; ed. (1995).

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royal times by referring to the small palace (parua regia) of Numa, or the transition from Republic to Empire by going through Caesar’s various forums.22 While the liber is construed as a foreigner, the poet remains a Roman with a perfect knowledge of Rome’s memorial topography. This quick tour of great lieux de mémoire ends on the Palatine Hill. Passing the closed front door of Augustus’ house, the liber launches into a whole series of questions which recall the aetiological approach of the Fasti:23 the book seeks to understand to whom this house belongs, if it is Jupiter who lives there, and wonders about the significance of the laurels that decorate this door (ll. 33–46). By passing from the enumeration of the lieux de mémoire of the Vrbs to this series of questions in front of the Princeps’ domus, the poet seems to be indicating that after arriving on the Palatine, he no longer has the keys to understanding the meaning of the monumenta. In fact, when he reaches the temple of Apollo, he restricts himself to describing it, even more elliptically than Propertius had done in elegy 2.1, as he mentions only the statue of Apollo, referred to with the circumlocution intonsus deus (unshorn god, l. 60), and the portico of the Danaids (ll. 61–62), without associating the temple with the victory at Actium, the revival of Rome, or even the Princeps himself. The poet is however quite aware of the significance of the Palatine, as he sends his book there precisely in the hope that it will find a place on the shelves of the temple library (ll.65–68). However, by making his liber a foreigner who does not know the Palatine, who does not know that the domus is Augustus’ and is ignorant of the fact that the temple of Apollo must henceforth be associated with the glory of the Princeps, he makes exclusion from cultural memory one of the many forms that exile can take. To be part of society is to share the understanding of lieux de mémoire with everyone and to accept certain memory obligations imposed by one’s cultural identity; inversely, to be excluded from society is to be excluded from the lieux de mémoire, just as the liber is finally rejected from the Palatine library, and it is even denied partaking in Rome’s collective memory, not unlike the poet who is reduced to describing Apollo’s temple summarily without reference to its significance. Admittedly, this staging of memory exclusion does not preclude a dash of irreverence,24 but it also attests that for the Augustan poets there existed a memory obligation in relation to the Palatine. Accordingly, not having the power to fulfil this obligation signifies exclusion and exile. To study the poetic representations of the Palatine temple in the light of memory studies is therefore to consider the poems that separate Propertius’ 22 23

Huskey (2006) 17–39 notes the omission of some important places and offers an interpretation. Miller (2009) 217. 24 See Huskey (2006).

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elegy 2.31 and Horace’s ode 1.21 from Propertius’ elegy 4.6 and Ovid’s triste 3.1 in an attempt to determine to what extent the poets progressively adhered to the memorial value of the temple, and to what extent they encourage a large part of the Roman people to adhere to it. In other words, it is an attempt to analyse the process of constructing a lieu de mémoire.

7.4

The Poets As Witnesses and Drivers of Memory Formation

The first impulse behind the lieu de mémoire certainly came from Augustus himself; by giving increasing importance to Apollo, in both religious and political contexts, he made the Palatine complex the new centre of the Vrbs and the symbol of the re-foundation of Rome. Jean Gagé has reconstructed the development of imperial Apollinism: it began in 36 BC, when Octavian first planned to erect a temple to Apollo on the Palatine, while the only sanctuary of Apollo was then outside the pomerium on the Circus Flaminius25, and it culminated around 20 BC, when Augustus had the Sibylline books transported from the Capitol to the Palatine and into the base of the Apollo statue.26 However, we do not know how the people of Rome viewed Augustus’ Apollinism. Due to a lack of sources, there are limits to the application of memory studies to ancient worlds: we do not have the means to determine the extent of the collective adhesion to the memorial value of the Palatine temple. Nevertheless, we can analyse the role played by the poets in the construction of the lieu de mémoire. Whatever their sincerity, the Augustan poets did indeed use the specific means of poetry to satisfy the memory obligation. First, the Augustan poets are witnesses of a process willed and orchestrated by the Princeps. This role as a witness of an important stage in the construction of the lieu de mémoire is certainly played by Tibullus’ elegy 2.5, composed around 20 BC. The poem opens with a plea to Apollo (Phoebe, faue) that he help the poet to celebrate the new priest entering his temple. This new priest is not named until line 17: he is M. Valerius Messalinus, who had just received the office of quindecimuir sacris faciundis et Sibyllinis libris inspiciundis (priesthood of the fifteen). There is no doubt 25 26

Gagé (1955) 99–110. Gagé (1955) 523–81, esp. 544–50, where Jean Gagé recapitulates all the arguments for rejecting 12 BC as the date of this transfer. Jean Gagé has shown that by putting the cult of Apollo at the heart of Roman religion, after the death of Caesar had created an unusual religious climate, in which the Romans were attaching more and more importance to oracles and prophecies, Augustus strengthened his image as a providential man.

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that the temple into which the new priest of Apollo had entered is the one on the Palatine. In fact, lines 17–18 allude to the function of the quindecimuiri, who alone had the right to read the Sibylline books, now transferred to the Palatine. In addition, all the commentators emphasize that the description of Apollo, which takes up lines 3 to 10, refers to the statue in front of the temple. Indeed, it contains several characteristic details: the lyre, the robe (as mentioned in Propertius, 2.31.16), and the laurel crown (as mentioned in Ovid, Ars. 3.389). However, in this elegy, Tibullus closely associates this reference to Apollo Palatinus and his temple with the victorious destiny of Rome. Admittedly, Augustus is not named, but the poet evokes the whole mythology attached to his victories, world domination, and restoration of peace; he mentions Jupiter’s combat against Saturn (9–10) and Aeneas and the Sibyl’s prophecy announcing Rome’s hegemony (57). Elegy 2.5 does therefore serve the purpose of celebrating an important stage in the construction of the lieu de mémoire. By transferring the Sibylline books from the Capitol to the Palatine, Augustus finally accomplished making Apollo tutelary deity of his new Rome, with the victory at Actium as its founding event. Tibullus celebrates this in his own way, in the subtle manner of an elegiac poet. But Tibullus was not just witness of this memory shaping process, he was also an active participant. In lines 83–104, assuming the role of a priest of Apollo, he claims that the god has given a favourable sign and he announces the return to peace. He then describes a rustic and pious Rome, which is the exact counterpart of the primitive Rome evoked in lines 25–32. Tibullus thus uses the evocative power of his elegiac poetry, characterised by the praise of the countryside, to associate the temple with the renouatio temporum promised by Augustus. Tibullus, in evoking the transfer of the Sibylline books, not only expresses his adhesion to the memorial value of the temple, but intends to contribute to its acceptance in Rome. He marks the beginning of a process that will be pursued by other poets. Thus, in elegy 4.6, Propertius does not confine himself to going back over the main themes of the official version of the battle of Actium, but adds to the temple’s value as a memorial, by staging what only a poet can: the intervention of Apollo during the battle, in the style of a mythological epic. He thus contributes to establishing in Rome the image of Apollo as protector of Augustus and the Romans, in the midst of a just war (bellum iustum). Propertius here puts into the mouth of Apollo a speech with an aetiological dimension:

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be´ ne´ dicte delignon mox ait : ‘o Longa mundi seruator ab Alba, Auguste, Hectoreis cognite maior auis, uince mari: iam terra tua est; tibi militat arcus et fauet ex umeris hoc onus omne meis. solue metu patriam, quae nunc, te uindice freta, imposuit prorae publica uota tuae; quam nisi defendes, murorum Romulus augur ire Palatinas non bene uidit aues. en, nimium remis audent prope: turpe Latinos principe te fluctus regia uela pati. nec te quod classis centenis remigat alis terreat: inuito labitur illa mari; quodque uehunt prorae Centauros saxa minantes: tigna caua et pictos experiere metus. frangit et attollit uires in milite causa; quae nisi iusta subest, excutit arma pudor. tempus adest, committe rates; ego temporis auctor ducam laurigera Iulia rostra manu’.

(Prop. 4.6.37–54, S. J. Heyworth (2007))

Then he spoke: ‘O Augustus, world-deliverer, sprung from Alba Longa, acknowledged as greater than your Trojan ancestors conquer now by sea: the land is already yours: my bow is on your side, and every arrow burdening my quiver favours you. Free your country from fear, that relying on you as its protector, weights your prow with the State’s prayers. Unless you defend her, Romulus misread the birds flying from the Palatine, he the augur of the foundation of Rome’s walls. And they dare to come too near with their oars: shameful that Latium’s waters should suffer a queen’s sails while you are commander. Do not fear that their ships are winged with a hundred oars: their fleet rides an unwilling sea. Though their prows carry Centaurs with threatening stones, you’ll find they are hollow timber and painted terrors. The cause exalts or breaks a soldier’s strength: unless it is just, shame downs his weapons. The moment has come, commit your fleet: I declare the moment: I lead the Julian prows with laurelled hand.’ (trans. A. S. Kline (2008))

Several details in this speech relate the victory at Actium to the Palatine temple. Apollo asserts that the victory at Actium was necessary as it had to confirm Romulus’ interpretation of the vultures flying over the Palatine. This is a reference to the episode in the founding history of Rome as related by Livy (1.6.4–7). Remus and Romulus, when both claimed power, decided to turn to augury. Remus, looking out from the Aventine hill, was the first to see six vultures; however, Romulus, on the Palatine, saw twice as many and therefore concluded that the omen was favourable to him. The Apollo of elegy 4.6 thus implies that had Octavian been defeated

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at Actium, the history of Rome that began with Romulus would have come to an end; what better way is there to say that the victory at Actium marked the re-founding of Rome, and that Octavian, the future Augustus, was a second Romulus? In addition, the reference to this episode is also an opportunity to recall that Romulus read the omen on the Palatine, and that the Palatine, on which he had been raised, was the first place that he decided to fortify, according to Livy (1.7.3). This is a way of legitimizing the choice of the Palatine as the site of the temple to commemorate the victory of the second Romulus and the revival of Rome. Propertius recounts later (4.6.69–70) that after fighting at Octavian’s side to grant him victory, Apollo abandoned his bow and called for a cithara, which is a clear reference to the statue of Apollo Citharoedus in the temple. Therefore, Propertius does not settle simply for adopting the memorial value that the Princeps wished to confer on the temple. Instead, he imagines a legendary version of the battle of Actium which legitimizes the erection of the temple on the Palatine. He cultivates its status as a lieu de mémoire: indeed, he uses the term monumenta in line 17 to describe the sea of Actium.27 By looking at elegy 4.6 in the light of cultural memory, it is clear that this is neither a propaganda poem with no poetic value nor a poem redeemable only in its sincerity.28 Propertius was not submissive to the will and vision of the Princeps and the new regime: he was a poet of his time, who saw the increasing importance of the Palatine temple in the landscape of the Vrbs. Ultimately, he took part in the shaping of the collective memory around this new monumentum. Similarly, in Aeneid 8.715, Virgil does not stand by idly as Augustus gradually imposes a memorial narrative on the Romans but also builds a lieu de mémoire. In this passage from the Aeneid, Virgil actually places the triple triumph of 29 BC in the Temple of Apollo Palatinus. While the image of Octavian seated on the temple steps before the triumphal procession lacks historical accuracy (in 29 BC the temple had not yet been built and the triumph took place on the Capitol), nevertheless the placement of the triple triumph at the temple contributes to its status as a lieu de mémoire. Just as Propertius rewrote the story of the battle of Actium to incorporate it into the memorial narrative surrounding the Palatine temple, so Virgil rewrote the story of the triumph to reinforce the links that brought Augustus’ religious and political programmes together in the 27 28

On monumenta in Horace, see Beckelhymer in this volume. On criticism of elegy 4.6 as a propaganda poem, see Williams (1968) 51, for example. On attempts to rehabilitate it, see Johnson (1973) 151–80, Connor (1978) 1–10, Arkins (1989) 246–51.

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figure of Apollo. In this sense, Virgil contributed to the construction of the imperial lieu de mémoire and encouraged the development of a collective memory around the Palatine temple. With the Carmen Saeculare composed for the Saecular Games in 17 BC, Horace sets himself up as both a witness of and a participant in the memory shaping process. The Carmen Saeculare takes the form of a hymn to Apollo and Diana. We know that it was sung by a mixed choir of twenty-seven youths and twenty-seven maidens, first in front of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus, then in front of the Capitol.29 This ceremony was without doubt one of the most important steps towards imposing Apollo as the tutelary deity of Rome and in constructing the Temple of Apollo Palatinus as a place symbolic of the revival of the Vrbs. From this perspective, Horace, in composing the Carmen Saeculare, is participating in shaping memory around the temple. But most importantly, this ceremony had been desired by Augustus and ordered by the Sibylline Books. When Horace repeatedly uses elements from the oracle in the Books (l. 7, ll. 16–17, ll. 36–37), he suggests that he is responding to a religious will greater than himself, that of the quindecimuiri or of the Princeps.30 He thus presents himself more as a witness than as an instigator. The emergence of a poetic memory obligation from 20 BC is obviously not enough to think that the entire Roman people saw the Palatine temple as a lieu de mémoire. However, there are indications that the poets accepted the memory obligation all the more easily because it responded to a deep aspiration: the aspiration for peace and the refoundation of Rome. Behind the memory obligation is thus a need for memory, which we can assume was shared by a large part of the Roman people after the civil wars.

7.5

Poets and the Need for Memory

All commentators agree that Virgil is announcing with the proem of Book 3 of the Georgics an epic poem to come, composed to the glory of the new ruler of Rome.31 To refer to this future epic, he uses the metaphor of building a temple, in the centre of which he will place Caesar:

29 30 31

This is what we learn from the Saecular Games Acta: see Acta 147–149 (Schnegg-Köhler) = 107–119 (Pighi) = CIL VI 32323. 90–152. On some passages of the oracle in the Libri being reused in the Carmen Saeculare, see Miller (2009) 250. See Wilkinson (1970) 286–90, Lundström (1976) 163–91, Landolfi (1987) 55–73, Balot (1998) 83–94.

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primus ego in patriam mecum, modo uita supersit, Aonio rediens deducam uertice Musas; primus Idumaeas referam tibi, Mantua, palmas et uiridi in campo templum de marmore ponam propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus errat Mincius et tenera praetexit harundine ripas. in medio mihi Caesar erit templumque tenebit.

(Virg., Georg. 3.10–16, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (1999))

If life lasts, I’ll be the first to return to my country, bringing the Muses with me from the Aonian peak: I’ll be the first, Mantua, to bring you Idumaean palms, and I’ll set up a temple of marble by the water, on that green plain, where great Mincius wanders in slow curves, and clothes his banks with tender reeds. Caesar will be in the middle, and own the temple. (trans. A. S. Kline (2001))

The temple in the centre of which Virgil places Caesar is of course the temple of poetry. Virgil then spins the metaphor: the poet becomes the priest at a completely fanciful ceremony, based on both the Nemean and Olympic games and the Latin games, which forms a sort of imaginary triumph in honour of the Princeps. The procession that closes this ceremony arrives in front of the doors of the temple which Virgil describes: in foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto Gangaridum faciam uictorisque arma Quirini, atque hic undantem bello magnumque fluentem Nilum ac nauali surgentis aere columnas. addam urbes Asiae domitas pulsumque Niphaten fidentemque fuga Parthum uersisque sagittis; et duo rapta manu diuerso ex hoste tropaea bisque triumphatas utroque ab litore gentis. stabunt et Parii lapides, spirantia signa, Assaraci proles demissaeque ab Ioue gentis nomina, Trosque parens et Troiae Cynthius auctor. Inuidia infelix Furias amnemque seuerum Cocyti metuet tortosque Ixionis anguis immanemque rotam et non exsuperabile saxum.

(Virg., Georg. 3.26–39, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (1999))

In gold and solid ivory, on the doors, I’ll fashion battles with the tribes of Ganges, the weapons of victorious Quirinus, and the Nile surging with war, in full flow, and door columns rising up with ships in bronze.

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be´ ne´ dicte delignon I’ll add Asia’s tamed cities, the beaten Niphates, the Parthian, trusting to his arrows, fired behind as he flees, two trophies taken indeed from diverse enemies, and two triumphs over nations on either seashore. Parian marbles will stand there too, living statues, the Trojans, children of Assaracus, and the names of the race of Jove, and father Tros, and Apollo, founder of Troy. Wretched Envy will fear the Furies and Cocytus’s grim river, Ixion’s coiling snakes and massive wheel, and Sisyphus’s remorseless stone. (Virg. Georg. trans. A. S. Kline (2001))

The ekphrasis of the doors of the imaginary temple allows the poet both to announce what he intends to celebrate in his future epic poem, and to pay homage to Octavian highlighting his various victories. He had won the battle of Actium in 31 BC, conquered Egypt in 30 BC, and in 29 BC Rome gave him a triple triumph, as his victory over the Dalmatae was also celebrated.32 This ekphrasis leads the way to a description of the journey of Inuidia sent to the torment of hell. Accordingly, Octavian’s conquests allow a return to peace. The parting of Inuidia, which refers to a hatred based on rivalry and envy, in particular signals the end of the civil wars. For many Romans, Actium marks, above all, a return to civil peace and national reconciliation. In the Georgics proem, Virgil is therefore imagining a temple that could be the site of Octavian’s triumph as well as being a place associated with a collective representation of Actium as the seminal battle in the return to civil peace. Virgil composed the Georgics proem in 29 BC, before the existence of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus.33 However, at that point Octavian had already made the decision to build it and Virgil must have been aware of this. Perhaps work had even already started. It may be that Virgil is alluding to this when he places a statue of Apollo in his imaginary temple, among the descendants of Assaracus, that is to say in the middle of the Julian dynasty. Additionally, the fact that the decoration on the doors of the imaginary temple are made from ivory, as on the doors of the real temple, is perhaps not a coincidence either. This would mean that through 32

33

See Virg. Aen. 8.714–715. The proem of Georgics 3 celebrates these eastern victories: as Della Corte (1986) ad loc. noted, the naval columns reference the four columns consecrated by Octavian after Actium and the Nile alludes to the conquest of Egypt. The Gandarides, an Indian tribe who lived near the lower Ganges, were not conquered, but represent the furthest point of the known East. By mentioning them the poet deliberately exaggerates the extent of Octavian’s conquests. On the date of composition of the Georgics 3 proem, see Thomas (1988, vol. 1) 1 and Horsfall (1995) 63–5.

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the Georgics 3 proem, Virgil was smoothing the way for the memorial function of the Palatine temple. If that was the case, Virgil was giving voice to the deep yearning for civil peace, and even before it was built, had understood the Palatine temple’s potential as a memorial. Nevertheless, even if we refuse to see an allusion to the future Temple of Apollo Palatinus in the proem, the fact remains that Virgil is expressing here a need for memory, a need to revive a national narrative of hope and to see a new sacred place proclaiming the rebirth of Rome. Hence with the Georgics 3 proem, as the temple had not yet been built, Virgil is not contributing to the establishment of the Palatine temple’s political symbolism, since he does not name it and instead emphasizes its metapoetic value. However, what Virgil is expressing in this proem is the need for lieux de mémoire as physical markers of the re-founding of Rome. This same yearning for civil peace undoubtedly explains Tibullus’ or Horace’s support for the Principate: indeed, Tibullus, through the rustic scenes in his elegies, constantly praises peace and Horace, in his Odes, regularly condemns civil war. This desire for civil peace was no doubt shared by many Romans and it was the promises of peace that enabled Augustus to impose the Principate. By putting their poetic power at the service of the memorial value of the Palatine temple, the poets invited Augustus to be consistent with his promises of peace and revival of Rome, of which the Palatinus temple was the symbol. The poets were all the more ready to make the Palatine temple a lieu de mémoire because it reminded Augustus of the promises of the Principate at least as much as it commemorated his triumph. It is in this sense that the poets accepted to become the actors of Roman cultural memory.

7.6

Conclusion

Looking at poetic representations of the Temple of Apollo Palatinus through the lens of memory studies helps to understand the role of the poets in the process of constructing a lieu de mémoire wished by Augustus. Augustus made the temple of Apollo a site of commemoration of his victories and a symbol of the revival of Rome. The poets were witnesses to this project of the Princeps, with steps as impressive as the transfer of the Sibylline books to the Palatine or the ceremony of the Saecular Games. They were also architects of the lieu de mémoire, reinventing the narrative of the battle of Actium, or of the triumph. They put poetic power at the service of the temple’s memorial value, because it commits Augustus to being consistent with the promises of peace and revival on which he

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founded the Principate: at least as much as an adhesion to the official discourse, the celebration of the Palatine temple is a way of engaging the Prince to respond to the yearnings of the Roman people and to legitimate his own power. The Palatine temple can therefore be considered a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s sense of the term, if we accept to substitute the idea of collective adhesion, of which the lack of sources does not allow us to form a clear idea, with the idea of a collective aspiration. In the end, it is the Prince himself who is bounded by the memory obligation.

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chapter 8

Monumenta and the Fallibility of Memory in the Odes Samuel Beckelhymer

c. 3.30 Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. non omnis moriar multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam: usque ego postera crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex: dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnavit populorum, ex humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos. sume superbiam quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam. I’ve finished a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the kingly ruin of the pyramids, which neither greedy rain, nor unchecked wind, nor the uncountable sequence of years Nor the flight of time can tear down. I shall not die in whole, but much of me will escape Libitina: I’ll continue to grow fresh with the praise of posterity, as long as a pontifex Ascends the Capitoline aside the silent virgin. They’ll say that I, born where the Aufidus roars, and where Daunus wanted for rain and ruled The rustic peoples – from humility to influence 135

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samuel beckelhymer – that I was first in bringing Aeolic song to Italic measures. Take your proud honors, well-deserved, Melpomene, and crown my hair, if you will, with the laurel of Delphi.

When Horace first published the Odes in 23 BCE, in an edition comprising the eighty-eight poems of books 1–3, Ode 3.30 stood as a self-reflexive epilogue in which the poet surveyed his work and announced the achievement of his own goals. Its clear and confident claims to poetic immortality resonate pointedly in form and tone with Horace’s earlier statements. The first two lines of the poem are particularly forceful, and feature one of the collection’s more memorable images and more durable phrases:1 exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius.

With these lines the poet signals to the reader the completion of the volume, and he offers an arresting metaphor for his work: he has finished not just a work of writing, but a kind of monument that will last longer than the hard bronze into which inscriptions are carved, and stand taller than the already ancient and crumbling pyramids of Egypt’s great dynasties. Indeed, Horace’s words have proved themselves prescient; the collection has reached us intact where other records have not, and it remains the preeminent achievement in the genre of Latin lyric. Furthermore, this assessment of poetry as a type of monument has endured for subsequent generations of readers and scholars as among the most powerful, and revealing of the poet’s self-appraisals.2 While Horace is not the first Latin poet to name a piece of writing a monumentum – the metaphor of poetry as lasting testament has precedents in both Greek and Latin literature3 – he is perhaps the first to compare so strikingly the permanence of a written work to the tangible, physical structures and memorials that are more commonly described as monumenta. 1

2

3

The present consideration of the Odes is confined only to these first three books as they were first published in 23 BCE. For the sake of brevity and consistency, any references to the Odes as a collection imply only books 1–3 and exclude the later fourth book. This ode and the image with which it begins have dominated in modern scholarship treatments and interpretations of Horace’s conception of his own work and its legacy. See, for instance, Atsabè (1950), Hulton (1972), Woodman (1974), and Simpson (2002), all of whom not only use 3.30 to demonstrate the author’s poetic goals in the Odes, but even include in the titles of their individual contributions to the discussion the phrase exegi monumentum, as though such a gesture were itself a prerequisite for any consideration of the poem. See especially Pinto (2010) on earlier claims – from Isocrates and Ennius – for poetry’s capacity to serve figuratively as a monument.

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But what does it mean for a poem, or a collection of poems, to be a monumentum, and how does Horace’s direct comparison to the physical properties of other monumenta differ from those earlier uses? We will return to the second question shortly, but first a brief sketch of the semantic character and range of monumentum will be useful for our understanding of the stakes of Horace’s claims. At its base etymological value, as an instrumental derivation from monēre “remind,” a monumentum is a tool by which memory is conveyed. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae captures this most fundamental meaning succinctly: “[monumentum est] id quo quis monetur.”4 So, put quite literally, a monumentum of any kind – whether an inscription, a temple, an entire settlement, or even a piece of writing – is a reminder. This broad definition naturally included categories for physical monuments – buildings or statues erected to commemorate various individuals or events – and it is perhaps this meaning that has eclipsed other senses in monumentum’s modern descendants (in Romance and in English). Nevertheless, even in these familiar usages, we cannot, as ancient readers and speakers of Latin did not, lose sight of the etymological underpinnings. In whatever form it takes, a monumentum serves to remind and, in some cases, to admonish its beholders. This last valence is surely at play when Vergil describes the Cretan Minotaur as Veneris monumentum nefandae at Aen. 6.26, and by doing so acknowledges that the terrible sight of the monster forces the viewer to recall the unspeakable act of lust that engendered it. In this way, Vergil’s usage clearly indicates the persistence of monere’s semantic force in monumentum.5 A monumentum does not merely ask the beholder to remember, but to engage with that memory and perhaps even to learn from its precepts. In this usage, monumenta may be regarded as manifestations of cultural memory, vectors of legacy, instruction, and commemoration that have a shared value for the groups that read, experience, and transmit them, and so serve to connect the past to the present.6 Such a designation, when applied to Horace’s poetry, sees the collection as an achievement of lasting importance, and a testament to the poetics and perhaps the politics of Latin literature during the early principate. The word carries with it a kind of 4 5

6

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae vol. VIII pp. 1460.67–1466.54. Vergil’s is an appropriate example of the admonitive force of monumentum for its contemporariness to Horace, but it is hardly the only such usage. Cf. as well Cicero at Phil. 9.12, where a son is a monumentum of his father’s character; Ovid at Met. 4.550, where Juno threatens to make Ino’s attendants saevitiae monumenta meae; et al. See also the contribution of Biggs in this volume for a discourse about the media by which cultural memory is transmitted.

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documentary authority, and so by calling his work a monumentum, Horace hopes – and if we share his confidence already knows – that his work will endure in just such a capacity for generations to come. Such an inference, at least at the most superficial level, is obvious to anyone who reads the ode. Indeed, by its positioning at the original end of the collection and by the admission of Horace’s own self-conscious poetic persona, 3.30’s promises of literary immortality are practically expected. It is my suggestion, however, that Horace’s use of the phrase exegi monumentum is even more calculated than it appears on the surface. I propose that the monumentum of 3.30 be read as a deliberate correspondence to an earlier instance of the word in ode 1.2, the only other appearance of the word monumentum in the Odes. There monumenta, as well as other modes of transmitting remembered events, are pointedly shown to be subject to error or erasure and less reliable, in stark contrast to the endurance of the monumentum of 3.30. Further consideration of the context in 1.2 and the carefully selected diction of 3.30 will show that Horace uses the monumenta of the earlier poem to anticipate the word’s appearance in 3.30 and to validate his bold declaration. By reading these instances in tandem, we can appreciate not only the ways in which Horace acknowledges the shortcomings of various mnemonic devices, and especially the unreliable process of sharing and revisiting communicative memories, but also the manner in which Horace uses the tension between different types of monumenta effectively to demonstrate the claims of 3.30. We will return to 1.2 in a moment, but let us first consider the basic, superficial function of the word in 3.30. The semantic valence of monumentum as we have presented it above already comports neatly with Horace’s poetic aims for the Odes. While these aims are restated in 3.30, his goals for the collection are first articulated at the other bookend of the first collected volume, in the first poem of book 1, with which 3.30 corresponds both metrically and thematically. In both poems, Horace’s concerns, or, more accurately, his promises, are that his poetry will be recognized and canonized among the ranks of lyric poets.7 In 1.1, this culminates in the final lines in the form of an assurance to the poem’s addressee Maecenas: quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres sublimi feriam sidera vertice (1.1.35–6)

7

On the manner in which Horace’s achievements in the genre of lyric builds towards this culmination in 3.30, see especially Thom (2010).

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But if you will insinuate me among the lyric bards, I’ll knock with my exalted head against the stars.

Horace’s programmatic aim in writing the Odes, then, is that it will win him entry among Latin’s lyric vates (a significant semantic departure from poetae, no doubt). In 3.30, he concludes that he has accomplished just this goal: dicar ... princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos.

We may even regard Horace’s attitude towards this outcome as a kind of guarantee; success is assured, provided that Maecenas plays his expected role. In both instances Horace uses only future indicative verbs, and so makes the eventuality of his canonization vivid and certain.8 Thus, canonization – that is, a lasting crystallization of this poetic accomplishment in the literary traditions, and so too in the cultural memory, of Latin and of Rome – can be plainly understood as Horace’s envisioned future for this volume of poetry. The collection qua monumentum, therefore, serves as a testament to this aim and as an enduring monument, in all senses of the word, to the institution of Latin lyric poetry. The label by itself is fitting in this application, but it is neither particularly radical nor wholly innovative. Horace, however, does not simply name his work a monumentum in a strictly figurative sense; rather he draws its monumental status directly into comparison with specific physical vehicles for cultural memory that have stood as visual, and seemingly permanent, representations of political, dynastic, military, and cultural legacy-making. Horace suggests two types of material monumenta: first, a generic aes “bronze,” which surely is meant to recall the metal into which tituli and acta could be inscribed, perhaps coinage as well, and especially statuary (a category of physical monumenta that is especially well attested); and the great pyramids of Egypt, which were already showing their age by Horace’s estimation.9 These, however, are weak and vulnerable to sundry external threats. He contrasts these 8

9

Both statements, the optimistic pledge of 1.1 and the confident declaration of fulfillment in 3.30, are further connected by their references to individual muses: in 1.1 Horace hopes neither Euterpe nor Polyhymnia will prohibit his ascension (literally, “cohibet tibias,” “withhold their flutes,” lines 32–33); while he directly instructs Melpomene to place a crown of laurel on his head at the close of 3.30 (“Delphica / lauro cinge . . . comam,” lines 15–16). The reference to pyramids serves the additional purpose of reminding the Roman reader of the still recent enough cultural and military triumphs of Rome over older and now obsolescent Egypt.

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weaknesses with the Odes’ scale and indelibility, both in terms of its longevity (perennius) and its impressiveness (altius). Physical monumenta, meanwhile, are susceptible both to the erosive forces of weather – imber edax (voracious rain) and Aquilo impotens (the unbridled North wind) are named explicitly – and to the inevitable decadence of time. Because his poetry does not rely on physical means to convey the substance of its cultural memory, the elements pose no great threat to his legacy. Of greater concern for writing, we might imagine, is the threat of literal obliteration through the inexorable passage of time. Horace names this threat the “innumerabilis / annorum series et fuga temporum” (“uncountable sequence of years and fleeting time”). Ostensibly this reinforces the physical vulnerabilities of bronze and the pyramids, but in the context of poetry and writing, which are not primarily physical, it seems likely that Horace has in mind the kinds of oblivion that can undermine speech and literature as well. The poet, however, confidently dismisses any such possibility of this outcome. The poetry will remain even after the poet’s own death, a kind of cultural institution comparable in significance and in durability to the most solemn of religious rites. Indeed just a few lines later Horace uses the office of the pontifex maximus and his official functions to represent the timelessness that his poetic legacy will enjoy. To this we will return. While coincidence of theme, meter, and their position at either end of the three-book collection demonstrate unequivocally a correspondence between 1.1 and 3.30, it is my suggestion that another poem in the collection invites consideration alongside the lofty boasts of 3.30 as well. As mentioned above, the opening lines of 3.30 are not the only place where physical monumenta are tested and shown to be fragile and vulnerable. Horace uses the word monumentum exactly one other time in the Odes, in the second poem of the collection, where the Tiber in flood threatens to “ire deiectum monumenta regis / templaque Vestae” (“to come and cast down the monuments of the king and the temples of Vesta”) (lines 15–16).10 When considered in light of the claims of 3.30, these monumenta in 1.2 immediately present a contrast to his monumentum aere perennius; hardly impervious to external forces, they are rather threatened by those same elemental forces in the face of which Horace’s poetic monumentum stands resolutely unmoved. This lexical correspondence is not the only point of contact between these two poems, and by our consideration of several echoes of 1.2 in 3.30, we may come to appreciate a more deeply symbiotic 10

The word occurs once more in Horace’s poetry, at Sat. 1.8.13, but nowhere else in Odes.

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relationship between the collection’s second and final odes. Let us begin, however, with monumenta. The monumenta regis of 1.2 are meant to represent the complex of buildings said to have been constructed during Numa’s kingship,11 Among these are the temple of Vesta, expressly named, and the Regia, seat of the early kings of Rome and later the collegium pontificum. These structures were also tasked with safeguarding the sacred objects that instantiated Rome’s imperial mandate, the pignora imperii.12 Mention of Vesta anticipates a brief mythological intervention from her most famous attendant Rhea Silvia just below, and the challenge to the seat of the pontifex maximus no doubt looks ahead to Horace’s dedication to Augustus, who subsumed that office as part of his inheritance from Julius Caesar. But there is additional significance beyond the confines of this single ode in Horace’s choice of buildings. 3.30 also makes an overt gesture to the college of the pontiffs. There Horace states that his renown will increase dum Capitolium / scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex, allowing the pontifex maximus and his solemn charges to serve both as a metonym for the state religion of Rome and as a suitable comparandum for the kind of continuity and lasting cultural presence that Horace himself claims to have achieved through his poetry. This is germane to our discussion because Horace shows in these two references to the pontificate that, even if the physical vessel that houses the organization and its activities becomes threatened, or is destroyed, the institution endures. In other words, cultural institutions and their ceremonies, which are deeply rooted in the history and legend of the Latin people, are not subject to external threats in the same way as bronze and pyramids and buildings. Such an inference offers a telling glimpse into the type of cultural legacy and longlasting currency that Horace expects his poetry will enjoy. The religious structures and associated objects contained in the epithet monumenta regis are tools of cultural transmission and tradition; that is, they are important, physical vectors for the collective memory of fundamental Roman institutions. But they are not invincible. Rather, in 1.2 Horace shows that they are fragile and vulnerable to natural forces. This characteristic is essential for our understanding of how Horace views cultural memory and monumenta: even in their great and inveterate significance, monumenta can be destroyed; buildings can be effaced; memory 11 12

This is Porphyrion’s inference in his ancient commentary to the Odes, who reasons that king Numa stands behind regis. The sacred fire of Vesta and the Palladium were the charge of the Vestals; the ancilia were kept safe in the Regia.

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can undergo oblivion. The inherent vulnerability of monumenta, then, makes the special status of Horace’s completed monumentum aere perennius all the more impressive, precisely because it is able to resist the most immediate and tangible of external threats. But Horace does more with the monumenta of 1.2. He insinuates them, and the moment they are tested, directly into a shared, communicative memory, one that combines, even confounds, the living recollection of the reader and the distant, mythical past.13 In doing so he makes us question the reliability not only of those physical monumenta, but also the degree to which we can trust that our shared, living memories are accurate. Thus, he demonstrates the fallibility and the volatility both of material monumenta (i.e., cultural memories) and of hearsay, living memory, and the imprecise mechanisms of their transmission, revision, and embellishment (i.e., various species of communicative memory). This two-pronged attack on two different modes of transmitting collective memory should have the effect of strengthening the claims of 3.30, but before we draw that conclusion, let us consider the rest of poem 1.2’s relevant sections, and especially the concerted effects of vulnerable monumenta and communicative memory. In terms of external considerations, and particularly its function within the collection, the second poem of book 1 establishes its position relative to the rest of the odes much in the same way that the first poem and the poems that follow do. Just as poem 1.1 addresses and celebrates Horace’s literary patron Maecenas, so does 1.2 nod to another important figure in Horace’s poetic program, Augustus.14 1.2 also features a new metrical schema, the Sapphic stanza, the second of nine distinct meters in nine consecutive odes that advertise and demonstrate Horace’s virtuosic mastery of the lyric genre, and are a defining characteristic of the so-called Parade Odes.15 At any rate, it becomes clear that much more than chance has determined

13

14 15

A contemporary comparandum to this strategy, by which Horace destabilizes the usual tools of memory and commemoration, is to be found in Livy’s literal creation of an urban topography for Rome, which is indistinct and mutable until it undergoes the historian’s written organization. See Jaeger (1997) for Livy’s written monumenta. 1.3 continues this trend with a dedication to Vergil, and one can appreciate a kind of hierarchy of indebtedness in these dedications, all of which appears very calculated. By unfurling the full array of lyric meters under his command, Horace hits the ground running, so to speak, on his way to proving himself the preeminent voice of Latin lyric. This subtle but forceful detail is not the only way that Horace uses these first poems to demonstrate mastery of the genre, and Fenton (2008) has noted as well that the opening salvo of poems in the first book, including 1.2, also features a distinct and nonrepeating arrangement of different types of trees, as though Horace has cultivated a rich and variegated literary grove in his poetry.

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where poem 1.2 occurs in the collection, and so a correspondence with other poems whose position is fixed by ulterior concerns – such as 1.1 and 3.30 – seems all the more likely. As to its content, ode 1.2 is a poetic reflection on the still-fresh wounds of Julius Caesar’s assassination, the civil war that followed, and the long process of reconciliation that lay ahead. The poem can be comfortably divided into two parts of roughly equal length. The first six stanzas lay out the unsettled and uncertain state of affairs at Rome. These act as an entrée into the central thrust of the poem, an appeal to Augustus to provide consolation, leadership, and direction for Rome and its people going forward.16 This request for divine assistance occupies the final seven stanzas of the poem, but it is in the first six stanzas of exposition that our interest in monumenta lies. Here Horace surveys the devastation of recent political unrest and civil war by comparing it to violent natural forces: snow, hail, lightning, and especially a noteworthy flooding of the Tiber, only just now beginning to recede. His reckoning of these phenomena offers a fertile ground for the exploration of communicative and cultural memories, and the behaviors, and at times fallibility, of such modes of transmission. These first six stanzas are presented below: Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae grandinis misit pater et rubente dextera sacras iaculatus arcis terruit urbem, terruit gentis, grave ne rediret saeculum Pyrrhae nova monstra questae, omne cum Proteus pecus egit altos visere montis piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo, nota quae sedes fuerat columbis, et superiecto pavidae natarunt aequore dammae. vidimus flavom Tiberim retortis litore Etrusco violenter undis ire deiectum monumenta regis templaque Vestae,

16

Several other deities are interviewed for the position of Rome’s savior, but Horace eventually settles on Augustus, whose divinity is already assumed and implied to have taken the form of, if not conflated entirely with, Mercury. On the implications of this see Miller (1991).

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samuel beckelhymer Iliae dum se nimium querenti iactat ultorem, vagus et sinistra labitur ripa Iove non probante uxorius amnis. audiet civis acuisse ferrum, quo graves Persae melius perirent, audiet pugnas vitio parentum rara iuventus Now has the father sent enough snow and dire hail upon the earth, and pelted our holy citadels with red hand, and terrified our city. Terrified our people that coming back was the grave age of Pyrrha, who lamented strange portents, when Proteus drove his whole flock to visit the high mountains, And the race of fish clung to the highest elm, which once had been for doves familiar roosts, and timid does paddled in the waters thrown up and over. We have seen the tawny Tiber, when its waves are twisted back upon the Tuscan bank, as it goes to topple the monuments of the king and the temples of Vesta, While he vaunted himself avenger of Ilia and her excessive complaints, and slipped outside his left bank, without Jove’s consent, doting husband of a river. They will hear how citizens sharpened swords better suited to killing grim Persians, hear of the battles, the youth made sparse by the fault of their parents.

The ode begins by noting that the vehement storm of civil and social discord has at last ceased its assault. Jupiter has decided that Rome has endured enough. The chaos and disarray of today and the disruption of the natural order of things recall in the minds of the fearful gentes of earth, and obviously in the mind of the poet as well, the flood that Pyrrha and Deucalion survived in the distant, mythical past: when fish swam among submerged trees; deer struggled to stay afloat in the high waters; and the

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mountain peaks became accessible to the gods and creatures who inhabit the seas. The world, now as then, is aswarm with ominous portents. With this image in our heads, Horace then directs our attention to the swollen Tiber and invites the reader to join him in the recollection of a shared memory. vidimus flavom Tiberim retortis litore Etruscto violenter undis ire deiectum monumenta regis templaque Vestae

(Hor. Carm. 1.2.13–16)

This semi-historical event is anchored through the use of a gnomic, firstperson plural verb, vidimus flavom Tiberim, to the living memory of Horace and his contemporary readers – we are imagined to have witnessed the event with Horace – and so represents a kind of communicative memory. Whether Horace has a specific flood in mind is unclear, and largely unimportant. After all, the Tiber floods frequently, one flood much like another. No particularly historic or distinct flood seems to have been recorded from this period beyond what would be expected.17 It is wiser to understand this flood as proverbial, rather than historical. At any rate, the poetic conceit requires only that we the reader are familiar with the behavior of the Tiber and its occasional propensity to flood its banks in order for us to appreciate the metaphorically unnatural state of Rome. But this imprecision serves another purpose as well: by speaking generally of an unspecified flood of the Tiber, and by making our own memory of such events complicit through vidimus, Horace effectively blends history and myth, and living memory as well, together. Indeed, his reference to Pyrrha (line 6) just before he introduces the Tiber invites us to wade into the muddy estuary where history and myth intermingle and to question the reliability of our own recollections. The effect is amplified by his inclusion of variant mythical accounts and his seamless movement between legend and history. Even the epithet flavom – “tawny yellow” because of the mud and silt that have been stirred up by the flood – highlights this murkiness. In Horace’s version of the flood, the Tiber personified has overflown his banks at the insistence of his querulous wife, here said to be Ilia (i.e., Rhea Silvia). This version of the myth seems to derive from lost verses of Ennius’ Annales, according to Porphyrion’s comment. Whatever its provenance, it offers a minor revision in its particulars of similar versions of the myth that

17

On this point, our source is Dio’s history, who notes floods in 27, 23, 22 BCE.

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have Ilia as the wife of the nearby Anio. In both versions, Ilia is wedded to the god either as she casts herself into the river in her grief at the apparent death of her sons, or as she is punished for violating her celibacy. In Horace’s present time, Ilia would appear to voice her discontent at the unjust assassination of Caesar and convinces her husband to swell and threaten the buildings of Rome. Her angry protests at the metaphorical self-inflicted wounds of a people striking down their own leader and resorting to the civil war no doubt echo the legendary civil-war-in-miniature of Romulus and Remus’ quarrel. Horace’s preference for the Tiber over the Anio serves to keep the dramatic action within the immediate reach of Rome, but the slippage between variations of the myth also reinforces a kind of imprecise and muddled fluidity, and so does little to separate Horace’s living memory and the distant, mythical past. Indeed, it may be argued that Horace actively courts further conflation by having Father Tiber vaunt himself as his wife’s dutiful ultor. The epithet in this context cannot but recall Ilia’s more famous – and more consequential – liaison with Mars, as well as the cult of Mars Ultor that Augustus, then Octavian, had created.18 As the recollection of events continues, further impurities in the mixture of myth and history provide more reasons to suspect a deliberate manipulation of our memory. Horace seems to contradict his own version of the events when he notes that Tiber’s flooding occurs Iove non probante. The Tiber has not asked for Jupiter’s permission, and instead succumbed to the imprecations of his wife. But while Jupiter withholds his permission here, he is explicitly named above as the agent of the violent and turbulent weather that caused the destructive flood and reversal of natural order (“satis nivis . . . misit pater”). It may be tempting to blame this inconsistency on sloppy inattentiveness to the continuity of the narrative on the part of the poet, but such judgment would be rash. Rather, this too reminds us to proceed cautiously in our own recollection, and recommends that we interrogate further the contents of our shared vidimus. Has Horace slipped from a living memory back into legend? If so, and if we cannot assume that the generic flood is associated with the unnatural state of affairs with which poem 1.2 begins, where in time should we locate Ilia and the occasion in which Tiber ire deiectum 18

If there is any doubt that this cult of Mars and notions of vengeance are at stake in 1.2, Horace dispels these by his use of ultor again at line 44, and inultos in line 51, and it is difficult to ignore the resonances with Augustus’ Mars Ultor in any of these instances, even if Mars alone among the gods described as possible saviors for Rome is not identified by name. On themes of vengeance in this poem more generally see Nussbaum (1961).

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monumenta regis? It seems unlikely that this flood could have occurred in the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, as no flooding of the Tiber that could be associated with the various omens that preceded and followed that event is ever mentioned. The next most obvious instance that would warrant and expect Ilia’s vocal complaints retrojects our interpretation of Horace’s narrative all the way back to her original encounter with the Tiber, at the moment when she either throws herself into the river out of sadness at the loss of her sons or is punished there by her uncle Amulius. This, however, would present a chronological inconsistency that is not easily reconciled: the Tiber cannot threaten these specific monumenta regis if Romulus is still an infant; Numa can hardly be the named “king” here, and he certainly cannot have constructed this temple complex, at this point in Rome’s history. All of this confusion, this imprecision, and this effortless, almost indifferent, movement between myth and legend and living memory demonstrate that even our recollection of relatively recent events is unreliable, subject to human error, and imperfect. In one sense, this muddled chronology and the virtual timelessness of the events that it establishes fits neatly within existing models of the role and function of cultural memory. Much in the way that a physical monumentum conveys the actions, persons, and events it commemorates from the past into the present, a narrative account such as that of 1.2, one that brings the suspect historicity of the mythic past into almost seamless contact with the present, accomplishes the timelessness of cultural memory precisely because it makes the past contemporary to the present (and presumably to the future as well). So, all the uncertainty as to which timelines, which flood, which legend “we have seen” (as subjects of vidimus) may serve its purpose simply as an articulation of the shared, timeless recollection of Rome’s citizens (and Horace’s readers). Whoever and just as importantly whenever “we” are, the example of a vengeful river in flood is both available and evocative to us. And yet, Horace cannot wish for his readers to look upon the myths and legends of Rome’s founding in this way. On the contrary, the premise of 1.2 relies on a clear distinction between “then” and “now,” insofar as it is fixed to a particular point in Rome’s history that resembles earlier events, but ultimately must stand apart from the previous strife and turmoil, both of the recent civil war and of those vengeful floods of the Tiber. In this way 1.2 challenges not only our theoretical framework for the persistence of cultural memory, but perhaps most saliently even the durability of those monumenta regis.

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This is not to say that 1.2 does not value these shared memories, even when they are imprecise. Communicative memories such as these serve a purpose. Horace uses them to appeal to our own sensibilities and draw us into his poetic exploration of the unsettled state of Rome, and to share in his joyous relief at the arrival of Augustus. But the poet proves as well that they cannot be documentary testimony for how events took place. Communicative memories serve a purpose, but that purpose is not to provide a genuine or sanctioned record of the past. They are inaccurate and inexact. One final stanza concludes the opening framework of the poem before Horace auditions various deities for the role of savior, and in this sixth stanza the poet provides one more piece of evidence of the fallibility of communicative memory: audiet civis acuisse ferrum, quo graves Persae melius perirent audiet pugnas vitio parentum rara iuventus

(Hor. Carm. 1.2.21–24)

Future generations will hear of the civil war in only the vaguest of terms: how citizens sharpened their swords and how the population was reduced because of the faults of their parents. In a vacuum, the phrase civis acuisse ferrum is a wonderfully succinct poetic rendering of the idea of civil war – citizens, not soldiers, sharpened their weapons. But in the broader context of imprecise memories, this version of the history is conspicuously reductive. Of course, the terseness of this summary hardly impedes our understanding of what happened, and we need not assume that living memory will revise and contract so momentous an event so quickly; naturally the rara iuventus will hear from their elders a much richer account of the war. But positioned in the wake of Horace’s deliberate conflation of myth, legend and history, this abridged civil war and its oral transmission stand as a final proof of the limitations of living memory and the occasional fallibility of our shared memory. Since communicative memory is not meant to preserve definitive records of Rome’s collective memory, it would seem obvious to assume instead that various conduits of cultural memory should undertake that important task, even if they will be challenged to keep distinct the historical “then” and the renovated “now.” Among the instruments of cultural memory are various types of monumenta. Horace has already shown that monumenta regis of 1.2 are not without their weaknesses, at least in their physical instantiations. In fact, in an ironic twist, Horace demonstrates just

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how vulnerable physical monumenta (i.e., cultural memories) can be by threatening their physical oblivion at the hands of the elements, which are themselves described in a shaky mis-recollection, one that has already been shown to be of dubious reliability. In other words, Horace uses an embellished and untrustworthy communicative memory, imprecise with regard to its specifics and perhaps occasionally anachronistic as well, to wipe away a cultural memory, reliable in its content but not so in the physical vulnerability of the medium by which it is conveyed. Neither of the forms of memory in 1.2 should be trusted: the one because it is inaccurate; the other because it is impermanent. This trial of two forms of collective memory, neither without faults, and the apparent departure from the anachronizing effects of pure cultural memory à la Assmann (where past and present are made contemporary) leave open the possibility that another kind of monumentum can serve the Roman state and its historical records better, Horace’s own monumentum aere perennius. His poetry will not suffer from the wear and erosion that plague physical structures and material records. As such, we can regard the monumentum of 3.30 as preferable to those monumenta of 1.2. But Horace’s diction in 3.30 also provides a response to the undependable and inexact contents of a communicative memory. While the correspondence of monumentum and monumenta in the two poems is overt, I argue that Horace’s choice of verbs, exegi, also stands as a direct reply to 1.2. Exegi, from exigere, is generally read as “completed, perfected, finished.” Certainly, it has this sense here, and with its object monumentum, the image of poetry as a building, structure or perhaps statue is vivid and immediate. But exegi also suggests that the final product, rendered passively, is a monumentum exactum. Even as it is used adjectively, the participle maintains its close association to the verb, but its semantic range extends to encompass meanings that denote not only completeness and perfection, but also accuracy, precision, exactitude. In other words, a monumentum exactum is not only a completed monument, but it is an exact one too. This final shade of nuance allows the opening line of 3.30, “exegi monumentum aere perennius,” to challenge and surpass both of the forms of collective memory in 1.2; a monumentum that resists the physical violence of elemental forces endures longer than stone and metal; that it has been completed in an act of exactio proves that it is a more accurate and more reliable means of preserving cultural records than mere oral transmission or even living memory. Horace’s monumentum exactum aere perennius stands apart from these other channels of commemoration.

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Armed with such an understanding of the semantic and contextual weight of this opening statement, we are now better equipped to appreciate the comparison of 3.30. I do not mean the comparison to bronze and to the rubble of the pyramids, but rather that passing reference to the pontifex maximus in lines 8 and 9. The collegium pontificum has seen its physical vessel endangered before, but the institution itself is not so easily effaced. This makes it an effective parallel for the legacy of a poetic collection. In fact, the permanence of the pontifex and his office may be assumed to the extent that Horace can use it as a measure of timelessness. The very phrase “dum Capitolium / scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex” in the poetic conception of Horace, who cannot have imagined an expiration date for the most important institutions of Rome’s state religion, effectively bears the meaning of “forever.” Horace’s poetry is intended to remain as a cultural institution long after he has passed away, and long after other records have been lost to time and weathering. Perhaps he had not imagined, when he described his accomplished as a timeless monumentum, that the Odes would survive long after the state religion of Rome and the office of the pontifex maximus had disappeared, but it seems fair more than two millennia later to admit that his assessment of his work and its endurance was accurate.

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chapter 9

Constructing Cultural Memory in Ovid’s Fasti: The Case of Servius Tullius and Fortuna Darja Šterbenc Erker

9.1

Elegiac Cultural Memories of Fortuna’s Temple

Ovid reinvented Roman cultural memory by re-constructing the memories of Servius Tullius, the sixth mythical king of Rome. In so doing, he joined historians, antiquarians, poets, and even the emperor Augustus in their efforts to rebuild and recover the Roman past.1 Furthermore, Ovid commemorated their collective endeavours in the Fasti, a didactic poem which discusses the aetiologies of Roman festivals (fasti) and highlights how Augustus appropriated Rome’s calendar by filling it with festivals dedicated both to his own achievements and those of his family, the domus Augusta. Political messages clad in religious imagery present a crucial frame of reference for the ancient readers’ understanding of the Fasti; when viewed through the lens of Augustus’ religious policy, its intertextual and intratextual interplay grows ever more evocative. While imitating poetic models from the related genres of love elegy and aetiological elegy, written by Callimachus and Propertius respectively, Ovid adopts discourses on religion promoted by Augustus and transforms them in a new and distinctly ‘elegiac’ manner. He thus reshapes memories of the past and renders the religious tradition of Rome both polyvalent and multifaceted. Ovid reflects with wit and humour on Augustus’ representation of his divinity. In the poet’s aetiological portrayals of mythical kings, we can thus recognise actions, values and sayings attributed to Augustus.2 However, 1

2

The Augustans re-organised the cultural memory of Rome as commemorated in late Republican literature, e.g. by Varro in his Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum. On Varro’s reconstruction of the cultural memory of Rome see Leonardis in this volume. On Augustus’ restoration of religion, see Scheid (2005). I wish to thank Ulrike Stephan†, Joy Littlewood, Eva María Mateo Decabo, Orla Mulholland, Astrid Khoo, Hermione Dowling, and Martin Dinter for reading and polishing the English of this chapter. For an expanded version of this chapter, see Šterbenc Erker (2023), 152–177. E.g. for Numa, see Šterbenc Erker (2015).

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while Ovid repeats some of the imperial messages and Augustan discourse, he simultaneously undermines Augustus’ mechanisms of religious selffashioning.3 I shall show how Ovid reflects on Augustus’ narratives of his divine origins by constructing his own version of memory of the Roman mythical past. What is more, I shall highlight how he questioned the possibility of transgressing the line between gods and mortals, thus contesting contemporary discussions such as those by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus on re-constructing the cultural memory of Servius Tullius. Ovid reflects Augustus’ religious legitimising mechanisms by echoing rumours of his divine origins. In the Fasti, events from the mythical past of Rome are closely intertwined with communicative memories recalling recent political events within Augustus’ family (domus Augusta).4 To name but one example, Ovid alludes to recent events in the domus Augusta as part of his portrayal of Servius Tullius, founder of the temple of the goddesses Mater Matuta and Fortuna on the Forum Boarium. By narrating how Servius’ mother conceived him with the deity Vulcan, Ovid alludes to the recent memory of Augustus’ self-representation as the son of a god. In addition, his narration of a legendary conspiracy to take the throne by Tullia, Servius Tullius’ daughter, alludes to the dynastic intrigues in Augustus’ family. Ovid’s poetic representations of the foundation of the temple of Fortuna thus serve as vehicles for re-constructing the Roman past while simultaneously using communicative memories to poke fun at Augustus’ self-aggrandisement in promoting himself as a divinity. In what follows, I shall demonstrate that Ovid presents Servius Tullius as Augustus’ mythical prototype by ‘rediscovering’ the cultural memory of the temple of Fortuna. As the poet delves into the aetiology of that temple’s foundation, moreover, he conveys Servius’ legacy through standard elegiac tropes. This integrative approach serves as a good example of the abundant inventiveness which characterises Ovid’s unique re-construction of cultural memory. Indeed, Ovid freely reorganises Rome’s cultural memory by alluding both to Augustus’ religious self-fashioning and to dynastic tensions within the imperial household.

3

4

See Robinson (2011) 9–11 who treats the differing interpretations as the act of a reader, and therefore perceives two categories of (modern) readership associated with the poem: supportive readers tend to reconstruct ideas that support Augustus’ regime, whereas suspicious readers reconstruct ones that subvert it. On communicative memory, see Assmann (2008).

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9.2 Augustus’ Divinity and His Divine Ancestors Questioning the possibility of transgressing the line drawn between gods and mortals was a part of the discourse on cultural memory in Augustan Rome. When employing religious self-fashioning Augustus continued Hellenistic and Republican practice, which had earlier been adopted by members of the elite in Rome.5 By basing his divinity on his ‘posthumous adoption’ by Julius Caesar, Octavian/Augustus established his identity as divi filius (‘the son of a god’) and presented himself as a divinely chosen political leader.6 After he had received the honorific name Augustus in 27 BC, the princeps restored temples, initiated new religious festivals and instituted new priesthoods. In addition, he displayed himself to the Roman citizens worshipping the guardian gods of Rome. Spencer Cole and Michael Koortbojian argue convincingly that in the rivalry between Antonius and Octavian after the death of Julius Caesar, rhetorical arguments for and against Caesar’s divinity played an important role.7 In the historical context of contesting and ascertaining Caesar’s divinity, Octavian interpreted the sudden appearance of a star in the sky during his games as confirmation that his adoptive father had been divinised. The appearance of the comet (sidus Iulium) at the ludi Victoriae Caesaris in August 44 BC seemingly confirmed the belief propagated by Octavian, that Caesar had emerged as a new god.8 Stars were traditionally associated with the gods9 and, according to the Stoic doctrine of astral immortality, also with distinguished men. While Caesar’s deification and reappearance as comet was recognised, it was not left uncontested by his opponents.10 In 42 BC, when Octavian succeeded Caesar, he pushed for Caesar’s consecration.11 Afterwards he presented himself as divi filius.12 A further interpretation of the meaning of the sidus Iulium emphasises the divine aspects of Octavian. Octavian himself in his Memoirs stated that 5

In the Republic, Roman statesmen perpetuated this notion by alluding to their divine descent and to the gods’ support and favour for them, see Wiseman (1974). On imperial legendary genealogies, see Hekster (2006). On the theophilia of Augustus in Propertius’ Elegy 4.6, see Šterbenc Erker (2017). 6 On the problematic nature of posthumous adoption, see Suet. Caes. 83.1; Malitz (2003) 242. 7 8 9 Cole (2013) 170–84; Koortbojian (2013) 7. Plin. NH 2.94. Weinstock (1971) 375. 10 The Epicurean Philodemus, who objected in 44 BC to Stoic doctrine on the divinity of the stars and astral immortality of distinguished men, opposed Caesar’s deification on these grounds; see Weinstock (1971) 372. Cf. Varro Ant. rer. div. 1 fr. 32 Cardauns (1976). 11 App. B Civ. 2.148; Dio Cass. 47.18.3ff; Weinstock (1971) 386; Beard/North/Price (1998a) 148–9; Cole (2013). 12 Ovid is referring to this affiliation when he speaks of Augustus as a pious avenger of his father, see Ov. Fast. 3.709–10; 5.569–76.

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he presented the star in public as Caesar who had joined the celestial numina, but ‘interiore gaudio sibi illum natum seque in eo nasci interpretatus est’, ‘with private joy he interpreted it as having been born for him, and that he was born in it’.13 Octavian saw himself as being born from the star, which is a further aspect of his divine origin. Octavian did not limit the presentation of his charisma to the rather abstract conceptualisation of himself as a divinity being born in the star, but disseminated narratives about his divine conception before the battle of Actium: he claimed that his mother Atia had been impregnated by the god Apollo while sleeping in his temple.14 Suetonius transmits the message that Apollo was Octavian’s father in three ways: firstly, he alludes to sexual acts between his mother, Atia, and the god in the form of a snake)15 and highlights Atia’s need to wash herself as if after intercourse.16 The snake left a snake-like mark on her body, which she could not wash away; sex with a divine being had made a physical impression on her body. Second, while pregnant Atia dreamt that her vitals were borne up to the stars and spread over the whole extent of land and sky. Third, Octavius, his father on earth, dreamed that the sun rose from Atia’s womb. Both the radiance rising to the stars from the foetus and the mark on Atia’s body serve as narrative devices highlighting the divinity of the child. Augustus’ claims to divine origins, mythical narratives of his closeness to the gods, his self-staging as a god-like person, and granting divine honours to his own father were religious strategies to win acceptance for himself as leader.17 The self-fashioning of Roman political leaders as gods provokes different modes of belief since one can believe in a narrative of divine conception without really believing it.18 Divine origins and qualities were perceived by sceptical intellectuals as a mythic narrative and a poetic truth that should not be taken at face value.19 Ovid presents a kind of poetic truth about the divinity of Augustus in his Fasti. He uses honorific names for the princeps: Augustus (used from 27 BC 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Pliny NH 2.94. Suetonius presents these narratives, which were also a part of Augustus’ own Memoirs, see Suet. Aug. 94.4. Scipio Africanus also referred to his divine conception using a similar narrative, see Livy 26.19.5–9; cf. Gell. 6.1.1–6; Beard, North and Price (1998a) 84–5; (1998b) 216–17. Suet. Aug. 94.4. Ovid stresses the divine origins of Augustus via Aeneas/Iulus and Julius Caesar from the goddess Venus, as well as via Romulus as a descendant of Mars, see Ov. Fast. 4.23–8. Cf. Veyne (1983) 169: ‘on y croit sans y croire’ and Feeney (1998) 14 on the ‘capacity of educated Greeks and Romans of the post-classical era to entertain different kinds of assent and criteria of judgment in different contexts, in ways that strike the modern observer as mutually contradictory’. Cf. Cic. Leg. 1.4 on omina at his birth.

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onwards) and pater patriae (from 2 BC onwards) and highlights his closeness to the gods.20 He even expresses the divinity of Augustus directly: tempus erit cum vos orbemque tuebitur idem, et fient ipso sacra colente deo. et penes Augustos patriae tutela manebit: hanc fas imperii frena tenere domum. The time will come when you and the world share the same guardian,21 And your rites will be carried out with a god himself officiating, And the protection of the homeland will rest in Augustan hands. It is proper that this house should hold the reins of power.22 (Ov. Fast. 1. 529–32)

Ovid refers to a typical pose of Augustus performing sacrifice, which is reflected in depictions of Augustus capite velato (with his head covered) performing libations with a patera (libation bowl) in reliefs or statues in Rome.23 The reference to Augustus performing rituals as a god forms part of a prophecy of the goddess Carmentis when she and her son Euander reached the future site of Rome as refugees from Arcadia. Unlike Horace, who merely suggests that the god Mercury would be incarnated in Augustus,24 Ovid makes Carmentis speak directly of Augustus as a god performing rituals for the gods.25 Thus Ovid intensifies the praise of Augustus and amplifies the emperor’s most prominent religious communication in the name of the state (res publica). However, the literary form of elegy lends itself to ambivalent messages and subversive readings, which attentive readers are expected to decipher by themselves.26 Additionally,

20 21 22 23

24 25

26

Ov. Fast. 4.19–22. Ovid refers here to the goddess Vesta and the penates (household gods) who guaranteed the wellbeing (salus) of the state, the res publica. Trans. adapted from Wiseman and Wiseman (2013). For Martial’s reception of Ovid’s expression ‘the god sacrifices to the gods’, see Mart. Ep. 8.4. On gods performing sacrifices on red-and black-figure vases, see Simon (1953). See also Himmelmann (1959); Veyne (1990). Hor. Carm. 1.2; Binder (2003) 57–65. Ovid puts in Carmentis’ mouth a prophecy about the deification of Augustus’ wife. Since she refers to her as Julia Augusta, a title Livia obtained by Augustus’ testament, this passage must have been written after Augustus’ death in 14 AD. Cf. Ov. Fast. 6.2 ‘quae placeat, . . . ipse leges’, ‘you youself will pick (sc. the causae) which you like’. Newlands (1995) 6–8 characterizes the poem as both serious and humorous and an open-ended work that depends on creative engagement with its audience. Like Janus, the programmatic deity of the Fasti, the poem ‘looks in two directions, toward both Ovid’s earlier erotic elegy and his new aetiological elegy on Roman times, and like Janus, it invites different and often competing readings’ (6). On Janus as programmatic deity in the Fasti, see Hardie (1991); Krasser (2008) 274.

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Ovid’s literary technique consists of exaggerating the praise of Augustus’ achievements in order to undermine them afterwards in an allusive way.27

9.3

Fortuna and Servius Tullius

In what follows, I shall discuss how Servius Tullius was conceived in order to show that Ovid’s revival of this cultural memory relates to Augustus’ propagation of his own divine origins. The narrative is part of the aetiologies of the founding of the temple of Fortuna. On 11 June, Roman matrons worshipped the goddesses Fortuna and Mater Matuta, who shared a common temple on the Forum Boarium. According to tradition, the founder of this temple was Servius Tullius, the sixth legendary king of Rome.28 Although he was of servile origin, Fortuna helped him to rise to power.29 Ovid depicts Servius Tullius in a completely new way, as a lover of the goddess Fortuna.30 This novel characterisation enables him to answer the aetiological question: ‘why was the head of the statue in the temple of Fortuna veiled by several togas?’31 According to Ovid’s elegiac images of Servius Tullius, Fortuna wished to hide the beloved features of her lover under regal togas because she was ashamed of her love for him: dum dea furtivos timide profitetur amores, caelestemque homini concubuisse pudet (arsit enim magno correpta cupidine regis, caecaque in hoc uno non fuit illa viro), 27 28

29

30

31

Cf. Robinson (2011) 321; Whitton (2013) 158; Šterbenc Erker (2019) 138–40. On Servius Tullius, see Vernole (2002). Ovid refers to the temple as a ‘monument of [Tullia’s] father’ (Fast. 6. 611: templum, monimenta parentis). According to legend Tullius also founded the temple of the goddess Fors Fortuna on the right bank of Tiber on 24 June, see Ov. Fast. 6.771–84. In the Fasti the narrator first explains why female slaves are to be kept away from the temple of Mater Matuta, then turns to the goddess Fortuna, see Ov. Fast. 6.473–568. Plutarch also stresses that Servius’ mother was a slave, see Mor. 287F (Quaes. Rom. 100); Mor. 289C (Quaes. Rom. 106). Ovid’s stress on the servile origins of the founder of the temple is interpreted by Barchiesi as a jibe against Tiberius from the gens Claudia who was adopted by Augustus on 26 June, 4 AD, two days after the commemoration of the foundation of the temple of Fors Fortuna on 24 June of that year, see Barchiesi (1997) 264–5. The fact that Ovid does not mention Tiberius’ adoption is surely significant, but there is no text signal to confirm that Ovid’s causa of Fors Fortuna alludes to Tiberius. Barchiesi focuses on this affair, but he does not take into account the story of Servius’ conception by Vulcan, see Barchiesi (1997) 228–9. Murgatroyd (2005) 201–5 analyses Ovid’s echoing of Livy in the Fasti. Ov. Fast. 6. 570: sed superiniectis quis latet iste togis? A model for such investigation of an unusual feature of a statue could be found in Callimachus’ Aetia. Callimachus for example probed the question why the golden wreath of the statue of Leucadian Artemis was replaced by a mortar, see Aet. 1, fr. 31c-g. Whereas Bömer (1958) 377 accepted Varro’s identification of Fortuna with Fortuna Virgo, see Varro as reproduced in Cardauns (1976) fr. 291, Claridge (2010) 283 correctly interprets the goddess as Fortuna.

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nocte domum parva solita est intrare fenestra, unde Fenestellae nomina porta tenet. nunc pudet, et voltus velamine celat amatos, oraque sunt multa regia tecta toga. While the goddess meekly declared her secret love, and was ashamed, as a dweller in heaven, to have slept with a mortal (for she burned, was swept away by a great desire for the king, and in the case of this man alone she was not blind), she used to enter his house by night through a little window, from which the Porta Fenestella takes its name. Now she is ashamed, and hides the loved features under a covering, (Ov. Fast. 6.573–80) and the royal face is hidden with many a toga.32

Ovid gives a surprising etymological explanation of the name Porta Fenestella, ‘the Gate of the Little Window’; unlike Livy, his explanation centres on Fortuna’s sexual escapades and not her favour towards Servius during his rise to political power.33 By climbing through the window, the goddess Fortuna acts as an elegiac puella, which makes Servius an adulterous man, since he would have been cheating on his wife, Tarquinia, daughter of Tarquinius Priscus.34 However, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both write that the name of the window commemorates the address of queen Tanaquil to the citizens of Rome from that very window after her husband Tarquinius Priscus had been murdered in which she persuaded them to make Servius Tullius king.35 Ovid thus manipulates this cultural memory to make it concordant with the tropes of love elegy. After her secret love affair Fortuna was ashamed of her desire for a mortal, and therefore she covered the face of the statue of Servius Tullius.36 This first aetiology of the covered head of the statue in the temple of Fortuna, as a sign that the goddess regretted fulfilling her sexual desire by sleeping with a mortal, is full of irreverent humour.37

32 33

34 35

36 37

Trans. adapted from Wiseman and Wiseman (2013). Cf. Livy 1.39.4. Porta Fenestella was the local name for the Porta Mugonia, adjacent to the window of the royal palace overlooking the Via Nova, near the Temple of Jupiter Stator, see Littlewood (2006) 175; cf. Chiu (2016) 145. Livy 1.39.4.; cf. Prop. 4.7.15–8; Chiu (2016) 147–8. D. H. 4.5.1; Plut. Mor. 273B-C (Quaes. Rom. 36). According to Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Tanaquil pretended that her husband was still alive and wanted the people to follow Servius Tullius, see Livy 1.41.4–6. Covering up one’s face with a cloak was a feature of mime, cf. Sen. Ep. 114.6. Aphrodite was also embarrassed after an affair with the mortal Anchises, see Hymn Hom. Ven. 247– 54; cf. Chiu (2016) 146–7.

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However, Ovid is not sure of the correct aetiology for hiding the head and face of the statue.38 Accordingly, he presents several aetiologies of this unusual feature. The second aetiology explains that the head of the king was concealed by the togae so that the people of Rome would not mourn when seeing Servius Tullius’ face.39 However, in a third aetiology the poet provides yet another reason. He highlights that Servius Tullius wanted to keep his head covered to avoid seeing his daughter, who had incited her husband to kill him and acquire his kingdom.40 These learned aetiologies end with a reference to the burning down of the temple of Fortuna in 213 BC, though one of its statues survived the fire. Ovid stresses that Vulcan, Servius Tullius’ father, preserved his son in the form of his statue.41 Ovid also specifies how the god Vulcan impregnated Servius’ mother: arserat hoc templum: signo tamen ille pepercit ignis; opem nato Mulciber ipse tulit. namque pater Tulli Volcanus, Ocresia mater praesignis facie Corniculana fuit. hanc secum Tanaquil, sacris de more peractis, iussit in ornatum fundere vina focum: hinc inter cineres obsceni forma virilis aut fuit aut visa est, sed fuit illa magis. iussa foco captiva sedet: conceptus ab illa Servius a caelo semina gentis habet. signa dedit genitor tunc cum caput igne corusco contigit, inque comis flammeus arsit apex. The temple had burned down, the fire, however, spared the statue: Mulciber42 himself aided his son. For Vulcan was Tullius’ father, and Ocresia of Corniculum, famous for her beauty, was his mother. When the rites had been carried out as was custom, Tanaquil ordered her to pour wine with her on the decorated hearth. Here among the ashes was the shape of a male organ, or it seemed to be43 – but no, it really was. As ordered, the captive woman squats on the hearth. Servius, conceived by her, has the seed of his race from heaven. 38 39 42 43

Ov. Fast. 6.571–2: ‘sed causa latendi / discrepat, et dubium me quoque mentis habet’ (‘However, there is some discrepancy as to why it is hidden, a matter on which I am also seized by doubts’). Ibid., 6.581–4. 40 Ibid., 6.581–620. 41 Ov. Fast. 6.625–6. This euphemistic epithet refers to the god’s ability to mould metal, see Fest. 129L: ‘a moliendo ferro’ (‘from moulding iron’); Littlewood (2006) 185. Vulcan was an ugly god who limped. Littlewood (2006) 186 underlines that postponing the clear perception of the phallus creates dramatic suspense.

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His father gave a sign when he touched his head with glittering fire, (Ov. Fast. 6.625–36) and a peak of flame burned in his hair.44

Ocresia, Servius’ mother, was a beautiful captive in Ovid’s poem, but ultimately also a slave who had to fulfil her mistresses’ orders.45 Sitting on the phallus in the ashes of the altar is not a very noble way to conceive a child, even if the child was fathered by a god. Dionysius of Halicarnassus also refers to the legendary conception of Servius Tullius; in his account a divine phallus rose up from the fire on the hearth in the king’s palace.46 Molly Pasco-Pranger argues that Servius’ mother had to sit down by the hearth; this reading makes the obscene imagery of the conception rather chaste.47 Anne and Peter Wiseman translate ‘at the hearth’, but in my adapted translation of the passage I follow Franz Bömer who translates foco correctly as ablativus loci, ‘on the hearth’.48 Ovid’s portrayal of divine agency at the impregnation of the mother of Servius Tullius is an irreverent depiction of the conception of a Roman political leader. Immediately after this scene, which recalls obscene dramatic plays (mimus),49 Ovid returns to solemn language when he asserts that the glowing of the hair marked Servius Tullius’ head as divine. In Ovid’s portrayal there is no reference to Servius Tullius’ future political role, as there is in Livy’s text, where the queen Tanaquil recognised in the glowing head of Servius Tullius the person who would occupy the royal throne in the future.50 Livy writes that Servius Tullius as a child was sleeping in the royal palace when his head was miraculously engulfed in flames.51 Using distancing devices such as ‘people say’ (ferunt) and emphasising the miraculous side of the narration Livy distances himself subtly 44 45

46

47 49 50 51

Adapted from Wiseman and Wiseman (2013). Her name is mentioned only by Ovid. The variant Ocrisia, as transmitted in some manuscripts of the Fasti, bears a striking similarity to the verb criso (‘to move one’s haunches’). Juvenal 6.322 thus describes Saufeia: ‘ipsa Medullinae fluctum crisantis adorat’ (‘admiring Medullina as the latter moves her haunches’). D.H. 4.2.1–3. This story of conception from a phallus on the hearth is told of Romulus, see Plut. Rom. 2, Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, see Verg. Aen. 7.678–681, and Modius Fabidius, founder of Cures, see D. H. 2. 48. Pasco-Pranger (2006) 271. 48 Wiseman and Wiseman (2013) 122; Bömer (1957) 289. Barchiesi (1997) 228 recognises the love affair of Servius and Fortuna as ‘good material for a mime show’; cf. Chiu (2016) 147. For a further element of mime in the Fasti, see above, note 36. Livy 1.39.1–3. The mythic queen Tanaquil interpreted this as a favourable portent and ordered that he be given the same education as her children; later he married her daughter and became – so the legend goes – the sixth king of Rome. Livy does not deny the humble origins of the king as son of a slave but insists that his mother was of royal birth: after the capture of Corniculum, the pregnant wife of the princeps of the town was recognized among the captives and was rescued from captivity, see Livy 1.39.1–2. On Tanaquil raising the boy at her court, see Livy 1.39.5.

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from its veracity.52 In the Fasti, however, the reference to a radiate crown is part of an explicit recognition of Vulcan as the father of the child. The apex of flames glowing on Servius Tullius’ head is a sign of divinity, which also appears in the Aeneid on the heads of Aeneas and Ascanius.53 In the battle of Actium Augustus, as depicted on Vulcan’s shield, forged for Aeneas, also appears with a radiate crown on his head.54 Additionally, Ovid refers to Augustus and Servius Tullius as gentle leaders.55 By depicting Servius Tullius as gentle leader with a radiate crown Ovid thus draws attention to points of similarity between him and Augustus.56 Augustus and Servius Tullius both express their wish never to set eyes on their daughter again. Servius Tullius speaks this ban himself: signum erat in solio residens sub imagine Tulli; dicitur hoc oculis opposuisse manum, et vox audita est ‘voltus abscondite nostros, ne natae videant ora nefanda meae.’ veste data tegitur; vetat hanc Fortuna moveri, et sic e templo est ipsa locuta suo: ‘ore revelato qua primum luce patebit Servius, haec positi prima pudoris erit.’ There was a statue, in the likeness of Tullius, seated on a throne. It is said to have put its hand over its eyes, and a voice was heared: ‘Hide my face, lest it should see my daughter’s abominable features.’ A robe was provided; it is covered. Fortuna forbids the robe to be moved, and this is how she spoke from her own temple: ‘The day Servius first appears with face uncovered, (Ov. Fast. 6.613–20) will be the first of shame abandoned.’57

52

53 54 55 56 57

On distancing devices, see Feeney (2007b) 185–6; Whitton (2013) 159. The radiant crown, known from Hellenistic statues of kings, was avoided by Roman leaders because it signified a claim to divinity. As such, these rulers represented radiate crowns only on a small scale, that is, on coins. It was only after Augustus’ death and consecration that this radiate crown was added to his statues: additional drill holes were made to attach it to the head, see Pollini (2012) 150–1. On the imagery of the radiate crown, see Bergmann (1998). On Aeneas’ radiating helmet, see Verg. Aen. 10.270: ardet apex capiti. On Ascanius’ radiating crown, see Verg. Aen. 2.682–6 and 693–8. For the flames on Augustus’ head and the appearance of the Iulium sidus over his head, see Verg. Aen. 8.680–81. Ov. Fast. 6.582: placidi ducis (Servius Tullius); Ov. Fast. 6.93: placidi ducis (Augustus). Cf. Littlewood (2006) 187; Pasco-Pranger (2006) 271–2. Augustus had a close relationship with Fortuna, to the extent that Frears (1981) 885 states, ‘Augustus was Fortuna’. Adapted from Wiseman and Wiseman (2013).

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Servius’ statue is imagined as alive; it moves its hands and speaks. It could be that Fortuna endorses her lover’s feelings; in a kind of sonic epiphany she uses Augustus’ moralistic vocabulary (pudor) to enforce her ban on removing clothing to emphasise shame, but we are not sure whether this refers to her or his embarrassment.58 Maybe Fortuna even refers to the narrator’s mention of her own shame at the beginning of the aetiology.59 For the ancient recipient it would have been obvious that Servius’ utterance that he did not want to see his daughter again alludes to Augustus’ words about his own daughter. According to Suetonius, Augustus was angry and ashamed because of the transgressions of both his daughter Julia the Elder and his granddaughter Julia the Younger. Although Augustus regarded himself as favoured by Fortuna all his life, as far as the two Julias were concerned he saw himself deserted by the goddess.60 He had them banished from Rome in 2 BC and 8 AD, respectively, because they ‘had polluted themselves by all kinds of vices’.61 The notoriety of Julia the Elder and Augustus’ reaction to it are reported a century later by Suetonius, who depicts Augustus as downcast: de filia absens ac libello per quaestorem recitato notum senatui fecit abstinuitque congressu hominum diu prae pudore, etiam de necanda deliberauit. In the case of his daughter he sent a complaint to the senate which was to be reported by a quaestor, while he himself stayed away. In addition, for a long time, overcome with shame, he avoided people’s company and even contemplated having her killed. (Suet. Aug. 65.2, trans. adapt. from Edwards (2008))

When Phoebe, Julia’s freedwoman servant, whom Suetonius presents as having been party to the activities of her mistress, hanged herself after Julia’s misdeeds were discovered, Augustus said that he had rather been the father of Phoebe than of Julia.62 When the Roman people wanted Augustus to call Julia back from exile to Rome, he wished in a speech in an assembly that they themselves might have ‘such daughters and wives’.63 According to Suetonius, Julia did not excel at spinning wool, as Augustus had foreseen for her, and was reluctant to conform to her father’s image of a modest woman.64 Seneca depicts Augustus’ daughter as meeting men at night on the Forum Romanum on the rostra where her father pronounced 58 59 60 61 62

Cf. Murgatroyd (2005) 205. Ov. Fast. 6.579, see above. Ov. Fast. 6.574: pudet. Barchiesi interprets Servius as oscillating between being a representative of morality and a transgressor of (sexual) morality, see Barchiesi (1997) 229. On Augustus and Fortuna, see Kajanto (1981) 517–18. On dedication of the altar to Fortuna Redux when Augustus came back to Rome from Syria in 19 BC, see Augustus, RG 11. Suet. Aug. 65.1: ‘Iulias, filiam et neptem, omnibus probris contaminatas relegavit’. Ibid., 65.2. 63 Ibid., 65.3. 64 Ibid., 64.2.

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the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis in 18 BC.65 Julia’s scandalous nocturnal meetings angered Augustus, and he banished her from Rome in 2 BC when he found her guilty of adulterium (‘adultery’).66 According to Seneca, since young men of noble Roman families and Julia were ‘bound . . . by adultery as if by a sacred oath’, the presence of Julia at the side of Iullus Antonius, son of Marcus Antonius, presented a danger to Augustus in his old age.67 The accusation of adulterium arose from Julia’s attempts to extort a divorce from Tiberius so she could marry Iullus Antonius, in order to strengthen the position of her own children as successors of Augustus.68 Paradoxically, the accusation of adulterium seems to be an Augustan label for women who mixed in politics.69 The emperor’s granddaughter Julia was also found guilty of committing adultery and banished from Rome, as if she was complicit with her husband, Aemilius Paulus, who planned the assassination of Augustus himself.70 Ovid projects the contemporary concerns of Augustus, especially the question of succession to his position as princeps, into the mythic past of Rome in the figure of Servius Tullius.

9.4 Crimen regni (‘Conspiring for the Throne’) Juno Moneta’s temple, built on the high citadel of the Capitoline, commemorated, according to Ovid, the Manlius who once repelled the Gauls from the Capitol, but died convicted of aiming at 65

66 67

68 69 70

Sen. Ben. 6.32.1. The adultery law was directed almost exclusively against the elite; it criminalised adultery and aimed at moral restoration of the res publica, see Cass. Dio. 54.30.4, 55.10.16, and Mette-Dittmann (1991). A senatorial court was created to punish matrons found guilty of adulterium; this was the first time that Roman matronae became subject to senatorial jurisdiction, see Šterbenc Erker (2013) 239. Sen. Ben. 6.32.1; Vell. 2.100.4–5; Plin. HN 21.9; Tac. Ann. 3.24.2; Cass. Dio 55.10.12. Sen. Dial. 10.4.6: ‘filia et tot nobiles iuuenes adulterio velut sacramento adacti iam infractam aetatem territabant Iullusque et iterum timenda cum Antonio mulier’ (‘his daughter and all the noble youths who were bound to her by adultery as by a sacred oath, oft alarmed his failing years – and there was Iullus, and a second time the need to fear a woman in league with an Antony’). Translation adapted from William Hardy Alexander. Syme (1978) 195, 207; Mette-Dittmann (1991) 96–7; Schmitzer (2010) 172; Šterbenc Erker (2013) 240–1. Šterbenc Erker (2013) 240–1. Tac. Ann. 3.24.2: ‘ut valida divo Augusto in rem publicam fortuna ita domi improspera fuit ob impudicitiam filiae ac neptis quas urbe depulit, adulterosque earum morte aut fuga punivit. nam culpam inter viros ac feminas vulgatam gravi nomine laesarum religionum ac violatae maiestatis appellando clementiam maiorum suasque ipse leges egrediebatur’ (‘Fortune, faithful to the deified Augustus in his public life, was less favourable to him at home, owing to the lack of moderation of his daughter and granddaughter, whom he expelled from the capital while punishing their adulterers with death or banishment. For naming their shared failures by the harsh appellations of sacrilege and treason, he superseded both the mild penalties of an earlier day and those of his own laws’). Translation adap. from John Jackson.

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kingship.71 This motif is expanded in the portrayal of Tullia as a tough kind of femme fatale; she and her husband each killed their previous spouse in order to marry each other. However, Tullia’s cruelty in her desire to reign is also directed against her own father. Tullia thus demands that her husband Tarquinius (who will soon become Superbus) kill her own father: et caput et regnum facio dotale parentis. si vir es, i, dictas exige dotis opes. regia res scelus est: socero cape regna necato, et nostras patrio sanguine tingue manus I make my dowry my father’s head and my father’s kingdom. Go on, if you’re a man, and claim the rich dowry I’ve announced! Crime is for kings. Kill your father-in-law, take his kingdom, (Ov. Fast. 6.593–96) and dye our hands with my father’s blood!72

Contrary to custom, here the daughter herself promises a dowry to her husband. Tullia’s lack of pietas culminates in her order to her carriage driver to drive over the body of her dead father, although the driver asks her with tears in his eyes not to force him to do so.73 Ovid presents this mythic event as an etymological explanation for the name of vicus Sceleratus (‘Wicked Street’), which commemorated Tullia’s crime in the topography of Rome. As far as this aetiology is concerned, Ovid is adhering to antiquarian tradition.74 However, the reference to the legendary dynastic strife in the royal family recalls the quarrels in the domus Augusta in which both Juliae, the daughter and granddaughter of Augustus, were involved in intrigues over the dynastic succession. Ovid depicts Servius Tullius as the elegiac lover of the goddess Fortuna, who regretted having a sexual affair with him. That he was killed by his son-in-law, although he was himself a son of Vulcan, is not only an irreverent representation of the legendary king, but also emphasises his mortality, another uneasy issue for Augustus, who managed to escape many planned assassinations, one of which was ascribed to the husband of his own granddaughter.75

71

72 74 75

Ov. Fast. 6.189: damnatus crimine regnis; cf. Livy 6.18–20. On adfectores regni as exempla for discussing tyranny at Rome, see Smith (2006) 61. Pasco-Pranger (2006) 262–3 claims that Julius Caesar can be recognised in the figure of Manlius but her argument lacks a solid base. Trans. adapt. from Wiseman and Wiseman (2013). 73 Ov. Fast. 6.605–8. Ov. Fast. 6.609–10; cf. Varro, Ling. 5.159; Livy 1.48.6–9; Festus Gloss. Lat. 333L. See page 162 with note 70 in this chapter.

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9.5 Conclusions: Ovid’s Competing Cultural Memories of Rome The story of Servius Tullius is an example of Ovid playing creatively with the cultural memory of Rome by linking Augustus in his aetiologies with Servius Tullius, a mythical figure whose story runs parallel to the emperor’s rise to political power from humble origins. Like Servius, Augustus was a favourite with Fortuna, a son of a god and a father who never wished to see his daughter again after her involvement in struggles over dynastic succession. While making his reader recognise features of Augustus in Servius Tullius, Ovid discusses traditional kingship elements and the motif of conspiring for the throne (adfectatio or crimen regni) in a playful way. Ancient authors did not agree on the identity of the veiled statue in the temple of Fortuna.76 Ovid invents his own version of Roman cultural memory to allude to the political issues of his own time, namely the communicative memory of Augustus and his household (domus Augusta). The narrative of divine agency at the conception of Servius Tullius would have been read by a Roman reader as a response to Augustus’ dissemination of legends about his own divine origin. While Livy speaks about poetic attempts to intertwine divine actions with the mythic history of Rome in order to confer a more dignity on the origins of cities, Ovid pushes references to Augustus’ divinity further than any other Augustan author by presenting him as a god sacrificing to the gods.77 However, the poet depicts the divine conception of Servius Tullius with irreverent humour that questions taking literally the divine origins of a powerful person such as Augustus. Readings of Ovid’s reconstruction of the cultural memory of the temple of Fortuna are twofold, as well. Modern readers themselves can decide whether they should interpret the divine conception of Servius Tullius as a miraculous story or as undermining rumours of divine conception.78 An interpretation that emphasises the miraculous aspect is characteristic of supportive readers of the Fasti, who take Ovid’s praise of Augustus’ divine charisma at face value. Readers who understand Servius Tullius’ story as Ovid’s subtle undermining of Augustus’ dissemination of legends about his divine origins, on the other hand, join the group of ‘suspicious’ readers, 76 77 78

Varro ap. Non. 278L, Plin. HN 8.197, D.H. 4.40.7 and Val. Max. 1.8.11 argue that the statue depicts Servius Tullius, while Cass. Dio 58. 7. 2 believes that it portrays Fortuna. Livy praef. 6–7; for Ovid’s presentation of Augustus as a sacrificing god, see above, Section 9.2. Pasco-Pranger (2006) 271 stresses the miraculous side of the story in Ovid’s Fasti; however, she is mistaken in claiming that that Livy ‘favors a version of the story that eschews the miraculous’.

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as Matthew Robinson puts it,79 who were well acquainted with the playfulness and irony of Roman elegy and its models. By appropriating Roman cultural memories of Servius Tullius, Ovid reflects on communicative memories: recent religious-political discourses and intrigues over dynastic succession. Ovid’s unique contribution to the memories of Servius Tullius contests previous literary representations of Servius Tullius’ divinity, for instance by Livy. Ancient authors represented the cultural heritage of Rome according to their own visions and their proximity to Augustus’ restoration of Roman society and its culture. By elegiac manipulation of cultural memories of Servius Tullius, Ovid promotes an alternative vision of the Roman past and a humorous way of reflecting on Augustus’ self-fashioning as a divine person. 79

See note 3 in this chapter.

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part ii

Politicising Cultural Memory

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chapter 10

Sulla’s Dictatorship Rei Publicae Constituendae and Roman Republican Cultural Memory Alexandra Eckert

10.1 Nostram Rem Publicam: The Best of All Political Systems At the beginning of the second book of Cicero’s De re publica (54–51 BC) we find a remarkable passage: Scipio Aemilianus, one of the dialogue’s interlocutors, cites Cato the Elder’s statement on the superiority of the res publica. Cato attributes the success of the Roman Republic to its gradual evolution thanks to the combined wisdom of many Romans through many generations. Cato rates the Roman constitution much more highly than the ones of Crete, Sparta and Athens because the laws and institutions of these Greek polities have been crafted by only a few, albeit ingenious, persons. Is [Cato] dicere solebat ob hanc causam praestare nostrae civitatis statum ceteris civitatibus, quod in illis singuli fuissent fere, qui suam quisque rem publicam constituissent legibus atque institutis suis, ut Cretum Minos, Lacedaemoniorum Lycurgus, Atheniensium, quae persaepe commutata esset, tum Theseus, . . . nostra autem res publica non unius esset ingenio, sed multorum, nec una hominis vita, sed aliquot constituta saeculis et aetatibus. Nam neque ullum ingenium tantum extitisse dicebat, ut, quem res nulla fugeret, quisquam aliquando fuisset, neque cuncta ingenia conlata in unum tantum posse uno tempore providere, ut omnia complecterentur sine rerum usu ac vetustate. Cato used to say that the condition of our polity was superior to that of others because in other polities it had nearly always been individuals, who – by enacting laws and establishing institutions – had constituted the political system of their community; for example, Minos in Crete, Lycurgus in Sparta, and in Athens, whose political system frequently changed, first Theseus, . . .. However, our own political system did not originate from the ingenuity of an individual, but of many, and it was not constituted in one generation, but over centuries and ages. For he [Cato] said there had never been a man so ingenious that he could consider everything nor could – without practical experience and the wisdom of the forefathers in 169

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alexandra eckert that matter – the combined ingenuity of men living in one generation provide such foresight to anticipate all eventualities.1 (Cic. Rep. 2.2)

Zetzel suggests that Cato’s words may stem from the first book of Cato’s Origines.2 Cornell, however, considers it more likely that this passage is a fragment from an unknown work of Cato the Elder.3 These scholarly assessments are strongly supported by Cicero himself, who stated that he would choose persons and positions carefully to achieve the greatest authenticity possible when composing dialogues or treatises.4 We may therefore assume that the passage above is from one of Cato’s works, which have been counted among the monuments of literature since as early as 70 BC.5 In the passage cited above, Cato employs the term rem publicam constituere to describe the process of constituting or forming (constituere) a political system (rem publicam) in different polities (civitates), namely Crete, Sparta, Athens, and Rome. However, Cato’s words do not solely depict abstract political thinking. Both his statement on, and his explanation of the superiority (praestare) of nostram rem publicam constituere, reveal the very significance this term carried for the Romans when referring to their own political system.6 In his commentary on De re publica, Zetzel relates Cato’s explanation to the polarity between an unordered and a systematic formation of political systems: “Cato here makes a virtue of the haphazard growth of the Roman

1

2 3

4 5 6

Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own. For the translation of constituere with ‘to constitute’ see Lewis and Short (1975) s.v. constituo. As this passage in De re publica demonstrates, the term rem publicam constituere conveyed connotations of ‘continually constituting’, i.e. ‘evolving’, ’forming’, or ‘shaping’ a political system over generations. Moreover, the translation above avoids associating the terms ‘State’ and ‘Nation’ with the Roman res publica and, therefore, proposes the more neutral terms ‘polity’ or ‘(political) community’. For a discussion of the applicability of the term ‘State’ to GrecoRoman antiquity see: Winterling (2014) 249–56. Zetzel (1995) 158. Zetzel (1995) 157; Cugusi and Sblendorio Cugusi (2001) F5; Cornell (2013) FrHist vol. I F131. Cugusi and Sblendorio Cugusi attribute this fragment to Cato’s Origines. Cornell points out that the passage in De re publica that refers to the different ways in which the Greeks and Romans evolved their polities is mirrored by a passage in Polybius (Polyb. 6.10.12–16), which may also have been influenced by Cato the Elder’s Origines. See Cornell’s commentary regarding fragment F131 in Cornell (2013) FrHist Vol II 151. For Cato the Elder and his reception see also Suerbaum (2002) 380–417. See Cic. Att. 13.16.1 (26 June 45 BC) and Cic. Fam. 9.8.1 (11/12 July 45 BC). Cf. Eckert (2018a) 22–23 with notes 20 and 21. Cic. Verr. 2.3.209. Cf. also Cic. de Or. 2.53. For rem publicam constituere cf. Eckert (2016a) 198–201. See also Cic. Rep. 2.21 where Cicero has not Scipio, but Laelius referring to Cato in very similar terms: ‘Tum Laelius: “Nunc fit illud Catonis certius, nec temporis unius nec hominis esse constitutionem rei publicae . . . ”’ (‘Laelius: “Now Cato’s word that the constitution of our res publica was neither the result of one generation nor of a single person becomes even more evident . . . ”’).

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constitution, in contrast to the systematic, but imperfect work of single [Greek] lawgivers.”7 This polarity might be one of the undertones of Cato’s remarks. However, the line of distinction that Cato draws between the Roman way of constituting a political system and the Greek methods seems to lie elsewhere: Cato discerns political systems shaped by a few ingenious lawgivers in a series of forward leaps, but interspersed with long periods of stagnation on the one hand, and the Roman Republic, which was brought to near perfection by many gifted statesmen, who continually improved the res publica over the course of centuries on the other. In the second book of De re publica, Cicero has his interlocutors illustrate how – since the foundation of Rome – the combined efforts of many Romans had shaped a nearly ideal republic. The first part of this account covers the role of the Roman kings in the tradition of rem publicam constituere. From Romulus to Servius Tullius, each king’s merits are listed and acknowledged leaving out Tarquinius Superbus, whose misdeeds ended the rule of the kings of Rome.8 His expulsion marked the beginning of an era in which the Roman magistrates and the Roman people became involved in the continuous process of constituting the Roman Republic. Cicero has his interlocutors, Scipio and Laelius, describe the establishment of the consulship, the introduction of the right of appeal to the Roman people (provocatio ad populum), the election of the first dictator, and the creation of the office of the tribunes of the plebs as prominent steps in shaping nostram rem publicam.9 Their assessment of the role of the socalled decemviri legibus scribundis (decemvirs to enact laws) remains ambivalent: while the codification of the Twelve Tables is praised as a cornerstone of Roman legislation, the outrageous abuse of power during the Decemvirs’ second term in office is condemned.10 Over the course of the second book, Cicero’s speakers illustrate an important cornerstone of the Roman concept of rem publicam 7 8

9 10

Zetzel (1995) 159. Cic. Rep. 2.2–40. Cf. especially Cic. Rep. 2.21. Laelius here refers again to Cato’s words on the constitution of the Roman Republic by many, over many generations: ‘perspicuum est enim, quanta in singulos reges rerum bonarum et utilium fiat accessio’ (‘for it is quite obvious that every king established many good and useful institutions’). For the important contributions of the kings Romulus, Numa and Servius Tullius to the formation of the res publica (quorum multa sunt eximia ad constituendam rem publicam) see also Cic. de Or. 1.37. See Cic. Rep. 2.53 (first consuls); Cic. Rep. 2.54–5 (provocatio); Cic. Rep. 2.56 (first dictator); Cic. Rep. 2.58–9 (tribunes of the plebs). Cic. Rep. 2.61–3. The assumption that the decemviri also included rei publicae constituendae in their title can only be found in Ampel. 28.2: ‘Populus Romanus . . . decemviros legum ferendarum rei publicae constituendae causa paravit’. However, Ampelius writes in the third century AD. It is therefore problematic to use this passage from Ampelius as a testimony.

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constituere: The political system of the Roman Republic attempted to overcome times of crisis by guaranteeing the adequate participation of relevant groups of Roman society, thus providing a certain balance of power. This particular aspect is also illustrated by a fragment of the second book of De re publica, which has come down to us through Nonius:11 statu esse optimo constitutam rem publicam, quae ex tribus generibus illis, regali et optumati et populari, confusa [I consider] that political system to be constituted in the best way, which is a mixture of those three [aforementioned] forms: kingship, aristocratic rule and democracy . . .12 (Cic. Rep. 2.41 = Non. de Comp. Doct. 342)

This Nonius fragment may well be a summary of a lost part of the original text of De re publica, which described how the offices of dictator, consul, and tribune of the plebs represented the monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements of the mixed constitution of the Roman Republic and how the continual improvement of the interplay between these institutions had culminated in the best (optimo) of all political systems.13 Both Polybius and Cicero drew their general ideas concerning the theory of a mixed constitution from earlier works of peripatetic philosophers.14 Nevertheless, it is likely that the concept of rem publicam constituere was first presented by Cato in his Origines as the shaping of a political system peculiar to the Romans. Scipio’s praise of Cato’s expertise concerning the Roman constitution indicates that Cato the Elder was highly valued as an important, if not the most important, authority in this field during the Republic.

10.2

Rem Publicam Constituere and Cultural Memory

According to Cato, the custom of rem publicam constituere distinguished the Romans from other political communities. The Roman habit of continually constituting and improving their political system over many generations had proven superior. This became evident to Romans and 11 12

13

14

See Jehne (2014) regarding the role of the Roman people, specifically Jehne (2014) 120–6. Cic. Rep. 2.41 = Non. de Comp. Doct. 342. Zetzel (1995) and the Loeb edition of De re publica (Keyes (1929) omit this fragment. Büchner’s edition of De re publica includes it. Büchner holds the opinion that the authenticity of this fragment has to be upheld until further convincing arguments are presented, and places Nonius’ fragment after Cic. Rep. 2.40. See Büchner (1993) 391. This Nonius fragment shows similarities to Polyb. 6.11.12. However, in contrast to the sixth book of Polybius, De re publica presents not only the office of consul, but also the office of dictator as the monarchic element of the Roman mixed constitution. See Polyb. 6.5.1; Cic. Rep. 1.34, 2.27 and 4.3. See also Zetzel (1995) 9.124 and 22–24.184. See Zetzel (1995) 17–22 on the theory of constitutions.

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non-Romans alike from the second half of the second century BC onwards, when, after the fall of Carthage and Numantia, Rome dominated the Mediterranean world. The feeling of distinction and superiority conveyed by Cato’s words indicates that the concept of rem publicam constituere played a vital role in Roman cultural identity. According to Aleida and Jan Assmann, cultural memory reflects a society’s cultural identity. Cultural memory preserves answers to questions such as, ‘what distinguishes us from others?’, ‘what do we deem important events of our shared past?’, and ‘what are fundamental aspects of our way of life?’. When Cicero decided to have Cato explain the custom of rem publicam constituere in De re publica, he summoned the greatest possible authority. Since Cicero’s time, Cato’s works belonged to a canon of monuments of literature, they were important to Roman cultural identity and represented Roman cultural memory.15 This chapter aims to demonstrate that not only events from a shared past can be remembered by members of a society as part of their cultural memory, but also more abstract notions, such as the concept of rem publicam constituere. Furthermore, this chapter will show how this concept, which already existed in Roman cultural memory during the second and first centuries BC, survived the transition from the Republic to the Principate.

10.3

Sulla’s Title: Dictator Legibus Scribundis et Rei Publicae Constituendae

In late 82 BC, the Roman dictator Sulla drew on the concept of rem publicam constituere when he assumed the title of dictator legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae (dictator to enact laws and to constitute the republic). Appian’s treatise on the civil wars is the prime source for how the interrex Valerius Flaccus brought a law before the Roman people to establish Sulla as dictator. According to Appian, the Romans approved the Valerian Law and empowered Sulla as dictator to enact laws as he deemed fit and to constitute the res publica (ἐπὶ θέσει νόμων, ὧν αὐτὸς ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῦ δοκιμάσειε, καὶ καταστάσει τῆς πολιτείας).16 15

16

For identity and cultural memory see Assmann J. (1988) 9–16; Assmann J. (1992); Assmann (1995). See Assmann J. (1992) 103–14 concerning the importance of a canon of literary texts for a society’s cultural memory. App. B. Civ. 1.99.462: . . . τοσόνδε μέντοι προςέθεσαν εἰς εὐπρέπειαν τοῦ ῥήματος, ὅτι αὐτὸν αἱροῖντο δικτάτορα ἐπὶ θέσει νόμων, ὧν αὐτὸς ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῦ δοκιμάσειε, καὶ καταστάσει τῆς πολιτείας. See also App. B. Civ. 1.103. For Sulla’s powers as dictator see Vervaet (2004). Baroni (2007) 784 and 791 proposes legum ferendarum instead of legibus scribundis.

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From Appian’s Greek text, Theodor Mommsen reconstructed the Latin formula legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae.17 Mommsen could be fairly certain about the plausibility of his reconstruction as both the bilingual Monumentum Ancyranum – which contains the Greek equivalent of Octavian’s title as a member of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC (triumvir rei publicae constituendae) – and Appian’s account employ the very same Greek word καταστάσει for the Latin term constituendae.18 The Fasti Capitolini inscription also records Sulla’s title as dictator, however in a very fragmentary way. As the lacuna is not large enough to hold the full Latin equivalent of the title as recorded by Appian in Greek, Degrassi proposed [dict(ator) rei publ(icae) constit(uendae) caussa], thereby omitting legibus scribundis.19 Accordingly, was Sulla merely dictator rei publicae constituendae, without the power legibus scribundis?20 If we believe Cicero, who was Sulla’s contemporary, Sulla’s dictatorship indeed encompassed the right to enact laws as he pleased.21 Thus empowered, Sulla introduced a constitutional programme that brought in a set of legislative measures concerning the Senate, the rights of the tribunes of the plebs, the cursus honorum, the jury courts, and the major priesthoods.22

10.4 The Valerian Law and Sulla’s Reign of Terror Cicero’s speeches against the Agrarian Law of Rullus, dated to 63 BC, illustrate how the Romans perceived Sulla’s dictatorship as abominable because it was intrinsically tied to his atrocities against his fellow citizens. Omnium legum iniquissimam dissimillimamque legis esse arbitror eam quam L. Flaccus interrex de Sulla tulit, ut omnia quaecumque ille fecisset essent rata. Nam cum ceteris in civitatibus tyrannis institutis leges omnes exstinguantur atque tollantur, hic rei publicae tyrannum lege constituit. Est invidiosa lex, sicuti dixi, verum tamen habet excusationem; non enim videtur hominis lex esse, sed temporis. 17 18

19 20 21

22

Cf. Mommsen (1952) 703 note 3. R. Gest. Div. Aug. 1; CIL I2 64. See also Hurlet (1993) 95 note 5 concerning the Monumentum Ancyranum as proof for the Latin formula rei publicae constituendae. Suet. Aug. 27.1: triumviratus rei publicae constituendae also confirms this title for Octavian. Degrassi (1954) 74–5. Sandberg (2018) 168 n. 8 accepts Degrassis emendation caussa in this inscription. For the use of caussa instead of causa in Latin see Lewis/Short s.v. causa. This is e.g. the position of Kunkel and Wittmann (1995) 703 convincingly disputed by Vervaet (2004) 42–3 and 49–51. Cic. Verr. 2.3.82: ‘. . . ut ipsius voluntas ei posset esse pro lege . . . and Sch. Gronovia in Rosc. 125 (Stangl 314): hic tulit legem: quicquid Sulla dixisset lex esset . . .’ strongly indicate that legibus scribundis belonged to Sulla’s powers, even if this power was not recorded in the Fasti Capitolini. Cf. also Vervaet (2004) 42–3 and 49–51. For Sulla’s legislative measures cf. Flower (2010) 117–34.

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Of all laws, I think that that passed by Lucius Flaccus, the Interrex, in regard to Sulla is the most iniquitous and least like a law: That all his acts, whatever they were, should be ratified. For, while in all other polities, when tyrants are created, all laws are annulled and abolished, in this case Flaccus, by his law, established a tyrant in a republic. It is a hateful law, as I have said, but there is some excuse for it; for it seems to be not the law of a man, but of the times.23 (Cic. Leg. Agr. 3.5)

Cicero refers to the Valerian Law as a hateful law, which had retroactively approved all of Sulla’s acts and had established Sulla as a tyrant in Rome. When Cicero employed these words, fewer than twenty years had passed since Sulla’s dictatorship. Bloodshed and atrocities unheard of in Roman history had accompanied Sulla’s appointment as dictator.24 When the interrex Valerius Flaccus proposed the law to empower Sulla, Sulla had won the Civil War of 83/ 82 BC in the Battle at the Colline Gate on 1 November 82 BC. In this Battle, 50,000 Romans lost their lives.25 Only two days after his victory, Sulla ordered the mass execution of about 7,000 Romans in the Villa Publica.26 Among the victims were enemy soldiers and civilians from the nearby town of Antemnae who had all voluntarily surrendered, as well as innocent bystanders.27 The victims’ cries of agony were heard all over the city. Many Romans may even have been eyewitnesses when Sulla’s soldiers threw dead corpses into the river Tiber.28 Soon thereafter, Sulla allowed his legions to kill whomever they pleased: personal enemies and uninvolved citizens alike. In Rome alone, 9,000 men fell victim to these acts of violence, and the bloodshed had still not come to an end.29 Sulla then ordered the execution of 12,000 enemy soldiers in the Italian town of Praeneste, despite the fact that they had voluntarily surrendered.30 As a consequence of the killings at Praeneste, the death toll of Sulla’s acts of vengeance almost doubled to nearly 30,000 Roman citizens.31 Sulla’s cruel deeds affected all strata of Roman society and were carried out by Sulla’s partisans before the interrex Valerius Flaccus proposed the Lex 23 24

25 28 29 30 31

Translation adapted from the Loeb edition by Freese (1930). For Sulla’s reign of terror in 82/81 BC, cf. Eckert (2014) 267; Eckert (2016a) 140–6; Eckert (2016b) 133–4; Eckert (2018b) 287–90; Eckert (2019) 161–7. For the memory of Sulla’s atrocities in Sallust cf. Seidl Steed (2017); Rosenblitt (2019); Gerrish (2019). App. B. Civ. 1.93. 26 Sen. Clem. 1.12.2. 27 Plut. Sull. 30.1–4. Dio Frg. 30–35, 109; Luc. 2.210–15. Plut. Sull. 31; Flor. 2.9.23–5; App. B. Civ 4.10; Dio Frg. 30–35, 109; Oros. 5.21. For Sulla’s maurauding soldiers see esp. Heftner (2006). Diod. Sic. 38/39.15.1; Val. Max. 9.2.1; Plut. Sull. 32.1. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.77.5 even reports a figure of 40,000 soldiers killed on Sulla’s orders after the end of the battles.

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Valeria.32 When Cicero, in his third speech against the Agrarian Law, referred to the hateful Valerian Law before an assembly of the people, it is likely that a large part of his audience remembered the horrors of 82 BC. Some of them had perhaps even attended the assembly of the Roman people, which had been forced – as Appian’s account indicates – to empower Sulla as dictator in the midst of the atmosphere of terror that Sulla and his partisans had created in Rome and Italy.33 This atmosphere of terror continued even after the Valerian Law was ratified, as it was this law, along with Sulla’s lex Cornelia de proscriptione, which formed the legal basis for Sulla’s proscriptions. The proscriptions prolonged the period of arbitrary killings for at least seven more months, until late summer 81 BC. Moreover, because the executions of proscribed Romans were carried out in public, they were highly visible in Roman society. The number of those who fell victim to the proscriptions – 4,700 according to Rome’s official archives – was relatively low compared to Sulla’s other acts of vengeance.34 The victims of the proscriptions were almost exclusively members of the Roman elite. However, the cruel circumstances of the killings and the long duration of the proscriptions provoked no less hatred than Sulla’s murder of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens during the weeks following his victory on 1 November 82 BC. Sulla’s acts of vengeance constituted an extreme transgression of Roman values and were directed against a substantial portion of Roman society. Consequently, the Romans perceived Sulla and Sulla’s dictatorship highly negatively.35 Sulla’s atrocities as dictator against his fellow citizens irrevocably eroded the legitimacy of his dictatorship. As such, Sulla’s rule may be considered as the initial step in a process that finally led to the abolition of this office in 44 BC. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the author of the Roman Antiquities, who lived during the reign of Augustus, provides a striking perspective on this phenomenon:36 32

33 34 35 36

The relative chronological order of events – battle at the Colline Gate, massacre in the Villa Publica, killings by Sulla’s marauding soldiers, execution of the inhabitants of Praeneste and the enactment of the Valerian Law – can be determined with some certainty due to the fact that the interrex Valerius Flaccus could not have been appointed before Marius the Younger and Carbo, the consuls of 82 BC, had died in Praeneste and Sicily, respectively. For the chronology of Marius the Younger’s and Carbo’s death cf. Jahn (1970) 161–2; Eckert (2016a) 143 note 27. App. B. Civ 1.98–99 illustrates how the Roman people ratified the Valerian law under compulsion. Val. Max. 9.2.1 refers to the Roman archives as a reliable source for the death toll of the proscriptions. For the negative view on Sulla’s dictatorship cf. Seidl Steed (2008) esp. 190–9. Straumann’s attempt (Straumann (2016) 74–5) to explain the hatred mentioned in Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.77.4 by stating that Sulla’s dictatorship was the first to annul the right of appeal

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ἐπὶ δὲ τῆς κατὰ τοὺς πατέρας ἡμῶν ἡλικίας ὁμοῦ τι τετρακοσίων διαγενομένων ἐτῶν ἀπὸ τῆς Τίτου Λαρκίου δικτατορίας διεβλήθη καὶ μισητὸν ἅπασιν ἀνθρώποις ἐφάνη τὸ πρᾶγμα Λευκίου Κορνηλίου Σύλλα πρώτου καὶ μόνου πικρῶς αὐτῇ καὶ ὠμῶς χρησαμένου: ὥστε τότε πρῶτον αἰσθέσθαι Ῥωμαίους, ὃ τὸν ἄλλον ἅπαντα χρόνον ἠγνόουν, ὅτι τυραννίς ἐστιν ἡ τοῦ δικτάτορος ἀρχή. But in the time of our fathers, a full 400 years after the dictatorship of Titus Larcius, the institution became an object of reproach and hatred to all men under L. Cornelius Sulla, the first and only dictator who exercised it with harshness and cruelty; so that the Romans then perceived for the first time what they had all along been ignorant of, that dictatorship is tyranny.37 (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 5.77.4)

Dionysius describes how Sulla’s rule as a cruel dictator set a precedent in Roman history, revealing to the Romans for the first time the tyrannical nature of dictatorship. Thus, Sulla’s reign of terror had severely undermined continued acceptance of this high office. From the outside perspective of a Greek living in Rome, Dionysius described the negative effect of Sulla’s cruel rule on the office of dictatorship. About twenty years later, Caesar’s rule as dictator eroded the acceptance of this office even further, albeit for a different reason.

10.5

The Aftermath of Sulla’s Rule: Caesar’s Dictatorships

At the beginning of the Civil War against Pompey, Caesar, who had only narrowly escaped Sulla’s acts of vengeance in 82/81 BC, markedly distanced himself from Sulla in a letter to the public. Therein he promised that he would not imitate Sulla’s cruelty.38 Aside from his policy of clemency towards his defeated enemies, Caesar had also stepped down as dictator in 49 and 48 BC. In the summer of 46 BC, after Caesar had returned victorious from his battles against Pompey’s followers in Africa, he pardoned his declared enemy Marcellus. At this occasion, Cicero decided to end the silence he had kept in the Roman Senate for years and held a speech thanking Caesar for his magnanimity towards Marcellus. Though Caesar had taken the office of decennial dictator just a few months before, Cicero was confident that Caesar would step down from the dictatorship as he had done before in 49 and 48 BC. It is striking to see how Cicero employed an

37

(sine provocatione) probably misses the point somewhat. There are strong arguments that the first dictators in early Rome always ruled sine provocatione. See Kunkel and Wittmann (1995) 672–3. Translation from the Loeb edition by Cary (1971 [1940]). 38 Cic. Att. 9.7C.1.

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element of Roman cultural memory to petition Caesar to strengthen the republican system after the Civil War:39 Haec igitur tibi reliqua pars est; hic restat actus, in hoc elaborandum est ut rem publicam constituas, eaque tu in primis summa tranquillitate et otio perfruare: tum te, si voles, cum et patriae quod debes solveris et naturam ipsam expleveris satietate vivendi, satis diu vixisse dicito. This part, then, is the one which remains to you – this is the task which you have to accomplish; this is what you must struggle for – to constitute the Republic, and to enjoy it yourself as the first, in the greatest tranquillity and quietness. And then, if you wish, you may say that your life has lasted long enough, when you have achieved what you owe to your fatherland, and when you, satisfied with your life, have reached your natural lifespan. (Cic. Marcell. 27)

In the Pro Marcello, Cicero also illustrated that key tasks for strengthening the res publica after the Civil War were the reestablishment of functional courts (constituenda iudicia) and the enactment of strict laws (severis legibus).40 In the summer of 46 BC, Cicero obviously believed that the dictator Caesar would be willing to earn merit and great honour as saviour of the Roman Republic and would resign from his high office to enjoy a life of tranquillity. At this time, the concept of rem publicam constituere must have still been perceived as highly positive. Otherwise, Cicero would not have dared to ask Caesar to utilise the office of dictator to constitute the Republic.41 However, the reputation of this high office had already been tarnished by Sulla’s unprecedented bloodshed. In what followed, it was further diminished by Caesar’s arbitrary extension of his term in office. While Sulla’s term as dictator was formally unlimited, according to the stipulations of the Valerian law, the dictator rei publicae constituendae of 82/81 BC was to step down after deeming that stability in the Republic had been achieved.42 Contrary to Cicero’s hopes in the summer of 46 BC, Caesar did not become a private citizen but instead accepted a dictatorship for life in 44 BC, thereby irrevocably pushing his high office beyond the 39 41

42

Cic. Marcell. 27. 40 Cic. Marcell. 23. The Somnium Scipionis written in the 50s BC is an additional testimony demonstrating that even after Sulla’s cruel rule as dictator rei publicae constitendae, Cicero, and probably others, held the hope that a dictator could still positively contribute to the evolution of the Roman Republic. In the Somnium Scipionis, Cicero has Scipio receive a prophecy that Scipio would become dictator to stabilise the Republic in a time of crisis. See Cic. Rep. 6.12: dictator rem publicam constituas oportet (‘as dictator you have to constitute the Republic’). Cf. Zetzel (1995) 229, who also assumes a relation between Sulla’s title dictator rei publicae constituendae and the aforementioned passage from the Somnium Scipionis. For Sulla’s abdication of his dictatorship cf. Vervaet (2004) and Vervaet (2018).

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boundaries set by the concept of rem publicam constituere.43 Sulla’s cruelty and Caesar’s violation of the Republican principle of a limited term in office finally destroyed the hitherto positive perception of dictatorship within the framework of rem publicam constituere. This had long-term consequences. Shortly after Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Marcus Antonius proposed a bill to abolish the dictatorship altogether.44 Cicero even praised Marcus Antonius in his first Philippic for having removed the dictatorship from the Republic, as it had acquired too much of the absolute power of the kings (dictaturam, quae iam vim regiae potestatis obsederat, funditus ex re publica sustulit).45 From then on, dictatorship no longer had a place in Roman political thinking, the idea of rem publicam constituere, however, prevailed.

10.6 Augustus, Tacitus, and the Continuity of Rem Publicam Constituere in the Principate When Augustus wrote his Res Gestae shortly before his death in 14 AD, he did not hesitate to mention explicitly his role as triumvir rei publicae constituendae. Augustus also utilised the concept of rem publicam constituere during his term as triumvir between 43 and 33 BC. Triumvirum rei publicae constituendae fui per continuos annos decem. Princeps senatus fui usque ad eum diem, quo scripseram haec, per annos quadraginta. I was a member of the triumvirate to constitute the Republic for the duration of ten years. Up to the day of writing these lines, I have been First Man of the Senate for forty years.46 (Res Gest. div. Aug. 7)

These lines signal that the Roman idea of continually constituting the Republic prevailed in the Principate. Kingship had long been, and dictatorship had just become, a negatively perceived element of Roman cultural memory. Hence, Augustus carefully distanced himself from both offices when crafting the new political system of the Principate. By formally keeping the Roman senatorial system alive and maintaining the office of consulship, he distinguished the Principate from the kingship of Rome’s 43 44 45 46

For Caesar’s dictatorships see Kunkel and Wittmann (1995) 712–16. For the dictatura perpetua see Kresimir Vukovic’s contribution in this volume. Cic. Phil. 1.3, 2.91, 2.115; App. B. Civ. 3.25; Dio Cass. 44.51.2. Cic. Phil. 1.3. See also Cic. Phil. 2.91, which relates to the horrors of Caesar’s dictatorship. Vervaet (2009) 50 argues for 31 December 32 BC as the official end date of the Second Triumvirate.

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past. Augustus also carefully documented in the Res Gestae that he had declined attempts to revive the dictatorship during the famine of 22 BC, thereby demonstrating that, even in times of emergency, this office had lost its legitimacy once and for all.47 Augustus not only utilised the concept of rem publicam constituere, he also complemented it with a new slogan: res publica restituta. This slogan conveyed the message that the civil wars had ended and that law and order had been restored – notions which closely resemble the ideas presented to Caesar in the Pro Marcello.48 The restitution of law and order is illustrated by an aureus issued in 28 BC that depicts the then-to-be Augustus as a lawgiver and bears the legend LEGES ET IVRA P(opulo) R(omano) RESTITVIT.49 Augustus formally included Republican notions and institutions in his new political system, thereby utilising the inherent flexibility of the overarching concept of rem publicam constituere. He also abstained from kingship and dictatorship, which had lost their authority as a result of previous acts of arbitrariness, violence, and bloodshed. By establishing a functioning political system and safeguarding fundamental civic values such as personal safety and the validity of law and order, Augustus was able to claim his position among the renowned statesmen of Roman history who had contributed to the continual process of constituting the res publica. Tacitus’ account – written probably in the decade before his death in about 120 AD – illustrates that Augustus had indeed successfully utilised the legitimising effects of rem publicam constituere as part of Roman cultural memory. postquam hic socordia senuerit, ille per libidines pessum datus sit, non aliud discordantis patriae remedium fuisse quam ab uno regeretur. non regno tamen neque dictatura sed principis nomine constitutam rem publicam. 47 48 49

Res. Gest. div. Aug. 5. On the crisis of the Republican dictatorship in the first century BC and Augustus’ refusal of the dictatorship cf. Burden-Strevens (2019) 152–5. Cf. Cic. Marc. 23 and the brief discussion of this passage earlier in this chapter. For this aureus see Rich and Williams (1999); Bringmann (2002) 119; Hurlet and Mineo (2009) 14–15. The aureus presumably relates to an edict Octavian had enacted in 28 BC. Tacitus’ comment in the Annales may relate to said edict (Tac. Ann. 3.28.2): ‘Finally Caesar Augustus in his sixth consulship had enacted laws to allow the Romans to live in peace under a Princeps.’ Judge (1974) argues that the slogan res publica restituta did not exist in Augustan times and was a much later invention. In the light of Cic. Marc. 23, the closing formula [quod rem publicam] / p(opulo) R(omano) rest[it]u[it] in CIL I2 231 (Fasti Praenestini for 13 January) and the aureus of 28 BC – the coin was not known to Judge – Judge’s position cannot be upheld. Nevertheless, Judge rightly points out that Mommsen’s verdict on the idea of res publica restituta drew too heavily on modern concepts of constitutional form. For a thorough discussion of the different positions in continental and anglophone scholarship cf. Mutschler (2011) 24–5 note 5. Contra Judge see Eck (2016) 98.

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After the former [Lepidus] became lethargic and the latter [Marcus Antonius] perished through his vices, the only cure for the conflict-ridden state was to have it ruled by a single man. However, he constituted the Republic by establishing neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship, but by creating the title of First Man of the Senate. (Tac. Ann. 1.9)

According to Tacitus, the constitution of the political system by a king or a dictator would no longer have been accepted by Romans during the time of Augustus. The so-called prudentes, the Romans with more oversight in political matters, would have praised Augustus for successfully stabilising the res publica while resorting to neither kingship nor dictatorship.50

10.7

Conclusion

Some concluding remarks on rem publicam constituere and cultural memory are in order at this point. Aleida and Jan Assmann have devised their theory of cultural memory based on Maurice Halbwach’s concept of collective memory.51 Members of a society invest substantial effort into maintaining cultural memory for a reason. Elements of cultural memory represent values, norms, concepts, and certain aspects of the way of life which are of fundamental importance to a society. Hence, cultural memory as a society’s body of shared memories and its guiding effect on living together stabilise a community and increase social cohesion. Due to the stabilising function of cultural memory, its elements are characterised by durability and longevity.52 The concept of rem publicam constituere, which persisted in Roman cultural memory for centuries and even survived the fundamental change of the political system from the Late Republic to the Principate, reflects this longevity. However, longevity does not mean that the complete body of shared memories must remain invariant over centuries, as some critics of Aleida and Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory have argued.53 Aleida and 50

51

52 53

The context of this passage by Tacitus is Augustus’ funeral in 14 AD. Tac. Ann. 1.9 depicts the position of the prudentes who praise Augustus for his wise stabilisation of the political system. Tac. Ann. 1.10 is devoted to voices criticising some of Augustus’ deeds – the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate being one example – yet these voices do not challenge his success in constituting the res publica. See Assmann and Assmann (1988); Assmann J. (1988); Assmann J. (1992) 42–5; Assmann and Czaplicka (1995); Assmann (1999) 131–42; Assmann J. (2005) 65; Assmann (2011b) 120–5; Assmann J. (2011) 48–50. Assmann J. (1988) 13–15; Assmann J. (1992) 52–6. For a comprehensive overview and discussion of critical voices on the theory of cultural memory see Eckert (2016a) 17–37. For critics of collective memory and cultural memory see e.g. Cancik and Mohr (1990); Fentress and Wickham (1992) ix–x; Gedi and Elam (1996); Klein (2000); Ulf (2008).

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Jan Assmann’s framework also encompasses the idea of the ‘delegitimising effect of remembering’, which provides the basis for understanding how – under certain circumstances – cultural memory can change within a comparably short timeframe.54 The Roman dictatorship is a striking example in this respect. Since Sulla’s and Caesar’s dictatorships, the office of dictator had become closely tied to fundamental violations of social norms. Furthermore, the majority of the Romans had been gravely affected by civil war and bloodshed. The result was that the office of dictator became delegitimised within about a generation and abandoned altogether in 44 BC. Augustus’ decision to reject the dictatorship signals that the office was once and forever delegitimised in Roman cultural memory. This process was irrevocable and could not be ignored by Roman rulers wishing to utilise the uniquely positive concept of rem publicam constituere to justify their power. 54

Assmann (1999) 130–42 especially 138–9 for a discussion of ‘delegitimising memory’ in the context of ‘function mode’ and ‘storage mode’ (German: ‘Funktions- und Speichergedächtnis’) of cultural memory.

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chapter 11

Remembering Differently: The Exemplarity of Populares as a Site of Ideological Contest in Late Republican Oratory Evan Jewell* 11.1 Introduction: Conflicting Memories in Cicero’s Lucullus In Cicero’s Lucullus of 45 BC, we find a moment often ignored by scholars, in which the proponent of anti-skepticism and Antiochus’ Stoic dogmatism in the dialogue, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, draws a lengthy analogy from oratorical practice to critique one of Cicero’s arguments as the proponent of Academic skepticism. Fortunately for us, the analogy opens a rare window onto the oratorical appropriation of certain politicians as exemplary populares.1 And so Lucullus argues: ‘In the first place I feel that you gentlemen’ – it was to me [sc. Cicero] he was speaking – ‘when you cite the names of the old natural philosophers, you are doing just what seditious citizens are accustomed [solent] to do when they quote some famous personages from antiquity, whom they say were populares, in order to make themselves appear to be similar to them. For they begin with Publius Valerius who was consul in the first year after the expulsion of the kings, and they recall [commemorant] all the other persons who, when they were consuls, carried popular laws about the right of appeal; then they come to the better known cases of Gaius Flaminius, who as tribune of the plebs some years before the second Punic war, carried an agrarian law against the senate and afterwards twice became consul, and of Lucius Cassius and Quintus Pompeius; indeed these men are even [quidem etiam] accustomed to include Publius Africanus [sc. Aemilianus] in their *

1

The suggestions and critiques of many people have improved this paper in its many iterations over the years, not least those of: Lea Beness, Tom Hillard, Amy Russell, Catherine Steel, Henriette van der Blom, James Tan, Anthony Corbeill, Cristina Rosillo López, Kathryn Welch, and not least, the editors, Martin Dinter and Charles Guérin. Of course, all remaining errors or infelicities of argument fall at my feet. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. While acknowledging the recent efforts of Robb (2010) and, more forcefully, Russell (2013) 105, 109, to discredit the value of using the term popularis, I still deploy it throughout this chapter as consistently as possible to describe the exempla and deceased (at the time) politicians who are articulated as such in ‘popular’ contexts (see below n. 8), especially since it is deployed by Cicero to describe a coherent group of exempla in the Lucullus, even though a person qua exemplum is rarely qualified as being popularis in oratory itself.

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evan jewell number. They say that the two very wise and most distinguished brothers, Publius Crassus and Publius Scaevola were supporters of the laws of Tiberius Gracchus, the former (as we know) openly [palam], the latter (as they suspect) more secretly [obscurius]. They also add Gaius Marius, and they certainly don’t tell lies about him [de hoc quidem nihil mentiuntur]. After parading this list of names of so many men of such distinction they declare that they are following their principle. Similarly, whenever you want to upset an already well established system of philosophy just as they did a political system, your school quotes Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, and even Plato and Socrates. But neither did Saturninus – to name the foremost enemy of my family – have any feature resembling those men of old, nor can the fallaciousness of Arcesilas be compared with the modesty of Democritus.2 (Cic. Luc. 13–14)

From what is an unapologetically hostile description offered by the interlocutor Lucullus, who labels the creators of this catalogue of exempla as ‘seditious citizens’ (seditiosi cives), we might reasonably assume – as filtered through the form of the Ciceronian dialogue – the existence of a debate among the Roman elite as to who should or should not be considered a popularis of the past, similar to that conducted by some modern scholars.3 Although this antique catalogue of exempla was not accepted as sterling silver by Cicero’s Lucullus, clearly the analogy’s utility in its philosophical context turns on Lucullus critically scratching through the popularis patina of the exempla to reveal their counterfeit ideological stance. In commenting on the passage, Andreas Haltenhoff has drawn attention to the mention of Publius Scipio Africanus (Aemilianus) among the exempla, in that Lucullus seems to express cynicism at his inclusion with the disdainful quidem etiam.4 While Lucullus also casts doubt on Scaevola’s allegiances (obscurius), he is happy to acknowledge that Publius Crassus’ Gracchan sympathies were common knowledge (palam). Lucullus’ opposite opinion of Gaius Marius’ inclusion, that ‘they certainly don’t tell lies about him’, exposes the contested nature of the exempla as ‘true’ or ‘false’ representatives of an ideological position.5 Clearly here, in the safety of a Ciceronian dialogue among his ideological peers, Lucullus could contradict the ‘seditious citizens’ and remember these men and their politics differently, far removed from the potential ire that such remarks might have generated in a public meeting convened 2 3 4 5

Cic. Luc. 13–4. Translation adapted from Rackham in the Loeb Classical Library (1933). I eagerly await the publication of new critical editions of the text by T. Hunt and E. Malaspina, and T. Reinhardt. See, for example, the lists compiled by Meier (1965) and Thommen (1989). So, Haltenhoff (1998) 88. Cf. Robb (2010) 85. Thus Robb (2010) 86: ‘what is clear from Lucullus’ reference to lying [about exempla] is the existence of a certain degree of dispute over who and what was popularis’.

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by a magistrate (contio). But in this chapter I propose that we can move beyond Lucullus’ internal discussion of the credibility of these ideological exempla and its parallel in the modern scholarship on the binary of populares and optimates, which has frequently attempted to classify certain politicians as one or the other.6 Rather, we can examine how this passage points to another way of remembering so-called populares, that is, to the actual oratorical practice of these ‘seditious citizens’, particularly before popular audiences in the contio, and to a lesser extent, the corona of forensic oratory. Through further case studies of understudied oratorical material, namely the fragments of Cicero’s Pro Cornelio in 65 BC, and what we can ascertain about the oratorical strategies of two tribunician orators in 63 BC, Publius Servilius Rullus and Titus Labienus, the lens of ‘cultural memory’ will be deployed to add greater complexity to our current understanding of popular speech in the late Republic. Although Assmann’s concepts of cultural and communicative memory have gained much currency in recent years, here I deploy them with an awareness of the imperfect equations that can be drawn between Latin mnemonic conceptions of the past and Assmann’s framework, such as memoria nostra et patrum (‘within our memory and our fathers’ memory’) and ‘communicative memory’, or memoria maiorum (‘memory of the ancestors’) and ‘cultural memory’, as has been well pointed out by Alain Gowing and his preference for the emic utility of the Latin terminology.7 In contrast to the flattening-out of ideological self-representation in the contio advocated by Robert Morstein-Marx, the heterogeneous ways in which orators remembered populares before ‘popular’ audiences can in turn broaden our understanding of the ideological claims that could be made before these same audiences through their cultural memory.8 In particular, populares who 6

7

8

The bibliography on populares and optimates is extensive, but see the still formative Seager (1972), Perelli (1982), Burckhardt (1988) and now, especially Wiseman (2009) 5–32 and Robb (2010), who offer fundamentally different points of view. Tiersch (2018) builds on Robb (with qualifications) and helpfully focuses on the (Ciceronian) contest over the semantics of the term popularis. Here I refer to the definitions set out by Assmann (1992) and Assmann (1995). See below n. 60 for further discussion of the problematic application of Assmann’s framework to Roman contexts, as shown by Walter (2004) 24–6, Gowing (2005), and Roller (2018) 229–32. Here I prefer the approach of Gowing (2000) and (2005), who offers a framework grounded in the Latin terminology. Cf. Fox (2007) 163–71. See Morstein-Marx (2004), again reiterated at (2013) 42–3, even though he tempers parts of his earlier argument in this piece. By ‘popular’ audience, I refer to audiences present at the contio and in the corona of forensic trials, comprising a heterogeneous mixture of persons that often changed from contio to contio, trial to trial. I therefore also use ‘popular’ to describe any oratory which occurred in the presence of these audiences. Some audiences, such as that surrounding the trial of Rabirius in 63, considered below, may have been more representative of the populus than usual, due to the trial

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became a specific type of political and rhetorical exempla, housed in the cultural memory of audiences, represent one flashpoint of this heterogeneity.9 The exempla under discussion here are understood as rhetorical and political, since they: (1) comprise the name of a politician, to whom (2) particular political acts or policies deemed popularis are attributed and (3) occur more regularly in rhetorical contexts, and thus serve the aims of oratorical (and by extension, political) persuasion, as set out by Cicero in various contexts.10 In view of this broadened and more varied conception of popular exemplarity, I will suggest that we need to reassess the unavoidable influence of the loudest oratorical voice preserved – Cicero. As will be demonstrated, because Cicero did not and could not always appeal to the memoria of populares to the same extent or in the same way that his opponents did, we cannot take him as representative of how ideology functioned among the audiences of the contio and corona. Rather, the burden should fall upon us to prove Cicero’s representativeness, especially in the light of the contional contours added by the non-Ciceronian evidence.11 As will be borne out, a reassessment of the Ciceronian oratory supporting Morstein-Marx’s notion of ‘ideological monotony’ in the contio shows that his framework unduly paints a portrait of oratorical sameness, at least in regard to an orator’s use of exempla as a component of cultural memory to self-identify as a representative of ‘popularis’ ideology.12

11.2 The Memory of Saturninus’ Exempla The catalogue of exempla in the Lucullus is not presented as the output of ‘seditious citizens’ in general. An explicit connection is made with the oratorical usage of one well-known popular speaker: Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, tribune for 103 BC, 100 BC, who was elected again in 100 BC requiring a iudicium populi, probably via the comitia centuriata. On audience composition at the contio, see Mouritsen (2001) 39–43, 56–7 and compare Morstein-Marx (2004) 41–2, 68, 122–36, esp. 131 n. 62. See also, for an exhaustive survey, Courrier (2014) 442–54, 496–9. In this study, I adopt the more expansive definition of Morstein-Marx, but also add the corona of forensic trials. For the corona, see: Cic. Fin. 2.74, 4.74, Tusc. 1.10, Flac. 66, 69 with Taylor (1966) 49, Millar (1986) 2, Horsfall (1996) 116 with n. 188, Morstein-Marx (2004) 206 n. 10, Courrier (2014) 532–46 and now Rosillo-López (2017), whose arguments about the influence of the corona are highly relevant to my approach. 9 For exempla as elements of cultural memory, see Hölkeskamp (2004) 169–98. On political and rhetorical exempla, see David’s (1980) classic analysis, and more recently, van der Blom (2010). See Langlands (2018: 4) for a broader, ethical definition of exempla. 10 See, for example, Cic. Inv. 1.49, Verr. 2.3.209, Orat. 120. 11 Cf. Tan (2008) on the unrepresentativeness of Cicero for our understanding of contiones. 12 In this way, I offer a challenge to Morstein-Marx (2004) that complements those made by Russell (2013) and, more explicitly with regard to Sallust, Rosenblitt (2016) and (2019) 115–30.

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for 99 BC, but killed soon thereafter.13 For we must take notice of the specific reference Lucullus makes to Saturninus in concluding the analogy from the passage quoted above, which implies that Lucullus’ analogical target may in fact be Saturninus’ original invocation of these exempla as the archetypal seditiosus civis.14 The suggestion appears to be confirmed by a later reference to Saturninus, when Cicero, having addressed Lucullus’ earlier critique, asks him: ‘Don’t you agree that I don’t just name famous men (inlustres homines), as Saturninus did, but also never imitate them unless they are distinguished, unless they are well known (nobilem)?’15 Despite this, the gravity of these exempla appears to have been lost on modern commentators, probably because Cicero’s interlocutor presents it as present custom: solent.16 But this use of the present continuous tense in this passage is generalizing and it certainly does not exclude Saturninus’ citation of these exempla. On the contrary, the specific mention of his name suggests that he was the paradigmatic practitioner of this mode of exemplarity, even if the practice remained relevant down to the dramatic date of the dialogue, that is, sometime between 63 to 61.17 It is also telling that the list of exempla contains no politician who was active in the period after Saturninus’ death in 100, but for Marius.18 The exempla therefore constitute a coherent group, temporally bounded by the terminus ante quem of Saturninus’ death in 100. Finally, we might ask: how can we even trust the interlocutor of a Ciceronian philosophical dialogue as our source for Saturninus’ oratorical practice since Cicero himself was a mere boy in 100 when Saturninus 13 14

15 16

17

18

See Badian (1984a) for the adjusted chronology of Saturninus’ death. Cicero applies the term seditiosus to Saturninus more than anyone else, for which see: Cic. Brut. 224 (in a catalogue of seditious orators), Leg. 3.20, 3.26, as noted by Wisse (2013a) 189. Cf. Robb (2010) 150–66 for a discussion of the term. Cic. Luc. 75. Cf. Haltenhoff (1998) 86. I am grateful to Lea Beness for this suggestion. Thus, the passage has been noted but not discussed within the context of Saturninus’ oratorical practice, as I propose here. See Meier (1965) 583, Seager (1972) 331 n. 16, 333 n. 1, Millar (1986) 9, Blösel (2000) 86 n. 276, Stemmler (2000) 174 n. 110, 183 n. 154, 185 n. 162, Chrissanthos (2004) 346 n. 32, van der Blom (2010) 164 n. 47, Duplá (2011) 283. Robb (2010) 77–86 offers the most detailed analysis of the passage, but still fails to realize its significance, as she is primarily concerned with its terminological significance (popularis, seditiosi). Cavaggioni (1998) 174 with n. 3 and Haltenhoff (1998) 86 rightly read the references to Saturninus as grounds for attribution, but do not pursue its implications. For the dramatic date of the Lucullus, based on the internal termini of Cicero’s consulship (referenced in past time at Luc. 62) and the death of the other interlocutor, Catulus, in 61, see Brittain (2006) xv n. 16. Brittain’s (2006) 9 n. 11 comment that ‘Cicero might [have added] the more recent example of Clodius [rather than Saturninus]’, only strengthens the suggestion that the exempla originated as a coherent group from Saturninus, but it also ignores the dramatic date of the dialogue, which is prior to the real ascendancy of Clodius as a seditiosus civis from 59 onwards. Similarly, pace Robb (2010) 79.

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met his gory end in the curia? To begin with, analyses of Cicero’s own historical research and his efforts to make his treatises approach a fairly high degree of historical verisimilitude, suggest that we need not discredit entirely the historicity of the information contained in these works.19 That Cicero himself rejected his first version of what became the Academica (posteriora) – the Lucullus – due to the inaccuracy of the interlocutors’ philosophical erudition, as his letters to Atticus (13.12.3, 13.16.1, 13.19.3) attest, and not because of the treatise’s political details, should only enhance the confidence we can place in Cicero’s portrait of Lucullus and his political sphere. The letters give the lie to his prefatory remarks in the Lucullus which attempt to head off any criticism of his speakers’ philosophical credentials, as Cicero claims that while Lucullus’ glorious career is well known, he had access to ‘more private details often ascertained from the man himself with few others’ about his philosophical training and interests.20 All that then remains behind the philosophical facade of Cicero’s Lucullus are those references to his public life: illa externa.21 Laced with references to the contio, tribunate, and politics in general, not to mention the extensive laudatory treatment given to Lucullus’ own biography, Cicero clearly made a concerted effort to frame the philosophical unrealities of the speakers within their political realities.22 So while Cicero has rightly been doubted for his renditions of earlier figures drawn from cultural memory, it seems reasonable to place some faith in his attention to the historical setting and accuracy of his interlocutor’s political statements here, especially when the historical period in question falls within communicative memory, inasmuch as Cicero knew Lucullus long and well as one of his contemporaries and friends.23 Lucullus’ enigmatic reference to Saturninus as the ‘foremost enemy of my family’, also assumes knowledge of a real inimicitia that we can only guess at, perhaps in connection with Saturninus’ role in the exile of Lucullus’ maternal uncle, Metellus 19

20 22 23

See Jones (1939) and Rawson (1972), and more specifically on the De Oratore, Fantham (2004), Gruen (1992) 624–8, Zetzel (2003) 131 n. 23; on the De Republica, Zetzel (1995) 12–13. Hanchey (2014) finds the historicity of the exempla in the dialogues problematic, but does not consider whether audiences would accept their historicity. Compare the welcome approach of Gilbert (2015). Cic. Luc. 4; see also Cic. Luc. 7. 21 Cic. Luc. 4. For Cicero’s biography of Lucullus, see Cic. Luc. 1–4. Political references: Cic. Luc. 6, 15, 56, 63, 75, 84, 97, 136–37, 144 (contio). Zetzel (1972) rightly debunked the notion of the ‘Scipionic circle’ drawn from the dialogues. But note that Scipio Aemilianus belongs temporally to cultural memory, while Lucullus was a contemporary of both Saturninus and Cicero. Cf. the more ambivalent approach of Fox (2007) 115–34. For Cicero’s friendship with Lucullus, besides his own claim to intimacy at Cic. Luc. 4, see: Cic. Leg. 3.30, Fin. 3.8; Plut. Luc. 41.3, 42.4.

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Numidicus.24 In sum, we can, I submit, with some confidence, view this list of exempla as being at least a representative part of Saturninus’ oratorical strategy – the communicative memory of Saturninus’ oratorical exploitation of a particular aspect of cultural memory.25 Now if we home in upon Saturninus’ exempla more closely, we find that they are not the typical tribunician populares derided by Cicero elsewhere; these truly are illustrious men (inlustres homines). All of the men cited are conspicuously consulars, whose careers largely stand in contradistinction to Saturninus’.26 It is not without significance that Lucullus specifically highlighted their consular status (cum consules essent).27 Most notably, all of the exempla mentioned, save Marius, are not known to have come into the type of violent conflict with their contemporaries that characterized certain tribunes, such as Saturninus himself, or the Gracchi, who are only indirectly mentioned in the reference to Crassus and Scaevola’s support of Tiberius Gracchus. Despite scholars since Christian Meier arguing that each of the exempla conceivably can be connected to some kind of popular measure which allowed them to be designated as populares, it is fruitless to rehearse these prosopographical analyses yet again.28 The emphasis should rather fall on the fact that Saturninus and others like him represented these individuals as populares of the past, calling upon them from memoria to shore up their ideological credentials by laying claim to be their successors, if only rhetorically. The exempla in the Lucullus also proclaim a pre-history of populares that reaches back into the depths of early Roman memoria, another aspect of the catalogue which has as yet not received due attention.29 Later, we will see 24 25

26

27 28

29

Haltenhoff (1998) 97–98. No mention is made in Epstein (1987). For Cicero’s critical assessment of Saturninus’ oratory, see Cic. Brut. 224. Note that this should now be added as a testimonium to any future edition of the fragmentary orators of the Roman Republic. It is missing from Malcovati’s ORF 2 and Manuwald (2019). The exempla cited are all distinguished: L. Valerius Poplicola (cos. suff. 509, cos. 508, 507, 504); C. Flaminius (cos. 223, 217; tr. pl. 232); L. Cassius Longinus Ravilla (cos. 127; tr. pl. 137); Q. Pompeius (cos. 141); P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Numantinus Africanus (cos. 147, 134); P. Mucius Scaevola (cos. 133); P. Licinius Crassus Dives Mucianus (cos. 131); C. Marius (cos. 107, 104–100, 86). Cavaggioni (1998) 174 with n. 3 argues that Saturninus’ claim to Gracchan continuity (known from other sources) was derived from an appeal to the auctoritas of the inlustres homines – but this observation only explains the exempla of P. Crassus and P. Scaevola; the others have no bearing on the Gracchi. Cf. Duplá (2011). See Meier (1965) 573–83, Haltenhoff (1998) 86–91, and Robb (2010) 79–86. Nevertheless, this approach seems somewhat anachronistic, as we are applying our own standards of who or what is and is not ‘popularis’ extrapolated from other ancient sources. Taylor’s (1962) seminal study of the ‘forerunners of the Gracchi’, though exhaustive, necessarily overlooked this passage since it excluded the insights offered by exempla.

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that variations of this archaic approach are detectable in Cicero’s Pro Cornelio in 65 and in Titus Labienus’ prosecution of Rabirius in 63. But here the popular tradition of exemplarity appears to present an aged patina of respectability, if not a foundational quality. For the sheer scope of time covered by the list is at once both staggering and significant, stretching back to one of the first consuls, Publius Valerius Poplicola, and so seemingly staking a claim to the existence of a popularis tradition ab initio. When Lucullus contests Saturninus’ proximity to his exempla, he underlines the antiquity of the exempla, arguing that he did not have any feature resembling ‘those men of old’. He also marks the temporal transition from Poplicola and the early consuls, who belong to antiquity, to Gaius Flaminius by noting, ‘then they come to the better known cases’, that is, presumably better known because they are more recent. Part of the respectable patina of this catalogue’s exempla therefore consisted of their reach into the archaic period. That this mode of exemplarity was particularly pertinent to the contio is suggested by Cicero’s final extension of the oratorical analogy towards the conclusion of the Lucullus: ‘Why then, Lucullus, do you bring me into disfavor and summon me before a contio, so to speak, and indeed, order the shops to be shut, as seditious tribunes do (ut seditiosi tribuni solent)?’30 Contional practice, then, is a metaphor running through the dialogue, and we should interpret the catalogue in that light. The catalogue thus points to an important oratorical strategy for any speaker seeking to build their popular credentials through the memoria of exempla: if one could be both nobilis and popularis, it is not inconceivable that a tradition of nobilis exemplarity could have arisen to service a popular mode of argument.31 Was this then another facet of popular oratory? The absence of the Gracchi or any other tribune who failed to make it further along the career ladder than the tribunate among these exempla, underscores the possibility that this list might well have been indicative of a tactic employed by Saturninus and other orators in the contio – distinct from the exempla which previous scholars have understood to constitute the popularis mode of exemplarity. For the most obvious choice of exempla for a popular orator seems to have been those dead tribunes who could be 30

31

Cic. Luc. 144. Translation adapted from Rackham (1933). Cf. Cic. Luc. 63 also on the contio. On this passage, see now, Russell (2016) 193–4. It is important to note that the verb commemorare used at Cic. Luc. 72 to denote the practice of the ‘seditious citizens’ (seditiosi cives) ‘recalling’ exempla is also used by Cicero elsewhere to describe oratorical practice: Cic. Agr. 2.92 (contio), Cic. Rab. Perd. 13.12, 24.8 (to describe Labienus’ contional use of exempla). Tatum (1999) 14–15 briefly explores the notion, but only with regard to the mutual popularis and nobilis regard for libertas (‘freedom’).

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held up as the martyred champions of the people.32 The technique is best exemplified in a non-Ciceronian source: the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Probably composed sometime in the late 80s BC,33 it offers an example of a speaker who laments the deaths of the Gracchi, Saturninus, Drusus, and Sulpicius individually – all tribunes of the plebs.34 At another point in the same handbook, we encounter what may be a fragment from a rival orator who warned Saturninus: ‘Do not, Saturninus, rely too much on the popular crowd; unavenged lie the Gracchi’.35 While these examples seem more suited to the contio, the affective potential of these martyrological exempla to sway the corona and iudices in a forensic trial is showcased elsewhere. In Cicero’s undelivered second pleading (actio) of the Verrine orations from 70, he planned on addressing Hortensius’ complaint that in the previous (delivered) actio Cicero had brought in the son of one of Verres’ victims for purely populist appeal (populariter agere): One would think I had brought forward the son of a Gracchus or Saturninus or someone like them, that the very name and memoria of his father might inflame the passions of the ignorant crowd. He was in fact Publius Junius, the son of a common man from the Roman plebs.36

All of this is to say that the more visible form of popularis exemplarity that has been studied by modern scholars is one in which the memoria of murdered tribunes could be invoked by an orator as a popular martyrology of sorts. But as the Lucullus has vividly demonstrated, this was not the only group of populares that one could resurrect from memoria before a popular audience. The strategy ascribed to Saturninus in the Lucullus does not seem to aim at turning the audience’s ill-will (invidia) against a magistrate or senator in the contio through an emotional, and often divisive, appeal to the memory of the dead. Quite the reverse: the tactic of Lucullus’ 32

33

34 35

36

See Von Ungern-Sternberg (1973), Martin (2000), and now, van der Blom (2010) 165–7 for studies of these exempla. Most scholars, however, have confined themselves to Cicero’s treatment of the Gracchi as exempla: Murray (1966), Béranger (1972), Gaillard (1975), Robinson (1994), Bücher (2006) 281–96, van der Blom (2010) 103–7. Dated on the basis of internal evidence between 86–82 by Marx (1894) 153–4, Caplan (1954) xxv– xxvi, and more recently reaffirmed by Corbeill (2002) 33 and Hilder (2015) 24–9. Achard (1989) xiii, perhaps too confidently, narrows it down further to 84–3. Contra Henderson (1951) 73 and n. 18, Douglas (1960) and Winkel (1979). Rhet. Her. 4.31. For a particularly dramatic rendition of the death of Tiberius Gracchus, see Rhet. Her. 4.68. Rhet. Her. 4.67. Cf. Flower (2006) 82 n. 48 and van der Blom (2010) 164–5, who perhaps go too far in suggesting that this – an opponent’s warning against Saturninus – can be taken as direct evidence for Saturninus’ own claim to be actively following the exempla of the Gracchi. For this and previously discussed ‘martyrological’ exempla, see Von Ungern-Sternberg (1973) 152–8 and Martin (2000) 35–7. Cic. Verr. 2.1.151.

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Saturninus seems to have played up the respectability, distinction, and aristocratic status (nobilitas) of the exempla in an effort to build a consensus among the audience in favour of the orator’s proposals.

11.3

Reading Between the Lines: The Cultural Memory of ‘Respectable’ Populares in Cicero

But can we see any similarly ‘respectable’ popular exempla in the oratory that we do possess? Such an investigation leads us into the lesser-studied parts of Cicero’s oratory and that of his opponents – the latter necessarily salvaged as testimonia from the lines of Cicero himself. Turning first to forensic oratory, Cicero’s Pro Cornelio offers glimpses of a strategy reminiscent of Saturninus’ long reach into the archaic past, but it is not combined with a focus on populares as consuls or nobiles. Instead, Cicero tailored his exempla to the specifics of Cornelius’ case and the audience of the corona. From the fragments preserved of two published speeches, both evidently from the same actio, we can ascertain that in 65 Cicero defended C. Cornelius, the tribune of 67, over the course of four days. What has come down to us is likely a string of witness cross-examinations transformed into two published speeches which saw the sharp blows dealt to potentially powerful backers of any future Ciceronian consular candidature softened by careful reframing efforts, prior to their transferal and memorialization within the fixity of the published version.37 Nonetheless, Cicero had still chosen to defend a not uncontroversial case: Cornelius’ tribunician measures were opposed by a number of senators, if one can judge by those consulars who testified against him.38 In the second of his published speeches for the defence, Cicero casts the case as a new iteration of the ancient struggle between a conservative establishment and populares, asserting: ‘This was the custom in the time of those ancient and bearded men: to prosecute populares.’39 That Cicero was here pointing to the cultural

37

38

39

On the trial more generally, see Griffin (1973) and Crawford (1994) 67–72. Here I follow Guérin (2015) 154–9 in viewing the oratorical material that Cicero delivered over the course of four days as corresponding more to a transcription of multiple witness interrogations, subsequently transformed into a published oratio continua, akin perhaps to the In Vatinium. For another reconstruction, see Kumaniecki (1970a) 29–30. Q. Catulus, Q. Hortensius, Q. Metellus Pius, M. Lucullus and Mam. Aemilius Lepidus. On this point, see Crawford (1994) 67 n. 8 with discussion. On Cornelius’ controversial tribunician activity, see and Millar (1998) 82–5 and Steel in this volume. Cic. Corn. 2 F4 (Crawford): Hic mos iam apud illos antiquos et barbatos fuit, ut persequerentur populares. Here and in all following references to the Pro Cornelio, I follow the text of Crawford (1994).

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memory of the tribunate becomes apparent in his extended references to the secessions of the plebeians and the foundation of the tribunate in his first speech, an approach which, although not as specific as that in the Lucullus, still asserts the proximity of a contemporary popularis to his ancient forbearers.40 Cicero also refers to the Porcian law (also referenced in the list from the Lucullus), Cassian law, and to one consul who was noticeably absent from the consules populares of the Lucullus: Gaius Aurelius Cotta, the consul of 75 who saw the passage of a law allowing tribunes to progress along the career ladder.41 Cicero’s (surviving) exempla therefore differ considerably from Saturninus’ consular list. For in his first speech Cicero evidently sought to remind his audience of the heritage of the tribunate as a seat of popular action rather than the consulship – hence Cotta’s inclusion only as one of its restorers – stretching down to Cornelius with a catalogue of popular laws and their promulgators. Cicero also activated the ‘respectable’ memoria of more recent populares from the ranks of the nobilitas in a strategy distinct from the first speech. In the published second speech he carefully reframed his cornering of a consular witness during the original interrogatio, Q. Catulus (cos. 78, cens. 65), within these hypothetical terms: But if I wanted to ask, in a friendly way, that most wise and humane man, Quintus Catulus: ‘Whose tribunate do you approve of less, Gaius Cornelius’, or – I shall not speak of Publius Sulpicius’, nor Lucius Saturninus’, nor Gaius Gracchus’, nor Tiberius’: I shall name no man whom those men reckon to be the seditious type, but rather, that of your maternal uncle, Quintus Catulus, a most outstanding and beloved man of his country? Now what do you suppose his answer would be to me?42 (Cic. Corn. 2 F5)

Further fragments from the speech reveal that the uncle of Catulus to whom Cicero refers is Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, the tribune of 104, who granted the people the right of choosing priests via the tribal assembly (comitia tributa), rather than by co-option.43 While Domitius is invoked as a family exemplum whose popular measures Catulus cannot deny, for our purposes, it is notable how Cicero, despite harping on the archaic memoria of the tribunate elsewhere in the speech, did not choose to assimilate

40 41 43

Cic. Corn. 1 F48–49 (secessiones plebis), F50 (lex Porcia, Cassia), and further, F53–54 (lex Aurelia, Plotia and Varia de maiestate). Cic. Corn. 1 F52. 42 Cic. Corn. 2 F5. Cic. Corn. 2 F6–7. See also Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus RE (21).

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Cornelius to its more recent, yet controversial history in the martyrological catalogue of the Gracchi, Saturninus and Sulpicius.44 Indeed, Cicero could not invoke these more readily known exempla because this would in fact undermine his strategy of forcing Catulus to acknowledge that even within a conservative family tree such as his, a popularis could be found – and one who exemplified a different, more ‘respectable’ type of popularis. Instead of the martyrs, Cicero threatened to impersonate Domitius – a popularis tribune who nevertheless opposed Saturninus in 100, became a consul in 96 and censor in 92, to be favourably remembered as a vir clarissimus here in 65.45 That Cicero was intent upon stressing the superlative credentials of Domitius and his maiores, is driven home by his extended shaming of Catulus through his ancestor Domitius’ controversial actions as tribune: Again – your uncle, a most illustrious man, with a most distinguished father, grandfather, and ancestors, I suppose, granted to the Roman people and snatched from the colleges of the chief potentates the power to co-opt priests – in complete silence, with the support of the nobility, with no one enlisted to interpose his veto?46 (Cic. Corn. 2 F6)

By making so much of Domitius’ exemplum, Cicero not only undermined Catulus, but suggested in the published reframing of his interrogation of the witnesses that Cornelius was more akin to the type of popularis that we saw in the Lucullus – one who could follow Domitius’ exemplum, that is, rejoin the ranks of his fellow nobiles after his tribunate, rather than become a seditious martyr of the people. Two years later, in a less personal reference, but a nonetheless highly intriguing one for our purposes, Cicero, as consul, again exploited the memoria of Domitius as both popularis and nobilis to criticize the tribune Publius Servilius Rullus. In his counter-contio, Cicero first highlights the dissimilarity of Domitius and Rullus, not with reference to Domitius’ popular measures regarding the priesthoods – which soon follow in the speech – but to his status as nobilis: ‘See the difference between Cn. Domitius, tribune of the plebs, a most noble man (hominem nobilissimum), and Publius Rullus, who, as I think, tested your patience [i.e. the people’s], when he said that he was noble (nobilem).’47 Although Ronald Syme appears to have been the only scholar to acknowledge the reference to 44 45 47

See Jewell (2018) 269–70 on the family exemplum in this passage. For Domitius’ controversial career, see Carlsen (2006) 42–50. 46 Cic. Corn. 2 F6. Cic. Agr. 2.19. Note also that Domitius’ measures regarding the priesthoods were again a ‘hot topic’ in 63, the year Labienus had revived them (annulling Sulla’s reform), which then saw the election of C. Julius Caesar as pontifex maximus in the same year (Dio 37.37.1).

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Rullus’ ancestry, if we accept the consensus reading of the manuscripts,48 then we can infer from Cicero’s testimony that Rullus had exaggerated his status as a nobilis in his earlier contio. Perhaps Rullus cited his ancestry in contradistinction to Cicero’s novitas as a ‘new man’ – a claim which Cicero combatted by playing up the superlative ancestry of Domitius nobilissimus.49 Certainly it can be supposed that Cicero’s counterpunch may have intended to turn Rullus’ assertion of his nobilitas into a source of contional invidia. From the Rhetorica ad Herennium we learn that nobilitas was one among several qualities which an orator could hope to exploit against an adversary.50 From the perspective of Rullus’ claim to nobilitas, he may have referred to his branch of the gens Servilia, descended, as far as we can tell, from the Servilii Gemini, the consuls of 203 and 202, and notably, among the decemviri appointed in 201 to settle Scipio Africanus’ veterans on land in Samnium and Apulia.51 The latter, highly topical, connection to an agrarian law may have given Rullus the impetus to play up an ideologically convenient ancestor, however distant. That Rullus’ particular sub-branch of the family had not attained the consulship for some time – his father of the same name is only known as a moneyer in 100 – may have opened the door for Cicero’s rebuttal.52 Whatever the reality of Rullus’ ancestry, the fact that he referred to it before a popular audience, and that Cicero felt the need to undercut him with the exemplum of Domitius, awakens us to the fact that Rullus may have also sought to present himself as popularis with a nobilis precedent for his agrarian proposal. In the same year that Rullus’ agrarian legislation failed, we can also find echoes of Saturninus’ strategy of citing populares from Rome’s more distant past in a speech that was very much about litigating Saturninus’ own memoria, that is, Cicero’s Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo (‘On behalf of Rabirius, accused of high treason’). By reading between the lines of Cicero’s rebuttal of the tribune Titus Labienus and his claim to be popularis, we can ascertain aspects of Labienus’ use of cultural memory in a trial which 48 49 51

52

Although the MSS agree, Zielinski (1904) 788 still argued for a better reading in popularem instead of nobilem, see the arguments given by Manuwald (2018) ad loc. for accepting the transmitted text. Novitas: Cic. Agr. 2.3–4. See Syme (1964) 410. 50 Rhet. Her. 1.8. The gens Servilia was a prominent plebeian family at this time, exemplified in P. Servilius Vatia Isauricus (cos. 79), but the Rulli appear to have been descended from a different branch. Cf. RE (80) for further details on P. Servilius Rullus’ later career. For the Servilii Gemini more generally, see Badian (1984b) and Livy 31.4 for the decemviri of 201, tellingly referred to by Cicero at Luc. 56, 84, which demonstrates their currency as exempla in the political discourse at the time of the dramatic date of the dialogue (the years immediately following Rullus’ proposed legislation, see n. 17). For P. Servilius Rullus RE (79) as monetalis in 100, see Crawford (1974) 328/1 – hardly a famous father to cite, but for his introduction of the aper to his feasts, for which see Pliny, NH 8.210.

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we know had a popular audience, since in a case of treason (perduellio), the trial was convened either by a tribune or duovir before a contio.53 Besides parading the portrait (imago) of Saturninus ‘on the rostra and in a public meeting’ (in rostra atque in contionem) and recalling the tribune of 98, C. Decianus, as an exemplum,54 he clearly made an appeal to the memoria of leges populares protecting the rights of citizens and those who had promulgated them.55 For as Cicero complains: ‘Do you really dare to mention to me the law of Porcius or of Gaius Gracchus or of any other popularis . . . ?’56 Part of Labienus’ strategy seems then to have focused on stressing the laws protecting citizens’ rights, allowing him to cite both ancient precedents, such as those granting the right of appeal (provocatio) also mentioned in the Lucullus, as well as more recent developments, especially Gaius Gracchus’ law concerning the execution of citizens.57 Significantly, the substance of Cicero’s rebuttal rested on undermining Labienus’ temporal and ideological proximity to the exemplarity of populares and their legislative achievements on behalf of the people.58 The crucial information is contained in a passage where Cicero invokes the Gracchi, arguing that a gulf of difference separates Labienus from Gaius Gracchus, from which he then proceeds to attack Labienus’ archaic vocabulary and procedural formulae associated with the punishment of crucifixion: Is this the man [sc. Labienus] who dares to say he is a popularis and I an enemy of your interests, though that man has searched out all the harshness of punishments and words not from our memoria or our fathers’, but from the annals and from the records of the kings [non ex memoria vestra ac patrum vestrorum sed ex annalium monumentis atque ex regum commentariis], while I have opposed and resisted his cruelty with all my works, with every plan, with every word and deed?59 (Cic. Rab. Per. 15)

The sharp distinction which Cicero draws between his audience’s memoria and documents (annales, commentarii) should attract our attention for 53 54 55

56 57 58

59

For the procedure and its contional setting, see Magdelain (1973) 405–6, 417. Cic. Rab. Per. 25. On Saturninus’ banned imago, see Flower (2006: 83). See Cic. Rab. Per. 24 (At C. Decianus, de quo tu saepe commemoras) with Russell’s (2013) treatment of this difficult period of tribunician oratory. Note that Labienus had cited Decianus for his contio in which he lamented the death of Saturninus. Cic. Rab. Per. 13. See Tyrrell’s (1978) 67–70, 81 discussion as to whether these laws referred to the right of provocatio. Tyrrell (1978) 96–9 and Morstein-Marx (2004) 108–9 do not discuss the expression of memoria; Fuhrmann (1987) 132 only does so indirectly as regards antiquarianism, and not its role as a rhetorical ploy. Cic. Rab. Per. 15.

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several reasons. First, it marks a demarcation in the Roman perception of the past – two generations against a potential number of centuries – which raises an essential question regarding the Roman perception of memory in time: precisely what time-spectrum could be enclosed in memoria? Here memoria is measured in generational spans that conceivably stretch back to the mid-second century BC.60 This accords well with the subject under dispute in the context of this speech – the alleged dissimilarity between Labienus and Gaius Gracchus. For Cicero clearly launches his challenge to Labienus on the basis of an inherent contradiction in Labienus’ claim to be following Gracchus’ exemplum, who conceivably could be included in the ‘memory of our fathers’ (memoria patrum) and, yet, still draw upon material from a period ideologically and temporally alien to Gracchan freedoms (libertas): the regal period. In this anti-regnal counterargument, Cicero recites some of the phrases and punishments Labienus had purportedly dredged up from the time of Tarquin through his appeal to a Duumviral commission, which he asserts are alien to both Romulus and Numa Pompilius, and now ‘overthrown not only by the shades of antiquity but also by the light of libertas.’61 By pointing to this contradiction in Labienus’ approach from the memoria of populares, Cicero asserts that his opponent has in fact gone too far back into the past – beyond memoria and into the archives. In this way, Cicero attempted to sever Labienus’ connection with the memoria of libertas as a popularis talking point, instead positioning himself as its defender. Indeed, if Labienus had pointed to an archaic Duumviral commission – the duumviri being the other magistrates besides the tribunate that could convene such trials – as a basis for the present trial, Cicero may well have been casting doubt on the very procedural standing for Labienus’ pursuit of the trial. For tribunes and duumviri had not held such trials within the credible bounds of memoria; only by drawing on the – often problematic – annales had Labienus found a procedural basis for the trial in the first place.62 60

61 62

For the relationship between audience memoria and documents, see also: Cic. Inv. 1.1, Ver. 2.3.209, Cluent. 62, Sul. 45, Mur. 16. For modern discussions of the temporal differences in memoria (vestra/ nostra, patrum, maiorum), see: Horsfall (2003) 88, Morstein-Marx (2004) 108 n. 177, Walter (2004) 35–8, Bücher (2006) 167–9, Hölkeskamp (2006) 491. Cf. Hölkeskamp (2006) and (2008) 107 and for an attempt to place these distinctions within Assmann’s temporal demarcations of ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’. Cic. Rab. Per. 13. See Magdelain (1973) 411, who points out that in effect the trial of Rabirius represents the only historical instance of the procedure; all other instances come down through the annalistic tradition preserved in Livy. For the annales and archives available in 63 to someone like Labienus, see Tyrrell (1978) 96–7.

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Whether Cicero’s counter-contio did in fact demolish Labienus’ exempla is doubtful; the procedural basis evidently obtained so long as the trial continued or a colleague’s veto intervened. On the verge of losing the trial, Cassius Dio informs us that Cicero’s political ally, the praetor Metellus Celer had the military flag on the Janiculum hoisted down, causing the people to disperse and the trial to end prematurely.63 Ultimately, Labienus did not attempt to reconvene the trial. But he had made his point, and partly this was achieved, it would seem, through an appeal to the capacious archaic memoria of populares and their laws.

11.4

Conclusion: Resisting the Ideological Monotony of Cicero’s Use of Cultural Memory

This chapter opened with the differing claims made upon the cultural memory of populares in a unique and understudied passage from the Lucullus. At one level we can read the passage as a Ciceronian adjudication of how certain politicians of the past should be remembered ideologically. In another way, it preserves an entirely different way of remembering them beyond the bounds of the dialogue’s ideological safety – an oratorical strategy which sought to remember those men as a coherent group of populares before popular audiences. The unconventional characteristics of these populares, as consuls and esteemed members of the nobilitas stretching back to the foundation of the res publica, force us to reconsider how cultural memory, here in the form of exempla, was deployed to ideological effect in the contio and forensic contexts. Labienus’ approach, or Rullus’, or Cicero’s in the Pro Cornelio certainly speak to some aspects of the exemplarity preserved in the Lucullus, yet none replicates it in its entirety. Not only do these case studies differ from what is typically noted about popular exemplarity – the roll-call of murdered tribunes – but their obvious differences underline the heterogeneous set of factors an orator had to take into account when approaching a popular audience and asserting an ideological claim upon their cultural memory. Audience composition, the opposing orators, the legislation or trial at hand, among other factors, could all discourage sameness. Rather than reinforcing the notion of a uniform mode of popularis speech, the diversity of these oratorical approaches underscores that heterogeneity of political discourse in the contio recently proposed by Amy 63

Dio 37.27.3.

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Russell for tribunician oratory in the 90s BC.64 In another quarter, Alison Rosenblitt has recently issued a persuasive challenge to Morstein-Marx’s ‘ideological monotony’ in her study of the contional speeches in Sallust. She finds that the speeches of Lepidus, Macer and Memmius all engage in a rhetoric of ‘hostile politics’ that does not resemble Cicero’s ‘popular’ oratory and rather represents a distinctive popular ideology.65 This rhetoric of ‘hostile politics’, according to Rosenblitt, stems from a reaction to Sulla’s hostis declaration in 88 (and subsequent declarations) and the trauma occasioned by the civil war and subsequent Sullan regime more generally.66 To be sure, the exempla of my analysis are not the exclusive product of the ‘hostile politics’ of the post-Sullan period. Nevertheless, Rosenblitt’s analysis, in its pointed contrast to Cicero’s rhetoric, which merely ‘alludes to such rhetoric [of hostile politics] in a manner which seeks to deflate its power’, adds further textures to the heterogeneity of popular speech and the ability for some speakers to deploy a popular rhetoric in the contio that was more extreme than other so-called ‘popular’ speakers. Such reassessments – persuasive to my mind – should, then, prompt us to question the existence of an a priori ideological landscape in which all orators had to operate to achieve any measure of popular success.67 Our current understanding of the contio as an ideologically ‘monotonous’ space, that is, where all speakers were ‘competing to be seen as the “true” representatives of the same “popular” ideology’ and therefore offered no real choices to the populus, as Morstein-Marx has proposed, does not capture the heterogeneity which this very competition engendered.68 Morstein-Marx’s main evidence for this monotony is, unsurprisingly, Cicero’s contional oratory, particularly that from his consulship in 63.69 In his pre-consular forensic oratory, we have certainly seen 64

65

66 67 68 69

Russell (2013) 102. Cf. Tiersch’s (2018) 44–5 reservations, and more generally, her argument for the ‘existence of a “popular” identity’ expressed through exempla (46–7). I prefer Russell’s view and see more room for heterogeneity within this ‘popular identity’ than Tiersch, who only touches the surface of these exempla. Rosenblitt (2016) and now (2019) 115–30. This is enmeshed with Tiersch’s (2009) argument that between the second and first centuries BCE the consensus-forming function of the contio disintegrated, though Rosenblitt (2019) 122 more pointedly hones in upon Sulla’s dictatorship as a watershed moment in popular political discourse. On the presence of Sulla’s dictatorship in Roman collective memory and its consequences, see Eckert and Steel in this volume. For the contrasts she draws with Cicero, see Rosenblitt (2019) 121. Morstein-Marx (2004) 229. Morstein-Marx (2004) 212–29. Hence Rosenblitt’s (2016) 660 criticism of his focus on Cicero. Much hangs too on his analysis (235–37) of the Ciceronian preservation of L. Licinius Crassus’ speech (Cic. De orat. 1.225) in 106 on the Servilian jury law, where Crassus asserted that the senate should be subject to the people, the style of which was assessed as populariter (Cic. Brut. 164). Yet without the entire

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that Cicero drew on the memoria of populares.70 But at a structural level, since he never held the tribunate, Cicero’s career never lent itself to the level of contional output that we know tribunes tended to produce.71 Cicero states as much in his inaugural contio, where he claimed that his ‘life choices’ (vitae meae rationes) had prevented him from holding a contio earlier in his life – that is, presumably, because he did not become a tribune.72 Thus, on the one hand, the extent to which Cicero’s oratory can be taken as a representative sample of ideology in the contio is quantitatively slight. On the other hand, in qualitative terms, a reexamination of the way Cicero cites populares as exempla in his contional oratory, demonstrates that he usually only does so as the opposing speaker (dissuasor) in a counter-contio to refute an opponent’s citation of the same exempla, often painting a contrast between the opponent and his exemplum. In his contio against Rullus in 63, Cicero only critiques Rullus’ earlier assertion of proximity to Tiberius Gracchus and his Sempronian law, while later he declares that Rullus is more revolutionary than Gracchus or Sulla in his plans to distribute Campanian land.73 Against Labienus, Cicero draws a sharp contrast between his target and Gaius Gracchus, establishing that Labienus had been the first to cite C. Gracchus; Cicero merely refutes Labienus’ original claim to follow Gracchus’ exemplum.74 The only instance in which Cicero actually cites populares in a positive manner and not when rebutting his opponent’s proximity to their exemplum, also comes in the De lege agraria: For I remember that two of the most illustrious citizens, the most talented men, the best friends of the Roman plebs, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, settled plebeians on public lands, formerly occupied by private persons. I am

70 71 72 73

74

speech, or others on the same law, it is difficult to ascertain how ‘popular’ it was in comparison to his opponents’ rhetoric; as so often is the case, we are at the mercy of Cicero’s evaluation. Besides the examples noted above, see also Q. Cic. Comm. Pet. 53 (oratione in contionibus ac iudicio popularis fuisti) with Morstein-Marx (1998) and (2004) 209. On the dominance of tribunician contional output, see the figures offered by Pina Polo (1996) and Tan (2008), and reiterated by Russell (2013) 103. Cic. Leg. Man. 1 with Steel (2001) 174–5. Cic. Agr. 2.31: here the Sempronian law was apparently first cited by Rullus (cf. Manuwald [2018] ad loc.); Cicero was not the one who invoked Gracchus, as Morstein-Marx (2004) 215 n. 50 appears to assume: ‘Audes etiam, Rulle, mentionem facere legis Semproniae, nec te ea lex ipsa commonet IIIviros illos XXXV tribuum suffragio creatos esse? Et cum tu a Ti. Gracchi aequitate ac pudore longissime remotus sis, id quod dissimillima ratione factum sit eodem iure putas esse oportere?’ Similarly at Agr. 2.81, again contra Morstein-Marx (2004) 215 n. 50. Cic. Rab. Per. 12–15. Cicero does not claim Gracchus as his own exemplum. Contra Morstein-Marx (2004) 214 n. 44: ‘C. Gracchus, whom Cicero invokes at length as his own moral exemplar . . . ’. Rab. Perd. 13 (cited above at n. 56) also makes it clear that Labienus had first invoked C. Gracchus, and so Cicero is actually refuting Labienus’ original claim to follow Gracchus’ exemplum.

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not one of those consuls who, like the majority, think it a crime (nefas) to praise the Gracchi, by whose advice, wisdom, and laws I see that many parts of the res publica were set in order.75 (Cic. Agr. 2.10)

Here Cicero does praise the Gracchi, but he does not and cannot claim them as exempla for his political stance, as Rullus and Labienus did in their capacity as tribunes. Nor does Cicero lament their deaths, a tactic he briefly tried out against Labienus, but again, only to contrast the exemplum with its aspiring imitator.76 Of course, as a consul, Cicero could hardly make a credible claim to the same martyrological exempla available to his tribunician opponents. But for an orator who claimed in the contio that he would be a consul popularis (Cic. Agr. 2.6), Cicero is remarkably silent about his ideological predecessors, that is, previous consules populares, despite having a ready-made catalogue of exempla at hand, as attested in the Lucullus. Granted, Cicero’s preference for Gaius Marius as an exemplum when speaking to the people in the Pro Rabirio, as well as the Catilinarian and post reditum contiones, does demonstrate a calculated awareness of how Marius was favourably remembered by popular audiences and supremely suitable to all of these respective occasions.77 But it also points to how Cicero’s choice of exempla was limited by his own, often shifting, political priorities. He was not a tribune like his defendant in 65, Cornelius; nor was he a consul proposing agrarian legislation, as Caesar was in 59. In short, he never chose to tread a political path that might have required him to take full advantage of the thesaurus of exemplarity open to an orator through the cultural memory of populares. Although Morstein-Marx’s notion of ‘ideological monotony’ makes sense in broad terms, wherein most speakers in the contio competed to be representatives of a ‘popular’ or popularis ideology, the phenomenon is arguably distorted by the Ciceronian playbook. As Cicero’s deployment of populares as exempla illustrates, important differences among orators and their espousal of this ideology become muted if we fail to consider how far they were willing to go in presenting themselves as a ‘friend of the people’. Some consuls, if we take Cicero at his word, thought it nefas to praise the Gracchi.78 Hence there is cause to wonder whether the exceptions to 75 76 77

78

Cic. Agr. 2.10. Translation adapted with modifications from Freese in the Loeb Classical Library (1930). Cic. Rab. Per. 14–15. See Cic. Rab. Per. 27–29, Catil. 3.15, 3.24, Red. Pop. 7, 9–10, 19–21. Thus I concur with MorsteinMarx (2004) 227. See Bücher (2006) 248–9 and van der Blom (2010) 195–208 on Cicero’s varying usage of Marius as exemplum. Cic. Agr. 2.10.

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Morstein-Marx’s rule would be so few had more popular oratory survived.79 Yet beyond this argument from silence – itself a valid consideration when we are literally weighing words – Cicero himself evidently refrained from ever citing certain exempla as his own role models, such as Saturninus or the full range of consules populares at either end of the exemplary spectrum. We are thus constantly at risk of being deafened to all other ‘popular’ voices by the monotony of the Ciceronian echo chamber, unless non-Ciceronian voices can be recovered, even from the very Ciceronian critiques levelled against them, as the foregoing case studies have shown.80 In so doing, the differing memoria of populares can offer us one way to break out of that echo chamber – to experience the greater polyphony of popular speech in late Republican Rome and its engagement with the cultural memory of the community. 79

80

Morstein-Marx (2004) 225 takes this statement as merely locating ‘Cicero in an independent position outside the “hard core” of the Senate’, but we can also take it as a reference to the memory of contiones held by consuls in previous years. For exceptions to the monotony, see the resistance of senatorial speakers to the Gabinian law in 67, the Manilian in 66, and the Trebonian in 55, all nevertheless treated by Morstein-Marx (2004) 179–86 as ‘empty eleventh hour debates’ without acknowledging our inability to assess them accurately in the absence of the speeches themselves. Cf. Arena (2012: 179–200). Plut. Pomp. 30.4 offers one glimpse of the non-popularis rhetoric at these debates: Q. Catulus’ reversal of the popularis appeal to the history of the secessiones plebis during a contio on the Manilian law, where he exhorted the senate to occupy a hill as did their ancestors. On this episode, see Millar (1998: 86), Morstein-Marx (2004: 183), and Arena (2012: 190–1). For two further ‘extreme’ examples, see Rosenblitt (2019) 124 on the contiones of Scipio Nasica and Sulla. Again, Rosenblitt (2016) and (2019) 115–30 has admirably remedied this with regard to Sallust’s popular speakers.

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chapter 12

Cultural Memory and Political Change in the Public Speech of the Late Roman Republic Catherine Steel

Sulla’s dictatorship transformed Rome politically, socially, and physically.1 The changes which he imposed created winners as well as losers; but collectively the experience of his rule was traumatic, combining unprecedented violence directed at individuals with continuing uncertainty around fundamental citizen rights.2 The trauma persisted, in the transformation in the operation of the res publica, the Roman state, which was regularly repeated through the annual political cycle; in the reshaping of the fabric of the city, including Sulla’s self-memorialisation and the elimination of memorials to his chief rival Marius; and in the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of his victims, not simply deprived of their property which had been transferred to new owners but also deprived of their citizen rights. Opposition to many of these changes kept them on the political agenda. Between 75 and 70 BC various restrictions imposed on the tribunate of the plebs were unpicked in a series of legislative measures; in the 60s Julius Caesar successfully challenged the prohibition on the memorialisation of Marius, his uncle by marriage, by re-erecting his trophies over Jugurtha and the Cimbri and Teutones which Sulla had pulled down;3 and the issue of the penalties which had been imposed on the children of the proscribed occasionally surfaced until Caesar rescinded them during the civil wars in the 40s.4 For four decades the significance and permanence 1 2

3

Flower (2010); Stein-Hölkeskamp (2013); Eckert (2016a); Eckert (2016b). The proscriptions differed from the earlier purges, during Sulla’s consulship in 88 BC and immediately prior to his victory in 82 BC, because they were based on a list; they were also on an entirely different scale, with thousands of victims compared to the twelve hostes identified in 88 BC and the seven whom Damasippus hunted down in 82 BC. The proscription list may have been intended to guarantee a non-arbitrary process, but the addition of unauthorised names to the list – such as that of the elder Sextus Roscius, an episode discussed below – undermined any sense of a process with boundaries. There were also threats to community rights, insofar as Sulla attempted to deprive some towns of their newly acquired Roman citizenship; that this attempt would fail did not become evident for some years. On the proscriptions, Hinard (1985); on citizenship, Eckert (2016a) 164–5. Suet. Iul. 11. 4 Plut. Caes. 37.1–2; Suet. Iul. 41; Cass. Dio 41.18.2.

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of the changes which Sulla had imposed on the res publica remained an inescapable object of debate. The terms of this debate were inextricably linked to the ways in which Sulla was remembered and memorialised. This can be seen as a series of contests not only between different versions of Sulla but between different kinds of memory. It set a positive tradition concerning Sulla which was reflected in the buildings, narratives, and accounts of his adherents and followers against a range of oppositional narratives which understood Sulla’s effects on Rome to be destructive. One possible approach to this contest between memory traditions is through the distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory which Assmann set out. The memory of Sulla’s dictatorship created by the acts which he authorised can be viewed as ‘cultural’ memory, in Assmann’s terminology: memory which was formalised and institutionalised through ritual, ceremony, the built environment, and written texts.5 In contrast, ‘communicative’ memory arises from personal recollection, articulated in less formal contexts and persists, at most, for a century after the events recorded. The differentiation between these two kinds of memory can provide a helpful context for the negative views of Sulla that circulated from his dictatorship onwards. It is important to note, however, that such a model diverges from Assmann in the speed with which memories are understood to have taken shape, since ‘cultural memory’ in Assmann’s formulation is a phenomenon which takes two to three generations to emerge. There are clearly some aspects of this model which do not work well for post-Sullan Rome. Communicative memory was not, in this situation, replaced by cultural memory after the passage of time; instead, the distinction between the two forms of memorialisation aligned with political stance, and mapped onto an opposition between an initially dominant ruling faction and its victims and critics, whose memory of events did not at first have the sanction of official memory. Moreover, the view of Sulla which underpinned the actions of the senatorial elite after his withdrawal from public life, and which I have suggested can be approached as an example of ‘cultural’ memory, was highly malleable in the sense that elements of the Sullan res publica were changed, modified, or abandoned in the following years. The extent to which these changes represented fundamental change in the Sullan res publica remains hotly debated but, even if they are regarded as merely minor adjustments, they nonetheless reflect a shift away from the initial presentation of Sulla according to his 5

Assmann and Assmann (1988); Assmann (1992) 50–6 (trans. 2011); cf. Erll and Nünning (2008).

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own view and that of his most dedicated followers.6 It is evident that Sulla’s dictatorship posed greater challenges of memorialisation in the decades following his dictatorship than his own self-presentation as the re-founder of the res publica would suggest.7 Thus, I suggest, the postSullan period can be understood as one in which the memory of Sulla underwent considerable reshaping by the elite in order to respond to critical pressure from within the Senate and from the Roman people as a whole. In order to demonstrate the worth of this approach to Sulla’s memory I shall consider three case studies which illustrate both the range of situations and means through which Sulla’s memory could be presented and challenged, and the kinds of adjustments that resulted. The first is Cicero’s defence of Sextus Roscius from Ameria from 80 BC; the second is a series of public meetings in the 60s BC at which tribunes of the people (plebs) articulated their rights through appeal to the pre-Sullan history of the office; and the third is the Sallustian recreation, in the 40s BC, of the political debates of the 70s B.C. These are three very different sets of evidence, but they all place debates current at the time of their writing into an historically informed context whose parameters are shaped by Sulla’s intervention in the public realm.

12.1

Defending Roscius

In 80 BC Cicero made his debut as an orator in the standing quaestiones by defending Sextus Roscius against a charge of having had his father murdered.8 The case is deeply peculiar, because the elder Roscius’ name had been included in Sulla’s proscription lists.9 Consequently, his death should not have attracted any legal penalty. Yet Cicero entirely fails to use that argument in defence of his client. The line of defence he does put forward is to suggest that his client is the victim of a complicated plot by some of his relatives to seize his father’s property and then eliminate him through judicial murder to ensure the security of their new possessions. The elder Roscius’ death is thus presented as one element in a complex sequence of events which played out during 81 BC. 6 7 8 9

Gruen (1974: 6–46) sets out the argument for continuity in its strongest form; see also Flower (2010). For Sulla’s dictatorship and the idea of rem publicam constituere in Roman cultural memory cf. Eckert in this volume. On the speech and its background, Stroh (1975): 55–79; Kinsey (1985); Riggsby (1999): 55–66; Dyck (2003); Dyck (2010); for the line of interpretation here followed, see also Steel (2017). Cic. Rosc. Am. 21.

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The reasons for Cicero’s choice of a high-risk strategy in place of one which would apparently be foolproof are unclear, though one possibility is that his client insisted on this line of argument in an attempt to reclaim his property; if he was acquitted through a defence which accepted the validity of his father’s proscription, that property was irrevocably forfeited.10 A side effect of this strategy was to avoid any direct engagement with the proscriptions themselves, since the elder Roscius’ death was not the result of the proscriptions, according to Cicero’s narrative, and his name was only inserted in the lists following his death.11 Cicero was able to offer some external support in the form of a decree of the decurions complaining of the inclusion of the elder Roscius’ name.12 Indeed, Cicero speaks of Sulla himself in highly honorific terms, while making one of Sulla’s freedmen, Chrysogonus, part of the plot against the younger Roscius.13 Chrysogonus nonetheless has acted without Sulla’s knowledge (imprudente L. Sulla).14 The events of Sulla’s dictatorship form an unavoidable backdrop to the speech, but Cicero is careful in how he deals with them. Later in the speech he engages directly with the prosecutor Erucius, whose prominence he ascribes to the high mortality rate due to the recent ‘battle of Cannae’ (pugna Cannensis) of advocates: this thinning out of practitioners has left Erucius as a ‘good enough’ prosecutor.15 Cicero develops the historical parallel with a clumsy topographical witticism: these men died not by Lake Trasimene but by Servilius’ lake, the lacus Seruilius being a location where the heads of the proscribed were displayed.16 He also develops his line of argument through imagery drawn from the Trojan war: he quotes a line from one of Ennius’ tragedies, ‘quis ibi non est uulneratus ferro Phrygio?’, and he concludes the list of names of the dead that he provides by likening the last, Antistius, to Priam.17 The result is a disquieting passage, in which the literary allusions and deflating parallels with the war against Hannibal contribute to an apparent trivialising of this recent civic violence.18 It can create the 10 12

13 15 17

18

Kinsey (1988). 11 Cic. Rosc. Am. 21. Cic. Rosc. Am. 24–25. The decree has dropped out of the text of the speech as it survives, but unless Cicero is positively misleading on the chronology their complaint must be about insertion of a name after the closing date rather than his name appearing within the timeframe but that inclusion being unjust. Cf. Buchheit (1975); Berry (2004) takes a different line. 14 Cic. Rosc. Am. 21. Cic. Rosc. Am. 89–90. 16 Dyck (2010) ad loc. The line of Ennius can be translated, ‘Who was not wounded there by Phrygian steel?’; it is evidently spoken by someone on the Greek side. A scholiast on this speech identifies the speaker as Ulysses (Schol. Gron. 311–12 St); see further Ramsey (2014). Lintott (2008) 427.

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impression that Cicero here is a highly partisan Sullan, for whom the deaths of Sulla’s opponents are of little concern. But that impression is arguably simplistic. The parallels with the Trojan war involve seeing the dead as both Greek – wounded by Trojan weapons – and Trojan, since one of the dead is a Priam. This confusion may simply show that the literary evocation of the Trojan war is to be understood only in the most general terms, and that its details do not bear close scrutiny. But such confusion also suggests that the specifics do not matter and perhaps even that they are inaccessible. That impression of a fuzziness around the precise circumstances of these deaths is confirmed by a closer inspection of the names of those who died. Cicero provides four: the first three – Curtios, Marios, denique Memmios – in the plural, the fourth being the specific Antistius. The possible or likely identifications of these prosecutors do not necessarily suggest that this is a list comprised solely of Sulla’s victims. In the second case the plural is probably generalising: the most likely identification for Marius is M. Marius Gratidianus, a prominent member of the dominant faction in Rome in the mid-80s who was killed after Sulla’s victory. Memmios is taken to refer to brothers Lucius and Gaius, who Cicero identifies as prosecutors (Brut. 136); nothing is known, however, of the circumstances of their deaths. No Curtius can be securely identified; and Antistius may be the Publius Antistius who was killed early in 82 on the order of the younger Marius because he was considered to be pro-Sullan.19 Cicero has perhaps here created a list which memorialises recent deaths in a variety of violent contexts, of which Sulla’s proscriptions are only one; if so, the result would be to overwrite a specific memory of the proscriptions with a less focused memory of recent violence which included but was not restricted to what occurred during Sulla’s dictatorship.20 Another strategy that Cicero employs to shape his presentation of the recent past is his use of euphemisms, as is apparent in the general appeals to the jury at the opening and close of the speech. At these points, he emphasises to his audience the importance of their task and the wider implications of the decision they are about to make. In the introduction, he observes that he is a suitable person to defend Roscius because he has not 19

20

Plut. Pomp. 10.3. Identification with this Antistius is supported by the fact that his death is attested at the right period, and he is identified as an orator in Brutus (182) though not specifically as a prosecutor. A possible alternative is the L. Antistius who is known to have prosecuted in the period prior to Sulla’s dictatorship (Cic. Balb. 48); although what little is known of the one attested occasion (he prosecuted an Italian who claimed to have been enfranchised by Marius) does not perhaps suggest a natural victim of the proscriptions, too little is known of the shifting political alignments of the 90s and 80s to put much weight on this. See Langland’s contribution to this volume for the ‘fuzziness’ of otherwise well preserved exempla.

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yet entered public life and is not high-born (nobilis).21 Hence, no-one will pay attention to what he says and if he does overstep the bounds of prudence his youth will ensure he is forgiven. Cicero then proceeds ‘although not only has the habit of forgiveness already been removed from our community but also the practice of trying cases’.22 This aside remains undeveloped at this point in the speech, but its suggestion that there are wider social problems which stand in the way of justice is one to which Cicero returns in his peroration.23 There, he warns the jurors against instigating a fresh and more cruel round of proscriptions, and suggests that they, as wise men who possess power and influence, have a particular duty to heal the res publica. He concludes by locating the danger of recent events not only in the horror of the deaths but in the loss of compassion through the community as a whole: ‘since when we are constantly seeing and hearing atrocities, even those of us who are very gentle by nature lose our common humanity in the press of horrors’.24 These sentiments must have resonated with his audience; but they leave the details unexplored. In the pro Roscio Amerino Cicero openly acknowledges the horrors of recent history. His approach, however, divorces them from identifiable people and puts the focus on activity in the future rather than the past. He suggests that responsibility for what has happened, if it can indeed be ascribed at all, is communal rather than individual. He is attempting to shape a memory which does not distinguish a distinctly Sullan phase of activity but instead shapes events into a ‘before’, which must be deplored, and a malleable present and future, capable of amelioration.25

12.2 Tribunician Theatre My second case study concerns a series of conflicts between tribunes in the years after the restoration of tribune rights, which took place between 75 and 70 BC. During the 60s BC, popularis or anti-senatorial tribunes turned to the pre-Sullan republic in order to apply the authority of history to their aim of showing that the popular will, rather than rules of procedure, was 21 22 23 24 25

On Cicero’s self-presentation, see particularly Dyck (2003): 243–6. Cic. Rosc. Am. 3: ‘tametsi non modo ignoscendi ratio uerum etiam cognoscendi consuetudo iam de ciuitate sublata est’. Cic. Rosc. Am. 153–4. Cic. Rosc. Am. 154: ‘nam cum omnibus horis aliquid atrociter fieri uidemus aut audimus, etiam qui natura mitissimi sumus assiduitate molestiarum sensum omnem humanitatis ex animis amittimus’. What remains unclear – but intriguing – is the extent to which Cicero generated this explanatory model on his own and how far it reflects advice, encouragement and even direction from more senior figures.

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the fundamental enabler of tribunician activity. In this case, however, the historical resonances are articulated not in texts but in the words and actions of tribunes played out in front of the people. During this decade a number of tribunes held office who pursued radical programmes of reform which provoked considerable opposition from at least some members of the Senate. These dissensions were publicly manifested in the course of the process of voting on legislation by clashes between tribunes, where one tribune attempted to veto the action of another. In 67 BC the tribune Cornelius attempted to pass legislation regulating the ways in which senators could be exempted from laws.26 In so doing he faced a veto from one of his tribunician colleagues, P. Servilius Globulus, at the voting assembly. When Globulus declared his veto, the herald who was reading out the legislation prior to the vote stopped reading, as was the normal response if a tribune imposed his veto. But Cornelius’ initial response was not to abandon the attempt to pass the legislation, but to take the text of the law and read it aloud himself. One of the consuls objected, violence erupted, and Cornelius dissolved the assembly. Subsequently he faced a prosecution for maiestas (treason).27 Also in 67 BC, the tribune Gabinius proposed a law creating an extraordinary command to fight the pirates – a measure which did not identify Pompeius by name but was clearly destined for him should it pass. It provoked vigorous opposition from the Senate, and also faced a tribunician veto from Trebellius. Gabinius adopted a different approach to neutralising Trebellius’ veto: he put Trebellius’ very status as a tribune to a vote by proposing the abrogation of his office, and when seventeen tribes had voted in support (an overall majority being secured with eighteen) Trebellius abandoned his veto. Both cases highlighted the same issue within the Roman constitutional framework: the absence of a mechanism for resolving disputes among the ten tribunes. The veto had the same final force when applied to another tribune as it did in other circumstances. Yet if the basis of the veto was the collective plebeian will, how could it legitimately be imposed on a measure which the people wanted? This was precisely the issue which Tiberius Gracchus had faced in 133 BC when his colleague Octavius attempted to veto his agrarian law. And Tiberius had also put his colleague’s status as tribune to a vote. In that case, the voting had proceeded to depose 26 27

Asc. 57C–59C; Dio 36.38.4–39.2; Griffin (1973). On maiestas Williamson (2016); on this trial see Jewell in this volume with further references.

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Octavius, and the fact of his being manhandled off the rostra by Tiberius’ attendants visibly demonstrated that he was not a tribune – because his body was evidently no longer sacrosanct.28 It seems extremely likely that Gabinius was conscious of this precedent when he started a vote on whether Trebellius was a tribune.29 If Sulla justified the restrictions he imposed on the tribunate by appealing to an original kernel of tribunician activity consisting of the protection of citizens, to which other functions, such as the ability to propose legislation and the application of the veto to others, were later accretions, it would not be surprising if historical arguments were used in the context of the discussions around the restoration of the tribunate in the 70s BC, as indeed Sallust’s recreation of Macer’s speech suggests was the case.30 In such discussions, the activities of Tiberius Gracchus were likely to have come into consideration. Gabinius himself may have drawn on his historical knowledge of Tiberius to identify a way of evading the veto when applied by another tribune at a legislative assembly where the legislation was likely to be approved. And some, at least, of his audience may have been conscious of and well-disposed towards the traditions of popularis tribunician activity to which Gabinius was aligning himself in his attempt to unseat Trebellius. The fact that Cornelius’ approach to Servilius’ veto was rather different means that an argument for his historical awareness is more speculative, but there are some suggestive indications. Although his actions involved physical contact, and indeed resulted in violence, they were inherently less confrontational than those of Gabinius – as Cicero argued in Cornelius’ defence.31 Cornelius did not challenge Servilius’ position as tribune; he merely sought to prevent the application of the veto in one particular case. We do not know what argument he gave to justify his attempt to foil a specific application of the tribunician veto, but the fragments of Cicero’s defence indicate that Cicero, at least, thought that one could be constructed by appeal to his audience’s historical understanding of the tribunate which seems to have emphasised the origins of the tribunate in the 28 29

30

For which see Steel (2010). Tiberius Gracchus is not among the exempla which Cicero uses among the surviving fragments of pro Cornelio, but that is perhaps not surprising; Cicero appears to have eschewed a specifically popularis history and justification for Cornelius, instead arguing that applying the veto to a fellow tribune was not in accordance with Roman tradition (76C–78C). But Asconius, in commenting on a passage in pro Cornelio in which Cicero compared Cornelius’ action with that of Gabinius, does note the parallel (72C). Sall. Hist. 3.15.2–3 and see further below pp. 213–214. 31 Asc. 72C.

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popular will.32 There is a reasonable case for thinking that both tribunes – who were also both connected to Pompeius – relied on a popularis history of the tribunate to demonstrate that there were circumstances in which the tribunician veto could be ignored. The encounters between Cornelius and Servilius and between Gabinius and Trebellius were reprised only a few years later in 62 BC, when the tribune Nepos faced a veto from his tribunician colleagues Cato and Minucius over his proposal that Pompeius be summoned back from the campaign against Mithridates. Not only was there a replay of the events of 67 BC, with a tribune vetoing at the point at which the contested legislation was being read out and the proposing tribune taking over from the herald; but the participants played out the internal logic of events even further. The legislation had actually to be read out; so the vetoing tribunes took the text of the law out of the hands of Nepos, and when Nepos – who perhaps had foreseen this eventuality – continued to speak because he had the text of the law by heart, they covered his mouth.33 The result in this case was the abrupt and unscheduled ending of the assembly as its supporters and opponents clashed violently. It did not, therefore, become an example itself of a particular understanding of the tribunate; if anything, it showed the vulnerability of the legislative process to violent interventions. But it seems very likely indeed that the antagonists in 62 BC were conscious of what had happened five years earlier as a powerful example of what could happen when tribunes were in opposition to one another. The individuals involved in 62 BC may well have been present at Cornelius’ assembly and, if not, will have been aware of its judicial aftermath; it is again plausible – though no more than speculation – that they analysed its tactics and outcome before an assembly on legislation whose contested nature would have been evident in advance. The fact that Nepos had memorised the legislation points in that direction. The result is a dynamic continuity in which the possibilities and boundaries on tribunician activity were explored and redefined.

32

33

Asc. 76–78C; note particularly the passage quoted in 76C, ‘Such was their courage that sixteen years after the expulsion of the kings they seceded because of the excessive mastery of the powerful and on their own account and for themselves restored the leges sacratae, created two tribunes, and dedicated as an everlasting monument the hill across the Anio (which today is called the Mons Sacer) where they had taken their position under arms’ (author’s own translation). Cass. Dio 37.43.1–43.2.

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12.3

Sallust’s Popular History

The speeches preserved from Sallust’s Histories are an important source for the shaping of the memorialisation of Sulla’s dictatorship.34 In these setpiece speeches Sallust sets out and explores a series of problems: the balance between senatorial and popular authority; the ongoing influence of and response to Sulla; and the nature of libertas (freedom). Their interpretation bristles with difficulty: in addition to the familiar problem of disentangling the orator from the historian, the absence of their narrative context creates the danger that Sallustian irony will go unobserved. Nonetheless, there are still some indications of the ways in which Sallust in the 40s BC deployed a double perspective on the history of the previous half-century, in which the attempts of politicians in the 70s BC to shape the collective memory of the Sullan period itself becomes an element in a developing crisis. This historical perspective on Sulla’s power is most evident in the two speeches in the quartet which offer a popular approach, those of Lepidus and Macer. Lepidus’ speech is placed in his consulship (78 BC); it is an address to the people which seeks their support for his challenge to the Sullan status quo.35 The speech openly engages with Sulla’s dictatorship, which it frames as a tyranny, marked both by cruelty and by the servitude of the Roman people.36 It is also unprecedented: Lepidus contrasts it with the more distant Roman past, in which heroic Roman leaders have protected the people’s freedom against foreign threats.37 The difference is all the more sharp because it is the descendants of these leaders who now assist Sulla: men ‘born to undermine what their ancestors acquired through courage’.38 Sulla’s soldiers, by contrast, did not intend to destroy these achievements from the past, but they have nonetheless done so in contributing to the overturning of the tribunate and the processes of law.39 Sulla himself, described as some Romulus (iste Romulus) (5), is said to regard this abandonment of past successes as itself a source of renown (gloria) (19): he will, it is implied, secure his place in Rome’s memory through his actions.

34

35 36 37 38 39

These speeches are by Lepidus from his consulship in 78 BC; by Philippus from 77 BC, which responds to the revolt of Lepidus, and is in some respects framed as a counter to his speech; an appeal by Cotta to the people as consul in 75 BC; and Macer’s speech as tribune in 73 BC. For the historical background, Santangelo (2014); Rosenblitt (2014). Cf. also Rosenblitt (2019). Tyranny: Sall. Hist. 1.55.1, 7, 22; on libertas in this speech, Arena (2012): 53. Sall. Hist. 1.55.4, ‘nam quid a Pyrrho, Hannibale Philippoque et Antiocho defensum est aliud quam libertas et suae quoique sedes, neu quoi nisi legibus pareremus?’ Sall. Hist. 1.55.3, ‘. . . geniti ad ea, quae maiores uirtute peperere, subuortanda’. Sall. Hist. 1.55.23.

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Moreover, he intends to hold on to his position (7–8), and his actions will continue to reverberate through the punishment of the children of those proscribed, an act without precedent not just at Rome but in all of human history.40 Lepidus thus offers an unambiguous assessment of Sulla’s dictatorship as a profound and dreadful deviation from Roman traditions and values. His solution is at first sight also clear: the Roman people must follow him to regain their freedom, as he demands in the final sentence of the speech.41 But on closer inspection that clarity seems elusive.42 Lepidus does not explain what he expects the Roman people actually to do once they have accepted the mission he places on them: the demand for armed rebellion remains implicit. He has no remedy for the pervasive fear which, he suggests, has hitherto prevented action against Sulla; indeed, this impression is enhanced further when he says that the alternatives available are either to remedy injustice or die courageously (15). Moreover, he is himself a compromised figure, who cannot deny that he possesses property acquired through the proscriptions (18); the fact that Sulla called him seditiosus might seem just to emphasise that he used to be among Sulla’s partisans.43 Such doubts about Lepidus’ vision and capacity are heightened by the perspective from the 40s BC. Not only was he wrong about Sulla, whose retirement from power (and its alleged folly) was to be contrasted with Caesar’s grip on his position (and Sulla’s death must have followed closely Lepidus’ speech in Sallust’s narrative), but he was also profoundly wrong about the Roman people and his own capacity to lead them. The deeply traditional remedy which Sallust has him propose – to follow and obey the consul – seems a peculiarly unsatisfactory and unreflective response to Sulla’s radical innovation. Macer’s speech has significant points of similarity with Lepidus’. Both are delivered to the Roman people, and both engage with popular liberty and the need to assert it in the face of powerful vested interests. The intertextual link is unmistakable from the closing words of each speech, with Lepidus’ ad recipiundam libertatem (to regain freedom) picked up by Macer’s quam uos repetiueritis libertatem (than you in reacquiring your 40 41 42 43

Sall. Hist. Lepidus 6, ‘quin solus omnium post memoriam humani [generis] supplicia in post futuros conposuit, quis prius iniuria quam uita certa esset . . .’; generis is Orelli’s addition. Sall. Hist. 1.55.27: ‘M. Aemilium consulem ducem et auctorem sequimini ad recipiundam libertatem.’ Cf. Rosenblitt (2013). The intensity of Lepidus’ adherence to Sulla is difficult to gauge, though he was involved in the fall of Norba (App B. Civ. 1.94)

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freedom),44 the repetition also underscores the difference in mood between the two speeches. Lepidus’ confidence contrasts with Macer’s sense of everpresent threat to popular liberty to counter which requires the constant vigilance of his listeners, as is highlighted in this final sentence: the people will remain in subjection as long as their urge towards freedom is less strong that the ruling elite’s desire for domination. Yet in many respects Macer’s world is more simple than Lepidus’. Where Lepidus spoke as consul and a former Sullan, combining attacks on his peers with an appeal to pity for ‘tortures of distinguished men’ (1.55.17), Macer presents a binary view of Rome, in which popular rights have been asserted through a series of struggles against the nobility, well known to his audience.45 This is the context in which current attempts to restore the full powers of the tribunate should be seen. To emphasise the threat Macer presents a brief history of the post-Sullan period, which traces the continuation of the Sullan regime through the actions of an identified series of magistrates since his retirement: Catulus, Curio, Lucullus, and now those who are attacking Macer have defeated the people’s misplaced hope that the death of Sulla would prove the end of suffering (finem mali).46 This memory of the recent past is what should fuel decisive action in the present. As in the case of Lepidus’ speech, interpretation is hampered by the absence of Sallust’s narrative context. Macer, himself a historian, was to die by suicide soon after his tribunate whilst facing prosecution; and tribunician rights were to be restored during the consulate of Pompeius and Crassus in 70 BC. Sallust permits Macer to forecast Pompeius’ role and to offer the hope that ‘Pompeius prefers to be the leading citizen with your support rather than a partner in their domination, and will be taking a leading part in supporting the tribunician power’.47 It is difficult not to see in that prediction an ironic look at the next two decades. In contrast with the speeches of Lepidus and Macer, that of Philippus, to the Senate in the early days of 77 BC in response to Lepidus’ uprising, offers a treatment of Rome’s present and recent past from which it would not be possible to discern that Rome had recently been under Sulla’s control. Neither Sulla nor his dictatorship are mentioned; key changes arising from that period – confiscation of property and citizenship and the limitations on the tribunate – are adduced only to underscore Lepidus’ own inconsistencies and poor judgement.48 The circumstances under 44 47 48

Sall. Hist. 3.15.34. 45 Sall. Hist. 3.15.1–3. 46 Sall. Hist. 3.15.9 Sall. Hist 3.15.24, ‘malle principem uolentibus uobis esse quam illis dominationis socium auctoremque in primis fore tribuniciae potestatis’. The translation is the author’s own. Sall. Hist. 1.67.14

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which they happened are omitted. The recent past that is openly acknowledged is anti-Sullan, with a list of those who ‘sow rebellion on rebellion, war on war’ and are the followers (satellites) of Saturninus, Sulpicius, Marius, Damasippus, and now Lepidus.49 In Philippus’ account of events, in which Lepidus is the one posing a threat to libertas, history is deceptive and an enabler of poor decisions: those who are failing to take decisive action against him use the ‘fine deeds of the Aemilian family’ to justify their decision.50 Perhaps that is why Philippus evokes the Ennian Fabius of the war against Hannibal only to reject his example: in this case, hesitation leaves the res publica unprotected.51 With Philippus’ speech, Sallust presents a very different memorialisation of Sulla’s dictatorship, in which the Sullan res publica is so normalised as not to require reference to Sulla, and those who oppose it do so from within an unbroken tradition that dates back to well before Sulla’s dictatorship. Thus despite their fundamental differences, both pro- and anti-senatorial positions in the 70s BC, according to Sallust, looked back to the pre-Sullan res publica to frame their arguments. From the conservative perspective, this manoeuvre enshrined the status quo; for their opponents, it allowed them to draw on the collective popular memory of popularis activity. In his record of oratory in the post-Sullan period, Sallust presents a world in which a key determinant for action is not only the memory you hold of Sulla but also your memory of what preceded him.52

12.4 Conclusions These case studies all involve attempts to use, or even to create, persuasive memories which will lead their audience to the desired argumentative outcome. Cicero wanted the jurors to acquit Sextus Roscius. The tribunes in the 60s BC, at least those proposing the contested legislation, arguably wanted to secure the support of their audience by appealing to a popularis history which placed the volition of the people at a particular moment ahead of the formal mechanism of the veto. And Sallust explores the ways in which the various speakers in his Histories wanted an audience of Roman 49 51

52

50 Sall. Hist. 1.67.7 Sall. Hist. 1.67.6, ‘gentis Aemiliae bene facta’. Sall. Hist. 1.67.17; this sentence also turns Cicero into a borrower from Philippus, placing the collocation quo usque + second person verb fourteen years before Cicero addressed it to Catilina and making him dependent on the opponent of his mentor Crassus. But see further Malcolm (1979). The fourth speech preserved from the Histories as a whole, that of Cotta to the Roman people during his consulship in 75 BC in response to popular unrest over the corn supply (Sall. Hist. 2.43), is concerned with the recent past only in terms of Cotta’s own career; its historical perspective is much more extensive, looking back to the practice of deuotio from the mid-Republic (2.43.10).

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citizens to follow their advice in legislative or other contexts, and showcases implications of their constructions of memory for subsequent events. What their uses of memory share, I suggest, is the appeal to a safe space which supports alternatives to Sullan history.53 It is in this space, which can also be seen as a space between different modes of memory, that these memories operate. Their particular approaches to recent history, with the exception of Philippus’ speech, were not yet codified as a formal and official account; according to Assmann’s definition they are not yet part of cultural memory. Indeed, the account of Sulla within the city of Rome was laudatory and lasting: the Senate continued to contain men he had directly appointed to it, the annual political cycle had been changed for good, and Sulla himself loomed over the political space with his gilded equestrian statue on the Capitol. Each of these cases reads as an attempt to identify and harness a communicative memory which differed, to a greater or lesser extent, from the official cultural memory of Sulla and which had the potential to modify the dominant Sullan narrative. For Cicero in 80 BC the recent past is an imprecisely defined period of suffering which the community as a whole could transcend. Sallust’s radicals, in contrast, suggest that a popularis history of Rome, asserting popular capacity against senatorial opposition, could offer a serious challenge, whether military or civil, to the Sullan res publica. A final question, then, is the extent to which the narratives these speakers offered made the transition from communicative to cultural memory and acquired a formal validity that shifted their use from contestation to exemplary affirmation. Cicero’s elevation of humanitas (humanity) does not seem to have had much traction within political discourse, though he returns to similar ideas in some of his later treatises. The possibility of a popularis history of Rome had a powerful advocate in Sallust, though it would greatly overstate the case to say that it became the dominant account of the history of the Republic. However, the unease that our case studies display in addressing Sulla’s legacy directly does seem to be widespread. Sulla used his position as dictator – and indeed, his activity as an autobiographer – to attempt to impose a memory of himself and his actions onto the fabric of Rome and onto its texts.54 This attempt to mould cultural memory, however, had only limited success. The communicative memory of his dictatorship among the Roman people, which recalled murder, exile, and expropriation, resisted. Unable to find a bridge between these two positions, alert communicators sought other routes, as did the political life 53

A similar elision covers the Social War.

54

See Smith (2009).

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of the Roman res publica. In the end, the cataclysms of the 40s and 30s BC derailed the process of Sulla’s memorialisation into entirely new areas, as it became part of a much bigger narrative about decline, transformation and restoration. By the early empire Sulla had become a much less nuanced exemplum of cruelty. In the intervening period, however, it reveals the complexity of memory formation in the late Republic.

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chapter 13

Remembering M. Brutus: From Mixed and Hostile Perspectives Kathryn Tempest

13.1 Historical Context On the Ides of March 44 BC, a momentous occasion took place in the history of Rome: Julius Caesar was assassinated in a crowded meeting of the senate.1 Almost immediately the scramble to define, legitimize, and record the act was set in motion. Marcus Junius Brutus, we are told, raised his dagger in the air and called on Cicero, presumably hoping he would be the ideal advocate for their deed; after all, Cicero had spoken out vigorously against tyranny in his published works, and this is the line they wanted to take now: that Caesar was a tyrant justly slain. For the same reason, the assassins took control over their image by rebranding themselves as ‘Liberators’ – that is, as the men who had freed Rome from Caesar’s rule. On the afternoon of the Ides, Brutus and Cassius attempted to address the people of Rome in a contio – a public meeting hastily convened in the forum. But there was little public support either then or in the meetings that followed. Within six months, the Liberators were forced to leave Italy; little more than a year later, Octavian and Antony had joined forces with Lepidus in the Second Triumvirate, and Brutus and Cassius were making their preparations for the war to come. Their efforts to raise men, money, and other resources in Lycia and on Rhodes were highly successful but, still, Philippi proved disastrous for Brutus and his troops. In two battles, three weeks apart in October 42 BC, the Liberators were defeated by the armies of the triumvirs in perhaps the largest civil combat Rome had ever seen. At its end, both Brutus and Cassius, together with an estimated 50,000 men, were dead.2 1

2

Fuller overviews can be found in Rice-Holmes (1928) 1–89; Syme (1939) 97–207; Frisch (1946); Rawson (1994) 468–90; Pelling (1996) 1–8; Gotter (1996) 21–41; Corrigan (2015) 93–202; for a timeline with sources, see Tempest (2017) 241–6. Brunt (1971) 487–9; on the scale of Philippi, see Plut. Brut. 38.5; App. B. Civ. 4.137–8; Cass. Dio 47.39.1–5.

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13.2 The Trauma of Philippi In the near-contemporary literature of Virgil, we see clear signs that the battle of Philippi marked a grim and irreversible milestone in Roman consciousness; one that theorists today might call a cultural trauma.3 Thus, in his first Georgic, Virgil recalls how twice Philippi saw Romans fighting Romans. As he imagines a farmer one day ploughing those fields and stumbling across the bones of the Republic’s heroes in the future, Virgil calls upon the gods not to prevent Octavian – ‘this young champion’ – from ‘rescuing a generation turned upside down’.4 Far from liberating Rome by killing a tyrant, the assassination of Caesar had thrown it into a series of bitter and bloody civil wars, which lasted almost fifteen years. By the time the Georgics were published, probably in 29 BC, men like Virgil, who had not experienced the battles first-hand, could admit their traumatic nature.5 There is a clear sense in these lines that Virgil’s generation seems to be adrift somehow, that a collective community has lost a secure sense of its own identity: a deep wound in the fabric of society in need of re-narration and repair. We could begin by mapping that process right back to the start, for the heated contiones that broadcast and debated the death of Caesar almost certainly had a significant impact on the formation of individual and group memories, as did the amnesty agreement reached in the Senate on 17 March, his funeral, shared as a collective, and the frenzied circulation of speeches and pamphlets that followed throughout 44 BC.6 Yet in all of this, I would attach particular significance to the process of cleansing and retribution initiated by Octavian, a year later, through the institutional arena of the courts. For the series of prosecutions and sentencing of all known assassins under the lex Pedia marked an important first stage in the production of a master narrative for this period;7 henceforth, the state 3 4 5 6

7

Alexander (2004); on its applicability to the politics of the Late Roman Republic, see Eckert (2014). The full text is at Verg. G. 1.489–501. A first stage in in the trauma process is ‘claim-making’ by an agent who acknowledges the event as a trauma; Alexander (2004) 11. On the contiones, see Pina Polo (1989) 308ff; on the increased speed of publications in this period, see Kelly (2008). The combination of speakers, messages, audiences, and situation accords with Alexander’s notion of ‘carrier groups’ who have ideal and material interests, as well as the projection of the trauma-claim onto the audience-public; see Alexander (2004) 11–12. On the lex Pedia, see Vell. Pat. 2.69.5; Plut. Brut. 27.4–5; Suet. Aug. 10.1; App. B. Civ. 4.27; Cass. Dio 46.48, 47.12.2; the suggestion here that the lex Pedia ‘marked an important first stage in the production of a master narrative for this period’ is based on the idea in cultural theory literature that a master narrative identifies and delineates (1) the injury, (2) the victim, (3) the impact on a wider audience, (4) the attribution of responsibility. From there, the trauma is played out in institutional areas, such as the law courts, and broadcast through mass media; see esp. Alexander (2004) 12–22.

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archives preserved an official record of the perpetrators and their roles in the conspiracy, which we already see appearing in the work of Nicolaus of Damascus. That script, however, was an evolving one, which grew from the assassination of Caesar to include the bloodshed and strife that followed in 43– 42 BC. What is more, competing narratives emerged as men fought to have their version of events heard both in the present and recorded for posterity. Thus, if the coins, letters and speeches that survive from this period enable us to recover something of the contemporary discourse, then the memoirs, biographies, and tales of the proscriptions that were circulating after the war shaped the cultural memory of Brutus through a process of active remembering.8 Some of these works were written by men who had fought on Brutus’ side, such as the historian Messalla (FrHist 61), who had served under both Brutus and Cassius; or Brutus’ stepson Bibulus (FrHist 49), who wrote up his personal reminiscences (ἀπομνημόνευμα) of his stepfather; as well as other eulogistic writers who praised Brutus and upon whom the biographer Plutarch later drew, namely, Volumnius (FrHist 47) and Empylus the rhetorician (FrHist A19). Told from this perspective, virtue and philosophy had joined forces with military strength to remove a tyrant. The assassination of Caesar coupled with the eventual death of Brutus at Philippi hence became part of a larger narrative which recorded Brutus’ self-sacrifice for the greater good – a motif familiar from legendary tales and the repertoire of Roman historical exempla. Others, such as Quintus Dellius (FrHist 53), wrote about his campaigns with Antony, while Gaius Asinius Pollio (FrHist 56) seems to have covered the period from 60 BC, perhaps going down to the battle of Philippi, in his own history of the civil wars. Octavian too attempted to shape the memory of these hideous years. Although we only have fragments and testimonia for Augustus’ writing (FrHist 60), his autobiography was likely hostile to Brutus and the conspirators. Later, in his Res Gestae, he simply described Philippi as the war in which he exacted vengeance upon those who killed his father.9 But still the language of retribution survives to remind us of the second historiographical tradition which presented the Liberators in far less glossy terms than the ones they used to portray their actions. In the eyes of their enemies, Brutus and Cassius were ‘cut-throats’, ‘murderers’, ‘the guilty ones’, and ‘man-slayers’ – all words which have worked their way 8 9

On autobiographies and memoirs for this period, see Geiger (2011); tales of the proscriptions are found in App. B. Civ 4.1–51 and Cass. Dio 47.1–17; cf. Osgood (2006) 64–81. Aug. Res. Gest. 2.

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into the surviving texts of the accounts of later writers such as Nicolaus, Appian, and Dio.10 Thus, we can gain fascinating glimpses into the memories and countermemories of individual groups from the narrativization of these events. And it is this very conflict in our sources that I wish to explore in this chapter. For the hostile tradition surrounding Brutus was not one that could easily be erased from history: how could a man famed for his virtus kill his friend and benefactor? Or, worse still, how could a man who belonged to the highest class of citizen engage in the lowest form of political behaviour? In her seminal article on Cassius and Brutus, Elizabeth Rawson acknowledges that there was indeed an anti-Liberator feeling in the later tradition surrounding them. General hostility attached itself first to the murder of Caesar, then to the renewal of the civil wars, as well as their conduct of that campaign in the Greek-East. However, because her focus is primarily directed towards the Greek writers, who were composing their works over a century and a half later, she does not see a source tradition personally unfavourable to Brutus. By this time, he had been remembered as another in a series of republican martyrs; all that was distressing about the assassination of Caesar was blamed instead upon Cassius.11 But can the same really be said of our contemporary or near contemporary sources, and especially those circulating in Latin in the first century after Philippi? I suggest not. And I propose to look instead at the struggle to control Brutus’ reputation which set in immediately after his death. An important starting point for the following analysis is Jan and Aleida Assmanns’ distinction between communicative and cultural memory, which is itself a refinement to Maurice Halbwachs’ pioneering theory of collective memory.12 Communicative memory designates lived, embodied memories, while cultural memory refers to institutionalized memories of events in the distant past. The former is made up of narratives about the life of the deceased, who was known to a group of people; the latter represents the culmination of a process of mediation through which the deceased has become objectified. Yet, in more recent years, scholars have largely stressed 10 11 12

As noted by Welch (2015). Thus Plut. Brut. 1.4; cf. Rawson (1986) and Flower (2006) 108–9. Halbwachs (1925); cf. Halbwachs (1950), translated and edited by Coser (1992). Although Halbwachs (1925) is often held up as a pioneering text, the origins for collective memory are somewhat more complex; see Olick, Vinitsky-Seroussi, and Levy (2011) 22–5. The bibliography on the concept of cultural memory is vast; some important contributions include: J. Assmann (2011) and A. Assmann (2011). On the distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory, see esp. Assmann and Assmann (1988).

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the need to explore different modes of remembering, as well as how, why, and what is remembered.13 A concept like ‘cultural’ memory runs the risk of being ‘reified’, they argue, while ‘collective’ memory has the potential to homogenize traditions that are often very diverse.14 It is only by looking at the process of remembering, then, as well as the medial processes through which memories come into the public arena, that we can begin to understand the dynamics of cultural memory.15 It is precisely this multidimensional aspect, inherent in the concept and practice of memory, that this chapter seeks to explore through a case study of Marcus Brutus. For, even though many of our contemporary accounts are either lost or fragmentary, still, I argue we can trace the formation of Brutus’ legend – that is his transition from communicative to cultural memory – in the literature and political practices of the Roman Republic. To this end, I shall first set the scene by examining Lucan’s portrait of Brutus at a critical moment in his reception history: that is, in the first half of the 60s AD, and less than a hundred years after his death. Then, looking back at the tradition Lucan inherited, I shall demonstrate that choice words and phrases in the Bellum ciuile betray mixed and hostile perspectives on Brutus, which enable us to tap into the conflicting verdicts surrounding the historical man. A central contention of this chapter is that the commemorative practices surrounding the death of Caesar influenced the possibilities for literary representations, and vice versa, specifically in the realm of exemplarity. This approach, especially when presented within a chronological structure, allows for description and analysis of how the memory of Brutus was actively contested in a struggle for ‘ownership’ over the cultural trauma that set in after the Ides of March and the subsequent battles at Philippi.

13.3

Memory of Brutus in the Early Empire

Writing his Bellum ciuile in the period of Nero, Lucan’s portrait of Brutus, though possibly incomplete, provides an interesting point of entry into the early empire’s formation of the cultural memory surrounding Caesar’s assassin. Brutus hardly plays a starring role. But in book 2 (Phars. 2.234ff), he does serve to elicit from Cato a justification for taking sides in the civil war between Pompey and Caesar. At the start of the passage in 13 14 15

On the importance of remembrance, see Erll (2008), esp. 4–7, and Schmidt (2009). See the collection of papers in Galinsky (2014a); see esp. Galinsky’s introduction (2014b) 7 for this summary of the problem. Erll and Rigney (2009a) 2.

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which he occurs, he is presented as a vir magnanimus (Phars. 2.234; cf. Sen. de benef. 2.20), one who is shaken by no fear, and whose speech reflects Stoic sentiments and imagery.16 Yet by the end of the passage, Cato has fuelled the younger man’s fighting spirit. And with the veneer of his philosophical idealism shattered, Brutus is spurred on by an excessive desire for civil war (Luc. Phars. 2.323–5). Not only has Brutus become the antithesis of the Stoic ideal;17 his characterization ominously foreshadows his zeal for bloodshed at Philippi. Other points of interest here are Brutus’ reverence for Cato, whom he appears first to imitate in his adoption of Stoic principles and then emulate in his decision to join the doomed republican cause – ideas that anticipate the portrait of Brutus in the fourth century work of the De viris illustribus, where he is described first and foremost as an imitator of his uncle Cato (vir. ill. 82.1); he only went to war and joined Pompey, the author tells us, because Cato summoned him to leave Cilicia (vir. ill. 82.5). Already, then, we are getting a hint that Brutus’ posthumous reputation was more complicated than it first appears; however, this impression is reinforced by Brutus’ only other major appearance in the text, in the seventh book of the Bellum ciuile. Here, Lucan describes a brief and imaginary scene, in which he depicts Brutus about to rush upon Caesar at Pharsalus with a view to killing him. But at this precise moment the poet interjects (Luc. Phars. 7. 588–96): Illic, plebeia contectus casside vultus, Ignotusque hosti, quod ferrum, Brute, tenebas! O decus imperii, spes o suprema senatus, Extremum tanti generis per saecula nomen. Ne rue per medios nimium temerarius hostes, Nec tibi fatales admoveris ante Philippos, Thessalia periture tua. Nil proficis istic Caesaris intentus iugulo: nondum attigit arcem Iuris, et, humanum culmen, quo cuncta premuntur, Egressus, meruit fatis tam nobile letum. Vivat, et, ut Bruti procumbat victima, regnet. There, covering your face with a plebeian helmet, unknown to the enemy, what a weapon, Brutus, you held! 16 17

Seo (2011) 201–4 and (2013) 69–72. One might object that Brutus was an Academic, not a Stoic; however, he was a follower of Antiochus of Ascalon, whom Cicero called ‘a perfectly genuine Stoic’ in all but a few areas of his philosophy (Cic. Acad. 2.132). The point does not, however, matter much as Brutus was equated with Stoicism from an early date; see Moles (1987) 64–5.

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O glory of Rome, last hope of the senate, final descendant of a family so famed throughout history, do not rush so recklessly into the enemy’s midst, nor bring on fatal Philippi ahead of time, you will perish in a Thessaly of your own. Nothing do you achieve here, intent on Caesar’s throat: not yet has he attained the citadel, or surpassed the peak of human law, controlling everything; he has not yet earned from destiny a death so noble. Let him live and let him rule, so that he may tumble, Brutus’ victim.

Although it appears Lucan perceived Caesar as a tyrant, and Brutus as a rightful defender of liberty,18 one who made an honourable sacrifice, still the message on the assassin’s posthumous reputation is mixed. There is a hint that Brutus is on his way towards earning a reputation as a political failure, hence he extinguishes rather than lives up to his family’s name. Worse still, there are signs of moral condemnation in Brutus’ potentially reckless behaviour: here he is characterized by temeritas – the very opposite of the virtus he purported to hold so dear in his life. In this scene, it is noticeable that Caesar, like Cato before him, will earn a death so noble (tam nobile letum),19 while Brutus is depicted as ‘intent on Caesar’s throat’ (Caesaris intentus iugulo). That is not to say that Lucan personally endorsed these ideas in his poem; rather, he seems to be responding to – perhaps even critiquing – an alternative tradition surrounding Caesar’s assassin. But what is important for the purposes of this chapter is that these critical receptions of Brutus were not isolated occurrences. In fact, as we shall see, Lucan’s choice of vocabulary in this passage is directly connected to the problem of Brutus’ exemplarity and the struggle to control how he was to be remembered.

13.4 Brutus: A Cut-Throat Assassin That the assassination of Caesar divided opinion is not, of course, a new observation: the point was made by Tacitus when he commented that ‘to some it seemed the worst of crimes, to others the most splendid’ (‘aliis pessimum aliis pulcherrimum facinus videretur’, Ann. 1.8.6). Cicero, of 18

19

For a similar expression, see Luc. Phars. 10.338–44, where the author interjects with the plea that Caesar must not fall foul of the plots of Pothinus, ‘lest Caesar’s head fall in Brutus’ absence’ (‘ut haec Bruto cervix absente secetur’). As Lucan goes on to elaborate, the example – that is the warning to all tyrants – would hence be lost (Exemplum . . . perit). Note that Horace uses the same phrase to describe the death of Cato the younger (Catonis nobile letum) at Carm. 1.12.35–6, if indeed the name is to be retained there; for alternative suggestions, see Heyworth 1984: 72; Harrison 2014: 80–1. A defence of the text can be found in Brown (1991).

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course, had championed the Ides of March loudly and it is to him that Tacitus owes the description of the deed as pulcherrimum.20 Yet the fact that Lucan calls Brutus’ imagined attack on Caesar at Pharsalus a rather reckless enterprise and describes his man as ‘intent on Caesar’s throat’ is not without significance in the debate over Brutus’ role in the assassination. For, the question of whether he had enacted an honourable tyrannicide or a ruthless murder can be traced back to Brutus’ own day; in a letter to Cassius, Cicero even describes Antony’s attempts to influence public opinion on the matter (Cic. Fam.12.3.1=SB 345): auget tuus amicus furorem in dies. primum in statua quam posuit in rostris inscripsit ‘PARENTI OPTIME MERITO,’ ut non modo sicarii sed iam etiam parricidae iudicemini. Your friend increases his madness by the day. To begin with, he has placed a statue and inscribed on its base: ‘TO AN EXCELLENT AND DESERVING PARENT’, so that now you will be remembered not only as cut-throats, but even as parricides.

The epitaph was a masterstroke on Antony’s part. Not only did it reflect badly on the men who had deprived their country of its parent (the parens patriae); it also evoked the well-known formula used by children to commemorate their pious gratitude on Roman funerary monuments. As recent events had already shown, monuments to Caesar had the power to provide what scholars in the wake of Pierre Nora call les lieux de mémoire: that is, sites or realms of memory that take on a special significance for a group’s remembrance.21 In this regard, the statue was but one example of the memorial mania that gripped Rome following the dictator’s death: others included games, spectacular honours, and the delivery and publication of speeches.22 Yet Antony had gone further still. The monument carried more than a memory of Caesar; the inscription that accompanied it sought to influence the memory of Caesar in the mind of the beholder and evoke an emotional response.23 From the moment of its erection, then, the statue of Caesar was part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to control how the dictator’s death should be received. 20 21 22 23

Cic. Fam. 12.3.1 (SB 345); cf. Ad. Brut. 1.17.1 (SB 25), Phil. 2.31. Nora (1984–92); I have retained the traditional translation of lieux as ‘sites’ or ‘realms’, but see Wood (1999) on the problems of translating this term into English. Sumi (2005) dedicates five chapters (Chapters 3–7) to the study of the public ceremonies and honours between Caesar’s assassination and the formation of the second triumvirate. Compare the observation of Wiseman (2014) 44–6 that statues and inscriptions worked together to function as carriers of memory; his point concerns honorary statues where ‘memory depended on the name inscribed’ (46).

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When Cicero commented that the Liberators would henceforth be labelled as ‘cut-throats’ and ‘parricides’, he thus saw an added danger in Antony’s political manoeuvring: Antony, he claimed, was attempting to redefine the terms by which the Liberators would be remembered. There was doubtless an immediate point behind Antony’s portrayal of his opponents: both the lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis and the lex Pompeia de parricidis carried heavy penalties under Roman law. Even though the Liberators were protected from prosecution under the terms of the amnesty agreed on 17 March 44 BC, still Antony was able to evoke the legal charges under which he deemed Brutus and Cassius guilty. Yet, as Kathryn Welch has pointed out, the Latin term sicarii was later recycled in the Greek narratives of Nicolaus, Appian, and Dio as sphageis. In other words, Antony’s rhetoric appears to have stuck and the version of history that remembered the Liberators as cut-throat assassins was not entirely erased.24 An early carrier of this idea is the poetry of Horace, who himself had fought on the side of Caesar’s assassins. Having joined Brutus as a young man, he had toured the Greek East, rising through the ranks to the position of military tribune, only to accept Octavian’s pardon after the republicans’ defeat at Philippi. As scholars have often noted, Horace rarely alludes to this phase of his life; even though Augustus appears to have nurtured an atmosphere of tolerance towards the assassins, still an ‘acquiescent silence’ was the better option.25 So when Horace does break his silence on his past record, the results are particularly interesting, not least because the message on Brutus is very often mixed. Thus, a hint of Brutus’ early reception can be traced in Horace Satire 1.7, where the poet describes a dispute (possibly fictitious) at Clazomenae at which Brutus was present in his capacity as proconsul of Asia Minor. The dramatic date is hence late 43/early 42 BC, some six years before the publication of the poem. Brutus occupies a silent role; he is there merely to preside over a legal case between a Greek businessman, Persius Hybrida, and a proscribed Italian man called Rupilius Rex. We are not told what the quarrel was about, and the brevity of Horace’s Satire has consequently made it subject to several interpretations.26 Yet, what is interesting for our purposes is that, at the 24 25 26

See also Welch (2015) 283. Citroni (2000) esp. 34; for Augustus’ tolerance towards the memory of the assassins, see Clarke (1981) 80. There is much more to be said about this satire and so I have restricted myself to the immediate point of throat-slitting here, which I do not believe has been made in this context before. For other readings of the poem and its meaning, all of which endorse a political reading in varying degrees, see Henderson (1994); Gowers (2002) 134–5.

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end of the satire, following a battle of wits between the two litigants, Persius shouts out (Hor. Sat. 1.7.32–4): . . . ‘per magnos, Brute, deos te oro, qui reges consueris tollere, cur non hunc Regem iugulas? operum hoc, mihi crede, tuorum est.’ ‘For god’s sake, Brutus, I beg you, you are used to finishing off kings; why don’t you cut this King’s throat? Believe me, this is a job for you.’

This exclamation represents the culmination in a series of remarks that portray Brutus as both a quasi-Eastern king, the ‘Sun of Asia’ (Sat. 1.7.23), and a praetor creaming the wealth of his province (Sat. 1.7.17–18).27 Indeed, later traditions appear to have hinted that Brutus became worse than the tyrant he had killed,28 just as Persius’ joke here implies that Brutus could kill at will. The term is not sicarius, but the idea of cutting by the throat is present in the use of the verb iugulo. And here the language is graphic; as Emily Gowers notes, ‘[it] makes this court case simultaneously a gladiatorial fight’.29 Far from being an honourable tyrant-slayer, Brutus is in the ‘business’ (operum hoc . . . tuorum est) of assassinating kings. Up until now a silent observer in the satire, Brutus is placed centre-stage in the dispute, suspended in a moment of time between the murder of Caesar and the final struggle at Philippi. As in Lucan’s description of Pharsalus, so here we find Brutus poised still, with the reader’s gaze directed at him, wondering what he will do next. Thus, Horace’s poem conjures up the same mental image and potential for violence as Lucan’s later description of Brutus as ‘intent on Caesar’s throat’ (‘Caesaris intentus iugulo’, Luc. Phars. 7.595). One might object that a gory focus on body parts is characteristic of Lucan’s epic technique;30 hence the attention to Caesar’s throat can be read as part and parcel of Lucan’s larger narrative style.31 Yet the detail in the poems of both Horace 27

28 29 30 31

The wealth (dis) of Asia is significant here because Brutus and Cassius had inflicted great financial penalties on the Lycians, Rhodians and others. Sources for Brutus’ subjugation of Lycia include Vell. Pat. 2.69.6; Plut. Brut. 30.4–31.7; App. B.Civ. 4.76.321–4.80.338; Cass. Dio 47.34.1–6; for the memory of Brutus and Cassius in the East, see Joseph. AJ 12.301–311 as well as the Greek letters of Brutus, edited by Torraco (1959), which pivot around the demands Brutus made of the communities in the Greek East. Further discussion in Rawson (1986) 107–9; Tempest (2017) 186–91. This idea may be detected in Plut. Brut. 45.6–9; for the idea that Brutus was becoming as bad as the tyrant he killed, see Moles (1979) ad loc. discussed by Tempest (2017) 205–6. Gowers (2002) 147; for the use of ‘iugulo’ in a gladiatorial context, cf. Sen. Ep. 7.5 ‘intermissum est spectaculum: interim iugulentur homines, ne nihil agatur’. Most (1992); Quint (1993) 140–7; Dinter (2012) esp. 9–49. Dinter (2012) 10 n. 5 notes 29 uses of iugulum alongside a plethora of body imagery in the extant text.

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and Lucan is gratuitous, almost forced; other ancient accounts recorded that Brutus had struck Caesar in the thigh, or perhaps the groin.32 The throat, on the other hand, was the target of the assassin.33 And, as we saw in Cicero’s letter, that the Liberators should be judged cut-throats was an idea already current in the contemporary fight for public and military support. So, what would Brutus do? Or rather, what would the reader have their Brutus do? Horace and Lucan leave such questions open to interpretation. But by using loaded vocabulary that recalls the negative case against Brutus, both writers invite deliberation; in other words, they re-open the debate over Brutus’ role in the assassination of Caesar and thus keep the memory of him alive.34 But there were additional, extratextual, sites of memory which evoked Brutus and called to mind his act of liberation throughout the periods of the late Republic and early Principate. His statues still stood, and portrait busts were housed in the atria of his descendants and admirers;35 more influential, still, were the coins bearing Brutus’ portrait, along with his take on the death of Caesar. As Cassius Dio commented on the famous Ides of March coin (RRC 508/3): ‘Brutus stamped upon the coins . . . a cap and two daggers, indicating by this and by the inscription that he and Cassius had liberated the fatherland.’36 Yet, as I have suggested elsewhere, the daggers were specifically pugio types and not the curved sicae associated with assassins; thus the imagery on Brutus’ coin appears to represent a counterstatement to the propaganda of his enemies.37 In the same vein, the bold legend (‘EID MAR’) may represent Brutus’ own efforts to champion the appellation ‘Ides of March’ over ‘Parricidium’.38 As in other coins minted throughout Brutus’ career, it emphasized his devotion to libertas, his ancestry, and the mos maiorum.39 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39

App. B. Civ. 2.117 (thigh) and Plut. Caes. 66 (groin), although Pelling (2011) ad loc. suggests that this version might be linked to the story of Caesar’s alleged paternity of Brutus. See Gowers (2002) 153. On the centrality of memory as a theme in, and for a reading of, Lucan’s Bellum ciuile see Thorne (2011). References to a statue of Brutus (in Mediolanum) can be found at Plut. Comp. Dion et Brut. 5 and Suet. Gram. et Rhet. 30.5; another was in Athens, see Raubitschek (1957, 1959). Portrait busts attested at Tac. Ann. 3.76; Plin. Ep. 1.17.3. Cass. Dio 47.25.3. On the symbolism of the pileus and the message of liberty, see e.g. Wallmann (1989) 37–38; Clark (2007) 149–53; Arena (2012) 32–4. Tempest (2017) 223–4; on the importance of looking at the daggers, see also Strauss (2015) 130–1, 221. Suetonius records that, shortly after Caesar’s death, it was decided the date should be called Parricidium and kept free of business (Suet. Iul. 88). Although this term is not recorded in any of the extant calendars from the Augustan period, Degrassi (1963) 424 suggests it may have appeared on the Fasti Maffeiani. Laignoux (2012); cf. Hollstein (1994) who focuses on the imagery of Apollo and Libertas.

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As the ‘medium that reached the widest audience on the most continuous basis’, Brutus thus knew how to utilize coinage to promote his public persona.40 And what helped in the creation and acceptance of his later legend was the fact that Brutus had recycled familiar motifs from Roman history in the construction of his own identity: even from an early stage in his career, he had advertised and attached his name to the exemplum of Lucius Junius Brutus. And in the century that followed his death, this was the version of history that his followers kept alive; for as long as Brutus was remembered as a man of conviction, he could be championed as a tyrannicide rather than an unscrupulous killer: ‘Our heroes’, Cicero had called them, using the Greek word which elevated Brutus and Cassius to a place in legend, our ‘tyrant-slayers’ and ‘liberators’ (tyrannoctoni and liberatores). ‘Forever will they be famous.’41 Cicero was keeping one eye on the present, but he had the other on the assassins’ posthumous reputations.

13.5

Debating Virtus: Brutus’ Nobility of Character

The positive tradition surrounding Brutus was hence not one which could easily be forgotten, and his memory was still ideologically charged in the early empire.42 For in his lifetime, Brutus had composed works ‘On Virtue’ (De Virtute), ‘On Proper Conduct’ (Peri Kathēkontos), and ‘On Endurance’ (De Patientia),43 all reinforcing his image as a man of moral fibre. Among his other literary works was a laudatio published after the death of his uncle Cato, as well as political pamphlets and speeches opposing tyranny, such as ‘On the Dictatorship of Pompey’ (De Dictatura Pompei), ‘For T. Annius Milo’ (Pro T. Annio Milone), and the speech he delivered on the Capitoline hill the day after Caesar’s assassination (Oratio Capitolina).44 The continued presence of material which championed Brutus’ memory perhaps goes some way towards explaining the atmosphere of suspicion surrounding Caesar’s assassin in the Tiberian age; memory of Brutus potentially wielded what Alain Gowing calls an 40 41 42 43

44

Ando (2000) 215. See e.g. heroes at 14.4.2 (SB 358); tyrannoctoni at Cic. Att. 14.15 (SB 369), 14.6.2 (SB 360); liberatores, ‘famous’ at Cic. Att. 14.12.2 (SB 366). On this point, see esp. MacMullen (1966) 1–45. References to De Virtute at Cic. Fin.1.3.8, Tusc. Disp. 5.1 and 30; Sen. Cons. Helv. 9.4. Peri Kathēkontos is mentioned by Charisius 83, Priscian, Inst. gramm. 6.7, Sen. Ep. 95.45. Three words of De Patientia (‘inridunt horum lacrimas’) are quoted by Diomedes, in Keil (1857–80), GL I, 383, 8. For the laudatio of Cato, see Cic. Att. 12.21.1 (SB 260); for fragments and testimonia of Brutus’ speeches and pamphlets, see Malcovati (1976), ORF4 158.

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‘intimidating power’, especially with regard to what it might ‘prompt people to do’.45 But what singled Brutus out as a particular problem among all of Caesar’s assassins was his nobility; for not even his greatest detractors could entirely deny his reputation for virtue. Velleius Paterculus provides a clear expression of the dilemma Brutus’ memory posed in his Historiae Romanae where Brutus receives mixed treatment. On his first mention, Brutus is numbered among the literary elite of his time (2.36.2); when he next appears, it is as a traitor to Caesar, his friend and benefactor (2.52.5, 56.3). At 2.69.6, Velleius admits Brutus had maintained a reputation for clementia (2.69.6),46 yet at 2.58.1–2 he is a felon who calls Caesar a tyrant purely to cloak his crime. Far from a liberator or a champion of the res publica, when Brutus is assigned to a political cause, he is classed as a ‘Pompeian’ – a clear echo of Antony’s own strategy to secure the support of fellow Caesarians at the outbreak of hostilities in 43 BC.47 But most telling of all is the epitaph for Brutus at the close of Velleius’ account of Philippi: ‘Brutus had maintained an unblemished character up to the day that swept away all his virtues with a single act of recklessness’ (‘incorrupto animo eius in diem, quae illi omnes virtutes unius temeritate facti abstulit’, Vell. Pat. 2.72.1). Here was a man, then, who had preached about and seemingly practised a life of virtue, yet he had committed what was, in the eyes of many, a hideous crime. To answer this conundrum, it was hence necessary to challenge the nature of that virtus; and, indeed, an attack on Brutus’ virtus might be detected in Velleius’ use of the word temeritas. For what was temeritas if not the opposite to virtus: ‘if rashness and ignorance are in all matters fraught with vice, the art which removes them is rightly called a virtue,’ wrote Cicero (‘Recte igitur, si omnibus in rebus temeritas ignoratioque vitiosa est, ars ea quae tollit haec virtus nominata est’, Cic. Fin. 3.72). In other words: recklessness could undo and was a blemish upon a man’s virtus. Brutus in the hands of Velleius has thus become a negative exemplum in a work which attaches premium importance to the virtutes of men;48 in this regard, Brutus is very different to his uncle, Cato, whom Velleius describes as ‘the man most akin to virtus’ (‘homo virtuti simillimus’, Vell. Pat. 2.35.2). 45 46 47 48

Gowing (2016) 58. On Brutus’ clementia, see Cic. Ad Brut. 2.5 5 (SB 5), 1.2a.2 (SB 6), 1.15.10 (SB 23); cf. Vell. Pat. 2.59.6; App. B.Civ. 3.79; cf. Dowling (2006) 34–7. On Antony’s ‘party’ rhetoric in 43 BC, see Welch (2012) 142–3. On the importance of virtutes within Velleius’ historiographical scheme, see Balmaceda (2017) 132–41.

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A similar attack against Brutus’ memory is contained in the work of Velleius’ contemporary, Valerius Maximus, who devotes only three anecdotes to Brutus throughout the nine books of his Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, none of them positive.49 A distinctive feature of Valerius’ work is that, whenever he mentions the assassination of Caesar, he frames it explicitly as a parricide, in a clear echo of Antony’s earlier rhetoric against Brutus and Cassius.50 Thus, he describes Brutus’ death as a worthy outcome for that crime (‘dignus . . . parricidio eventus’, Val. Max. 1.5.7); here, and elsewhere, he tells of the omens that prefigured the assassin’s downfall.51 But he also couples the accusation of parricide with the problem of Brutus’ virtus when he claims that, to do away with Caesar, Brutus first had to kill – ‘be the parricide of’ – his own virtues (‘M. Brutus, suarum prius uirtutum quam patriae parentis parricida’, Val. Max.6.4.5). ‘A single deed,’ he adds, ‘hurled them [sc. his virtues] into the abyss and drenched all memory of his name with inexpiable abhorrence’ (‘uno enim facto et illas in profundum praecipitauit et omnem nominis sui memoriam inexpiabili detestatione perfudit’, ibid.). The substance of the exemplum has little else to do with the assassination; rather, these lines form a prelude for Brutus’ words as he went into his last battle at Philippi: ‘Confidently I go into battle’, he said, ‘for today either all will be well or I shall not be caring’ (‘fidenter’ inquit ‘in aciem descendo: hodie enim aut recte erit aut nihil curabo’, ibid.). However, the context leaves little room for admiration of Brutus. For the point about murdering his own virtus is a paradox; in Stoic thought, true virtus was immune to physical assault of all types. The only way we can make sense of this sentence, then, is to accept the premise that the virtus of Brutus was not the real deal; it was just a fragile veneer. However, as we can see if we look back to the text of Lucan (quoted above, pp. 223–24), the challenges to Brutus’ virtus focused as much on his courage as his moral and political conduct: that is to say, on his virtus in the fuller sense of the concept.52 For, Brutus’ imagined intervention on the battlefield recalls similar episodes in the epic tradition generally, and Virgil 49

50 51

52

These occur at Val. Max. 1.4.7, 1.5.7 and 6.4.5; in all other mentions, Brutus is a peripheral figure; cf. Bloomer (1992) on Valerius’ ‘consistent technique of malediction’ against Brutus and the other assassins. See e.g., Val. Max. 1.5.7, 6.4.5 (of Brutus); 1.8.8, 3.1.3, 6.8.4 (of Cassius); on this point, cf. Bloomer (1992) 221–2. Here Valerius recalls Brutus’ impromptu recital of the dying Patroclus’ last words at Hom. Il. 16.849; cf. Val. Max. 1.4.7 (the omen of eagles). See Miller (2009) 26: ‘surviving accounts clearly reflect the winners’ historical perspective’. On the concept and meaning of virtus, see Omme (1946); Eisenhut (1973); Sarsila (2006); McDonnell (2006); Balmaceda (2017).

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specifically, in which the noble warrior rushes into the enemy’s midst. As Matthew Leigh has noted, on the one hand it was entirely appropriate for Brutus to be featured in this way, since there was an intense political pressure on the aristocratic general to show personal virtus in the line of fighting: that is, Brutus needed his moment of aristeia. Yet, on the other hand, Leigh observes a pointed sarcasm in Lucan’s use of the future participle periturus which here has the sense of ‘later to die’ or ‘destined to die’ at Philippi as opposed to ‘intending to die’, which is the meaning it would usually possess in such scenes.53 Other features in this passage confirm the impression that Brutus appears less than heroic. The opening couplet has him hiding in a plebeian helmet. But why has he hidden his face (contectus . . . vultus) rendering himself ‘unknown to the enemy’ (Ignotus hosti)? And if we punctuate these two lines with an exclamation mark, as many editors and translators have done, the tone suddenly seems ironic: what sort of weapon was he carrying? It is surely not one that will secure glory. On one reading of this passage, then, it is hard to see Brutus as a figure of heroism and loyalty; a man of virtus. Unlike the famous death awaiting Caesar (tam nobile letum), the reader is reminded of Brutus’ failure to die like the aristocrat he was.54 What is more, as in Velleius and Valerius before him, Lucan too seems to draw a link between Brutus’ potential to act recklessly (temerarius) and his ultimate downfall – his death in a Thessalian battle of his own (Thessalia periture tua).

13.6 Philippi and the Republican Ideal of Virtus Whether or not this was the image of Brutus Lucan intended to project is not at issue here; after all, it must be of some relevance that the authorial intervention prevents any such premature assassination of Caesar. Yet, what is important is that the poet’s choice of vocabulary appears to tap into the vibrant hostile tradition surrounding Caesar’s assassin. In other words, when it came to Lucan to write his epic, the material was already there. Questions over Brutus’ virtus and potential for recklessness thus segue neatly into Lucan’s warning not to ‘bring on fatal Philippi ahead of time’ (‘Nec tibi fatales admoveris ante Philippos’). For among the criticisms that were levelled against Brutus was the fact that he had led his men into a needless war – one that cut a broad swathe through the Roman 53 54

Leigh (1997) 108; on other scenes of this type, see Leigh (1993) 98–103. Thus Leigh (1997) 109. For a more positive reading of the passage, see Fratantuono (2012) 273 but he, too, admits that there is some ambiguity, especially concerning lines 593–5 (Caesar’s nobile letum and the recklessness of Brutus).

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aristocratic elite.55 And this response, too, can be traced back to the recollections of his contemporaries. Take the first three stanzas of Horace’s famous Philippi ode, for example (Hor. Carm. 2.7.1–12): O saepe mecum tempus in ultimum deducte Bruto militiae duce, quis te redonavit Quiritem dis patriis Italoque caelo, Pompei, meorum prime sodalium, cum quo morantem saepe diem mero fregi, coronatus nitentis malobathro Syrio capillos? Tecum Philippos et celerem fugam sensi relicta non bene parmula, cum fracta virtus et minaces turpe solum tetigere mento; O Pompeius, often led, with me, to the edge of doom, when Brutus was head of our army, who has made you a Roman again and restored you to the Gods of the country and the Italian sky. Pompeius, first of my friends, with whom I so often broke into the lagging day with neat wine, head garlanded and hair sleek with Syrian malobathrum? With you I experienced Philippi and the swift flight my little shield indecorously left behind, when virtue was snapped, and menacing men shamefully bit the dust.

The Ode begins by welcoming the return home of an unknown Pompeius, a former republican comrade in arms. But the emphasis on a past temporal crisis in the first line (tempus in ultimum) is explicitly linked to Brutus’ leadership of his men in the second (Bruto militiae duce). Not once but often (saepe) Brutus led his men into extreme peril. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that later ancient sources routinely painted Brutus as an incompetent general: he had urged on the catastrophic decision to fight the first battle of Philippi; his discipline of the troops on the day was poor; his decision to fight the second battle of Philippi had been equally shortsighted. Cassius was the better commander in war, Velleius tells us, and Brutus the better man: ‘in the one there was more vigour; in the other, more virtus’ (‘in altero maior vis, in altero virtus’, Vell. Pat.2.72.2).56 55 56

See e.g. Vell. Pat. 2.71.2. Brutus’ responsibility for the first battle (Plut. Brut. 39.8); poor discipline (Plut. Brut. 41.4; App. B. Civ. 4.110); decision to fight the second battle (Plut. Brut. 56.2; App. B. Civ. 4.124). Comparisons between Brutus and Cassius at: Vell. Pat. 2.71.1–2; App. B.Civ. 4.123. See Moles (1987) 60–1.

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Scholars who read this Ode as critical in tone hence emphasize Horace’s assaults on Brutus’ inadequacy as a man and as a general: his virtus was not what it claimed to be.57 At least, that is how the ancient scholiast Porphyrio interpreted the point of the phrase ‘fracta virtus’ in the third stanza, suggesting that its relevance rested on the fact that ‘Brutus and Cassius publicly prided themselves above all on their virtue’ (quia virtute se Cassius et Brutus praecipue iactabant, Porph. ad loc.), yet that ideal was a brittle one – their virtus was shattered in the wake of their inevitable defeat. Instead, later sources presented the republicans in general – and Brutus in particular – as arrogant and menacing men, who were eventually forced to submit to the triumvirs.58 Even Brutus, upon his death, was reported to have denounced his reputation for virtus: ‘O wretched Virtue, you were but a word! And yet I practised you as a deed’ were Brutus’ final words, according to the version found in Cassius Dio (47.49.2).59 Yet a closer look at the rest of the poem suggests that this is not the line Horace was endorsing; nor does he appear to be delivering a personal attack on Brutus’ memory. For, another way of reading this Ode is to focus on how Horace is gently nudging Pompeius into the admission that they were all wrong to share and follow Brutus’ cause; that is, the poem acts as a political apology and as a call to forget the past.60 Thus, we can note how Horace tempers the reproach of Philippi by including himself and Pompeius in its remit (Tecum Philippos . . . sensi). They were young men who frequently indulged in the excesses of youth: the wine, garlands, and exotic oils of the second stanza. As is appropriate in this context, Horace’s own experience of leaving the army is described using a literary motif: the throwing away of one’s shield in battle (relicta non bene parmula).61 But, he also suggests some reasons: he was no real soldier to begin with (hence the use of the diminutive form parmula to accentuate his ‘little’ shield); he also saw that virtus had been snapped. In so doing, however, Horace makes it clear that it was not just the virtus of Brutus which was lost; rather, he turns 57

58

59

60 61

Cf. Nisbet and Hubbard (1978) ad loc. ‘[Horace] is clearly alluding to Brutus’ unbending Stoicism’; the argument that Horace is overtly critical of Brutus in this poem is taken up and expanded in Moles (1987). On Brutus’ arrogance, see Sen. Suas. 6.14.4 where he is singled out as an exemplum of vice (for his superbia); on the arrogant and menacing attitude of the republicans generally, see App. B.Civ. 2.125; on their submission, see ibid. 2.135. On this passage as representative of the hostile accounts of Brutus’ death (versus the positive tradition represented at Plut. Brut. 52.5, where he celebrates the reputation for virtue he is leaving behind), see Tempest (2017) 208–10. For other attempts to blend the lines between the positive and negative readings, see Citroni (2000) and Osgood (2006) 101–3. Smith (2015); cf. Harrison (2017) ad loc. ‘a symbolic and ironic presentation of weakness and defeat’.

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the defeat into a communal loss. Many lost their lives and many surrendered: ‘menacing men shamefully bit the dust’.62 In the end, the Republican ideal of virtus was simply not worth fighting for anymore. As Carlos Noreña has explained in a study of imperial ideals, for centuries the Roman aristocracy had perpetuated its standing based partly on its exclusionary ideology.63 According to the old concept of virtus, rank, status, achievements, and virtue were all represented as something that could be inherited and passed down through the generations. Virtus was hence an individual virtue, one which bestowed glory on the man who attained it. In his lifetime, Brutus had indeed engaged in something like this concept of virtus when he celebrated and advertised his ancestry; his virtus had also caused him to emulate his ancestors by plotting to kill Caesar and then to fight for liberty under the banner of republicanism. But in the last generation of the Roman Republic, the competition for personal supremacy had brought men into civil conflicts of unprecedented scale: ‘to the edge of doom’, ‘to crunch point’, ‘tempus in ultimum’ as Horace put it in the opening lines of his Ode. Conversely, under Augustus, the aspect of virtus celebrated most was the ethical concept that looked to the protection of Rome’s citizens.64 In January 27 BC, four years before the Odes were published, the senate and people of Rome had honoured Augustus with the golden shield on which virtus was inscribed along with clementia, pietas, and iustitia. While Augustus is not explicitly referenced in this poem, he is doubtless the unnamed saviour of line 3: ‘quis te redonavit Quiritem . . . ?’65 Whereas Brutus had only led his men into extreme peril, Augustus had restored Pompeius to Rome; a detail which forces the reader to ponder whose military legacy, whose virtus, was the greater: the man who imperilled or the man who saved Rome’s citizens.

13.7

Brutus Remembered

Later writers give us further clues as to how Brutus was remembered in the early empire, in an age before Plutarch had reworked the material for his biography. Tacitus tells us that portrait busts of the conspirators were not 62

63 64 65

The precise meaning of this phrase is unclear but it could be taken as referring either to the deaths of the Republicans who fell in battle (akin to the Homeric motif of warriors ‘biting the dust’), or to the surrender (proskynesis) of those who admitted the victors as their superiors; it could be that Horace has elements of both meanings in mind. Noreña (2011) 78–9. The transformation of the concept is more complex than this summary suggests, see esp. McDonnell (2006) 385ff, but this is one of the main ways in which virtus changed in its usage. pace West (1998) 50–1.

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included in the funeral procession of Junia (widow of Cassius and Brutus’ half-sister) when she died in 22 AD, out of regard for the emperor Tiberius.66 Just three years later, Cremutius Cordus was put on trial for inciting people to civil war by praising the Liberators.67 Under Nero, admiration of Caesar’s assassins was more sinisterly interpreted as a cry of protest against the imperial system,68 while in the Octavia attributed to Seneca, Nero is made to ponder the value of clementia before dismissing it with the obvious historical exemplum: Brutus had slaughtered the leader who saved him, he objects, before adding that ‘Caesar fell afoul of a sinful civilian crime’ ([Sen.] Oct. 498–502). Of equal, if not more importance, in the shaping of the next generation’s memory were rhetorical exercises in which students debated propositions such as ‘should Marcus Brutus have accepted the gift of his life from the divine Caesar’ or ‘what reasoning did Brutus employ in killing Caesar?69 Thus, his legacy lived on to be evoked in dramatic performances and other recitals: just the mention of the fate of Brutus and Cassius was allegedly enough to make Otho shake when he heard their names at a banquet (Suet. Oth. 10). While these references are themselves embedded in various literary forms, still they nod to a broader tradition of disseminating knowledge and debating the reputation of Brutus in other media, including orally, which we then see reflected in the literature of the age. As other studies have shown, the poetry of Horace generally represents a quasi-amnesia and suppression of Philippi, while the works of Virgil a few years later engage his audience in the painful act of remembering and, from there, towards a restoration of the city of Rome.70 In the Tiberian age, when ‘inquiry into the past thrived’, to cite Alain Gowing,71 Velleius’ history goes in search of new exempla of relevance for his new society; but, whereas Velleius explores these paradigms through a process of ‘renarrativization’, Valerius records select anecdotes from the past of moments he thought ought to be recorded (Val. Max. 4.1.12). In these works, Brutus primarily

66 67 68

69 70 71

Tac. Ann. 3.76. Tac. Ann. 4.34–35; cf. Moles (1998); Gowing (2005) 26–7; Sailor (2008) 250–313; Wisse (2013b). A prime example is that of Thrasea Paetus, whose accusers described him as an emulator of the Bruti (aemulus Brutorum, Tac. Ann. 16.22). Thrasea’s son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, was also exiled for sympathizing with Caesar’s enemies; see Tac. Ann. 16.28, Hist. 4.8; on his downfall, see Cass. Dio 65.12.2–3 and Suet. Vesp. 15. A paraphrase of Sen. Ben. 20.1–2; on Seneca’s treatment of Brutus, see Lentano (2009). On Horace, see: Citroni (2000); Gowers (2002); on memory in Virgil’s Eclogues, see Meban (2009); on the Aeneid, see Seider (2013). Gowing (2005) 34.

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survives as a reminder of what went wrong; he becomes a negative exemplum in a bygone age. For his part, as we have seen, Lucan both inherited and contributed to the memory of Caesar’s assassin in his Bellum ciuile. There Brutus appears to have lost the mantle of republicanism he donned in life, and is treated solely in terms of tyrannicide; he is a liberator of the regna of others, and not a restorer of senatorial authority.72 As for his exemplary virtus, in Lucan’s hands, Brutus is explicitly made to deny his own claim to that quality when he declares that Cato is its only guardian in the present age (Luc. Phars. 2.243). Yet when Cato inspires men to follow him with virtus in Book 9, it is noticeable that he leads them down a ‘path from which there is no return’ (Luc. Phars. 10.407–8). Thus, while the elder Brutus applauds the future awaiting his progeny (Luc. Phars. 6.791–2), the prospect of a second Brutus – a younger Brutus to free Rome from tyranny once again – is a thought to which the Delphic Oracle cannot give expression (Luc. Phars. 5.206–8). Such an assembly of ideas takes us back into the realm of cultural memory studies, and more specifically into the field of exemplarity, where recent scholarship has emphasized the evolutionary nature of exempla through various processes of remediation.73 Rather than a linear development, Rebecca Langlands has noted how Roman exempla are part of ‘a cultural practice that mobilises the idea of “tradition” and shared cultural memory, yet is also constantly changing and adapting and allowing for new interpretations’.74 By its very nature, then, a ‘site of exemplarity’ – a coin termed by Langlands to distinguish between the content (here Brutus) and literary form of the exemplum – contains ‘some kind of inherent conflict and inconsistency’.75 In this connection, collective forgetting and rupture can be as important as collective remembering; in the case of Brutus, different aspects of his memory site appear to have been emphasized or glossed over at different moments in his reception history. Thus, the later cultural memory of Brutus was not a static but a dynamic, selective, and creative process; indeed, few historical figures have left behind such a conflicting legacy. In conclusion, this chapter has aimed to introduce some material that adds to our appreciation of the dynamics of remembering through a case 72

73 74

See e.g. Luc. B.C. 5.206–8. As Seneca had already pointed out, Brutus was foolish to think libertas was still possible; in Lucan, Cato is made to say that ‘Freedom’ is just a name, and an ‘insubstantial shadow’ at that (tuum/ Nomen, Libertas, et inanem prosequar umbram, Luc. B.C. 303–4). See now Langlands (2018), esp. ch. 9 on the dynamics of Roman exempla. Langlands (2018) 204. 75 Langlands (2018) 175.

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study of one of the most enigmatic figures of Roman history. For, the ambiguity inherent in the exemplum of Brutus can be traced back to its origins in the communicative memories of his peers and other survivors of the civil war, and then developed through a process which itself admits of variability: cultural trauma and the cycles of generational memory. That is to say: we witness a case of memory in the making and even a level of premeditation in the way Brutus was remembered. The years between 44 and 31 BC were thus critical for the later cultural memory surrounding Brutus.76 For, in the struggle to claim ownership over the trauma that set in after the death of Caesar and Philippi, literature, alongside media such as coins, inscriptions and oral performances, proved an influential means of transmitting particular and powerful group memories. This approach not only highlights the participatory demands of remembering; it also reminds us to view our primary sources ‘in action’ at a transitional moment between Republic and Empire, and from communicative into cultural memory. At one end of that process, I have argued that Lucan received his portrait of Brutus as part of the emerging cultural memory of his day; his Bellum ciuile hence provides a certain lens through which to look back on Roman communicative memory, as opposing carrier groups designated Brutus either a virtuous tyrannicide, a cut-throat killer and parricide, or a flawed man who led Rome into a bloody civil war. At the other end, I have sought to explain how communicative memory itself helped shape and inspire the cultural memory of Brutus by preserving narratives and counter-narratives for later generations to (re) interpret. Through these sources we not only get a fascinating glimpse into the vocabulary and ideas current in the thinking about Brutus after the assassination of Caesar and his own death at Philippi; we see how the variety of responses he inspired in those who knew him were precisely the qualities that gave rise to the adaptation and appropriation of his memory in the centuries that followed. 76

As Osgood (2006) has effectively shown, these years were wildly unpredictable and attitudes as to how events would unfold were themselves in a state of flux.

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chapter 14

The Making of an Exemplum: Cato’s Road to Uticensis in Roman Cultural Memory Mark Thorne

14.1

Cato and Cultural Memory

This is a tale of two Catos, the real-life man and the legend. The difference can be helpfully illuminated through two stories. Our first opens on 5 December 63 BC in Rome at the Temple of Concord where an important meeting of the Senate has been debating the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators.1 Should they face exile or death? Decimus Junius Silanus, the consul-elect for the following year, proposes execution and many others in the Senate agree. But Gaius Julius Caesar, the praetor-elect and new pontifex maximus, steps forth and makes a stirring speech against the death penalty, arguing instead for exile. The Senate is momentarily persuaded, but then something remarkable happens: Marcus Porcius Cato, only thirty-two years old and the tribune-elect, stands up and delivers a passionate, uncompromising speech against Caesar’s motion, articulating the need for decisive action to deter future treason. His speech sways his fellow senators back to a vote for execution of the conspirators. Everyone present takes note, for a new senatorial star is on the rise. Our second story takes place about twenty years later, and yet surprisingly we find ourselves at the very same moment: 5 December 63 BC in the 1

See Ramsey (2007a) 189–217 for background. Van der Blom (2016) 316 provides a full list of the extant ancient sources; these of course are themselves literary mediations of the actual event, but they do preserve at least the outline of what transpired that December day in 63 BCE. The only surviving near-contemporary treatments are those of Cicero (Sest. 61 and Att. 12.21.1 = SB 260), who wrote from eyewitness experience (and also chronicled the day’s events in his no longer extant treatise on his consulship), and also of Sallust Cat. 52–3, who entered public life in the mid-50s BCE and surely heard first-hand testimony as well as read accounts by Cicero and others by the time he composed in the late 40s BCE. It is essential not to overlook the undoubted influence of the episode’s portrayal in Cicero’s Cato and Caesar’s Anticato, both non-extant, upon Sallust’s own monograph, which was written but a few years later after the deaths of both Cato and Caesar (and likely Cicero too). The other chief sources are Vell. Pat. 2.35.3–4; Plut. Cat. Min. 23.1–5, Caes. 8.1–2, Cic. 21.4; Suet. Jul. 14; App. B. Civ. 2.6; and Dio 37.36.2–3; Livy’s lost treatment (in Book 102) was certainly influential. All these, however, were admittedly composed by later generations and thus are best approached as both products and further agents of Roman cultural memory on the topic.

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Temple of Concord, where an important meeting of the Senate is debating the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators. Again Caesar speaks in favour of exile, and again Cato successfully urges the necessity of execution for the sake of the Republic. The crucial difference is that this second scene is not the actual event but a literary reconstruction by the Roman author Sallust several years after Cato’s death, remediated in textual form as a key scene in his Bellum Catilinae (52–53). Most likely composed during 43 or 42 BC, the work recalls with around two decades of hindsight the momentous year of Cicero’s famous consulship, and the events and people described are the combined products of both Sallust’s own personal memory and Rome’s evolving cultural memory that emerged from years of civil war and the fall of the Republic.2 This tale, which takes us from the Cato who is alive and well in 63 BC to the famously dead but remembered ‘Cato of Utica’ who resisted Caesar, died for the Republic, and became a famous exemplum virtutis, reveals the forces of cultural memory at work.3 Such a memorial transformation during those two decades was neither accidental nor foreordained but instead required a conscious choice to commemorate.4 While historical scholarship has done a good job of establishing the trajectory of Cato’s life and several studies have illuminated the posthumous growth of the ‘Cato legend’ in surviving texts,5 a fuller understanding of this transformation requires an investigation into the larger memory frameworks in Roman culture that helped pave Cato’s passage into becoming not only an 2

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Ramsey (2007a) 6 provides a concise summary of the issues, settling on 42 BC as a likely date; the past tense fuere viri duo, M. Cato et C. Caesar at Sall. Bel. Cat. 53.6 indicates at the least that both men were dead at the time of composition. Cato’s geographical agnomen ‘Uticensis’ is first attested in Pliny the Elder (HN 7.113 and 29.96) and echoed by Cassius Dio (43.13.4); on the possible evolution of the term ‘Uticensis’ see Pasco-Pranger (2012) 28–31. It may thus be imperial in date, but I think it likely that some version of it began to circulate by the Augustan period, if not already in the last days of the Republic in the wake of Cicero’s Cato and Caesar’s Anticato. Since there were two famous Catos with exactly the same name, there was an obvious need to find ways to distinguish them, and a reference to Utica (site of both his death and his tomb) was an obvious option. Valerius Maximus, for example, announces that for Cato, Utica monumentum est (3.2.14), and it is highly unlikely that Valerius was the first to invent this focus on Utica in the exemplary tradition. Commemoration in these terms requires a conscious act to privilege something from the past as significant for the present (thus entailing the forgetting of other things which feel less significant). Cf. Saito (2010) 629–34; Galinsky (2014b) 3 (with references); and the essays in Boyer and Wertsch (2009) on the sociological and neurological dimensions of memory’s constructive nature and its role in identity formation. Fehrle (1983) provides the best historiographical overview and remains invaluable. On historical issues, see e.g. Taylor (1949) 162–82; Dragstedt (1969); Berthold (1971); Fantham (2003); Marin (2005) 93–151; Van der Blom (2012) and (2016) 204–47. On the development of the Cato legend in contemporary and later authors, see Afzelius (1941); Hemmen (1954); Pecchiura (1965); Goar (1983); Marin (2005) 1–92; Gäth (2011).

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exemplary figure but one who was particularly useful for Romans to remember in the years after his suicide. This chapter represents an initial attempt at such an investigation. In approaching Cato’s memorialization at the end of Late Republic, it is essential to keep in mind two key factors. The first is that all such acts of memory are performative and selective, ‘created in and for the present, with all that this implies’.6 The second factor is that his commemoration emerged from the interaction of individual memories, cultural frameworks, and encoded media.7 One hermeneutic framework within cultural memory studies that can shed useful light here is the theoretical approach of kulturelles Gedächtnis developed by Jan and Aleida Assmann.8 A central issue this approach examines is the problem of long-term memory survival: the preservation of knowledge of the past beyond the scope of ‘communicative memory’ (a few generations or roughly 80–100 years) requires their encoding into longer-lasting mediations (e.g. rituals, memorial statues, common texts, calendar observances) that together constitute a group’s ‘cultural memory’.9 One limitation of this approach, however, is that their work primarily focuses on the gap between the two,10 leaving the role of still-living memory on the early formation of ‘cultural memory’ comparatively overlooked. Cato’s entry into Roman cultural memory, however, clearly involved the interaction of both processes working together. The significance of this overlap is acknowledged by Astrid Erll who offers a corrective in viewing ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory (as the Assmanns define these terms) not as a simple dichotomy but rather as two mental frames for thinking about the past, for ‘in a given historical context, the same event can become simultaneously an object of the Cultural Memory and of the communicative memory’.11 She goes on to locate the real distinction not in terms of chronological distance but as a mode of how a community conceives of an event at any given moment as ‘near horizon’ (communicative memory) or ‘distant horizon’ (cultural memory). The former frames the past in a more personal way, whereas the latter frames the past event more as a shared part of foundational history for a group’s identity.12 6 7 8

9 11 12

Langlands (2018) 187. Here I follow the tripartite model of cultural memory proposed by Erll and Young (2011) 102–4. Cf. Assmann (1995); also Assmann (2008) and (2010). Helpful overviews of cultural memory studies generally can be found in Erll and Young (2011) esp. 27–37 on kulturelles Gedächtnis; Bommas (2011b); Olick, Vinitsky-Seroussi, and Levy (2011); Rigney (2016); and Galinsky (2016b). Assmann (2008) 111. 10 Assmann (1995) 126–9; Assmann (2008) 112–13, 117–18. Erll and Young (2011) 31. Erll and Young (2011) 32; examples cited include the French Revolution and the Holocaust as examples of events that almost immediately entered the status of monumentalized events that were

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With regard to Cato, his contemporaries carried inside them their own personal memories gained from direct interaction or stories heard from others, and some of these people then fashioned mediations of Cato’s life and (selected) deeds in the form of artfully arranged stories, rhetorical set pieces, and written texts. These various mediations of Cato, which followed available cultural models and spoke to their own present concerns, in turn shaped the personal ‘communicative’ memory of others, and thus the cycle repeated as personal memories and depersonalized media continued to influence each other. Among the cultural media available to Romans in the late Republic, of foremost importance were exempla, stories of memorable characters and their actions that could become positive or negative ‘templates of behavior used by the Romans to embody particular characteristics with an ethically normative force’.13 In the light of all this, the following pages attempt to move closer to answering several key questions regarding Cato’s early commemoration at the end of the Republic. Which events from his life emerged as his ‘islands of memory’, that is, those privileged events which came to be considered by others most important for the purposes of later recall?14 In what ways did the Romans’ love for exempla shape the contours of Cato’s memory, both while alive and after his death? Which agents were most invested in shaping the ways in which Cato would be remembered? Cicero, with his prodigious publications from the period – especially his lost Cato – and recognized political and rhetorical authority, played the most crucial role. Caesar also shared responsibility, particularly with his Anticato. Sallust’s famous synkrisis of Caesar and Cato in his Bellum Catilinae played a key part as well in cementing Cato’s place in Roman cultural memory. But one of the most important and overlooked agents for the early shape of Cato’s commemoration was none other than Cato himself.

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understood both as recent and as foundational, even ‘mythical’, for their respective communities. The collapse of the Republic and the memorable deeds of its leading figures, including Cato, fits such a description. For the enduring significance of the Republican past for subsequent generations, see Gowing (2005) and Gallia (2012). On the central link between memory and identity, cf. Assmann (2008) 113: ‘Cultural memory reaches back into the past only so far as the past can be reclaimed as “ours” . . . Knowledge about the past acquires the properties and functions of memory if it is related to a concept of identity.’ Seo (2013) 9. Cicero provides a rhetorical definition at Inv. rhet. 1.49; cf. Rhet. Her. 4.62 and Livy’s famous statement (praef. 10) on the exemplary nature of his own historical work. On exempla generally, Langlands (2018) and Roller (2018) offer the most recent comprehensive discussion; cf. also Walter (2004) 51–62, 374–407 and Van der Blom (2010). Van der Blom (2010) 15–16, Lowrie (2007), and Roller (2004) 4–6 (revisited at Roller (2009) 216–17) usefully address the situational flexibility exempla had in their application and re-appropriation. I adapt here Assmann’s (1995) 129 term ‘islands of time’ which refers to those specific events which get selectively fixed in memory as privileged moments of greater significance.

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14.2 The Beginning of the Cato Brand Marcus Porcius Cato was born in 95 BC into a respectable but comparatively unremarkable nobilis family.15 Cato’s greatest possession, however, was his own legendary name which he shared with his great-grandfather Marcus Porcius Cato. Consul in 195 and censor in 184, Cato the Elder had long since become one of Rome’s famous ‘sites of exemplarity’ for oldfashioned virtus.16 By the late Republic the very mention of the name ‘Cato’ evoked among a Roman audience associations with wisdom, serious-mindedness, moral rectitude, thrift, and good old-fashioned Roman virtus.17 Cato the Elder had consciously shaped this kind of exemplary brand during his lifetime; according to Plutarch, in his own writings he mentioned how some would excuse their behaviour by declaring that ‘they should not be blamed, for they are not Catos’ (οὐκ ἄξιον ἐγκαλεῖν αὐτοῖς, οὐ γὰρ Κάτωνές εἰσι).18 Carrying this legacy, the younger Cato consciously saw in his great-grandfather a model for constructing his own ‘Cato brand’.19 Cicero asserts in the Pro Murena, for example, that Cato himself claimed his great-grandfather as a family model for imitation (domesticum exemplum ad imitandum, 66; see further discussion below at p. 245). And Cassius Dio, although writing much later, continues in a similar vein by writing that Cato the Younger ‘strove to emulate the great Cato’ (ὁ δὲ δὴ Κάτων οὗτος ἦν ἐκ τοῦ τῶν Πορκίων γένους καὶ τὸν Κάτωνα τὸν πάνυ ἐζήλου),20 and like his ancestor he quickly set a living exemplary standard for his contemporaries.21 Since collective memory is remarkably pathdependent, this existing cultural memory of Cato the Elder as a site of exemplarity exerted a profound influence on how his later namesake began to be viewed and thus remembered by his contemporaries. This in turn 15 16

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Means and Dickison (1974) 211. See also Syme’s (1939) appendix ‘The Kinsmen of Cato’ in his Roman Revolution. I adopt here the helpful model of Langlands (2018) ch. 8 in distinguishing a ‘site of exemplarity’ from its individual mediations or retellings (‘exempla’). See also Langlands and Jewell in this volume. On Cato the Elder’s life and legacy, see Astin (1978). In this chapter I distinguish the two Catos primarily by the terms Elder and Younger mainly due to tradition, despite the lack of evidence that either were identified this way (Maior / Minor, etc.) in the ancient world; see Pasco-Pranger (2012). On Cato the Elder and his virtues, especially the likelihood of his own efforts to fashion this image, see Cornell (2009) 20. Plut. Cat. Mai. 19.5. I borrow this eminently useful phrase from Volk (2021) 69. The later biographical tradition highlights key episodes of familiar ‘Catonian’ virtues like integrity, seriousness, and firmness of spirit; see e.g. Plut. Cat. Min. 1.2, 3.9, and 4.2. Cass. Dio 37.22; cf. also Plutarch Cat. Min. 8.2. Cf. Plut. Cat. Min. 8.5 on the difficulty many of Cato the Younger’s contemporaries faced in trying to imitate him.

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meant that from the beginning, the Roman exemplary tradition was the foremost cultural institution responsible for shaping Cato the Younger’s subsequent memory development.22 Given this influence, it is worth considering briefly the place of Cato the Elder in Roman cultural memory during the Late Republic. Cicero provides us with our best evidence, even if he is admittedly biased in favour of a fellow novus homo who came from outside Rome to become consul.23 In his early In Caecilium 66 (70 BC), for example, the first man he names in the list of past clarissimi viri is ‘that famous Marcus Cato the Wise, most eminent and prudent man’ (‘M. Catonem illum Sapientem, clarissimum virum et prudentissimum’).24 He appears again in Cicero’s second Verrine oration (70 BC) as his foremost personal model for a Roman statesman who, although hailing from a family of lowly origins, still braved the potential wrath of his more nobly born fellow Romans to fight for the overall good of Rome and achieve the highest glory.25 Cicero maintained his attachment to Cato the Elder as a personal exemplum down to the end of his life, and in the De Finibus (45 BC) he notably has Cato the Younger say that the name of Cato the Elder was always on Cicero’s lips.26 He even devoted the entirety of his De Senectute (44 BC) to the exposition of the older Cato as a model for living well in old age.27 These examples, although illustrating Cicero’s personal views, nevertheless testify to the power of the Cato name to Roman ears. This desire to claim Cato the Elder as a personal exemplum is something that Cicero and Cato the Younger shared in common. It comes to the fore in Cicero’s Pro Murena, his defence speech for Murena in November 63 BC against charges of electoral misconduct that had been brought forward by Cato and others. This work is a key landmark in the development of Cato the Younger within Roman cultural memory as it is the earliest surviving work to mention Cato the Younger by name. From 22

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For general discussion of exempla, see most recently Langlands (2018) and Roller (2018); Van der Blom (2010) 15–16 and Roller (2004) 4–6 (revisited at Roller (2009) 216–17) also address the situational flexibility exempla had in their application and re-appropriation. Hanchey (2014) discusses Cato the Elder’s popularity and rhetorical usefulness in Cicero. On his status as a personal exemplum for Cicero, see Van der Blom (2010) 154–65, 246, and 275–6. Cic. Caec. 66. All translations are my own. Cic. In Verr. 2.5.180. Similarly, Cicero portrays Cato the Elder at the beginning of the De Re Publica (1.1) as the best exemplum of a man who (like himself) was of obscure birth and yet devoted himself unstintingly for the safety of the Republic. Cic. De Fin. 3.37: quem in ore semper habes. Van der Blom (2010) 335 argues that Cicero’s choice to speak with the exemplary voice of Cato the Elder at this time can be viewed as a way to also invoke his great-grandson’s exemplary resistance to the Caesar’s dictatorial regime.

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Plutarch (Cat. Min. 16–18) we know that by the end of 63 Cato had already gained public renown for his startlingly honest conduct as quaestor (in 65 or 64),28 and here in the Pro Murena we find a contemporary window into those elements of Cato’s character that were already becoming part of his communicative memory. Cicero understood that one effective way he could help subvert the authority of the prosecution and thus protect his client (from the charge of electoral bribery) was to tackle Cato’s reputation head on, which is why he mentions him first among the prosecutors at the beginning of the speech (3) and goes on to devote an entire section of the speech (58–67) to undermining Cato’s fascinatingly inflexible character through the clever use of damning praise.29 In short, Cato is an extremist, and who can trust a person like that? Cicero first introduces Cato as a promising tribune-elect who had already earned a reputation for an unusually rigid lifestyle marked by ‘the most serious authority and integrity’ (‘gravissimo atque integerrimo’), but he hints that such rigidity is liable to be more harmful than helpful in the present political climate.30 He builds on this in the later section, where he goes out of his way to acknowledge Cato’s numerous exemplary virtues (honestas, gravitas, temperantia, magnitudo animi, iustitia, etc.) and singles out his sincere devotion to Stoicism, all of which would be potentially admirable if it were not simply too extreme – and thus in the light of the ongoing Catilinarian crisis potentially too dangerous – for common sense and indeed human nature (‘paulo asperior et durior quam aut vertias aut natura patitur’, 60)!31 Such a subversive portrayal naturally serves his forensic goals, but it should also be recognized that the only reason Cicero would choose to paint this kind of exaggerated superhuman image of ethical rigidity and philosophical commitment as part of his strategy is if Cato was in fact already widely recognized in such an image, even if distorted for rhetorical effect. A bit later, after attempting to cast into doubt the validity of Cato’s ‘extremist’ brand of Stoicism, Cicero closes by bringing up his own personal interest in the authority that name ‘Cato’ represented: De cuius praestanti virtute cum vere graviterque diceres, domesticum te habere dixisti exemplum ad imitandum. Est illud quidem exemplum tibi propositum domi, sed tamen naturae similitudo illius ad te magis qui ab 28 29

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Plut. Cat. Min. 16–18. On Cicero’s portrayal of Cato in this speech (and on the rhetorical needs that shape it) see Craig (1986), Stem (2006), and Van der Wal (2007) 185–90. Cicero in fact specifically identifies Cato as ‘the root and core of the whole prosecution’ (fundamentum ac robur totius accusationis, Pro Mur. 58) based on the potential sway his upright reputation could have upon the jury. Cic. Pro Mur. 3. 31 Cic. Pro Mur. 60–61. Cf. Stem (2006) 218.

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mark thorne illo ortus es quam ad unum quemque nostrum pervenire potuit, ad imitandum vero tam mihi propositum exemplar illud est quam tibi. . . . tolle mihi e causa nomen Catonis, remove vim, praetermitte auctoritatem quae in iudiciis aut nihil valere aut ad salutem debet valere. When you spoke with truth and conviction of his outstanding virtue, you said that you had an exemplum in your own family to imitate. You do indeed have an exemplum set before you at home, but it has been easier for this to be passed on to you who are his descendant than to each one of us. And yet his model is set before me to imitate as much as it is before you. . . . please take the name of Cato out of the case, remove that name’s power, and set aside that name’s authority which in the courts should either have no power or have power as a refuge for the accused. (Cic. Pro Mur. 66–7)32

Cicero here is essentially competing with Cato the Younger for control of this exemplary tradition. Inasmuch as Cato the Elder evokes the traditional (and thus non-extreme) mos maiorum in Roman culture, Cicero is arguing that he is interpreting Cato as a site of exemplarity more appropriately than Cato’s own descendant.33 The exemplary invocation of Cato the Elder thus serves the specific rhetorical goal of undermining his moral authority on all counts, but it also points to a genuine personal interest in the famous consul.34 Cicero’s personal fascination with Cato the Elder and consequently the ‘Cato brand’ played its own part in shaping his own developing interest in his namesake descendant, a fact that in turn influenced Cicero’s frequent mediations of Cato the Younger in his writings throughout the course of his long career. Cicero’s literary popularity meant that many people would read and re-read them, thus continuing the cycle of cultural memory formation.

14.3

Commemorating Cato before the Civil Wars

In addition to the Pro Murena, the other earliest references to Cato also date to 63, the year of Cicero’s consulship and famed Catilinarian conspiracy. Cicero repeatedly commemorated his consulship the rest of his life, a habit that also had the side effect of boosting Cato’s commemoration, since it was Cato’s stirring speech at the famed 5 December meeting that 32 33

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All translations are the author’s own. Craig (1986) 237 emphasizes the degree to which Cicero’s rhetoric here achieves ‘the isolation of Cato from the bases of his moral authority, which gives the escape the jurors are seeking from the moral stigma which may attach to their acquittal of a guilty man’. Cf. Van der Blom (2010) 155. See Van der Blom (2010) 245–7, 275–6.

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led to what Cicero saw as his signature triumph during his consulship.35 He in fact went so far as to have Cato’s speech published,36 an act that was probably meant at the time to boost Cicero’s public relations but that also turned the speech into a momumentum of Cato’s ethical gravitas, his political position as the original ‘opponent of Caesar’, and his oratorical power. Many of Cicero’s other attempts to commemorate his consulship likely mentioned Cato as well, and these most likely involved a move from ‘near horizon’ to ‘distant horizon’ memory. We know that both Cicero and Atticus had composed drafts of histories in Greek on the events of his consular year,37 and even more intriguing is the possibility of Cato playing a role in Cicero’s epic De consulatu suo.38 None of the surviving fragments mention Cato, but the epic’s logical climax was probably the legal execution of the conspirators and Cicero’s acclamation as Rome’s pater patriae.39 Given Cato’s role in these events, he may have made an appearance as a virtuous and timely ally in Cicero’s labours to save the Republic. At the same time, his letters during these years reveal a more complicated picture in the realm of communicative memory. On several occasions Cicero expressed his frustration with Cato’s inflexibility in both ethics and politics, including the famous complaint that Cato ‘speaks in the Senate as if he were in the Republic of Plato rather than in the dregs of Romulus’ (‘dicit enim tamquam in Platonis πολιτείᾳ, non tamquam in Romuli faece, sententiam’).40 As private letters, however, they did not widely influence the developing shape of Cato’s cultural memory during this period.41 Cato’s exemplary tribuneship of 62 was so immediately memorable that by the following year his name had already become a byword of upright execution of the office, as we see in a letter of Cicero in which the lessvirtuous tribune Cornutus is simply called a Pseudocato.42 After this, Cato’s next island of memory emerged from another connection with Cicero. In 58, Clodius managed to get a law passed aimed at punishing Cicero for the unlawful execution of Roman citizens during the Catiline affair, and Cicero made the reluctant choice to go into voluntary exile; Cato was 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Seneca’s famous assessment was that Cicero spoke of his consulship non sine causa sed sine fine (Brev. Vit. 5.1); see Dugan (2014) and Steel (2005) 49–63. Plut. Cat. Min. 23.3; this was probably Cato’s only published speech. Cic. Ad Att. 1.19.10 = SB 19 and Cic. Ad Att. 1.20.6 = SB 20. See Courtney (1993) 173–4 on the ancient fragments; for analysis see Kubiak (1990); Knox (2011); Tatum (2011) 178–9; Volk (2013); Gee (2013); Marciniak (2015). Tatum (2011) 178. Ad Att. 2.1.8 (SB 21); see also Ad Att. 1.18.7 (SB 18), 2.9.2 (SB 29), Cic. Ad Att. 2.21.1 (SB 41). Cicero’s letters to Atticus were not published until after Cicero’s death; see White (2010) ch. 2. Cic. Ad Att. 1.14.6 (SB 14).

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likewise sidelined by being assigned the mission to oversee the annexation of Cyprus.43 When the political winds had changed and Cicero was able to return by late 57, he promptly set about re-establishing his reputation and role in Roman political life. This included public acts of memory as he frequently recounted his role as saviour of the state in 63 and his other patriotic efforts on behalf of the Republic. Cato again appeared in some of these, emerging as even more virtuous and exemplary than ever before. In the De Domo Sua (57 BC), for example, Cicero presented Cato as a living exemplum of virtues in direct contrast to Clodius’ many vices in such a way that suggests a mingling of both communicative and cultural memory.44 Cato was already both a living man and an emerging site of exemplarity. Cato’s most significant commemoration in this period, however, came the following year in the Pro Sestio (56 BC). When reminding his audience of the assistance Sestius had bravely provided to the consuls back in 63, Cicero goes out of his way to mention that it was during this time that Cato had also defended the Res publica.45 Cicero boldly declares that his opponents have failed to recognize in Cato ‘what strength lies in his seriousmindedness, integrity, greatness of soul, and finally his spirit of virtue which stands calm in the savage storm and shines out in the darkness’ (‘quid gravitas, quid integritas, quid magnitudo animi, quid denique virtus valeret, quae in tempestate saeva quieta est et lucet in tenebris’, 60). The Pro Sestio in fact provides a sort of blueprint for Cato’s islands of memory at this period, at least as Cicero saw it (60–63): the energy he dedicated to preserving the state from danger during the Catilinarian crisis, the auctoritas he displayed over the crowds in his tribunate of 62, and the mutual suffering they both shared at the hands of Clodius in the early 50s. On the eve of the civil wars, Cicero provided another statement on Cato in a striking set of correspondence between the two (ad Fam. 15.3–6 = SB 103, 110–112). Cicero, then governor of Cilicia, wanted Cato’s support for the awarding of a triumph for recent military successes, and this correspondence gave him an opportunity to reflect consciously on their parallel careers and respective services to each other. Recalling Cato’s senatorial support over the past thirteen years, he writes: ut praestantissimas tuas virtutes non tacitus admirarer (quis enim id non facit?) sed in omnibus orationibus, sententiis dicendis, causis agendis, omnibus scriptis Graecis, Latinis, omni denique varietate litterarum 43 44

On Cicero’s voluntary exile, see Moreau (1987) and Kelly (2006) 110–25; on Cato’s mission to Cyprus see the recent treatments in Morrell (2017) 98–128 and Drogula (2019) 157–89. Cic. Dom. 21–23. 45 Cic. Sest. 12.

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mearum te non modo iis quos vidissemus sed etiam iis de quibus audissemus omnibus anteferrem. I do not merely admire in silence your extraordinary virtues (for who won’t do at least this?), but in all my speeches, senatorial addresses, court cases, all my writings, whether in Greek or Latin, and ultimately in every manner of literary activity I have elevated you more than anyone, beyond not only those we have seen but also those we have ever heard about. (Cic. Ad Fam. 15.4.12 = SB 110)

Even granting rhetorical exaggeration, this summary reveals the frequency with which Cicero considered he had commemorated his political ally.46 What might explain Cicero’s eagerness to praise Cato? Despite their many differences, Cicero and Cato both shared an identity that was fully invested in politics, devoted to the Res publica, genuinely passionate about philosophy (albeit different branches), looked back to Cato the Elder as a personal exemplum, and liked to claim the ethical high ground in regard to both philosophical virtue and the mos maiorum.47 Cicero did get genuinely frustrated at him when he felt that Cato’s political inflexibility did more harm than good to the republic, but this did not diminish what at times must have been sincere admiration.48 There were of course other avenues that helped shape how Cato was thought of and remembered during this period. We know that Metellus Scipio had at one point published ‘abuses’ against Cato, although there is no way to gauge their wider reception.49 Another tantalizing glimpse is found in a surviving fragment of a speech by Licinius Macer Calvus against Vatinius, probably dating to 54 BC, in which he mentions the contemporary Cato as a living exemplum of a virtuous and upright praetor compared to the corrupt job Vatinius had done the previous year.50 And in partnership with these, Cato of course remained a vital part of communicative memory as he came up naturally in the conversation of his contemporaries. On the whole, however, our surviving evidence points to Cicero as playing 46 47 48

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One might read here a nudge from Cicero that Cato should be grateful for all this free publicity and help him in turn. E.g. Cic. Ad Fam. 15.4.16 = SB 110. Cf. Stem (2006) 223–31. At the time of composition in 50, the letter only references Cicero’s earlier commemorative mediations that had helped Cato begin to enter Roman cultural memory, but upon the letter’s posthumous publication (after the deaths of both Cicero and Cato) it became itself another such mediation, one that overtly linked Cato and the theme of triumphal victory, on which see Martelli (2017). Plut. Cat. Min. 57.3; Scipio had married the very woman to whom Cato had at the time been engaged, leading Cato to retaliate by writing (but not publishing?) abusive verses against Scipio (Plut. Cat. Min. 7.1–2). Quint. Inst 9.2.25.

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the biggest role. These various textual mediations, the ever-changing needs of partisan politics, the forms of rhetoric, and the cultural power of the ethical and philosophical exemplum all worked in concert to shape the path along which Cato’s memory would travel in the coming decade on his road to becoming something much more than Cato the living man.

14.4

Commemorating Cato during the Civil Wars

After the outbreak of civil war in 49 BC, it was not Cicero but Caesar who made the first attempt to commemorate Cato. In his Bellum Civile, Caesar presents Cato to his readers not as an exemplum virtutis but as one of the true ringleaders of the opposition.51 Cato had indeed been his political inimicus since the 60s, and Caesar introduces him into his narrative of the war as a man ultimately motivated by personal hostility and the lingering sting of his failure to be elected consul in 52.52 He brings Cato into the narrative two other times, the first when he gives a speech blaming Pompey for lack of preparation (1.30.5) and again when Caesar in a speech names Cato as one of his many personal enemies who had done him personal injury through a pattern of harmful obstruction in the Senate (1.32.3). All three appearances encourage Caesar’s readership to remember Cato not as a great man who embodied the virtutes Romanae but as a betrayer of the Res publica who ultimately lacked precisely the right kind of gravitas, constantia, and integritas for which he was supposed to be famous.53 After this point in Book 1, Cato disappears completely from the rest of the work as if the object of a Caesarian damnatio memoriae.54 If he wished to make his old enemy similarly disappear from the minds of his fellow Romans, however, his hope went spectacularly unfulfilled. After the Pompeian defeat at Pharsalus, Cato sailed for Africa, taking charge of the territorial capital at Utica. In early 46 BC, news reached him of Caesar’s victory at Thapsus, spelling certain defeat for the senatorial cause in the region. Caesar marched on Utica, eager to accept the surrender of Cato, one of his oldest political enemies, as he had done with so many other foes as part of his program of clementia. Cato did not give him the pleasure. In April of 46, as Caesar approached the city, Cato famously committed suicide. His life and death, both of which had been increasingly 51

52 53

Batstone and Damon (2006) 50–1; See Yates (2011) for an examination of Cato’s portrayal in Caesar’s BC. Grillo (2012) 178–80 argues that the first book (the only to mention Cato) was written during the war between 49 and 48 but posthumously published after 44; cf. Peer (2015) 167–82. Caes. BC 1.4: Catonem veteres inimicitiae Caesaris incitant et dolor repulsae. Cf. Grillo (2012): 43. Cf. Grillo (2012) 43–4. 54 Grillo (2012) 44.

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defined by resistance to Caesar, stood out from his peers and provided a memorial focal point for his contemporaries to work out the meaning(s) of the civil war, offering both a ‘near horizon’ and ‘distant horizon’ memorial perspective.55 Cato could henceforth be variously recalled as the man of exemplary ethical behaviour, philosophical vigour, and above all anti-Caesarian politics. A new wave of memory construction on Cato was coming, and unsurprisingly Cicero was first in line. Within a month or two after Cato’s death, M. Iunius Brutus reached out to Cicero, urging him to write a treatise in praise of their mutual friend.56 Cicero had been pardoned by Caesar but still looked for ways to protest to the new regime, and the memory of Cato provided a potent tool towards this end. But what should Cicero say? In a revealing letter (probably from May 46), he wrote to Atticus about the πρόβλημα Ἀρχιμήδειον he faced: even if he stuck to the less controversial topics of Cato’s ethical and philosophical virtues (his gravitas and constantia are specifically named), such praise would still be an odiosum ἄκουσμα to Caesar’s camp.57 And yet Cicero knew that the political Cato remained essential for speaking to the core truth (as he saw it) of his meaning: ‘But that man cannot be praised unless these things are elaborated: that he foresaw our present situation and what was happening, he fought in order that those things might not happen, and in order that he not see what in fact did happen he departed this life’ (‘Sed vere laudari ille vir non potest nisi haec ornata sint, quod ille ea quae nunc sunt et futura viderit et ne fierent contenderit et facta ne videret vitam reliquerit’).58 The result was Cicero’s Cato, the work that more than any other ensured Cato’s permanent entry into Roman cultural memory. This laudatio of Cato’s life and death is unfortunately lost, and our ability to reconstruct its form or contents is limited to what can be surmised from the few surviving fragments and testimonia.59 It undoubtedly commemorated its subject as a man of exemplary virtues, but from this point on Cato was also indelibly 55

56 57 59

The presumably pro-Caesarian author of the Bellum Africum relates (88.1) that the people of Utica gave Cato a public funeral in large part ‘on account of his unique integrity and because he had proved so very different from the other leaders’ (tamen propter singularem integritatem et quod dissimillimus reliquorum ducum fuerat). This theme of Cato’s uniqueness, seen all the way back in Cicero’s Pro Murena, continued to find expression in the post-suicide tradition, most forcefully at Cic. Off. 1.112 (on which see further below at p. 255). At Orator 35 Cicero thanks Brutus for suggesting the theme, although Ad Fam. 6.7.4 = SB 237 hints that perhaps Brutus was not truly responsible for the initial suggestion. Cic. Ad Att. 12.4.2 = SB 240. 58 Cic. Ad Att. 12.4.2 = SB 240. Fehrle (1983) 322–4 collects eighteen testimonia and five possible fragments; Jones (1970) identifies a slightly different set. For assessments on Cicero’s Cato, see Pecchiura (1965) 25–7; Kumaniecki (1970); Kierdorf (1978); Fehrle (1983) 285–92; Gäth (2011) 10–16.

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linked in Roman memory with the fall of the Republic, and the fall of the Republic just as indelibly meant Caesar. The clearest surviving fragment (from Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.33) gives us a key glimpse into the overall picture of Cato that Cicero was monumentalizing: Contingebat in eo, quod plerisque contra solet, ut maiora omnia re quam fama viderentur, id quod non saepe evenit, ut expectatio cognitione, aures ab oculis vincerentur. With regard to him it turned out opposite of what is customarily the case, for he was in every respect greater in reality than his reputation; it has rarely happened that acquaintance outstrips expectation, that the ears are conquered by the eyes.

Whatever Cicero’s frustrations with the living Cato, this Cato of posthumous memory was a figure of triumphant virtue ready to challenge Caesar and stand for what had been lost in his victory. In constructing such an exemplum for his fellow Romans, Cicero’s Cato laid out the chief milestones in Cato’s life and in the process did much to establish the official ‘mnemonic map’ as it were of Cato’s various islands of memory. Plutarch’s later biography gives us a good impression of the episodes that Cicero likely included; in addition to praise of his family background and childhood, Cicero probably highlighted Cato’s helpful role in the events of his own consular year. It was, however, his noteworthy death that inevitably became a focal point, for the manner of a person’s death could speak to the ultimate meaning of a praiseworthy life, especially in the hands of a master rhetorician like Cicero.60 None of the surviving fragments reference his death, but we know that his suicide quickly became a talking point,61 and the predominance of Cato’s suicide in later mediations suggests the impact that Cicero’s Cato had upon subsequent memory. Stoics could see in the dying Cato an exemplum of a living (rather than abstract) model of the true Sapiens, while Romans in general could see in him an exemplum that embodied the potential to claim libertas from a dying Res publica and resist Caesarism. Although Cicero filled his Cato with material largely derived from communicative memory, it is likely that his mediated Cato was framed at least in part in the mode of ‘distant horizon’ cultural memory as a mythologized figure, indelibly tied to the demise of the nowlost Republic and the readers’ own evolving identities as people who had shared this personal and traumatic experience. Cicero was painfully aware 60 61

Edwards (2007) 5. See Ad Fam. 9.18.2 = SB 191 from July of 46 in which Cicero noted that while other senatorial leaders met nasty ends, ‘Cato’s was brilliant!’ (at Cato praeclare).

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that he had surrendered to Caesar, but as long as his work had its readers, his newly monumentalized Cato could root itself in Roman cultural memory and continue to resist Caesar forever. Cicero had finished the Cato by mid-summer of 46 but most likely waited to publish it until Caesar had left for Spain later that year to fight the remaining Pompeian forces there.62 Subsequent events showed that it sparked much interest. Cicero had demonstrated that Cato’s memory could serve as a fertile mnemonic landscape for working out people’s own attitudes – and memories – towards the lost Res publica and the new state of affairs under Caesar’s regime, and many more Catos soon appeared, each contributing to Cato’s establishment as a required part of the story of the end of the Res publica and the rise of Caesar. Brutus himself was the next person to write a Cato, finishing it at least in draft form by the following March.63 That it was written at all suggests that Brutus felt Cicero’s treatment was in some way inadequate; what we do know is that Cicero was thoroughly annoyed at Brutus for under-representing Cicero’s own role in comparison with Cato in the famed Senate debate of 5 December 63 BC. This multiplicity of Catos reveals the potential tugof-war over Cato’s narrative and the ends to which those mediated memories could be employed.64 By early 45 Caesar had read both men’s eulogies of his old enemy, and he too decided to enter the emerging memory wars over the meaning of Cato and thus the meaning of his triumph in civil war.65 He first directed his subordinate Hirtius to write a treatise against Cato, which Cicero soon received.66 Sensing a strategic error on Caesar’s part, Cicero asked Atticus to publish Hirtius’ work more widely so that its ineffective attempts at painting Cato negatively would fan the flames of controversy and only provoke popular praise of Cato’s memory all the more.67 After achieving victory at Munda, by the summer of 45 Caesar finally published his own work in two books, pointedly named Anticato. Cicero would have to take this rebuttal more seriously. Wary of offending the de facto ruler of the Roman world, Cicero complimented Caesar on the work’s style while avoiding praise of its content.68 Caesar’s Anticato (also lost) was an exercise in rampant character destruction aimed at delegitimizing the virtuous 62 64 65 67 68

Gäth (2011) 11. 63 Caesar read their Catos while in Spain. See Cic. Ad Att. 12.21.1 = SB 260. Cf. Langlands (2018) 200–5 on the tendency of sites of exemplarity to become contested. See Cic. Ad Att. 13.46.2 = SB 338. 66 See Gäth (2011) 19–21. Cic. Ad Att. 12.44.1 = SB 285: ut ex istorum vituperatione sit illius maior laudatio. Cf. Ad Att. 12.45.2 = SB 290. Cic. Ad Att. 13.50.1 = SB 348; Cic. Ad Att. 13.51.1 = SB 349.

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shape that Cato’s memory had already by now obtained.69 According to Plutarch, Caesar had ‘poured out against him after death such a great cup of wrath’ (εἰς ἀναίσθητον ἐκχέας ὀργὴν τοσαύτην),70 and the fragments reveal a pattern of direct attacks on Cato’s supposed virtues.71 Gelzer named Caesar’s assault on the memory of Cato ‘his most disastrous mistake’ and rightly so.72 By this point, Cato’s legacy as a man of exemplary virtues was already too well established to suffer much from Caesar’s vituperatio, and the extra attention which his Anticato drew to Cato only functioned to galvanize resistance to his regime around an idealized memory of the dead man and monumentalize (and mythologize) him further as a foundational element of Rome’s collective memory of the end of the Republic.

14.5

Commemorating Cato after the Civil Wars: Caesar et Cato in aeternum

Caesar returned victorious to Rome in the fall of 45 BC to find that his Anticato had prompted an even greater outpouring of Catonian memory as others soon began publishing their own Catos. M. Fabius Gallus published his own Cato in the summer of 45, and we know that Cato’s close companion Munatius Rufus wrote one as well.73 Riding the wave, Cicero made the strategic choice of the recently dead Cato as his Stoic interlocutor in the third and fourth books of his De Finibus, also completed that summer. In so doing he monumentalized Cato even more as the Stoic paragon of philosophical virtues, naming him a ‘divine, remarkable man’ (divino ac singulari viro, 3.3.6) and ‘the pattern of all virtues’ (omnium virtutum auctore, 3.4.44).74 And when Cicero placed into Cato’s mouth the declaration that only the true Sapiens is ‘rightly the one and only free man . . . rightly unconquerable’ (‘recte solus liber . . . recte invictus’, 3.3.75), 69 70 71

72 73

74

The most in-depth analysis remains Tschiedel (1981), who charts thirteen testimonia and eleven possible fragments; see also Pecchiura (1965) 31–5, Zecchini (1980) 45–7, and Gäth (2011) 21–30. Plut. Caes. 54.1. Caesar attempted to demonstrate that Cato was variously a drunkard (Plin. Ep. 3.12.2–4, Sen. Tranq. 17.9), obsessed with money (Plut. Cat. Min. 11.6–8, 36.4–5), inhuman in his treatment of his wife (Plut. Cat. Min. 52.5–8, Prisc. 6.36), and in general the embodiment not of noble virtues but rather of arrogantia, superbia, and dominatio. Gelzer (1968) 332. Fabius Gallus: Cic. Ad Fam. 7.24.2 = SB 260; Munatius Rufus: Plut. Cat. Min. 25.2, 37.1; cf. Geiger (1979). There remains the distinct possibility that even more Catos were written for which we lack evidence. Thus Cicero could praise Cato without directly antagonizing Caesar. On Cato in the De Finibus, see Spahlinger (2005) 96–108 and Graver (2016).

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it was an easy leap to the image now rooted in Roman memory of Cato invictus defying Caesar to the last at Utica. Cicero found a reason to invoke the dying Cato yet again in his Tusculan Disputations from later that same summer, where Cato’s voluntary death is here explicitly paired for the first time (in the extant literature) with that of Socrates as both men are presented as powerful exempla of magnitudo animi.75 Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March the following year did not remove the motivation for remembering Cato but instead gave it more room to grow. One intriguing hint of the communicative memory of Cato at the time comes in a letter from July of 44 in which Cicero tells Atticus that Quintus’ son ‘promises that he will be a Cato’ (‘pollicetur se Catonem’). As for Cato’s quickly developing status as a full site of exemplarity in Roman cultural memory, Cicero’s De Officiis (written in late 44 when he no longer feared displeasing Caesar) openly praised Cato unique constantia in life and in death, this time with directly political overtones. It would have been wrong for the other commanders to commit suicide, Cicero included, but Cato was always a special case: Catoni cum incredibilem tribuisset natura gravitatem eamque ipse perpetua constantia roboravisset semperque in proposito susceptoque consilio permansisset, moriendum potius quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus fuit. But nature had granted to Cato an incredible seriousness of mind, and he himself had strengthened it by unswerving consistency and had stayed ever true to his purpose and fixed resolve; for him it was necessary to die rather than to look upon the face of a tyrant. (Cic. Off. 1.112)

Once again we find Cato paired with Caesar, here in the guise of the antiRepublican tyrant. When Cicero at last re-entered the public square with his Philippics, it is not surprising that Cato appeared again now that wouldbe tyranny had a new face in Antony. Cicero invoked him in a list of famous Romans who had died in the civil wars, including Cato ‘who, when departing from life, did foresee many things but at least didn’t see you become consul’ (‘qui cum multa vita excedens providit, tum quod te consulem non vidit’).76 And early the following year in 43, Cicero invoked him again when naming various senatorial leaders who had been in Pompey’s camp alongside Cicero: ‘Foremost among them was Cato, foremost also among all mankind in virtue’ (‘quorum princeps M. Cato idemque omnium gentium virtute princeps’).77 In communicative and cultural memory, Cato had joined the ranks of Roman sites of exemplarity 75

Cic. Tusc. 1.74.

76

Cic. Phil. 2.12.

77

Cic. Phil. 13.30.

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alongside his great-grandfather and had become the face of resistance to perceived tyranny. This was the culturally memorialized Cato that Sallust had inherited when he began writing the Bellum Catilinae in 43 or 42 BC. By the time that Sallust published his literary reflection on the roots of Roman civil discord within his own generation, so many of its main characters, like the Republic itself, had perished. The terrible costs of civil war as well as the more recent wounds of Mutina and (depending on the exact date of composition) perhaps even Philippi were painfully fresh. It is in this light that we must read his powerful narrative of the 5 December debate over the fate of the conspirators, which notably Sallust portrays as a contest not between political factions but between Caesar and Cato.78 In his famed synkrisis comparing the two,79 Sallust explains that the greatness of Rome was due to ‘the outstanding virtue of a few citizens’ (‘paucorum civium egregiam virtutem’, 53.4), and in his time there were two who especially stood out in his own personal memory, Caesar and Cato, possessing great virtues but radically divergent natures (‘memoria mea ingenti virtute, divorsis moribus fuere viri duo, M. Cato et C. Caesar’, 53.5). Here we have a fascinating account that neatly straddles the dividing line between communicative and cultural memory; Sallust personally remembers Cato, but the channels of commemoration are already settling in place. Sallust then proceeds to itemize their respective virtues which in his view embodied the greatness of the Roman people: Caesar was marked by vigorous energy and beneficence, whereas Cato exemplified the (by now expected) qualities of integritas vitae, abstinentia, and severitas. Sallust concludes by saying that Cato ‘preferred to be good rather than merely appear so’ (‘esse quam videri bonus malebat’, 54.6), a sentiment similar enough to the fragment from Cicero’s Cato discussed above (from Macrobius, Sat. 6.2.33) to suggest it as a source. It is here, in Sallust’s repackaging of 5 December 63 BC, that we find our surest evidence that the processes of cultural memory had fully begun to do their work. Cato was by now an established site of exemplarity that poignantly united Roman virtutes with political resistance to the name of Caesar. In the intervening two decades since the actual event described, Cato had lived his life in Roman politics, promoted his own exemplary Cato 78

79

Many readers have pondered the conspicuous absence of Cicero from Sallust’s version of the debate, but in the light of Cato’s developing place in cultural memory perhaps a big part of the explanation lies in the fact that by that point it was not Cicero but Cato who was now remembered as the true opponent of Caesar. Sall. Bel. Cat. 53–54.

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brand among his contemporaries, and had been the repeated object of mediation and monumentalization into textual forms, thus shaping the channels along which his subsequent memory would run as the primary role of communicative memory began to fade. He had fought in the civil war against Caesar, committed a spectacular suicide to avoid surrendering to tyranny, and had been subsequently commemorated by Cicero, Caesar, and others in a memory war over the meaning of Roman identity in the wake of Caesar’s triumph and rise to mastery over the Roman world. This was the road that Cato – living, dead, always remembered – had taken from one 5 December to the other, from communicative memory to a new cultural memory that would continue to be a vital force long into Rome’s future.

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part iii

Building Cultural Memory

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chapter 15

Sites of Exemplarity and the Challenge of Accessing the Cultural Memory of the Republic Rebecca Langlands

This chapter will discuss some of the ways that recent scholarship on cultural memory has contributed to thinking about the role of exempla in Roman culture, and particularly to the development of the idea of the ‘site of exemplarity’.1 It will also suggest how insights found in this scholarship might sharpen our appreciation of some of the challenges that face modern scholars who are studying cultural memory in antiquity, especially when it comes to the Roman republic from which so little written testimony survives. These themes will be focused through the discussion of the somewhat obscure case of Vibellius Taurea, a bold native of the city of Capua who clashed with the Romans during the Second Punic War. In general, the Roman exemplum represents a particular, Roman form of what we might call historical knowledge or commemoration. It is a commemorative medium that presents the past in the form of stories that are short, morally charged, and memorable, allowing them to be easily retold. However the exemplum is also a mode of engaging with the past within a wider framework of exemplary ethics which includes processes such as inspiration and emulation, as well as moral debate and controversy.2 Roman exemplary ethics is a story-telling tradition that we can now only access through the specific literary and material monuments that happened to survive from antiquity. Yet it certainly had an existence in wider Roman culture beyond these particular references to it. It is clear that the exemplary tales cited in our extant texts were widely known and must have been easily recognisable from even very brief allusions. The very fact that mentions of historical exempla are often so brief is itself suggestive of this familiarity. References to exempla in ancient texts and speeches usually need supplementation by readers and audiences; they do not provide the full story but function as references to something that is already known. 1

On which see Langlands (2018) 166–225, 258–335.

2

On exemplary ethics see Langlands (2018).

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Often, a textual marker for this presumed familiarity is the word ille (‘that’), standing for ‘that well known figure’.3 This is the case in both of the references to the figure of Vibellius Taurea that are made by Cicero. The first comes during his second speech against the Agrarian Law proposed by Rullus, which was a contio delivered before the people in 63 BC, and the second in his attack on Piso of 55 BC, which was delivered before the senate.4 In the first speech, Cicero refers to Vibellius as a well-known type of person, alongside a certain Blossius, of whom he claims to be reminded when he looks at the self-styled praetor Considius, who has taken on the airs and graces of a Roman magistrate. ‘Indeed it was already hard to bear looking at Considius’ face . . . When I looked at that man in Capua with his Campanian arrogance and regal attitude, I seemed to see those well-known (illos) Blossius and Vibellius types’.5 In the second instance, Vibellius is mentioned in the context of another type – ‘the Decius Magius type’ – and both are apparently well-known in Capua: Seplasia me hercule, ut dici audiebam, te ut primum aspexit, Campanum consulem repudiavit. Audierat Decios Magios et de Taurea illo Vibellio aliquid acceperat; in quibus si moderatio illa quae in nostris solet esse consulibus non fuit, at fuit pompa, fuit species, fuit incessus saltem Seplasia dignus et Capua. By Hercules, I heard it said that as soon as the Seplasia6 set eyes on you [sc. Piso], it rejected you as a Campanian consul. It had heard of the Decius Magius types, and it had had some information about that famous (illo) Vibellius Taurea; if those men didn’t quite have the moderation that we are used to see in our consuls, they at least had the show and the appearance and the style that was worthy of the Seplasia and Capua.7 (Cic. Pis. 24)

In both cases the references to the man himself are minimal – just his name is given, with no indication of his story or characteristics, as we often find in exemplary references.8 In each case it is the audience of the speech (in the first 3

4

5 6 7 8

On the use of ille, illud etc. to refer to well-known exemplary material see the useful discussion of Morstein-Marx (2004) 68–118; cf. Méthy (2003) 206. On referentiality, cf. Langlands (2018) 166–76, 254–5. As we will see, any events to which Cicero is referring here would have taken place well over a hundred years earlier, so we are dealing here with ‘cultural memory’ and its dynamics, and not with ‘communicative memory’, in terms of the distinction drawn by Assmann. Cic. Agr. 2.93: ‘iam vero vultum Considi videre ferendum vix erat . . . hunc Capuae Campano supercilio ac regio spiritu cum videremus, Blossios mihi videbar illos videre ac Vibellios’. Seplasia was the name of the main forum in the city of Capua, and it was where the perfume-sellers traded. Translations from the Latin are the author’s own. I shall return shortly to the question of why I call Vibellius an exemplum, rather than merely a historical figure.

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including a gathering of the people and in the second his fellow senators) who is left to supply the rest of the details and the interpretation of their significance in this context. Moreover, in the speech In Pisonem, the allusion itself makes the suggestion that his name was common currency in Capua too: ‘audierat Decios Magios et de Taurea illo Vibellio aliquid acceperat’ (‘It had heard of the Decius Magius types, and it had had some information about that famous (illo) Vibellius’).9 A key methodological issue arises when dealing with such elliptical references to the past where so much is left unsaid: how can modern scholarship take as an object of its study the ‘common knowledge’ to which such references refer? How should we conceptualise this intangible knowledge of the past possessed by Cicero’s audiences in Rome and Italy, to which we no longer have access, and which, as Robert Morstein-Marx has argued, seems to be held in common by the population beyond the literate elite.10 What form does it take? How was such knowledge about the past held in cultural memory and circulated within ancient culture? In the study of Roman exempla, it has proved helpful to think in terms of reference to a ‘site of exemplarity’. This is a concept developed by analogy with the ‘site of memory’. The idea of the lieu de mémoire originated in the influential work of Pierre Nora, where it described symbolic locations (not always literal ‘places’) around which collective memories within a community took shape. Nora considered these to be a particular feature of a post-industrial literate society; material monuments deliberately created to harness collective nostalgia, which emerged in the specific conditions of nineteenth-century France to replace the declining oral tradition of peasant society (milieux de mémoire).11 Subsequently the concept has undergone considerable refinement, most usefully in the recent application of the idea of the site of memory to other cultures, especially contemporary cultures, by scholars such as Anne Rigney, Astrid Erll and Laura Basu. Such scholars conceive of sites of memory in more abstract terms, as historical episodes or figures which have been the focus of particular commemorative intensity and, importantly, contestation – such as the Indian Mutiny, the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Anne Frank, or the Holocaust.12 The articles in Erll and Rigney’s 2009 volume Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory explore how particular ‘remediations’ of each site 9 12

Cic. Pis. 24. 10 Morstein-Marx (2004); van der Blom (2010) 13. 11 Nora (1989). Cf. Rigney (2008), Erll (2009a) on the Indian Mutiny, Basu (2012) on the legend of Ned Kelly; Rigney (2012) on Walter Scott.

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(novels, performances, paintings, newspaper articles, works of scholarship) relate to the wider site of memory. The approach of their volume, focusing on remediation of sites, is highly relevant to the practice of ancient historians, reliant as we are on particular literary texts for our insights into cultural memory.13 Like the sites of memory discussed in Erll and Rigney’s volume, a Roman ‘site of exemplarity’ is not a physical location but an imaginative space of remembrance organised around a historical figure or episode; it is part of the field of reference which is mobilised every time a reader or listener encounters an allusion to a particular exemplary story or person.14 It frames the interpretation of every allusion to that person or story. A site of exemplarity does not rely on or derive from a single canonical text, although an influential work of literature or work of art may have a disproportionate effect on how it is constituted. It is made up of many different versions of the exemplary event and references to that event in a variety of media, from high art to conversation. It is also always liable to change and modification over time. The site of exemplarity for Vibellius Taurea, for instance, is likely to have been made up of different variants of his story (on which more later), retold in a variety of different media. Different communities will remember different versions of the same event, or place different emphases on its interpretation; in this case it is likely that local Campanian communities would frame the figure of Vibellius differently from those in urban Rome, even in Cicero’s day.15 Depending on the communities within which it circulated, the means of circulation may have included gossip and family lore, song, theatrical performance, painting and sculpture, funeral and religious rites as well as literature and written history.16 Each of these new versions is a ‘remediation’, in the terminology of recent scholarship on cultural memory.17 Together they constitute the site of exemplarity at any one time, and over time each new remediation may change the site to a greater or lesser extent. A site always encompasses a diversity of accounts, representations, and interpretations of the historical events which, taken together, render the site heterogeneous, so that there is 13 14 15 16

17

For remediation see also Biggs, Hartman, Moser, Palmer, and Thorne in this volume. Erll (2009), Basu (2009). See Hilder (2015) on non-elite Italian communities cultivating different exempla from the senatorial elite in Rome, with more emphasis on tribunes of the plebs, for instance; cf. Langlands (2018) 229. Cf. Damon (2010) 376: ‘If Fabius Pictor’s contemporary account of the Second Punic War is lost, for example, the war’s crucial events are nevertheless known from subsequent narratives that build on Pictor’s (and others’), from allusions to those events in other sorts of work (speeches, poems, letters), and from the material record, to list only the most obvious sources.’ Erll and Rigney (2009).

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never total agreement about either the facts or how to interpret them.18 An allusion to an exemplary figure, then, is a reference to something more complex than might at first appear. The term ‘site’ might seem to imply something static, so it is important to bear in mind the fact that sites of exemplarity are continually in flux, changing, if only slightly, with every new remediation. Over time, some sites of exemplarity will disappear without a trace, as Roman culture changes and new priorities emerge, as discussed later in this chapter. The case of Vibellius reminds us how little we now have that allows us to grasp the contents of these sites of exemplarity, and of the fields of reference to which ancient listeners would have had access when they heard the name Taurea or Vibellius. Robert Morstein-Marx describes the references to Vibellius and Blossius in the De Lege Agraria as ‘intriguing allusions’.19 Perhaps there once existed written accounts of the episode(s) which made Vibellius notable that are now lost to us, or perhaps the event itself was primarily commemorated through ephemeral media such as story-telling or performance. In the cases of many familiar exempla, we are able to feel satisfied that we have understood a brief reference in a Ciceronian speech because we can find a more extensive description of a person or event in another ancient work. Very often it is Livy’s history that provides elucidation, and when Livy does not include a version of a particular story, we are in trouble. In this case, it so happens that there is indeed an account of a memorable deed performed by a Vibellius, who may well be the man to whom Cicero refers here, although Livy’s account does not fully elucidate those Ciceronian references. It comes in Book 26 of the history. The episode described takes place in 212 BC, during the Second Punic war when the Romans are fighting Hannibal in Italy. The context is a debate about how the Romans should deal with the leading men of the allied Italian towns who had defected to Hannibal and have now been defeated by the Romans. The two generals, App. Claudius and Q. Fulvius Flaccus, are in disagreement. Claudius wants to show clemency towards these rebel allies, Fulvius wants to execute them as a deterrent to other allies tempted by defection. Both seem reasonable positions. Unable to resolve the situation they send a message to the Roman senate asking them to make a decision one way or the other. However, Fulvius is worried that the senate’s judgment will be in favour of clemency, and thereby deprive him of the opportunity of punishing the Campanian rebels, and so, as they await the 18

Basu (2009) 149; Langlands (2018) 201–5.

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Morstein-Marx (2004) 73.

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decision, he gallops through the night to Teanum, the first town, and gathers all the leading men together and executes them all. Then, he gets back on his horse and thunders off to the next town Cales. There he gathers all the men together and is about to execute them, when the messenger from Rome turns up with the edict from the senate. Holding the message unopened in his hand, Fulvius proceeds with the execution. Only once he has killed them all does he open the senate’s response, to find, as he expected, that they have ruled for clemency. It is at this point in the story that Vibellius Taurea appears, to mount a Campanian response to Fulvius’ troubling behaviour. Livy’s first version of the episode goes as follows: Consurgentem iam Fuluium Taurea Vibellius Campanus per mediam uadens turbam nomine inclamauit . . . ‘me quoque’ inquit ‘iube occidi ut gloriari possis multo fortiorem quam ipse es uirum abs te occisum esse.’ Cum Flaccus negaret profecto satis compotem mentis esse, modo prohiberi etiam se si id uellet senatus consulto diceret, tum Vibellius ‘quando quidem’ inquit ‘capta patria propinquis amicisque amissis, cum ipse manu mea coniugem liberosque interfecerim ne quid indigni paterentur, mihi ne mortis quidem copia eadem est quae his ciuibus meis, petatur a uirtute inuisae huius uitae uindicta.’ Atque ita gladio quem ueste texerat per aduersum pectus transfixus, ante pedes imperatoris moribundus procubuit. When Fulvius was rising from his seat, a Campanian called Vibellius Taurea pushed through the middle of the crowd shouting his name . . .. He cried: ‘Order me to be killed too, so that you can boast that a man who is much braver than you are has been killed by you.’ When Flaccus said he really didn’t think that the man was completely right in the head, and that anyway, if he wanted to, he was prevented from killing him by the recent decree of the senate, Vibellius replied: ‘Now that my country has been captured and I have lost all my friends and relatives, and with my own hand I have killed my wife and children so that they should not suffer humiliation, I do not even have the same opportunity for death as my fellowcitizens, therefore let me seek in courage a release from this unwelcome life.’ And thus he pierced himself through the middle of his chest with the sword which he had hidden in his robes, and fell dying at the feet of the general. (Livy 26.15)

This fuller account gives us some sense of the figure to whom Cicero may be referring in his speeches – a local Capuan figure who had clashed with Roman leaders about a hundred and fifty years earlier. It does not give us much clarity, however, about the significance of this figure in the context of Cicero’s speeches, and what he might have meant to the various members of Cicero’s audiences. From the wider context of Cicero’s speech

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before the people we can gather that Vibellius represents that natural ‘arrogance and intolerable ferocity of the Campanians’ (‘illam Campanam arrogantiam atque intolerandam ferociam’, Agr. 2.91), which had been neutralised by the defeat of Capua at the hands of Fulvius in 212 BC. Morstein-Marx describes the reference as perhaps ‘conjuring up the notion of an innate Campanian rebelliousness and arrogance with which colonists would inevitably be infected and thereby transformed into a terrible threat to Roman freedom’.20 In Valerius Maximus’ collection of exempla, Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, dating from about 30 AD, the exemplary quality of the episode is clearer. The story is cited in two different chapters in Book 3 to illustrate the qualities of first bravery (fortitudo) and then perseverance (constantia). Furthermore, when these two passages are read alongside one another, as their inclusion in the same book suggests they should be, they send out conflicting moral messages. By creating this juxtaposition and resulting conflict, Valerius presents the episode as a striking illustration of two key features that are characteristic of sites of exemplarity more generally: indeterminacy of meaning and moral controversy.21 In the two versions the story is told from two different viewpoints and with different moral emphasis. The first version appears in the foreign section of the chapter on bravery. Our Taurea is the hero, the exemplum of courage, and he is prepared to sacrifice his wife and children in order to draw attention to the cruelty of Fulvius: Ille quoque ex pluribus corporibus in unum magna cum admiratione Calibus cruor confusus est. In quo oppido cum Fulvius Flaccus Campanam perfidiam principes civitatis ante tribunal suum capitali supplicio adficiendo vindicaret, litterisque a senatu acceptis finem poenae eorum statuere cogeretur, ultro se ei T. Iubellius Taurea Campanus obtulit et quam potuit clara voce ‘quoniam’ inquit, ‘Fulvi, tanta cupiditate hauriendi sanguinis nostri teneris, quid cessas in me cruentam securem destringere, ut gloriari possis fortiorem aliquanto virum quam ipse es tuo iussu esse interemptum?’ Eo deinde libenter id se fuisse facturum, nisi senatus voluntate impediretur, adfirmante, ‘at me’ inquit, ‘cui nihil patres conscripti praeceperunt, aspice, oculis quidem tuis gratum, animo vero tuo maius opus edentem’, protinusque interfecta coniuge ac liberis gladio incubuit. Quem illum virum putemus fuisse, qui suorum ac sua caede testari voluit se Fuluii crudelitatem suggillare quam senatus misericordia uti maluisse? 20 21

Morstein-Marx (2004) 73. On these characteristics see Langlands (2018) 141–65 and 258–90.

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rebecca langlands Also at Cales that gore from many bodies was mingled together to great amazement. In that town, when Fulvius Flaccus was avenging Campanian treachery by inflicting capital punishment on the leaders of that city before his own tribunal, and had received letters from the senate forcing him to put an end to their punishment, the Campanian Vibellius Taurea offered himself to him voluntarily, and said, as loudly as he could: ‘Since, Fulvius, you are seized with such a great desire to drain our blood, what is holding you back from wielding your bloody axe against me, so that you may boast that a man somewhat braver than you has been killed on your orders?’ Then when Fulvius asserted he would have done so readily if he were not impeded by the will of the senate, Vibellius replied to him: ‘Watch me, whom the conscript fathers have not so instructed, carry out an act that while it is a welcome sight for your eyes, is yet greater than your own spirit.’ And straightaway, having killed his wife and children, he fell upon his sword. What kind of man shall we consider him, who wanted to bear witness with the blood of his family and his own blood that he would rather jeer at Fulvius’ cruelty than exploit the mercy of the senate? (Val. Max. 3.2.ext.1)

Taurea is represented as destroying the very things that are most valuable to him – his family and his life – in order, as Valerius interprets it, to draw attention to Fulvius’ cruelty and to demonstrate his own great spirit. Valerius’ concluding flourish asks rhetorically ‘What sort of man should we think him, who wanted to bear witness with the slaughter of his family and of himself that he would rather revile the cruelty of Fulvius than take advantage of the senate’s mercy?’ (Val. Max. 3.2.ext.1). Later in Book 3, however, the same story is told in the Roman section of chapter 3.8 on the virtue of constantia (consistency or staying power). This time Fulvius is the hero, refusing to give in to the senate’s demands for mercy and sticking to his guns: Sed dum exempla propositae rei persequor, latius mihi circumspicienti ante omnia se Fulvi Flacci constantia offert. Capuam fallacibus Hannibalis promissis Italiae regnum nefaria defectione pacisci persuasam, armis occupaverat. Tam deinde culpae hostium iustus aestimator quam speciosus victor Campanum senatum impii decreti auctorem funditus delere constituit. Itaque catenis onustum in duas custodias, Teanam Calenamque divisit, consilium exsecuturus, cum ea peregisset, quorum administrandorum citerior esse necessitas videbatur. Rumore autem de senatus mitiore sententia orto, ne debitam poenam scelerati effugerent, nocte admisso equo Teanum contendit interfectisque qui ibi adservabantur e vestigio Cales transgressus est, perseverantiae suae opus executurus, et iam deligatis ad palum hostibus litteras a patribus conscriptis nequiquam salutares Campanis accepit: in

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sinistra enim eas manu, sicut erant traditae, reposuit ac iusso lictore lege agere tum demum aperuit, postquam illis obtemperari non poterat. But while I am searching for examples of my theme, as I cast my gaze around widely, the perseverance of Fulvius Flaccus suggests itself before all others. When Capua had been persuaded by the deceitful promises of Hannibal to undertake their nefarious defection from Roman rule, he had conquered them by force. Then, as righteous a judge of the enemy’s guilt as he was a glorious victor, he decided to destroy the Campanian senate which was the original author of the impious decree. Therefore, he had them shackled in chains in two prisons, at Cales and Teana, intending to carry out his plan when he had completed some matters that seemed more pressing. But when a rumour arose that the senate had made a more merciful decision, lest they should escape the punishment they deserved for the crime, he thundered down to Teana through the night on horseback. When the men there had been killed he travelled over to Cales, intending to carry out the task he had determined to do. With the enemies already bound to the stake, he received the letters from the Senate that in vain ordered the Campanians should be spared: he took them in his left hand, just as they had been handed to him, and ordered the lictor to carry out his legal duty, and then at last he opened them, after they could no longer be obeyed. (Val. Max. 3.8.1)

On this version of the story Valerius’ final moralising comment is: ‘With this constancy he surpassed even the glory of his victory, because, if you judge him with the praise shared out accordingly, you will find he is greater in the punishment of Capua than in its capture’ (‘Qua constantia victoriae quoque gloriam antecellit, quia, si eum intra se ipsam partita laude aestimes, maiorem punita Capua quam capta reperias’). By juxtaposing these two versions of the episode within the same book, Valerius conveys a clear sense that the episode means something different depending on perspective. Indeed, it would be possible to read these two versions as representing first a Capuan and then a Roman stance on the same events (significantly, the first version falls within the foreign section of its respective chapter and the second within the Roman section). One might read Valerius’ two versions as conveying the sense that in the end everybody involved in the episode ‘wins’, either through heroic sacrifice or through virtuous triumph. Such awareness of the importance of focalisation and perspective is an important aspect of Valerius’ work and of Roman exemplary ethics more generally.22 We may conclude that this double perspective is written into Roman remembrance of this episode, but it is also possible that the elements of ‘Capuan’ perspective 22

On focalisation and exemplarity, see Langlands (2018) 154–60, 309–14, 326–34.

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reflect an alternative Campanian viewpoint that remembers the episode differently, and represents more positively the Capuan pride and aspirations for autonomy. In his own reworking of the episode in his epic poem about the Punic war, Punica, written several decades after Valerius’s work, Silius Italicus brings out similar themes of double perspective and controversy. Silius takes this set-piece confrontation between Fulvius and Vibellius and re-formulates it on the epic model of the battlefield confrontation between two wellmatched opponents, allowing us to witness the encounter from both sides (Sil. Pun. 13.369–380). The two men deliver matching speeches, with an equal allocation of lines, in which they, as it were, state their cases; this pair of speeches draws on the traditions of both epic poetry and declamation. hic atrox uirtus (nec enim occuluisse probarim spectatum uel in hoste decus) clamore feroci 370 Taurea ‘tune’ inquit ‘ferro spoliabis inultus te maiorem anima, et iusso lictore recisa ignauos cadet ante pedes fortissima ceruix? haud umquam hoc uobis dederit deus.’ inde minaci obtutu toruum contra et furiale renidens 375 bellatorem alacer per pectora transigit ensem. cui ductor: ‘Patriam moriens comitare cadentem. qui nobis animus, quae dextera cuique uiritim, decernet Mauors. tibi, si rebare pudendum iussa pati, licuit pugnanti occumbere letum.’ Then came a deed of horrible bravery, (for I do not approve of hiding attested glory even if it is that of an enemy), as with a fierce yell Taurea said: ‘Will you remain unavenged as you despoil with your sword a life greater than your own, and at the order of the lictor, will the decapitated head of a hero lie at the feet of cowards? Never will the god grant you this.’ And so with menacing aspect, rejoicing wildly and fiercely, he eagerly thrust his warlike sword through his own breast. And the general answered him ‘By dying you are keeping your doomed country company. Mars will judge the bravery and military skill of each of us. You, if you thought it was shameful to succumb to command, could have met your death in battle.’ (Sil. Pun. 13.369–380)

The epic allusions here are to the battlefield exchanges between Mezentius and Orontes in Virgil’s Aeneid 10.739–74423 and through these to the 23

As he dies at the hands of the doomed Mezentius, Orodes tells him defiantly: ‘Your victory over me will not be unavenged; the same fate lies ahead for you – you’ll die on this battlefield too’ (‘non me, quicumque es, inulto victor, nec longum laetabere: te quoque fata prospectant paria atque eadem mox arva tenebis’, Virg. Aen. 10.739–741). Mezentius’ response is the contemptuous: ‘You die now.

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deaths of Patroclus and Hector in the Iliad (16.852–3 and 22.365–6).24 At Pun. 13.370, Vibellius is explicitly an enemy (hostis), but an honourable one (decus), and the epic flavour of the encounter fashions him as a worthy opponent to the Roman. Yet within a frame that recalls earlier epic encounters, Fulvius’ parting shot ‘you could have died fighting’ is particularly wounding: for this exchange does not take place like its epic predecessors on a battlefield, but in a civic context, and, according to an earlier scene in book 13, Vibellius has had his chance to die gloriously while fighting against the Roman general Claudius, whom he challenged to single combat (Pun. 13.143) but he has fled ignominiously from that encounter. Silius here brings together two separate anecdotes that are both found in Livy, where they are not, however, explicitly connected, and in doing so further complicates the character of Taurea.25 As Cowan puts it: ‘His suicide, Capua’s suicide, Capua’s self-destruction is represented here either as an act of atrox uirtus, a decus, or as a futile act of cowardice and bravado masquerading as courage. Silius leaves the question open.’26 However, Fulvius’ comment that Mars will be the final arbiter of each man’s behaviour when it comes to assessing their virtue is piquant. Whereas in the Homeric and Virgilian instances it is the fate of men and the moment of their death that are in the hands of the gods, for Silius it is the moral judgement of their actions. The ability to judge right and wrong is taken away from mortals, so that the readers of the Punica are explicitly left unable to pass judgement one way or another on the protagonists of this encounter. Silius’ reworking of the Homeric and Virgilian tradition here is thus an indication of his interest in bringing a more intense ethical flavour to traditional epic themes, not least through a strong emphasis on the difficulty of making definitive moral judgements. In addition to indicating that the significance of the episode is open to debate, these later treatments by Valerius Maximus and Silius Italicus highlight specific moral anxieties that it may raise. For instance, the initial clash between Fulvius and the Roman senate raises the question of how far (if at all) Fulvius is right to insist on executing the allied leaders, and to attempt to bypass the commands of the senate. The plot of the episode itself makes it clear that he is aware that he will need to follow their decision once it has been made known to him; this is why he refuses to open the

24 25

But let Jupiter decide what he wants to do with me’ (‘nunc morere; ast de me divom pater atque hominum rex/viderit’, Virg. Aen. 10.743–4). Achilles responds, like Mezentius and Fulvius in our passage: ‘You die now; I’ll die when my time comes, whenever that may be’, Hom. Il. 22.365–6. Episodes are at Livy 23.46–7 and 26.15. 26 Cowan (2007) 37.

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message from Rome until the punishment has been carried out. He is not proposing actually to defy the orders of the senate, just to evade them. Next, in philosophical terms the story problematises the virtue of constantia, especially in Valerius’ version, where this is the moral rubric under which the story is related. Is it always right to have confidence in one’s own opinion and to carry on regardless of the disagreement of others? The episode features several motifs that are commonly found in exemplary tales of ancient Rome. On Vibellius’ part these include: the killing of one’s own family members rather than allowing them to fall into the power of someone else, and a willing surrender to tyrannical violence that indicates freedom from tyrannical power.27 On Fulvius’ part they include: steadfast resistance to the persuasions of other Romans and confidence in one’s own decisions, with the courage to persevere with the plan in which one believes.28 Both Valerius Maximus and Silius Italicus bring out the moral complexity – the ‘controversiality’ – of the exemplum in their treatments of it.29 It is highly plausible that this strand of Campanian history might have been remembered very differently in the region itself, as a brave resistance to Roman hegemony and an attempt to assert the rightful status of a rich and powerful region. From the Campanian perspective and in the context of a more local Campanian cultural memory, Vibellius may have been commemorated as a local hero, with the guts to stand up to Roman imperium.30 From these later accounts in Valerius and Silius the story emerges as one that dramatizes some of the troubling aspects of the earlier history of the relations of Rome with towns in Italy. The episode has the 27

28

29

30

A classic instance of this is the killing of Verginia by her father to avoid her falling into the power of Appius Claudius (e.g. Livy 3.44–48, Val. Max. 6.1.2, with others in 6.1), others include Regulus’ submission to torture and execution by the Carthaginians (e.g. Val. Max. 1.1.14, 4.4.6), Mucius Scaevola’s burning of his own hand to deprive Porsenna of his capitulation (Livy 2.12, Val. Max. 3.3 with others in 3.3, including the slave of Tagus smiling as he is tortured to death having avenged his master’s murder at 3.3.ext.7. Often described as the virtue constantia, which Fulvius epitomises in Val. Max. 3.8; other key examples of this quality in the Roman tradition include Fabius Maximus (Ennius Ann. 363–5, Livy 22) and Regulus again (esp. Cic. Off. III and Hor. Odes 3.5). See Langlands (2018) 272–83, 309–21. Cf. Cowan (2007) 37 ‘Note the conflict between the authorial approval given – grudgingly – to Taurea’s action and the dismissive comment of Fulvius, structurally privileged at the close not only of the episode but of the entire Capuan narrative’; Tipping (2010) 43: ‘In his capture, punishment, and purging of Capua at Punica 13.94–380, Fulvius is fair, but certainly by comparison with Marcellus in Punica 14, harsh, and may be tainted with a Herculean madness.’ On controversiality in Roman exemplary ethics see Langlands (2008); Langlands (2018) 258–90, 315–21 and 326–35. There was certainly an independent Campanian tradition of celebrating heroic duels that is attested in wall-paintings from tombs around Capua; see Oakley (1985) esp. 408 on this in relation to the stories of Vibellius and later Bardius.

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capacity to act as a nuanced exemplary tale about the clash between Roman authority and Italian towns that explores issues about imperialism and relations between city and provinces, about imperium and military and diplomatic ethics. As such, it is a typical site of exemplarity, in that it appears to incorporate moral controversy and uncertainty, and to have the capacity to stimulate debate through the juxtaposition of conflicting or contradictory elements that are difficult to reconcile. The individual remediations of the site created by Valerius and Silius bring out a complexity that seems already inherent in this episode and its surrounding site of exemplarity, in the form of the indeterminacy, moral controversy, and odd jarring details that form part of the consensus about it that is transmitted.31 Both the moral complexity and the conflicting traditions of a site of exemplarity are best understood as part of a single heterogeneous site of exemplarity that deploys contradiction and lack of clarity to ethical purpose. This description of sites of exemplarity and their role in Roman cultural memory and in Roman ethics ties nicely into the way that Matthew Fox has expressed the role and nature of memoria in Cicero’s writings: Memoria, therefore, can be seen as a process aimed at producing a particular effect, rather than one determined by a causal process of actual recollection. Such a view of memory is key to the inspirational but flexible manner in which historical exempla function. Apart from the general edification which citation of historical precedent involves, exempla open up the possibilities of argument rather than close them down . . . concrete evidence is, of course, the copious historical exempla in Cicero’s speeches, where there is a clear assumption that history provides a shared system of values through which the orator can seek to promote a consensus within his audience, while at the same time, individual exempla are in effect a constant reinterpretation, or at least a re-presentation of familiar material.32

My suggestion (although without the survival of remediations from that earlier period this is impossible to establish definitively) is that such memory dynamics, particularly indeterminacy and openness to constant reinterpretation, would have been present earlier too, before Cicero’s intervention in Roman thought, within the cultural memory of the Roman republic.33

31 32

On consensus in sites of exemplarity see Langlands (2018) 128–40, 180–1, on the role of jarring details see 201–4, and on indeterminacy 141–65. Fox (2007) 165. 33 Langlands (2018) 227–34.

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Once again, recent scholarship on cultural memory can help to enhance our understanding of this characteristic feature of sites of exemplarity. Laura Basu has argued that it is precisely this kind of inherent conflict and inconsistency within a memory site that keeps a site alive and relevant over time. She writes (in relation to the legend of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly): ‘contestation appears to be an important element in the maintenance of the memory site, arising out of a preoccupation with veracity, but stimulating the production of myth. The myth-making effects can be seen almost as a by-product of the struggle for veracity, whereby the creation of myth is an effect of the “internal proliferation of meaning”.’34 The internal ambiguity of a site of memory is vital to this. The same is true of ancient Roman sites of exemplarity; they are usually controversial in terms of interpretation of the actions of the hero, they are often factually ambiguous, and they are always morally charged.35 Vibellius is alternately viewed as hero and villain, as loyal and brave or as arrogant and disruptive, Fulvius teeters on the boundary between fair and harsh, between steadfast and cruel.36 The drive for constant reworking is related to the quality of historicity – just like the story of Ned Kelly, Roman exempla are events that are represented as really having happened. Even the exempla that are most ‘legendary’ in character are associated with particular historical periods. Importantly, as Basu puts it: ‘“truth” and “myth” are therefore both part of the same medial processes, and paradoxically, the media work together to produce a contested site of memory’.37 Texts such as Valerius Maximus’ and Silius’ treatments of Vibellius can be seen as participating in this process; they provide new accounts of the story that attempt to make sense of its troubling elements, but in doing so they also reconfirm those elements, and even generate new conflicts or uncertainties. Is Vibellius a coward? What is the moral value of his suicide? Is Fulvius’ behaviour representative of an excessively punitive form of imperium? How just or legitimate is his behaviour? The moral controversy is the most ethically significant element of ‘conflict’ within sites of exemplarity, but another significant feature – I believe – is the frequency with which ancient authors seem unable to 34 35 36

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Basu (2009) 150; cf. Wertheim (2009) 167 on a similar contestation around the figure of Anne Frank, Basu (2012). Langlands (2018) 202–5, 258–90. Vibellius is by far the bravest of all the Campanian horsemen longe omnium Campanorum fortissumus eques, who competes with the Roman Claudius in virtus (Livy 23.46; note the term ambigere, to be in doubt or dispute). Cf. Cowan (2007) 37. Basu (2009) 153.

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agree on basic factual details such as the dates of exemplary events or the names of exemplary heroes. The duel between Vibellius and Claudius, for instance, is variously dated to 215 BC (by Livy), 212–211 BC (Appian), and 211 BC (Silius). We may also note that Valerius transposes the first two letters of Taurea’s name, so that our Campanian exemplum becomes ‘Iubellius’. For the modern reader, such lack of certainty about such a fundamental detail can be disconcerting. At first sight it suggests that ancient authors do not have a firm grasp on a historical episode. It is particularly striking when it happens to extremely well-known figures about whom many sources provide lots of detailed information, and where it is at odds with the certainty with which other aspects of a story are conveyed. Yet ancient authors often draw attention to the lack of certainty about names of exemplary figures – it is evidently not perceived by them as an embarrassment. A representative instance of this is found in these lines from Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights. Having related Cato’s version of the exemplary tale of the Roman tribune whose bravery and self-sacrifice during the First Punic War rivalled that of Leonidas, Gellius concludes: Hanc Q. Caedici tribuni virtutem M. Cato tali suo testimonio decoravit. Claudius autem Quadrigarius Annalis tertio non Caedicio nomen fuisse ait, sed Laberio. With such high personal testimony did Marcus Cato honour the bravery of Quintus Caedicius the tribune. But Claudian Quadrigarius, in Annals Book 3, says that his name was not Caedicius, but Laberius. (Gell. NA 3.7)

On this line, Tim Cornell comments: ‘If the episode had been a wellestablished part of the tradition about the First Punic War, commemorated in Naevius and Ennius, or in Fabius Pictor and other early historians, one would expect the hero’s name to have been enshrined for ever.’38 This is a very reasonable comment from a modern scholar of ancient history: one might indeed expect there to be a high level of certainty about basic details surrounding figures from relatively recent history. When the ancient authors are unable to agree on such details it can indeed convey the impression to modern scholars that the figure or episode in question is not well-known or considered historically important. This is especially the case if one is invested in the idea that memory works by preserving traces of original events – the ‘unbroken chain’ model of remembering, where details of past events are safely preserved over time, often in written accounts or other monuments 38

Cornell (2013) vol. III 122.

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which are able to transcend the limitations of personal and communicative memory.39 This model implies that at the original time of the deed, the name of the protagonist and the key details of the event were well-known, but that over time these may be forgotten or confused if they are not carefully and consistently preserved (‘enshrined’) in cultural memory. However, the frequency with which this confusion about names (and other basic details) occurs among ancient sources, and the fact that it is regularly emphasised by the sources (as in the case of Aulus Gellius, above), suggests that it is in fact a significant, positive feature of sites of exemplarity. Moreover, it is found in connection with some of the most well-known and widely celebrated figures of Roman legend and history, not only the more obscure figures such as Vibellius Taurea of whom scarce traces remain.40 Such lack of certainty does not merely reflect a lack of clear knowledge about the past. Rather it is what Ann Rigney has described as a ‘procreative’ aspect of Roman cultural memory, completely compatible with a cherished and well-maintained site of exemplarity.41 It represents a form of niggling imperfection in the tradition, of the kind that keeps the tradition alive and under constant renovation. Returning to Livy’s account of the Vibellius episode, we can see that his work is engaging with the site of exemplarity in just such a fashion. Livy’s text itself offers multiple versions, as we shall see below at page 277, yet it is just one remediation of a heterogeneous site with which he and his audience were very likely already familiar. His account engages creatively with the existing moral complexity of the site just as the later versions of Valerius and Silius do, and, like theirs, partly draws its meaning from that site. Not only does Livy relate more than one version of the event, but he follows this by explicitly considering various different explanations for the troubling behaviour of both Fulvius and Vibellius that have also been transmitted within the site of exemplarity.42 For instance, it is potentially worrying that where the two Roman leaders held divergent opinions about how to respond to the situation, it was Fulvius’ brutal plan that prevailed, and that Claudius was unable to restrain him from executing the Campanian leaders. Livy reports two alternative suggestions for why this 39 40

41 42

Langlands (2018) 195–201. Another indicative case discussed in Langlands (2018) 207–13 is that of the legendary hero of early Rome usually known as Mucius Scaevola, whose cognomen is variously identified in the ancient tradition as Cordus, Scaevola and Opigonos. Plutarch draws attention to the uncertainty at Plut. Pop. 17. Cf. Rigney (2012) 78–106 on the ‘ambivalence’ in memory sites that helps to keep them ‘procreative’. For the exploration of motive as a means of reinterpreting exemplary stories see Langlands (2018) 108–9, 143–60, 260–6, 308–9.

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might have been. First, some have suggested that Claudius did not exert restraint because he was dead: Quia et quod ad supplicium attinet Campanorum et pleraque alia de Flacci unius sententia acta erant, mortuum Ap. Claudium sub deditionem Capuae quidam tradunt . . . Because everything relating to the punishment of the Capuans and many other things were done by the decision of Flaccus alone, some relate that Appius Claudius died just before the surrender of Capua . . . (Livy 26.16)

Taurea’s exceptional self-sacrifice is also explained away by some: hunc quoque ipsum Tauream neque sua sponte uenisse Cales neque sua manu interfectum, sed dum inter ceteros ad palum deligatur, quia parum inter strepitus exaudiri possent quae uociferaretur silentium fieri Flaccum iussisse; tum Tauream illa quae ante memorata sunt dixisse, uirum se fortissimum ab nequaquam pari ad uirtutem occidi; sub haec dicta iussu proconsulis praeconem ita pronuntiasse: ‘lictor, uiro forti adde uirgas et in eum primum lege age.’ Some say that Taurea did not come to Cales willingly and that he was not slain by his own hand, but while he was being tied up to a stake with the rest of them, because they could hardly hear amidst the shouting what was being said, Flaccus ordered there to be silence; and it was then that Taurea spoke those words that were cited above, that he was an extremely brave man who was not being killed by his equal in courage; to these words, by the order of the proconsul, the herald announced the following: ‘lictor, flog this brave man and inflict the legal punishment on him first.’ (Livy 26.16)

Livy also reports the following (perhaps in an attempt to mitigate Fulvius’ behaviour): Lectum quoque senatus consultum priusquam securi feriret quidam auctores sunt, sed quia adscriptum in senatus consulto fuerit si ei uideretur integram rem ad senatum reiceret, interpretatum esse quid magis e re publica duceret aestimationem sibi permissam. Some authorities say that the decree of the senate was also read before he beheaded them; but that, because in the decree of the senate it was added that, if he saw fit, he should refer the decision to the verdict of the senate, he interpreted it that they allowed him to decide which course he thought most in the interests of the state. (Livy 26.16)

Such inconsistency within sites of exemplarity as Livy reveals here is precisely what drives forward constant revision of the site, so that each remediation strives to produce a new solution to the problems the site

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generates. Such innovation is in addition to the amendments that arise from cultural changes that take place over time and ensure changing interpretative contexts. As a result, sites of exemplarity are constantly changing – often imperceptibly from remediation to remediation, so that shifts only become apparent when one takes a longer view. However, unfortunately for the modern scholar, sites of exemplarity are also prone to undergoing dramatic changes which are never acknowledged at all in the ancient sources. A striking example is once again the case of Mucius, which I have elaborated elsewhere.43 By the early first century AD, the iconic central detail of this story is that of the hero destroying his own right hand in Porsenna’s hearth. Livy tells us that it was this extraordinary act that won him the nickname Scaevola (“left-handed”) by which he is commonly known: (‘who was afterwards endowed with the cognomen Scaevola because of the destruction of his right hand’, cui postea Scaevolae a clade dextrae manus cognomen inditum, Livy 2.13.2). As the century progresses the mere mention of flame or fire was enough to conjure up Mucius’ story. Yet Cicero never mentions this episode when he refers to the heroic Mucius, and he never uses the cognomen ‘Scaevola’ despite his close familiarity with the contemporary Scaevolae clan. It seems that the story of the burning hand only appears for the first time in Livy’s account, written only a couple of decades after Cicero’s last reference to Mucius. Indeed it may have been Livy that introduced this arresting detail into the tradition, where it swiftly took hold of the popular imagination and became central. Thus the site of exemplarity surrounding Mucius seems to have undergone dramatic rupture around the beginning of the first century AD. The site of exemplarity associated with Mucius with which Cicero was engaging may well have been very different to the one referred to regularly from the Augustan period onwards. We are all familiar with the claim that cultural memory is created in and for the present. Cultural memory does not operate, as it appears to, by simply preserving traces of the past, or by handing down knowledge about that past through the generations in an unbroken chain. It is, rather, an active process, constituting performance in the here-and-now of the present and of its relation to the past (or, better, to a constructed past).44 As Erll and Rigney write: ‘As the word itself suggests, “remembering” is better seen as an active engagement with the past, as performative rather than as 43 44

Langlands (2018) 206–17 with a full discussion of the possible sources and development of the story. For a helpful articulation of this idea see the introduction to Erll and Rigney (2009), especially 1–2; see also Rigney (2008) and Taylor (2003).

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reproductive. It is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories.’45 On the other hand, every culture is of course invested in seeing their community’s cultural memory as an unbroken chain of memory that traces directly back to an original event which is being commemorated.46 A community deliberately presents every memory site as an unbroken chain of memory, which has been passed on through the generations, carefully keeping as pristine as possible a memory that stems from an original event in the past. This is the explicit aim of many acts of public communication such as war memorials. When it comes to personal memory, we need to feel confident about our own specific memories of the past, even though we may be aware at the same time in the abstract that our personal memory is constantly remade and remodelled, so that our memories are continually erased and replaced by us as we move through time.47 While we may recognise that memory is continually created in the present, it is very hard to hold this knowledge in our mind when it comes to our own memories; the whole system of memory relies on us trusting, at least to some extent, our own memories. There is an analogous tension at the heart of cultural memory. Even as communities and the individuals within them ‘remember’ and reshape the past to serve the needs of the present, they are also invested in believing in that past, and believing that it has been preserved. Often this important myth of preservation is woven convincingly into the story itself. In conclusion, recent scholarship exploring the mediation and remediation of sites of memory has enabled me to come to a better understanding of certain puzzling features of Roman exempla as they appear in Latin literature of the late Republic and early empire. These include their inevitably controversial nature, the frequent uncertainty over basic details such as names, the coexistence of consensus and indeterminacy, and the evidence of the rupture and change that has taken place in many of the story traditions, even when they have continued to be well-known. Even the most well-known and widely cited exempla are remembered and transmitted as ambiguous and controversial, and are constantly being reworked and reinterpreted. Awareness of this inherent complexity and dynamism of Roman cultural memory will affect our ability to interpret the brief references that we find 45 47

Erll and Rigney (2009) 2. 46 Langlands (2018) 195. On ‘memory reconsolidation’ and the dynamics of personal memory see the chapters in Alberini (2013).

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in so many texts from ancient Rome. We cannot rely on a site of exemplarity being the same in Cicero’s day as it was a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later. We certainly cannot rely on Livy to provide us with the full interpretative framework for deciphering brief references found in his near contemporary Cicero (although since Livy’s was such an influential work we can at least make an assumption that his version will have been influential on later writers and in shaping the site, in the same way that literary works can be on modern sites of memory).48 When it comes to the period of the Republic, and the decades and centuries before Cicero and Livy were writing, we have to be especially careful not to retroject details that we find there, and not to imagine that the stories trace a continuous line back to the date in which they are set, or that they have always existed in the same or similar form. We need to be very cautious indeed about any ambition to reconstruct what sites of exemplarity may have looked like in the periods before Cicero was writing by examining the traces in later literature. This dangerous process is precisely the one I have undertaken here with the case of Vibellius, where the treatments of Valerius Maximus and Silius are used to argue that the story to which Cicero was making reference to in his speeches, was a morally complex exemplum incorporating multiple perspectives. There is no guarantee that the meanings and the details attached to this figure in the imperial works of Valerius and Silius did not originate in the first century AD, just as the burning hand did with Mucius. Yet in order to make the most of the references to cultural memory that we do possess dating from this earlier Republican period (including fragments from Roman literature as well as the inscriptions, reliefs, and coins that have been examined by other contributors to this volume), we do need to extrapolate the complex sites of exemplarity with which they are likely to have been engaging, and to speculate about the communities for whom they might have been meaningful. While we exercise caution, I propose that we ought to explore the possibility that the controversiality and moral richness that can be seen in later periods was also part of sites of exemplarity both in Cicero’s day and in earlier periods.49 Further work remains to be done on the question whether evidence of this can be found in the extant literary and material remains of the Roman Republican period. 48 49

On this, see Rigney (2012) on the influence of Walter Scott on cultural memory. Cf. Langlands (2018) 226–34.

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chapter 16

The Festival of the Lupercalia as a Vehicle of Cultural Memory in the Roman Republic* Krešimir Vuković

The early history of Rome has long been subjected to various forms of criticism. I am told that public-school boys in the United Kingdom used to read whole books of Livy’s history, which they (in turn) were told was the work of his imagination, and this view has become a communicative memory still propagated by many historians. This unstable construct began to shake under the weight of Ogilvie’s voluminous commentary (and its continuation by Oakley).1 A serious modern reconsideration began with Tim Cornell’s monograph The Beginnings of Rome in which he argued for the internal consistency of the traditions on early Rome.2 Cornell made the case that the main body of narrative is likely to go back a long way and shows a structure that could not simply be invented by historians of the late Republic and early Principate. Given that Roman historiography started only in the second half of the third century BC, there is a gap of several centuries between this and the regal period (traditionally dated 753–509 BC).3 Accordingly, if there was any earlier material, it must have been transmitted by means other than formal historiography, and oral tradition seems like the obvious candidate. However, this hypothesis raises more questions than it answers: How exactly was this material transmitted, and how much of it was changed in the process? Who was responsible for maintaining memories going back to the regal period? Are we actually able to demonstrate that particular institutions are centuries old, and, if so, how did they change in different periods of Roman history? This chapter will attempt to answer some of these questions using the festival of the Lupercalia as a case study. I will argue that this festival served *

1

I would like to thank the volume editors and organizers of the conference Cultural Memory in Roman Republic at King’s College London in 2016, Martin Dinter and Charles Guérin, for their diligent work and advice. The chapter also profited from the discussion with conference attendees and feedback from the anonymous readers. All translations of ancient sources are my own. Ogilvie (1965); Oakley (1998). 2 Cornell (1995). 3 See FRHist 2.160–78.

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as a vehicle of cultural memory in a double capacity: first, it involved large segments of the population in a ritual that invoked memories of Romulus and of the regal period; second, it required the presence of ritual specialists who were bound by certain scruples that carried ancient memories. While the former aspect involved the populace of Rome in an act of collective memory in a wider sense, the latter was restricted to religious specialists and carried a form of cultural memory that can only be revealed using crosscultural comparative evidence. The function of religious festivals as vehicles of cultural memory is generally well known and its Roman side has been well explored, most notably by Rodriguez Mayorgas. She points out that collective memory at the Lupercalia was enacted through ritual performance and the festival’s lieu de mémoire, the cave Lupercal.4 The very continuity of both sacred space and religious performance ensured that a memory of early Rome was evoked through the ritual proceedings. This memory was transmitted in the form of a foundation myth or myth of origin, which is typical of early cultures.5 Romulus and Remus were the prototypical figures associated with the origins of Rome and the nudity of the running Luperci reminded the populace of the youth of the twins. Almost all the sources that mention the Lupercalia directly link the ritual with the adolescence of the twins and their pastoral escapades such as cattle raiding. A number of Roman festivals were in some way associated with Romulus, but only the Parilia and the Lupercalia are specifically tied to the foundation of Rome. The circuit that the running Luperci made around the Palatine Hill corresponds to the limit of the Palatine pomerium, a ritual boundary that Romulus is said to have ploughed, and Varro explicitly calls the Lupercalia a purification of the most ancient Palatine city.6 The first extensive evidence on the festival comes from the late Republic, mostly in the form of reports on the celebration in February 44 BC, when Caesar was famously offered a diadem by Mark Antony, acting as captain of the Luperci. In the Philippics, Cicero gives the only original account, which is largely followed by a number of historians writing in the imperial period. Cicero presents the event as his own memory and makes a claim to veracity and senatorial authority. However, his account comes in the context of a biased invective against Antony in which Cicero seeks to portray him as a tyrant and a traitor to the Republic. Already, the main 4 5 6

Rodriguez Mayorgas (2007) 42–7, 63–7 and (2010) 100–1. See also Pfeilschifter (2009) 109–39. See Assmann (2011) 34–9 and also Galinsky (2015) 13–14. Varro Ling. 6.34. On the pomerium see Coarelli (2012) 15–29. For the ritual circuit see Vuković (2018) 37–60.

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evidence for the event only provides a skewed perspective, which is mediated by the views of the famous orator. Erll and Rigney have recently analysed the concept of mediation as central to the workings of cultural memory: memory is shaped by the means of its transmission and takes different forms depending on the nature of the medium.7 In our case the Lupercalia celebration of 44 BC is mediated by means of Cicero’s speech, which becomes central to all later accounts and our understanding of the event. The author’s claim to have experienced the actions of the day firsthand is a frequent device that aims to give his account an air of historicity.8 Nevertheless, it also adds a mythical dimension for the modern readers as we are far removed from Cicero’s own time. This dislocation also partly applies to his Roman audience, many of whom could not claim the same sort of proximity to the event as the senator and for whom the last days of Caesar (already in the process of becoming a god at the time of Cicero’s writing) were slowly taking the shape of myth. However, the ‘social life’ of a memory, which implies that it cannot live outside the social context in which it is transmitted, is as important as the process of mediation.9 The speech’s audience has a crucial role to play in the memory that the speech seeks to transmit. Cicero could place emphasis on particular aspects of the event (and we shall see that he did) but complete fabrication was out of the question: the speech was published and circulated and the Lupercalia was one of the most popular city festivals, attended by countless citizens from all classes of society. Accordingly, gross misrepresentation was out of the question. This is a summary of the scene that Cicero describes: Caesar, dressed in a purple robe, is sitting in a golden chair crowned with a golden crown (which did not yet signify royal power). Antony climbs up the rostra to offer him a diadem, the sign of Hellenistic kingship, which he refuses. This seems to be accompanied by a form of proskynesis, as Antony throws himself at Caesar’s feet and then addresses the crowds gathered in the Forum naked (in a loincloth). We have no idea what he says, but Caesar refuses the diadem and Cicero has the whole of the Forum groan in anguish at the mere sight of it.10

Various scholarly opinions have been advanced as to what Caesar wanted to achieve by staging this spectacle. However, we will never know this, not least because memories of this day were closely tied to the traumatic memory of Caesar’s assassination which it preceded by a mere month. 7 10

8 9 Erll and Rigney (2009). Basu (2009) 152. See the studies in Erll and Rigney (2009). Cf. Cic. Phil. 2.84–87, with Ramsey (2007b) 282–9.

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Memories can reinforce each other to such an extent that they become entangled. Accordingly, recalling one immediately recalls the other. We will soon explore this further by analysing episodes that preceded the account of the Lupercalia. First, however, we need to contextualize the event in the political atmosphere that marked the end of the Republic. There are several indications that Caesar had engaged with the Lupercalia previously, which suggests that he did stage the event. He added a third group to the two traditional colleges of the Luperci and appointed his closest collaborator, Antony, as their captain.11 Caesar’s regal dress and his convenient position on the rostra also support the view that this was a premeditated, concerted effort. Considering the difficulty of Caesar’s situation in those final months of his life, his most likely intention was to stage an ostentatious refusal of kingship. The Lupercalia was celebrated on the 15 February (a month before the Ides of March) when long-standing tensions between the senate and the dictator reached a critical point.12 Caesar’s position of permanent dictator (dictator in perpetuum) had only recently been awarded. However, this was not the only anomaly in his relation to the Republican constitution and the senatorial establishment. The senate also voted in a number of honours, some of which Caesar refused but many of which he accepted or even encouraged. Dio Cassius and Plutarch wondered as to how far these were meant as genuine honours and as a form of flattery as opposed to extravagant attempts to make Caesar unpopular and repugnant.13 The senate itself consisted of a varied body of individuals without a single aim and many of its members found it difficult to position themselves in relation to ‘the one who holds all power’, as Cicero dubbed Caesar.14 Cicero’s own Caesarian speeches show that these tensions were brewing from at least as far back as his delivery of Pro Marcello (in 46 BC) with its notable beginning diuturni silentii (‘of a long silence’) stressing his reluctance to speak and his praise of Caesar’s clemency (clementia), capped with a grim memento mori at the end: Caesar must also die and others will shape the memory of his role in the Republic.15 These other memory-makers to whom Cicero is referring obviously included the senate. Thus, in the end Caesar yielded to the senate by recalling Marcellus, although he had every reason to hate him. The air grew thicker in the following year after Caesar’s victory at Munda when the senate voted in the greatest number of honours: Caesar 11 12 15

Dio 45.30.2. Suet. Iul. 76.1 only says that the Luperci Iuliani were added as one of his honours. See my discussion below on p. 287. See Luke (2012). 13 Plut. Caes. 57.3; Dio 44.7. 14 Cic. Ad Fam. 9.16. Cic. Marc. 21–3 and 25–33.

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was given tribunician sacrosanctity, and awarded the titles of permanent imperator, liberator, parens patriae, sole censor for life, and dictator in perpetuum. The latter caused the most controversy as, in Rawson’s words, it was ‘the final slamming of the door on Republican hopes’.16 All this gave Caesar unprecedented power and he was essentially a king in everything but the name.17 Smaller incidents noted by later historians could indicate that this was understood by many, not just Cicero. In January 44 BC, on his ceremonious return from the Alban festival, Caesar was hailed as king (rex) to which he replied he was ‘Caesar’ not ‘rex’. That same winter someone crowned one of his statues with a diadem and when the tribunes arrested the man, Caesar had the sacrosanct plebeian representatives deposed, according to Suetonius, because they had deprived him of the glory of refusing kingship.18 Both these episodes are transmitted in imperial sources and may be later narrative elaborations partly constructed after the Lupercalia incident to build up the plot leading up to Caesar’s assassination. All our records of Caesar’s final days are tinged with the memory of his untimely death. Cicero even starts his final passage on the Lupercalia reminding his audience of this fatal event.19 The stories became entangled in the larger framework of Caesar’s assassination creating a narrative that seeks to pull together many different threads. As Rothberg has shown, memories are not unequivocal and competing but multidirectional and interactive.20 Caesar’s assassination was so central in any account of his demise that it naturally shaped the recall of earlier events. It thus acted as a sort of dispositif, pulling a variety of disparate elements into the larger narrative.21 Whatever happened in January needed to be reinterpreted in the light of major events that marked February and March of 44 BC. Nevertheless, subjective as the accounts may be, they fit the historical evidence that indicates the complexities of Caesar’s uneasy situation and the fact that he had to pronounce on it. 16 17 18

19

20

21

See Rawson (1994) 424–67 (citation at 463). See Eckert’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of the terms dictator and rex. According to Suet. Iul . 79.1, this happened on his return from the Feriae Latinae. Other sources present it as a separate episode, but disagree on whether there was one statue or two: Appian B Civ. 2.108.449; Plut. Ant. 12.7 and Caes. 61.8; Dio 44.9.2; Nic. Dam. Vit. Caes. 69. See Pelling (2011) 455–6. Cic. Phil. 2.86: ‘Quid indignius quam vivere eum qui imposuerit diadema, cum omnes fateantur iure interfectum esse qui abiecerit?’ (‘What is more unbecoming than that he who put on the diadem lives while everyone confesses that the one who rejected it was rightly killed?’). Rothberg (2015) 16 on the Holocaust and postcolonial movement writes: ‘the content of a memory has no intrinsic meaning but takes on meaning precisely in relationship to other memories in a network of associations’. I am using this term in the sense developed by Basu, see below at pp. 287–8.

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As one of the most popular festivals, the Lupercalia, attended by crowds of onlookers and participants from all layers of society, was in many ways an ideal time and place to make a statement. Both the senate and the people would openly witness Caesar’s actions up on the rostra. Even historians who accuse Caesar of royal aspiration describe his refusal as threefold, with Antony offering the diadem three times only for it to be rejected ostentatiously each time in turn. Perhaps this is why Cicero uses the iterative imperfect tense in his description.22 In any case, in the end, Caesar had the diadem sent to the Capitol, confirming Jupiter as the only king in Rome, and had his refusal officially inscribed in the Fasti. The act of writing is a particularly potent form of memory, not least because the inscription was set up on the Capitoline, the hill that was the seat of divine power, brimming with inscriptions and statues of the great ancestors.23 This act of Caesar’s makes the option of refusal more likely than the other two options, either that Caesar actually wanted to be made king (a taboo in Republican constitution), or that he staged this as an experiment (as Plutarch suggests)24 to gauge the mood of the people and see if they would approve of him accepting the diadem. There were certainly other reasons why the Lupercalia was chosen as an occasion to make a statement about kingship. In order to understand this, we must also look at Caesar’s relationship with other events and his honours that carried royal associations: among the many statues that were erected in his honour, one was placed in the temple of Quirinus, and bore the remarkable title deo invicto (to the invincible god). Another statue was placed on the Capitol among the seven kings of Rome and that of Brutus. Caesar was also given the privilege of riding in a chariot in the city, which was otherwise forbidden to anyone but the triumphator. Weinstock argued that this was a regal attribute, and the same goes for the depiction of Caesar’s head on coins in 44 BC, which had never before been done for a living person, but which was established practice for the early kings of Rome as well as sundry Hellenistic rulers.25 In addition, Caesar’s house received a pediment, a trait usually reserved for temples and regal palaces. One might dispute particular points in Weinstock’s argument, as well as his great reliance on Dio, but there is no doubt that many of Caesar’s honours clearly evoked the early kings, not least Romulus.26 22 23 25 26

Cic. Phil. 2.84: ‘Tu diadema imponebas cum plangore populi; ille cum plausu reiciebat’ (‘You were putting on the crown to public groans, he was rejecting it to applause’). See Geiger (2008) 27–30. 24 Plut. Caes. 61.7. Weinstock (1971) 273–80 (with references). Quinctius Flamininus issued a golden coin with his portrait but this was in Greece, not in Rome. See RRC 458. For criticism see North’s (1975) 171–7 review of Weinstock.

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Caesar’s identification with Romulus perfectly fitted his programme to present himself as the new founder of Rome, one who readily manipulated existing structures and current associations for his own benefit. Quirinus, the deified Romulus, was the model according to which Caesar sought to establish his own deification, although he did not foresee that the mythical model would be followed in the manner of his death.27 Caesar had Antony appointed as his priest (flamen) and also the magister of a new Luperci college, Luperci Iuliani.28 Because this festival was tied to the figure of Romulus and the city’s foundation, it provided a further link in the chain of actions serving to portray Caesar as Rome’s new founder, a new Romulus. The establishing of the Luperci Iuliani tapped into the very core of Rome’s foundation legend in which the two Luperci colleges represent the groups of Romulus and Remus. It cannot be incidental that this role was also evoked at the festival of the Parilia when Caesar’s victory at Munda was commemorated on the traditional birthday of the city of Rome.29 Caesar’s statue was carried in procession along with the statue of Quirinus in the same way that the new Luperci Iuliani ran alongside the old Fabiani and Quinctiliani. By inserting himself into the traditional associations evoked by these festivals, Caesar showed that he understood memories were pliable and could be reconstructed with a view to present circumstances. Of course, not everyone agreed to this reshaping of cultural memory. After Caesar’s death we never hear of the Luperci Iuliani again, in either the literary or the epigraphic record. It would seem that when Augustus revived the festival, it was an act of selective memory: he chose to forget an embarrassing incident in the Forum involving his father and a crown so close to his assassination. As we have seen, Caesar exploited a festival that traced its mythical origins to the foundation of the city and the founding figures of Romulus and Remus. In this sense the Lupercalia acted as a node of mythical relations based around events that led back to the founder king. In other words, the festival was a lieu de mémoire, a stable point in the Roman ritual calendar. Nevertheless, it evoked mythical memories, the content of which was subject to (re-)interpretation and (re-)negotiation. Recently, Basu has pointed out that we need more specific terms to address Nora’s old category of lieu de mémoire and proposed dispositif, a term used by Foucault and Deleuze to describe a network of interrelated elements and the contingent 27 28 29

According to one version of Romulus’ death, the king was killed by senators on Campus Martius. Iuliani, not ‘Iulii’ as many erroneously write. For this and the epigraphic evidence on the Luperci see Vuković (2016) 251–60. Weinstock (1971) 184–6. Caesar was not yet back in the city to orchestrate this himself but advance expressions of interest to one of his aides cannot be excluded.

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relations between them.30 Basu imports this term into the discourse of memory studies to describe the diverse range of responses that tend to cluster around (controversial) historical figures. She lists three main features of a dispositif: first, it is a system of discursive relations (such as power and knowledge) which constitute subjectivities; second, and this is a definition coined by Foucault, a dispositif responds to an urgent need, such as the creation of mental illness in response to a part of the population that was seen as burdensome to a mercantilist economy; and third, the term dispositif ‘is a historical formation, and the relations that compose it change over time’.31 This terminology is most useful for our analysis of the Lupercalia because the festival acts as a dispositif in all three aspects that Basu identifies. Its special role in the Roman calendar gives it a meaning beyond the mundane and provides its participants with a set of subjective roles that constitute forms of power and connect them to the mythic figures of the Roman past. Caesar, Antony, Cicero, the senate, and the crowd (and the crown) all play different roles in the Lupercalia and create a varied set of different interpretations (from Cicero, later historians, the conspirators, the crowd, etc.), the subjectivity of which expands as time moves on. At the same time the festival responds to an urgent need on the part of Caesar (to define his position), the senate, and the people (to take a stance in relation to Caesar’s unprecedented power) each observing the festival from their subjective positions. Finally, the historical associations which the Lupercalia evokes or rather the memories which it triggers are not set in stone but subject to re-negotiation and re-interpretation just like the figure of Romulus himself (the great founder but also the great king). The sensitive nature of a dispositif consisting of a series of subjective and fluctuating relations means that it cannot be ascribed any definitive meaning. Caesar’s mistake was to overlook the full dispositive range of the Lupercalia: his apparel and position on the rostra was consistent with his attempts to align himself with Romulus. However, his refusal to be crowned was a statement that underestimated the evocative richness of the festival in which the roles of Romulus (as both founder and king) could be easily conflated and which was interpreted freely by a range of other subjects in ways that suited their purpose (most notably the conspirators and later Cicero). Gilles Deleuze stresses the relational aspect of dispositif which he sees as a multilinear ensemble of lines that link it up to other concepts and institutions, drawing them closer together but also distancing them at intervals.32 The Lupercalia had this sort of relation to the institution of 30 31

Basu (2009), 139–56. In her case the historical figure in question is that of Ned Kelly. Basu (2009), 143. 32 Deleuze (1992) 159–68.

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the flamen Dialis, a priestly figure of great antiquity. Caesar was able to initiate a reform of the calendar as pontifex maximus (‘chief priest’, a title that appears on his coinage more than any of his magistracies).33 This implies that he was a religious specialist with access to pontifical books and traditions that were transmitted as memories for centuries before Rome existed as a city. This claim may seem bombastic and exaggerated, but I argue that a case can be made for it, specifically when it comes to the Lupercalia. While the foundational aspect of the Lupercalia was current in the period of the late Republic and thus constitutes what Jan and Aleida Assmann call ‘functional’ memory, as pontifex maximus Caesar no doubt also had access to other latent memories of the festival which tied it to the figure of flamen Dialis (a position vacant since Merula died in 87 BC).34 We cannot possibly ascertain the extent of these memories nor how widely known they were in the late Republic but these two aspects do not exclude each other. Though the office of the flamen was vacant the dispositive relation between it and the Lupercalia established a line of memory that could be evoked in the late Republic. After all, memories are not immutable but multidirectional entities with various aspects in constant dialogue with each other. To cite but one example, Dumézil claimed that the Lupercalia was originally a festival of royal inauguration and that Caesar seized on this long-lost association when he climbed up the rostra in royal apparel. Space restricts me from engaging with this argument, which seems to me unconvincing.35 However, another of Dumézil’s ideas seems much more fruitful when it comes to ancient memories of the Lupercalia, and this is the relationship between the actions of the Luperci, and the priest of Jupiter, flamen Dialis. According to Jan Assmann, the transmission of cultural memory is frequently a task given to religious specialists who can faithfully preserve a vast amount of detailed information through countless generations of their religious order. An obvious example he cites is the Vedas, the sacred books of India, orally transmitted through the millennia by the Brahmins.36 Dumézil on his part has adduced convincing arguments and showcased parallels between the flamen Dialis and the Brahmin.37 Although linguists prevaricate on whether the two words can be related 33 34

35 37

See Jehne (1987) 163–85. See Assmann (2010), who uses the terms ‘functional’ versus ‘storage memory’ which do not fit well with our interpretation of the Lupercalia as dispositif. Memories are not passive bits of information which are simply stored and retrived but rather made up of dynamic sets of relations which are in constant (re)negotiation. See Erll (2018a) 305–24. For a discussion see Vuković (2015) 256–67 (with references). 36 Assmann (2011) 39–40. See Dumézil (1935) and Dumézil (1988).

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in terms of phonetic laws that regulate the established relationship between Latin and Sanskrit, when we look at the religious scruples that these specialists had to observe, there is little doubt that a common origin needs to be ascribed to the Indian and the Roman figure.38 The number of parallels is striking and they are specific enough to exclude the possibility of an anthropological universal (let alone borrowing). The category of the dog as an impure animal may be a typological widespread trait of world religions, but having as many as nine different matching traits related to specific taboos on both sides (oath, army, horse, funeral, alcohol, raw meat, oil, nudity, homicide) can hardly indicate anything but a common origin between the Indian and the Roman religious official (see Table 16.1). Although most classicists are averse to considering such comparanda and Dumézil’s work is not en vogue nowadays the flamen Dialis’ bizarre taboos readily fit Assmann’s model of cultural memory as entrusted to specialists. It is fascinating to observe the contrast between the taboos binding the flamen and the actions and aspects of the Luperci (the first and third column in the table below). While the flamen may never be completely naked, the Luperci are most noted for their nudity.39 He must not touch or mention a dog or goat while these are the very animals that the Luperci sacrifice. The flamen may never even set his eyes on an army, while the Luperci identify themselves with wolves in pursuit of cattle as warbands do in other Indo-European societies.40 While the Luperci use wine and oil these are the very substances the flamen must avoid. Lastly, the taboos related to death find a counterpoint in the initiation ritual of the Luperci. The central part of male initiation rituals consists of a symbolic enactment of death.41 The Luperci achieve this through the application of a knife to their forehead. The knife is dipped in the blood of a recently sacrificed victim. The tension is then relieved by wiping off the blood and replacing it with milk:42 τὰ δὲ δρώμενα τὴν αἰτίαν ποιεῖ δυστόπαστον· σφάττουσι γὰρ αἶγας, εἶτα μειρακίων δυοῖν ἀπὸ γένους προσαχϑέντων αὐτοῖς, οἱ μὲν ᾑμαγμένῃ μαχαίρᾳ τοῦ μετώπου ϑιγγάνουσιν, ἕτεροι δ’ ἀπομάττουσιν εὐϑύς, ἔριον βεβρεγμένον γάλακτι προσφέροντες. γελᾶν δὲ δεῖ τὰ μειράκια μετὰ τὴν ἀπόμαξιν.

38 39

40

For a discussion see De Martino (2018) 7–43. The Luperci were most likely not completely naked, although the only Republican relief depicting them shows them retrieved naked. The adjective nudus, consistently applied to the Luperci in the ancient sources, simply refers to the absence of toga and tunica, the hallmarks of a Roman citizen. See now Vuković (2023) 4–6. See McCone (1987). 41 Eliade (2009) 60–2. 42 Plut. Rom. 21.4–5.

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What is done (at the festival) makes the reason (for its name) hard to guess. For they (sc. the Luperci) slaughter goats and then, after two young men of noble birth are brought to them, they touch their foreheads with a bloody knife, and others immediately wipe it off using wool drenched in milk. The young men must laugh after their foreheads are wiped.

For the sake of memory, I shall dwell on this ritual, which I call the bloodrite. Plutarch cites a certain Butas (a Republican author of the second century BC), Table 16.1 Structural comparison of the prohibition of the flamen Dialis and Brahmin and the activities of the Luperci Flamen Dialis

Brahmin

Luperci

must not touch or mention a dog or goat

must not study when a dog barks or touch anything in contact with dogs must never be stark naked nor see his wife in the nude must stop all his religious activity near a war, or hearing the sound of arms cannot study the Vedas on horseback or other conveyance must avoid smoke from a funeral pyre, cannot study during a funeral

sacrifice a dog and a goat

never, even at night, can he be completely naked must not set eyes on an army must not mount or touch a horse must not go near a funeral pyre avoid intoxicants and not touch fermented stuff must not rub himself with oil outdoors must not touch raw meat he is sacrosanct and killing him is an aggravated crime

must not ingest alcohol at all having rubbed his head, he cannot apply oil to any other part of the body must not eat nonsacrificial meat

consistently described as naked they are a warband in the mythology of the festival come from the equestrian order Lupercalia is a part of the Parentalia, commemoration of the dead drink wine at the festival smear themselves with oil

killing a Brahmin is a supreme crime

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help themselves to raw sacrificial meat in one of the Lupercalian aetiologies the central part of initiation is a ‘bloodrite’ which takes the form of symbolic death

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who says that the bloodied sword is a symbol of the slaughter and danger that Romulus and Remus experienced when fighting Amulius, and that the milk is a memory of their nourishment by the she-wolf at the Lupercal.43 Similarly, Assmann refers to a Neo-Assyrian Sarsaru ritual in which men drink water as a symbolic memory aid. According to Assmann, the act of drinking acts as a reminder of the men’s oath of loyalty to the king and constitutes ‘bonding’ or ‘connective’ memory.44 Assmann ascribes this function to water, but blood is a much more salient and memorable liquid. The bloodrite was an event of high intensity that triggered connective memory: it linked the new identity of the Luperci as initiates to the act of sacrifice and ritual slaughter. Plutarch’s speculation shows that this aspect of the ritual was long lost on most participants who turned up for the running and more entertaining parts of the festival. However, Ulf argues that the bloodrite gives us a glimpse into a less popular aspect of the festival, one that involves the Luperci being initiated with the blood of a sacrificed victim.45 The bloodrite is reminiscent of blooding the novices on their first hunt, a custom abundantly attested even in modern times. In England, boys used to be initiated this way on their first foxhunt, a practice now banned, but abundantly attested in current communicative memory.46 The curious bloodrite was not the only unusual aspect of the Lupercalia. Crowds turned up to see young men undress and run around in the Forum. The archaeological record shows that in the later period women also revealed their bodies to receive the blows of the fertilizing whip, which was considered to facilitate conception and delivery.47 It was in many respects a wild and savage custom, as Cicero called it, a festival day unlike any other in Republican Rome.48 How do we account for the presence of the upright flamen Dialis at this chaotic festival? Our only source for this is a couplet in Ovid’s Fasti that many critics have tried to excise or violently alter.49 However, in religious terms, the flamen’s presence makes perfect sense. The detailed parallels 43 46 47 48 49

Plut. Rom. 21.6–8. 44 Assmann (2006a) 9–11. 45 Ulf (1982). Blooding the novices on their first hunt is a custom widespread throughout Eurasia (Boyle (1969) 12–16) and I personally heard reports of it in North America. The pictorial evidence dates to the third century AD. See Solin and Brandenburg (1980) 271–84. See also Parrish (1984) 156–60 and pl. 42. Cic. Cael. 26, also Prop. 4.1A.25–26. See Fraschetti (2005) 20; Dumézil (1970) 346. Ovid. Fasti 2.281–282 reads: ‘inde deum colimus devectaque sacra Pelasgis/ flamen ad haec prisco more Dialis erat’. For an overview of the scholarship and textual variants see Robinson (2011) 215. Stephen Heyworth is working on a new critical edition of Ovid’s Fasti with a commentary where the issue will be addressed.

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between the activities of the Luperci and the taboos of the flamen show that they were devised in common as part of a very ancient system that can be traced to Indo-European origins. The two groups of priests are bound by contrasting observances and have to meet in the liminal period at the end of the year, in the month of February when normal order is suspended before it is again reconstituted at the beginning of a new year that originally started in March.50 The structure of contrasting observances shows that the Lupercalia belonged to a ‘ritual memory culture’ that, as Assmann says, was ‘concerned with maintaining the course of the world and the survival of the group’. The flamen and the Luperci maintain a memory of an ancient order of things that is ‘fundamentally timeless’.51 They are intrinsically linked in an ancient structure whose form implies a cultural memory of what Assmann calls ‘cosmic symbolism’ where particular rituals and activities correspond not only to each other but to the perceived structure in the cosmos, both in nature and culture.52 To conclude, the Lupercalia carried the memory of the Roman foundation myth by recalling the youth of Romulus and Remus. This was the foundational memory of the festival that Caesar exploited to make a statement about kingship. However, the complex nature of the festival invoked other memories including that of the presence of the flamen Dialis (an office vacant from 87 BC) who was required to appear as part of a system of cosmic symbolism that was lost on most Romans of the late Republic, but which carried the ritual memory of ancient Indo-European ancestry, and thus preceded the Republic by millennia. The theories of cultural memory enable us to see the various aspects of the Lupercalia in all its complexity from its beginnings down to the turbulent times of Caesar and Cicero. 50 52

See Rüpke (2011) 72–7. 51 Assmann (2006a) 14. Assmann (2006a) 11–16. See now Vuković (2023).

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chapter 17

Inscriptions on the Capitoline: Epigraphy and Cultural Memory in Livy Morgan E. Palmer*

In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline: Lex vetusta est, priscis litteris verbisque scripta, ut qui praetor maximus sit idibus Septembribus clavum pangat; fixa fuit dextro lateri aedis Iovis Optimi Maximi, qua parte Minervae templum est. Eum clavum, quia rarae per ea tempora litterae erant, notam numeri annorum fuisse ferunt eoque Minervae templo dicatam legem quia numerus Minervae inventum sit. Volsiniis quoque clavos indices numeri annorum fixos in templo Nortiae, Etruscae deae, comparere diligens talium monumentorum auctor Cincius adfirmat. M. Horatius consul ea lege templum Iovis Optimi Maximi dedicavit anno post reges exactos. There is an ancient law, written in archaic letters and words, that whoever is the praetor maximus should drive a nail on the ides of September; the law was affixed to the right side of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in the part which is the sanctuary of Minerva. This nail, they say, because during those times written documents were rare, was a marker of the number of years, and the law was dedicated in that sanctuary of Minerva because number is an invention of Minerva. Cincius, a diligent authority on such monuments, affirms that at Volsinii nails indicating the number of years are also found affixed in the temple of Nortia, an Etruscan goddess. Marcus Horatius the consul dedicated the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus by this law in the year after the kings were driven out.1 (Livy 7.3.5–8) *

1

I would like to thank Martin Dinter and Charles Guérin for organizing a delightful conference in Paris and for their editorial work. Additionally, I would like to thank Dennis Kehoe, the conference participants, and the readers for Cambridge University Press. For the Capitoline nail see Purcell (2003) 29; Gallia (2012) 65. The translations are my own.

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Livy portrays the archaic character of the inscription, highlighting the ancient lettering and words, and making it possible to envision its precise placement within the section of the temple dedicated to Minerva. He cites Cincius (an antiquarian who studied and wrote about inscriptions, and who may have been contemporary with Augustus) for the significance of the location, calling him ‘a diligent authority on such monuments’ and using the verb adfirmare to underscore his scholarly authority.2 Livy’s description of this ancient law is one of several instances in which he combines ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision to preserve historical inscriptions in Roman cultural memory.3 As Martin Dinter has shown in his studies of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ in Latin poets, the combination of epigraphic and literary media offered new opportunities for shaping memory.4 Instances of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ include ‘systemic pointers’ (phrases marking the presence of inscriptions), Systemkontamination (intermixing of visual and textual media, as in the case of ekphrasis), and ‘medial quotations’ (recurring formulae that evoke the language of inscriptions).5 With the phrase ‘written in archaic letters and words’ (priscis litteris verbisque scripta), Livy combines a ‘systemic pointer’ (scripta) with subtle Systemkontamination evoking the appearance of ancient inscribed letters, and then summarizes the content of the law. Elsewhere in Livy’s text, as we shall see, it is possible to identify clear allusions to epigraphic conventions that appear as ‘medial quotations’. Furthermore, Livy adds topographical details to the sort of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ that Dinter has detected in Latin poetry, describing the original location of the inscription within the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Augustus eventually moved the ritual of the Capitoline nail to his own Forum, but Livy’s narrative preserves the inscription and its original location in Roman cultural memory.6 This chapter will examine how Livy combines ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision in his descriptions of inscriptions on the Capitoline, preserving aspects of the traditional epigraphic landscape in Roman cultural memory. The study will begin by situating the Capitoline and Livy’s characterization of it within the theoretical framework of Pierre 2

3 5 6

For Lucius Cincius see Heurgon (1964); Oakley (1997) ad 7.3.5–8. Heurgon (1964) 434 suggests that he was a contemporary of Varro, and Klotz (1964) 202 dates his work to the age of Augustus. Cf. Gallia (2012) 62 with n. 42. See Palmer (2019). 4 For ‘inscriptional intermediality’ see Dinter (2011); Dinter (2013a). See Dinter (2013a) 306–7. For the transfer of the ritual of the Capitoline nail see Purcell (2003) 29–30. For the decreased centrality of the Capitoline during the age of Augustus see Edwards (1996) 71 with n. 10.

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Nora’s lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’). I shall argue that Livy creates intermedial reconstructions of what Nora has called ‘monumental memory-sites’ while drawing attention to tensions between ‘portable’ and ‘topographical’ lieux de mémoire. Three case studies will illustrate how Livy uses textual and topographical details to preserve traditional inscriptions placed on the Capitoline within his text. The first case, a golden bowl inscribed with the name of Camillus (Livy 6.4.1–3), features a ‘medial quotation’ highlighting the triumph of the republican hero together with precise topographical details. The second case, a tablet affixed under a statue of Jupiter commemorating the military victory of Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (Livy 6.29.8–10), also combines ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision. Comparison of Livy’s version of this inscription with Paul the Deacon’s epitome of the second-century AD grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus, which does not identify the location of the inscription, illustrates the extent to which ‘inscriptional intermediality’ and topographical precision were aspects of Livy’s literary technique. The differences between the two sources suggest that Livy reconstructed the inscription selectively, choosing to emphasize details about its location. The third case study, duplicate inscriptions placed above the doors of the temple of the lares permarini and the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Livy 40.52.5–7) features several traditional epigraphic conventions which create the impression of authenticity. By providing precise details about the locations of these inscriptions, Livy is able to focalize upon the duplication, closely associating two topographical sites. In all of these cases, Livy infuses ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with details that foreground the original topographical context of the Capitoline. I shall conclude by contextualizing Livy’s ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with the continuing importance of the evolving space of the Capitoline as a lieu de mémoire and a centre of epigraphic activity. This analysis reveals the extent to which Livy made the authorial choice to incorporate inscriptions with their original conventions and locations into his text, preserving the historical epigraphic record associated with an evolving lieu de mémoire in Roman cultural memory.

17.1

The Capitoline and Inscriptions as Lieux de Mémoire

In Livy’s history and in the city of Rome, the Capitoline serves as the most important lieu de mémoire. In the first pentad of the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy establishes the role of the Capitoline as a fixed centre of Roman cultural memory. He reports that when the foundations for the temple of Jupiter

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Optimus Maximus were constructed, the auspices indicated that the shrine for Terminus, the god of boundaries, was not to be moved from the site, a detail symbolizing the topographical fixity of the Capitoline (Livy 1.55.1–6). The first pentad ends with Camillus’s speech entreating the Romans not to move to Veii, in which he evokes the religious significance of the Capitoline as an immovable centre of Roman religion, convincing the Romans to stay in Rome (Livy 5.51–54). In the second pentad, the space of the Capitoline evolves into a centre of epigraphic activity as the Romans rebuild their city after the invasion of the Gauls. The topography of the Capitoline reflects Livy’s characterization of the space as a place of memory. The south summit, known as the Capitolium, housed the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which was surrounded by a precinct called the area Capitolina. The area Capitolina featured additional monuments: temples, statues, inscribed treaties, inscriptions dedicated by triumphant generals, and tituli marking statues of famous Romans.7 The north summit, known as the arx, featured the temple of Juno Moneta, a goddess associated with memory.8 By describing the precise location of inscriptions such as the law commemorating the ritual of the Capitoline nail, Livy identifies their exact placement within this landscape of memory, preserving ancient inscriptions in his written version of the Capitoline. Furthermore, the inscriptions in Livy’s narrative function as lieux de mémoire in their own right, and Nora’s theoretical framework can be applied to better understand Livy’s authorial choice to combine ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision when describing Capitoline inscriptions. Nora has identified distinctions between ‘portable’ lieux which can be moved, ‘topographical’ lieux ‘which owe everything to the specificity of their location and to being rooted in the ground’, and ‘monumental memory-sites’ such as ‘statues or monuments to the dead’ for which ‘even though their location is far from arbitrary, one could justify relocating them without altering their meaning’.9 Inscriptions, which still retain meaning when moved into new contexts (such as literary works or museums), fit the definition of ‘monumental memory-sites’ which fall between the categories of ‘portable’ and ‘topographical’, and 7

8 9

For the topography of the Capitolium see Reusser (1993b); Tagliamonte (1993). For the area Capitolina see Reusser (1993a). See De Angeli (1996); Tagliamonte (1996) for the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. For dedications on the Capitoline see Reusser (1993a) 117. See Giannelli (1993) for the topography of the arx; Giannelli (1996) 123–5 for the temple of Juno Moneta. For the temple of Juno Moneta and memory see Purcell (2003) 27. Nora (1989) 22.

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this is consistent with how the Romans perceived them. Varro characterizes funerary monuments as places of memory while explaining that they were placed along roads so that they could serve as reminders to passers-by of their own mortality (Varro Ling. 6.49). Although Roman inscribed tomb monuments still had meaning when removed from their initial locations, Varro’s definition indicates that their placement along the road was deliberate. Thus, as monuments with a location that ‘is far from arbitrary’ they fit Nora’s definition of ‘monumental memory-sites’, between the categories of ‘portable’ and ‘topographical’. Livy’s narrative draws attention to the tensions between these sub-categories of lieux de mémoire during an era of increasing epigraphic and topographical transformation. Inscriptions from the Capitoline naturally take on ‘portable’ qualities as they are transposed into Livy’s narrative, undergoing medial transformation, but Livy preserves their ‘topographical’ character by combining ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with precise references to location. Through ‘inscriptional intermediality’ Livy moves inscriptions into the space of his ‘written Rome’, but he does so with sensitivity to their traditional conventions and locations.10 He preserves traditional inscriptions in Roman cultural memory as ‘monumental memory-sites’ that retain ‘topographical’ characteristics. In contrast, Augustus boldly moved ‘monumental memory-sites’ to new locations while changing the city of Rome. Livy’s ‘written Rome’ mimics the topographical and epigraphic landscape of the city, preserving ‘monumental memory-sites’ through intermedial references while also drawing attention to the gradual transformation of the Roman cityscape. This transformation must have become increasingly apparent as Augustus rose to power and Livy continued to write his history.11 The Augustan ‘epigraphic frenzy’ (furor epigraphicus) altered the epigraphic landscape as inscriptions with new conventions and locations appeared throughout the city of Rome.12 Like Livy, Augustus was attentive to the placement of inscriptions, and as Nelis-Clément and Nelis have noted, ‘epigraphy plays a key role in Augustus’s spatial reorganization of the city of Rome’.13 Augustus’s programme of topographical and epigraphic transformation included work to revitalize and renovate the Capitoline, a longstanding Roman lieu de mémoire 10 11 12 13

For ‘Livy’s written Rome’ see Jaeger (1997). Burton (2000) proposes that Livy began work on the Ab Urbe Condita in 33 BC or 32 BC and provides an extensive bibliography for the composition date. For the ‘epigraphic frenzy’ (furor epigraphicus) see Alföldy (1991); Nelis-Clément and Nelis (2013). Nelis-Clément and Nelis (2013) 321.

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and a centre of epigraphic activity.14 Augustus oversaw the creation and restoration of temples on the area Capitolina, repairing the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus without inscribing his own name, replacing the roof of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and building a new temple of Jupiter Tonans which rivalled the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.15 After defeating the Parthians in 20 BC, Augustus ordered the construction of a temple of Mars Ultor on the Capitoline (Cass. Dio 54.8.3). He situated it adjacent to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius and the temple of Jupiter Tonans, creating a close topographical association between three Capitoline monuments to Jupiter that he had built or restored.16 In addition to pursuing strategic building projects on the Capitoline, Augustus gradually transferred lieux de mémoire, such as the Capitoline nail, from the Capitoline as he developed other parts of the city. His Augustan forum, dedicated in 2 BC, featured a new temple to Mars Ultor, inscribed with his own name, which rivalled the one on the Capitoline and became the new repository for the Parthian standards.17 The Campus Martius also became increasingly important as a centre of monuments and epigraphic activity promoting the imperial family. Augustan building projects in the Campus Martius directed by Agrippa were under way as early as 27 BC, making the beginning of this urban transformation roughly contemporary with the composition of Livy’s history.18 Additionally, Suetonius claims that Augustus moved statues with accompanying inscriptions from the Capitoline to the Campus Martius (Suet. Calig. 34), enforcing the character of ‘portable’ lieux upon places of memory that had been associated with an established topographical location. Like the emperor, Livy was interested in preserving the rich epigraphic and topographical landscape of the Capitoline, but the way in which he attempted to control memory of 14

15

16 17

18

For the Capitoline as a lieu de mémoire see Gallia (2012) 56. See Hölkeskamp (2001) for the Capitoline as a landscape of memory and Hölkeskamp (2006) 491 for the Roman ‘landscape of lieux de mémoire’. For Augustus’s repair of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus see Mon. Anc. 20.1. See Coarelli (1996a) for the temple of Jupiter Feretrius; Gros (1996) for the temple of Jupiter Tonans. For the rivalry between Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Jupiter Feretrius see Suet. Aug. 91.3. Zanker (1988) 186–7. Cf. Haselberger and Thein (2007) 148 for the temple of Mars Ultor on the Capitoline. Ovid provides a firsthand account of the inscription with Augustus’s name that adorned the temple of Mars Ultor (Ov. Fast. 5.567–68). Cf. Alföldy (1991) 289; Nelis-Clément and Nelis (2013) 330–1. See Haselberger and Thein (2007) 156 for the new temple as a repository for the Parthian standards; Haselberger and Thein (2007) 196 for the dedication date. Haselberger and Thein (2007) agues for the centrality of the Campus Martius in the Augustan building programme. For the date and Agrippa’s role in the building projects see Haselberger and Thein (2007) 100–9.

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the epigraphic record differed. Whereas Augustus wrote himself and his achievements into the Roman cityscape, Livy sought to preserve the memory of pre-Augustan historical monuments, including inscriptions. As Augustus became increasingly powerful, Livy’s project took on additional significance: his portrayal of the city provided a counter-narrative to Augustus’s epigraphic activities. At a time when Augustus was enforcing ‘portable’ status onto ‘topographical’ lieux de mémoire, Livy emphasized the precise original locations of monuments, underscoring their value as ‘monumental memory-sites’ with strong topographical associations. As ‘monumental memory-sites’ within Livy’s ‘written Rome’, inscriptions mimic ‘topographical’ lieux firmly situated in their original locations. While Augustus moved ‘monumental memory-sites’ from the Capitoline, forcing them into the roles of ‘portable’ lieux de mémoire, Livy sought to preserve the original topographical context of ancient Capitoline inscriptions in Roman cultural memory through ‘inscriptional intermediality’.

17.2

The Inscribed Name of Camillus

Livy’s first reference to an inscription placed on the Capitoline is his description of a dedication honouring Camillus which stands near the boundary of the first and second pentads of the Ab Urbe Condita. Livy begins Book 6 by remarking that the availability of writing, which he describes as ‘the one reliable guardian of the memory of history’ (una custodia fidelis memoriae rerum gestarum, Livy 6.1.2) made it possible to produce a clearer account, and shortly thereafter he introduces an inscription honouring Camillus.19 As the triumphant Camillus returns from successful campaigns in 388 BC, he marks his victory with an epigraphic dedication on the Capitoline: Camillus in urbem triumphans rediit trium simul bellorum victor. Longe plurimos captivos ex Etruscis ante currum duxit; quibus sub hasta venumdatis tantum aeris redactum est ut, pretio pro auro matronis persoluto, ex eo quod supererat tres paterae aureae factae sint, quas cum titulo nominis Camilli ante Capitolium incensum in Iovis cella constat ante pedes Iunonis positas fuisse. Camillus returned to the city triumphing as a victor of three wars at the same time. He led before the chariot by far the most captives from the Etruscans; from them, sold under the spear, so much money was made that, when the price for the gold was paid back to the matrons, from what remained three 19

Cf. Palmer (2019) 77–8 for this example of ‘inscriptional intermediality’. Langslow (2013) 173–4 cites this passage as evidence for the limited number of surviving archaic inscriptions.

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golden bowls were made which, with an inscription of Camillus’s name, were placed in Jupiter’s chamber (it is an established fact) before the feet of Juno before the Capitoline burned. Livy20 (6.4.1–3)

Livy uses the participle triumphans in his triumph notices, and this evokes language attested in the epigraphic record. Kraus cites a usage of triumphans on an inscription honoring Lucius Mummius:21 L(ucius) Mummi(us) L(uci) f(ilius) co(n)s(ul) duct(u) auspicio imperioque eius Achaia capt(a) Corint(h)o deleto Romam redieit triumphans ob hasce res bene gestas quod in bello voverat hanc aedem et signu(m) Herculis Victoris imperator dedicat. Lucius Mummius son of Lucius, consul with military command, under his auspice and authority, with Achaia having been captured, with Corinth having been destroyed, returned to Rome triumphing on account of these deeds carried out well. Because he had vowed them in war, as imperator he dedicates this temple and statue of Hercules Victor. CIL 6.331 = CIL 12.626 = ILLRP 122 = CLE 3 = ILS 2022

This inscription illustrates that the phrase ‘returned to the city triumphing’ (‘in urbem triumphans rediit’) evokes language attested in the pre-Augustan epigraphic record. Inscribed triumphal fasti provide additional parallels for how this language continued to be used on inscriptions. The Fasti Barberiniani, an inscribed record of triumphs that occurred between 43 and 21 BC, includes several instances of the recurring phrase ‘he triumphed, he gave the palm’ (‘triumphavit, palmam dedit’).23 For example, this phrase marks the triumph of Lucius Antonius in 41 BC: ‘Lucius Antonius from the Alps on the Kalends of January triumphed, gave the palm’ (‘L(ucius) Antonius ex Alpibus K(alendis) Ian(uariis) triumpavi[t], / palmam dedit’, Degrassi Inscr. Ital. 13.1.36.41). The subsequent entry for the 40 BC peace of Brundisium includes a comparable usage of the participle ovans, which Livy employs regularly to describe ovations: ‘Imperator Caesar celebrating an ovation because he made peace with Marcus Antonius, gave the palm. Marcus Antonius celebrating an ovation because he made peace with Imperator Caesar, gave the palm’ (‘Im[p(erator) Caesar] ovans quod pace cum / [M(arco) 20

21 22 23

Emphasis mine here and elsewhere in the translations. Roman triumphs ended at the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. See Beard (2007) 102; Rea (2007) 45; Hölkeskamp (2006) 483–5. Kraus (1994) ad 6.4.1. For Livy’s usage of triumphal formulae see Phillips (1974) 269; Pittenger (2008) 283 with n. 34. Cf. Oakley (1997) ad 6.4.1. Lucius Mummius vowed the temple in 145 BC and dedicated it in 142 BC. See Palombi (1996) 24. Kruschwitz (2002) 149 argues that the inscription is a copy of the original. Cf. Phillips (1974) 269–70 with n. 23.

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Antoni]o fecit, palmam dedit / [M(arcus) Antonius] ovans quod pacem cum [Imp(eratore) Caesare fecit, palmam ded]it’, Degrassi Inscr. Ital. 13.1.36.40). These entries on the Fasti Barberiniani may be compared with entries on the Fasti Capitolini, an inscribed record of triumphs from Romulus to Lucius Cornelius Balbus in 19 BC: L(ucius) Antonius M(arci) f(ilius) M(arci) n(epos) co(n)s(ul) ex Alpibus [K(alendis) Ian(uariis) a(nno) DCCXII] / Imp(erator) Caesar divi f(ilius) C(ai) f(ilius) IIIvir r(ei) p(ublicae) c(onstituendae) ov[ans an(no) DCCXIII] / quod pacem cum M(arco) Antonio feci[t] / M(arcus) Antonius M(arci) f(ilius) M(arci) n(epos) IIIvir r(ei) p(ublicae) c(onstituendae) ovan[s an(no) DCCXIII] / quod pacem cum Imp(eratore) Caesare feci[t] / L(ucius) Marcius L(uci) f(ilius) C(ai) n(epos) Censorinus co(n)s(ul) a(nno) [DCCXIV] / ex Macedonia K(alendis) Ian(uariis). Lucius Antonius son of Marcus, grand-son of Marcus, consul, from the Alps on the Kalends of January, in the year 712. Imperator Caesar son of divus, son of Gaius, tresvir for restoring the republic, celebrating an ovation, in the year 713, because he made peace with Marcus Antonius. Marcus Antonius son of Marcus, grandson of Marcus, tresvir for restoring the republic, celebrating an ovation, in the year 713, because he made peace with Imperator Caesar. Lucius Marcius son of Lucius, grandson of Gaius, Censorinus the consul in the year 714, from Macedonia on the Kalends of January. (Degrassi Inscr. Ital. 13.1.1.39–41)

Although the verb triumphare is not present on this inscription, Phillips has suggested that it may be implied in the many instances in which no verb is given, such as the record of the triumph of Lucius Marcius Censorinus.24 Such an implied usage would suggest that the verb is a familiar and recognizable epigraphic convention that may be used allusively on inscriptions and in ‘medial quotations’. Dinter writes that medial quotations ‘evoke the inscriptional and are less discrete or easily discernible from the surrounding text’.25 In the Ab Urbe Condita, variations of the phrase in urbem triumphans rediit function as medial quotations that allude to the language of inscriptions. Livy uses a version of this phrase himself within the text of an inscribed tablet placed in the temple of Mater Matuta, which marks the triumph of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.26 The inscription 24 25 26

Phillips (1974) 270–71, also discussing Livy’s usage of ovans. Cf. Beard (2007) 66. Dinter (2013a) 308. Phillips (1974) 270 argues that Livy ‘displays more variation than the inscriptions do, but with only a few exceptions it is variation on a recognizable model’. For the inscription see Galli (1987–88); Pittenger (2008) 284–5; Östenberg (2009) 198; Palmer (2019) 78–84. For usages of this phrase on the Lucius Mummius inscription and Livy’s Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus inscription see Kruschwitz (2002) 144.

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reports that ‘triumphing a second time he returned to the city of Rome’ (‘iterum triumphans in urbem Romam redit’, Livy 41.28.9). Livy’s usage of these words within the text of a literary inscription illustrates their suitability for the epigraphic medium, while also reflecting his authorial sensitivity to the epigraphic tradition. When the phrase appears outside the text of an inscription, introducing an epigraphic dedication, it functions as a ‘medial quotation’ that evokes traditional epigraphic language more subtly. Livy also provides precise topographical details that record the exact placement of this historical inscription, noting that the dedication was placed in Jupiter’s chamber before the feet of Juno. While Livy offers a vivid visual description of the inscription’s location, he also makes it clear that it is a reconstruction, mentioning that this dedication occurred before fire destroyed the Capitoline. After the temple was destroyed in 83 BC, it was rebuilt upon the foundations of the original building, and the reconstruction featured the same arrangement of three contiguous rooms for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.27 Livy’s precise details about the location of the inscription made it possible to superimpose the memory of its placement within the original temple upon memory of the contemporary space. As Jaeger writes in her discussion of Livy’s references to specific monuments, ‘Such precision has a universalizing function: a reader at Rome could see monumenta or, if not the monumenta themselves, the places where they once were’.28 With the detail that the inscription existed before the temple burnt down, Livy draws attention to his role in preserving this inscription, lost to the fire, in Roman cultural memory. A similar decree of topographical precision is attested on post-Augustan inscribed military diplomas. Diplomas often combine the expression in Capitolio with an additional phrase providing more precise information about the location of the original imperial decree discharging the soldier.29 For example, a diploma dating to 64 AD records the placement of a decree on a statue base located behind the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: ‘It is written and recognized from a bronze tablet which was fixed in Rome, 27

28 29

For the 83 BC destruction of the temple see Tagliamonte (1996) 146–7. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.61.4 attests that the temple was rebuilt upon its foundations following the original arrangement. Cf. De Angeli (1996) 149–50; Oakley (1997) ad 6.4.3. Jaeger (1997) 10. For detailed discussion of these decrees and a catalogue see Corbier (2006) 131–46. As Cooley (2012) 172–3 has observed, ‘Each diploma was an official extract copied from the imperial constitutions which were displayed as inscriptions upon large bronze tablets on the Capitol in Rome, none of which otherwise survives’. Corbier (2006) 144 has noted that precise details about location would have made it easier to find individual tablets when many were displayed on the Capitoline.

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on the Capitoline, behind the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on the base of the praetor Quintus Marcius Rex’ (‘descript(um) et recognit(um) ex tabula aenea quae fixa est / Romae in Capitolio post aedem Iovis O(ptimi) M(aximi) in / basi Q(uinti) Marci Regis pr(aetoris)’, CIL 16.5). This information would have allowed the holder of the military diploma to envision the precise location of the original inscription commemorating his service and to place it amidst the high concentration of monuments on the Capitoline, even as he viewed a copy rather than the original decree. Similarly, ancient orators relied on enargeia, vivid description, and loci memoriae, specific places that were envisioned in order to aid memory.30 As Cicero notes in De Oratore, this technique worked well when the details of smaller sections of a space, such as rooms and statues within a house, were envisioned with precision (Cic. De or. 2.86.353–54). With his description of an inscription placed in Jupiter’s chamber before the feet of Juno’s statue, Livy makes it possible to call to mind its exact location within the smaller space of Jupiter’s chamber, as if it were still there. With the verb constare, he emphasizes that the location of the inscription is established, preserving this topographical detail in Roman cultural memory. By combining ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision, Livy is able to control memory of Camillus’s inscribed dedication, ensuring that it remains preserved in his narrative as the landscape of the city changes. Additionally, Camillus’s epigraphic dedication prefigures, and perhaps rivals, Augustus’s epigraphic activities. At a time when Augustus was inscribing his name throughout Rome, Livy chose to preserve the inscribed name of the republican hero Camillus in the Ab Urbe Condita. Camillus triumphed multiple times, and the inscription marks his victories in three wars. Similarly, Augustus celebrated a triple triumph in 29 BC and exerted increasing control over triumphal honours.31 The final triumph recorded on the Fasti Capitolini, the 19 BC triumph by Cornelius Balbus, was the last triumph celebrated by someone who was not a member of the imperial family.32 Livy is selective about the triumphs that he includes in his history, and it is significant that he chooses to highlight Camillus’s triumph with 30

31

32

For enargeia see Quint. Inst. 4.2.64, 6.2.32, and 8.3.61–71; Zanker (1981); Vasaly (1993) 20, noting that this included the subcategory topographia or topothesia for descriptions of places. For the loci memoriae see Favro (1996) 7. For Augustus’s triple triumph see Favro (1996) 92; Beard (2007) 296 and 303. Kraus (1994) ad 6.4.1 notes the parallel between the triumphs of Camillus and Augustus, with the caveat that Livy ‘never explicitly compares Augustus to any republican hero’. For Augustus’s increasing control over the triumph see Beard (2007) 68–71, 288 and 296–305. Beard (2007) 69.

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a medial quotation and an inscription marking his name.33 In the age of Augustus this republican hero continued to have a prominent place in Roman cultural memory. Augustus included Camillus in the gallery of summi viri in his forum, attempting to recast him as one of a series of republican heroes whose achievements prefigured his own.34 In Livy’s narrative, the inscribed name of Camillus serves as a reminder that an exemplary republican hero had already left his own mark upon the Capitoline long before Augustus began controlling the triumph and rewriting the city.35

17.3

Monumentum Rerum Gestarum: Cincinnatus’s Dedication

In 380 BC, just a few years after Camillus’s dedication, another triumphant republican hero, Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus, adds an inscription to the Capitoline. After securing victory over Praeneste, Cincinnatus places a statue of Iuppiter Imperator on the Capitoline with an accompanying inscription: Romam revertit triumphansque signum Praeneste devectum Iovis Imperatoris in Capitolium tulit. Dedicatum est inter cellam Iovis ac Minervae tabulaque sub eo fixa, monumentum rerum gestarum, his ferme incisa litteris fuit: ‘Iuppiter atque divi omnes hoc dederunt ut T. Quinctius dictator oppida novem caperet’. He returned to Rome, and triumphing he brought onto the Capitoline the statue of Iuppiter Imperator transported from Praeneste. It was dedicated between the chamber of Jupiter and of Minerva and a tablet was affixed below it, a monument of his accomplishments, and it was inscribed with approximately these letters: ‘Jupiter and all the gods granted this, that Titus Quinctius the dictator should take nine towns’. (Livy 6.29.8–10)

Livy begins this epigraphic reference with Romam revertit triumphansque, a variation of in urbem triumphans rediit, the medial quotation that introduced Camillus’s inscription. Kraus has noted that this phrasing resembles a military report or a dedicatory inscription.36 In addition, the language that Livy uses to introduce the inscription makes it clear that he is 33

34

35

36

The section of the Fasti Capitolini where this triumph would have been recorded is no longer extant. See Degrassi Inscr. Ital. 13.1. For discrepancies between the triumphs in Livy and on the Fasti Capitolini see Beard (2007) 74. The inscription honouring Camillus commemorates his successful argument that the Romans should not move to Veii, as well as his triumphs (CIL 6.1308). For Livy and the Augustan Forum see Luce (1990). Hölkeskamp (2006) 480 has observed that heroes such as Camillus and Cincinnatus were part of the ‘“honor roll” of Rome’s “collective memory”’ and that they left their mark on the city through monuments, including ones placed on the Capitoline. Kraus (1994) ad 6.29.8.

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reconstructing the text. He writes ‘it was inscribed with approximately these letters’ (‘his ferme incisa litteris fuit’), signalling that the text provided is not necessarily the precise text that appeared on the stone. Kraus has noted that ‘the tabula has its own indeterminability’ and ‘ferme can be code for scholarly care’.37 In this instance, Livy’s version of the inscription can be compared with another Latin source. A reference to the inscription is preserved in Paul the Deacon’s epitome of Festus:38 Trientem tertium pondo coronam auream dedisse se Iovi donum scripsit T. Quintius Dictator cum per novem dies totidem urbes et decimam Praeneste cepisset. Id significare ait Cincius in Μυσταγωγικῶν lib. II duas libras pondo et trientem. Titus Quinctius Dictator wrote that he had given as a gift to Jupiter a golden crown a ‘third third part’ in weight, when in nine days he had taken just as many cities and on the tenth he had taken Praeneste. Cincius in Mystagogicon Book II says that this means two libras in weight and a third part. Fest. 498 L

A comparison of Livy’s account with Festus’s highlights the extent to which ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical flavouring is part of Livy’s authorial strategy for preserving historical inscriptions within his written version of the city. Whereas the fragment of Festus references a gold crown and its weight, Livy does not mention this, instead focusing on the placement of the inscribed tablet together with the statue of Iuppiter Imperator on the Capitoline.39 Livy gives precise information about the location of the inscription, which was placed below a statue situated between the chambers of Jupiter and Minerva. The inscription, which records that Jupiter and all the gods granted the victory, rests under the watchful eyes of two of the deities who, according to Livy’s version, made Cincinnatus’s success possible. The statue itself, transported from Rome to Praeneste and resituated within the space of the Capitoline, becomes part of the Roman memory landscape, recalling Cincinnatus’s victory granted with the approval of Jupiter. The accompanying inscription alludes to the significance of the placement of the statue within the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, specifying that Jupiter allowed the dictator to take nine towns. 37

38 39

Kraus (1994) ad 6.29.9. Cf. Oakley (1997) ad 6.27.3–29.10. Stein (1931) 7 has argued that fuit indicates that the inscription no longer existed in Livy’s time. Cf. fixa fuit at Livy 7.3.5 with Oakley (1997) ad 7.3.5. Dionysius of Halicarnassus Ant. Rom. 14.5 also preserves an account of the victory over Praeneste which resembles the inscription. Cf. Oakley (1997) ad 6.27.3–29.10. Heurgon (1964) 435 suggests that Livy has confused Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus with Titus Quinctius Flaminius, who triumphed and placed a statue of Iuppiter Imperator on the Capitoline. Cf. Stein (1931) 6–7; Östenberg (2009) 83–4.

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By combining ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision, Livy reconstructs a joint monument to Cinncinatus’s triumph, making it possible to envision the statue and the inscription affixed below it in their exact location within the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In addition, the phrase monumentum rerum gestarum highlights the role of the inscription itself as a memorial.40 Jaeger has noted that this phrase also appears in Livy’s description of an inscription dedicated by Hannibal at the temple of Juno at Croton (Livy 28.46.15–16). She argues that by evoking memory of Hannibal’s actions without detailing them in the inscription, Livy privileges his own retelling of the Punic Wars in the Ab Urbe Condita.41 Whereas the epitome of Festus preserves a reference to Cincius, the antiquarian who studied and wrote about inscriptions, here Livy does not mention Cincius. Gallia has observed that ‘Many of the Capitoline inscriptions discussed by Cincius must have been destroyed in the fire of 83 BC, but the survival of their texts in his work (and perhaps in earlier written sources) ensured that they would not be forgotten’.42 Livy’s description of the inscription marking the ritual of the Capitoline nail includes a clear appeal to the authority of Cincius, but here Livy does not mention him. By providing his own version of the text without mentioning a source, Livy gives his own reconstructed version of the inscription, unique for its pairing of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision, greater authority. He preserves his own version of the inscription in Roman cultural memory, distancing himself from Cincius’s model.

17.4 Epigraphic Doubling: Lucius Aemilius’s Inscriptions Livy also describes an inscription from the temple of the lares permarini that was duplicated and placed on the Capitoline.43 His description of the inscription placed above the doors of the temple of the lares permarini and 40

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Kraus (1994) ad 6.29.9 comments, ‘like L.’s text, the tabula is a historical narrative, selecting the details of divine aid, Roman power (dictator), and a precise number . . . to represent Quinctius’ res gestae’. For res gestae on this inscription see Stein (1931) 45. For monumentum rerum gestarum see Östenberg (2009) 199. Cf. ob hasce res bene gestas on the Lucius Mummius inscription (CIL 6.331 = CIL 12.626 = ILLRP 122 = CLE 3 = ILS 20). Jaeger (2006) 392. Gallia (2012) 62–3 discusses the possibilities that Cincius saw inscriptions before the 83 BC fire, read about them in a literary source, or saw reinscribed texts placed on the Capitoline after the fire. The temple of the lares permarini was vowed by Lucius Aemilius Regillus and dedicated by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. See Macrob. Sat. 1.10.10. For the duplicate inscriptions cf. Östenberg (2009) 49 with n. 196, 197–8. Flower (2017) 101 has argued that the novel application of the epithet permarini to the lares allowed Regillus to convey the imperialistic message that ‘the whole Mediterranean, even in the newly accessible Aegean, was somehow a “Roman Sea”’.

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the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in 179 BC combines topographical precision with authentic epigraphic language:44 Supra valvas templi tabula cum titulo hoc fixa est: ‘Duello magno dirimendo, regibus subigendis, patrandae pacis causa haec pugna exeunti L. Aemilio M. Aemilii filio . . . Auspicio imperio felicitate ductuque eius inter Ephesum Samum Chiumque, inspectante eopse Antiocho, exercitu omni, equitatu elephantisque, classis regis Antiochi antehac invicta fusa contusa fugataque est, ibique eo die naves longae cum omnibus sociis captae quadraginta duae. Ea pugna pugnata rex Antiochus regnumque . . .45 Eius rei ergo aedem laribus permarinis vovit’. Eodem exemplo tabula in aede Iovis in Capitolio supra valvas fixa est. Above the doors of the temple a tablet was fixed with this inscription: ‘With a great war finished, with kings subdued, for the sake of bringing about peace, this battle was given to Lucius Aemilius, the son of Marcus Aemilius, as he went out. Under his auspice, command, good fortune and military leadership between Ephesus, Samos, and Chios, with Antiochus himself keeping watch, with the whole army, with cavalry and elephants, the fleet of king Antiochus, before this time undefeated, was scattered, crushed, and put to flight, and there on that day forty-two long ships with all of their crews were captured. With that battle having been fought, King Antiochus and his kingdom [were defeated]. Therefore for this reason he vowed a temple to the lares permarini’. A tablet with the same text was affixed in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline above the doors. (Livy 40.52.5–7)

The inscription includes vivid details that memorialize not only Lucius Aemilius Regillus’s victory, but also the battle itself, with a description of the location, the forty-two captured ships, and the elephants. In addition, the inscription features several conventions that parallel items on the Lucius Mummius inscription. These include the term vovere and the phrase auspicio imperio.46 The early Latin forms duello and eopse as well as the archaic usage of the genitive preceding ergo give the text an air 44

45 46

See Palmer (2019) 82–4 for this monument as an example of ‘inscriptional intermediality’. See Biggs in this volume for another reading of this inscription with attention to its topographical placement, language, and historical context. There is a lacuna in the text here. See Briscoe (2008) ad 40.52.7. See Kruschwitz (2002) 143–4 for discussion of these constructions on the Lucius Mummius inscription (CIL 6.331 = CIL 12.626 = ILLRP 122 = CLE 3 = ILS 20). For usages of the ablative absolute on inscriptions see Kraus (1994) ad 6.29.8; Briscoe (2008) ad 38.50.3 noting that they are characteristic of inscriptions dedicated by generals celebrating triumphs. Untermann (1988) 439 has written that the phrases auspicio imperio felicitate ductu and pugna pugnata are authentic for a second century BC text. For auspicio imperio felicitate ductu as a triumphal formula see Pittenger (2008) 25 with n. 2.

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of authenticity.47 Additionally, the phrase duello magno dirimendo regibus subigendis is in Saturnian meter, which was common on inscriptions. The first century AD writer Caesius Bassus quotes this line in his work on Saturnian meter, citing it as an example of a dedication placed by a triumphant general on the Capitoline.48 These details give the inscription an ancient epigraphic character, but the text is not exclusively archaic. Untermann has observed parallel usages of exire in Cicero, and Briscoe has noted that emendations have been suggested for the phrase L. Aemilio M. Aemili filio because ‘only in imperial inscriptions are there examples of a nomen being repeated in a filiation’.49 It is likely that this is another instance in which Livy has preserved what was ‘inscribed approximately’ (ferme incisa), using epigraphic conventions to craft an authentic recreation of the original inscription. The multiple epigraphic conventions integrated into this instance of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ illustrate the active role that Livy played not only in preserving traditional inscriptions in Roman cultural memory, but also in preserving traditional epigraphic conventions. Additionally, Livy once again combines ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with topographical precision, describing the placement of the inscription in two different locations. As is the case with his descriptions of the inscriptions honouring Camillus and Cincinnatus, Livy specifies the placement of the inscription within the temple space. He notes that the duplicates were situated in corresponding locations above the doors of each temple. Flower has argued that ‘It seems likely that this is another instance of the Aemilii competing with the Cornelii Scipiones, who were famous for cultivating a special relationship with Jupiter’s temple on the Capitol . . . Regillus’ posting of the text invited a comparison between the two temples’.50 Additionally, the duplication of the inscription has broader significance when considered in the context of the Capitoline as a centre of cultural memory within Livy’s narrative. Jaeger has noted that when Lucius Aemilius Paullus goes to the temple of Jupiter at Olympia, he orders a sacrifice to be prepared just as if he were on the 47

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Briscoe (2008) ad 40.52.5 observes that ‘Forms of ipse in which the first part of the pronoun is declined like is are confined to early Latin, and largely to Plautus’. Untermann (1988) 439 remarks that elsewhere in Livy the form duello only appears in sacral contexts. For the genitive preceding ergo see Briscoe (2008) ad 40.52.7, noting that it ‘is an archaism regularly used in formal contexts’. Caesius Bassus, De Saturnio Verso (Keil (1857–80) 6.265). The grammarian Atilius Fortunatianus also mentions verse inscriptions dedicated by triumphant generals on the Capitoline (Keil (1857–80) 6.293). Cf. Stein (1931) 7, 68; Beard (2007) 75 and 351 n. 5; Briscoe (2008) ad 38.50.3 and 40.52.5–6; Östenberg (2009) 197. Untermann (1988) 439; Briscoe (2008) ad 40.52.5. 50 Flower (2017) 94.

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Capitoline (Livy 45.28.5). She writes, ‘The narrative, therefore, reflects some fundamental convictions about the organization of space: Rome is the center of the empire it rules, and the Capitoline, the fixed center of Roman religion and home of the gods who are the source of Rome’s supremacy, is the center of Rome’.51 The inscription attached to the temple of the lares permarini gains a more central place in Roman cultural memory through its duplication on the Capitoline. Livy characterizes the Capitoline as a place of memory, and the duplicated inscription absorbs these connotations, becoming part of the epigraphic record associated with this lieu de mémoire. Furthermore, by moving this inscription a second time into the space of his historical narrative, Livy is able to preserve the duplication itself in Roman cultural memory. In his text, Livy focalizes upon the duplication, solidifying the topographical link between the two different locations where the inscription was placed. The visual details that he provides about the placement of the inscription above the doors of the temple of the lares permarini in the Campus Martius and the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline make it possible to envision them both simultaneously.52 The inscription, removed from two different topographical lieux de mémoire, takes on additional topographical significance as it becomes ‘portable’, undergoing a medial transformation as it enters the space of Livy’s narrative. Through this characterization of the duplicate inscription, Livy controls how it is remembered, ensuring that its space in the landscape of the Capitoline is remembered together with its placement in the temple of the lares permarini. As mentioned previously, Augustus gradually shifted monuments to the Campus Martius, but Livy’s account ensures that the duplicate placed on the Capitoline does not fade from memory.

17.5

Conclusion

Livy’s descriptions of inscriptions on the Capitoline ensured that aspects of the traditional epigraphic landscape remained preserved in Roman cultural memory. As he reconstructed traditional inscriptions and their conventions, his epigraphic activity complemented the Augustan ‘epigraphic frenzy’. Readers of Livy’s account could juxtapose his descriptions of historical inscriptions with their own memory of the space where these monuments were located, envisioning them as they once were on the Capitoline. 51 52

Jaeger (1997) 3. For the topographical location of the temple of the lares permarini see Coarelli (1996b). Orlin (2007) 82–3 has discussed the temple of the lares permarini as an example of a monument ‘in which Roman memories and Roman history resided’.

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As imperial epigraphic and building activities became increasingly visible, Livy ensured that the pre-Augustan epigraphic landscape did not fade entirely from memory. Livy’s authorial choice to infuse instances of ‘inscriptional intermediality’ with precise information about location reflects his sensitivity to the value of the original topographical contexts of ‘monumental memory-sites’ amidst a changing epigraphic landscape. Augustus converted ‘topographical’ lieux de mémoire into ‘portable’ lieux de mémoire while creating his own new inscriptions that rivalled historical ones. By the time when Tacitus was writing, an inscription recording the name of the republican consul Catulus, who dedicated the restored temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, was conspicuous amongst the names of Caesars.53 The result of Augustus’s epigraphic activities, as Tacitus attests, was a markedly different epigraphic landscape in which historical inscriptions like the ones honouring Catulus were at risk of fading from Roman cultural memory. Livy recalls an earlier time when republican heroes like Camillus left dedications that were visible within the memory landscape of the Capitoline. Through enargeia, he recreates them vividly in his narrative, using ‘inscriptional intermediality’ together with topographical precision to describe their placement upon the Capitoline. As the Capitoline, the quintessential Roman lieu de mémoire, evolved, Livy ensured that his inscriptional ‘monumental memory-sites’ remained in Roman cultural memory along with their original topographical contexts. As Roller has noted, whereas ‘built structures’ are subject to ‘appearance and disappearance’ while ‘existing within specific, circumscribed intervals of time and space’ the literary medium is not subject to the same constraints, and a text that is continually copied and circulated ‘cannot easily be made to disappear altogether’.54 The medium of a written annalistic history, which mimicked the Roman landscape but was not subjected to the changes that it experienced, made it possible for Livy to preserve aspects of the traditional epigraphic landscape through ‘inscriptional intermediality’. While the ‘monumental memory-sites’ that he describes become ‘portable’ through ‘inscriptional intermediality’, Livy foregrounds their ‘topographical’ qualities in an era when Augustus was transforming the city by changing and moving longstanding lieux de mémoire. 53

54

He writes, ‘The name of Lutatius Catulus remained among so many works of the Caesars all the way up to Vitellius’ (‘Lutatii Catuli nomen inter tanta Caesarum opera usque ad Vitellium mansit’, Tac. Hist. 3.72). For discussion of this passage see Edwards (1996) 79–82; Rea (2007) 60–1; Sailor (2008) 205–14; Gallia (2012) 63–70. Roller (2013) 129.

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Although the epigraphic landscape that Livy recreated and preserved is an even more distant memory today, the Capitoline still retains aspects of its original character. Nora has written that lieux de mémoire experience metamorphosis over time, and the landscape of the Capitoline has transformed and evolved while still remaining a ‘site of memory’.55 Remains of the foundation of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus have been integrated into the Capitoline Museum, illustrating the continuing status of the monument as a ‘topographical’ lieu de mémoire. In addition, visitors to the Capitoline museum may see the reconstructed fragments of the Fasti Capitolini in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as an array of inscriptions displayed in the Galleria Lapidaria.56 These inscriptions are ‘monumental memory-sites’ that stand between the categories of ‘portable’ and ‘topographical’. Moved to the galleries, they take on additional significance as lieux de mémoire ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself ’ within a modern museum that preserves inscriptions in Roman cultural memory.57 They serve as a reminder that the Capitoline has long been, and continues to be, a centre of Roman cultural memory and epigraphic activity. 55 56 57

Nora (1989) 19. For the renovations see Fentress (2007). For the placement of the Fasti Capitolini see Beard (2007) 61–2. For the Galleria Lapidaria see Velestino (2015). Nora (1989) 7.

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chapter 18

Cultural Memory and the Role of the Architect in Vitruvius’ De Architectura Edwin Shaw

18.1

Introduction

The power of place to stir memory was well-known in antiquity, and is exemplified by a speech Cicero places in the mouth of Piso in de Finibus (On Ends). Piso reflects on the Athenian cityscape, and remarks on the capacity of places and the memory associated with them to stir emotion even more strongly than hearing or reading.1 Accordingly, the role of monuments and buildings in Republican memory has been the focus of a good deal of recent scholarship.2 Nor was the mnemonic potential of buildings lost on the princeps himself: as recent work by Eric Orlin and others has shown, architecture played an important role in the Augustan regime, shaping memories of recent events, and stimulating remembrance of a more distant past.3 Examples include the temple of Apollo on the Palatine and the new constructions on the Capitoline (treated elsewhere in this volume), as well as the Forum Augustum, with its statues of Republican notables (the summi viri) evoking a particular model of Roman history.4 As Orlin has highlighted, the same idea underpins the re-dedication of ancient temples with new dies natales (dedicatory anniversaries), recalibrating their memorial associations along new lines.5 It is also illustrated by Augustus’ autobiographical testament – the Res Gestae – and its inscription of a monumental ‘authorised version’ for a Roman and imperial public.6 With this chapter, I will develop these ideas further by considering a text which is contemporary with the early years of the Augustan period, and 1 3 4 5

Cic. Fin. 5.2. 2 See e.g. Roller (2013), Hölkeskamp (2016a), (2018). See Orlin (2007) and (2015) with full bibliography; cf. Zanker (1988) esp. 101–238, Sauron (2003), Rea (2007). On monuments to Actium in particular see Hölscher (1985). See Delignon in this volume. On the summi viri see Luce (1990); Geiger (2008); Shaya (2013). Orlin (2007) esp. 82–90. 6 Cf. Yavetz (1984).

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which casts a different light on the power of building: Vitruvius’ de Architectura (On Architecture). A treatise in ten books, Vitruvius’ work systematically sets out the knowledge of the discipline, from the siting of cities, to the properties of building materials, and the construction of various kinds of siege engines.7 While the work has, of course, had considerable influence in architectural history, it has been less frequently used as a document of its Augustan context, although recent scholarship has begun to rectify this.8 In this chapter, I will use cultural memory as an heuristic entry point to examine aspects of Vitruvius’ writing. After a brief discussion of Vitruvius’ background and work, I will demonstrate that the work echoes the importance of memory and codification found in the buildings of the Augustan age. Vitruvius emphasises the contribution that the architect might make here, and his work reinforces the significance of the memorial dimension in Augustan monuments. Beyond this, I will suggest that the nature of Vitruvius’ work itself, codifying a specific version of Roman architectural practice, echoes Jan Assmann’s ideas on cultural memory as institutionalised body of knowledge. Finally, I will examine a specific invocation of cultural memory within Vitruvius’ overall project, to show that Vitruvius carves out a distinctive role for the architect in society partly through an appeal to cultural memory.

18.2 Vitruvius’ Project We know little about Vitruvius beyond what he tells us, and what we can deduce: he was an apparitor (a paid civil servant),9 his background was in the military, and he had served with Julius Caesar;10 he perhaps had some connection with Augustus’ sister Octavia, resulting in his continued favour even after the Ides of March.11 Despite this, his name is not associated with any of the major examples of Augustan architecture; his relationship to the regime seems rather distant than intimate. The de Architectura seems likely to have assumed its final form at some point in the 20s BC. Based on Vitruvius’ identification of Augustus as 7 8

9 10

Respectively Vit. de Arch. 1.4; 2.3–10; 10.10–16. On Vitruvius’ influence see Rowland (2005). Particularly important recent contributions on the author include McEwen (2003), the special 49th issue of Arethusa dedicated to Vitruvius (2016), and the Budé editions of the work by Fleury et al. (1969–93). On Vitruvius’ social status see Masterson (2004) 390–2, with previous bibliography; on Vitruvius’ notion of service see Gros (1994). Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.2. 11 Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.2.

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imperator Caesar, Ronald Syme suggested the year 27 BC;12 however, scholars differ on when its material was actually collected.13 Elizabeth Rawson suggested that the work reflected the cultural milieu of the 40s and 30s BC better than the early Augustan period;14 based on Vitruvius’ lack of attention to contemporary developments, for example the possibilities afforded by new techniques with concrete, he has been characterised as conservative and even regressive.15 However, while the technical content may well date to the late Republic, the framing of the finished project is clearly Augustan, responding to the new opportunities for building afforded by post-Actian stability;16 although – particularly if 27 BC is the correct date – the work likely predates the most significant Augustan architectural projects, it nonetheless echoes the rhetoric of restoration associated with the early Augustan period.17 This early Augustan context is important, not just because of the new opportunities it offered for architects, but also in the light of contemporary debates about Roman identities and values.18 Vitruvius presents his work as the codification of all architectural subject-matter into a unified handbook. He claims in the preface that ‘in these rolls I have unfolded all of the principles of the discipline’ (‘his voluminibus aperui omnes disciplinae rationes’, Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.3). This reflects a late Republican tendency towards the systematisation of knowledge, recalling Varro’s near-contemporary encyclopaedic treatment of various technical disciplines (including architecture), and broad-ranging treatises like Cicero’s de Oratore (On the Orator).19 Nonetheless, this aspect of Vitruvius’ project is worth investigation, since to codify architectural 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19

Syme (1958) 182. See Rowland & Howe (1999) 3–5 for an overview of previous scholarship; they conclude that the books reflect the changing context of the 20s and were probably published before 22. Cf. also Gabba (1980); Baldwin (1990); McEwen (2003) 305 n.2. Rawson (1985) 86–7. cf. Romano (2016) for Vitruvius as a transitional figure. See Vit. de Arch. 2.8.7 on apparent disdain for modern methods; cf. Rawson (1985) 190; Schrijvers (1989). Von Hesberg (2018) 37 reads Vitruvius’ approach as conservative, using the past as a frame for the assessment of the present. See Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.1 and further below, pp. 317–8. On the theme of restoration within the imagery of the period see Galinsky (1996) 90–106; Zanker (1988) 101–66. The topic is all-encompassing, but see especially Galinsky (1996) 80–140; Wallace-Hadrill (1997) and (2008). Gowing (2005) 17–20 notes that the new imperial context also prompted a reassessment of Roman memories. Varro’s de Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) and Cicero’s rhetorical works (along with Lucretius, whom I consider further below) are cited with approval as literary precursors at Vit. de Arch. 9.prol.17. See Rawson (1985) 140 on the influence of dialectic and systematisation on Vitruvius. See also André (1992) 915. On Varro see also Leonardis in this volume.

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knowledge in this way was a distinctive departure from the tradition of architectural writings within which Vitruvius worked, and on which he drew.20 Quellenforschung may have identified sources for specific parts of Vitruvius’ work, but it also suggests that the overall structure and eclecticism of content is Vitruvius’ own.21 I will return to this below. Vitruvius’ intended readership has provoked disagreement. Was his aim to set out a convenient work of reference for practising craftsmen – as in his reference to the written notes which he suggests that builders ought to keep – or to address a wider, educated elite?22 The answer is surely both.23 Vitruvius buttresses his technical material with anecdotes, remarks on his work’s place within an intellectual tradition, and discussion of more general aspects of Greek and Roman culture presumably intended to appeal to a broader audience. The combination is at times somewhat jarring: it is hard to imagine a reader equally receptive to detailed recommendations on plastering and the story of Alexander’s architect Dinocrates.24 Rather, the multiple levels surely represent an attempt to communicate to multiple audiences: not just to craftsmen, but also their educated patrons.25 The inclusion of this more literary material (mostly in the prefaces to each book) not only makes his work more readable through variety and ornament, but also makes a point about the sophistication of the role and status of the architect.26 The sense that Vitruvius writes for an elite audience as well as a practical one underpins assessments of the aims of the de Architectura. One important aspect of the codification of architecture is the sense that this represents a departure for a field previously seen as beneath the Roman elite. Throughout, Vitruvius stresses the intellectual as well as practical aspects of the architect’s craft, as in the opening discussion of the architect’s qualities: 20 21

22

23 25

26

See Novara (1994); Vitruvius discusses his sources at Vit. de Arch. 7.prol.10–18. On Vitruvius’ sources see Rawson (1985) 188–9. Tomlinson (1989) discusses Vitruvius’ source use in books 3–4, demonstrating that the overall ordering of the text is his own contribution; cf. also Gros (1973) and (1975), reprinted in Gros (2006), as well as Courrént (2001). On compilation as literary activity in the imperial period see the papers in König & Whitmarsh (2007). Vit. de Arch. 1.1.4: ‘litteras architectum scire oportet uti commentariis memoriam firmiorem efficere possit’ (‘a architect must be a man of letters that he may keep a record of useful precedents’). Cf. Romano (2013). Cf. Courrént (2005), Rowland and Howe (1999) 1. 24 Vit. de Arch. 7.3; 2.prol. On the social position of architects in the period see Schrijvers (1989). Geertman (1994) adduces Cicero’s de Oratore and Strabo as parallels for Vitruvius’ combination of technical and more cultural material. On the rhetoric of Vitruvius’ prefaces see Frézouls (1989); André (1992); for his commentary on the status of the architect see Brown (1963); Gros (1994); Novara (1994).

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itaque architecti qui sine litteris contenderant ut manibus essent exercitati non potuerunt efficere ut haberent pro laboribus auctoritatem; qui autem ratiocinationibus et litteris solis confisi fuerunt umbram non rem persecuti videntur. at qui utrumque perdidicerunt, uti omnibus armis ornati, citius cum auctoritate quod fuit propositum sunt adsecuti. Architects who without culture aim at manual skill cannot gain a prestige corresponding to their labours, while those who trust in theory and literature obviously follow a shadow and not reality. But those who have mastered both, like men equipped in full armour, soon acquire influence and attain their purpose.27 (Vit. de Arch. 1.1.2)

In the discussion which follows, Vitruvius develops this idea by associating architecture with other better-established disciplines within Roman culture. His ideal architect is knowledgeable in all of the artes: learned (litteratus), a skilled draughtsman, knowledgeable in mathematics, music, philosophy, history, law, and astronomy.28 The similarity here to the orator of Cicero’s de Oratore as a multi-skilled polymath is no coincidence:29 part of Vitruvius’ aim is similarly to establish a thoroughgoing relevance to the architect’s art, and his competence across a broad field of intellectual endeavours. I will have more to say on Vitruvius’ attempt to justify the architect’s status throughout this chapter.

18.3 Memory and the Role of the Architect One aspect of the architect’s importance which Vitruvius highlights is his relation to memory: the text repeatedly mentions the relationship to the past which is embedded in architecture. This theme is introduced from the very beginning of the work, with Vitruvius’ dedication to the princeps.30 After some more or less topical praise for the settling of the civil wars, Vitruvius moves on to his distinctive area of interest: cum vero adtenderem te non solum de vita communi omnium curam publicaeque rei constitutionem habere sed etiam de opportunitate publicorum aedificiorum, ut civitas per te non solum provinciis esset aucta, verum etiam ut maiestas imperii publicorum aedificiorum egregias haberet auctoritates, non putavi praetermittendum, quin primo quoque tempore de his rebus ea tibi ederem, ideo quod primum parenti tuo de eo fueram notus et eius virtutis studiosus . . . quod animadverti multa te aedificavisse et nunc 27 28 30

The English translation of Vitruvius here and throughout is adapted from Granger (1931). Vit. de Arch. 1.1.3. 29 Cic. de Or. 1.45–73. Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.1. Nichols (2009) 109–13 compares Vitruvius’ dedication to Augustus with Horace’s at Hor. Ep. 2.1.1–1.4.

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edwin shaw aedificare, reliquo quoque tempore et publicorum et privatorum aedificiorum pro amplitudine rerum gestarum ut posteris memoriae traderentur, curam habiturum. conscripsi praescriptiones terminatas, ut eas adtendens et ante facta et futura qualia sint opera, per te posses nota habere. I, however, observed that you cared not only about the common life of all men and the constitution of the state, but also about the provision of public buildings; so the state was not only made greater through you by its new provinces, but the majesty of the empire was also expressed through the eminent dignity of its public buildings. Hence I think that the opportunity of bringing you my proposals about these things should not be missed, in particular because I was formerly known to your father, whose virtues I revered . . . For I understand that you have built, and are now building, on a large scale. Furthermore, with respect to the future, you have such regard to public and private buildings, that they will correspond to the grandeur of our history, and will be a memorial to future ages. I have furnished you a detailed treatise so that, by reference to it, you might inform yourself about the works already undertaken or about to be so. (Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.2–3)

Vitruvius foregrounds the memorial dimension (ut posteris memoriae traderentur), suggesting that the project of codifying architectural knowledge is valuable precisely in that it might express the majesty of the empire in perpetuity. This goes beyond Cicero’s idea of buildings stirring memories themselves based on texts or experience (Plato’s philosophy, or the orator’s recollection of great speeches given in the Curia). Instead, Vitruvius suggests the construction of buildings precisely with a view to their memorial potential, as permanent expressions of great deeds (res gestae). Vitruvius’ suggestion as to the power of buildings here is not new: it draws on Republican practices of aristocratic commemoration through building, as exemplified by the construction of temples or other monuments out of spoils of war as permanent reminders of services rendered.31 However, distinctively Vitruvian is the sense that buildings might now express for posterity the majesty of the empire more widely, standing as recognitions of a whole Augustan context rather than memorialising a solely personal achievement. This is not the aristocratic commemoration of the Republic, but an expression of the newly unified position of Rome as a whole, and a statement of the potential contribution of buildings to the overall image of society. Vitruvius’ stress on the memorial dimension 31

E.g. C. Duilius’ monumental column decorated with ships’ prows (columna rostrata), commemorating his naval triumph of 260 BC (on which see Roller (2009) 219–29; Roller (2018) 134–62). Oskanish (2016) argues that Vitruvius’ work actually shares many of the commemorative aims of contemporary historiography.

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echoes the evocations of the past in Augustan architecture itself, which hold particular significance in an Augustan context precisely because of the newly unified society they commemorate. The focus on memory in architectural practice manifests itself in a different way in Vitruvius’ claim that the architect needs some familiarity with history. This idea is in fact more closely aligned with the idea of cultural memory as a shared repository of meaning. Vitruvius begins as follows: ‘historias autem plures novisse oportet, quod multa ornamenta saepe in operibus architecti designant, de quibus argumentis rationem, cur fecerint, quaerentibus reddere debent’ (Vit. de Arch. 1.1.5) (‘Architects ought to be familiar with plenty of historical narratives, because of the many ornaments they often include in their works; these they ought to be able to explain when asked about their inclusion’). That is, part of the architect’s job is to explain the historical referencepoints of their work. The emphasis here on explanation, rather than on the necessity of historical knowledge in actually designing a building, is somewhat surprising, but significant. It implies that the historical reference itself is already implicit within a specific architectural feature, rather than being somehow encoded by the architect himself. Historical knowledge is not required for the architect to include caryatids, to use Vitruvius’ example, because supporting columns in female form were an established part of the available vocabulary.32 Although Vitruvius does provide an etymology, which he traces to the treacherous support of the Peloponnesian city of Carya for the Persians, this is so that the architect might explain it to an enquirer. The significance of caryatids is latent within the architectural vernacular, with the role of the architect being rather to interpret than to encode a specific message himself. The mnemonic content of architecture is implicit within the medium, so the memorial function of the architect consists of drawing out elements already imbued with particular associations, and mediating the established significance of specific features. The point is repeated in the second example Vitruvius gives here, which in the same way connects architectural ornament (this time male supporting figures) to a specific historical event: 32

Vit. de Arch. 1.1.5: Rowland and Howe (1999) 136 note that the historical accuracy of Vitruvius’ explanation is itself questionable. Cf. von Hesberg (2018) 39 on the marked simplification of Vitruvius’ version of the narrative; we might consider this in relation to its enshrinement as a mnemonically useful and transferrable motif.

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edwin shaw non minus Lacones, Pausania Agesilae filio duce, Plataeeo proelio pauca manu infinitum numerum exercitus Persarum cum superavissent, acto cum gloria triumpho spoliorum et praedae, porticum Persicam ex manubiis, laudis et virtutis civium indicem, victoriae posteris pro tropaeo constituerunt. Ibique captivorum simulacra barbarico vestis ornatu, superbia meritis contumeliis punita, sustinentia tectum conlocaverunt, uti et hostes horrescerent timore eorum fortitudinis effectus, et cives id exemplum virtutis aspicientes gloria erecti ad defendendam libertatem essent parati. itaque ex eo multi statuas Persicas sustinentes epistylia et ornamenta eorum conlocaverunt. Equally, the Spartans under the command of Pausanias, son of Agesilas, after defeating an infinitely large army of Persians at the battle of Plataea with just a small force, gloriously celebrated a triumph with spoils and plunder; they built the Persian Colonnade from the booty to mark the merit and courage of the citizens, and to be a trophy of victory to their descendants. There they placed statues of their captives in barbaric dress – punishing their pride with deserved insults – to support the roof, that their enemies might be shaken by the fear of such bravery, and their fellow-citizens, looking upon such a pattern of virtue, might be fortified and prepared for the defence of freedom by such glory. Following from this, many have set up Persian statues to support architraves and their ornaments. (Vit. de Arch. 1.1.6)

Again, architects do not impose a specific historical or mnemonic message onto their work; they rely instead on a significance already inherent within the features they deploy, and re-enacted in the present. The Persian Colonnade and the memory it represents is actually said to stir up the virtue of the citizens, and to inspire them to the defence of freedom: the memory embodied within the feature has normative value within the present. Vitruvius’ claim for the power of architecture here is remarkably similar to the claims made elsewhere in Republican literature for historiography and the power of images: the architectural vocabulary taps into the past in a similar way.33 Vitruvius’ discussion here of the significance of history to the architect is I think highly relevant to the theme of cultural memory. The point of his examples is that an architectural feature itself might visually codify a specific event, and that this feature might then serve as a mnemonic device within subsequent usages, making the connection back to 33

Compare Sempronius Asellio’s criticism of bare annales at FRHist 20 F2, as – unlike Asellio’s work – unable to inspire citizens to virtuous deeds: ‘nam neque alacriores ad rempublicam defendundam neque segniores ad rem perperam faciundam annales libri commovere quicquam possunt’ (‘For books of annals cannot move anyone to be readier to defend the republic, or more hesitant to do something wrong’). The power of imagines to inspire emulation is addressed at Polyb. 6.53–4; cf. also Sallust’s remarks on imagines at Jug. 4.5–6.

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its original significance even when deployed in diverse contexts. The architectural feature itself becomes a kind of encoded memory, realised and interpreted anew within subsequent buildings, and in replicable form. As well as the clear connection here with cultural memory as an institutionalised corpus of material to be remembered in the present, there is also a link with Matthew Roller’s idea of ‘intersignification’ within Republican monuments.34 Roller’s discussion of the ways in which monuments might derive meaning from their interrelation, and from the deployment of shared signs within divergent contexts, seems to mesh well with Vitruvius’ ideas about the transferable mnemonic force of specific motifs within the architectural vernacular, and the sense that their inclusion in a given building might allow it to tap into a specific set of memories associated with the motif and its role in previous buildings.35

18.4 The Organisation of Memory In the light of this relationship between architecture and cultural memory, and in particular the relevance of a corpus of architectural motifs constituted with reference to memory, it is worth returning to Vitruvius’ claim to outline a unified discipline and to the wider cultural contribution which this might imply. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has demonstrated how far Vitruvius’ text engages with important contemporary questions, and in particular how much it has to say about identity: he argues that the work mediates between qualities perceived as respectively Greek and Roman, and that part of its purpose is to present Greek theory for a Roman audience.36 In what follows, I will consider how this idea of an author intellectually engaged with his period might also be relevant in the terms of cultural memory. In so doing, I shift focus: rather than Vitruvius’ commentary on the mnemonic role of architecture, I want now to consider Vitruvius’ written work as itself a contribution to the fixing of a specifically Roman cultural memory, expressed in architectural terms. Jan Assmann’s formulation of the term remains a useful starting-point for thinking about de Architectura, particularly the ideas that cultural memory represents a ‘concretion of identity’, that it reconstructs itself in 34 35

36

Roller (2013), followed by Hölkeskamp (2018). Roller (2018) 130 in distinguishing ‘intersignification’ from intertextuality suggests that architecture and monuments cannot draw on the resources of ‘metrical or phonetic repetition or other acoustic patterning’ that texts can; but in the light of Vitruvius’ comments here on the transferability of architectural motifs, it is worth considering whether visual patterns and repeated motifs might achieve something of the same effect. Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 144–210.

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relation to contemporary contexts, and that it is organised through particular institutional forms (including written texts).37 These aspects of Assmann’s formulation provide a useful lens through which to view de Architectura and its project. I suggest that one way to approach the de Architectura is to read it precisely as a concretion of Roman cultural memory; that is, to view the text itself as an expression of Roman cultural memory – in the terms of architectural practice – within the institutionalised form of an encyclopaedic literary work. The practices and guidelines codified in Vitruvius’ work provide an aggregation of knowledge sanctioned by memory. Vitruvius’ encyclopaedic corpus, I suggest, codifies Roman cultural memory by defining Roman building through reference to traditionally ratified practice. I suggested above that Vitruvius’ project of outlining a coherent disciplina of architecture is distinctive. In his prefatory statement, Vitruvius links this to the provision of a coherent set of guidelines for the emperor Augustus and the new opportunities afforded by extensive building, but it is also worth considering this formalisation of knowledge as itself a kind of memorial device. Inherent within ‘unfolding all of the principles of the discipline’ is a claim to systematise and thus to ‘fix’ that knowledge. In claiming to write systematically and comprehensively, Vitruvius’ text is inevitably also prescriptive, not just outlining possibilities but also delineating boundaries. The corpus of architectural knowledge he creates is encyclopaedic, but is also complete and immutable.38 Comprehensiveness was, of course, a goal of technical and didactic writings, as is clear from comparison with eclectic texts like Cato’s de Agricultura. Yet Vitruvius’ comprehensiveness, and the attempt to delimit the corpus of architecture, also represents a distinct choice, particularly within the context of the new opportunities for building afforded by the Augustan context. Despite (or perhaps even because of) these new opportunities across not just Italy but the world, Vitruvius’ concern remains the descriptive codification of a body of existing and ostensibly traditional practices. The text monumentalises a specific version of architectural knowledge appealing to a constructed version of existing Roman practice.39 37

38 39

Assmann and Czaplicka (1995) 129–33. While Assmann’s work has been developed by later scholars, his fundamental idea of the concretion of identity through institutional buttresses remains particularly relevant to Vitruvius’ text. Hölkeskamp and Stein-Hölkeskamp (2017) 62 reiterate the idea of canonical literary texts as ‘Orte und Träger der Bewahrung von Tradition und Wissen’; while Vitruvius’ work is canonical in a different sense from Virgil’s or Livy’s, it nonetheless fulfils a similar role in memorial terms. For the perfection of Vitruvius’ ten books see McEwen (2003) 15–89. Cf. the focus on the global scope of Augustus’ imperium in the first sentence of the work (Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.1): ‘cum divina tua mens et numen, imperator Caesar, imperio potiretur orbis terrarum’ (‘When your divine mind and power, emperor Caesar, gained the empire of the world’).

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This is worth considering in the light of the ‘conservatism’ which Vitruvius supposedly demonstrates. Vitruvius shows little interest in innovations in the use of concrete and of vaulting; but rather than these omissions being prompted by the architect’s lack of concern for modern developments, we might instead view them as deliberate omissions from a closed set of techniques ratified by tradition. As we are often reminded, forgetting is as significant as remembering:40 Vitruvius’ implicit claim to have included everything important again prescribes techniques traditionally sanctioned within Roman practice, ignoring those not supported by tradition. The knowledge circumscribed by Vitruvius’ ten books can be read as an attempt to fix a specific model of Roman architecture as a reference-point for Augustan Rome. Vitruvius’ claim to have outlined the whole discipline becomes the descriptive codification of an institutionalised body of knowledge. Taken in this way, the text constitutes one of Assmann’s institutional buffers of cultural memory. As well as offering a commentary on the importance of the memorial dimension within buildings themselves, in a broader sense the de Architectura serves as a repository for a specifically Roman cultural memory as exemplified in and transmitted through architectural means. In the light of this, I return to the other criteria of Assmann’s formulation: that cultural memory might serve as a concretion of identity, and that it might have normative value in certain contexts. Both of these functions, I think, are similarly apparent in Vitruvius’ encyclopaedic endeavour. For the normative and prescriptive point of the work, we might return to the initial statement of purpose. Vitruvius claims to write what and when he does because of the increase in new building across the whole empire.41 Normative expression of existing Roman traditions is thus particularly relevant: Vitruvius’ work formalises a body of traditional forms to be extended and re-constructed in new contexts. He codifies knowledge precisely in order that it might manifest the traditionally sanctioned forms in a contemporary context. Vitruvius’ codified Roman cultural memory also has something important to say about Roman identity. As Wallace-Hadrill has noted, Vitruvius is concerned with the knowledge and influence of the Greeks, but he is also concerned with pointing out distinctively Roman parts in what he records, and while Vitruvius’ architectural system is dominated by Greek theory, it also incorporates Roman tradition.42 In fact, it is worth noting how often 40 42

E.g. Galinsky (2015) 13. 41 Vit. de Arch. 1.prol.2. Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 208: ‘the Roman-ness of Roman architecture is something elaborately constructed by Vitruvius, a specific product of a specific historical juncture’.

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Vitruvius’ descriptions of supposedly traditional Roman architecture actually seem inadequate, and out of keeping with actual contemporary practice (to judge by extant archaeological remains). However, we might again read this as an attempt to enshrine a particular, constructed, version of Roman practice within the mnemonic record, and to emphasise a distinctively Roman contribution within the codified corpus of cultural memory.43 This is illustrated by an example from Vitruvius’ technical material, from the section of his work dealing with the architectural orders. Vitruvius describes the standard Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, but he attaches a fourth to these called the Tuscan, with its own rules of proportion.44 Vitruvius’ Tuscan order seems actually not to correspond well to contemporary practice: the scheme provided by Vitruvius seems more prescriptive than descriptive, and few temples actually exist meeting his criteria.45 However, Vitruvius’ effort to define the style in the terms of the better-established architectural orders represents an attempt to codify a specifically Italian form within the overall corpus, and thus to introduce a supposedly indigenous Italian element into his fixing of architectural knowledge. The name ‘Tuscan’ exemplifies this: in appealing to the oldest period of Roman history, Vitruvius links this form precisely to the period of Rome’s origins, a particular locus for cultural memory.46 Even if it does not represent contemporary practice, Vitruvius’ discussion of this ‘Tuscan’ form integrates this supposedly Italian element within the cultural memory which his work institutionalises. Another example of the formalisation of a specifically Roman cultural memory comes in the well-known polemic against wall-paintings depicting ‘unrealistic’ or impossible subjects.47 In Book 7 of his work, Vitruvius rails equally against those who paint and those who enjoy impossible scenes such as porticoes held up by stalks, rather than columns, or half-human half-animal creatures: ‘neque enim picturae probari debent, quae non sunt similes veritati, nec, si factae sunt elegantes ab arte, ideo de his statim debet “recte” iudicari, nisi argumentationes certas rationes habuerint sine offensionibus explicatas’ (‘For pictures cannot be approved which do not 43 44 45 46 47

McEwen (2003) 6. On Vitruvius and archaeology see further the articles in Clini (2014). Vit. de Arch. 4.7; see Rawson (1985) 189 for useful discussion. Vit. de Arch. 3.3.7 cites the Temple of Ceres at the Circus Maximus, Pompey’s Temple of Hercules, and the Capitoline Temple as examples. See further Gros (1992) lii–lvi and 176–8. Cf. von Hesberg (2018) 42–3 for Vitruvius’ definition of these architectural orders by reference to the past. Vit. de Arch. 7.5. Elsner (1995) 51–8 reads Vitruvius’ remarks on paintings’ subject-matter as a polemic against the memorialisation of fundamentally impossible and thus unhistorical subjects.

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resemble reality. Even if they have a fine and accomplished finish, paintings can only be praised if they exhibit their proper subject without transgressing the rules of art’, Vit. de Arch. 7.5.4) The new style, Vitruvius suggests, is deceptive, and its popularity a result of lax morality (iniqui mores).48 Importantly, Vitruvius frames this discussion precisely as the opposition between the time-sanctioned subject-matter of the ancients and debased contemporary forms, with Vitruvius’ argument in favour of the preservation of traditional subject-matter. Again, his recommendations and formalised system privilege a set body of traditional material, here associated with questions of morality and appropriateness. An appeal to a canonical cultural memory is applied in the moralising discourse of the present. I suggest, then, that Vitruvius’ systematisation of the whole discipline of architecture, precisely in the context of an early Augustan building boom, is clearly comprehensible within Assmann’s model of the formalisation of cultural memory through the institution of literary texts. Vitruvius comments on Roman identity: he does this through a work which articulates a carefully codified version of Roman practice laid out in relation to existing tradition. Vitruvius is not, as scholars have charged, conservative or outpaced by the developments in the architectural practice of his time. Rather, his text presents a deliberately restrictive version of the canons of architecture, fixing a specific version of Roman cultural memory to be endlessly reapplied across the expanding empire. This implies a further role for the architect himself: if the text constitutes the codified body of cultural memory, then the architect’s role is the mediation and expression of that memory in contemporary contexts.

18.5

Architecture and the Beginnings of Civilisation

As a final demonstration of the relevance of cultural memory to Vitruvius’ project, I return now to the place of the architect himself, and to one of the more literary passages of the work, which draws together the role ascribed to the architect with the political context of the text’s composition. Book 2 of the de Architectura is mostly concerned with building materials, combining analysis of different substances with an Epicurean atomist theory intended to explain their qualities. However, the relevant passage for my purposes precedes this detailed discussion, and deals with a very different subject. In the book’s preface, Vitruvius includes an anecdote about Dinocrates, the architect who monumentalised Alexander the Great 48

Vit. de Arch. 7.5.3.

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through the planning and building of Alexandria. Central to this anecdote are questions of appropriate commemoration, and the importance of the architect and his subject.49 Having thus established memory as a relevant theme for this part of the text, Vitruvius turns his attention to human origins. Vitruvius begins with a statement of method: sed antequam naturales res incipiam explicare, de aedificiorum rationibus, unde initia ceperint et uti creverint eorum inventiones, ante ponam, et insequar ingressus antiquitatis rerum naturae et eorum qui initia humanitatis et inventiones perquisitas scriptorum praeceptis dedicaverunt. itaque quemadmodum ab his sum institutus, exponam. But before I start to explain the properties of nature, I will first discuss the arts of building, where they came from, and how their innovations developed; I will follow in the footsteps of early nature, and of those writers who have devoted treatises to the beginnings of humanity and its diligently sought-out discoveries. In the way suggested by these men, I will begin. (Vit. de Arch. 2.prol.5, my translation)

Vitruvius claims to follow the example of previous authors in his discussion of early history: however, as we will see, Vitruvius’ reference to previous treatments of the subject is better taken as a general reference to these authors’ subject-matter (the origins of human civilisation) than to the specifics of their content. Nonetheless, the reference to an existing body of material is significant, in pointing clearly to the literary dimension of the account which follows, and signalling the author’s engagement with existing discussions of the origins of civilisation. After this introduction, Vitruvius embarks upon his narrative.50 Humans, according to his version, began like beasts (ut ferae), living in forests, woods, and caves. The chance discovery of fire prompted them to come together, and to develop language. Characteristic of this early stage was skill with their hands: ‘They easily handled with their hands and fingers whatever they wished.’51 This resulted, naturally, in the first efforts at building, with the construction of rudimentary shelters. These rapidly became more sophisticated, as each builder admired the craftsmanship of his neighbour. ‘Since men were of an imitative and teachable nature’, Vitruvius continues, ‘they boasted of their inventions as they daily showed their various achievements in building, and thus, exercising their talents in 49 50

Vit. de Arch. 2.prol.1–4. For useful recent discussions of this passage see Callebat and Gros (1999) xxvii–xxxi; McEwen (2003) 92–102; Formisano (2016). Vit. de Arch. 2.1.1–1.6. 51 Vit. de Arch. 2.1.2.

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rivalry, were rendered of better judgement daily’.52 This development, Vitruvius suggests, catalysed a wider process: the development of craftsmanship through building led to the beginnings of civilisation (humanitas) itself.53 Vitruvius thus uses an appeal to the most distant memories of humanity, that frequently canvassed material on origins, in order to fix his discipline’s historical significance. He projects back the architect’s importance onto an understanding of the beginnings of human civilisation already enshrined within cultural memory. The whole passage thus fits neatly within Vitruvius’ overall project, restating the status and importance of architecture as a discipline. However, we can also develop this sense of the evocation of a specific version of the past by comparison with other accounts. Following on from Vitruvius’ consciously literary introduction, scholars have noted the similarities between this passage and Lucretius’ discussion of human origins in book 5 of de Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe).54 Indeed, elements of Vitruvius’ discussion certainly do echo Lucretius’: there are similarities in the discussion of early man, the development of crafts through the observation of nature, and details including the origins of fire in the friction of tree-branches.55 However, there is another important literary parallel here beyond that with Lucretius. The structure and content clearly recall another nearcontemporary work codifying a technical approach to a specific discipline, which also reaches back into the earliest past to establish its subject’s importance – Cicero’s de Inventione (On Invention).56 It seems very likely that Vitruvius knew this work, which sets out a conventional approach to rhetorical instruction and particularly to the invention or discovery of 52 53

54

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Vit. de Arch. 2.1.3. Vit. de Arch. 2.1.6: ‘tunc vero et fabricationibus aedificiorum gradatim progressi ad ceteras artes et disciplinas, e fera agrestique vita ad mansuetam perduxerunt humanitatem’ (‘from the construction of buildings, they progressed by degrees to other crafts and disciplines, and led the way from a savage and rustic life to a peaceful civilisation’). This is lent additional weight by the fact that the technical discussion which follows in Vitruvius’ second book echoes Epicurean atomic theory, and by Vitruvius’ professed admiration for Lucretius elsewhere (Vit. de Arch. 9.prol.17). On Lucretius in Vitruvius’ work see Weiner (2016) (with discussion of previous bibliography at 134 n.6; on this passage specifically, 138–9); on this passage see also Callebat and Gros (1999) 64 with further bibliography. Lucr. 5.925–987 (origins); Lucr. 5.1241–280 (crafts); Lucr. 5.1096–1101 (friction – cf. Vit. de Arch. 2.1.1). Cicero’s work is in some ways more obviously parallel with Vitruvius’ than Lucretius’ is: it is in prose rather than verse; the scale is more comparable; the order of Vitruvius’ discussion also parallels Cicero’s. We might perhaps even see a reference to Cicero in Vitruvius’ repeated use of inventiones in reference to the development of human civilisation in the passage.

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persuasive arguments. To judge from its later influence, the de Inventione was (despite being repudiated by Cicero himself) among the orator’s most-read works;57 Vitruvius himself refers to Cicero’s rhetorical works elsewhere as examples for technical literature; there are also Ciceronian elements within Vitruvius’ technical vocabulary, which point towards a knowledge of the rhetorical tradition perhaps derived from de Inventione.58 Cicero’s account of origins is largely similar to Vitruvius’, in that he too begins with humans living in the fields and living on wild fare, without laws or social institutions. However, Cicero’s idea of the civilising influence is very different: quo tempore quidam magnus videlicet vir et sapiens cognovit quae materia esset et quanta ad maximas res opportunitas in animis inesset hominum, si quis eam posset elicere et praecipiendo meliorem reddere; qui dispersos homines in agros et in tectis silvestribus abditos ratione quadam conpulit unum in locum et congregavit et eos in unam quamque rem inducens utilem atque honestam primo propter insolentiam reclamantes, deinde propter rationem atque orationem studiosius audientes ex feris et inmanibus mites reddidit et mansuetos. At this juncture a man, great and wise I am sure, became aware of the power latent in man and the wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power and improve it by instruction. Men were scattered in the fields and hidden in sylvan retreats when he assembled and gathered them in accordance with a plan; he introduced them to every useful and honourable occupation, though they cried out against it at first because of its novelty, and then when through his reason and eloquence they had listened with greater attention, he transformed them from wild savages into a kind and gentle folk.59 (Cic. Inv. 1.2)

The change in human character, and the move away from rusticity towards civilisation, is thanks to the influence of a single, gifted speaker. The shift could only be due to the power of persuasion, Cicero argues, because nothing else adequately explained the deviation from the previous doctrine of the rule of the powerful.60 Like Vitruvius, Cicero gives a kind of ‘foundation myth’ for human civilisation, a process by which the wild 57 58

59

See Achard (1994) 28–9; for Cicero’s disdain for the work, Quint. Inst. 3.1.20, Cic. de Or. 1.5. Vitruvius refers directly to Cicero’s rhetorical works (Vit. de Arch. 9.prol.17); he does not specify whether he means de Inventione, de Oratore or something else (he says simply de arte rhetorica, ‘on the art of rhetoric’), but the detailed technical vocabulary of de Architectura seems likely to be derived from the more limited but more systematic de Inventione. On the rhetorical origins of Vitruvius’ technical terminology for architect’s task see Rowland and Howe (1999) 143; on Vitruvius as reader of Cicero see Courrént (1998). Translation adapted from Hubbell (1949). 60 Cic. Inv. 1.3.

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spirits of mankind are tamed. In Cicero’s account, however, the factor forming communities and civilising humans is oratory. While there are clear similarities between Vitruvius’ version and both Cicero’s and Lucretius’ (and indeed between Cicero’s and Lucretius’), the divergent elements in Vitruvius are important.61 While Cicero posits an oratorical ‘culture hero’ in civilising humanity, Vitruvius makes no mention at all of persuasion. In his account, even the formation of towns and social institutions is due to the civilising powers of fire and of building, with speech simply arising naturally from human concourse.62 Nor does Vitruvius replicate the Lucretian schema of the independent emergence of various crafts.63 Rather, Vitruvius places the beginnings of architecture first, as the innovation from which the other crafts all stem. Building draws together scattered peoples; the emergence of craftsmen leads to the development of intellectual culture and its various disciplines. It is not the orator who provides the intellectual impulse to human life, but the craftsman (faber). It is significant that Vitruvius’ recollection of human origins parallels Cicero’s account, but wholly replaces the role of the orator with that of the craftsman and builder. In a work which uses memory as a way to fix and legitimise specific practices in the present, Vitruvius again highlights the cultural role of the architect, and his primary place within the memory of human intellectual development. The architect is configured as civilising force, and the appeal to a deep level of cultural memory legitimises his role in the present. Further, we might also read this as an attempt to replace the role of the orator within cultural memory with that of the architect. By reconfiguring the beginnings of human civilisation around the builder rather than the speaker, Vitruvius elevates the architect’s role at the expense of the orator’s, who remained culpable in the chaos of the late Republic and whose place under the new Augustan regime was more problematic. It is also striking that Vitruvius’ model of the development of human civilisation owes less to one single ‘culture hero’, an individual like Cicero’s orator, and more to the development of the art through the contributions of many. The model moves away from a single dominant personality towards a more collaborative narrative, perhaps more in keeping with Vitruvius’ corpus of architectural knowledge manifested in the shared past, rather than reliant on the individual force of the orator.64 61 62 64

McEwen (2003) 142–6 discusses similarities between Vitruvius and Cicero in this passage, and also notes the parallelism between Vitruvius’ craftsman and Cicero’s orator. Vit. de Arch. 2.1.1. 63 Lucr. 5.1350–448. I am grateful for this final point to the Press’s anonymous reader.

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18.6 Conclusion I have here used cultural memory as a frame through which to explore some important themes in Vitruvius’ work, working outwards from the commentary which the text offers on the possibilities of architecture to the sense that Vitruvius’ encyclopaedic project might play a monumentalising role of its own. On the simplest level, the de Architectura stresses the importance of the builder in mediating memory: Vitruvius’ contribution corroborates the importance placed on the manipulation of memories in the architecture of the Augustan age. Further, applying the stress on the memorial possibilities of architecture to the project of the whole work suggests a new reading of the text as not just an outline of the discipline’s boundaries, but a codification of memory with something significant to say about Roman identity. In tandem with this reading of the work as a document of cultural memory, I have suggested a reading of the architect’s own position which effectively locates the architect as a new source of authority, based on historical precedent. Memory is invoked in order to set up the architect as an alternative to the position of the orator. Focusing on the memorial dimension thus suggests new ways to read Vitruvius’ work, both echoing and developing contemporary Augustan themes in memory and Roman identity, as well as substantiating Vitruvius’ claims about the role of the architect in the new Augustan context.

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part iv

Locating Cultural Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

chapter 19

Exchanging Memories: Coins, Conquest, and Resistance in Roman Iberia Alyson M. Roy

In 211 BC, the Romans were embroiled in a multi-front war with the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, and despite surviving the disastrous battles of the early years of the war, the Romans continued to face significant setbacks. In the Iberian Peninsula that year, the last-minute defection of Rome’s Celtiberian allies led to the deaths in battle of Publius and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, along with many of their soldiers. This was a disastrous blow to Rome’s war with Carthage, since the campaign in Iberia had been the only successful front in recent years.1 It is perhaps surprising, then, that the Romans minted a coin in Iberia that year that was stamped with symbols of Roman victory (Figure 19.1). The coin shows the Roman god Jupiter on the obverse (front) wearing a laurel wreath on his head, and the goddess Victory standing before a Roman trophy on the reverse (back). Wearing armour and a military cloak, the goddess places a crown on the trophy: rough-hewn logs strapped in a T-shape and decorated with captured armour. Her actions evoke the Roman tradition of crowning a triumphal general with a laurel wreath. This coin represents the complex, multi-faceted role that coinage played in shaping and reflecting recent Roman memory. Coinage was part of a visual culture, including public and private architecture, victory monuments, and inscriptions, that reified elite conceptions of power and prestige. As recent scholarship has observed, the city of Rome was a ‘memory landscape’ embedded with medium-specific coded messages that deployed a syntax rife with symbols of Roman military power.2 Above all, this syntax utilized the vocabulary of the Roman triumph, a military parade granted by the senate to especially successful generals. 1 2

Richardson (1986) 40. Galinsky (2016b) 27 refers to the city of Rome as a ‘memory landscape’, in which buildings and statues that created and reflected cultural memory were embedded. For the idea of an elite syntax in visual culture, see Rutledge (2012, 121). See also Hölkeskamp (2016a) 203–4.

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Figure 19.1 A silver victoriatus (RRC 96/1) struck in 211 BC at the Roman mint in Iberia. The coin depicts the laureate head of Jupiter on the obverse and the goddess Victory crowning a trophy on the reverse, with the legend ROMA in exergue. American Numismatic Society, Coins of the Roman Republic Online, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ark:/12148/btv1b10422383 v

Whereas temples decorated with spoils of war highlighted Roman military success, they were fixed monuments in the memory landscape. Unlike buildings, coins were mobile, varied on a yearly basis, and moneyers had autonomy in designing their iconography.3 Just as with architecture, coin iconography drew on symbols that reflected Roman social mores, in particular the vital role that military power played in elite political and social success. Coinage drew on a visual syntax of both ‘invented traditions and intentional history’ to bolster the moneyers’ familial claims and to assert Roman legitimate authority.4 In essence, coinage extended the memory landscape of Rome into the provinces, aiding the Romans in projecting their authority to conquered peoples. The coin minted in Iberia in 211 BC suggests one such ‘invented tradition’ intended to bolster Roman claims to power in the Iberian Peninsula. If this coin alludes to a specific victory rather than just victory in the abstract, there is only one possible candidate: Marcus Claudius Marcellus’ sack of Syracuse in 212 BC. Since it appears to have circulated only in Iberia, the coin also functioned as a kind of historical erasure, masking the Romans’ disastrous losses at the hands of the Celtiberians, and replacing their memory with an image of Roman triumph.5 This intentional 3 5

Hölkeskamp (2016a) 187. 4 Hölkeskamp (2016a) 186. The coin was a small issue, and six of the seven known examples are found in Iberian hoards.

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obfuscation of the local reality fits easily within the context of Roman political culture. As Harriet Flower points out, ‘choosing what to remember must entail also the choice of what to forget, what to pass over in silence, and what to obscure’.6 In this instance, the coin functioned as a memory device, shaping and obscuring memories of the recent past and, perhaps, stimulating future memories.7 Scholarship on cultural memory has long recognized the central role of memory in Roman political culture.8 In recent years, the field has focused on the production of cultural memory, particularly with respect to sites of memory. The emphasis on sites of memory reflects both the influence of Pierre Nora’s work on the field and the centrality of architecture within Roman cultural memory.9 Remembering and being remembered were the responsibility of elite Romans, who defined themselves in terms of public recognition and celebration for personal achievements.10 To commemorate oneself through the medium of public architecture, thus inserting oneself into Roman communal memory, was the highest achievement of an elite Roman male, one underscored by their funerary practices.11 Additionally, in part because of the prominence of architecture as a platform for the expression of public recognition in ancient Rome, historians have also emphasized the relationship between material culture and cultural memory, examining how ‘architectural environments shape our memories, if not identities’, and how memory is produced, reproduced, and at times completely rewritten within the urban landscape. This focus within cultural memory studies on fixed sites of memory has, until recently, privileged the urban landscape and the written word over more transitory or mobile forms of memory production, including coins. 6

Flower (2006) 1. Eric Orlin similarly states that ‘intentional forgetting provided one means of creating a sense of unity’ (2016) 138. As Cicero states in a letter to Caesar (Epist. ad Caes. Frg. 7), ‘as for the raison d’etre of a monument, I am reminded by its very name: it must look more to the memory of posterity than the favour of the present time’. See also Galinsky (2016b) 34. I borrow the term memory device from Flower (2006) 53. 8 The very concept that memory is constructed and reconstructed is aided by the Roman tendency to construct and reconstruct public buildings to reflect shifts in cultural memory. See Orlin (2016) 116–18. 9 This is not to say that Nora’s (1989) concept of lieux de mémoire only identified fixed monuments as sites of memory. Nora’s term is remarkably elastic, but Roman scholarship has tended to prioritize fixed monuments over mobile objects until recent years. See Larmour and Spencer (2007) 12–46. While memory studies is not its explicit focus, the contributors to Russell and Hellström (2020) demonstrate the importance of mobile objects as focal points for imperial messaging. 10 Harriet Flower (2006, 53) outlines the different types of objects that ‘(re)produced Roman political memory’. 11 Elite Romans celebrated elaborate funerals (pompae funebris) in which family members wore wax masks of famous ancestors and dressed in the clothing that marked their ancestor’s highest office, all while parading through the city (Flower 2006) 54–5. See also Flower (1996). 7

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Part of that focus on fixed forms stems from the delineation between cultural memory and communicative memory. First coined by Jan Assmann, communicative memory is what one might term the recent past, memory directly communicated within a few generations. Cultural memory, Assmann argues, requires a material form to express memories of the distant past.12 Roman sites of memory, however, demonstrate that even cultural memory is rarely static, either in meaning or form.13 For the Romans, the past was not fixed; it shifted to meet the needs of the present.14 As Karl Hölkeskamp eloquently states, in Rome, memoria ‘is never able to reach a “finished”, static form, but must necessarily remain in a state of permanent flux’.15 The delineation between cultural and communicative memory is also problematic because of the emphasis it places on the distant past, as opposed to recent events, with respect to the role of artefacts in shaping public memory and establishing sites of memory. In discussing the role of coin iconography in the larger visual ensemble of Roman memory in the Republican period, Hölkeskamp posits that the frequent references to the distant past were part of a purposeful attempt to trace the long trek from ‘humble beginnings’ to imperial power. Weaving together the distant past, recent events, and the present, the Romans both revised and invented history to suit the needs of the present. Thus, references to the past were intended to enhance, even amplify, the strength and fortitude that Rome had long displayed. Indeed, the Romans used these distant historical markers of Roman fortitude as memories of both long-ago and more recent history. Ultimately, the distinction between cultural and communicative memory, between sites of memory or the distant past, and recent events or the present, is not an effective illustration of the Roman system for producing cultural memory. Coins are an ideal medium for exploring the flexible and ambiguous nature of Roman cultural memory, and in particular, the purposeful entanglement of past and present within material memory devices.16 Focusing on coin circulation in Roman Iberia, I argue that coins functioned as storehouses of Roman memory, a complex mix of commemoration, invented tradition, and erasure that the Romans used as 12 13 14 15

Galinsky (2016b, 13) and others have probed the artificial nature of these distinctions in recent years. For example, Orlin (2016) on the elastic nature of memory in Augustan architecture, and Gowing (2005) and Gallia (2012) on how memory of the Republic was reshaped in the Principate. Flower (2006), for example, frames reshaping memory in terms of the development of memory sanctions in the Republican period. Hölkeskamp (2016a) 203–4. 16 For entanglement, see Rowan (2016) 21–57.

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a self-conscious expression of their legitimate authority. Furthermore, their circulation among Roman soldiers and Italian merchants, if not also indigenous peoples, in areas of Roman expansion, particularly those still undergoing conquest or prone to rebellion, suggests they served a secondary purpose of ‘performing’ Roman subjugation of local peoples. Drawing on both the distant and recent past, the Romans minted coins that wove together invented tradition and intentional history. They thus presented a mobile visual narrative of Roman dominance that enhanced and reified the process of conquest. The visual syntax expressed through coinage had a dramatic impact on local iconography, which both rejected and absorbed Roman imagery to make explicit claims about local identities. Coin imagery drew on motifs and symbols that were prevalent in Rome and the wider Mediterranean world, and their coded symbols served as memory devices that could trigger and amplify actual memories and memories that elites wanted to implant in public consciousness. The overlapping economic and symbolic functions of coins in the ancient world meant that the process of exchange was multi-layered.17 Economically, coins identified the issuing authority and served as a legitimate and standardized unit of exchange. Symbolically, they communicated state or individual interests depending on the social and political conditions of the issuing authority.18 The potent images of power and military victory on Roman coins, symbols that were, as we will see, more prevalent on coins flowing in Iberia than in other regions, thus had a secondary effect of storing and communicating the memories of a specific minority group within a larger population they sought to conquer.19 Indeed, the spread of those coins was coupled with military conquest, revealing the self-conscious desire of the Romans to produce an exchange of memories: a Roman version of history for a local one.20 In effect, objects were 17 18

19

20

Noreña (2011b, 248–9) discusses the communicative function of coins. Noreña (2011b) 251. Typically, the obverse (front) image identified the issuing authority through the bust of a god or goddess connected to the city’s understanding of itself, usually Roma or Jupiter for the Romans. The reverse (back) image communicated a message about the city, often an eponymous image or one connected to the city’s founding or history. The legends usually enhanced the ‘readability’ of the coin’s message. Wallace-Hadrill (1986, 67–70) argues notes that the reverse image bore most of the ‘discursive force of the coin’s message’ in the Republican period. See also Williamson (2005) 19–29; Noreña (2011b) 248–9. This process of exchange is accentuated by the gradual spread of Roman minting practices within the Iberian Peninsula. By the reign of the emperor Claudius, no local coinage remained in the Peninsula, and not a trace of local memory was preserved in monuments, histories, or coins according to Woolf (1996b, 361).

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both physical reminders of Roman authority and visual narrations of conquest.21 While trophies and inscriptions made explicit claims about Roman dominance, coins played an even more critical role in conveying Roman power. Their mobility made coins a constant reminder of the Roman army’s presence. Roman soldiers were paid in denarii, and thus their very presence implied subjugation since they served to further Roman territorial expansion. As soldiers spent their coins on local services and entertainment, Roman coins made their way into local economies, where their iconography also evoked the dominance of the Roman military.22 Local peoples’ experiences of the Roman army may also have provided a psychological framework for reading these coins and their martial images. Collectively, these factors ensured that coins served as potent material expressions of Roman victory and drove the exchange of memories as part of the process of Roman territorial expansion. As such, coins should be read as monumenta, a term deployed by Roman writers to denote the mnemonic role of the written word and concrete objects, including tombs, temples, and coins. They make frequent use, for example, of the goddesses Victory and Roma, piles of shields, captives, and trophies on their coins. As Varro explains, monumenta were designed to make one remember (Varro Ling. Lat. 6.49). Previous scholarship has recognized the importance of architecture and coins as monumenta based on Varro’s definition.23 Both types of objects preserved the memory of military achievements by individuals and families. For numismatics, this axiom became pronounced after the 130s BC, when Roman coin iconography began to change annually, allowing coins to serve as monumenta to each moneyer’s family.24 The importance of coinage as a medium for the production of cultural memory was reinforced by the fact that moneyers were usually the young men of prominent families just starting their careers, who used the office to make explicit familial claims to authority and prestige that could bolster their careers.25 The result of this emphasis on familial achievement within the elite syntax was the mixture of intentional history and invented tradition, 21

22 23 25

There is some debate on whether coin images were inclusive or exclusive. I argue that images of battle and other martial symbols were accessible to a wide audience. Furthermore, armed horsemen were common on local pre-Roman coinage, and statues and reliefs of warriors and of battle were prevalent in Iberian visual culture, so such images were examples of entanglement. See Levick (1999), Rowan (2016), and Noreña (2011) 248–9. For the expression of authority through coinage see Howgego et al. (2005) and Wallace-Hadrill (1986, 66–87). See, for instance, Meadows and Williams (2001) 41–3. 24 Meadows and Williams (2001) 37–8. A secondary effect of their desire to enhance their careers was that military references became a dominant part of the visual vocabulary of Roman coins.

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both public and familial, within visual culture. In a much-cited passage in the preface to his history of Rome, Livy claims that monumenta presented an ‘accurate’ (incorrupta) account of past events. As Gary Miles asserts, ‘the essential attribute of monumenta, whether written or not, is that they are themselves direct survivals from the past for which they provide evidence: they represent an unbroken link with the past, a part of the past that is still available for direct, personal inspection’.26 Monuments and coins fix in material form otherwise transient events. However, they not only record or reflect, but also create and reinvent history. As Miles notes, Livy’s contrast between monumenta and fabulae (fable), in conjunction with his claim to provide his audience with models for what to imitate or avoid, suggests that his true subject is ‘the collective identity of the Roman people, a subject that depends less upon what happened in the past than upon how the past has been [or should be] remembered’.27 Coins were doubly monumenta for Roman victory: the words and images engraved on them functioned as collective memories of Roman victory, and the metal on which images were struck also came to Rome through conquest. Coin images could reflect and create a shared conception of the past that the Romans could use to negotiate their interpretation of events both with their peers and with non-Roman populations. This process is exemplified in Roman Iberia.

19.1

Memory and the Shaping of Roman Power in Iberia

The flow of Roman coins into Iberia in the second through first centuries BC points to an aspect of memory theory that has not received much attention in ancient history: the purposeful reshaping and influence of memory as a tool of conquest. As a crucial form of communication, coins became metonyms for conquest in the West.28 Plundered precious metal and coins were melted down and minted with symbols of Roman power; and they were used to pay Roman armies to fight further wars of expansion, which started the cycle anew.29 The frequent references to 26 27 28 29

Miles (1995) 17. Miles (1995) 18. This also reflects Flower’s claim, mentioned earlier, that Roman political culture was about choosing what to remember, to forget, and to rewrite (1996) 1. I adapt the concept of a metonym for conquest from Larmour and Spencer (2007, 12). The iconography, minting practices, and geographic distribution of coins during the Second Punic War suggest the Romans consciously employed coins as an expression of power from a very early date. One example is overstriking, or literally overlaying your image on top of another, which is an overt demonstration of power, particularly when the image added is one of military victory and the coins that are overstruck were seized as plunder. One such example is RRC 61/6, minted in 215 BC.

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plundered coinage and bullion in triumphal booty lists reflects the importance that the Romans placed on coinage, both as a source of financial prosperity and as a tool in the process of subjugating foreign peoples. The presence of coins with martial images in areas of Roman expansion is well attested by hoard evidence in the Iberian Peninsula.30 The symbolic relationship between conquest and coinage is reinforced by the role that the Roman military played in distributing Roman coinage. It took the Romans two hundred years to complete the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and they maintained a regular military presence until 19 BC, the end of the Cantabrian Wars under Augustus. They also faced repeated rebellions throughout the region, some of which were on a large enough scale to threaten Roman hegemony.31 Since coins were required to pay the army, the appearance of Roman coins in high volume is easy to understand. A side-by-side comparison of the known coin hoards in the Iberian Peninsula and the military settlements points to a correlation between coin circulation and military occupation.32 There were at least twenty-five military camps and another seven military settlements located in the Iberian Peninsula from the Republican period.33 While coins obviously followed the armies, as their primary form of pay, many coin hoards have no geographic connections to Roman military presence. This geographical distribution strongly suggests that Roman coins circulated within local economies.34 As Kenneth Harl points out, Roman soldiers likely sought out brothels, alcohol, games, and other entertainment in local villages while on campaign.35 Harl argues that the Roman army should be thought of as a ‘traveling city’, and that currency rarely left that ‘city’. If it did, he asserts, it circulated among Italian 30

31 32 33 34

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By contrast, the Romans appear to have made only sparing use of inscriptions or monuments in Iberia before the late second century BC, perhaps in part because there was no history of honorific inscriptions before the Roman conquest. For Iberian epigraphy, see Beltràn Lloris (1999, 131–51); Rose (2003, 155–75). For the spread of literacy and monumental writing under the Romans, see Curchin (1995, 461–76); Woolf (1996a, 22–39); Prag (2013, 320–48). The massive increase in praetors applying for triumphs after campaigns in Hispania in the second century BC suggests a significant upheaval. See Richardson (1986). This data was compiled using Chaves Tristàn’s coin catalogue (1996) and the camps in Morillo and Aurrecoechea (2006). Morillo and Aurrecoechea (2006) 77, 95. There was also a correlation between coin hoards and local mining operations. A significant percentage of hoards were located in the Sierra Morena Mountains, where most of the Iberian mines had been located. This correlation makes sense considering that the Romans relied on Iberian silver mines for approximately fifty percent of their silver bullion, about 1,500 talents per year (ten million denarii), in the Republican period (Harl 1996, 46). For Roman mining exploitation in the Iberian Peninsula, see Blázquez (1996) and Garcia-Bellido (1986) 13–46. See also Ripollès (2005) 81.

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merchants, not locals.36 While this may be true of the earliest period of Roman activity in the late-third and early second century BC, as is evidenced by the lower number of hoards, this does not hold true for the later periods. In fact, the increasing presence of mixed-composition hoards – with Roman denarii, local jewellery, or local coinage – in the last decades of the second century BC suggests at least the possibility that Roman coins were beginning to diffuse into local hands.37 At the same time that their raw material underscored Iberian subjugation, coins also transmitted characteristically Roman stories about legends, genealogy, history, and rituals at the behest of each year’s moneyers. While moneyers might have been focused more on memorializing their family’s achievements than Rome’s, they drew on a basic visual vocabulary for conveying power that was rooted in Roman triumphal imagery. While the iconographic choices that moneyers made do reflect the tension between ‘the elite syntax and the mass readership’, as Stephen Rutledge notes, they also invoked an increasingly shared and widely legible visual system that communicated Roman memories of triumphal prowess.38 Coins thus became key components in a coherent visual ensemble, including inscriptions, victory monuments, and architecture, that formed part of the rhetoric of empire, projecting images of Roman dominance onto conquered peoples.39 That coin iconography could be and was read by local peoples as an expression of Roman military power is evident in periods of insurrection, when as will be seen local peoples sometimes returned to pre-Roman iconography to express their resistance to Roman authority.40 36

37

38 39

40

Harl (1996) 60–1. While the soldiers were typically paid in denarii (Harl 1996, 60–1), excavations at military camps indicate that Roman soldiers had bronze asses and semisses, suggesting the need to ‘break’ their larger denominations. See also Evans (2013, 120). Harl notes that coins did travel into provincial markets, but that circulation was ‘irregular, diffuse, and haphazard’ (1996, 60–1). Chaves Tristán catalogued other objects that were found within hoards of Roman denarii in the Iberian Peninsula such as the Chiclana de Segura hoard from c. 114 BC with thirty-eight pieces of gold and jewellery (1996, 58). The presence of indigenous objects of precious metal does not guarantee that an indigenous person buried the hoard, since such objects could have been Roman spoils, but it does raise the possibility. Rutledge (2012) 121. I borrow the concept of a coherent ensemble from Hölkeskamp (2016a) 203–204. Scholars focused on ancient literacy rates suggest that there was a significant degree of ‘functional literacy’, meaning that people could recognize certain words or images and extrapolate the meaning from context. See n. 28 for relevant sources. The two most famous examples of this conscious return to pre-Roman coin iconography during a rebellion are the Social War in Italy (91–88 BC) and the Sertorian War (82–72 BC), discussed below p. 345. In both revolts, the rebels seized Roman-controlled local mints and began issuing coins that utilized local dialects, and images that resonated with local traditions.

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The prevalence of Roman coins in Iberian hoards, particularly when mixed with local coinage or precious metal objects, suggests that even if Roman currency did not profoundly affect regional currency until much later, it did circulate into local hands, facilitated by the Roman army. Hoards that do not correspond to the location of military camps or battles may not seem to be connected overtly to conquest. In fact, hoards that were distant from Roman military activity further support the argument that Iberians obtained Roman coins because there is less chance that a Roman soldier could have buried the hoard. There are also numerous hoards that date to periods of crisis when both Roman soldiers and Iberians would have been worried about protecting their wealth. The date and geographical location of hoards is a useful tool in understanding the dissemination of coins to assert Roman authority, particularly when many of those coins are struck with martial images, essentially acting as mnemonic devices for recollecting Roman military success or suggesting future triumph. Another indicator of the relationship between coinage, memory, and conquest is the fact that there is a clear correspondence between hoards with a higher than average percentage of martial coins and the date and location of rebellions.41 The increased percentage of Roman coins in the hoards during and after Iberian rebellions certainly suggests an increased presence of the Roman army in the region. The army’s involvement in the local economy had the added effect of circulating coins that advertised Roman authority and military success. While perhaps not their primary intention, continual engagement with coins that advertised Roman power and military success served both to bolster Roman troop morale and further entangle such imagery within the local visual landscape. In other words, such entangled coins reshaped local and Roman memory, creating ‘invented traditions and intentional history’.42 One such invented tradition that is directly tied to Roman activity in Iberia is a denarius minted by Tiberius Veturius Gracchus in 137 BC (RRC 234/1, Figure 19.2). The obverse shows a bust of Mars wearing a plumed helmet, while the reverse depicts an oath-taking scene. Two warriors face each other, one bearded and without armour, the other beardless and in armour; each holds a weapon and touches a pig held by a figure kneeling between them. It was issued during the Numantine War, a massive rebellion sparked in 155 BC 41

42

This is not to say that such coins do not appear in hoards that are not linked chronologically and geographically to rebellion, but rather that the composition of rebellion hoards indicates a disproportionate number of coins that reference or evoke Roman military superiority in comparison with other iconographic types. Hölkeskamp (2016a) 186.

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(b)

Figure 19.2 A silver denarius (RRC 234/1), struck in 137 BC by the moneyer Tiberius Veturius. The obverse shows a helmeted bust of Mars and the reverse an oath-taking scene with two warriors facing each other, one with a beard and armour, one beardless and without armour. Both have their hands on a kneeling warrior holding a pig. Image in public domain, courtesy of the American Numismatic Society, Coins of the Roman Republic Online, 1937.158.593.

and reignited in 143 BC, when Rome sent its generals to focus on the stronghold of Numantia, in north-central Iberia. This coin has multiple layers of interpretation, and demonstrates how a moneyer could weave together the present with allusions to the distant past in order to make a statement about Roman fortitude.43 On the surface level, it memorialized the achievements of the moneyer’s family history, both real and invented.44 The obverse probably referred to Tiberius Veturius, priest of Mars (flamen martialis) in 204 BC, and to the aetiological story of the smith Mamurius Veturius, who reproduced the shields of Mars that fell from heaven. Michael Crawford claims that the reverse image refers to the military disaster at the Caudine Forks during the Samnite Wars in the late fourth century BC, and the resulting dishonourable treaty that required the Romans to be stripped of their armour and pass humiliatingly under an oxen yoke.45 According to Crawford, the allusion to Caudine Forks 43 44

45

Hölkeskamp (2016a) 197. On the tendency of moneyers to reimagine genealogy in order to shape Roman memory, Hölkeskamp (2016a) 187–8 states that coins had ‘multilayered ambiguous images and complex combinations of motifs and symbols’. That moneyers were early-career elites, he argues, contributed to their desire to exploit the ‘symbolic capital’ of coin iconography. Crawford (1985) 266.

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paralleled the military failure at Numantia and the new treaty of 137 BC, the foedus Numantinum, concluded by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (Tribunus Plebis (Tribune of the People) 133 BC). Caius Hostilius Mancinus had bungled a campaign at Numantia and Gracchus, Mancinus’ quaestor, negotiated a treaty that, while unfavourable in Roman eyes, saved the Romans from greater disaster.46 The moneyer, whose full name was Tiberius Veturius Gracchus Sempronianus, thus honoured his adopted gens, the Veturii, and his biological family, the Sempronii. While non-Romans were unlikely to have read the stories of Mamurius Veturius or the Caudine Forks or to have detailed knowledge of Roman history, they would be aware of Mars’ association with war and the Romans’ new treaty with the people of Numantia, underscored by the appearance of the sacrificial pig on the reverse. This coin thus illustrates the melding of the distant past and recent events to (re)produce Roman-valued memory. By intertwining the longago Caudine Forks disaster with the recent embarrassment at Numantia, Veturius highlights his relative Gracchus’ treaty and seeks to reframe the disaster of Mancinus’ campaign as a success. This coin’s distribution also suggests that it circulated widely amongst the people most concerned with the events depicted on the coin’s reverse. It is found in twenty-one hoards in the Iberian Peninsula and fourteen hoards in Italy, but not at all in the hoards in Cisalpine Gaul and in only one hoard on the Greek Peninsula. This circulation raises the question of whether the coin refers to or even constructs an alternative version of the literary accounts of the disaster at Numantia. By juxtaposing the god of war and the oath-taking scene, it seems to turn the supposed disaster into a success. If Crawford is correct in reading the reverse image as an allusion to the Caudine Forks, the coin may have reminded Roman audiences that they had survived that disaster and emerged victorious and they would do so again in Hispania.47 Circulating this coin among the Roman armies in Hispania also could have boosted morale for those soldiers fighting to recover from Mancinus’ failure. The daily presence of images of victory such as this coin amplified the overall visual narrative of Roman military prowess exemplified by Roman foreign policy, including the establishment of garrisons, forced deportation, 46

47

Steel (2013) 12–13. Even so, the Senate did not see it that way and refused to ratify this treaty. The Senate repudiated the treaty and ordered that Mancinus be handed over to the Numantines, but the Numantines refused to take him and Mancinus was sent back to the Romans. Crawford (1973, 5) argues that there are clear similarities between the two stories and that Mancinus’ disaster helped shape the Livian version of the Caudine disaster. He emphatically states that he finds it ‘impossible to believe’ that the coin’s reverse could refer to anything other than Caudine forks.

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the sacking and pillaging of local cities, and tearing down city fortifications.48 In Iberia, the number of coins alluding to military victory far outweighs the other iconographic types, particularly in comparison to the hoard evidence in Cisalpine Gaul and Greece. Between 215 and 55 BC, the Romans minted approximately 180 different issues with martial iconography, and most of those iconographic types appear in Iberian coin hoards.49 There are approximately 138 known silver coin hoards from the Iberian Peninsula with coins dating to the Republican period. Most of these hoards contain only Roman coins – mostly denarii, but with some victoriati, quadrigata, and quinarii – and some have a mixture of Roman, Iberian, and Greek coins.50 Most of the 138 coin hoards have more coins evocative of Roman military action than any other type. The prevalence of such coins suggests that the Romans saw these coins as a powerful tool of conquest. Furthermore, hoards with these coins often correspond in date and location to areas prone to rebellion. Table 19.1 records the date and location of Iberian rebellions.51 Table 19.1 Date and Location of Wars and Rebellions in Iberian Peninsula, 107–60 BC Year

Rebellion/War

Areas of Conflict

197–195 189–178

Iberians and Ilergetes Lusitanians, Celtiberians, Vascones Lusitanians (Viriathus), Celtiberians, Vettones, Callaeci

Ebro Valley Guadalquivir Valley

155–132

123–121 115–107 101–93 82–72

48

49 50 51

Callaeci Lusitanians Lusitanians, Arevaci Sertorian Wars

Territory of the Vettones, Lusitanians, Vascones, Celtiberians (Numantia), southern coast, Murcia, northern Portugal, Ebro River Valley Northern Portugal, Balearic Islands Lusitania, Ilerda, Barcino, Colenda Lusitania, Termes, Colenda Lusitania, Langobriga, Ilerda, Ebro Valley, Celtiberia, Contrebia, Lauro, Italica, Valentia, Guadalquivir Valley, Vaccaei

For an overview of Roman activity in the Iberian Peninsula, see Richardson (1986). For Roman military practices such as sacking cities after sieges, see the volume edited by Rich and Shipley (1993) and in particular Ziolkowski’s contribution (69–91). Crawford (1985). I am using data from Chaves Tristán’s 1996 catalogue. The Granada hoard is the only one in Chaves Tristán’s catalogue solely composed of Iberian coins (Chaves Tristán (1996) 488). The map in Figure 19.3 shows the major cities and ethnic groups in the Iberian Peninsula for those unfamiliar with the place names.

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Figure 19.3 A map of the major pre-Roman and Roman towns of the Iberian Peninsula, drawn by Ricardo Vela Rabago. © M.T. Dinter 2021

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Exchanging Memories Legend for Map of Roman Towns in Spain Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 14A

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Roman name Lucus Augusti Bracara Augusta Langobriga

Modern name Lugo Braga Santa Maria da Feira

Asturica Augusta Astorga Clunia Peñalba de Castro Termes Tiermes Numantia Garray Contrebia/ Botorrita Contrebia Belaisca Caesaraugusta Zaragoza Kelse/Celsa Velilla de Ebro, Zaragoza Ilerda/Ilirta Lleida Emporiae, Empúries Emporion Barcino/Barkeno Barcelona Tarraco Tarragona Kese/Kissa/Cissis near Tarragona [exact location disputed] Saguntum Sagunto Valentia Valencia Carthago Nova Cartagena Castulo Linares Corduba Córdoba Astigi Ecija Hispalis Seville Italica Santiponce Gades Cádiz Lascuta Alcalá de los Gazules Baelo Bolonia Onuba/Onoba Huelva Pax Iulia Beja Ebora Évora Emerita Augusta Mérida Scallabis Santarém

Type of town Major City Major City Town Major City Major City Town Town Town

Major City Town Town Town Town Provincial Capital Town

Town Town Major City Town Provincial Capital Major City Major City Town Major City Town Town Town Major City Town Provincial Capital Major City

Figure 19.3 (cont.)

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The overwhelming presence of martial coins in these hoards points to a purposeful circulation of these coins to assert Roman dominance in the face of revolt, either to bolster troop morale or bombard local peoples with images of Roman power. The hoards associated with the Sertorian Wars, for example, demonstrate that both sides in the conflict utilized coin iconography to aid their cause.52 Comparing the hoards in Roman Iberia with those found in Greece and Cisalpine Gaul further suggests that the Romans purposefully circulated coins imbued with victory motifs in the Iberian provinces. While there are around 138 Roman hoards in Iberia, there are approximately twenty-three known Roman hoards in Greece and only fifteen of these are datable. Not only are there significantly fewer hoards in Greece, but there are significantly fewer coins connoting military prowess among those hoards. Of the fifteen datable hoards in Greece, the only hoard with an end date before the 50s BC is a hoard of denarii found in the Piraeus dating to 86 BC. Harold Mattingly argues that this hoard likely belonged to a Roman soldier who buried it during Sulla’s siege in 87/6.53 Although Roman intervention in the Greek world began in the late third century BC, the hoards post-date the period of initial conquest in Greece, a marked contrast to Iberia, where the earliest Roman coin hoards correspond to the initial period of conquest.54 In fact, the Romans used local coinage in the Greek world throughout the Republican period.55 Many more inscriptions and trophies illustrating Roman power and celebrating Roman military victory have been found in Greece than in the Iberian provinces. In other words, the Romans also employed material expressions of power in Greece, but more often through monuments and inscriptions than through coins. Cisalpine Gaul provides a middle ground in the Roman use of coinage as a tool of conquest and helps to elucidate the degree to which Roman coinage diffused through the provinces to further conquest. There are seventy-two known hoards in Cisalpine Gaul, with fifty-one datable hoards. Those datable hoards roughly correspond to periods of conflict 52 53 54

55

The coin hoard data in this section was compiled from Crawford (1974), Chaves Tristàn (1996), and Backendorf (1998). Mattingly (1927) 287–8. The earliest known hoard of Roman coins dates to 205 BC, the period of Scipio Africanus’ campaign that began with the siege of Carthago Nova in 209 BC. The Romans declared their intent to occupy the province in 197 BC by establishing two provinces, Hispania Citerior (Nearer Spain) and Hispania Ulterior (Further Spain). Burnett (2005, 177–8) argues that the dearth of Roman coins in Greece is due to local derision for Roman coinage and Harl (1996, 38–72) provides an overview of the spread of the denarius with overseas expansion, including in the East.

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and colonization. There are many more coins struck with martial images in the Cisalpine hoards than in Greece, but there is also a greater diversity of iconographic types than in Iberia, thanks in part to higher Italian economic activity in the region.56 The evidence in Cisalpine Gaul suggests first that while coins followed the army, those coins did not have to be issued with symbols of martial power and second that the army was not the only means by which Roman coins circulated in a province. The differences in the hoard data between Hispania and Gaul could indicate that the Romans circulated more coins emblematic of military activity in the Iberian Peninsula, either because of the frequency of rebellions or because the Roman armies were required to maintain more of a standing army in the region. While the Romans faced rebellions in Cisalpine Gaul, they were generally of shorter duration and seemed to have required a smaller number of Roman legions to end the threat. Cisalpine Gaul’s proximity to Rome and the quality of its roads made it much easier for the Romans to mobilize troops than was the case in Hispania. Despite these factors, the sheer volume of coins in the Iberian Peninsula that were stamped with images of power suggests that there was a purpose behind their circulation. The relationship between military activity and the spread of Roman coinage in the Iberian Peninsula illustrates that said purpose was to support the conquest of the region. The composition and location of Roman hoards demonstrates that Romans invested heavily in suppressing rebellion. These coins, bearing symbols of Roman power, particularly martial images, disseminated a staunchly Roman perspective on power. Coupled with the army’s role in distributing coinage, coins served as a potent and self-conscious material expression of power, one with both short and long-term impact. In the short term, local peoples could discern an obvious economic and symbolic link between coinage and the Roman army. Roman soldiers brought coins into the region, in the form of military pay and through exchange for goods and services in local towns. The long-term, symbolic impact of Roman coinage on local history and identity, however, should not be overlooked.57

19.2 Exchanging Memories: From Resistance to Celebration Perhaps the most significant evidence that Roman coins served as a material expressions of power and their ability to shape cultural memory is their impact on Iberian coin iconography. Studies of local identity in the 56 57

There was also a higher degree of veteran settlement in Cisalpine Gaul in the Republican period, which also accounts for the higher percentage of martial coin iconography in the region. For more on the long-term messaging of Roman coin imagery, see Noreña (2011b).

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West in the wake of Roman conquest highlight the stark ‘absence of any independent memory of a past before their conquest by Rome’.58 As Greg Woolf argues, ‘No local coinages preserved images of founders, festivals and monuments did not celebrate historical events and no local histories or vernacular literatures were created’.59 In the Iberian Peninsula, by the late first century BC, Roman iconography had completely supplanted local minting traditions, even in cities where local peoples retained control of their mints. Not only were Roman images prevalent, but local peoples also used them to celebrate their loyalty to and recent membership in Roman culture. This obfuscation of local memory came about because of the dissemination of Roman imagery in the region throughout the conquest period. Of course, the exchange of local memories was not a process completed without resistance. However, that very resistance underscores the symbolic capital stored in Roman coins. The process of infusing local memory with Roman imagery began with the slow acquisition of local mints. While the Romans controlled Iberian mines and some mints for much of the Republican period, many Iberian cities continued to mint their own coins or began to mint their own coins during Roman occupation.60 This is particularly true of the coastal cities, where the tradition of minting coins in some cities pre-dated Carthaginian expansion into the region in the third century BC.61 The cities with mints that pre-dated the Roman period were typically the largest fortified cities in their region and had incorporated their long-standing Hellenistic influences into their numismatic iconography.62 Their tendency towards iconographic synthesis allowed them to adapt Carthaginian and Roman influences as well. Roman symbols, such as the ship’s prow and the eagle, cropped up on Iberian coins from an early period.63 Iberian mints also adopted Roman metrology almost immediately. In addition, some Iberian cities began using Latin as early as the second century BC.64 In other words, we see ample evidence of the impact that Roman coinage had on Iberian minting. Roman images had an economic and symbolic power that allowed local elites to assert their position with respect to Roman authorities. In fact, some of the most enduring Roman coin imagery relied 58 59 60 62

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Woolf (1996b) 361. Ibid. For evidence of the purposeful use of Roman history and memory to express local power, and the melding of local tradition with Roman memory, see Johnston (2017). Ripollès (2005) 79–81. 61 See Villaronga et al. (2011). López Sánchez (2012, 1–2), for example, notes that many cities adopted Latin script and numismatic symbols while also maintaining a strong Phoenician identity in their iconography. See also Villaronga et al. (2011). Ripollès (2005) 81. 64 Ripollès (2005) 82–3.

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on ambiguous iconography that coded as both Roman and local, images such as the wolf.65 The symbolic capital of Roman coins made coinage one of the most powerful media for resisting Roman authority. One of the most culturally entangled images in the Iberian Peninsula was the wolf. Long associated in Roman memory with Romulus and the founding of the city, the wolf was also a popular symbol in Iberian cultures. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the wolf became a focal point for resistance. During the Sertorian conflict, the pre-Roman wolf coins of the Kese were reissued from Sertoriancontrolled mints.66 These coins showed a male head with curled hair on the obverse and a wolf walking with either a raised or bowed head on the reverse, along with an Iberian legend denoting the issuing city. Their practice could be compared to the Italian cities that minted coins with their own script and imagery during the Social War as an expression of defiance against Roman power.67 The fact that these Iberians expressed their resistance to Roman rule through coinage indicates that they were aware that coins could be used to assert power and authority.68 Even more revealing, in the Augustan period, as local mints shifted to producing Roman coins, the wolf reappeared in a Romanized form in the same regions in which the Sertorian wolf coins had circulated.69 This blatant attempt to stamp Roman identity onto local cultural memory demonstrates the power that coin iconography had in shaping the invented traditions that were synonymous with the Augustan period. By the mid-first century BC, the Augustan production of memory was well underway, and Iberian mints began issuing coins that expressed their loyalty towards Rome (Figure 19.4). The names of Roman magistrates also began appearing on Iberian coins in the second century BC, particularly at Baelo and Lascuta, both of which are located in the far south near Gades. The mint at Baelo produced a coin in this period with Hercules and a vine on the obverse and a bull on the reverse, with the inscriptions of the place name BAILO and Q.MANL.P.CORN, denoting the magistrates Q. Manlius and P. Cornelius, who held office in Baelo c. 47–44 BC.70 65 67 68

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Rowan (2016). 66 Villaronga et al. (2011) (hereinafter ACIP) (1269–82). Cities such as Corfinium and Bovianum in southern Italy minted coins with the head of Italia on the obverse and a non-Latin inscription with an Italic image on the reverse. See Crawford (2011). The mint at Ilirta (Lleida) in northeast Iberia near Tarraco (modern Tarragona), is the bestdocumented example of an Iberian mint that reverted to minting coins with pre-Roman metrology, weight, and iconography. See Villaronga’s (1987) coin catalogue ACIP. Rowan (2016) 27–31. Villaronga i Garriga (1994) (hereinafter CNH) (p.124); Villaronga (1987) (hereinafter NAH) (464). For the magistrates, see Curchin (1990, 139–40).

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Figure 19.4 A bronze coin (RPC I, 51.) minted at Ebora (Evora, Portugal) in the Augustan period. The coin and its reverse inscription celebrate the name that Caesar gave the town in 57 BC when he conquered it, Liberalitas Julia, as well as the original toponym, Ebora. Image Courtesy of the Roman Provincial Coinages Database, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ark:/12148/btv1b84823302.

The coin is a hybrid of Ibero-Phoenician imagery, with the head of Hercules, and Roman imagery, with the bull and magistrate’s name. Lascuta minted a similar coin, with Hercules on the obverse with the Latin toponym LSCUT and an altar with four palms and the Phoenician toponym LSKWT on the reverse.71 In the same period, they minted a coin with the names of magistrates on the obverse and reverse, along with a laurel wreath border.72 The wreath is not typical of Iberian coins and seems an obvious reference to Roman victory iconography. The most significant indication of Roman iconographic influence on Iberian coins are the coins minted at Saguntum from the mid-second century into the first century BC. Saguntum played an important symbolic role in Roman conquest ideology as the city whose fall to Hannibal precipitated Roman expansion into the region. It became a Roman colony and by the mid-second century BC showed a clear synthesis of its IberoPhoenician past and its Roman present. These coins have a ship’s prow on the reverse with a Victory and caduceus above, with an Iberian or Latin place name ARSE in exergue.73 The earlier coins have a helmeted head on the obverse, but the coins from the late second century have the head of the 71 73

NAH (453); CNH (p.126). 72 NAH (455); CNH (p.126). ACIP (1984–95); CNH (309/9, 310/45–46, 310/64).

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goddess Roma on the obverse, along with Phoenician inscriptions denoting the ethnic group, such as BALKAKALTUR and IKORBELES.74 Others have Roma and Latin inscriptions for the place names Saguntum and Arse.75 The coins from Saguntum are bronze coins and are therefore unlikely to have been minted to pay the Roman army or indemnities.76 The Saguntine coins that utilize a hybrid Ibero-Roman iconography continued into the first decade of the first century BC, which is when the Romans took over all the mints. These hybrid coins demonstrate that the people of Saguntum had internalized these victory images to the point that they minted them for their own purposes without Roman inducement.77

19.3 Conclusion Roman historians have long been interested in the process through which local tradition in the western half of the empire was subsumed by more dominant Roman cultural traditions, a process that Andrew Johnston refers to as the ‘forgetfulness of empire’.78 However, as Johnston argues, this was not a straightforward process. Local peoples did not simply forget their past; their self-representation in the form of coins, inscriptions, and monuments in the early imperial period reflects a conscious melding of local and Roman memories.79 Essentially, local peoples performed the same actions as the Romans had; they drew on the elite Roman syntax to express their loyalty to Rome and their membership in the community. Local elites deployed Roman memories to make explicit claims to power within their communities, and by doing so, adapted Roman memories as their own. Thus, in some ways, the Roman practice of circulating coins as tools of conquest was a successful one. The coins that entered Rome via conquest and were melted down to be restruck as Roman coins were distributed throughout the provinces following the army. Many of these coins drew upon a triumphal vocabulary that permeated Roman visual culture, including architecture, trophies, inscriptions and monuments. The same images that characterized Roman elite expressions of prestige – particularly 74 76 77 78 79

CNH (309/9). 75 CNH (310/45, 46). The Romans generally expected payments in silver, which is partly why the Iberian denarius developed. See Evans (2013) 120. Many Spanish mints also adopted Latin or bilingual Latin and Iberian script for their coin inscriptions beginning in the early second century BC. Johnston (2017) 4. More recently scholars have argued that the concept of forgetfulness elides local agency in the production of imperial imagery. See the contributions to Russell and Hellström (2020).

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those of triumphal generals and their descendants – became part of a larger language of power that extended the memory landscape of Rome to encompass the provinces. These material monumenta were part of a collective Roman memory that gradually incorporated provincial peoples into the process of reflecting and recasting cultural memories. In the process, the circulation of Roman coins with martial and victory images had a profound influence on Iberian coin imagery. The fact that Iberians chose to use Roman images of power to assert their loyalty indicates that over the course of the period from 211 to 55 BC, local peoples became keenly aware of the messages of authority conveyed by Roman numismatic iconography. Even more, Iberian peoples internalized these images to such a degree that they used what had once been a symbol of their subjugation to express their right to participate in the workings of Roman government. The coinage of Iberia had come full circle, from a coin minted in 211 BC to boost Roman morale when it looked like they might lose their foothold in the region to coins that celebrated Romano-Iberian culture. In essence, the Romans crafted an iconography of conquest, which was in turn absorbed and redeployed among the people they had conquered. In the JulioClaudian period, imperial mints would replace provincial coinage, and the Iberians, the same people who fought so vehemently against Roman authority, were among the first to embrace Roman iconography on their coinage, but in doing so, laid claim to new invented traditions that joined those minted by the Romans.

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chapter 20

Cicero and Clodius Together: The Porta Romana Inscriptions of Roman Ostia As Cultural Memory Christer Bruun

20.1 Fausto Zevi’s New Reading of the Two Inscriptions Decorating Ostia’s Porta Romana At the mouth of the Tiber river lies Ostia, Rome’s port town. Legend has it that Ostia was founded as Rome’s first citizen colony (a colonia civium Romanorum) back in the 600s BC, but the archaeological evidence dates the first structured settlement, which was protected by a wall of tufa blocks, to the 300s BC.1 Soon the settlement outgrew the small castrum (as the area surrounded by the early wall is called today) and both private and public buildings spread out in every direction. The Roman Late Republic (c. 133–31 BC) brought hardship on several occasions. During the first four decades of the last century BC, the inhabitants of Ostia suffered both from troops involved in civil warfare and from a raid by daring pirates from the eastern Mediterranean.2 The town was unable to protect itself adequately, since it lacked a proper town wall. The calamities which Ostia experienced eventually led to the construction of a wall which included an area of some sixty-nine hectares. All of the builtup area outside of the castrum was now protected, and apparently, some of what was still virgin soil was also included. The construction of the wall used to be dated to ‘the Sullan period’, quite a vague but therefore very convenient expression (Sulla3 had already risen to fame as a military commander well 1 2

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Pavolini (2006): 22–3. On the unprotected state of Ostia and late-republican attacks on the town, see Zevi (1996–97): 61; Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Caldelli, and Zevi (2010): 37; cf. Cic. Imp. Cn. Pomp. 33 on the Ostiense incommodum atque ignominia rei publicae. On the ancient memory of the Sullan period, see Eckert and Steel (and the bibliographic references they provide) in this volume.

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before 88 BC, when he was consul, and after having been dictator from 82 to 79, he died in 78 BC).4 The main gate in the wall of Ostia is known as the Porta Romana (its name in antiquity is unknown).5 Practically nothing remains of the gate, but in antiquity it was the principal entrance (or point of exit) for those travelling by land between the capital and the harbour town. Today the same entrance is used by visitors to the archaeological site of Ostia Antica. In the early 1900s, fragments of two identical Latin inscriptions belonging to the gate were discovered. One of them had been affixed to the attic of the gate on the outside, while the other text decorated the inside (Figure 20.1). Today we know that the monumental text, on five lines, announced that the Senate and the Roman people were responsible for the construction of the porta and the wall, through the work of certain Roman magistrates. The two texts, as they are currently restored, read as follows (Figure 20.2):6

Figure 20.1 Reconstruction of the Porta Romana, after Zevi 1996–97: 110. 4 5 6

See Zevi (1996–97): 61–3 on the so-called ‘Sullan wall’. Most recently on the Porta Romana from an archaeological perspective, see Pensabene (2007): 184–91. The reading given here is that of Zevi and Manzini (2008) (= AE 2008, 278). As we shall see below, in the immediately preceding period, slightly different suggestion for how to read and restore the texts were presented.

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Figure 20.2 The two inscriptions decorating the Porta Romana, after Zevi and Manzini 2008: 205.

(A) Se[nat]us po[pu]lusq[ue R]o[manus] c[oloniae O]sti[ensi]u[m mu]r[os et port]as dedi[t] M. [Tulliu]s C[icer]o c[o(n)s(ul) fecit loca]vitqu[e] P. Cl[o]d[ius] Pul[cher tr(ibunus) pl(ebis) co]nsumm[avit et pro]ba[vit] p[orta]m [vetustate corruptam –]er[–]ru[–] (B) [Se]n[at]u[s p]opulu[sque R]o[manus] co[loniae] O[stie]nsium m[u]ro[s et portas dedit] M. [Tull]iu[s] Ci[ce]ro c[o(n)s(ul)] fec[it locavit]que [P. Clodi]us P[u]lcher tr(ibunus) p[l(ebis) consu]mmav[it et prob]av[it] [portam vetus]tate [c]orrupta[m –]re a [– ru –] ‘The Senate and the People of Rome gave to the colony of the Ostians the city wall and the gates. The consul, M. Tullius Cicero, accomplished this and let out the contract, P. Clodius Pulcher, tribune of the people, completed and approved (it). The gate which had decayed due to old age [was rebuilt . . . with decorations, care of . . . magistrates / the res publica of Ostians?]’

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For anyone familiar with Roman history and society, the presence of M. Tullius Cicero, the consul, and the tribune of the plebs, P. Clodius Pulcher, in the same inscription will appear odd, to say the least. But before moving on to a discussion and an interpretation of the text, some background as to how these two texts became available to modern scholarship may be useful. It is easy to see that both inscriptions are quite poorly preserved. Not until fairly recently was the content, which is nothing less than sensational, revealed to the modern world. Perhaps some scholars still doubt that the inscriptions have been read correctly. Back in 1910, when the excavator Dante Vaglieri presented his restoration of the identical texts, the result looked as it does in Figure 20.3. At that point it had not yet been realized that the author of the construction was the Senate of Rome; Vaglieri believed that the Ostian municipal authorities had been responsible. It is now something of a curiosity to note that the sailors, the nautae, were supposed to have benefited from the activity of the authorities. The fragmentary state of the inscriptions does much to excuse Vaglieri, who also enormously underestimated the width of the text. The restoration in the Supplement volume of CIL XIV from 1934 by Lothar Wickert (Figure 20.4) clearly shows how little remained of each text. Wickert’s entry also reveals that a number of fragments were attributed to the two texts, although it was not clear how they could be fitted in. Importantly, this restoration contained a misconception which continued to plague scholarship for a long time: the alleged presence of a consul called P. Clodius Pulcher in line 4. And of Cicero there was no trace. Moving forward forty years to the second edition of Russell Meiggs’s classic Roman Ostia (1973), which still is the go-to work for any study of

Figure 20.3 Dante Vaglieri’s reconstruction of the text of the Porta Romana dating to c. 1910 (from Zevi 1996–97: 74).

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Figure 20.4 The reconstruction of the two inscriptions belonging to the Porta Romana by Lothar Wickert in the Supplement volume of CIL XIV at no. 4707 (1934). He also published eight tiny inscribed fragments for which he was unable to find a place.

Roman Ostia, not much had changed. Meiggs’s somewhat labyrinthic work addressed the issue in two places. Initially he suggested that the text referred to a P. Cl[odius] P[u]lche[r co]nsu[l], while in a later addendum he expressed the belief that the family name was to be read Cl[audius].7 Then, in 1997, a new and quite sensational reading of the preserved fragments was presented by the eminent Italian archaeologist (and epigrapher), Fausto Zevi. Zevi had had the opportunity to work in the epigraphic storage rooms of Ostia Antica since the mid-1960s, and many are the discoveries he made there. This is one of the most important ones. Based on a careful study of the marble fragments from the Porta Romana inscriptions, Zevi presented a markedly different version of the two identical texts, after adding several new pieces recovered in the storage rooms of the Ostian Soprintendenza.8 Thus, the main content became clear in 1997, namely that the Senatus Populusqe Romanus were the authors of the gift, and that the work had been handled by Cicero and by Publius Clodius. But in several places the text was, and still remains, heavily restored, and there were problems with the verbs on lines 3 and 4, which led to changes in the 2008 revised version. The restoration of the text benefited from the almost unique circumstance (in the field of Latin epigraphy) that there were two identical inscribed plaques. Which fragment belonged where could therefore sometimes be determined merely by studying the stone, and sometime only by doing so. After those slight later changes, the authoritative version now has the form which already was presented above:9 ‘Senatus populusque Romanus / coloniae Ostiensium muros et portas dedit / M. Tullius Cicero co(n)s(ul) fecit 7 9

Meiggs (1973): 208, 594. 8 See Zevi (1996–97) for his first restoration of the text. Zevi (1996–97) (cf. AE 1997, 253), Zevi (2004); cf. Caruso and Papi (2005) (cf. AE 2006, 261); and now Zevi and Manzini (2008) (cf. AE 2008, 278), repeated in Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Caldelli, and Zevi (2010): 95–97 no. 8. The inscriptions are found under CIL XIV 4707 (published before the new reading). Length of the texts: Zevi and Manzini (2008): 190 (5.32 m or c. 18 pedes).

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locavitque / P. Clodius Pulcher tr(ibunus) pl(ebis) consummavit et probavit / portam vetustate corruptam [–]’ (AE 2008, 278). The changes, when compared with what Wickert or Meiggs thought, are obvious. Suddenly, a new section can be added to Cicero’s already extensive biography. And not only that. No longer are we dealing with the activity in Ostia of a consul named Claudius Pulcher. Instead, we find the infamous tribunus plebis, Clodius, Cicero’s bête noire, in an official capacity completing the building project that Cicero began in 63 BC.

20.2 Memoria at Ostia and the Many Forms of ‘Memory’ in Current Scholarship Fausto Zevi’s work merits more recognition than I believe it has received so far. The time is ripe for a study aiming at evaluating how the Porta Romana and its inscriptions can contribute to our understanding of how memory of the past was present, was generated, and was promoted at Ostia. It is clear from the archaeological context that the monumental public inscriptions belong to a rebuilding of the town’s main gate during the late Flavian period (or possibly under Nerva or in the very first years of Trajan’s reign), that is, over one-and-a-half centuries after the days of Cicero and Clodius.10 This is an essential fact worth underlining. The text is not even close to being contemporary with the two late-Republican political leaders. Line 5, although poorly preserved, is further evidence that the inscription was cut at a later moment, when vetustas, the passing of time, had made a restoration necessary. This restoration amounted to, if not the creation, then at least an enhancement of an Ostian ‘lieu de mémoire’, in a very physical sense of the concept developed by Pierre Nora and his colleagues.11 In order to 10

11

In his latest contribution Zevi dated the rebuilding thus: ‘risale al volgere tra I e II secolo d.C.’, i.e., ‘the turn of the second century’; see Zevi in Zevi and Fedeli (2013): 152. For earlier suggestions see Zevi and Manzini (2008): 194 ‘alla fine del I secolo d.C.’. Cf. the comment in AE 1997, 253, based on Zevi’s first publication on the topic: Domitianic, or possibly under Nerva or Trajan [‘à la rigeur, Nerva ou Trajan’]. See also Pensabene (2007): 184–91. The same approximate date is now also found in Coarelli (2021): 213. For the English version of vol. I, see Nora (1996). It is unclear how significant the first version of the Porta Romana was in the social and cultural life of Ostia. There was undoubtedly much traffic going in and coming out of the gate, but we do not know of any regular or particular events or ceremonies that took place in the vicinity. No temple was located near the Porta Romana. von Hesberg (1998) proposed that a marble statue of a winged Minerva belonged to the late-republican phase of the gate, which would have enhanced its prominence; similarly Zevi (2004): 31. However, according to Pensabene (2007): 190–1, the Minerva/Victoria is clearly a late Flavian work. For the topography of the area, including a discussion of the statue, see Pavolini (2006): 50–3.

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evaluate the ideological climate at Ostia in the period which saw the restoration of the Porta Romana, we have to engage with the process of remembering (and forgetting) in human societies. As noted by Maurice Halbwachs in his seminal work on memory, and supported by more recent research, individual memories tend to stretch back no further than three generations, around eighty years into the past (although there are some estimates of up to four generations and a century), regardless of whether a society is literate or based on an oral culture. In the terminology of Aleida and Jan Assmann, this way of remembering is called ‘communicative memory’.12 In our case, we are facing an interval twice as long, and this means, to further employ the Assmanns’ terminology, that we are dealing with ‘cultural memory’.13 Halbwachs’s term ‘collective memory’ (the title of his important collection of studies published in 1950) is still occasionally used in contemporary scholarship, while Peter Wiseman prefers ‘popular memory’.14 Below, there will be more to say about the usefulness of these concepts for the present topic. A line of thought similar to that of the Assmanns was developed by the anthropologist, Jan Vansina, who identified three epochs of memory in the societies that he studied: the recent past spanning three generations, the distant mythical or legendary past, and a constantly moving (i.e., receding) ‘floating gap’ in between.15 If these theories are applied to Ostia at the turn of the second century AD, we can expect that the ‘communicative memory’ of the authors of the new Porta Romana would stretch back at least to the upheaval caused by the construction of the first deep water harbour at Portus, beginning in 41 or 42 AD, and further back to events belonging to the principate of the emperor Tiberius, which began in 14 AD. However, probably all but the last phase of the long reign of the first emperor, Augustus – which was an important period for Ostia – was already covered by the mist of time. As for events at the furthest end of the chronological spectrum, those of the legendary past, there are indeed some signs that the origins of the Roman people and of the colonia of Ostia were being kept 12 13

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See Halbwachs (1950); J. Assmann (2008): 122–13, 117 (where the concept is stretched out over as many as four generations and one hundred years). For this distinction, and how the concepts of ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural memory’ differ from that of ‘collective memory’ introduced by Maurice Halbwachs, see J. Assmann (2008): 109–10. Similarly Gallia (2012): 3–5. Halbwachs (1950). For ‘collective memory’ in recent studies, see, e.g., Hölkeskamp (2014): 65; cf. Hölkeskamp (2012): 386: ‘Fundamente der kollektiven Identität der gens togata’. Wiseman (2014) for ‘popular memory’. This theory was cited by J. Assmann 2008: 112.

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alive in the public sphere.16 The years when Cicero and Clodius were political opponents would seem to belong in the ‘floating gap’ of Vansina. In order for Cicero and Clodius to receive mention in the inscription of the Porta Romana, a process within the sphere of the ‘cultural memory’ of the Assmanns is necessary. How should we imagine the process which led to their names being commemorated on the attic of the Porta Romana around 100 AD? Aleida Assmann refers to two ways in which cultural memory is preserved and can be accessed: through what she calls a ‘canon’, a narrow set of elements of active cultural memory, and through the ‘archive’, the composition of which is selfevident, as it consists of texts and objects with a potential to evoke the past.17 It can be expected that originally not just the Porta Romana’s predecessor but several town gates will have carried some commemorative inscription(s) already before the rebuilding in the late first century AD. There were three such gates (with modern names Porta Romana, Porta Laurentina, and Porta Marina), and in addition there were openings towards the Tiber about which we have no concrete details.18 Clodius, as the later of the two magistrates who were involved in the building process, undoubtedly had his name inscribed. Indeed, Cicero said as much in a letter to Lentulus Spinther in December 54 BC (Fam. 1.9.15). This inscribed plaque or these inscribed plaques (the text may also have been carved straight onto a block of the structure) would represent a strong case for being the ‘archive’ that was accessed by those who formulated the new text to be placed on the attic of the new monumental gate around 100 AD.19 The original inscriptions from the late 60s and early 50s BC may have survived into the late first century AD (they were undoubtedly much more modest and less regular in form than what became the norm after the Augustan ‘revolution’ in public inscriptions).20 If one or more of them were still extant, they would have represented an ‘archival source’ for the mentioning of Clodius and, probably, Cicero in the new inscriptions. But 16

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Some examples were mentioned in Bruun 2009: 125–7; see further the frieze plaques which decorated the central basilica and contained scenes from Rome’s earliest history and the early and middle Republic, on which Marini Recchia and Zevi (2008). I will return to these matters in my monograph on civic identities at Ostia during the Principate. A. Assmann (2008): 99–104 for an exposition of the ‘canon’ and the ‘archive’. On the gates, see Pavolini (2006): 49–51, 170–1, 210–11. Zevi in Zevi and Fedeli (2013): 145 noted that the known portion of the wall amounts to some two km, but that also along the Tiber the town must have been protected by a wall, of which nothing survives. It is obvious that any such inscriptions could have suffered damage or been moved for some reason during the intervening century and a half. Alföldy (1991) on the Augustan ‘epigraphic revolution’.

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they do not represent a sufficient condition for this to have happened. There was no necessity, no legal requirement that these two ancient magistrates be mentioned in the new inscription, that every step in the construction of the gate and wall a century and a half earlier be dutifully recorded. To be sure, Roman jurists point out that the names of previous benefactors of a public building ought to be preserved when rebuilding and restoration takes place, but, first of all, this was in reality often a dead letter,21 and, second, Cicero and Clodius were not private benefactors, but were acting as magistrates.22 The two late-Republican political leaders had the opportunity to affix their names to the construction, since they were both involved, at different stages, in the expenditure of public money on this project. As Cicero reports, Clodius indeed did inscribe his name. Perhaps it must remain uncertain whether Cicero too had been able to erect an inscription that was likely to survive, considering that in his magisterial year the work had barely begun. Five years later, there were tall walls and gates on which to affix public inscriptions giving credit to Clodius, but what could Cicero have used for that purpose in 63 BC? There is an important point to make regarding the monumental inscription on the restored Porta Romana. Local magistrates undoubtedly had the right to affix their names to a building, the construction of which they oversaw. In this light, it is remarkable that the monumental Porta Romana inscriptions do not name any contemporary Ostian political leader(s) or, if they did, the name(s) would have appeared in smaller letters on the last and now damaged line of the text. Far from being presented as the main actors of the recent restoration, which they undoubtedly were, the magistrates played a very secondary role, if indeed their names could be read on line 5 at all.23 This fact further emphasizes the significance of the first four lines of 21 22

23

See Wesch-Klein (1989): 187–8 on legal requirements, rebuilding and the commemoration of earlier private sponsors in inscriptions. The Pantheon in Rome was an exception. When Septimius Severus carried out restorations around 200 AD, he allowed Marcus Agrippa’s name to remain and affixed a much smaller text underneath recording his own contribution. The story may be even more complicated than so. Adam Ziolkowski has proposed that the inscription mentioning Agrippa, M. Agrippa L. f. cos. tertium fecit (CIL VI 896), was not inscribed until the rebuilding which took place during the emperor Hadrian’s reign; see Ziolkowski (2007): 466–74. There are currently twenty-four letters at the beginning of l. 5 (portam vetustate corruptam), and if the spacing is similar throughout, there would be space for another forty letters. These letters must accommodate a verb and a subject, which could consist of r(es) p(ublica) Ostiensium or the names of two magistrates including their office, or even a benefactor, and possibly a further explanation of what had been done (such as restituendam et exornandam curaverunt or the like). Two names such as Naevius Proculus and Sentius Clodianus, to cite two duoviri at the turn of the century, take up thirty-one letters, which would leave very little space for their office and the verb, although

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the text, which was composed at the initiative of the supervising magistrates or the town council (the ordo decurionum), or both.

20.3 Remembering Cicero and Clodius We can conclude that at Ostia, when the main gate needed to be completely rebuilt, a conscious decision was made. The intention was to preserve, or perhaps to document (for the first time, in such a monumental fashion), in this most public of spaces in the town, for future generations of Ostians, the participation of two great Romans of the past. These men were Cicero, the statesman and orator, and Clodius the . . . what? Clodius was a nefarious rabble-rouser! What were the Ostian political leaders thinking? Inspired by cultural memory studies, we should ask which memories the author(s) of the new text had accessed. As already pointed out several times, the period in which Cicero and Clodius were active lay way beyond the range of ‘communicative memory’; we are in the ‘floating gap’ of Vansina or even in the zone of ‘cultural memory’ (the Assmanns). When events lying that far back in history are remembered, it is either because they have become part of the ‘canon’ or because information has been retrieved from the ‘archive’ (A. Assman). Aleida Assmann summarizes thus: Cultural memory, then, is based on two separate functions: the presentation of a narrow selection of sacred texts, artistic masterpieces or historic key events in a timeless framework; and the storing of documents and artifacts of the past that do not at all meet these standards but are nevertheless deemed interesting or important enough to not let them vanish on the highway to total oblivion.24

When it comes to analysing which of these factors may have had an impact on the decision made at Ostia, we are at a great disadvantage because of the paucity of tangible evidence surviving from Ostia. No other local inscriptions mention either Cicero or Clodius, and no statues representing Cicero have been found, while we have no idea of the appearance of Publius Clodius, and therefore the many published portraits from Ostia do not help us here.25 The Ostians were not averse to monumentalizing the lives of past

24 25

abbreviations may have been used. The question of whether contemporary magistrates were named must remain open. A. Assmann (2008): 101. See Calza (1964) and Calza (1978) for the Ostian portraits before c. 250 AD. However, I cannot help but being reminded of the portrait which is commonly thought to represent Cicero when looking at the marble statue in Calza 1964: 42 no. 54 with fig. XXXII, although she called it ‘Statua di togato’ and suggested it represented ‘qualche cittadino portuense, forse un funzionario’. The statue is dated

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leaders, but the two men known to have been lavishly commemorated, Cartilius Poplicola and Lucilius Gamala, were both of local origin and were mainly active on the local scene. They belong to the Late Republic and the triumviral period, which means that, by the turn of the first century AD, they both qualify as part of Ostia’s cultural memory.26 We can be certain that (some version of) the res gestae of M. Tullius Cicero belonged to the ‘narrow selection of sacred texts, artistic masterpieces or historic key events’27 that informed the politically and culturally leading group at Ostia around 100 AD. More of his speeches were probably known at the time than is the case today, including his In P. Clodium et Curionem from 61 BC, today known only in fragments.28 Cicero’s rhetorical and philosophical writings represented another body of texts bound to have been known. Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, concluded before the mid-nineties AD, is ample proof of Cicero’s impact. His letters, although not written for publication, had been circulated as well.29 Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae makes vague references to Cicero’s actions in 63 BC, but above all he played a role in Livy’s canonical history of Rome, Ab urbe condita. Unfortunately, the books covering the years of Cicero and Clodius are lost, but even the surviving brief summaries of the various book (the Periochae) attribute a considerable and positive role to Cicero on several occasions.30 The same is unlikely to have been the case for Clodius, even though some of his actions could perhaps have found understanding from the historian. As it is, he is mentioned in Per. 103, which covers the years 62 to 58 BC, only three times. He appears a final time in Per. 107, in connection with his funeral. Plutarch’s Life of Cicero, coupled with that of the great Athenian Demosthenes, had yet to appear when the Porta Romana was restored. In that work too, a largely negative treatment is given of Publius Clodius Pulcher over a long section. This is of course in agreement with the earlier references we find to him in classical literature (Plut. Cic. 28–35).

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to the reign of Claudius. One may note that the portrait in Calza (1964): 41–2 no. 53 by her is labelled a portrait of Pompey the Great and dated to the same period. On the monument to Poplicola, see Pavolini (2006): 178–80; Cébeillac-Gervasoni, Caldelli, and Zevi (2010): 107–12; on the elogium of Lucilius Gamala (the Elder), see the relevant contributions in Gallina Zevi and Humphrey (2004); Cébeillac- Gervasoni, Caldelli, and Zevi (2010): 99–104. Assman (2008) 101. 28 See Crawford (1994): 227–63 for the fragments and a full commentary. A thorough overview of the reception of the speeches in the first century AD in La Bua (2019); for Cicero’s influence and references to his activity in a wide range of authors from Sallust to the younger Seneca and Quintilian, see Gowing (2013) and the substantial study by Keeline (2018). On the letters in the first century AD, see Beard (2002): 116. See Liv. Per. 102 (the years 65–62 BC), 103 (the years 62–58), 104 (the years 58–56), 120 (his murder).

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Today what we know about Clodius’ actions is enough to condemn him many times over, and how much more must those Romans who possessed literary education have been able to say about him? He seems to have achieved herostratic notoriety, and while that was enough to preserve his name in some of the same canonical texts that kept the memory of Cicero alive in later times, those deeds would not seem to constitute a reason for immortalizing him on the Porta Romana in Ostia.31 Even later than Plutarch is the historian Cassius Dio, who at the beginning of his Book 56 has the senator, Q. Fufius Calenus, launch into a vehement attack against Cicero in 43 BC, as the latter is engaged in delivering his Philippic speeches against M. Antonius (Cass. Dio 56.1– 28). Among the many things that Cicero is criticized for is his alleged ultimate responsibility for the killing of Clodius (Cass. Dio 56.2.3), as well as for provoking Catilina and for executing several senators who sided with Catilina without trial (Cass. Dio 56.2.3, 56.10.1, 56.20.2, 56.20.5). Dio’s account is much later than the first century AD, which is our focus here. However, as pointed out by Thomas Keeline, it seems likely that the anti-Ciceronian (and pro-Clodius and pro-Catilina) views attributed to Fufius Calenus were based to some extent on ideas present in Roman society since the first century BC, albeit often in the somewhat artificial context of exercises produced in the rhetorical schools.32 This is something to keep in mind when turning, below in Section 20.4, to the question of whether one can assume the presence of an alternative Roman cultural memory. To recapitulate the ‘Ciceronian version’ of Clodius’ ‘curriculum vitae’: if we leave aside his sacrilegious intrusion into the Bona Dea festival in 62 BC, there was the abominable legislative program in 58 BC when Clodius was tribune of the people – a program which included, among other issues, the law known as the lex de capite civis, which in fact forced Cicero to leave Rome. And Clodius did not improve after that year in office. He became the leader of a gang of thugs and violent ruffians, who at last in 52 BC attacked the Roman gentleman, Annius Milo, on a country road outside Rome. And in the ensuing fight, Clodius was killed. We can read all about this in Cicero’s Pro Milone, the long speech in defence of Milo, who by

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On Clodius in general, see Tatum (1999), Benner (1987). Keeline (2018): 182–8 for the speech of Fufius Calenus, and 154–61 for views critical of Cicero by Asinius Pollio and the pseudo-Sallustian Invectiva in Ciceronem, among other texts. However, the discussion centres on 63 BC and the Catilinarian conspiracy; besides one passage in Fufius Calenus’ speech, there is no attempt to redeem Clodius.

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a weird twist of fate was accused of killing Clodius. And Cicero’s letters contain much other material on Clodius over the years.33 All of this, in one form or another, would have been known to the educated elite of Roman Ostia. Thus, what on earth could have led Ostia’s political leaders to have Clodius’ name inscribed above their gate? Did they not cherish Cicero’s name and memory? Could there have been a greater insult to Cicero than for him to appear in an enterprise joined with Clodius? Scholars who have discussed the issue have used rather bland expressions to characterize what we are dealing with, from ‘as an impartial reminder of the events that occurred in this tumultuous period of history’ to ‘salomonicamente’ (i.e., the Ostian authorities handled with the issue of who should be mentioned in a Salomonic way).34 But if anything, the reference to Clodius appears to be highly partisan, and it ought to have incensed all those who had been brought up according to the ‘canon’ of Roman ‘cultural memory’. Unless, of course, there was an ongoing reinterpretation and revision of the late-Republican past during the second half of the first century AD. Andrew Gallia’s recent monograph, Remembering the Roman Republic, is concerned precisely with cultural memory during the half-century from Nero’s death in the year 68 to the end of Trajan’s reign in 117 AD.35

20.4 Political Antagonism and ‘Cultural Memory’ The focus in Gallia’s work on remembering the Roman Republic is on ideological currents within the senatorial order.36 It is worth pondering, if corresponding or alternative views were present in other segments of Roman society. There is something too monolithic, for my liking, in ‘cultural memory’ theory as presented and defined by Aleida Assmann, especially in what concerns the ‘canon’: The active dimension of cultural memory supports a collective identity . . .. It is built on a small number of normative and formative texts, places, persons, artifacts, and myths which are meant to be actively circulated and communicated in ever-new presentations and performances . . .. The canon is not built up anew by every generation; on the contrary, it outlives the 33 34 35 36

For references in the letters, see n. 40 above; on their transmission during the first century AD, see Beard (2002): 116. On the circulation of the Pro Milone, see the note by Dyck (2002). For the former phrase, see Zevi (2004): 31, for the latter term, Coarelli (2021): 213. Gallia (2012): 8. On this work, see the review by Hölkeskamp (2013). As observed by Hölkeskamp (2013): 141–2.

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christer bruun generations who have to encounter and reinterpret it anew according to their time. This constant interaction with the small selection of artifacts keeps them in active circulation and maintains for this small segment of the past a continuous presence.37

I am not sure if the reference to a ‘collective identity’ at the outset of this quote allows for antagonistic cultural and, above all, political views in the same historical context (although the phrase ‘reinterpret it anew’ occurs later in the quote). This seems to be what is needed in order to explain the presence of Clodius on the Porta Romana. In many western nations, the latter part of the 2010s saw a critical revision of the history of these nations among politically active citizens, not least in the United States, which as tangible results had the toppling of statues and the renaming of buildings, with the intention of removing the names of past members of the socio-political elite from public view.38 What was always a certain ideological undercurrent, has achieved a strong or even dominant position in the current ideological climate. Did something similar take place in Roman society? Obviously, conclusions drawn from the recent political movements in the United States and elsewhere are not immediately transferable to late-Republican Rome. Still, we may ask if there were downtrodden sections of the Roman population that eventually were able to dominate the political climate to the extent that Clodius ‘the rogue populist’ (to use Ciceronian parlance) was rehabilitated. In any case, rewriting history and, possibly, rehabilitating men of the past had been a pastime of the Roman elite for centuries.39 The rubric of a seminal article by Peter Wiseman, ‘Legendary Genealogies’ from 1974, perfectly captures this cultural phenomenon, which played out during the Roman Republic.40 Falsi triumphi, plures consulatus was famously how Cicero (Brut. 62) characterized this phenomenon, which led to numerous unwarranted claims becoming part of Rome’s ‘cultural memory’. The purpose was to magnify the social rank and the deeds of both real and 37 38

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A. Assmann (2008): 100. For the debate about statues, see, e.g., ‘Controversial Confederate statues remain in U.S. Capitol despite being removed elsewhere’ at www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/09/19/confeder ate-statues-remain. For the drive to rename buildings see, e.g., ‘Calhoun Who? Yale Drops Name of Slavery Advocate for Computer Pioneer’ (The New York Times, 3 September 2017) about the removal of the name of an 1804 Yale graduate from what is now Grace Hopper College. On the reshaping of historical and recent political figures through iconographical programmes in Augustan times, see Moser in this volume. See Wiseman (1974), Wiseman (1979) (which contains, among other sections, one called ‘The Legend of the Patrician Claudii’).

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spurious ancestors.41 To repeat the question: Had the history of Rome during the 60s and 50s BC undergone a revision, a century and a half later, of which we thus far have been unaware?

20.5 The Ostians: Their Own Memory It has been said that the process of creating ‘cultural memory’ is a process of both remembering and of forgetting.42 If Publius Clodius, the tribune of the people, on the Porta Romana was made an equal of Cicero, the statesman, it means that some aspects of his res gestae were either forgotten or reinterpreted, while other deeds perhaps were called back from oblivion. How should we picture this process? Can we at least tentatively identify the actors behind Clodius’ rehabilitation? Let us consider Ostian society at the end of the first century CE. It is thought that Ostia was already a town of considerable size (for the Roman world) at the end of the Republic, with well over ten thousand inhabitants,43 but the construction of the new deep-water harbour which began during the reign of the emperor Claudius in 42 CE gave the town a major boost. The port functions of Ostia expanded, there were many newcomers, and new commercial enterprises were undoubtedly founded. These enterprises served importexport businesses, they catered to grain storage, shipping, river transport, and other activities. Eventually, this extensive migration to Ostia must have had an effect also on the town’s elite. There are two reasons which allow us to interpret the Porta Romana inscriptions as a product of this historical context. First, in 58 BC, during his year as tribune of the people, Clodius was active in promoting the grain import to Rome in order to provide for his free distributions. The free grain for the plebs frumentaria in Rome, guaranteed by the so-called lex Clodia frumentaria (or annonaria) was a novelty, and it meant that grain imports had to be secured.44 This also meant ever more business for Ostia and for many Ostian professions. The importance of Ostia for grain imports only grew during the Principate. 41

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See the study by Ronald T. Ridley (1983) of the same title; a longer quote reads: ‘his laudationibus historia rerum nostrarum est facta mendosior. multa enim scripta sunt in eis quae facta non sunt: falsi triumphi, plures consulatus . . .’. Similarly Liv. 8.40.4. The existence of this phenomenon is acknowledged by Hölkeskamp (2014): 393. A. Assmann (2008): 97–8. The number is based on the late-republican inscription CIL XIV 375, which mentions that at a public banquet (epulum), 214 triclinia were prepared; scholars assume that the participants were male citizens only. That many triclinia could have accommodated 1,926 free men, which indicates a total population of at least ten thousand; see Zevi (2004): 25 n. 43; Lo Cascio (2004): 87. Tatum (1999): 119–25.

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This is revealed by the building of new horrea, and we know that the emperor Claudius built the new harbour precisely because he wanted to facilitate the import of grain into Rome. A century earlier, Clodius, the tribune of the people, had been a pioneer when it came to organizing the grain import to Rome.45 Second, and more importantly, as is well known, Ostia is unique in the Roman world due to the many professional associations, corpora and collegia, which are to be found in the town. Almost all of them in one way or another were involved in shipping and trade, often serving grain imports, whether they were navicularii (shippers), saccarii (porters), pelliones (sailmakers), or fabri navales (shipwrights). One thing they all had in common was that in order for them to be able to establish a proper association, they needed official permission. The permission, sometimes solemnly recorded in inscriptions with the formula cui ex S(enatus) c(onsulto) coire licet (to whom it is permitted by a decision of the Senate to unite in an association), was awarded by the Senate in Rome, but it is clear that such permissions could not be given against the wish of the emperor. In an atmosphere of constant distrust of Roman associations from the side of the authorities, a political stance which during both the Republic and the early Principate led to outright prohibitions,46 the one exception to this approach from the ruling Roman elite was Publius Clodius, the tribunus plebis. One of his major legislative initiatives in 58 BC was precisely to establish ‘freedom of association’, which today is considered a fundamental right in most western societies. He was the author if what today is known as the lex Clodia de collegiis.47 Once he was gone, the Roman authorities again started to clamp down on the corpora and collegia. To be sure, during the Principate, many associations were founded and their numbers did grow. At Ostia, we know that the fabri tignuarii (the builders) received official authorization around 60 AD. In total, there is evidence for around fifty professional corpora and collegia at Ostia, to which can be added several more of a primarily religious nature (hastiferi, cannofori, and others).48 45 46

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Admittedly, Clodius was in charge for a year only and other famous men, such as Pompey the Great and Augustus, later played important roles in Rome’s cura annonae. De Robertis (1955): 33–9. As late as c. 110 CE, the emperor Trajan famously refused to grant his governor Pliny’s request that a collegium of fabri (builders, carpenters) be established in Nicomedia, since he suspected that such an association might easily come to engage in subversive activities (Plin. ep. 10.33.3 and 10.34.1). See Tatum (1999): 117–19. For a partly outdated survey of the Ostian collegia and corpora, see Hermansen (1982): 56–9 (including cultic associations), with English translations on 239–41; for the full picture, see Bruun, in progress.

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In this context Clodius becomes of interest. His pioneering advocacy for the Roman collegia was likely important when Ostians of the imperial period assessed his contribution to the history of their town. The controversial tribune had perhaps always remained a hero for some groups in Roman society, although one cannot expect that particular part of the story to be conveyed by the literary texts of that age which, let’s face it, predominantly convey Cicero’s views. As for Clodius, it is interesting to take note of a graffito discovered in 1979 on a wall near the entry to the Roman theatre in Terracina: Publi progenies Appi cognomine Pulchri occubuit letum (CIL I2 3109a). The wall is in opus incertum and a date of between 80 and 30 BC has been suggested; thus, the suggestion by both Heikki Solin and W. J. Tatum, that this is a reference to the death of Publius Clodius the tribune, makes sense. The same site produced a graffito containing the two words Caesar / CAICAP. The most likely interpretation is that the graffito citing Clodius is meant to be taken positively; Tatum suggested that it derives from an elogium for the dead tribune.49 Even members of the senatorial elite gave Clodius some credit afterwards, since he apparently, according to a letter by Cicero, received a statue erected by Cornelius Dolabella in 47 BC in Rome (Cic. Att. 11.23.3).50 We must obviously ask, is it plausible that such subversive undercurrents could have survived in Ostia for a century-and-a-half? In this context, it is relevant to quote a passage from Robert Morstein-Marx’s study of political life in the Late Roman Republic: ‘A much wider and deeper stratum of historical and civic knowledge is likely to be hidden or half-submerged beneath the surface of the oft-cursory explicit allusions in our texts’.51 Morstein-Marx proceeded with an investigation into how such knowledge may have been promoted and preserved, stressing the importance of the iconography and the texts present on Roman Republican coinage.52 This is not a viable path of research to pursue here, since Ostia did not have its own coinage and Publius Clodius never struck coins nor was he ever mentioned in any emissions by other magistrates. 49

50

51 52

See Solin (1981) for the graffiti and the interpretation; in agreement Tatum (1990), esp. 301 (elogium). See also Solin (1998): 287 for the meaning of text (against discordant views): Publi is to be taken as a vocative, after which a switch to the third person occurs. In my translation, this gives ‘Oh Publius, by cognomen Pulcher, descendant of Appius, he met his death’. Shackleton Bailey (1966): 292–3 noted that there is no corroborating evidence, but that ‘it is not at all improbable’ that Dolabella would have done so; Cornelius Dolabella was another patrician who through adoption had become a plebeian and then a tribunus plebis. See Morstein-Marx (2004): 82. The passage is often quoted, e.g., by Hölkeskamp (2012): 397; Hölkeskamp (2014): 67. Morstein-Marx (2004): 82–91.

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It is necessary to think of other ways in which an alternative memory could have survived at Ostia, eventually to become codified as ‘cultural memory’ within a specific and important stratum of Ostian society, a stratum that could influence the wording of the inscription on the Porta Romana. If anything, associations represent the optimal context for preserving such an alternative memory of the Roman past. When getting together, the members would be talking among themselves, about matters that were important to each group’s trade, which in my view is precisely why the authorities were keen to suppress these clubs or guilds in the first place. But an uncompromising hard line proved impossible, and the Roman authorities had to make concessions to Ostia’s professionally active population. They were too important for Rome’s provisioning for total repression to be feasible.53 For the full picture to emerge, it needs to be emphasized that the corpora and collegia of the Roman world were not forerunners of nineteenthcentury trade unions. Their membership did not consist of workers but of entrepreneurs of various kinds, such as the owners of building firms or ships, shop owners, and the like. When these collegia engaged politically, it was not a struggle between capital and workers, but between ‘bourgeois’ entrepreneurs and the imperial elite, who mainly (but by no means exclusively) based its wealth on landownership.54 When this is the situation, it may also be easier to accept that a re-evaluation of history and memory at Ostia could reach all the way up to the municipal authorities. Peter Wiseman, in a well-argued article from 2014, makes an important point in this context, drawing the conclusion that ‘in Rome, as in the cities of the Greek world, an ordinary person could get a decent literary and historical education without ever having to open a book’.55 And to this I would add that when the Ostian members of the many corpora and collegia freed themselves from the Ciceronian literary corpus, there was nothing to prevent them from focusing their attention on a defender of their right to form associations back in the good old days, a period which eventually slipped out of the ‘communicative memory’. Although this re-interpretation probably never became part of the cultural memory of the elite in Rome, at least and at last it did become part of Ostian ‘cultural memory’ – of an alternative kind. 53

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For a social analysis of the supporters of Clodius in the 50s BC, see Benner (1987): 155–76; Tatum (1999): 142–8; for the members of the corpora and collegia during the Principate, see, e.g., Meiggs (1973): 313, Herz (1994): 296, Tran (2006). See Bollmann (1998): 275–345 on Ostia. For a social analysis of the supporters of Clodius in the 50s BC, see Benner (1987): 155–76; Tatum (1999): 142–8; for the members of the corpora and collegia during the Principate, see, e.g., Meiggs (1973): 313, Herz (1994): 296. Wiseman (2014): 62.

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It remains to explain how this pro-collegium ideology, inspired by an alternative ‘cultural memory’, could have made inroads into the governing elite of Ostia. This must have been the case, since, as mentioned above, the text of the Porta Romana inscriptions was determined either by the (unknown) magistrates who were in charge of the restoration, or, less likely, by some collective decision of the town councillors, the decuriones. There is a lively ongoing debate about the composition of Ostia’s governing elite during the late first and the second centuries AD, and the subject is much too complicated for even a superficial discussion here. Suffice to say, that the old interpretation of Russell Meiggs, that Ostia underwent a ‘social revolution’ in this period, is surely exaggerated. At the same time, there is no doubt that many members of new families advanced socially and both entered the curia and held magistracies in the town.56 By about 100 AD, this process must already have been ongoing for several decades, due to the influx of new commercially and professionally active inhabitants who benefited from the opportunities that the new deep-water harbour of the emperor Claudius provided. It makes sense that new members of the elite, accustomed to seeing family members active in professional corpora and collegia, should also have partaken of the alternative ‘cultural memory’ that re-evaluated Clodius’ contribution to Roman society and to Ostia in particular. I am less persuaded by the interpretation cited above, that the town fathers ‘impartially’ decided to mention both Cicero and Clodius. This interpretation requires both a considerable amount of ‘forgetting’, in regard to what Cicero represented in Roman culture, and in any case presupposes an active and partisan invocation of Clodius’ role. In sum, there are grounds for arguing that behind the inscription on Ostia’s Porta Romana, there is a very particular undercurrent of Roman memoria, an undercurrent of a different view of Roman history than what we find in the versions known to us which are heavily influenced by Cicero. Leaving aside the Ciceronian slander, Clodius was an active legislator and had much support, and one of the things he did was to introduce freedom of association for the collegia.57 Ostia during the imperial era is famous for its great number of professional associations, collegia and corpora, and it is not a stretch to think that in the cultural memory of this population a positive image of Clodius’ legislation has been preserved. 56

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See Meiggs (1973): 196–208 for the ‘Social Revolution’, an idea which most actively has been countered by Henrik Mouritsen, see Mouritsen (2005): 40–4 (with references to earlier contributions). A thorough discussion of the issue will appear in Bruun, in progress. Tatum (1999): 117–19.

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Remembering both Cicero and Clodius at Ostia when the Porta Romana was rebuilt represents a particular aspect of memoria in Rome’s port town. At the same time, making the memory of Cicero and Clodius such a conspicuous and permanent part of the built-up cityscape contributed to establishing Ostian civic identity for generations to come. The Porta Romana truly became a ‘lieu de mémoire’.

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chapter 21

Augustan Cultural Memories in Roman Athens Muriel Moser*

In the early first century AD, the democratic institutions of Athens dedicated an honorary statue to the Roman senator Lucius Cassius Longinus.1 In the process, they re-used a monument consisting of a bronze statue and a marble base from the Classical period.2 Elsewhere, I have investigated why Athenians rededicated such old statues to Roman senators in this period. I have shown that old statues, that is statues from the Classical (and Hellenistic) period, were particularly suitable honours for Roman benefactors because of their shape and the cultural memory attached to them. I have detailed the manner in which they were employed as a political strategy both to engage powerful Romans and to manoeuvre them into a position of patronage and support for the city.3 *

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This chapter is part of my ongoing research project on Athens’ relationship with Rome in the period from Sulla to Nero. I would like to thank the editors of this volume for the opportunity to publish this chapter here and the audience of the Augustan Cultural Memory conference 2017 for their stimulating comments. I am indebted also to the anonymous readers of Cambridge University Press for their careful reading and their helpful suggestions on the thoughts presented here, and to Ralf Krumeich for the permission to use his illustrations in this paper. Given the brevity of the dedication (on which below Section 21.1), it is unclear with which of two men of the same name this honorand is to be identified: the Lucius Cassius Longinus who became consul in 11 AD, or his son and namesake, consul in 30 AD: father: PIR² C 502, RE III.2 1739–40, s.v. Cassius (66) (Groag); son: PIR² C 503 and RE III.2 1740, s.v. Cassius (67) (Groag). They were descendants of the brother of the tyrannicide C. Cassius, L. Cassius Longinus, tribune of the people in 44 BC: Syme (1986) 98 and RE III.2 1739 s.v. Cassius (65) (Münzer). I will return to the question of Cassius’ identity below. Neither of them can securely be located in Athens, so that the date and circumstance, e.g. the nature of the benefaction, must remain open to speculation. In total, twenty such re-used statue monuments have been found on the Roman Acropolis. Their remains are discussed in Moser (2017) with further references, including Krumeich (2008), (2010), (2011); Keesling (2007), (2010); Shear (2007), and Blanck (1969). See now also Worthington (2021) 297–8; Keesling (2019) 183–216 and Rous (2019) 149–75. Both marble bases and bronze statues were re-used in the process, as is indicated by the lack of evidence for their replacement (there are no signs of any damage such a move would have caused) as well as in some cases by the artists’ signatures preserved, on which see below. Significant, too, is the particular re-use of the old dedications (inscriptions) in these instances which highlight the reemployment. This differentiates these statues from other forms of re-use, where only parts of the earlier monuments were re-employed (statue or base), but not the earlier dedications (such as, for instance, in the case of the equestrian monument for Agrippa in front of the Propylaea (IG II² 4122), on which see Krumeich (2008) 361–2). Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Moser (2017), where I offer a detailed discussion of the re-use of the statue of Cassius as well as the Athenian (external and internal) political context of its re-employment.

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In this chapter, I propose to move beyond the question of Athens’ relationship with Rome and investigate instead the dynamics of such commemoration: the re-use of a Classical Greek monument to illustrate the virtues of a Roman political actor in Roman culture and society under Augustus. I am especially interested in the messages that this particular use of the Greek past for illustrating good Roman behaviour may have stirred in a visitor of Athens who was educated in Roman memorial practices. In late Republican and Augustan culture, past Greek individuals and their actions were increasingly used as exempla to illustrate good (Roman) political and ethical behaviour in literature,4 and they also were used in imperial representations in Rome5 and Athens.6 With that in mind, this chapter sets out to examine what the use of a Greek exemplum may have communicated to a Roman viewer about Cassius’ political and ethical conduct in Athens and about his status in the Augustan present. In order to grasp the full range of memory dynamics at play, my discussion will take into account recent research on the intermedial Roman exemplary memory practices and the place of the (Greek) past within them. Finally, my conclusion will highlight (some of) the Roman political messages that honorands like Cassius and other onlookers may have seen communicated about their position in the Augustan world through their Athenian honorary monuments.

21.1

Greek Exempla and Roman Virtue(s)

Lucius Cassius Longinus was honoured with the impressive bronze statue of a bearded Athenian warrior in an energetic lunging position (Figure 21.1).7 The base on which this statue was mounted carries two

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Most recently, see Langlands (2018) and Roller (2018). Geiger (2008) 37–47 and David (1998a) offer good overviews of the exemplary literature of this period, Schulz (2018) 309–11 discusses their place in Roman rhetoric (theory). Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 231–6 usefully introduces antiquarianism and at 237–9 the use of Greek models. For more specialised studies, see Stem (2012), Anselm (2004), Holzberg (1989), Dionisotti (1988), and Geiger (1985), excellently discussed in Klowski (2015), as well as Miles (2008) 226–31 and Bradley (1991) on the lives of Cornelius Nepos. On the exemplary works of Atticus and Varro, see Prokoph (2015) and Cardauns (2001) 79–80. On Valerius Maximus, see David (1998b) and Skidmore (1996). Augustus showed strong interest in Athenian history, for instance by using Salamis as a parallel for his naval victory at Actium both in art and re-enactments of his victory, on which see Hölscher (1984) and (1985). On Augustus and the Persian Wars more generally: Spawforth (1994) and (2012) 106–17. The fundamental study on Augustan Athens is Graindor (1927); and now also Worthington (2021) 243–64, Spawforth (2012), Alcock (2002), (2005), Böhme (1995), and Shear (1981) 356–67. See also the contributions to Dijkstra, Kuin, Moser and Weidgenannt (2017) and Fouquet and Gaitonou (2013). Krumeich (2010) 342.

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Greek inscriptions (chapter 21.2). The first looks very old and is set in stoichedon.8 A closer look discloses that this was a metrical inscription. With its reference to the toils of Ares, it opens the possibility that

Figure 21.1 Reconstruction of the statue monument of L. Cassius Longinus (drawing by Julia Ochmann). 8

IG I³ 850: [Πα]ρθένοι Ἐκφάντο με πατὲρ ἀνέθε|κε καὶ hυιὸς ἐνθάδ’ Ἀθεναίει μνε͂μα πόνον Ἄρεος Ἑγέλοχος μεγάλε τε φι|λοχσενίες ἀρετε͂ς τε πάσες μοῖραν | ἔχον τένδε πόλιν νέμεται. (vacat) | Κριτίος καὶ Νεσιότες ἐποιεσάτεν. Translation from Shear (2007) 236: ‘Hegelochos, the father and the son of Ekphantos, dedicated me here to Athena Parthenos as a memorial of the toils of Ares; and, having a share of great philoxenia and of all excellence, he lives in this city. Kritios and Nesiotes made (me).’

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Figure 21.2 Facsimile of the pedestal of a statue of Hegelochos, re-used as a public honorary statue for L. Cassius Longinus (after Rumpf, A. 1964. ‘Zu den Tyrannenmördern’, in E. Homann-Weddeking and B. Segall, eds., Festschrift Eugen von Mercklin, Waldsassen, 142 fig. 5d).

Hegelochos, who saw to the statue being put up in the Classical period (or another member of his family), fought against the Persians.9 The inscription also reveals the names of the artists who had made the statue, Kritios and Nesiotes (line 6). This is striking. For these were the famous Athenian sculptors from the fifth century BC, known, for instance, to have crafted the replacement of the statues of the tyrannicides that had been carried off by the Persians in 490 BC.10 Below this text, there is a shorter, more recent inscription of only three lines. This records that ‘the boule and the demos [dedicated this] to Lucius Cassius, on account of his virtue’.11 Our Roman viewer may have paused to consider this piece of news: the statue of a bearded Athenian warrior from the Classical period (its age indicated by its form, style, and its creators) had been rededicated to a Roman individual with the name Lucius Cassius, who had received it as a public honour for this virtue towards the city. But who was Cassius? There was no indication on the stone dating the erection of the monument, or of Cassius' identity and career.12 Furthermore, why was he honoured with such 9 11 12

10 Shear (2007) 236 with further references. Krumeich (2010) 342. IG II² 4168: ἡ βουλὴ καὶ ὁ δῆμος | Λεύκιον Κάσιον | ἀρετῆς ἕνεκα. On the identity of L. Cassius, see n. 1 and my discussion below at p. 384–5. The vagueness of the dedicatory inscription is in any case representative of most of the dedications to Roman senators on the Roman Acropolis: see Moser (2017) 175–6 with further examples.

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an old statue? All monuments erected to Romans in this period appealed to the Athenian past; indeed, even new statue monuments were made to look old, consisting of small, quadratic bases that gave them an antiquated look.13 However, this statue monument was an original bronze from the Classical period. Did it simply underline Cassius’ interest in Classical Greek art, a common feature of senatorial culture in Rome?14 Perhaps there was more: after all, Cassius was aligned with a Classical Athenian warrior. Clearly, this statue did not offer a true-to-life representation of the Roman individual. He was a Roman, not a hoplite from the fifth century BC. Was the juxtaposition of Cassius’ deed to Hegelochos’ perhaps a call for viewers to reflect on Cassius’ virtue in the light of the Classical Athenian warrior’s?15 This was not an unrealistic conclusion, for such use of Classical Greek models to highlight Roman successes and to construct Roman political identities had become an increasingly important feature of Roman culture in the late Republic. Greek art styles were employed in Roman culture to communicate certain Roman ideas or qualities.16 Elements from the Greek Classical period for instance highlighted the arete/virtus (moral virtue) of the theme or person thus represented.17 In this case, they underlined Cassius’ arete towards Athens. In literature, moreover, events from the (Classical) Greek past were used to assess the quality of current Roman political actions.18 A good example of this are the short political biographies which placed Greek alongside Roman lives, to serve as exempla for virtuous political action. To name the most important works of this period, Cornelius Nepos’ De Viris Illustribus compared, apparently on an equal footing, famous Greeks and Romans, kings, generals, and statesmen.19 A work (possibly the first)20 of Roman political biography, it was probably revised under Augustus and expanded into eighteen books that covered Greek lives, in particular from the Classical period, non-Greek biographies (of Hellenistic and Carthaginian rulers) as well as Roman lives from the 13 14

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Krumeich (2008) 405. See e.g. the artistic interests of Lucullus (Plin. HE 35, 125, 150), of Atticus, Cicero and Pompey (Cic. Att. 1.8.2, 1.9.2, 85.1), or of Piso (Tac. Ann. 54.1). On Greek art and Roman Republican culture more generally, see Anguissola (2014) and Wallace-Hadrill (2008) 361–71, esp. 361–2. Note that this alignment of a Roman individual with an Athenian warrior of the Classical period also characterised Germanicus’ equestrian statue in front of the Propylaea, a re-dedication of an earlier monument, which was re-arranged for the purpose. In the process, the original dedication was reinscribed in old-fashioned lettering on the monument to be visible above the new dedicatory words for Germanicus (IG I³ 511 + IG II² 3269): Krumeich (2008) 362 and (2010) 355–61 with pl. 73–77. Hölscher (2006), esp. 242–59. 17 Hölscher (2006) 252. For classical Athenian examples in exemplary literature, see n. 4 above. Van den Poel (2009) discusses Classical Greek exempla in Roman declamations. Geiger (2008) 40. 20 Geiger (2008) 41 with Stem (2012) vii.

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Republic.21 Around the same time, Marcus Terentius Varro composed a work that betrayed more openly the close relationship between literary and figurative exempla, that is, between words and images. Entitled De Imaginibus/Hebdomades and published in 39 BC, it included some 700 portraits of illustrious men, Greek and Roman, which were accompanied by short texts.22 Here, the emphasis seems to have been on the images rather than the short texts, suggesting that the visual representations did most of the work of reconstructing the biographies. A similar œuvre, but one that perhaps paid more attention to text, were the so-called Imagines of Titus Pomponius Atticus. Again, the described individuals (Romans only, it seems) were represented by their imago (portrait) accompanied by four to five lines of verse detailing their achievements and the offices they held.23 Useful comparisons can be drawn between these works and Cassius’ statue. First, his monument betrays an interest in experimenting with the alignment of text and image to reconstruct Cassius’ exemplary action that also characterised the works of Varro and Atticus. In a similar way, this intermedial monument uses text (the inscriptions) to illuminate the meaning of an artwork (the statue).24 In addition, as seen in exemplary literature, Cassius’ monument also draws on the extraordinary, exceptional and emotional. It is a dynamic, Classical statue, rather than the quotidian, normal and routine. The still-standing statue creates a statement about an exemplary action and its actor.25 Second and more importantly, Cassius’ monument made use of a Greek model in a manner that is comparable to the use of the (Greek) past in exemplary literature. Authors such as Cornelius Nepos did not attempt to elucidate the famous deeds of the ancient Greeks in their time. Instead, authors used a Roman exemplary frame to reconfigure them as examples of public figures in the Roman state, translating the cultural context from ancient Greece to the Roman present rather than reconstructing a Classical Athenian reality.26 In a similar way, or so our Roman viewer may have concluded, the re-used monument did not suggest that Cassius was an Athenian citizen or that he had assisted Athens in a military capacity; rather the point of the juxtaposition was that 21 22 23 24 25 26

Anselm (2004) offers an in-depth analysis of Nepos’ strategic use of his Greek source material. Plin. NH 35.11 with Geiger (2008) 44; Cardauns (2001) 79–80. Plin. NH 35.11 with Prokoph (2015) 99. I explore this interplay in more detail in Moser (2017) 170–7. For the role of the extraordinary in Roman memory, see Galinsky (2016b) 18. Stem (2012) 140–61, discussing Nepos’ use of Agesilaus, Miltiades and Eumenes as exempla for his Roman readers; also Anselm (2004) 72–110.

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his benefaction was comparable in importance to that of a successful Athenian warrior from the past. However, it would be precipitate to stop here. For many more messages may have been conveyed by Cassius’ statue if we consider the multiple cross-references and ‘intersignifications’ it endorsed. They become more clearly discernible if we consider Cassius’ monument as an exemplum and draw on the results of recent engagement with the specific characteristics of the memorial practice of the Roman exempla tradition to investigate its full memorial potential. The Roman exempla tradition, which constituted a crucial part of Rome’s memorial culture, consisted of simplified stories of past political actions and their actors who were considered exemplary in their ethical and moral character.27 At first, only deserving Roman aristocrats were allowed to serve as exempla for other Romans, but during the course of the first century BC, exempla were also drawn from past non-aristocratic Roman as well as foreign politicians.28 In texts, monuments, and other media, exempla provided illustrative or didactic material for contemporary debates about proper Roman political behaviour. Due to its multilayered, multidimensional, and multimedial character, Roman exemplary discourse was a complex memory practice, and traditional concepts of cultural or collective memories provide only insufficient models for its analysis.29 In recent years, scholarship has thus moved beyond these notions of cultural and collective memory to investigate the specific memory practices at work in the Roman exemplary tradition. This concerns in particular the tension between the high recognition factor of exempla on the one hand, and their flexibility and adaptability on the other. In other words, how is it possible that a brief mention of a name, say L. Licinius Lucullus, sufficed to rally certain moral connotations of the story alluded to (in this case his wealth), if the same exemplum could be used to different ends in different moral contexts (e.g., to highlight his military success or to denounce his luxuria)?30 As Robert Morstein-Marx put it, the brief references to exempla suggest ‘that a much wider and deeper stratum of historical and civic knowledge is likely to lie hidden and half-submerged beneath the surface 27 28 29

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E.g. Späth (2001) and David (1998a) 10 Skidmore (1996) 18–21 and n. 4 above. On Greek exempla (Cimon, Themistocles, and Demosthenes) in Roman declamations, see again van den Poel (2009) and his list at 349–52. This has been argued in more detail by Späth (2016), who discusses Maurice Halbwach’s definitions of collective and private memory (e.g. Halbwachs (1925) and (1950)) and Jan Assmann’s arguments on cultural and communicative memory (e.g. Assmann (1992) and Assmann and Czaplicka (1995)). On Lucullus, see Mastrorosa (2016).

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of the oft-cursory explicit allusions in our text’.31 Part of the solution must thus be that each exemplum constituted a number of heterogeneous stories and meanings that could be made to bear on different contexts. Rebecca Langlands has recently attractively proposed that exempla constituted ‘sites of exemplarity’, similar to ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de mémoire).32 These ‘sites of memory’ did ‘not rely on or derive from a single canonical text . . ., but were made up of a range of different versions of the event and references to that event’.33 Langlands suggested that this field was not static but constantly shifting because the ‘site of exemplarity’ of an exemplum was continuously altered and adapted to current political trends and needs. In turn, the mention of an exemplum, for instance recalling the name of a famous exemplary figure from the past, functioned like a ‘remediation’ of this field of memory: it prompted the recipients of the exemplary discourse to recall the large ‘site of exemplarity’ to which the name was connected. It also allowed them to use this cultural memory to complement the elements of the story that were not mentioned, as well as to gauge the ethical and moral standards that were projected in that instance.34 In other words, each allusion to a ‘site of exemplarity’ through the use of an exemplum pointed not to a single story but to a ‘heterogeneous field of reference’. The recipients’ task was to rally the necessary details in order to interpret correctly the meaning of the exemplum they were confronted with, especially because due to their heterogeneity, ‘sites of exemplarity usually contain(ed) some kind of inherent conflict and inconsistency’.35 Importantly, as Langlands and others have repeatedly stressed, these ‘sites of exemplarity’ were heterogeneous and not reliant on one single source.36 Indeed, ‘sites of exemplarity’ were the result of various processes, of cross-references, interconnections, and ‘intersignifications’, which were mediated through texts, monuments, and other media. Take the most traditional representation of the exempla maiorum, the ancestor masks displayed in the atrium of Roman aristocratic houses, where texts (tituli) contextualised the busts (imagines).37 The importance of the intermedial nature of exempla is also revealed by the above-discussed works and their attempts to align the historical nature of the exempla with their textual and 31 32 33 34 35 37

Morstein-Marx (2004) 82, cited in Hölkeskamp (2014) 67. Langlands (2018) 166–86. See also Langlands in this volume. The fundamental text on lieux de mémoire is Nora (1984–92). Quote taken from Langlands (2018) 175. On remediation as a necessary constituent of memory, see Erll and Rigney (2009) 4. Langlands (2018) 181. See also Roller (2004) 7. 36 See Langlands in this volume. Flower (1996) 181–2.

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visual representations. Exempla could also be performed in speeches and monuments.38 As a result, and as Matthew Roller suggested, it is necessary to broaden the notion of the intertextuality of exempla to include objects, monuments, buildings, and even urban spaces into the sources and remediations of these ‘sites of exemplarity’. In order to pay tribute to the multiand intermedial nature of the Roman exempla memory culture, Roller proposed to pay attention to the ‘intersignifications’ between these media and their different sign cultures in the same way as to the literary intertextuality of exempla.39 But how does this knowledge inform us about the memory dynamics at work in the commemoration of Cassius’ virtue in Augustan Athens? It suggests that Cassius’ statue was entangled in a web of so-called ‘intersignifications’ with other material memorials and popular memories in Athens. These other webs of memory need to be taken into consideration in the attempt to reconstruct possible readings of the memory dynamics at play in this statue. Thinking about the multiple possible webs of ‘intersignifications’, a good place to start is the nature of Cassius’ monument. Cassius’ statue was part of a public honour from the Athenian political institutions, suggesting that they considered him as one of their important (future) benefactors.40 His actions were thus deemed exemplary for a Roman in Athens. The monument thus clarified what constituted good Roman political conduct in Athens. With this aim, it inevitably also stirred memories of inappropriate Roman conduct in the city. These were not hard to find: Athens was full of (visual) reminders of the catastrophic activities of past Roman politicians in the city, such as the pillaging of its artworks by Sulla, Verres, Piso, and the like.41 The results of these events were still visible in the Athenian urban landscape. Cassius’ statue was deeply ingrained into this web of memories, not least because of its appeal to the Classical artworks of the city, which had been a preferred object of plundering. Cassius, however, had not destroyed but assisted Athens. The cross-references of his monument with the reminders of bad Roman 38 39

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On imagines, elogia on tombs and laudationes at funerals, see Flower (1996) 91–184. Roller (2013) 120, 129–30. This aligns nicely with Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp’s suggestion to use Clifford Geertz (1973)’s notion of culture as a ‘web of significance’ to enlighten Roman exemplary discourse, see Hölkeskamp (2014), (2016a), (2018). On the possibility that these were proleptic honours (a concept introduced by Domingo Gygax (2016)), see Moser (2017) 175. On the pillaging of Roman officials in Athens: e.g. Sulla: App. Mith. 108–59; Plut. Sull. 12–14 with Habicht (1995) 297–313; Hoff (1997); Kuin (2017). Verres: Cic. Verr. II 1.45; Piso: Cic. In Pis. 96–98 with Hoff (1989b). On the memory of Sulla, see Eckert and Steel in this volume.

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conduct thus helped to underline Cassius’ virtuous qualities as a supporter and benefactor of Athens. The memory of Roman conduct regarding Athens’ artwork was in turn deeply interwoven with the traumatic handling of Athens by Rome’s generals overall. This includes Sulla, who had used his military powers to abuse Athens.42 The civilian, or rather, the personal aspect of Cassius’ statue is particularly significant in this context. As we have seen, there was no indication of office in his dedicatory inscription. Cassius thus appeared to have assisted Athens as a private individual rather than in any official capacity. Some viewers may have wondered whether this reflected Augustus’ policy to present himself as a simple citizen while being the main general and ruler of Rome. Perhaps Cassius, too, had acted in this way, and had downplayed his institutional power.43 Note also the striking dichotomy between the military aspect of the re-used statue and the civilian outlook of Cassius’ inscription. This contrast may have reminded some viewers of the difficulties of claiming military success under Augustus, and recalled memories of why this was the case: the centralisation of government to end decades of bloody civil wars that had destroyed Rome and Athens.44 Cassius’ statue thus carried at least two important messages for Roman visitors to Athens. Cassius was an exemplary Roman visitor to Athens because he had assisted the city rather than pillaging it like many earlier Roman politicians. In so doing, he had acted in a civilian, almost private capacity rather than in a military one, as was appropriate in Augustan Athens as well. In this way, then, Cassius was set up as an exemplum of proper Roman political behaviour in Athens.

21.2 Republican Families in the Empire of Augustus However, the ‘site of exemplarity’ of Cassius’ statue moved beyond this statement, for it consciously alluded to C. Cassius, the murderer of Caesar. As noted, its dedication was very brief, mentioning only the name of Lucius Cassius, with no further details. Yet to many Roman visitors, the name of Lucius Cassius will have sounded familiar. Could this be a relative or descendant of the famous murderer of Caesar, C. Cassius Longinus? As 42 43 44

On traumatic events of Sulla’s conduct in Athens, see Eckert (2016a). Caesar: Cass. Dio 42.14. These were preferred tactics for Roman politicians (including Germanicus) in Athens, see Tac. Ann. 53.3. On the history of Athens from Sulla to Augustus, see the overview in Worthington (2021) 195–298; Habicht (1995) 297–361; Hoff (1989b) and Shear (1981). Further literature is listed at Moser (2017) 170.

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was well-known, Cassius had also had a good relationship with Athens. After all, it was there that he and Brutus had assembled their camp ahead of the battle at Philippi. Our visitor was no doubt told that they had even been honoured with a statue close to the famous statue group of the tyrannicides on the Agora, a celebration to reflect their liberation of the Roman Republic (or so some thought).45 Indeed, did the present statue not deliberately allude to this event? Our Cassius, who, as indicated above, was either the grandson of the brother of C. Cassius the tyrant-slayer, or his son,46 was represented with a warrior statue that was made by the same artists who had crafted the replacement statues of the tyrannicides, which were shown in a forward-lunging pose very similar to that of Cassius’ statue. Thus, rather than hiding the problematic Republican heritage of the honorand’s family and its conduct in Athens, the monument proudly alluded to the episode of the erection of an important statue to one of the murderers of Caesar. Why? Several interpretations would have presented themselves. On a general level, this highlighted that Athens had been an important city in recent Roman history, when Roman generals had repeatedly used Athens as a power base against Rome.47 At the same time, Athens was one thing which all the Roman warlords of the past century could agree on that they all wanted to support, regardless of their conflicts with one another. Cassius’ support, too, showed that Athens rose above the fray. However, by alluding to these events, the statue also revealed that Athens had played a major role in the traumatic civil wars between Caesar and Pompey, between the supporters of Caesar and Cassius and Brutus, and finally between Octavian and Antony.48 Athens’ role in these events was not unproblematic, so that these were potentially troublesome memories to Roman and Athenian viewers.49 Thus, Cassius’ statue highlighted not only the close relationship of the gens Cassia with Athens, one that may have been framed by the rules of patronage,50 but also their political importance in Republican Rome and 45

46 47 48 49 50

Cass. Dio. 47.20.4; IG II² 3222; Plut. Brut. 24–26; IDélos 1622 and Cic. Fam. 12.16 with Habicht (1995) 354–6 and Raubitschek (1957) and (1959). Azoulay and Lloyd (2017) 139–62 discuss the importance of the statue group in Roman times. Syme (1986) 98. See my discussion in n. 1 above. See literature in n. 42 and also Hoff (1997) and (2005). On traumatic events of the Roman Republic see Galinsky (2016a) 2–6; Gowing (2005); (2016); Eckert (2016b); Gallia (2012). The problematic behaviour of Athens in Roman civil wars is a point denounced by Piso in Tac. Ann. 55.1–2. On Roman patrons in the Greek East, see Eilers (2002); Tanner (2000) and Rawson (1973).

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their role in the end of Caesar’s regime. Though how does this explain this reference to C. Cassius under Augustus? The memory of C. Cassius was certainly not unproblematic. Cassius’ memory was suppressed in some instances, such as at the funeral of his sister-in-law, Julia Prima, in 22 AD, when the portrait busts (imagines) of Cassius and Brutus were omitted in the procession.51 Yet others cherished his memory, particularly in connection with the battle at Philippi, where Antonius and Octavian had been able to defeat the murderers of Caesar.52 The memory of Philippi was refreshed in 2 BC with the inauguration of the Forum of Augustus and the temple of Mars Ultor.53 The ‘site of exemplarity’ of C. Cassius was thus, as was characteristic for exempla, inconsistent for it comprised of many stories about his moral and ethical virtues. As in the case of written exempla, the viewer of Cassius’ monument had to decide which one was best suited here to complete the reference to C. Cassius that was implied by the form and creators of the statue rededicated to his relative L. Cassius.54 Was this an intended senatorial critique of or even resistance to the Augustan regime?55 Looking around, viewers may have noticed several other Roman monuments on the Acropolis dedicated to influential Roman senators which betrayed a similar interest in their Republican forebears. Their analysis could produce insights into how to read the reference to the murderer of Caesar in L. Cassius’ monument. Family histories constituted a crucial part of the political culture of the Roman Republic.56 Augustan self-representation, which was deeply ingrained into this tradition, also had a strong emphasis on genealogy and noble descent. Certainly, the most famous Roman point of reference for this is Augustus’ new forum in Rome, which was inaugurated in 2 BC. Here, an impressive arrangement of statuary imagines displayed his version of Roman history and his family,57 drawing heavily on Republican traditions of aristocratic self-advertisement.58 In Athens, too, Augustan representation placed emphasis on the dynastic nature of his power. This is well 51 52 53 55 56 57

58

Tac. Ann. 3.76. On funeral processions, see Flower (1996) 91–158. Tac. Ann. 4.34.4 on Messala Corvinus citing Cassius in his dialogue with Augustus in the senate. Syme (1986) 88–9. 54 Langlands (2018) 181. For (senatorial) resistance under Augustus, see Dettenhofer (2000); Raaflaub and Samons (1990) and Syme (1986) 115–27. Walter (2004). Sage (1979) 192. Spannagel (1999) discusses the archaeological evidence. On the Forum Augustum as a site of memory and learning, see Woolf (2015); Geiger (2008); Sehlmeyer (1999) 262–70; Luce (1990). Flower (1996) 255.

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illustrated by the Roman agora or Roman market.59 The project was begun under Caesar, who in around 50 BC granted fifty talents for its construction.60 This donation had been solicited by a certain Herodes; his son Eucles, who also acted as an ambassador of Athens, then procured another considerable sum from Augustus61 In view of the importance Roman politicians assigned to the location and possible interpretations of their projects in Athens, it is possible that Eucles had proposed to Augustus that his involvement in the market was an advantageous project for the emperor. It had the potential to emphasise his qualities both as a restorer of economic prosperity and as a pious son of Caesar.62 In any case, it seems that the Augustan regime embraced this reading of the benefaction as evidence for dynastic legitimacy, a notion that was stressed in the building inscription as well as the equestrian monument for his adopted grandson Lucius, which was erected around 2 BC in the entrance of the market.63 Similarly, two further re-used monuments dedicated to Roman senators on the Acropolis of Athens highlight the increased interest in family history during this period. My first example is the statue of the Augustan grandee Lucius Aemilius Paullus, consul in 1 AD.64 Paullus also stemmed from an important Roman family, the Aemilii. The descendants of L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, who had defeated the Macedonian king Perseus in 168 BC, putting an end to the Antigonid dynasty, were known to parade their political heritage in Rome and had, for instance, requested a family tree from Atticus. In Athens, L. Aemilius Paullus is honoured in two monuments. The first is a re-used monument on the Acropolis and the second a new monument that cannot be located.65 Significantly, like Cassius’ monument, his re-used statue also stemmed from the Classical period. Its Classical provenance was 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

On the Roman agora, see now Dickenson (2017) 142–57, 170–88, and 237–52. Cic. Att. 6.1.15; IG II² 3175 with Hoff (2005) 333–4. Cic. Att. 6.1.25; IG II² 3175 with Dickenson (2017) 242–50; Hoff (1989a). Note Pompey’s reaction to Caesar’s involvement in the Roman market and his unhappiness of being linked to the Piraeus in Cic. Att. 6.1.15. Building inscription: IG II² 3175 (ll. 1–2). On Lucius’ monument, see IG II² 3251 with Hoff (2001). PIR² A 391. These are IG I³ 833 + II² 4147 (= Krumeich (2010) 380–81 no. B4): ὁ δῆμος | Λεύκιον Αιμίλιον | Παύλλου υἱόν Παύλλον | ἀρετῆς ἓνεκα. ‘The demos dedicated this to Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus, because of the virtue.’ And IG II² 4146: ὁ δῆμος | Λεύκιον Αιμίλιον Παύλλον | Παύλλου υἱόν. ‘The demos dedicated this to Lucius Aemilius Paullus, son of Paullus, (because of the virtue).’ The slightly different word order of the two dedications may indicate that the statues were set up at different times or in different places. For a similar case, see my discussion of the inscriptions to Paullus Fabius Maximus below.

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underlined by the original inscription and statue which presented a man stepping slightly forward.66 So, while it was not as dynamic as that of Cassius, Aemilius was also shown in movement as an energetic benefactor of Athens.67 Significantly, Aemilius’ dedication highlighted his filiation (son of Paullus), thus emphatically implying his noble descent from L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, whose defeat of Perseus had had relevance for Athens as well. The statue thus constructed cross-references to past relations of the gens Aemilia with Athens. It also reminded the viewer of the memory of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus, a hero from the Republic. The second example is Paullus Fabius Maximus, who was honoured with at least six statues in Athens, two of which were re-used statue monuments on the Acropolis.68 He was a member of the grand Republican family of the gens Fabia, whose ancestors also included L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus (by adoption).69 The Fabii, too, were proud of their heritage, and are mentioned as another family who requested Atticus to compose a genealogy of their family.70 Further, when a son was born to Paullus Fabius Maximus in circa 1 AD, he was called Persicus, to be a living memorial of his ancestors’ military successes against the Hellenistic king Perseus.71 Again, there were many connections with the past, references to past Athenian-Roman relations as well as the memory of L. Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus. Given the constraints of this chapter, I cannot discuss all six monuments in detail. Yet even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals that Paullus Fabius received many substantial honours in Athens, not only from the demos and two private citizens, but also from the most distinguished political institution in the city, the Areopagus.72 In one dedication on a reused statue, the demos explicitly notes that Paullus showed goodwill to them (εἰς ἑαυτον).73 On the inscription of their statue dedication on the Agora, the private dedicatees Polyeuktos and Eudemos call him their friend

66 67 68 69 71 72 73

Krumeich (2010) 380–1 no. B4. On dynamic statues as representations of energetic benefactors, see Moser (2017) esp. 174–7. Re-used monuments: IG II² 4128 = Krumeich (2010) 377–8, no. A11; IG II² 3443 + 4129 = Krumeich (2010) 371–2 no. A5; new monuments: IG II² 4130, 4131, and 4132 and SEG 23, 1968, 122. Syme (1986) 403–20 with pl. XXVII (The Fabii). 70 Corn. Nep. Att. 18.4. DNP 4 (1998) 377 s.v. Fabius (II 14) (Eck) and n. 82 below. IG II² 4129, 4130, 4131, and 4132 (all four by the demos); SEG 23, 1968, 122, a private dedication by two Athenians; and IG II² 4128 (Areopagus). IG II² 4129 (ll. 1–3): ὁ δῆμος | Παῦλλον Φάβιον Μάξιμον ἀρε|τῆς ἕνεκεν τῆς εἰς ἑαυτόν. ‘The demos dedicated this to Paullus Fabius Maximus because of the virtue he showed towards them.’

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and benefactor (ἑαντῶν φίλος καὶ εὐεργέτης).74 A further benefaction probably explains the decision of the Areopagus to set up its own re-used monument: a column carrying a statue for the man (because of his virtue).75 There is thus the suggestion that Paullus was a benefactor on several occasions, that he made benefactions to the demos, to his friends in Athens, and to the Areopagus,76 and that his benefactions were continuous or very substantial. Paullus’ benefaction to the Areopagus is difficult to determine. Yet, the re-used monument that he received by the institution established several interesting ‘intersignifications’ with other Roman memories about Athens. The involvement of the Areopagus was noteworthy for the institution, the most prestigious political body of Athens, was greatly admired by Roman thinkers, including Cicero. This was especially because of its links to the ideal Classical Athenian past of Athens77 Further, it is possible that the institution was greatly assisted by several earlier Roman politicians in Athens, such as Sulla or Caesar.78 Like Cassius’ statue, a benefaction to this institution and a public honour granted by it thus stirred memories of these potentially problematic earlier (Republican) interactions with Athens. In addition, Paullus’ column monument was impressive: composed of three large cylinders, its statue would have stood around twelve feet tall. It was thus higher and bigger than Tiberius’ statue, which measured only 7 feet and 8 inches in height.79 These were impressive monuments which suggested that their honorands were important political players in Rome. Did they betray a competition with Augustus? Aemilius and Paullus could certainly boast an impressive lineage. However, these men were closely linked to the

74

75

76

77 78 79

SEG 23, 1968, 122: Π]ο[λύ]ε[υκ]τος [. . . c.8 . . . καὶ Εὔδη]|μος Πολυεύκ[του Φλυεῖς Παῦλλον] | Φάβιον Κοΐντου [υἱὸν Μάξιμον τὸν] | ἑατῶν [φ]ίλον κ[αὶ εύεργέτην]. ‘Polyeuktos and Eudemos from Phyla, sons of Polyeuktos, dedicated this to Paullus Fabius Maximus, son of Quintus, their friend and benefactor. IG II2 3443 + 4128: ἡ βουλὴ | ἡ ἐξ Ἀρήου πάγου | Παῦλλον Φάβιον Μάξιμον | ἀρετῆς. ἕνεκεν’. ‘The boule of the Areopagus (dedicated this) to Paullus Fabius Maximus because of his virtue.’ The top column has not been preserved, so that it is unclear whether the original statue was being re-used in the process: Krumeich (2010) 377–8 no. A11. Indeed, the different wordings of the dedications suggest at least three benefactions, as do their different placements within the honorific landscape of Athens.: IG II² 4128, 4129 and 4131 stem from the Acropolis, IG 4130 was set up in the Sanctuary of Asclepius, IG 4132 in the Theatre of Dionysios on the south slope of the Acropolis. I propose to return to these dedications of Paullus as well as those of L. Aemilius Paullus in a future publication. On Cicero and the Areopagus, see Rawson (1985). On Sulla and the Areopagus, see Kuin (2017) with references; on Caesar, see Hoff (1989b) 272. IG II² 3244 with Krumeich (2008) 356.

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Augustan project. To begin with, statues of members of the Fabii and the Aemilii, notably the two generals Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator and L. Aemilius Paullus, were erected on the Forum of Augustus.80 They had been singled out by Augustus as exemplary Roman politicians of the past. In real life, too, these two senators had close relations to the imperial house. Aemilius Paullus married Julia, Augustus’ daughter, in 4 BC.81 Paullus Fabius Maximus, who was married to Augustus’ cousin Marcia, was one of the most influential members of the entourage of Augustus – he was consul in 11 BC and proconsul of Asia in 10/9 BC.82 Their close rapport with Augustus and the appearance of their ancestors on the Forum of Augustus revealed that they were leading families in the Augustan regime at the time. It is thus hardly likely that their involvement with Athens represented senatorial resistance to Augustus’ rewriting of history. Indeed, in Rome, the Aemilii had in fact accepted Augustus’ offer to modify their building on the Forum Romanum, the Basilica Aemilia, which had been renovated by Paullus and his ancestors and decorated with portraits on round shields (imagines clipeatae) of his exemplary ancestors, before it burned down in a fire in 14 BC. On the Augustan reconstruction, Augustan heroes were now shown surrounded by the exempla maiorum (the examples of the ancestors) of the Aemilii,83 a visual reminder of the good relationship of the two families and their interest in collaboration. The same interplay of reference of the Aemilian past with the Augustan present was constructed in Paullus’ Athenian honorary statue. Thus, rather than undermining the Augustan project, these senators were signing onto it, perhaps at the request of Augustus, as a means to (re) build Rome and its Augustan empire. This commemorative practise, whereby people aligned with the regime make dedications or receive dedications in their own name, was just what Augustus wanted – at least at certain times and in certain places, and visibly so in Athens. How could Cassius’ statue be realigned with these monuments? Like these monuments, it consciously played on the memory of Cassius’ relative, in this case on the memory of C. Cassius Longinus, the murderer of Caesar, who had been celebrated as the liberator of the Republic. Like L. Aemilius Paullus, Cassius had been an important figure of the Roman Republic. However, unlike Aemilius Paullus, Cassius belonged to the 80 81 82 83

Sage (1979) 193. On their elogia, see Luce (1990) 113–14. PIR² A 391. On the conspiracy and (late) death of Aemilius Paullus, see Syme (1986) 104–27. On Paullus, see RE 6.2 (1902) 1780–1789, s.v. Fabius (102) (Groag); PIR² F 47; DNP 4 (1998) 377 s.v. Fabius (II 14) (Eck). See Freyberger and Ertel (2007) 493–524, esp. 518.

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problematic recent past of Rome. As a result, his memory was not part of the official Augustan rewriting of history. He was, for instance, not included in the Republican heroes in the new Forum of Augustus. Still, Cassius’ family was able to work towards a reconciliation with the Augustan house. L. Cassius Longinus (the father) was appointed suffect consul in 11 AD. His son, suffect consul in 30 AD, even became the husband of Julia Drusilla, the sister of Caligula, and he and his brother were important political players in their time.84 This return to prominence of the Cassii is reflected in their Athenian honorary statue monument, which aligned them with other families of the Augustan aristocracy. It resolved, at least in part, the inconsistencies of the site of exemplarity of the tyrannicide C. Cassius in the Augustan present by presenting L. Cassius Longinus (father or son) not (only) as a relative of the heroic liberator, but as an exemplary friend of Athens and member of the Augustan senatorial élite. Our senators, Cassius, Aemilius and Paullus, who were awarded the most notable old monuments on the Roman Acropolis outside the imperial house, were no senatorial rebels. They belonged to important families that had been known to involve themselves successfully in the new regime and align themselves through marriage to the Julio-Claudian family. Rather than resistance, I propose that the nature of their representation in Athens reflects Augustus’ success in integrating these families into his new political system, as was for instance attempted with the inclusion of the Fabii and the Aemillii among the statues of the heroes of the Roman Republic in the Forum Augustum and on the Basilica Aemilia.85 So, what did these complex monuments communicate to their onlookers in Athens? They revealed the willingness of senatorial families to identify themselves with the political regime of Augustus and the willingness of Athens to comply with their wishes. At the same time, they reflected the competition between leading senatorial families of Rome for fame and distinction, a competition that was perhaps consciously kindled by the Athenians. Again, we see a feature of Roman cultural memory reflected in the monumental landscape of Athens. For these statues seemed to produce multiple rivalling particulate memories (Partikulargedächtnisse) of the Roman past in Athens, each attached to different senatorial families.86 However, they all communicated that the past had been successfully resolved in the Augustan present. Indeed, the reflection of the genealogical 84 85 86

Syme (1986) 306 and pl. XXIV. On the Forum Augustum as a place of integration, see Sehlmeyer (1999) 268–9; Hölscher (1984) 11. See Walter (2004) on this phenomenon in Republican Rome.

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interest in senatorial monuments in Augustan Athens indicates the strength of this memory project which combined collective and private cultural memories of Roman exempla and imagines as a source of unity, identification and competition among the Roman elite.87 These monuments hence are useful examples of how powerful Roman families tried to come to terms with the new political system. By attempting to preserve the distinction of their families, they represented a certain competition for Augustus’ claim to surpass other Roman families in fame and success in Athens. Yet there is also an acceptance of the arrival of a new age, and new ways of using cultural memories for current political purposes.

21.3

Augustan Athens: Exemplary Monuments and Integrative Remembering

In this chapter, I have analysed three re-used Athenian honorary monuments dedicated to Roman senators as part of Roman cultural memory. The discussion highlighted that through their ambiguity between past and present and Greek and Roman history, they evoked various memories and allowed for multiple readings by their (potential) Roman viewers. As was shown in the first part, these re-used statues constructed complex moral exempla about good Roman conduct in Athens. In the second section, I analysed the construction of Cassius’ identity through the reference to C. Cassius, the murderer of Caesar, within the context of the Roman interest in genealogy. This was an important feature of Augustan political culture, which is reflected also in other Roman monuments in Athens, such as in the monuments of L. Aemilius Paullus and Paullus Fabius Maximus. My discussion revealed that as in the literary productions and in the media in Rome, in Athens, too, we find conflicting family memories and competing interpretations of the Roman past. The discussion concluded that rather than being signs of senatorial resistance, the monuments of Cassius, Aemilius, and Paullus reflected the success of the Augustan regime to rewrite Roman memories in a way that was acceptable to (some) Roman senators in this period. They established senatorial identities in Athens that were deeply ingrained in the political culture of the Augustan age in which Republican heroes and their actions (in Athens) were rallied to highlight the qualities of the new emperor. 87

RGDA 8.27; Suet. Aug. 89.2; on Augustus’ use of imagines in Rome as a model to emulate or rival, see e.g. Geiger (2008) 53–162; Flower (1996) 223–55.

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In sum, Augustan cultural memory in Athens as it is reflected in these statues was complex and political. On close examination, it was revealed that honorific monuments to Roman senators, similar to imperially funded monuments and places, shared several characteristics of Roman memory culture under Augustus, including the use of the Greek past as exempla for Roman conduct and the interest in genealogies. All in all, with their interplay between word and image and their construction of ‘intersignifications’ with other texts, monuments, and places in Athens (and Rome), these monuments communicated a wide range of messages to different audiences, for different outcomes and with different effects. They were sites of exemplarity of Roman conduct in Athens, and, perhaps even more importantly, sites of constructive senatorial behaviour under Augustus.

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chapter 22

Different Pasts: Using and Constructing Memory in Augustan Carthage and Corinth Günther Schörner*

22.1

Introduction: Urban Memory–Place Memory

Since the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the spatial dimension and conditionality of memory – its connectedness and links to space and place – have been well known.1 Halbwachs asserts that collective memory is only possible if it is ‘localized’.2 Hence, the trope of a city or town as a landscape of memory has become fixed in memory studies and has even given rise to the term ‘urban memory’.3 Urban memory can refer to anthropomorphic phenomena (as when the city is said to have a memory of its own). More commonly, however, it points to the city’s status as a physical place and an ensemble of objects and practices which enables recollections of the past and embodies it through traces of successive building and rebuilding.4 The inhabitants of a city thus draw upon its image to identify with its past and present as a political, cultural, and social entity. In that sense, the urban landscape of Republican and Imperial Rome has thoroughly been investigated and reconstructed as a landscape of memory.5 The work of M. Halbwachs is the starting point for P. Nora and J. Assmann, two of the most influential researchers in the field of memory studies, who have shaped the field of research in ancient studies over the last decades. P. Nora is relevant to this topic because he coined the concept of lieu de mémoire and thus makes the localization and place-relatedness of *

1 2 5

I thank Martin Dinter (London), C. Guerin (Paris), and M. Martinho dos Santos (São Paulo) for inviting me to the Conference on ‘Cultural Memory in Augustan Times’. The constructive comments received at this meeting have substantially improved my argument. A first draft was read by two anonymous reviewers and I am grateful to both for their comments. Finally, I thank Dr S. McCormack and Martin Dinter for significantly improving the language of this chapter. Halbwachs (1941) 159. See also Hoelscher and Alderman (2004); for antiquity: Alcock (2002) 24 f.; Schörner (2017) 94 (citation). Middleton and Brown (2011) 43. 3 E.g. Srinivas (2001). 4 Crinson (2005) xii. E.g. Favro (1988); Favro (1993); Hölscher (2001); Muth (2012); Roller (2013); Orlin (2016); Hölkeskamp (2016a).

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memory explicit, even though he defines lieu not only as a physical place, but also as objects, events, and even customs.6 J. Assmann further developed Halbwach’s concept of collective memory and separated it into two subcategories, communicative memory and cultural memory.7 He provides a framework for deciding which form of collective memory is crucial in a specific context by precisely describing and naming the characteristics of each. The main focus of the following study, however, will be on the place-relatedness and place-boundness of memory. The theory that memory is ‘inbuilt’ into a fixed place has a natural consequence; within that model, displacement is defined as the destruction of the material expressions or frameworks of collective memory.8 The psychologist M. Lewicka thus states in his article on remembering in and of two historically contested cities, Lviv (now Ukraine, previously Lwów, Poland) and Wrocław (now Poland, previously Breslau, Germany) that ‘cities or towns that . . . were destroyed by war are important research targets for investigators of collective memory’.9 While this observation has thus far been applied to modern cities and towns, it is also relevant to cities of the Roman world.10 The term of ‘place identity’, which carries two different meanings, plays a crucial role in studies on the memory of destroyed, divided, or otherwise contested cities.11 It is defined in the psychological sense as ‘those dimensions of self that define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment’.12 According to this conceptualization, place identity serves as a prerequisite for distinguishing oneself from others.13 Since it is impossible to use archaeology to investigate ‘place identity’ in that sense, it is the second, spatial meaning of this term which is essential for archaeological memory studies: a set of place features which guarantee the location’s distinctiveness and continuity in time, while taking into account the dual significance of ‘identity’.14 The related term ‘place memory’ also has two meanings.15 On the one hand, it denotes the contents of individual memories (i.e. when a person remembers a specific place). On the other, it refers to descriptions of places, specifically with respect to their monuments or other material traces, which therefore perform the function of ‘aides mémoires’ to collective memory.16 6 7 8 10 12 15

Nora (1984–92); Nora (1989) Fundamental Assmann (1997); in English: Assmann and Czaplicka (1995); Assmann (2008). 9 Middleton and Brown (2011) 43. Lewicka (2008) 213. E.g. Gilloch and Kilby (2005); Bakshi (2014); Ward (2016). 11 Lewicka (2008) 211 f. 13 Proshansky (1978) 147. See Twigger-Ross and Uzzell (1996). 14 Stedman (2003). 16 Lewicka (2008) 214. Hayden (1997).

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In what follows, I will compare the Augustan-era rebuilding of two previously destroyed cities in the Roman world, Carthage and Corinth, in order to investigate the roles which identity, place, and memory play in using (and constructing) different pasts.

22.2 Corinth and Carthage As Case Studies Corinth and Carthage were both seen together as symbols of Roman Imperialism in Republican times.17 Both were centres of supra-regional significance and centres of the resistance against Roman expansionism. They were subsequently embroiled in violent wars with Rome which ended with the defeat and destruction of both cities by Roman troops in the same year, 146 BC. After an interlude, both Corinth and Carthage were revived as coloniae by Gaius Julius Caesar, and were then revitalized and rebuilt by Octavian/Augustus. The parallelism of war against Rome, subsequent destruction, and refounding as coloniae has not only been noted by modern classicists, but was already recognized by numerous ancient authors such as Strabo, Appian and Plutarch. 18 Despite these well-known similarities, the two colonies have only rarely been viewed together and compared in relation to their development in the first decades of their existence, that is, in the Augustan era. The reason for this lack of focus may be the complicated and sometimes inadequate archaeological evidence. A more detailed investigation into how the colonies were planned and built in the first decades after Caesar’s death enables further study of how these cities, with their eminent but – from a Roman point of view – also very contaminated past, dealt with their backgrounds, and how the history of the newly constructed cityscapes influenced the form of memory. In order to accomplish this aim, a closer look at the archaeological evidence of both cities is required.

22.3

Carthage

Our knowledge about Punic and Roman Carthage stems mostly from the French excavations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the large multinational excavation project, financed by UNESCO, ‘Sauvegarde de Carthage’ in the last quarter of the twentieth century.19 17 18 19

Wiseman (1979); Martin (1988); Purcell (1995); Davis (2010); Modrow (2017). Strab. 17.3.15; App. Pun. 136; Plut. Caes. 57.8. On the history of excavations see Kleinwächter (2001) 29 and Docter et al. (2015).

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A first settlement named Colonia Iunonia was planned and partly executed under Gaius Gracchus in 122 BC, but without success, and Carthage was re-founded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC as Colonia Iulia Concordia Karthago.20 The Gracchian and Caesarean colony was not situated in the area of the Punic ruins, as is stated by several authors.21 For example, Appian describes it as ‘ἀμφὶ τὴν Καρχηδόνα’, but it might have been established in the north-western area of Megara, a very fertile plain (today La Malga).22 It is generally agreed that this relocation was a consequence of the execration after the siege and destruction in 146 BC.23 The founders of the Augustan colony, however, returned to the place where the Punic city stood.24 The building projects began in the penultimate decade of the first century BC with a terminus post quem of 15 BC for the most extensive measures.25 The centre of the Punic city was the Byrsa hill, and this Punic core also became the heart of the new Augustan colony (Figure 22.1). This is evident from the alignment of the decumanus and the street system with the Byrsa hill forming the centre of the rectangular grid.26 The topography of the hill, however, was completely modified: the irregular shape of the hill top was levelled and the slopes were raised by the erection of enormous substructures, thus creating a large esplanade.27 In general the new Roman hill platform on the Byrsa was far lower than the Punic level. This removal of the Punic surface has been interpreted also in religious terms as a means of suspending the prohibition to settle on the ground of the Punic city.28 Using the Byrsa as city centre indicates that the orientation of the city by the groma was determined by a scheme set out in the archaic Punic period, following the line of the coast in an orthogonal plan.29 In the planning of the Augustan colony, in contrast to the Punic period, this coastal alignment was projected onto the entire urban area. The second orientation of the Punic city, with a fan-shaped street system on the slope of the hills, 20 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Martin (1988); Fishwick (1995) 239; Mokni (2008). 21 See Flügel et al. (2018) 378–81. App. Pun. 136; Le Glay (1985) 239; Kleinwächter (2001) 36. Gros (1990) 551; Fishwick (1995); Gros (2000) 534; Rakob (2000) 73. History of colony foundation: Fishwick (1995). Rakob (2000) 78; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 295–7; Flügel et al. (2018) 371f. The terminus is given by stamps on amphora handles. Gros (2000) 536; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 52–4. Rakob (2000) 76; Kleinwächter (2001) 40; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 51; Flügel et al. (2018) 361f. Gros (1990) 551; Gros (2000) 537; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 52. Rakob (2000) 76; Kleinwächter (2001) 33.

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Figure 22.1 Carthage: the Punic (===) and Roman(—) street system overlaid. The thick lines (—) are contour lines. Rakob, F. (2000). ‘The Making of Augustan Carthage’, in E. Fentress (ed.), Romanization and the City. Creation, Transformations, and Failures. Proceedings of a Conference Held at the American Academy in Rome, 14–16 May 1998. Portsmouth: pl. before p. 73.

vanished without a trace in favour of the strictly enforced master-plan.30 Roman Carthage was laid out from its foundation as a unified, structured, large city without regard for topographical constraints. Therefore, high 30

Rakob (2000) 76; Kleinwächter (2001) 33.

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terracing and long flights of steps were needed to resolve the 55 metre difference in elevation between the coast and the Byrsa plateau, and major roads lost their function as traffic-lanes for carts and carriages.31 Unfortunately, the Augustan layers on the Byrsa are disturbed and it is difficult to gain a clear picture of the building history. The frame of the early plateau suggests a coherent building programme, and many marble decorations and fragments of sculptures attest to the high quality of the buildings erected.32 It is, therefore, certain that the main concentration of monumental buildings dominated the city from the Byrsa terrace already in Augustan times. On the esplanade, a large level area was established which was divided into two separate spaces (Figure 22.2). The first was the actual forum and was bordered by porticoes. In the east, a large basilica was erected, probably with the capitolium, a temple for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, opposite.33 The second open area, which was separated from the forum by porticoes, was dominated by a further large temple. Unfortunately, the identity of the divinity to which it was dedicated remains unclear. Possible candidates are Juno, Asclepius, and Concordia. Each of these attributions would imply different interpretations – Asclepius-Eshmun as well as Juno-Tanit would provide a link to Punic religion, while Concordia would stress the political intention of founding the colony – but at present no final conclusion can be reached.34 What is certain, however, is that on the Byrsa, Augustus and the imperial family were present because high quality marble portraits of Julia and one of the grandsons of Augustus have been found there. Furthermore, a temple of the Gens Augusta was erected south of the esplanade.35 To this sanctuary belongs the famous altar depicting (among other themes) Aeneas together with Ascanius and Anchises fleeing from Troy.36 The results of numerous small-scale excavations allow us to see a reconstructed layout of the entire city. The colonia (settlement) was divided into four centuriae (usually square areas) which were then subdivided into insulae (blocks).37 The two eastern centuriae were smaller due to the irregular shoreline, and the corner of centuria A in the north-west was missing.38 31 33 34 35 36

Rakob (2000) 76. 32 Gros (2000) 538; Rakob (2000) 79; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 255–60. Deneauve (1990); Kleinwächter (2001) 53–5; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 260. Gros (1990) 556; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 267. For Asclepius, cf. Benseddik (2010) 1, 87, and 220s; For a discussion of Caelestis, see Ifuku (2014). Gros (1990) 560; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 271–3; Rives (1995) 53–64. For information on the altar, see Poinssot (1929). Poinssot (1929); Rives (1995) 53–5. 37 Gros (2000) 535. 38 Gros (2000) 538.

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Figure 22.2 Carthage: Roman Byrsa (first phase) Ladjimi Sebaï, L. (2005). ‘La colline de Byrsa à l’époque romaine. Etudes épigraphique etétat de la question’, Karthago 26: 69, fig. 19. N.b. Figure 22.2. was originally used by Deneauve, J. (1990). ‘Le centre monumental de Carthage. Un ensemble cultuel sur la colline de Byrsa’, in Carthage et son territoire dans l’antiquité. Actes du 4e colloque international sur l’histoire et l’archéologie de l’Afrique du Nord, Strasbourg, 5–9 avril 1988. Paris: fig. on p. 151.

In addition to the representative forum on the Byrsa hill, a commercial market square has been assumed in the south-eastern part of the colonia near the coast. It has been proposed that it was situated at the same location as the earlier Punic agora (open public space for assemblies and markets).39 That assumption appears reasonable because the stairways up to the Byrsa hill impede and prevent any effective transport of goods. 39

Gros (2000) 537; Kleinwächter (2001) 45–52 and 58.

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In general, the Punic city was not obliterated, although large amounts of existing building material were re-used as much as possible and the debris from the destruction (Römisch bewegter punischer Schutt (RBPS = Roman Moved Punic Debris)) was used for levelling.40 In the infrastructure of the streets, the colony reveals continuity between already existing Punic constructions and new Roman constructions as almost all Punic cisterns were reused in Augustan times.41 A major street following the seashore was established by cardo XVIII, which was located over the Punic sea walls.42 In general the first Roman houses were built over the latest Punic pavement level and therefore the alignment of the Punic buildings was copied, but no visible traces of Punic predecessors remained above ground.43 In post-Augustan times, apart from the Byrsa, Carthage grew slowly. Up until the second century AD no street paving is attested, and Pierre Gros characterized Carthage as ‘cité pauvre à la monumentalité réduite’ (‘a poor city, a shadow of its former self’).44 In summary, the archaeological evidence slightly contrasts with literary sources such as Pomponius Mela.45 Pliny’s statement that the Roman colony was founded upon the remains of Great Carthage is, however, confirmed; this was evidently a crucial point for the Romans.46 Thus, on the basis of current excavation results, the procedure in Ausgustean times was described as ‘conscious staging of the new foundation on the remains of the late Punic metropolis, but with the adoption of formative urban planning elements’.47

22.4 Corinth Both Strabo and Diodorus stated that the city was razed to the ground, but Corinth was not destroyed to the same degree as Carthage. 48 As has been shown, the damage to buildings in the city centre was selective.49 The North Stoa and the theatre were severely spoilt and the hall to the west of the South Stoa was also demolished, but the South Stoa itself remained virtually intact as the water supply continued in working order. The city’s consciousness of its own history, however, had been undermined, since 40 41 45 47

48

Recent results: Flügel et al (2018) 361–8. The term ‘Römisch bewegter punischer Schutt (RBPS)’ is coined on 361. Rakob (2000) 77. 42 Rakob (2000) 81. 43 Rakob (2000) 80. 44 Gros (2000) 538. Pomp. Mel. 1.7.34; cf. Gros (2000) 539. 46 Plin. Nat. 5.24; cf. Miles (2003) 127. Flügel et al (2018) 375. Quote in the original in German: ‘bewusste Inszenierung der Neugründung auf den Resten der spätpunischen Metropole, aber unter Übernahme prägender städtebaulicher Elemente’. Strab. 8.6.23; Diod. Sic. 32. 4.5. 49 Walbank (1997) 95.

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public inscriptions were deliberately broken.50 It is evident that Rome intended to destroy Corinth as a political entity, even though it remained as a physical accumulation of buildings. The land formerly belonging to the polis (city) Corinth became either ager publicus (public land) or was handed over to Sikyon, as the Isthmian Games were also transferred to the same city. Many of the older Greek buildings stood upright when the Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis was founded in 44 BC, and they subsequently could have been re-used after restoration and/or adaption works under Augustus.51 Corinth had a roughly rectangular plan with the forum situated more or less in the centre, encompassing an area of 1500 x 1200 metres or 180 hectares.52 The planning of the urban site was normally a separate undertaking from the land survey and the establishing of the limitatio (fixing the boundaries) of the territory. That was also the case at Corinth where the groma (instruments for the land survey) were set up in one or more locations on the outskirts of the city, in contrast to the procedure in Carthage.53 As in Carthage, the forum in Corinth also constitutes the centre of the city. Its axis, however, is slightly skewed from an exact east–west orientation to conform to the line of the South Stoa which was originally constructed during the first quarter of the third century BC, reflecting the alignment of the archaic temple.54 This conformity in alignment reveals that at the outset of the Roman colonia, it was decided that the South Stoa should be used as the southern boundary for the new forum (Figure 22.3). The older Lechaion Road functioned at first as an orientation line of the groma and therefore as cardo maximus (main north–south oriented street).55 In deviation from the standard design, however, there is no main decumanus (main east–west oriented street). Temple E in the west is related to the forum and is also carefully situated in relation to the grid 50 51

52 53 54 55

Walbank (1997) 95. The archaeological work in the last 100 years was focused on the monumental centre of Corinth and as a consequence we know very little about the domestic dwellings both of the Greek and the Roman city – in contrast to Carthage. We therefore have to concentrate on the public buildings in that which follows. For a survey of this site’s excavation history, see Williams and Bookidis (2003). Walbank (1997) 109. Walbank (1997) 111. For the entire planning and measuring process, see Romano (2003) and especially Romano (2005) 30. Walbank (1997) 115; Bookidis (2005) 141; Romano (2005) 32–8. Walbank (1997) 114; Romano (2005) 32.

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Figure 22.3 Corinth: Sketch plan of the forum area c. 30 BC from Walbank, M. E. H. (1997). ‘The Foundation and Planning of Early Roman Corinth’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 10: 112 fig. 6.

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plan of roads, yet it is neither on the same axis of the forum nor of the grid plan.56 This indicates that the planning of the forum is based on a deliberate compromise and that the relationship between the axis of the forum, the Lechaion Road and the other main roads, and the most important temples, was worked out at the foundation of the colony. During the first two decades of the colony the forum consisted of little more than a large open space.57 It would not be until the Augustan period when the Roman colonists were sufficiently prosperous that they would begin to further develop that central square in earnest (Figure 22.4). At first, the plan of the forum involved an extensive levelling of the valley. The building of the rostra was also part of the original plan because with this measure a prominent natural outcrop of rock could be disguised.58 As one of the first measures, the South Stoa was renovated whereby the open colonnade was retained essentially in its original form, but the rooms at the rear were completely altered.59 The difference in the size of the rooms must have been intentional, implying that accommodation was provided for specific purposes, perhaps offices for magistrates of the colonia. New research has also proved that the Basilica Julia was erected much earlier than previously thought, a date in Augustan times is well supported.60 The structure follows Roman building concepts for a typical basilica. Due to the presence of statues of the Julio-Claudian family displayed within the building, including the Emperor Augustus and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius, the Basilica Julia most likely also served – aside from its main function as a law court – as the seat of the imperial cult.61 The Northwest Stoa, which closed off the north side of the forum and which was once presumed to have been built in Hellenistic times, was also erected during the reign of Augustus.62 The installation of Temple E and its temenos (holy precinct) was planned together with the forum in the early years of the colony.63 Rising above the forum in the west, Temple E occupied a prominent place in the city only comparable to the Temple of Apollo at the north. In its first phase it was a limestone Doric temple with six columns across its façade.64 The identification of Temple E is fiercely disputed: based on Pausanias’s description of the situation in the second century AD, the temple is often attributed to Octavia, the sister of Augustus, but there are strong arguments for interpreting Temple E as the capitolium of the colonia.65 56 59 62 65

Romano (2005) 36. 57 Walbank (1997) 123. 58 Walbank (1997) 117; Bookidis (2005) 152. Walbank (1997) 118; Steuernagel (2009) 307. 60 Scotton (2016). 61 Scotton et al. (2014). Walbank (1997) 119. 63 See n. 53. 64 Walbank (1997) 122; Bookidis (2005) 155. Walbank (1989); Williams (1989); Börker (1990).

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Figure 22.4 Corinth: The Forum area in later Augustan/ Iulio-Claudian times. Artist: Williams II. C.K. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations. Steuernagel, D. (2009). ‘Romanisierung und Hellenismós. Drei Fallstudien zur Gestaltung und Nutzung griechischer Tempel in den römischen Provinzen Achaia und Cyrenaica’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 124: x. Fig. 22.4 was originally used by Williams, C. K. II (1993). ‘Roman Corinth as a Commercial Center’, in T. E. Gregory (ed.), The Corinthia in the Roman Period. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 8. Ann Arbor, MI: 32 fig. 1.

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The Greek temple to the north of the forum was built as a Doric hexastylus, thus having six columns in the front, in the middle of the sixth century BC. In the early imperial period, the interior of the temple was fundamentally transformed. The columns in the cella, the room in the centre of the temple, were removed and the inside wall destroyed, resulting in a more spacious interior.66 At the west of the forum stands a tightly clustered series of buildings, mostly small-scale temples on a high podium following Roman building concepts.67 The first building on the terrace was Temple F. Probably built early in the reign of Augustus, it was a small tetrastyle Ionic temple with a niche for a cult statue in the back of the cella. The stairs and the crepis (stepped platform) gave it further height, so it rose markedly above the forum. Temple D was built later in the Augustan period, following an extension of the Northwest Stoa into the north end of the West Terrace. It was built in the Tuscan order, with a tetrastyle prostyle porch and a simple cella. In the last years of Augustus’ reign Cn. Babbius Philinus donated a Fountain of Poseidon to the city during his tenure as aedilis. Not all details of the building are clear, but some marble dolphins and the dedicatory inscription are still extant.68 Two more fountains near the forum provide further insights into how older Greek monuments were treated in the first decades of the colony: the Peirene fountain was established during the archaic period, when tunnels were dug into the clay beneath the Upper Lechaion Road Valley.69 The facility was gradually extended, initially consisting of six chambers, providing access to three deep draw basins before 146 BC. In the first years of the colony, preliminary renovations focused on the stabilization of the existing architecture and the maintenance of the water supply system.70 In the two final decades of the first century BC, an ornamental two stories high screen wall was erected across the front of the old Greek spring house, and the former fountain antechambers were converted into basins.71 The rebuilding of the Peirene must have been one of the earliest monumental projects undertaken at the colony. Additional improvements soon followed within the first decades of the first century AD further utilizing the space in front of the Peirene.72 66 68 69 70 71 72

Steuernagel (2009) 299–306. 67 Williams (1974); Williams (1987); Williams (1990). See n. 58; Mylonopoulos (2003) 153–5 and 158–60; Gebhard (2005) 186; Robinson (2011) 201. For a general history of the Peirene fountain, see Robinson (2011). Robinson (2005) 121; Robinson (2011) 150. For information on the Roman phase I, see Robinson (2005) 121; Robinson (2011) 181; Robinson (2013) 347. For information on the Roman phase II, see Robinson (2005) 123; Robinson (2011) 182–9. For general information see Thomas (2010) 138; Robinson (2013) 348–50.

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Another older prominent fountain was also heavily remodelled in the early years of the Roman colony. The Glauke fountain consisted of four large reservoirs fronted by three draw basins and an architectural façade stemming from the Early Hellenistic period.73 Extensive quarrying transformed the topography of the area to the west of the archaic temple and south of the theatre. That work ended in the mid-first century AD and was followed by the construction of Temple C and its temenos next to the Glauke fountain.74 At that time, the Glauke fountain was transformed into a freestanding cube of limestone with no signs of Roman remodelling at the porch and the façade. In this manner, Glauke was exposed and, together with the archaic temple, formed part of a vista of antique monuments.75

22.5

Rebuilding Carthage and Corinth: Differences and Similarities

At first sight the differences between Corinth and Carthage are decisive, the most obvious distinction being that the earlier pre-Roman buildings of Corinth were in much better condition than those at Carthage. For this reason, many Greek buildings were re-used in Roman times in contrast to the buildings of Punic Carthage, none of which were restored or reclaimed after the founding of the colony.76 This common observation should not, however, overshadow the fact that the similarities between both cities (aside from their destruction in 146 BC and re-foundation in 44 BC) are by far more interesting and significant: (1) The continuity of name and place: both colonies were founded on the exact site of their forerunner and both bore their pre-Roman name as part of the official colony title. This is easily understandable for Corinth, but highly significant for Carthage because former attempts at Roman settlements did indeed use other names and/or were located in a different place.77 As a result, a formal religious ban had to be suspended to make this possible.78 73 75 76 77 78

Robinson (2005) 128–31. 74 Robinson (2005) 131. Williams (1987) 35; Pfaff (2003) 133; Robinson (2005) 133–8; Steuernagel (2009) 310; Robinson (2011) 180–201; Robinson (2013) 349. E.g. Rakob (2000) 82. The Gracchian colony should be named colonia Iunonia (Plut. C. Gracchus 9.1): Martin (1988) 237; Kleinwächter (2001) 35 n. 214; Arnaud-Portelli (2004) 23. Here n. 23; cf. also Rives (1995) 41; Steuernagel (2009) 303.

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(2) The social composition of the inhabitants/colonists: the coloni (settlers) were not only veterans of Caesar’s or Octavian’s armies, but were also much more diverse in origin. Carthage was too large for 3000 coloni, so soon after perioeci (inhabitants of the surrounding area) had to be integrated. This probably included descendants of the 6000 Gracchian coloni, but surely also people from Africa.79 This circumstance is comparable to Corinth, as recent research has identified three groups which formed the local élite of the Early Imperial colonia:80 (1) Wealthy freedmen, almost exclusively of Greek stock (2) Roman negotiatores (businessmen) long active in the east (3) Locally influential Greeks, co-opted into the ruling structure Both Corinth and Carthage were therefore not strictly veterans’ colonies in a meaningful sense.81 Instead, a significant and influential proportion of the population were likely to have been of local origin. (3) The preservation of the alignment:82 due to the location of the groma on the Byrsa and the alignment to the coastline, almost all the main street axes at Carthage follow their Punic forerunners. At Corinth, the forum was oriented towards older buildings such as the South Stoa, and the decumanus for the limitatio of the urban insulae is identical with the ancient Lechaion Road. (4) The spatial continuity of structures: at Corinth many of the Greek buildings were re-used in the early years of the colony and spatial continuity is therefore a given fact. At Carthage crucial buildings and areas of the city kept their former position, such as the acropolis/ forum, the commercial market/agora and the harbours.83 (5) The implementation of typical Roman urban concepts: besides the standard division into insulae, a key feature both of Carthage and Corinth is the separation or the doubling of the central square to form a forum and a forum adiectum.84 At Carthage the two squares are nearly the same size, whilst at Corinth the southern part separated by the rostra, the raised platform for public speaking, is considerably smaller than its northern counterpart – here, however, the precinct of Temple E has to be taken into consideration even if it is differentiated by a cluster of buildings.85 79 81 83 84 85

Gros (2000) 535; Rakob (2000) 82. 80 Fornis (2008); Millis (2010); Millis (2014). 82 Millis (2010), 20 f. (for Corinth). See nn. 26, 29, and 55 above. See nn. 33 and 39 above; for the harbours: in particular Hurst (2011), especially 55 f. Doubling of fora: Gros (1990) 557–60; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 68, 255. For the Temple E precinct, see Romano (2005) 32–4.

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(6) Large-scale interventions into the natural topography: even if the transformation of the Byrsa hill at Carthage is unparalleled, the plan of the forum at Corinth nevertheless also involved extensive levelling of the valley.86 (7) Slow development: after the efforts of the first decades, it took a long time before the colonies were established and equipped with additional amenities and infrastructural facilities. For example, the roads remained unpaved at Carthage until the second century AD and at Corinth even the forum only received its pavement after an earthquake in 77 AD.87

22.6 Remembering and Using the Past at Carthage and Corinth If we look more closely at the practices of remembrance and attitudes towards the past in both cities, we will notice once again some commonalities as well as some slight differences. The fact that Carthage and Corinth were situated on sites where ancient settlements once were is highly significant. Places were important as repositories of memories, so it is no coincidence that this spatial continuity is often mentioned in scholarship.88 This point is most significant for Carthage, where the colony was relocated to its final site after attempts at choosing a new site for the Gracchian or Caesarean settlement. Although (or even because) the physical topography of Punic Carthage was consciously eradicated, Pierre Gros has argued that in many ways the Augustan building plan mirrors Virgil’s thesis of re-founding Carthage as ‘une acte de réconciliation à la fois politique et ethnique’.89 Furthermore, the name Colonia Concordia Iulia Karthago shows that the foundation of a Roman city on the site of Punic Carthage should be interpreted as a symbol of reconciliation. As Richard Miles has put it, Carthage had to be rebuilt because Rome was – in part – constructed on the rivalry between the two cities.90 This works particularly well when the memory of Punic Carthage

86 87 88

89

Here n. 40; cf. also Rives (1995) 41; Ladjimi Sebaï (2005) 260. For Carthage see n. 44. For general information see Gros (1990) 546–8. For the pavement see also Gebhard (2005) 186. Cf. Miles (2003) 127. The recent literature on the connection of memory and space is abundant and increasing. For structured introductions, see Till (2003); Hoelscher and Alderman (2004); Ebeling (2010); Meusburger, Heffernan, and Wunder (2011). Classic discussions on this theme include Halbwachs (1941); Nora (1984–92); Nora (1989). Gros (1990) 557. 90 Miles (2003) 132.

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as a city is evoked. Memories and traditions connected to the Punic past as a whole, however, did not necessarily serve the same purpose. The strong links between Rome and its emperor are evident in the application of typical Roman urbanistic forms and in the adoption of cults closely related to the emperor, such as the cult of Venus Genetrix and, primarily, the religious veneration of Augustus and his family.91 More significantly, however, is the fact that, both at Carthage and Corinth, we can trace specific trends of Augustan memory politics. One characteristic of this political practice was that Augustus did not inhibit remembrance, but instead offered a constructive direction for the present and the future by managing and redirecting memory. As Karl Galinsky has noted, Augustus’ procedure was not simply to suppress or minimize earlier memories and leave a void, but to go beyond them and fill that void by constructing new memories.92 The newly built city of Carthage can therefore be construed as an offer to the inhabitants to create and build memories for the future; the more effort that was devoted to the building of the new city, the more compelling that proposition was. Here we can detect strong parallels between Augustus’ own building measures at Rome and Carthage and even Virgil’s description of Dido building Carthage.93 Corinth also shows close links to Rome and the emperor and makes ‘future memories’ possible. In contrast to Carthage, continuity seems to be a much more applicable concept in Corinth, because the centre of the Roman colony is sprinkled with ancient Greek buildings which can be seen as repositories of memories and triggers of remembrance. It has to be highlighted, however, that most of these temples, fountains and stoai were rebuilt and re-used. Through these means, the centre of Corinth was designed as a new multi-faceted memoryscape. It is important to emphasize that the building measures at Corinth are closely comparable to those in Rome itself. In the capital, older structures were rebuilt with only minor changes, whereas others were severely altered and a few buildings were removed totally. A famous example of this is the temple of Pietas.94 Eric Orlin has recently shown how (re-)construction projects in Augustan Rome held the potential to reshape Roman memory.95 The re-use of older Greek buildings in Roman Corinth often meant that the functional continuity of the buildings was profoundly interrupted as 91 92 93 94

For the temple of Venus Genetrix at Corinth, see Walbank (2010) 360. Galinsky (2016a) 22. On Virgil’s description of Dido’s Carthage, see the contributions of Goldschmidt (2017) and Modrow (2017); cf. Sirago 1994 and now also Biggs (2020a). Galinsky (2016b) 25. 95 Orlin (2016) 124.

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well. This is best seen in the temples and their cults. We can speak of cultic continuity only insofar as the gods honoured seem have to remained the same, but in all cases changes in ritual practices took place. In general, no ritual continuity with their previous usage is assured, a fact which is often mirrored in architectural alterations.96 The modus operandi in Augustan Corinth should not be termed as a refoundation but rather a revival or renewal, perhaps comparable to the renewals of forgotten cults at Rome in Augustan times.97 Introducing new ritual forms and adapting older locales to these new practices is therefore consistent with Augustan conceptions of memory and religious renaissance. The return of the Isthmian Games is also a fitting example in this context.98 The selective and somewhat superficial appropriation of ancient ‘Greek’ Corinthian traditions is an important process in the re-creation of Corinth as a Roman colony and in the formation of its collective identity. The restructuring of the South Stoa and the renovation of the fountains are evidence of this process, along with the contemporaneous renovation of the most sacred sources in the heart of Rome, such as the lacus Iuturna or lacus Curtius, creating a parallel between the two cities.99 The fountain of Peirene was renovated in a completely Roman fashion; the fountain of Glauke was transformed into an archaizing monument and the location of Medea’s death. The designation of the fountain fits perfectly to the late identification of Medea’s victim as Glauke as E. Moore has outlined recently.100 The combination of the fountain with the myth of Medea allowed the inhabitants of Roman Corinth to demonstrate their knowledge of mythology and their connection with the classical past.101 Both were used as ‘historiated’ locations of creatively adapted stories.102 This kind of invented tradition (to cite Eric Hobsbawm) is another way to create memories for the future, and is, furthermore, typical for Roman Greece as a society with strong links to the past but with weakened or destroyed social patterns for which the ‘old’ traditions had originally been designed.103 If one now considers – as a form of closing remark – the two sites under the terminology of P. Nora and J. Assmann, then some general observations can be made.104 96 97 98 101 102 103 104

See Thomas (2010) 119–23. Following Thomas (2010) 123. For Augustan cults at Rome, see Scheid (2005). 99 Gebhard (2005) 185–9 with bibliography. Robinson (2011) 195. 100 Moore (2017). Identification by Apollod. Bibl. 1.9.28; Paus. 2.3.6; see Moore (2017), esp. 265–71. Robinson (2011) 179. Hobsbawm (1983); on the ‘invention of tradition‘ at the Corinthian fountains, see Robinson (2005) 134; Robinson (2013) 350. For P. Nora’s and J. Assmann’s work see here n. 6 and 7.

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Without doubt both colonies can be described as lieux de mémoire. Specific crystallization points can admittedly only be identified in Corinth, since here individual buildings are re-used, even if the form could be modified and the function changed.105 In Carthage, it is primarily the foundation and construction of buildings as feats and civilizing achievements that are highlighted. For this we have a contemporary emic testimony with Virgil’s description of Dido’s foundation of Carthage.106 In my eyes, however, it is decisive that future memories were made possible in both cities. Here, fundamental offers are made to enable the heterogeneous population to form a communal identity. The disparate composition of the population means – in J. Assmann’s terminology – that the inhabitants brought many different forms of communicative memory to the newly founded colonies. Also a city-specific cultural memory, which is uniform or at least carried by a clear majority, cannot have existed (yet). By laying track for new memories, however, the conditions are created to form such a common cultural memory. In this sense, both Carthage and Corinth completely follow Assmann’s dictum so that ‘if you want to belong to a community, you must follow the rules of how and what to remember’.107 105 106 107

For an example in Rome see the contribution of Delignon in this volume. Modrow (2017) 271f.; Flügel et al (2018) 376f. (with bibliography); see also here n. 93. J. Assmann at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo on 15 May 2013 cited after Meckien (2013).

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Index Locorum

ACIP (Ancient Coinage of the Iberian Peninsula) 1269–82, 351 1984–95, 352 3418b, 352 Appian Bellum Civile 1.99.462, 173 2.108.449, 285 2.117, 228 4.27, 219 Libyca 136, 396–7 Aristophanes Clouds, 64 Augustus FrHist 60, 220 Res Gestae Divi Augusti 2, 220 7, 179 Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 1.1.17, 51 3.3.2, 47 3.3.3, 44 3.3.14, 46 3.7, 275 20.10.2, 52 Aurelius Victor De Viris Illustribus 82.1, 223 82.5, 223 Bibulus FrHist 49, 220 Brutus Cato, 253 Caesar Anticato, 253, 254 Bellum Civile 1.3.23, 250 1.30.5, 250

Cassius Dio Historia Romana 37.22, 243 44.7, 284 44.9.2, 285 46.48, 219 47.12.2, 219 47.24.3, 228 54.8.3, 299 56.1–28, 366 56.2.3, 366 56.10.1, 366 56.20.2, 366 Cato the Elder De Agricultura 5.4, 63 Cicero Academica 1.9, 113 Brutus 62, 368 Cato, 251, 253 De Consulatu Suo, 247 De Domo Sua 21–3, 248 De Finibus 3.3.6, 254 3.3.75, 254 3.4.44, 254 3.72, 230 5.2, 313 De Inventione 1.2, 328 De Lege Agraria 2.10, 201 2.19, 194 3.5, 175 De Legibus 1.1, 81 1.2, 84, 85, 89 1.3–5, 88 1.5, 94 2.1–5, 92

466

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Index Locorum De Officiis 1.104, 50 1.112, 255 De Oratore 2.353–54, 304 3.45, 50 De Re Publica 2.2, 170 2.41, 172 5.2, 97 Divinatio in Caecilium 66, 244 Epistulae ad Atticum 1.14.6, 247 2.1.8, 247 6.1.25, 387 6.2.15, 387 7.3.10, 49 11.23.3, 371 12.4.2, 251 12.44.1, 253 13.50.1, 253 14.4.2, 229 14.6.2, 229 14.12.2, 229 14.15, 229 Epistulae ad Brutum 1.17.1, 224 Epistulae ad Familiares 9.16, 284 9.16.4, 49 11.27–8, 224 12.3.1, 225 15.4.12, 248 In Pisonem 24, 262 In Verrem II 2.1.151, 191 Lucullus 13–14, 184, 187 75, 187 144, 190 Marius fr. 17.9–13, 90 Orationes Philippicae 2.12, 255 2.31, 224 2.84, 286 2.84–7, 283 2.86, 285 9.12, 137 13.30, 255 Pro Caelio 26, 292 Pro Cornelio II

F4, 192 F5, 193 F6, 194 Pro Lege Manilia 33, 51 Pro Marcello 21–3, 284 25–33, 284 27, 178 27–8, 94 Pro Murena 3, 245 58–67, 245 60–1, 245 66–7, 245 Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo 13, 196, 197 15, 196 25, 196 Pro S. Roscio Amerino 3, 206 21, 208 89–90, 206 153–4, 208 154, 208 Pro Sestio 12, 248 60–3, 248 Tusculanae Disputationes 1.74, 255 CIL (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum) I2 626, 301 I2 3109a, 371 XIV 4707, 358 XVI 5, 304 CNH (Corpus Nummum Hispaniae ante Augusti Aetatem) 309/9, 353 310/45, 353 310/46, 353 Cornelius Nepos Atticus 18.4, 387, 388 Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca Historica 32.4.5, 401 Dionysius of Halicarnassus Antiquitates Romanae 5.77.4, 177 Diphilus Stratiotes, 66 Empylus FrHist A19, 220

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467

468

Index Locorum

Ennius Annales 206–7, 35 Eupolis Kolakes fr. 157 Kassel and Austin, 64 Evanthius De Comoedia 3.6, 53 Festus fr. 498 Lindsay, 306 Fronto Epistulae p. 227, 11 van den Hout, 51 p. 56, 22 van den Hout, 51 Gaius Asinius Pollio FrHist 56, 220 Horace Carmina 1.1.35–6, 138 1.2, 138, 142–9 1.2.15, 140, 141 1.2.44, 146 1.2.51, 146 1.31, 122 2.7.3, 235 2.7.9–10, 234 2.7.1–12, 233 3.30.1, 149 3.30.1–2, 136 3.30.8–9, 141, 150 3.30.10–4, 139 3.30.15–6, 139 Sermones 1.7.17–8, 227 1.7.23, 227 1.7.32–4, 227 1.9, 63 ILLRP (Inscriptiones Latinae Liberae Rei Publicae) 13.1.1.39–41, 301–2 Lactantius Institutiones Divinae 5.12.11, 50 6.11.8, 50 Livy Ab Urbe Condita prol. 339 1.55.1–6, 297 5.51–4, 297 6.1.2, 300

6.4.1, 296 6.4.1–3, 301 6.29.8–10, 296, 305 7.3.1–9, 294 7.3.5–8, 294 26.15, 266 26.16, 276–8 40.52.4–7, 37 40.52.5–7, 296, 308 41.28.9, 303 Periochae 103, 365 107, 365 Lucan Pharsalia 2.234, 222 2.243, 237 2.323–5, 223 5.206–8, 237 6.791–2, 237 7.588–96, 224 7.595, 227 10.407–8, 237 Macrobius Saturnalia 2.1.10, 50 2.24.21, 68 6.2.33, 252 Menander Dis Exapaton 59–63, 66 Kolax, 63 Perikeiromene, 64 Messalla FrHist 61, 220 Minucius Felix Octavius 14.1, 46 NAH (Numismática Antigua de Hispania) 453, 352 455, 352 464, 351 Nicolaus Damascenus Bios Kaisaros 69, 285 Nonius Doctrina de Compendiosa p. 57, a15–19, 55 Ovid Fasti 1.529–32, 155 2.281–2, 292

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Index Locorum 6.2, 155 6.473–568, 156 6.570, 156 6.573–80, 156 6.593–96, 163 6.613–20, 160 6.625–36, 158 Metamorphoses 4.550, 137 Tristia 3.1.27–32, 124 Petronius Satyricon 26, 63 Plato Phaedrus 229 c-d, 92 274 c-275 c, 92 275d-277b, 93 Plautus Amphitruo 180, 51 378–89, 71 403–15, 71 413–4, 73 488, 56 Asinaria 359–69, 65 371–431, 65 701–11, 64 865–7, 64 Bacchides 439–42, 68 524–5, 67 526–9, 67 Casina 907–11, 74 912–4, 75 Cistellaria 158–89, 76 177–8, 77 185–7, 77 Epidicus 195, 65 200–5, 65 382–7, 61 Menaechmi, 73 Miles Gloriosus 985, 63 Pseudolus 107, 65 126–8, 70 388–9, 70 399–405, 70

Rudens 428, 74 429, 74 434, 75 Trinummus 27, 69 319, 50 Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historia 2.94, 154 5.24, 401 18.107, 52 35.11, 380 35.22, 28 35.23, 30 Pliny the Younger Epistulae 1.16.6, 50 Plutarch Antonius 12.7, 285 Brutus 1.4, 221 27.4–5, 219 Caesar 54.1, 254 57.3, 284 57.8, 396 61.7, 286 61.8, 285 66, 228 Cato Maior 22, 69 Cato Minor 23.3, 247 Cicero 28–35, 365 Romulus 21.4–5, 291 21.6–8, 292 Pomponius Mela De Choreographia 1.1.34, 401 Priscian Institutio de Arte Grammatica 2.370, 1–10, 54 Propertius Elegiae 2.31, 119 4.1A.25–26, 292 4.6.11–24, 123 4.6.37–54, 128 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria

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469

470 Quintilian (cont.) 9.2.25, 249 10.1.99, 48 Quintus Dellius FrHist 53, 220 Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.67, 191 RRC (Coinage of the Roman Republic) 96/1, 334 234/1, 342, 343 508/3, 228 Sallust Bellum Catilinae 53–4, 256 Historiae 1.55.3, 212 1.67.6, 215 1.67.7, 215 3.15.1–3, 214 3.15.24, 214 3.15.34, 214 3.15.9, 214 Seneca the Younger Medea, 113, 68 Octavia 498–9, 236 502, 236 Servius On the Aeneid 1.140, 57 5.412, 102 On the Georgics 2.288, 42 Silius Italicus Punica 13.369–380, 270 Strabo Geographica 8.6.23, 401 17.3.15, 396 Suetonius Caligula 34, 299 57, 66 De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 7.533–6, 48 7.534.4–6, 48 Divus Augustus 10.1, 219 65.2, 161 94.4, 154 Divus Julius 79.1, 285

Index Locorum Otho 10, 236 Tacitus Annales 1.8.6, 224 1.9, 181 3.24.2, 162 3.76, 236, 386 4.34, 386 Historiae 3.72, 311 Terence Adelphoe 186–7, 64 984–96, 69 Andria 40, 78 723, 78 919–45, 78 Eunuchus 774–5, 66 790–5, 66 797, 66 Heautontimoroumenos 1033–4, 68 327–8, 65 Phormio 335, 62 Tertullian Ad Nationes 2.1.41, 100 Valerius Maximus Facta et Dicta Memorabilia 1.5.7, 231 3.2.ext.1, 268 3.8.1, 269 4.1.12, 236 6.4.5, 231 Varro De Gente Populi Romani fr. 1 Fraccaro, 99 fr. 37 Fraccaro, 103 De Lingua Latina 5.7–9, 108 6.13, 110 6.34, 282 6.37–9, 109 6.49, 298, 338 8.3–6, 107 Res Divinae 1, fr. 2a Cardauns, 112 15, app. Cardauns, 103 15, fr. 206 Cardauns, 111

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Index Locorum 16, fr. 250 Cardauns, 110 Res Humanae fr. 1 Mirsch, 104 Res Rusticae 2.1.3–5, 101 3.1.1–5, 105 Saturae Menippeae fr. 428 Astbury, 101 fr. 488 Astbury, 98 fr. 537 Astbury, 98 Velleius Paterculus Historiae Romanae 2.35.2, 230 2.36.2, 230 2.52.5, 56.3, 230 2.58.1–2, 230 2.69.5, 219 2.69.6, 230 2.72.1, 230 2.72.2, 233

Virgil Aeneid 1.140–41, 57 1.418–493, 410 6.26, 137 Georgics 1.489–501, 219 3.10–16, 131 3.26–39, 132 Vitruvius De Architectura 1.prol.2–3, 318 1.prol.3, 315 1.1.2., 317 1.1.5, 319 1.1.6, 320 2.prol.5, 326 7.5.4, 325 Volumnius FrHist 47, 220

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471

Index

acculturation, 33–4 aetiology, 125, 127, 151–2, 156–8, 161, 163, 164, 291, 343 allusion, 133, 263–5, 343–4, 382 amnesia, 97, 236 ancestry, 34, 36, 101–3, 112, 128, 153, 185, 194–5, 202, 212, 228, 235, 243, 286, 293, 335, 369, 382, 388, 390 antiquarianism, 9, 53, 69, 98–104, 105, 110–14, 151, 163, 196, 295, 307, 376 Antonius, M. (Mark Antony), 63, 122, 124, 153, 162, 179–81, 218, 220, 225, 230–1, 255, 282–8, 301–2, 366, 385–6 appropriation, 4, 34, 183, 238, 242, 244, 411 Appuleius Saturninus, L., 184, 186–95, 202, 215 archaism, 39, 50, 309, 411 archive, 41, 87, 176, 197, 220, 362–4 Athens, 10, 28, 66, 69, 83–9, 169–70, 228, 313, 365, 375–93 audience, 5, 7, 25, 28, 32, 44–6, 53, 59–60, 70, 74–9, 176, 185, 191–201, 207–10, 214, 215, 229, 236, 243, 248, 261–6, 273, 276, 283, 285, 316, 321, 339, 344, 393 Augustus See Julius Caesar Octavian, C. authority, 31, 42–3, 46–59, 64, 73, 89, 97–8, 101, 111–14, 124, 138, 172–3, 180, 189, 208, 212, 237, 242–8, 273, 282, 294–5, 301, 307, 330, 351, 354 autobiography, 216, 220 battle in Sicily, 28 of Actium, 37, 115–33, 154, 160 of Cannae, 206 of Colline Gate, 175–6 of Eurymedon, 36 of Marathon, 28 of Myonessus, 36, 40 of Naulochus, 115

of Philippi, 218–38, 256, 385–6 of Plataea, 320 battlefield, 62, 231, 270 biography, 29, 46, 102, 188, 220, 235, 243, 252, 360, 379 Caesarism, 11, 252 canon, 3, 10, 44, 47, 49, 58–60, 173, 264, 322, 325, 362–7, 382 canonization, 53, 138–9 Capitol, 126–30, 135, 141, 150, 162, 216, 286, 297, 300, 303, 305, 309 Carthage, 19, 119, 173, 272, 333, 396–412 Cassius Longinus, C., 218–21, 225–31, 233–4, 236, 384–6, 390–2 celebration, 4, 83, 120, 122, 134, 282, 335, 349, 385 ceremony, 44, 130–1, 133, 141, 204, 225, 360 circus Flaminius, 126 coinage, 25, 139, 229, 289, 333, 337–42, 348–51, 354, 371 comedy, 43–7, 49, 61–76, 79 commemoration, 25, 28–9, 32, 36, 39–40, 45, 59, 94–5, 118, 122, 129, 133, 137, 149, 151, 157, 162–3, 222, 225, 240–2, 246–51, 256–7, 272, 275, 279, 287, 296–7, 304, 318, 326, 335–6, 362, 365, 376, 383, 390 communication ceremonial, 44 public, 279 religious, 155 competition, 38, 95, 199, 235, 389, 391 conservatism, 6, 8, 323 contio, 185–201, 218–19, 262 Cornelius Sulla, L., 10, 73, 173–9, 182, 199–202, 348, 355, 383–4, 389 cult, 111–12, 404 of Mars, 146 of Penates, 103 of Venus Genetrix, 410

472

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009327749.025 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index dedication (temple, epigraphic), 10, 38, 120–2, 141, 142, 161, 297, 300–5, 309–12, 317, 375, 378, 379, 384–90, 406 defeat (military), 27, 33, 36, 39, 123, 226, 234–5, 250, 267, 386–8, 396 deification, 153, 155, 287 delegitimisation, 182, 253 education, 104, 159, 366, 372 ekphrasis, 25, 120, 132, 295 emotion, 2, 4–5, 8, 191, 225, 313, 380 epicureanism, 153, 325, 327 ethics, 7, 186, 235, 245–51, 261, 269–73, 376, 381, 386 exemplarity, 28, 183, 186–202, 216, 222, 224, 237, 241, 245–57, 305, 376, 390 exemplum, 7–8, 23, 34, 111, 163, 183–201, 207, 210, 217, 220, 224, 229–31, 236–8, 240–52, 255, 261–8, 272–5, 279–80, 320, 376–86, 390–3 family, 24, 35, 64, 67, 101–2, 107, 113, 117, 151–2, 163, 184, 188, 193–5, 215, 224, 243–6, 252, 264, 268, 272, 299, 304, 335, 338–43, 359, 373, 378, 385–92, 399, 404, 410 Fasti Barberiniani, 301 Capitolini, 174, 302–4, 312 triumphales, 37, 301 festival, 24, 151, 153, 281–2, 285–93, 350, 366 Lupercalia, 110, 281–93 forgetting, 4, 77, 86, 119, 237, 240, 323, 335, 361, 369, 373 fountain, 406, 411 of Glauke, 407, 411 of Peirene, 406, 411 of Poseidon, 406 funerary (art, rituals, monuments, processions), 28, 34, 39, 103, 181, 219, 225, 236, 240, 251, 262, 264, 272, 290, 291, 298, 335, 338, 365, 383, 386 grammar, grammarians, 42–7, 51–9, 100, 108, 296, 309 heroical figures, 25–6, 33, 46, 219, 229, 267–78, 296, 304–5, 311, 329, 371, 388–92 historiography, 31, 93–5, 281, 318, 320 honorary (statue, monument), 225, 375–6, 390–2 identity collective identity, 117, 339, 367–8, 411 concretion of, 6, 72, 321, 322, 323 local, 85, 337, 349 Roman, 6, 98, 124, 257, 315, 323, 325, 330, 351 inheritance, 2, 141

473

innovation, 25–6, 32, 61, 82, 213, 278, 329 intermediality, 25, 29, 39–40, 295–6, 298, 307, 311, 376, 380, 382 inscriptional intermediality, 295–7, 300, 304–11 intersignification, 8, 25, 321, 381–3, 389, 393 intertextuality, 321, 383 Julius Caesar Octavian, C./Augustus., 5, 9–10, 68, 97–114, 141–8, 151–6, 160–4, 174, 176, 179–82, 218–20, 226, 235, 287, 295, 298–300, 304–5, 310–12, 322, 340, 361, 376, 379, 384–93, 396–410 Julius Caesar, C., 2, 4, 94, 141–7, 153, 177–82, 194, 201–2, 213, 218–38, 247, 250–7, 282–9, 293, 314, 352, 384–92, 396–7, 408 Junius Brutus, M., 4, 11, 50, 218–38, 251, 253, 385 Licinius Crassus, L., 50, 199 Licinius Crassus, M., 214 lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’), 62, 74, 81, 85–93, 124, 133, 225, 228, 263, 279–80, 296–300, 310–12, 335–6, 382, 412 Marius, C., 81–4, 88–91, 184–9, 201–2, 215 martyrology, 191–4, 201 mediation, 7, 11, 23, 26, 30–6, 40, 91, 221, 249, 257, 263, 279, 283, 325 premediation, 31, 34–5 remediation, 7–11, 36, 90, 91, 93, 94, 114, 237, 263–4, 276–9, 382 memoir, 153, 220 memorialisation, 10, 11, 94, 192, 203–4, 212, 215, 217, 241, 324 self-memorialisation, 203 memory collective memory, 2, 5, 23, 62, 68, 75, 87, 95–6, 116, 125, 129–30, 141–2, 148–9, 181, 199, 212, 221, 243, 254, 282, 305, 361, 381, 394–5 communicative memory, 3, 6, 10, 11, 23, 27, 34, 114, 138, 142–5, 148–50, 164–5, 185, 188, 204, 216, 221–2, 238, 241–9, 252–7, 276, 281, 292, 336, 361, 364, 372, 381, 395, 412 false memory, 32 functional memory, 4, 60, 69 intratextual memory, 79 mediated memory (prosthesis), 30, 34 memory apparatus (dispositif), 6, 9–10, 67, 288 memory formation (Geformtheit), 117, 126, 217, 246 memory obligation, 117, 120, 122–6, 130, 134 memory reservoir, 4, 114, 182 memory suppression, 236 memory war, 253, 257 postmemory, 24, 33, 36 storage memory, 4, 60, 65, 69, 114, 182, 289

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474

Index

mnemohistory, 6, 114 mnemonic landscape, 253 map, 252 trigger, 4 monumental inscription, 363 monumentalization (of individual or event), 252–4, 257, 322, 325, 330, 364 morality, 98, 161, 325 mos, 7, 68, 98, 228, 246, 249 mythology, 2, 10, 33, 34, 99, 106, 112, 117, 124, 127, 142, 144–50, 164, 242, 274, 279, 282–3, 287, 293, 328, 361, 411

remembering, remembrance, 1, 4, 23, 36, 56, 77–9, 86, 95, 98, 123, 182, 185, 198, 220, 222, 225, 236–8, 255, 264, 269, 275, 278, 313, 323, 335, 361, 364, 367–9, 374, 392, 395, 409–10 renarrativization, 236 repositories (of cultural memory), 8, 50, 62, 299, 319, 323, 409–10 republicanism, 235, 237 rewriting (of history), 73, 305, 368, 390–1 ritual, 3, 8–10, 24, 34, 38, 52, 69, 81, 83, 99, 117, 155, 204, 241, 282, 287, 290–3, 307, 341, 411

narration, 62, 75, 77, 89, 152, 156, 159–61

sanctuary of Apollo, 115, 126 of Delphi, 117, 119 of Minerva, 294 saturnian (verse), 25, 35–40, 309 self self-fashioning, 152–4, 165 self-presentation, 205, 208 self-representation, 28, 152, 185, 353, 386 Sempronius Gracchus, G., 54, 193, 196–7, 200, 397 Sempronius Gracchus, Ti., 184, 189, 193, 200, 209–10, 344 Sempronius Gracchus, Ti. (cos. 177), 302 senate, 161, 174–82, 199, 202, 205, 209, 214–17, 224, 235, 239–40, 247, 250, 253, 262, 265–71, 277, 284–6, 288, 333, 344, 356–8, 370, 386 shrine for Terminus, 297 site of exemplarity, 5, 7, 237, 243, 246–8, 255–7, 267, 273–80, 382–6, 391, 393 of memory, 62, 74, 85–6, 91, 228, 263, 274, 279–80, 296–300, 311–12, 335–6, 382, 386 Sparta, 103, 169–70, 320 spoils (of war), 39, 116, 318, 320, 334, 341 Stoicism, 11, 153, 183, 223, 231, 234, 245, 254

oratory, orators, 43, 49, 80, 95, 183, 185, 190–2, 195, 198–201, 205, 207, 212, 215, 251, 273, 283, 304, 315–18, 328–30, 364 Palladium, 112, 124, 141 paradigm, 7, 26–7, 37, 187, 236 patronage, 73, 375, 385 penates, 3, 8, 38, 103, 112, 155 performance, 3, 7, 30, 38, 43–6, 68, 75, 265, 353, 383 performative (acts, contexts), 25, 42, 44, 59, 77, 241, 278 Pompeius (Pompey) Magnus, Cn., 177, 209–11, 214, 222–3, 229, 250, 255, 385 pontiffs, collegium of pontiffs, 3, 97, 112, 135, 140–1, 150, 194, 239, 289 Porcius Cato M. (cos 195 BC) the Elder, 6, 63, 69, 169–72, 243–6, 249, 275, 322 Porcius Cato M. (pr. 54 BC) the Younger, 11, 211, 222–4, 229–30, 237, 239–56 portent, 89–90, 94, 159 portrait (imago), 34, 46, 56, 103, 122, 129, 186, 188, 196, 219, 222–3, 228, 235, 238, 286, 320, 364, 380, 382, 386, 390, 392, 399 posterity, 30, 135, 220, 318, 335 posthumous memory, 223–4, 229, 252 priesthood, 113, 126, 153, 174, 194 procession triumphal, 129 propaganda, 73, 129, 228 proscription, 176, 181, 203–8, 213, 220, 226 readership, 152, 250, 316, 341 recollection, 23, 32, 35, 40, 78, 83, 142, 145–9, 204, 273, 318, 329 reconstruction (temple), 5, 46, 100–2, 106, 164, 174, 192, 240, 303, 377, 390 religion, 100, 112–13, 126, 141, 150, 297, 310, 399

Temple, 36–40, 88, 115–20, 125–33, 137, 147, 152–60, 301, 303, 308–9, 313, 318, 324, 334, 338, 399–407, 410 of Apollo (Corinth), 404 of Apollo Palatinus, 115–34, 313 of Concord, 239–40 of Divus Iulius, 4 of Fortuna, 152, 156–8, 164 of Juno Moneta, 162, 297 of Juno of Croton, 307

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Index of Jupiter at Olympia, 309 of Jupiter Feretrius, 299 of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 40, 294–9, 303, 306–12 of Jupiter Tonans, 299 of Lares Permarini, 25, 36–7, 40, 296, 307–10 of Mars Ultor, 299, 386 of Mater Matuta, 152, 302 of Minerva, 295 of Nortia, 294 of Pietas, 410 of Quirinus, 286 of Regilius, 39 of the Gens Augusta, 399 of Vesta, 112, 141 theatre, 64, 371 of Corinth, 401, 407 tribunate, tribune of the plebs, 171–2, 174, 186–202, 208–15, 226, 239, 245, 247–8, 264, 275, 285, 344, 357, 358, 366, 369–71, 375 triumvirate, 174, 179–81, 218, 225, 234, 365 Tullius Cicero, M., 5, 12, 44, 49–51, 80–96, 113, 169–78, 183–201, 205–10, 215–17, 224–30, 240–57, 273, 278–80, 292–3, 304, 309, 313–18, 327–9, 356–74, 389

475

veteran (soldier), 26–31, 34–5, 63, 195, 349, 408 victory (military), 33, 36–40, 115–28, 132, 133, 175–6, 203, 207, 250–3, 269, 270, 284, 287, 296, 300, 304–6, 308, 320, 333–41, 344, 348, 352–4, 376 war Cantabrian Wars, 340 civil war, 5, 11, 113, 133, 143, 144, 147–8, 182, 220, 236, 240, 255, 256, 317, 355, 385 Caesar (49–45 BC), 177–8, 203, 222, 248–51, 253, 257, 385 Second Triumvirate (43–36 BC), 115–16, 124, 130–3, 143, 146, 180, 218–23, 235–8, 384 Sulla (83/82 BC), 173, 175, 199, 216 Numantine War, 342 Persian Wars, 40 Punic Wars, 36, 40, 270, 307 First Punic War, 23–7, 31–41, 275 Second Punic War, 34, 183, 261, 265 Seleucid War, 36, 40 Sertorian, 348, 351 Social War, 351 Trojan War, 40, 206–7 Trojan War (fall of Troy), 27–8, 112 warfare, 23, 28, 30, 355 witness, 7, 30–4, 49, 53, 88, 120, 126–7, 130, 175, 192–3, 238, 239, 268–70, 286

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009327749.025 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009327749.025 Published online by Cambridge University Press