Romulus' Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian

Frontispiece: ‘Sacrarium praebeat securitatem: Romulus’ Asylum’ from the Romulus cycle painted by the Carracci, Palazzo Magnani, Bologna, late sixteenth century. Photograph by Marco Baldassari, reproduced courtesy of Unicredit Banca, Bologna.

Romulus’ Asylum Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian

EMMA DENCH

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß E. Dench 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. ISBN 0–19–815051–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CONTENTS

Abbreviations Introduction 1. Roman Ethnographies 2. Romulus’ Asylum: The Character of the Roman Citizenship 3. The Idea of Italy 4. Flesh and Blood 5. Languages and Literatures Epilogue: Closure?

x 1 37 93 152 222 298 362

Bibliography

369

General Index

415

ABBREVIATIONS

AC AJP ALMArv ANRW BCH BICS CA CAH2 6 CAH2 7, 2 CAH2 9 CAH2 10

Chass. CIL CM CP CQ DdA FGH FIRA G&R HSCP H&T ILLRP

L’Antiquite´ classique American Journal of Philology Annales Latini Montium Arvernorum Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt Bulletin de correspondance helle´nique Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, London Classical Antiquity Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 6, The Fourth Century bc, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1994) Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7, 2, The Rise of Rome to 220 bc, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1989) Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 9, The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1994) Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 10, The Augustan Empire 43 bc–ad 69, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1996) M. Chassignet (ed.), Cato Les Origines (Fragments) (Paris, 1986) Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (1863– ) Classica et Medievalia Classical Philology Classical Quarterly Dialoghi di archeologia F. Jacoby (ed.), Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin, 1923–58) S. Riccobono, Fontes Iuris Romani AnteIustiniani (1941) Greece and Rome Harvard Studies in Classical Philology History and Theory InscriptionesLatinae Liberae Rei Republicae, ed. A. Degrassi, vol. 12 (1965), vol. 2 (1963)

Abbreviations ILS JHS JRA JRS LCM MD MEFRA NC NSc ORF4 PBSR PCPS Peter RBPh REA Riv.Fil. Riv.Stor.It. SCI SEG Sk. SVF Syll.3 ZPE

xi

H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (1892– 1916) Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Roman Studies Liverpool Classical Monthly Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici E´cole franc¸aise de Rome: Me´langes: section antiquite´ The Numismatic Chronicle Notizie degli scavi di antichita` E. Malcovati (ed.), Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta, 4th edn. (Turin, 1976) Papers of the British School at Rome Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society H. Peter (ed.), Historicum Romanorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, 1883) Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Revue des e´tudes anciennes Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica Rivista storica italiana Scripta classica Israelica Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum (1923– ) O. Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford, 1985) H. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (1903– ) W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, 3rd edn. (1915–24) Zeitschrift fu¨r Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Introduction

1. ON MYTHS REMEMBERED AND FORGOTTEN In one of the rare post-classical artistic representations of the myth of Romulus’ asylum, the asylum is a small but resplendent, white stone ‘classical’ temple at the centre of the painting. It is set well back and framed by a rugged natural landscape, wild grasses, rocks, mountains and trees, the distant focal point of the two groups of fugitives represented as hurrying towards it: two Wgures at the edge, their legs hidden by the frame, and, standing on the rock at the other side of the painting a man with a small boy who points at the asylum. Beneath the painting, in the centre of the frame, the magniWcently inscribed motto addresses the viewer: ‘Sacrarium praebeat securitatem’, ‘Let the sanctuary oVer safety’. The painting forms part of the Romulus cycle from the walls of the salon of the late sixteenth-century Palazzo Magnani in Bologna, the combined work of the three Carracci, Ludovico and his better-known cousins Agostino and Annibale.1 The order of the asylum, the Wfth painting within the cycle, disturbed the seventeenth-century biographer of the Carracci, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, enough for him to check his Livy, Plutarch, and Florus to conWrm his suspicion that it belonged not before the foundation of the city, but after it.2 The order in which the scenes appear is likely to be a matter of deliberate choice, just like the selection of scenes depicted, and the label inscribed below each of them. It is, for example, no surprise that Romulus’ fratricide, with its unfortunate implications of civil war, is omitted from this cycle. As for the 1 The painting of the asylum was attributed to Agostino in the 1678 biography of the Carracci written by Malvasia, and has not been seriously discussed since then. I am very grateful to David Stone for discussing the Carracci with me. 2 Summerscale 2000: 153.

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order of paintings in the cycle, it is true that this follows the sequence of Plutarch, who places the asylum in a digression out of narrative time so that readers are told about it before they are told the story of the foundation of the city itself. But placing the asylum early in the sequence surely also suited the desires of the Carracci and their patron Lorenzo Magnani to emphasize both the remarkable character of Bologna, based on the openness and initiative of her citizens, like that of her model, ancient Rome, and the character of Magnani’s palazzo itself, a place of security, strength and nobility that recalled its classical prototype.3 Plutarch’s version of the myth of Romulus’ asylum is certainly one of the noblest that survives from classical antiquity, with its emphasis on the most traditional sense of asylum as a place of sanctuary. But the atmosphere of calm, elegance, and monumentality conveyed by the painting of the asylum in the Palazzo Magnani is not in general that conveyed by the multiple ancient versions of the story that Romulus, needing to people the new city, opened up an asylum ‘between the two groves’ for (variously) all-comers, political refugees from oppressive regimes, slaves, an immigrant assortment of Latins, Etruscans, Phrygians, and Arcadians.4 This is one of the numerous stories associated with the beginnings of Rome that has potentially very unfortunate overtones, that even in antiquity provoked both scorn and apology, such as the idea that Rome’s founders were suckled by a wolf, that the city itself was founded on an act of fratricide, and that both Roman marriage and the origins of the Roman people were based on rape.5 Thus, while Romulus’ 3

Plut. Rom. 9; Stanzani, ‘Le storie’, in Emiliani 1989: 177–85, 180–1; cf. Boschloo 1974: 1. 25–8. 4 Florus 1.9 for the ethnic assortment. 5 Scorn and apology: for the rape of the Sabine women, see e.g. Cic. de Rep. 2. 12; D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 30. 5 for the rape as ‘an ancient Greek custom’; Augustine clearly found the myth of Romulus’ Asylum very suggestive as a metaphor for baptism and redemption: in the very positive contexts of CD 1. 34, the asylum is interestingly credited to both Romulus and Remus; but see Contra Cresconium 13. 16 for distancing from the sin city of Romulus’ asylum in the context of debate with the Donatists (cf. Minucius Felix 25. 2); on the treatment of the asylum story by Augustine and by Servius the ‘pagan’ commentator on Vergil, see Bruggisser 1987: 163 V.; for the thesis that much of Roman mythology is hostile invention, see Strasburger 1968; for more plausible alternatives, see e.g. Cornell 1975, 1986; Bremmer and Horsfall 1987.

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asylum could be made to stand for ‘traditional’ Roman ‘openness’ to noble refugees, it was hard ever to write out entirely overtones of ignobility, the implication that Rome and the Roman citizen body were descended from slaves, sinners, a deeply uncomfortable mixture of races and classes that upset a socially and cosmically pleasing emphasis on distinction, the ‘crap of Romulus’ as Cicero so eloquently put it. Furthermore, unlike even other potentially ignoble stories of Rome’s origins, that of the asylum was, as we shall see, visually poor, desperately hard to represent in its lack of action, distinctive characters or monuments. The eVorts of the Carracci to ennoble, and indeed even to picture, the asylum constitute an interesting Bolognese chapter in the Renaissance imaginative reconstruction of the monuments that signiWed Rome’s Wnest hours.6 The appropriation and translation of the asylum into a classical monument of calm and security far removed from the doubts and questions raised by surviving classical textual versions highlights some of the real oddness of what is in all probability a not very ancient foundation myth of the Roman citizen-body, a myth that loomed large in the late Republic and the early imperial period. While modern scholars have a tendency to insist on the ‘purely juridical’—as opposed to ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’—nature of Roman identity, with its basis in the citizenship, the myth of the asylum is strikingly uninterested in the legal procedures of manumission or enfranchisement, and within a Roman context an unusually impersonal, collective, and potentially even popularist descent-myth that engages closely with a well-known

6 Flavio Biondo, in his Roma Instaurata (composed 1444–6) II, 57, fol. ciiir located the asylum at the temple of Fortuna Virilis, following his readings of Livy and Ovid. The fact that this area around the Forum Boarium was in his day frequented by loose women and runaways enhanced the likelihood that this was the correct site. It is, ironically, perhaps the link with the temple of Fortuna Virilis that encourages subsequent imagination of the asylum as a temple: an Etruscan three-cella one like the temple of Fortuna Virilis in Fabio Calvo’s 1527 Simulachrum of the Capitoline, and a simpler, more ‘classical’ version in his Simulachra of Rome at the time of Pliny the Elder, and Roma Quadrata, both also of 1527 (Jacks 1993: 198–9 with Wgs. 58–9); see, in general, Barkan 1999.

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origin-myth of the Athenian people.7 The asylum can be invoked as a foundation myth of the social mobility and ethnic mixture of Rome, a cause alternatively of her success or ruin. Along with the much better known, better remembered, and more pictorial rape of the Sabine women, a myth to which the asylum is frequently explicitly juxtaposed in ancient accounts, despite or because of its very diVerent implications for the ethnic character of the Roman people, the asylum provides a suggestive starting-point for many of the main themes of this book. These include recurrent and sometimes contradictory motifs in Roman self-perception, such as the peculiarity of the Roman ethnic, cultural, and moral character as well as its ‘secondarity’ with respect particularly (but not exclusively) to Greek culture; that Roman identity is a particular kind of plurality, based on both the incorporation and transformation of other peoples and cultures; that local and Roman identities may be asserted simultaneously, but the tension between them may be made very obvious; that the plural nature of Roman identity is itself traditional and based on blood descent; that Roman identity, especially in a progressively far-Xung world of Roman citizens who rarely if ever participated in the political institutions of the Roman state, was rooted in the topography of Rome and, importantly, her neighbours, her inherited institutions, and her political past; and not least that the ethnic, social, and political nature of Rome were sites of intense debate. In terms of modern approaches to the past, a close look at these

7

J. Hall 2002: 22–3, would make a very strong distinction between Greek ethnic identity and ‘Romanitas’ (sic) as ‘the cultural communication of a legal– juridical status that lacked any concept of an ethnic core . . . Roman identity was predicated from an early date on the notion of ethnic heterogeneity between Latin, Sabine and Etruscan populations’: the narrow interpretation of ‘ethnic core’ as the perception of homogeneous ethnic origins is very limiting in the context of the ancient Mediterranean. Woolf 1998: 240 is a much more complex statement, ‘Those Roman aristocrats who had taken on the burden of regulating civilization had deWned Roman culture in such a way that it might function as a marker of status, not of political or ethnic identity’, and implies historical process, but in the discussion of ‘symbolic centre’ that follows he omits notions of a collective past, which would include the Republic (the modern narrative history of which is largely based on the works of Greek provincials of the imperial period) as well as Roman myths of origin.

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myths suggests the often long and complex process of the ‘invention of tradition’, the tendency to loop present concerns back into much earlier stories of roots, and the limits of invention. These are processes that are often obscured in an overemphasis on the best-documented period of the end of the Republic and early imperial period, and in a tendency to write cultural history synchronically. In addition, they suggest that debate on the plural nature of Roman identity is well under way long before the reign of Claudius, during which the most famous political discussion about the traditional nature of extending the Roman citizenship took place. Last but not least, the reception of these myths suggests much about the politics of classics in the modern world. While the ‘picturesque’ reception of the rape in modern painting has encouraged the attention of gender studies in more recent years, the asylum remains a largely forgotten myth, alternatively an unfortunate reminder of the ‘race-mixture’ of a Rome that was the paradigm of both the British empire and the independent American state, and too uncomfortable with itself to inspire modern liberals looking for idealizing models of ‘multiculturalism’. 2. FRO M R ACE- MIXT URE TO MULTICULTURALISM: ROMAN IDE NTITY IN MODERN CONTEXTS In the earlier part of the twentieth century, European and American admirers of the Roman empire, that emblem of rationality, duty, and above all the god-given successful civilization of ‘natives’, quickly came upon a stumbling-block, an embarrassment of huge proportions. This was the Roman practice not only of enfranchising foreigners, including the ‘natives’ themselves, but also of manumitting slaves and admitting them to the citizen-body. The fact that there were in antiquity any number of well-known ancient pronouncements on Rome which on the contrary attribute her success and her territorial expansion to her ‘generosity’ with the citizenship was passed over in silence. Two very diVerent examples are Philip V of Macedon writing to the people and magistrates of the Thessalian polis of Larisa in 214 bc, using Rome as an exemplum, and Claudius’ speech concerning the long-haired Gauls in ad 48, as

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remembered on the Lyons tablet, and reinterpreted by Tacitus, centuries of diverse Roman experience and practice blurred into a one-track narrative.8 This was, for some, not an attractive model for either America before the Civil Rights movement nor for essentially ‘racially’ exclusive European empires.9 Instead, ‘race-mixture’ and immigration were seen as factors that contributed directly to Roman ‘decline’. Tenney Frank, in his pioneering work on Roman economic history, Wrst published in 1920, blamed the ‘proliWc’ reproduction of slaves, resulting in ‘the displacement of real Italic people by men of Oriental, Punic, and Iberian stock’.10 This was a primary cause of the upheavals instigated by the Gracchi that were to lead ultimately to the fall of the Roman Republic. The perceived link between antiquity and the present is made explicit in A. M. DuV’s Freedmen in the Roman Empire, published in Oxford in 1928: ‘race-mixture hastened the decline of the Persian empire, and American statesmen today are justiWably alarmed by alien immigration.’ In an imaginative tour de force, the fall of the Roman empire is explained in the emotive terms of the ‘bastard brood’ of ‘freedmen and their descendants [who] in a great measure ruined Rome’.11 Such accounts had their remote basis in a highly selective and highly interpreted reading of Roman literature, through the early twentieth-century frameworks of race, class, eugenics, and social theory. This book was written within the very diVerent political, social, and intellectual context of the west, and particularly the English-speaking west, between the very end of the twentieth and the very beginning of the twenty-Wrst century. The last half-century has seen a series of challenges both to the ‘owner8

Philip V of Macedon: Syll.3 543; IG 9. 2. 517; tr. Austin 1981, no. 60; Claudius and the long-haired Gauls: ILS 212; Tac. Ann. 11. 24; cf. the place of multi-ethnic Rome in the ancient rhetoric of realipolitik: e.g. [Q. Cicero] Comm. Pet. 14, 54: ‘Roma est civitas ex nationum conventu constituta’; Dio 52. 16. 3 for ‘Maecenas’ on Rome as a merchant-ship with a multi-ethnic crew in need of a monarch. 9 I emphasize ‘for some’: the multiplicity of European views of ‘empire’ is stressed in e.g. Mackenzie 1995; C. Hall 2000; for Rome as an admired model of ethnic plurality in some 20th-cent. British, South African, and Italian contexts, see Ch. 4, § 2, below. 10 Frauk 1920: 119-20; cf. ch. 10, ‘The plebs urbana’, esp. pp. 160, 162–4. 11 Ibid. 206.

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ship’ of the classical world and to the ways in which it is studied, the most recent chapters in a surprisingly long history of debates within academia about the ‘usefulness’ of the classical past and its accessibility. Promotion of the present as innovative has tended to encourage stereotypes of the comparatively recent past, a partial and Xattening view that could characterize ‘old’ (and sometimes even ‘new’) classics as exclusively the preserve of educationally privileged white males Xuent in Latin and Greek, concerned with political events viewed from the centre, considered exclusively or at least primarily through accounts of the ‘great’ classical authors. If there is some truth in such stereotypes, they are culturally narrow and selective. Most interestingly, they function as the foundation myths of some academic disciplines and approaches, above all archaeology when it is conceived of and taught as separate and separable from classical studies and even history, a development more or less peculiar to Britain, as well as (with rather more justiWcation) feminist studies of classical antiquity.12 Undoubtedly, however, it was reactions to the publication of the Wrst two volumes of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, in 1987 and 1991 respectively, that occasioned the loudest public debate about the politics of classics. A long-standing popular, Afrocentrist interest in claiming the African roots of Greek civilization and of various prominent individuals in the Graeco-Roman world, most notably Cleopatra, was not taken seriously before Bernal’s problematic and provocative attempt to document in overawing detail, and in distinctly old-fashioned scholarly discourse, both the ‘realities’ of the Egyptian/‘Semitic’ origins of Greek culture and the essentially racist roots of modern academic 12 See e.g. the polemics of Spivey and Stoddart 1990: 11; Dyson 1991: 27– 8; Freeman 1996; in calmer mode, Morris 2002. For the long history of archaeology, its dialogues with local history and historians in the Mediterranean and northern Europe, and its prime place in the predominantly German model of a classical education: see e.g. Momigliano 1950; Marchand 1996; Barbanera 1998; for women and classics before the mid-20th cent., see e.g. McManus 1997: ch. 1; Beard 2000; for 19th-cent. African American classicists, see Haley 1993; Ronnick 2001. For feminist studies and self-perceptions, cf. Ch. 4, § 2, below. For some of the peculiarities of Classics in 19thand 20th-cent. Britain, and above all Oxford and Cambridge, see Clarke 1959; Stray 1998, 1999.

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Classics.13 The volumes were received as a direct challenge, and scholars of classical antiquity, particularly but not exclusively in the United States, joined heated public debates on racial identity and the educational politics of race.14 Perhaps one of the major reasons that such discussions have recently become so heated is that, particularly in the Englishspeaking world, identity politics have recently been at the foreground of the study of Classics. In simple terms, late twentiethand early twenty-Wrst-century reception has involved a peculiarly intense and sometimes very personalized relationship with the classical world.15 Ancient societies can thus be imagined in a number of ways that reveal the especial importance of the classical world for the construction of our own, modern identities. At the less sophisticated end of scholarly enquiry, ancient societies are imagined to be like ‘us’, as ‘we’ aspire to be, or the opposite of ‘ourselves’. This has come to be particularly true in the case of ethnic and cultural identities, as well as gender. Much scholarly work on ancient societies alike now stresses the subjective nature of identity, and theorises the complexities of plural and hybrid cultural and ethnic identities, their situational nature, and the socio-speciWc manifestations of ethnocentrism.16 Nevertheless, race, in the senses of anti-black ‘colour prejudice’ and ‘racism’ as commonly understood at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyWrst, remains dominant, especially but not exclusively in non-

13 African roots before Bernal: see esp. Rogers 1946, vol. 1; James 1954; C. Williams 1971; Jones 1972; Diop 1974; cf. Haley 1993: 38–9, n. 4 for Black oral traditions and the possible inXuence of images of the jazz musician Josephine Baker. For Bernal’s attribution of ‘black’ emphasis to marketing rather than authorial intention, see Bernal 1989: 30–2, esp. 32 for representation of the publisher’s line, ‘Blacks no longer sell. Women no longer sell. But black women sell.’ 14 e.g. The Challenge of Black Athena 1989; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996; van Binsbergen 1997; Berlinerblau 1999. 15 Very diVerent examples include Hallett and van Nortwick 1997; Lee Too 1998b: 1–15; Davidson 2000, 2001 on the autobiography of Sir Kenneth Dover; Mendelsohn 1999. 16 e.g. Modes de contacts et processus de transformation dans les socie´te´s anciennes 1983; Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1987; E. Hall 1989; Clarysse 1992; J. Hall 1997, 2002; Wallace-Hadrill 1998; Whitmarsh 2001.

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academic publications.17 Some years before the publication of the Wrst volume of Black Athena, Frank Snowden was asking whether or not ancient societies were ‘racist’. The title of his earlier book, Before Color Prejudice, suggests his conclusions. The absence of racism that Snowden detects in antiquity is construed as a positive virtue: ‘There is nothing in the evidence . . . to suggest that the ancient Greeks or Romans established color as an obstacle to society. The relationship of blacks and whites continues to be a critical problem of the twentieth century. Not without meaning for this vital question is the experience of the Ethiopian in classical antiquity—the Wrst major encounter in European records of blacks in a predominantly white society. The Greeks and Romans counted people in’.18 There are clearly serious methodological problems here: anachronistic and inappropriate questions are being asked about ancient societies with wholly peculiar historical, political, and social structures. Such approaches leave no space for the exploration of these, and diVerence from ‘us’ is interpreted as a utopian opposite to ‘us’. More recently, ancient societies, particularly the city of Rome and Hellenistic Egypt, have come quite regularly to be described as ‘multicultural’, a vague but politically resonant, and generally aspirational, term at the time of writing. The adjective ‘multicultural’, when applied to ancient societies at the end of the twentieth century, has in fact suggested a number of diVerent meanings. For example, it has been used polemically within the Black Athena debate to challenge particularly exclusive ‘black’ claims to own classical culture: thus, a ‘multicultural’ classical world can be imagined as being above or beyond the black–white polarities of race, one in which all ethnic groups may share, a utopia for some, but for others a retrograde denial of decades of struggle for recognition and reparation.19 It should be emphasized that ‘multiculturalism’ in this particular, highly racialized United States academic context suggests 17 Thompson 1989: 2–4 on the general sloppiness of the conceptualization of anti-black ‘racism’ or ‘colour prejudice’ in modern discussions of the ancient world. 18 Snowden 1983: 217–18. 19 Rogers 1996; cf. for campus politics and the ‘dangers’ of Afrocentrism and the ‘ethnicity cult’, see Arthur and Shapiro 1995; Willett 1998.

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something quite diVerent from, for example, oYcial Canadian policy, let alone liberal aspirations in contemporary Britain to educate schoolchildren about diVerent cultures in religious education classes, to emphasize the virtues and historical usefulness of admitting asylum-seekers, or, most commonly, to praise the London restaurant scene.20 Indeed, even elsewhere in scholarship produced in the United States, ancient societies are regularly applauded for their ‘multiculturalism’ on the grounds that they are not perceived to ‘discriminate’ against black people.21 Elsewhere, ‘multiculturalism’ is synonymous with ethnic and or cultural plurality, a blander term of approbation that hints at analogies with the modern western city and some defensiveness that is the legacy of the Black Athena debate.22 Indeed, readings of aspects of Roman society, her perceived ‘generosity’ with the citizenship, the plurality of the ethnic origins of the Roman people, the coexistence or appropriation of diVerent cultures and religions, might at Wrst sight make Rome appear a worthy model for aspirational European ‘multiculturalism’ at the beginning of the twenty-Wrst century. We need, however, to be very careful. For one thing, as we have already begun to see, the term ‘multicultural’ suggests a multitude of speciWc modern political agenda. It is also salutary in this context to note that Rome’s ‘openness’ or ‘race-mixture’ has been idealized in distinctly non-liberal contexts within recent history. These include a speech made by Mussolini in the forum in 1924, praising an ancient Rome that had welcomed in her former enemies, taking on board their cults and customs, and Theodore HaarhoV’s bizarre modelling of a united South Africa on Rome, a unity that brings together and appreciates the 20 Pamphlets produced by the Canadian government include Multiculturalism: Being Canadian (1987), and Multiculturalism: What is it Really About (1991); for a warmly satirical treatment of multiculturalism in 1970s Canada, see Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man, in which Lesje, the central character, pushed into kitsch, ‘ethnic’ folk-dancing festivals as a teenager, longs to substitute the line, ‘Kiss me, I’m multicultural’ for the chorus, ‘Kiss me, I’m Ukrainian’; recent British Wctional classics including Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) celebrate and satirize the racial hybridity and social hypocrisy of British multiculturalism. 21 See especially Galinsky 1992. 22 See e.g. Johnson 1992; Galinsky 1992; Cartledge 1998a.

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opposing qualities of Britons and Boers—like Greeks and Romans—but that explicitly leaves ‘negroes’ out.23 If the selectivity of vision, and the political and ideological agenda, seem very obvious and problematic within such contexts, it is humbling to ask what light some historical perspective will shed on the optimistic and non-conXictual images of provincial cultural ‘negotiation’, ‘do-it-yourself’ ‘Romanization’, and Roman cosmopolitanism that have come to dominate much contemporary scholarship on the Roman empire within the English-speaking world.24 It is inevitable, and indeed often desirable, that our experience of the present should inspire the questions we ask of the past. But when we come to answer them, we should both have some awareness of the socio-speciWc nature of our own concerns and, indeed, those of the theoretical models that we invoke. Just as importantly, we should expect ancient societies to do more than simply mirror our aspirations for our own; for to counter images of Roman cosmopolitanism and ‘do-it-yourself’ ‘Romanization’ with images of domination and discrimination, creating a nightmare world, is still to place modern dreams too much at the centre. 3. MYTH AS PARADIGM: THE ASYLUM AND T HE R A P E In Roman literature, the myth of Romulus’ asylum is frequently explicitly linked with that of the rape of the Sabine women, and together these myths come to function as ways of thinking about, and asking questions about, the ethnically and/ or politically and/or socially plural nature of the Roman citizenbody. In this section I look closely at the development of these traditions with the aim of illustrating the complexity of Roman self-perception in some diVerent chronological, political, cultural, and generic contexts. 23 Mussolini Opera Omnia xx, 305, 4 June 1924, with Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 262–3; on HaarhoV 1948, and the importance of British selfperception as a mixed-race people ‘like the Romans’, cf. Ch. 4, § 2, below. 24 For concerns of this kind, see e.g. J. Williams 2001b; Curti 2001; James 2001; Dench 2003b; Dench 2004.

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Mythological genealogies were the broad common ‘language’ of ethnic identity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Notions of shared origins and of descent from gods and heroes delineated human groups of all kinds, including families, clans, tribes, and urban communities. Mythological genealogies were the ‘language’ in which kinship, distinction, diVerentiation, and ethnic plurality were regularly articulated, in which the world was mapped and selves were located throughout the Mediterranean world. This ‘language’ was intensely discursive, lending itself well to the creation of alternative versions, to change, invention, and reinvention, and to multiple means of cultural expression, from cult to painting, to sculptural reliefs, poetry and prose. Mythological genealogies provide those interested in perceptions of identity with excellent source-material: they have the particular virtues both of being ‘subjective’ markers of ethnicity, and of being used in socio-speciWc ways. The close interrelationship of myth and history has occasioned considerable modern debate about the extent to which the two were distinguished, and in particular the extent to which myth was ‘believed’.25 It is sometimes claimed that ‘authentic’ Roman myth scarcely exists in the historical period. The ‘problem’ of authenticity is one that recurs in discussions of many aspects of Roman culture. It relates both to the ‘secondarity’ of Roman culture, its tendency to use as reference points especially (but not exclusively) Greek culture, and to perceptions of the minimal social and political impact of Roman literature, one of the main modes of the cultural expression of myth. But this ‘secondarity’ is a self-conscious dynamic of Roman creative culture rather than an objective marker of its unoriginality, its inauthentic nature. Much Roman literature of the later Republic and early imperial period probably cannot be considered to be ‘mass media’ in the sense that, for example Wfth-century Athenian tragedy is imagined to be, although it is certainly possible to overdo the contrast in a tendency to idealize Athenian democratic 25 On genealogy, ethnography, and ethnic identity in the Mediterranean world in general, see e.g. Bickermann 1952; Rosalind Thomas 1992; Hartog 1996; J. Hall 1997; Malkin 1998; C. Jones 1999; for the distinctive character of myth, the classic is Veyne 1988; see now Davies 2004.

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13

culture.26 However, it is unclear why the ‘elitism’ of much Roman literature, in terms of its audience as much as its authors, should be seen as compromising its cultural, political or social importance. On the contrary, having a literate education was used to signal eligibility for political or military oYce and very much more generally ‘belonging’ within the Roman elite. Literature was written or sponsored by members of prominent households from its beginnings, individuals with vested interests in the perpetuation and propagation of memory. Welltravelled texts or memories of texts further suggest the prestige and desirability of literature for the aspirational, the competitive, mobile and self-transforming ‘elite’. Demonstrably Vergil’s Aeneid, a work with an intense and far from straightforward interest in the ethnic, cultural, and moral identity of Rome, travelled far beyond the literary salon. Augustus notoriously quoted with irony ‘en Romanos, rerum dominos, gentemque togatam’ (‘Behold your Romans, masters of the world, the toga-wearing race’) and attempted to make the Roman forum at least mirror an ideal pronounced by Jupiter, by having access to the prime Republican political space restricted to wearers of the toga.27 The Aeneid too was to inXuence empire-wide the iconographic repertoire of Roman myth, while lines of the poem were recalled or copied in locations as distant as Masada and Hadrian’s Wall.28 Within literature and art of the historical period, there is exceptional emphasis on origins. In fact, few ‘Roman’ myths do not relate directly to issues of origins between Rome and her neighbours, with considerable emphasis on institutions and topography.29 Roman historiography too, from its comparatively late beginnings at the end of the third century bc, is very interested in myths of origins, which occupy a disproportionate amount of space within narrative accounts. This emphasis may be explained partly because of the importance of local histories as a model for writing the history of Rome, a 26 Wiseman’s reconstructions of the social contexts of early Roman ‘literature’, through his emphasis on drama, ritual and performance, are very diVerent: see e.g. 1998 for emphasis on dramatic contexts. 27 Suet. Aug. 50. 5; Verg. Aen. 1. 282. 28 For epigraphical attestation of Vergil, see Hoogma 1959. 29 Cf. Price 1996: 814–17.

Introduction

14

model much more dominant than their comparatively poor rate of survival would suggest.30 But comparison of a number of themes with archaic, classical, and Hellenistic origin-myths begins to show up some of the real peculiarities of Roman emphasis, as well as the busyness of the composite Roman literary traditions. For example, Mediterranean descentmyths regularly feature the arrival of individuals from elsewhere, and unions of locals and new arrivals: such stories articulate the connection of ‘colonies’ with mother cities, the ethnic and cultural encounters, clashes, and interchange that underlie the establishment of new settlements. But nothing comes close to the tortuous chains of Roman lineage: the inclusion of major episodes of mythological narrative rooted in Latium with the most tangential connections to Rome; the contradictory readings of Rome’s ethnic nature loosely connected by largely colourless genealogical link Wgures, or by the political succession of Rome’s kings. The moral, cultural, and even ethnic distance from the Greek world that simultaneously suggests its importance as a reference point for Rome Wnds some limited points of comparison in other ‘barbarian’ histories of the Mediterranean world, not least in some Jewish selfdepiction of the Hellenistic world and the Roman empire. We should note also the distillation of Roman political as well as social and ethnic dynamics into the topographically speciWc stories of her roots, a sign above all of the increasingly symbolic nature of a collective past, a collective centre.31 Multiple versions of both the asylum and the Rape survive from the period between the later Republic and the age of Hadrian, from diVerent genres of literature, including Augustan works of the broadest ambition and impact, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Livy’s history of Rome and, in the case of the rape of the Sabine women, from the frieze of the Basilica Aemilia and coins of the later Republican and Antonine periods. Both myths clearly pre-exist the end of the Republic in some version: the ‘invention of tradition’ does not begin in the late Republic, and, while the Augustan age is certainly a dynamic period for

30 31

Cf. Pearson 1939, 1942 for local histories in the Greek world. Cf. Fox 1996; Chaplin 2000.

Introduction

15

the retelling of the remote past, it has no monopoly on these processes.32 The story of the rape of the Sabine women was clearly given great prominence in Roman culture of the second century bc, as we can tell from fragments and names of lost works. The emphasis in these on the rape changing meaning into marriage is striking: the narrative moves from a Roman attack, shifts to perceptions of civil war, a war between kin, to reconciliation. The only surviving fragment of Ennius’ play Sabinae, ‘The Sabine Women’, reads, ‘When the spoils you have taken are from a son-in-law, what label will you put on them?’ A little more than a hundred years after the conquest and extraordinary incorporation of the Sabine people into the Roman state, the mythological rape was perhaps providing the means to begin to think about a newly, but hesitantly, plural Roman society.33 The story of the asylum is much harder to track before the late Republic: insofar as we can tell, there is in second-century literature the general idea of the presence of immigrants or foreigners on the site of Rome. There is, however, no mention of a deliberate action of Romulus, or of any special time or place when and where these people were gathered.34 The earliest explicit reference to the agency of Romulus is given in Cicero’s De Oratore, where he is said to have gathered ‘shepherds and immigrants’.35 It is possible to see traces of political debate about the nature of Romulus’ gathering in the last decades of the Republic. In a letter written to Atticus in 60 bc, Cicero

32 On the applicability of Hobsbawm 1983 to ancient societies, see Curti and Dench forthcoming. 33 Sabinae (Vahlen Scenica 370–1); cf. Fabius Pictor fr. 7 (P.); Enn. Ann. 99 (Sk.); Gnaeus Gellius fr. 15 (Peter) ¼ Gell. NA 13. 23. 13; cf. Ch. 5, § 5, below. I will explore questions of the kinds of self-conscious pluralism that we can most plausibly attribute to the earlier Republic in the chapters to come, most notably Ch. 4, § 3; Ch. 3, §§ 3 and 4, and Ch. 2, § 3. 34 Fabius Pictor ap. Plut. Rom. 14; Cato Origines 20 Peter ¼ Gellius 18. 12. 7; Calpurnius Piso Ann. fr. 4 P. ¼ Serv. Ad Aen. 2. 761; argument from silence is, of course, dangerous, but it is perhaps more alarming that all these passages are normally taken without question to refer to ‘Romulus’ Asylum’ when there is no mention either of Romulus or of the asylum. 35 De Or. 1. 37.

16

Introduction

draws a contrast between Cato the Younger’s pitching of his speech to the senate ‘as if he is in Plato’s Republic’, and the reality of being ‘amongst Romulus’ crap’. While it is Cato’s misguided assumption that is the butt of the joke here, Cicero was to return to the ordered social and political hierarchy of Plato’s Republic in his own version, written in the later 50s bc, where the essentially aristocratic interpretation of Servius Tullius’ centuriate assembly plays out a Roman political ‘translation’. The ‘crap of Romulus’—the Latin faex combines the meanings of ‘dregs’, ‘rubbish’, and ‘excrement’—suggests a very diVerent model, in pejorative terms an indiscriminate mess. It is worth noting too that, in the late Republic, dangerous overtones of tyranny could be associated with Romulus: although ‘tyranny’ could be used to describe a considerable range of political behaviour, the context here would suggest ‘popular’ politics perceived to be inimical to discrimination and order. It is possible that the story of Romulus’ gathering arose originally as a distinctly popular—even a ‘democratic’ version of the origins of the Roman people, something that would help to explain the impersonal nature of those gathered, a nameless mass.36 In surviving literature, the name ‘asylum’ is only given to Romulus’ gathering from the Augustan period. Given the richly antiquarian nature of late Republican and early imperial writing, and its interest in ‘foreign’ words, we might reasonably expect them to have picked up on the word ‘asylum’ if it had appeared in earlier works. Roman writers are conscious that asylum is a loan-word from Greek: for example, at the beginning of Book 35, Livy signals this when describing a category of sanctuary which ‘the Greeks call asyla’.37 It has to be said that early imperial versions of Romulus’ asylum, in their tendency 36 Att. 2. 1. 8. 5; cf. Classen Philologus 1962 for references to Romulus in the Republic. The concept of tyranny in the late Republic was, of course, available for use by both sides: while it could be made against populares, it was also made against Cicero himself, an upstart from Arpinum who had taken summary action without regard for popular sovereignty: Sall. Invect. in Cic. 7. If it is correct to see here an allusion to a ‘democratic’ myth of the Roman citizen-body, the ‘usual suspect’ would be Licinius Macer. I owe this suggestion to Peter Wiseman. 37 Livy 35. 1.

Introduction

17

to emphasize that the fugitives were granted the Roman citizenship, correspond very awkwardly with normal Greek associations of a place of refuge: this emphasis is particularly clear in the accounts of Strabo and Dionysius.38 Plutarch’s version, as I have already suggested, comes closest to the more usual understanding of the concept within the Greek world: the reception of fugitives and refusal to give them up to enemies, emphasized by a brief catalogue of criminals, although even he crosses over into a foundation myth of the noblest Greek tradition, when the asylum is sanctiWed by an oracle given by Delphic Apollo.39 It is not, of course, that the concept and history of asyla in the Greek world is Wxed: major developments take place in the Hellenistic and, still more, the Roman period, when asyla became increasingly deWned, restricted, and regulated. It is also possible to Wnd in the Greek world instances of fugitives being given land and the citizenship of the community to which they had Xed. Such parallels were what scholars in the earlier part of the twentieth century searched for, seeking to reduce the sense of anomaly surrounding the story of Romulus’ asylum.40 It is, however, striking that there is no sign of antiquarian attempts in antiquity to Wnd parallels of this kind. Romulus’ asylum has a single, tantalizing parallel within the Roman world. According to Dio, the right of asylum was decreed by the Roman people in 42 bc, two years after the death of Caesar, for the temple of Divus Julius in the forum, singled out for this unique honour on the precedent of ‘the asylum of Romulus’.41 Unique origins based on unique precedents in the ancient world always raise suspicions about the veracity of 38 Strabo 5. 3. 2 ¼ 230 C; D.H. Ant. Rom. 2, 15, 4; for the rape of the Sabine women as explicitly a citizenship myth, see e.g. Cic. Rep. 2. 13; Livy 1. 9. 15. 39 Plut. Rom. 9: emphasis here on the more usual meaning of the asylum may be a sign of a concern to make Roman institutions more wholly parallel with Greek ones. The role of the Delphic oracle may most immediately recall traditions of the foundation of Greek colonies. For an interesting ‘barbarian’ parallel involving the reinterpretation of central and southern Italian sacred spring myths now sanctioned by Apollo to explain the arrival of the Mamertini in Sicily, see Dench 1995: 211–12. 40 For asyla, see e.g. Sinn 1993; Rigsby 1996; for judicious comments on antiquarian reconstruction, see Ogilvie 1965: 62–3. 41 D.H. 47. 19.

18

Introduction

the precedent, and the example of Romulus’ asylum, given the lack of good evidence for such a tradition before the dramatic date of Dio’s narrative, is no exception. It has to be said that Dio’s account raises problems in itself; this is the only notice we have of an asylum of Divus Julius, and we never hear of it being used. As Dio admits himself, it is walled up and apparently inaccessible, hardly convenient for use as an asylum.42 It is thus all the more diYcult to try to pin down any contemporary signiWcance: although the explicit link made by Dio between the asylum of Divus Julius and that of Romulus is suggestive, we are wholly reliant on circumstantial evidence to explain the link. In the immediate context of the aftermath of Caesar’s death, perhaps the most ‘traditional’ overtones of asylum are of greatest relevance: safety from persecution. Such overtones would Wt in nicely with traditions of Caesar’s clemency, eagerly preserved if not actually invented.43 Particularly in their narratives of the asylum, the Augustan narrative accounts of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are in many respects very diVerent indeed, suggesting the very diVerent concerns of each work as a whole. Livy’s version appeals to readers’ topographical memory, often evoked in the Augustan tendency to trace the origins of Rome, alternatively very near and very distant, in the current topography of the city. Thus, the site of the asylum is ‘the place which is now enclosed between the two groves as one goes up the hill’: the virtual tour invites us to assume intimate knowledge, whether or not we actually possess it.44 His version is emphatically lowly and socially open, his original Roman people an indiscriminate mixture of slaves and free men. He ‘sees through’ Romulus’ claim 42

Rigsby 1996: 577–8. App. bc 2. 106. 443 with Weinstock 1971: 395; cf. Suet. Iul. 75, ‘remembered’ at the funeral games in the quotation of Pacuvius’ ‘Men servasse, ut essent qui me perderent?’ (‘Did I save these men in order for them to murder me?’) (84. 2); but NB also hostile traditions on Caesarian admissions of foreigners to the senate: 80. 2–3. 44 This invitation to assume intimate knowledge is an aspect of the appeal to Rome as a symbolic centre, as ‘roots’; the formula ‘between the two groves’ predates the Augustan period (Cic. Div. 2. 40 for the image of Epicurus’ gods living between two worlds ‘as if between the two groves’, and it is possible that Calpurnius Piso’s notice of Lucoris as the god of ‘this place’—cf. n. 35 above— represents an etymological spin on ‘lucos’, ‘groves’. 43

Introduction

19

that his motley gathering is ‘earthborn’, alluding to the ‘vetus consilium condentium urbes’, ‘the old ruse of city-founders’: by implication, then, the best-known myth of the earthborn, that of the Athenians, is itself a sham.45 The social openness of Livy’s asylum is not, however, unproblematic, for all his emphasis on its contribution to the strength and power of Rome. His mob is potentially revolutionary in its eagerness or hunger for ‘new things’: it reminds us of his treatment of the popular element in the work as a whole, an intrinsic part of what Rome is, but prone to disputes with the upper classes and to particular character traits.46 The indiscriminate mixing of slaves and free men in the asylum itself raises questions. Indiscriminate mixing—in this case of ages and sexes—is one of the problematic features within Livy’s account in Book 39 of the Bacchanalian aVair of 186 bc, but the removal of distinctions between patrician and plebeian is upheld in discussions of the lex Canuleia at the beginning of Book 4. The breakdown of distinctions is a side-eVect of the growth and overgrowth of Rome, as necessary and desirable as it is dangerous. Livy’s lowly asylum is part of a ‘developmental’ scheme that also includes monarchy: Rome needs time to grow up, in social and political terms, before she becomes a Republic.47 There is a hint here of a more general cultural taste for rags to riches and riches to rags stories: the mobility of Romans, and Rome collectively is an important feature of a number of versions of the myth. The inextricable connection between acute awareness of status and cultural expectations of social mobility is nicely brought out in Juvenal’s satirical warning to the ancestor-paraders that, in their genealogical enthusiasm, they will ultimately trace their illustrious roots back to the infamous beginnings of the asylum.48 Dionysius’ asylum, in contrast, is a far nobler place, open to political refugees Xeeing from oppressive regimes, tyrannies, and oligarchies, a place from which slaves are explicitly excluded, and barbarians excluded by implication. His Rome, 45 Livy 1. 8. 6; for a full discussion of Roman use of Athens as a paradigm for the citizenship, see Ch. 2, below. 46 ‘avida novarum rerum’. 47 Cf. 2. 1. 4; 5. 53. 9; for the theme of blood mixing, see Guastella 1985: 49 V.; Moatti 1997: 264. 48 Juv. Sat. 8. 272–5.

20

Introduction

here as elsewhere, is modelled on the archaic Athens of Thucydides, his Romans are Greeks of the Wnest kind: Rome is thus a Wt ruler of others, and especially of Greeks. For Dionysius, origins denote essential character: Rome will later accrue more sullied aspects, but her essential, Wnely Greek ethnic and cultural character will be preserved.49 It is clear, then, that Livy’s account of Romulus’ asylum is very diVerent from that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and that the diVerences outlined above have to do with the distinct preoccupations of each work as a whole, as well as with the diVerent cultural personae of the authors.50 Nevertheless, it is interesting that there are also some broad similarities that include the location of Rome in relation to Greekness, in the form of Livy’s allusion to Athenian claims of autochthony and Dionysius’ insistence on the Greek origins and character of the Romans. Most importantly, in both accounts, the potential openness of the citizenship raises problems. Dionysius’ response is to write out of the origins of Rome the more objectionable features of contemporary Roman society, mentioned elsewhere in his narrative. In Dionysius’ emotive language, these are the tangling, washed-up discordance of barbarian peoples, including Italians such as the Marsi, Samnites, and ‘Tyrrhenians’ (the Etruscans), and the proliWc freeing, and incorporation into the citizenship, of slaves of unsuitable character.51 Livy’s response is rather to suggest the ambivalent character of the indiscriminate beginnings of the Roman people, to raise questions about the distance between beginnings and contemporary society.52 The story of the rape of the Sabine women is a rather diVerent kind of foundation-myth of the citizen-body, which is made 49

D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 15. 3–4; cf. Thuc. 1. 2. 5–6 with Gabba 1991: 103. On Dionysius’ Greekness in the context of Augustan Rome, see Bowersock 1965: 130–2; Schultze 1986; Hartog 1991; Luraghi 2003. 51 D.H. 1. 89; cf. 4. 24. 4–8, esp. 4. 24. 8 for the recommendation that the censors should chuck out of Rome
e . . . ØÆæe ŒÆd IŒÆŁÆæ
 ^ıº . . . KŒ
B º ø (‘the polluted and impure band from the city’) under the pretext of founding a colony. 52 These issues are extremely complex in Livy: see e.g. Preface 5, implying that the remote past oVers solace from contemporary troubles, to author and readers alike, an expectation that is hardly borne out by the narrative itself; cf. Moles 1993. 50

Introduction

21

to follow on from the asylum in the developed narratives of the early imperial period. The ways in which the myth complements that of Romulus’ Asylum are made most explicit in Livy’s account: the asylum deals with the problem of manpower, the rape with her lack of women.53 Mythological rapes function in ancient thought in general as a useful metaphor for conceptualizing encounters between diVerent peoples, and particularly for conceptualizing the origins of a ‘mixed-race’ people who might continue to show signs of ethnic and/or cultural variegation.54 While there is a tendency in recent scholarship on ancient myths of rape to focus upon their violent character, it is worth emphasizing the polyvalence of treatments of the rape of the Sabine women, as well as the importance of the myth as an aetiology of Roman marriage ritual and the potentially ‘political’ role of Roman women.55 These generally pull either towards the harmonious outcome, or towards the violence of the clash, although there are often hints of both. I will concentrate here on two related aspects of the rape in Augustan accounts; the rape as mythological paradigm for the Roman conquest and, most recently, political incorporation of Italy, and the rape as a way of thinking about shared blood descent. In these contexts, the double-pull of accounts of the rape broadly corresponds to the double-pull of ‘generosity’ and violence in ancient accounts of the Roman conquest of Italy, and indeed, in Roman accounts of ‘imperialism’ more generally.56 Late Republican and Augustan authors are sometimes interested in a degree of Sabine cultural distinctiveness: if this is not brought out in the story of the rape itself, then it is manifested in the composite culture and institutions of modern Rome: there is a familiar aetiological telescoping of origins and present here. The most notorious examples come from Varro’s observations of Sabinisms in modern Latin in his De Lingua Latina. However, a sense of cultural distinctiveness is apparent also in 53 The retort to the Roman ambassadors requesting that their neighbours provide them with women is that they should open an asylum for women too, thus Wnding Wt mates for their male asylum-seekers: 1. 9. 5; cf. 1. 9. 1. 54 Zeitlin 1986; Dougherty 1993; Arieti 1997. 55 For marriage ritual, see esp. Livy 1. 9. 12; Plut. Rom. 15; for the ‘political’ role of Roman women, see above all Purcell 1986. 56 North 1993.

22

Introduction

Dionysius’ account of Romulus marrying the couples ‘according to the rites of the woman’.57 Perhaps a sense of propriety encourages here the maximum amount of acceptable cultural pluralism amongst the emphatically non-barbarian Romans of Dionysius’ account. Plutarch in his Life of Romulus is the most enthusiastic exponent of a theory of mass religious and cultural exchange in the aftermath of the rape: Herodotean ideas about the permeability of ‘imperial’ states are the ultimate ancestor of a particular set of Second Sophistic ideas about cultural exchange.58 Elsewhere, any sense of cultural distinction and, indeed, of original ethnic distinction, tends to be complicated particularly in the case of Latins and Sabines by ambivalence about the extent to which they are—and, in a leap of logic, always have been—kin to the Romans. The potential transformation of both selves and other peoples that is a key feature of Roman thought is exaggerated in the case of the Sabines. Sabines were in Roman thought for so long such an intrinsic part of Roman identity that the kinship that is a result of the rape can push very much into the background any sense of original distance and distinction. This is a precursor of the more general ambivalence about whether or not the Social War was to be imagined as a civil war: that question is there in the Italian books of the Aeneid, and it is answered by Velleius Paterculus’ insistence that the Italians shared blood and descent with the Romans.59 In Chapter 4, we shall Wnd that there was much more interest in the idea of blood descent than we might have expected of such a socially mobile and ethnically plural society. Livy’s Italians are in Book 1 generally not remarkable for their cultural distinctiveness. This perhaps has partly to do with the dignity of his historical voice, limiting the amount of aetiological indulgence allowed. His rape of the Sabines is decidedly light on lust and violence (although both are still just visible), and he is silent about cultural diVerence between Romans and 57

Ant. Rom. 2. 30. 6. Plut. Rom. 21. 1; cf. 14. 6 for Romulus’ intention in the rape ‘to mix together and mingle the races with the strongest bonds’; cf. Ch. 4, § 3, below for Plutarch on cultural exchange and Alexander the Great; the Romans of course never incorporated gods and rituals in any systematic way: North 1993: 136. 59 Vell. Pat. 2. 15. 2. 58

Introduction

23

Sabines.60 Nevertheless, the idea of foreignness is in general an important aspect of Roman identity in Livy, and Italians can certainly be described as outsiders: an openness to foreigners is part of what makes Rome grow from the Wrst book, a feature remarked on by Tanaquil, wife of the Etruscan Tarquin the Elder, who sees Rome as a kind of meritocracy where ‘nobility is dependent on virtue’, where her husband can follow in the footsteps of Sabine Tatius, Numa of Cures, and half-Sabine Ancus Marcius, rather than being stiXed by Etruscan snobbery.61 If the incorporation of foreigners and foreign-ness, of individuals such as Tarquinius Priscus, or even those of servile descent, such as Servius Tullius, is something that helped Rome to grow, it is also this that will eventually lead to her downfall: it is no accident that, in his Preface, moral problems immigraverint into Rome, marking the beginning of the end.62 This ability to portray Italians as foreigners is to my mind a reminder of the diYculty of incorporating Italy after the Social War: Italy was actively having to be written into Roman history, even and especially during the Augustan and Tiberian periods. The story of the rape is used also as a paradigm of the character of Roman conquest and expansion. In particular, it can be used as a paradigm of Roman expansion through the assignment of new statuses, and through grants of the citizenship. Livy’s account uses the historical language of Rome’s involvement in Italy and the familiar spin of narratives of Roman conquest and empire: Wnding themselves denied societas (‘alliance’) and conubium (‘intermarriage’), Romulus’ men go out to solicit it. The rape comes only when Rome’s neighbours repeatedly refuse such a relationship, but it is immediately given the ‘spin’ of ‘an opportunity to obtain civitas’: in one chapter of Livy, the complex history of Rome’s conquest of Italy, of the assignment of diVerential statuses with huge time-lags between them, is compressed.63 When conubium is discussed in this context, there are hints of the ius conubii, one of the major juridical signiWers of Latin status. It is signiWcant that, in early imperial accounts in general, the rape of the 60 62

Arieti 1997. Pref. 11.

61 63

Livy 1. 34; cf. Musti 1981. Livy 1. 9; Miles 1995: 190–1.

24

Introduction

Sabines ‘spills over’ to include Latin towns.64 It does not seem accidental that the ius conubii should at least from the late Republic have coincided with a strong sense of shared cultural identity, and even common ethnic descent between Romans and Latins, far more persistently asserted than that with Italians in general. Any notion of shared descent can, however, always be complicated by reference to the Romans as Greek, or as urbane, in contrast with barbarian or rustic Latins, or by questions about how far Rome’s Trojan descent joins her with, or separates her from, her neighbours, as when Juno and Jupiter’s ‘reconciliation’ at the end of the Aeneid weighs Latin against Trojan elements in the Roman progeny, or, in a very diVerent kind of example, when the Romans celebrated the cult of the Roman Penates at Lavinium: these aspects can be complementary, or the cracks between them can be allowed to show.65 We might think here more broadly of the double-pull and relative balance of ‘generosity’ or ‘violence’ in accounts of the rape, similar to the double-pull in Roman accounts of expansion and incorporation in Italy, or even to narrative accounts of the foundation of the principate. At one extreme is Dionysius’ exceptionally centripetal account of the aftermath of the rape, when surrounding people Xock to join Romulus and form colonies, attracted by the fame of Rome.66 We are looking at a geographically restricted version of Velleius Paterculus’ exceptionally friendly account of Rome’s Italian wars, an early version of ‘the making of Roman Italy’ through acts of Roman kindness and generosity.67 Elsewhere, however, the emphasis is diVerent: one can hardly get more stark than the Vergilian ‘raptas sine more Sabinas’ (‘the Sabine women lawlessly carried oV’), Wguring on the Shield of Aeneas, and contributing towards one of the stories of the Aeneid, that of the violence of

64

e.g. Livy 1. 9. 8; D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 35. 2; Plut. Rom. 17. Lavinium: Y. Thomas 1990; for diVerent readings of the ethnic and cultural relationship between Rome and Italians in the later Republic and early imperial period, see Ch. 4, § 3, below. 66 D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 35. 6–36. 2. 67 For Velleius Paterculus, see Ch. 2, § 3, below. 65

Introduction

25

Roman conquest and expansion.68 Nor does the rape have to be read inevitably as pointing towards unity and/or reconciliation: like Romulus’ asylum, which functions explicitly as an aetiology of civil war in Lucan’s Civil War, so the rape in Ovid’s Fasti preWgures civil war in an allusion to Pompey and Caesar marked by the emphatic ‘then for the Wrst time did a father wage war upon his daughters’ husbands’.69 After considering versions of these myths in the contexts within which they were written, we can begin to see particular emphases in the language and concerns of the Augustan period: attempts to link two very diVerent stories as foundation myths for the Roman citizenship are striking. In the process, a range of diVerent kinds of approaches to descent is juxtaposed: the more restricted notion of marriage and the mixing of blood with the highly impersonal, and potentially extremely open, asylum. It should be added that, within early imperial narratives, these two myths are themselves juxtaposed with numerous other stories of immigration and accretion. What we do not see here is any unchallenged belief in the beneWts of an open society and a plural society, but a complicated set of questions about who is who, with varying emphasis on kinship and cultural aYnity. In the process, there is a sense of grasping for familiar models on which to base what has become a wholly peculiar notion of citizenship. We might well want to think about the diVerent kinds of ambivalence we see in the work of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus concerning immigration, mobility and cultural fusion within the context of a more general spirit of the age. The end of the Republic, and particularly the civil wars, had fostered anxieties about status, about cultural and political models, about what happened when ‘normal’ models of patronage were massively inXated in the drift towards monarchy. Amidst these comparatively familiar themes, we should not forget the momentous changes involved in the changed and changing reality of Italy. 68

Verg. Aen. 8. 635. Lucan bc 1. 97; it is possible that the topographical reference to the Asylum at Tac. Hist. 3. 71 alludes to traditions of primeval civil war; Ov. Fasti 3. 202. 69

26

Introduction 4. R OMAN IDENTITIES: THE HOLE IN THE MIDDLE?

To date, little work has been done on questions of speciWcally Roman ethnic and cultural self-deWnition.70 This is particularly noticeable in comparison with the prominent and inXuential studies written both on Greek ethnicity, ethnocentrism, and cultural identity, and on cultural change within the Roman provinces over the last two decades. This gap has to do partly with the fact that the modern historiography of ancient Rome has traditionally been very focused on the legal aspects of politics and institutions. It is striking that A. N. Sherwin-White’s monumental The Roman Citizenship, an account very closely concerned with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of citizenship legislation, and Wrst published in 1939, remains the classic work on the question of what it was perceived to mean to be Roman in antiquity.71 Important as such studies undoubtedly are, it has been hard to get beyond the reception of Roman society as characterized by power and institutions rather than by culture. This image is based partly on ancient self-images, although it is worth noting that the most classic formulation of Rome’s role in relation to Greek ‘culture’, Anchises’ instruction to Roman posterity from the underworld in the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid, describes Rome’s talent for conquest and rule as artes.72 Such trajectories of modern scholarship considerably delayed the discussion of fundamental ‘political’ issues in terms other than the narrowly juridical, or indeed chronological narrative, such as the role of the emperor in the Roman world, or the essential shape of Roman Republican politics, and there is still much work to be done on the culture and socio-speciWc importance of Roman law.73 I have begun to illustrate the inseparability of myth, history, and institutions in ancient perceptions of the Roman citizenship, and in the course of this book we shall keep returning 70

It is interesting that there is no essay on Roman ‘cultural identity’ in Laurence and Berry 1998. 71 Cf., much more recently, Nicolet 1976; Gardner 1993. 72 Verg. Aen. 6. 851–3. 73 Some of the most important contributions to these themes, very diVerent in terms of style and method include Veyne 1976; Millar 1977; 1998; Nicolet 1988; Hopkins 1978a, 1983; for thoughts on the Roman legalizing mentality, see Beard 1993; Wallace-Hadrill 1997.

Introduction

27

to the theme of the inseparability of ‘institutions’ from ‘culture’, ranging from writing, representing, and holding triumphs to the relationship between intellectual debates on how far identity is based on origins, culture, or clothes, and provincial government, tax collection, expulsion, or massacre. The traditional tendency to write the history of Rome in terms of power and institutions is directly connected to a lingering belief in the ‘primary’ character of Greek thought, a belief that has in recent decades encouraged great scholarly interest in archaic and classical Greek systems of thought, mentalities, and myths, and the application of anthropological, psychoanalytical, and post-structuralist approaches.74 Underlying assumptions of the ‘derivative’, ‘secondary’, or even downright secondrate character of Rome have tended to limit scholarly ability to take Roman thought seriously, as if secondarity implied ‘insincerity’. Such problems have to date come to a head most of all in the study of Roman religion, and have occasioned many sophisticated recent contributions, revising previous perceptions of both the imperial cult and Roman religion itself as political manipulation.75 But it is possible that underlying assumptions of this kind also discourage enquiry into ancient perceptions of the ethnic roots of Roman identity. It is certainly striking that, despite awareness of the subjective nature of ethnicity amongst ancient historians and archaeologists, in the case of the Roman empire and, interestingly, to some extent also in the Hellenistic world, there seems to be an assumption that perceptions of identity in ethnic terms will be undermined by the ‘reality’ of the ability to ‘become’ Roman or Greek. If this were the case, it would be very diYcult to account for the rhetoric of ‘pure blood’ in the Roman imperial period.76 74

For path-breaking approaches of this kind to the Greek world, see esp. Vernant 1962, 1965, 1974a; Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1972–86; VidalNaquet 1981. Such attention in turn risks exoticizing Greek culture: see Davidson 1997: xxvi; for serious anthropological enquiry into Roman mentalities, see above all Bettini 1986. 75 e.g. North 1976, 2000; Price 1984; Beard and Crawford 1985; Beard, North, and Price 1998. 76 Cf. Ch. 5, § 2, below for perceptions of ‘becoming Greek’ in Near Eastern contexts. ‘Becoming Roman’ is only occasionally perceived to replace local identities.

28

Introduction

Modern perceptions of the priority of Greek culture are also apparent in the shape of research that has to date been done on Roman self-perception. Despite the broad-ranging title of Gruen’s, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome, published in 1992, he is concerned exclusively with the changing attitudes of the Roman elite towards Greek culture. The idea of Greek culture is undoubtedly a very important, complex, and absorbing aspect of the self-perception of Romans and indeed of other ‘barbarian’ peoples of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. This importance is suggested by the diVerent conceptual ‘packages’ of ‘Greekness’ that survive from diVerent ‘barbarian’ cultural environments of the Achaemenid empire and the Hellenistic world, and the diVerent interfaces they suggest: the petasos-wearing Ionians, one of the many culturally distinct people advertised as the variegated realm of the Persian king; the religious and political Hellenismos inimical to Jewish identity in 2 Maccabees; the camel-driver who represents himself as in danger of starvation because of his inability helle¯nizein; Graecus ritus and utraque lingua, two striking Roman modes of signalling the appropriation of Greek culture.77 In the chapters that follow, we shall also repeatedly see the reception of Greece as an important reference point for ethnographical enquiry, the roots of Rome, the invention of Roman literature, deWnitions of dress, language, and political and imperial identities. On the other hand, the idea of Greece was by no means the only reference point for Rome, as I shall show above all in Chapter 3, ‘The Idea of Italy’, an exploration of territoriality, and the importance of variegation and hybridity as modes of selfperception.78 One of the most valuable results of looking closely at Roman perceptions of Italy is that an interest in plurality emerges much earlier than usually assumed, complicating any easy polarity of selves and others, rulers and ruled. Writing cultural histories of Rome is also impeded by peculiar disciplinary marriages and separations. I have already mentioned the substantial disciplinary separation between 77 Petasos-wearing Ionians: Kuhrt 2002: 19–22; 2 Maccabees 4: 7–13; the camel-driver: P. Col. Zen. 2. 66 (tr. Bagnall and Derow 2004, no. 137); Graecus ritus: Ch. 4, § 4, below; utraque lingua: Ch. 5, § 2, below. 78 On modern critical theory of cultural in-betweenness and hybridity, see Bhabha 1994.

Introduction

29

archaeology and ancient history in the English-speaking world, and we shall see in the chapters that follow some of the consequences for the ways in which Roman rule has been modelled in recent years.79 Equally problematic for the themes of this book are the quite diVerent ways in which some Roman historians as well as literary scholars have immersed themselves in Roman literature. One ironic example is the relatively new sub-discipline of Roman historiography that has played such an important role in questioning the assumed narrative authority of ancient texts, but that has also encouraged the study of individual texts in a vacuum, referring to other texts but not engaging as one mode of cultural expression with others in the dynamics of a broader social and political world.80 On the other hand, in recent years, Roman historians have begun to react to the institutional, legal, and narrative bias of traditional accounts, and have become less nervous of Wction, rhetoric, panegyric, and hyperbole as modes of representing, modelling, and ‘negotiating’ power, status, and empire. Interest in perceptions and selfrepresentation has begun to rival more traditional interest in ‘how it really was’, to the extent that it can be hard to see beyond a world made of literature.81 While it has been important particularly in the treatment of certain themes, above all the citizenship, to redress the legalistic tendencies of older accounts, I have been concerned throughout this book to raise as a problem the relationship between the worlds constructed in literary works and action and experience. For example, in Chapter 5, I shall explore ways in which ancient education both encouraged and ultimately limited literary diversity, particularly in the writing of history, of roots. We can and should posit a relationship between ‘literary’ ethnographies and the ‘invention’ of the world whether through the ‘arts’ of war and government, the choice of slaves on ethnic grounds or indeed the assignment to 79

80 See esp. Ch. 1, § 7, below. See my remarks in Dench 2002. For ‘How it really was’, see Finley 1985; for perceptions and self-representation, very diVerent in style and methods, see e.g. Brunt 1990c; Hopkins 1993; Edwards 1993; Gleason 1995; Fitzgerald 2000; Woolf 2003: 205 with n. 7 sees the root of the problem rather diVerently, as a split between the historians’ sociological focus and the literary scholars’ linguistic interests. There is much more work to be done along the lines of, and indeed going rather further than, Bloomer 1997 and Habinek 1998. 81

30

Introduction

slaves of identities Wtting the jobs they did. But we should also be aware of the potential gap between highly aspirational statements and experience: one striking example is Brent Shaw’s studies of banditry, never eliminated as panegyrists claim, but almost certainly ‘sewn up’ in far less honourable ways, involving the collaboration of Roman oYcials.82 Another factor that has perhaps discouraged the study of Roman identity, and that usefully complicates the questions that I am asking in this book is recent reaction to the dangers of Romanocentrism, worked through in a number of diVerent contexts. Thus, for example, ‘Romanization’ has now for a number of decades been perceived as a problematic means of conceptualizing cultural change at a provincial level within the Roman empire: with its implications of Roman intention, agency and even of some monolithic ‘Roman culture’, it might limit our perceptions of the local role in the processes of change, and imply an overemphasis on the perspective of the conquerors. More broadly, the notion of a ‘centre’ in terms of political, social, and geographical Wxity has rather fallen out of perceptions of the political culture of empire: there is a general tendency amongst contemporary scholars modelling the economy, imperial power, the composition of the Roman elite, or the role of the emperor to question divisions between centre and periphery, and particularly between central power and ruled periphery, preferring to imagine a more dynamic, geographically and socially mobile world of networks of favour and privilege.83 Undoubtedly, these developments further complicate the study of Roman identity: its plural, often virtual, and comparatively permeable quality discourages enquiry and evades deWnition: as soon as we move beyond the most narrowly legalistic deWnition on the basis of the citizenship, the question of who we mean when we talk about ‘the Romans’ is immediately pertinent. Even if we were to ‘restrict’ our enquiry to Roman citizens in the late Republic, we would be dealing with a geographically 82

Shaw 1984, 1993. For mobility as a Mediterranean phenomenon, and its particular Roman manifestations, see above all Purcell 1983, 1990b, 1995a; Horden and Purcell 2000. 83

Introduction

31

sprawling, culturally and socially diverse virtual community for whom being Roman would have had very diVerent signiWcance in diVerent contexts, and indeed mattered at all to very varying degrees. The modern misapplication of the term Romanitas, a long way from its speciWc late antique contexts, begs questions about how far, in what ways and by whom ‘Romanness’ was perceived to be any kind of entity, as well as undermining the signiWcance of it as a late antique concept.84 It is hard not to feel sympathy with Balsdon’s acknowledgement that it was diYcult to Wnd a suitable title for his Romans and Aliens, posthumously published in 1979. ‘Peregrini’, a word represented by the ‘Aliens’ of Balsdon’s title, was indeed one Latin word for ‘foreigners’, used particularly for non-citizens.85 Certainly, too, Roman identity could be represented as primarily or ideally exclusive, drawing sharp lines between ‘Romans’ and ‘foreigners’. We might think of C. Fannius’ appeal to the Roman people in a popular speech of 122 bc to imagine themselves crowded out of rallies, games, and festivals if they admit Latins to the citizenship, or of idealized condemnation of ‘foreign’ cults at Rome, the problem of ‘foreignness’ in perceptions of societal breakdown at the end of the Republic, or indeed alien expulsions.86 But deWning Roman identity by reference to a single, imagined out-group was only a mode of self-perception, and it was one that never remotely attained the prominence of dividing the world into Hellenes and barbarians.87 To make any 84 It is true that, especially from the mid-1st cent. bc, the adjective Romanus is found qualifying language, but this is unusual in comparison with Latinus, and the pointed meanings should be noted: Versteegh 1987; Ch. 5, § 2, below. Romanitas is Wrst attested in Tertullian Pall. 4. 1. 1, where the contrast is not with ‘barbarity’ but with Greekness. For ‘block’ conceptualization of Romanness in later and late antiquity, see below, Ch. 2, § 3, below; Heather 1999. 85 Noy 2000: 1–3 for the semantic range of peregrinus in comparison with other vocabulary of foreignness. 86 C. Fannius: ORF 4 144; Julius Victor 6; ‘foreign’ cults: Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 228–31; for the inadequacy of ‘policing’ even at the heart of Roman religion, see Bendlin 2000. 87 It is interesting that recent scholarship on Greek society would also seek to move beyond polarities. See e.g. Rosalind Thomas 2000; J. Hall 2002; the complexity and multiplicity of perceptions of Greek identity was already clear in E. Hall 1989: see esp. 201–23. This disillusionment with polarities as a total explanatory device is also to be noted in critiques of E. Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism: see e.g. Mackenzie 1995; C. Hall 2000.

32

Introduction

sense of how Roman identity worked, we would have for a start to factor in the important political, cultural, and social motifs of incorporation and transformation. Ultimately, Balsdon’s book represents an attempt to write about something like Roman attitudes towards foreigners, organized by tribal names, but it never comes to terms with the diYculty that much of his material in fact concerns Roman attitudes to other kinds of Romans, or indeed potential Romans. On the other hand, it is possible to overemphasize the signiWcance of the speciWcally Roman framework of a humanitas that excludes both barbarity and inhumanity, suggestively diVerent from the more familiar counterparts of barbarian and Hellene.88 Some scholars have recently stressed the potential of humanitas to include and integrate, belying its initial appearance of organizational neatness, the absence of an ‘ethnic’ label on an ideal, universal state of being. But to privilege one distinctively Roman way of thinking about other peoples, the potential glide between barbarity and humanitas, is itself problematic, and perhaps symptomatic of the optimism of much recent scholarship on the Roman empire, the tendency to emphasise the potential of individuals to climb, integrate, and become Roman, rather than the potential consequences of being judged not to possess humanitas, the intrusive, destructive, and exclusive face of empire and the profound inequalities of Roman society.89 In the chapters that follow, I take a thematic approach to my subject, considering diVerent ancient cultural expressions of what it was both to be and to become Roman, and the relationship between being or becoming Roman and other ethnic, political, cultural, or religious identities. The kinds of questions that I am asking are to an extent ‘centralizing’. Despite modern nervousness about Romanocentric perspectives, it is hard to deny that sometimes empire was experienced or exercised as, primarily, power and domination, involving local collaboration 88

See esp. Veyne 1993; Woolf 1998: 54–76. This problem is most clearly apparent in Dauge 1981, but it is also a dominant interpretative framework in Woolf 1998: see e.g. 73–5 for the Gauls reading Vergil’s Aeneid and learning rather speciWc messages from it: ‘That myth oVered an account of the Gauls’ past—as barbarians—and hope for the future as civilizers.’ 89

Introduction

33

to a greater or lesser extent. This aspect is most apparent in the process of conquest, but by no means exclusively, and it will not do to assume a crude periodization of imperial behaviour that characterizes the imperial period as altogether ‘softer’ than the Republic. Even if by the early imperial period Roman rule was sometimes characterized as a paternalistic corrector of behaviour, and if the political integration of individual members of the elite and the transformation of barbarians into soldiers, even Roman soldiers, was in general terms on the increase, these factors would not determine the experience of rule, as we can see for example from well-documented complaints about the behaviour of Roman soldiers in the provinces.90 Elsewhere, that centrality is a projection of a culturally and geographically diVuse virtual community that thrived on making increasingly abstract the traditional Mediterranean language of kin and politics: the evocation of Roman urbanity by people who had never crossed the Alps into Italy; Greek provincials of the imperial period writing political, biographical, and military histories of the Roman Republic; the provincial cult of Roma that made a symbolic entity of religion, politics, and space; Paul of Tarsus’ appeal to Caesar and journey to Rome to be tried, making virtual membership of the Roman political state a concrete reality.91 Each of my Wve themes—ethnographies, citizenship, Italy, bodies, and language and literatures—concerns cultural expressions of empire and modes of perceiving Roman identity, its relationship and indeed compatibility with other identities. I have set out in each case to write a cultural history of the theme, and both to acknowledge the diversity of perspectives, agencies and modes of expression and to trace and give context to common threads. In each chapter, I focus on the period between about 300 bc, when we can begin to trace clearly patterns of distinctively Roman imperial behaviour, above all the mass annexation of land and incorporation of peoples, and the age of Hadrian. My approach throughout is comparative in 90

Alston 1995. Urbanism in Gaul: Woolf 1998: Ch. 5; the cult of Roma: Mellor 1975, 1981; Price 1984: 40–3; signiWcantly, the cult of Roma in the city of Rome was a late development, in the Hadrianic temple of Venus and Roma: Beard, North and Price 1998: 1. 257–9; Paul of Tarsus: Acts 25: 11–12; cf. 22: 23–9, 23: 27. 91

34

Introduction

the sense that I am particularly interested in the ways in which Roman identity was perceived in antiquity in relation to that of other peoples. Despite modern interest in ‘modelling’ ancient ‘empires’ in relation to other ‘empires’ ancient and modern, it is at least as proWtable to consider the imperial genealogies, reference-points, and comparisons that were made in antiquity between Rome and the states, rule, morality and culture of other peoples.92 My themes have been chosen to illustrate dynamic ancient debates on what it was perceived to mean, what it ideally meant to be Roman, on the interplay of ethnic, cultural, political, religious, and spatial dimensions. In recent decades, studies of local provincial cultures have largely focused on an increasingly empire-wide ‘elite’, in their construction of, participation in, and reWnement of cultures of power: Roman imperial culture represents a unique balance between integration and the ‘preservation’, or rather reformulation of distinctive local cultures.93 Although there has been concern about overlooking ‘the poor’, this focus on the ‘elite’ is encouraged by their visibility, itself bound up with the political culture of the Roman empire.94 While later Republican ‘political issues’—such as inclusion in the Roman citizenship, the beneWts of citizenship, and military conscription and the veteran-settlement—occasioned intense debate about the interests of the Roman people, by the end of the Augustan period the world was a very diVerent place, in terms of the relocation of

92 For Roman comparisons with past empires, see GriYn 1982; cf. more broadly Golden 1992 for a thought-provoking analysis of the employment— and problems—of cross-cultural comparison amongst ancient historians. 93 For the very diVerent shape of the Persian empire, see Briant 1996; it should also be noted that the relationship between participation in imperial culture and political ‘loyalty’ to Rome is a complex one: the former by no means necessarily implies the latter. 94 For the poor, see e.g. Alcock 2001; for problems of deWning and writing about ‘the poor’, see e.g. Whittaker 1993; Purcell 1994b. While I recognize that the dynamics of power are complex, much more so than any simple bipartite model of ‘politicians’ having power over those who do not (see, succinctly, Whitmarsh 2001: 18–19, with bibliography), I am concerned that recent studies of Roman imperial culture may be beginning to minimize the increased social and political distinction that is a key aspect in the peculiar shape of the Roman empire.

Introduction

35

popular politics within a highly ideologically laden and increasingly international culture of social distinction. My interest in the construction of speciWcally Roman identity is somewhat narrower than imperial culture in general, and issues of an increasing emphasis on distinction and ‘elitism’ are particularly pertinent here. When Juvenal deXates those who overenthusiastically parade their family trees by warning them that they will eventually trace their roots back to the asylum, a myth that was probably once susceptible to distinctly popular and collective readings is relocated within a world characterized by competitive individual social mobility.95 The togas and the respectable variety of Latin that are proclaimed as ‘cultural’ markers of Roman identity in the age of Augustus are respectively impractical, hard, and costly to maintain, and necessarily involve education. Both are intensively coded, all too easy to get ‘wrong’. Nevertheless, my quotation marks around the terms ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’ signal recent recognition of the diYculty of deWning such an entity in a highly socially and geographically mobile world.96 Furthermore, if the construction of Roman identity tends increasingly from the late Republic to be expressed in terms of social (in addition to ethnic, cultural, moral, and/or religious) distinction, that social distinction can be articulated at many levels. These include the advertisement of newly freed status, attempts on the part of wealthy individuals to free themselves from the civic and Wnancial obligations of their local communities, and assertions of the superior worth of being born a citizen as opposed to buying the citizenship. Within a profoundly and proudly unequal and arbitrary world, not all Roman identities were the same. 95

Cf. n. 48, above.

96

Cf. Ch. 2, § 2, below.

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1 Roman Ethnographies

1. I NTRODUCTION The emperor Caligula was remembered in later tradition not for his military prowess, but for games of Roman imperial charades. His antics in northern Gaul and on the German frontier, miming the conquest and subjection of some of the most troublesome northern barbarians (Germans and, somewhat indirectly, Britons) were the most notorious. As a grand Wnale to a carefully staged battle in which some of his own German bodyguard were made to play the enemy, he instructed his soldiers to line up on the shores of ‘Ocean’ and Wll their helmets and pockets with shells, the ‘spoils of Ocean due to the Capitol and Palatine’. A Wtting triumph was subsequently arranged, and the embarrassingly small number of genuine deserters and prisoners was padded out with tame Gauls hand-picked for height and noble appearance who were to be displayed in the triumphal procession. The appearance and sound of the Gauls was modiWed accordingly, their hair grown and dyed a suitably barbarous red, and they were instructed to speak German and take on German names. The very triremes on which Caligula had set sail on Ocean were transported all the way back to Rome for the procession.1 These are pointedly absurd stories told against Caligula, a barely rivalled ‘bad emperor’ in the later Roman historical tradition, bringing to the fore the literally farcical nature of

1 I paraphrase parts of Suet. Gaius 43–9 (compare Dio 59. 25. 2–5). For the modern historian concerned primarily with questions of what happened when, this account is clearly less than satisfactory. For my purposes, however, Suetonius’ compression, lack of concern for precise location in time or space, and above all his thematic arrangement and moral emphasis bring out most clearly what is at stake in the telling of these stories.

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his reign.2 It is precisely the intentional absurdity of these stories that makes them useful. What we can see here is comic and extreme manipulation of a number of important themes that recur in Roman literary, monumental, and institutional constructions of the world and its peoples, and their place within it, introducing many of the major themes of this chapter. There is, of course, nothing remarkable about the fact that the Romans, or Greeks, or any other ancient people, were ethnocentric. Herodotus, in his Histories, a work that was to be so inXuential on the historical, geographical, and ethnographical thought of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, depicts the Persians honouring those geographically nearest to themselves and despising those furthest from themselves.3 Revealing the interest in dramatizing alternative perspectives that is typical of both the work and later Wfth-century sophistic rhetoric more generally, his ‘Persian version’ implicitly questions and qualiWes the unique character of Greek ethnocentrism. Similarly, a feature common to empires of the ancient Mediterranean is the conceptualization and organization of ‘their’ world through cultural expression of all kinds, and not least through written texts, from the Behistun monument to the correspondence of the Seleucids, to the Augustan Res Gestae.4 This chapter focuses primarily on Roman literary accounts of the world and its peoples and anticipates my discussion in Chapter 5 of the particular character and signiWcance of literature in the GraecoRoman world. The Romans, like other peoples of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world, from the end of the third century bc 2

For Suetonius, Caligula’s capture of specially released fake ‘prisoners’ is pure farce, a mimus (45. 2), and with considerable irony this incident is followed directly by the emperor’s admonishment of the senate for amusing themselves at the theatre (amongst other pleasure-centres) during a national crisis. Theatricality is a leitmotif in accounts of reigns of ‘bad emperors’: cf. Edwards 1994; Woodman 1993 for ancient traditions on Nero. Cf. Beard 2003, esp. 39 for the signiWcance of obviously fake triumphs: ‘In Roman imperial ideology, one of the characteristics of monstrous despots is that they literalize the metaphors of cultural politics to disastrous eVect.’ 3 Hdt. 1. 134. 2. 4 Alcock et al. 2001: esp. 281; questions of the authorship and reception of texts, particularly when ‘copying’ is a key part of the process, are of course highly relevant here, and the answers suggest quite diVerent models of ‘empire’.

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39

wrote themselves into the history of the ‘inhabited world’ in a literature that constantly engaged with the primarily Greek frameworks and images that had long been regarded as something of an international ‘language’ of memory and civilization.5 However, as they wrote themselves into this history, at the same time they frequently set Rome at an angle to it, one important signal of Roman claims to be both a master of Greek culture and to have a separable, remarkable character of their own. My purpose here is to trace the development of some of the distinctive shapes of Roman conceptualization of their imperial world. At the risk of spoiling the fun, it is worth unpacking some of the farcical elements of Caligula’s imperial charades in northern Europe. His desire to demonstrate the subjection of Ocean to Roman rule by the collection of dues in the ludicrous form of shells is a comic version of deep-seated ambitions to conquer Britain, from the time of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar’s own expedition to Britain is an important episode in the increasingly explicit link between world rule and individual power in the last decades of the Republic. Cicero could envisage both Pompey and Caesar seeking to extend the boundaries of the Roman empire as far as the world went, and the emulation to surpass Alexander the Great focused the connection between individual and world rule.6 Augustus was repeatedly urged by poets to go and Wnish oV Britain, while the embarrassment of Britain remaining as a ‘threat’ to Roman rule could be dealt with in various ways.7 It is, of course, no accident that the conquest of Britain Wnally took place under the relatively weak rule of Claudius. The latter’s victory procession contained beaks of ships to represent the crossing and ‘conquest’ of Ocean, while a contemporary statue from the Sebasteion of Aphrodisias advertises his physical mastery of the female Britannia.8 Caligula’s 5

For this complex process, see e.g. Dench 1995: ch. 2, with bibliography; for the ‘invention of history’ in the archaic period, see Curti 2002. 6 Brunt 1990c: 290. 7 e.g. Hor. Carm. 1. 35. 29 V.; 4. 14. 47–8; Britain in Strabo and in the Res Gestae cf. Smith 1988a: 59 on the emphasis in the Res Gestae on achievements and additions at the edges of empire and, more generally, groupings of ethne¯, ‘peoples’ of the world, in early imperial iconography. 8 Suet. Claud. 17; Smith 1987; cf. Levick 1990: ch. 3.

Roman Ethnographies

40

‘expedition’ here is a direct parody of Julius Caesar’s. Caesar had made prized pearls from the British side of ‘Ocean’ the symbol of his conquest, made up into a breastplate that he dedicated to Venus Genetrix on his victorious return, while Caligula’s shell booty was a cheap imitation from the wrong side of the sea.9 ‘Ocean’, the geographically vague monsterWlled limit of the world in Homer, had subsequently been localized in various places, symbolizing the shifting edges of topographical knowledge and imagination. Its identiWcation with the North Sea or the English Channel at the end of the Republic and much of the Wrst century of empire reXects the fact that northern Europe was a major theatre of war in this period.10 It is not, of course, incidental that northern Europe was, in Hellenistic ethnographical tradition, the home of the biggest threats to ‘civilization’, scarcely diVerentiated ‘Gauls’ and ‘Celts’, northern barbarians who became more variegated as they were systematically picked oV by both Roman conquest and her ethnographical writing. Already, then, we can begin to see some of the important features of the conceptualization of a distinctively Roman imperial world in the early empire. These include the appropriation of, and improvement on classical and Hellenistic inventions of the world for both Roman depiction of conquest and conquerors, and even for Roman conquest and imperial activities themselves. They also include the notion of the Roman past as a reference point for both competition and idealization: as we shall see below, the Roman past could in certain contexts be imagined to be so distant from the present that it could itself become the subject of ethnographical enquiry, another country with lessons to teach. Caligula’s attention to the appearance of components of his triumph reminds us of the importance within Roman cultural traditions of displaying the enemy to the people of Rome in all his physically speciWc glory. Caligula cheats to get his ‘captives’’ appearance to Wt his version of events by modifying the appearance of Gauls, resorting to hair-dye and German lessons, but he 9

Pliny NH 9. 116; cf. Suet. Iul. 47, with Hurley 1993: 168– 9. Romm 1992: 124–49; for the reception of Homeric ideas of Ocean within Augustan geography, see Strabo 1. 1. 3 ¼ 2 c. 10

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41

is parodying a distinctly Roman taste for depicting the conquest of an ethnically variegated world. This sense of variegation was itself continued even as individuals and peoples ‘became’—or were made—Roman, in institutions such as the army or the voting tribes, in Roman histories of their beginnings and remote past, in the self-conscious parading on the part of some of the Roman elite of local (and sometimes downright ‘foreign’) origins. And while Caligula’s input into making Gauls into Germans was a little too obvious, it is possible that the joke would have had an especial resonance within a culture that seems to have been fascinated with the idea of transformation and metamorphosis, symbolic ways of thinking about the structures and expectations of Roman society and empire. 2 . BOUNDARIES AND DEFINITIONS I need at this point to explain brieXy what I mean in this chapter by ‘ethnographies’. To a considerable extent, the category of ‘ethnographical writing’, as distinct from, for example, ‘history’ or ‘geography’, was created by modern scholars. In particular, Jacoby’s masterful edition of fragments of Greek historical writing, published between 1923 and 1958, suggested organizational categories. Jacoby’s third volume deals with ‘Histories of States and Peoples’, and is subdivided into two categories: ‘Horographie’—local histories—and ‘Ethnographie’—writings about other peoples, a subdivision that has some basis in ancient thought.11 Late archaic and classical Greek interest in ‘other peoples’ other than that of Herodotus in his Histories may be embedded within the perie¯ge¯sis or the periodos ge¯s—the ‘round the world’ account—or take the form of genealogical accounts of peoples and settlements, or of specialist accounts of individual peoples: ‘Persika’, ‘Indika’ or ‘Lydika’. The roots of such writing lie ultimately in epic: Homer’s Odyssey in particular comes to be perceived as a model for a travelogue. Examples of authors of works of this kind who were well known in antiquity include 11 See, however, Jacoby’s own earlier views (Jacoby 1909) on the close interconnection of ethnography, history, and geography. On all such problems of categorization, and above all for ‘ethnography’ as history, see Clarke 1999a: esp. 56–66.

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Hecataeus of Miletus, whose information on Egypt is much maligned by Herodotus, and Hellanicus of Lesbos, a near contemporary of Herodotus and a proliWc writer of studies of both the Greek and barbarian worlds. In extant ancient literature, however, we are most familiar with geographical and ethnographical material as an integral aspect of much ‘historical’ writing, from Polybius to Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus, as well as of other kinds of literature. To Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the Augustan period, one of the distinctive features of Herodotus’ Histories was its combination of accounts of ‘barbarian’ and ‘Greek’ histories.12 Herodotus introduces detailed ethnographical and geographical material on ‘other peoples’ as the Persians encounter them in course of conquest, and his account of the Persian army, which has swept up and incorporated ‘other peoples’, forms one of the climaxes of the work.13 In the Histories, ethnographical ‘digressions’ are part and parcel of historical explanation, as well as Wnding a place within the narrative framework of war between Asia and Europe. In this respect, the Histories clearly act as a precedent for much of Hellenistic and Roman history-writing.14 A greater self-consciousness about writing within a speciWc tradition, of being able to manipulate and break the ‘rules’, and to dip in and out of diVerent literary genres within a single work is a noticeable feature of Hellenistic literature.15 Roman ways of writing about other peoples essentially ‘grew up’ within this Hellenistic cultural environment, and Roman literature reXects literary and more broadly cultural fashions for erudition lightly and allusively handled, with the eVect that ‘scientiWc’ learning, including geography and ethnography, becomes material for literary genres of all kinds: ethnographical ‘excursuses’ and allusions may be skilfully manipulated as much within loveelegies as within history-writing. We might think, for example, 13 D.H. Thuc. 5. Hdt. 7. 61 V. e.g. Murray 1972; there is, however, some truth in Prontera’s idea (1984a: 194) that Herodotus is more ‘historical’ in his treatment of Greeks, and more ‘geographical’ in his treatment of barbarians. 15 Rossi 1971; Prontera 1984a: 212–13; one must, however, beware of treating the history of genre in an overly schematic way: for a sophisticated discussion, see Barchiesi 2001. 12 14

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of the games Catullus plays by evoking and alluding to far-Xung places, from the tomb of Battus to the wilds of Britannia.16 Hellenistic and Roman writers may signal that they are entering an ethnographical zone in a number of ways: by an announcement and, usually, a justiWcation of a ‘digression’, by the choice and organization of subject material in general, or by speciWc verbal signiWers, such as the Latin formula of ‘situs’ (‘site’) or ‘positus’ (‘position’) with the genitive of place or people: for example, Sallust announces in the Jugurtha that it is time to explain brieXy the ‘site of Africa’ (17. 1), while Velleius Paterculus enters his ethnographical excursion in the course of Tiberius’ wars by announcing that he will describe the ‘peoples of Pannonia and the tribes of Dalmatia, and the site of regions and rivers and the numbers and manners of men’.17 This ‘embedding’ of geographical and ethnographical material with which we are so familiar is not, however, the end of the story of Hellenistic and Roman writing. For example, Strabo is selfconsciously carving out a separable genre of geographical writing when he cites a set of predecessors that most strikingly does not include Herodotus.18 Ethnographical literature provides us with extensive evidence of ways of seeing the world, and ways of thinking about the world within the context of perceptions of historical change, and above all, as we shall see below, perceptions of the interaction of diVerent peoples. Up to now, I have been discussing ethnography in the formal context of Greek and Latin literature. But the description and conceptualization of the world and its peoples was by no means a narrowly or exclusively literary exercise, and it is my intention in this chapter to think about literature within the context of a broader cultural history of Roman imperial experience. For a start, ethnographical ways of thinking pervade other cultural forms in both public and private contexts of the Graeco-Roman world. We might think, 16 Catull. 7. 6, 11. 11–12; Cf. Hardie 1986: 5–32 for a careful and useful discussion of the relationship between poetry and cosmology in ancient literature. 17 Sall. Iug. 17, 1; Richard Thomas 1982: 3; cf. Norden 1922 on the original title of Tacitus’ Germania, ‘De Origine et Situ Germaniae’. 18 On Strabo’s omission of Herodotus on the basis of a well-established tradition of thinking of him primarily as a historian, see Prontera 1984a: 202.

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for example, of drinking cups representing Ethiopians or ‘pygmies’ used in the symposia of the archaic Greek and south Italian worlds, or ‘barbarians’ represented on stage within the Dionysia, an Athenian civic festival, or the Gauls adorning the altar of Attalid Pergamum, Hellenistic south Italian vase-paintings within which Romans and Samnites are made iconographically to play the roles of Greeks and barbarians.19 More profoundly, literature gives sense and meanings to lived experience, as well as itself inXuencing experience of the world and shaping its meaning.20 For example, Herodotus’ Histories was perhaps something approaching a ‘set text’ for the expedition of Alexander, while the expedition itself was the impetus for the account of India written by Alexander’s companion Nearchus, a work that seems to have been heavily inXuenced by Herodotus’ accounts of India, Egypt, and Arabia.21 Within the Hellenistic world in general, a literary and artistic taste for the far-Xung reaches of the world and its peoples reXects not just an engagement with literary and artistic traditions. It also reXects the importance of the idea and forms of imperial expansion after Alexander, and, increasingly, the nature and articulation of world rule. Within the city of Rome itself, ethnographical ways of thinking were a central part of public life. For example, the institution of the triumphal pageant and the erection of triumphal monuments acted out in and inscribed on the city distinctive ways of thinking about Rome and her position within the world.22 Within literature too (and indeed art), we shall see the importance of such socio-speciWc ways of imagining and enacting relationships with other peoples. However, while we 19

Ethiopians and pygmies: Lissarague 1990; ‘barbarians’ on stage: Hall 1989: 160–5; Goldhill, 1986: 57–78 for the Dionysia in general; Gauls at Pergamum: Ku¨nzl 1971; Wenning 1978; Pollitt 1986: 97–110; Romans and Samnites: Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996: 183–4 with bibliography. 20 Cf. Barchiesi 2001 on the peculiar patterns of interpreting Latin poetry, ranging from the exclusively formal to a more broadly political focus. 21 Murray 1972: 205–7, with n. 1. See also Bowersock 1989; Vasunia 2001: 256–65. 22 On the cultural distinctiveness of the Roman triumph and of monuments of victory and expressions of world rule, see esp. Smith 1988; Pietela¨ Castre´n 1987; Ziolkowski 1992; for the importance of warfare individually and collectively at Rome, the classic account is Harris 1979.

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must be aware of the varying impacts of diVerent cultural forms, it is nevertheless important not to apologize excessively for using literary evidence or indeed ‘Wction’. We should, of course, be well aware that literature of all kinds oVers select and heavily interpreted views of ‘reality’. Literature too, like any other cultural form, has distinctive rules and restrictions all of its own. The importance of rhetoric within ancient education and social and political life in general compounds all these problems: we must be aware that rhetorical training produced its own traditions of stock Wgures and arguments and that it was a matter of pride to be able to produce varying arguments according to individual situations.23 Thus it is quite normal to Wnd political opponents attacking each other on quite similar grounds, that of luxury and eVeminacy being frequently levelled at the end of the Republic, and it is quite reasonable for us to doubt the literal truth of such claims. It is, however, important not to conclude that we are ‘only’ dealing with rhetoric: such accusations could have a damaging impact on individuals and, perhaps more signiWcantly, suggest socio-speciWc concerns about the character of leadership, concerns that were loudly addressed during the Augustan principate.24 Rhetoric necessarily engages with issues of contemporary resonance. We should be wary of dismissing ancient explanatory frameworks for the rise and fall of ‘empires’ for example, such as lust and luxury, and of imposing instead our own, more ‘sensible’ (but also entirely culturally determined) explanations, such as economic motives for expansion. On the contrary, assumptions about the moral problem of empire were the basis upon which opinion could be swayed and manipulated, and action taken.25 The relationship between ethnographical knowledge and the articulation of power and space in the Augustan world is the subject of Nicolet’s Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire. Both Strabo’s Geography and Augustus’ Res Gestae are in diVerent senses powerful reinventions of the world. These reinventions will both inform and reXect the 23

For a useful case-study of Cicero, see Vasaly 1993; cf. now Steel 2001. See esp. Edwards 1993: 6–9; Wallace-Hadrill 1997; cf. also Davidson 1997: xxi for the ‘real’ eVects of forensic oratory in 5th-cent. Athens. 25 Purcell 1995c is a useful exercise in taking Roman rhetoric seriously. 24

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more ‘concrete’ arrangements of the world, whether through the assignment of power in the diVerent provinces of the empire, or the new articulation of space through, for example, the formation of the Augustan Italian ‘regions’. Nicolet focused on a particular kind of relationship between space and the new experience of monarchy in Rome, concentrating on the kinds of centralization expressed. The conceptualization of the world as in some sense a unity centred on Rome, a phenomenon that has its roots long before the Augustan period, is one very important aspect of Roman understanding and articulation of empire.26 It is not, however, the only distinctive aspect, as I shall try to show in the sections that follow. 3 . S ECONDARITY AND TRADITION In the interval, while I was living on the moon, I observed some strange and wonderful things that I wish to speak of. In the Wrst place there is the fact that they are not born of women but of men: they marry men and do not even know the word woman at all! Up to the age of twenty-Wve each is a wife, and thereafter a husband. They carry their children in the calf of the leg instead of the belly. When conception takes place the calf begins to swell. In course of time they cut it open and deliver the child dead, and then they bring it to life by putting it in the wind with its mouth open. (Lucian, True Stories (Loeb tr.) 1. 22.)

Lucian’s mid-second century ad True Stories is remarkable not least for being an early precursor of the modern genre of science Wction, a reminder of the extreme importance of the reception of classical traditions for early modern and modern European ‘invention’ of the colonial and post-colonial worlds. The work is an extreme version of the sort of consciousness of older cultural traditions that we Wnd so frequently in Roman imperial literature. The fact that this passage is such an obvious parody

26 Nicolet 1988; Purcell 1990c questions the signiWcance of the Augustan moment, and looks at deliberate Roman reconWguration of the world as a much longer phenomenon, traceable certainly from the Middle Republic; Clarke 1999a carefully contextualizes Strabo within Hellenistic geographical thought, showing what exactly is and is not new about his vision of the world.

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of a centuries-long ethnographical tradition makes it a useful introduction to this section.27 Lucian makes a game out of traditions of both the ethnic and cultural location of authorial identity and of ethnographical subject matter and concerns. He makes considerable play of the idea of being on the fringes of the Greek world, as a selfconfessed ‘Syrian’ or ‘Assyrian’. Graeco-Roman traditions of placing the authorial self ‘between’ cultures or perspective are quite old. Given his inXuence on later literature and particularly on ways of writing about ‘both Greeks and barbarians’, it is perhaps unsurprising that quieter versions of this phenomenon are apparent in the Histories of Herodotus.28 At the other end of the chronological scale, we should also think seriously about the ways in which both Lucian and the world of the so-called Second Sophistic in which he writes are particular and peculiar.29 However, we will come to see the self-conscious positioning of the authorial voice oV-centre, on the boundaries, moving between worlds, as a frequent feature of the literature of the Roman imperial world. This is an important signal of the special nature of the Roman empire, with its capacity to incorporate, and its interest in sponsoring hyphenated identities.30 Lucian is explicit about his aim to amuse ‘those concerned with literature’. He turns the assertions of veracity that are traditional in travel literature on their head by reminding his readers of the importance of the motif of lying within that Wrst travelogue, Homer’s Odyssey, and by exposing as liars predecessors ranging from the notorious Ctesias of Cnidos to Herodotus himself.31 Lucian’s version of stock claims of truthfulness makes him ‘truthfully declare his whole tale false’.32 In the passage given above, Lucian parodies the ethnographer’s interest in wonders and the incredible, pushed beyond the realms of 27 For the origins of science Wction, see Guthke 1990. See also, more generally, Grafton with Shelford and Siraisi 1992. 28 For authorial self-consciousness, Marincola 1997; for the realities of Herodotus’ east Greek context, Rosalind Thomas 2000: 7–8, 9–16. 29 For Lucian in general, see e.g. Jones 1986; Goldhill 2001a: 1–4, with bibliography. 30 Cf. the essays on Apuleius’ Prologue to his Metamorphoses by Too and Clarke in Kahane and Laird 2001. I will return to this theme in Ch. 5. 31 32 Lucian 1. 1–2; 1. 3, 2. 31. Ibid. 1. 4.

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belief in the sub-genre of paradoxography in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.33 SpeciWcally, he parodies the ethnographer’s interest in relations between the sexes, the implicit comparisons between the mores and norms of ‘our’ society and those of other peoples.34 There are some parallels between Lucian’s games of placing the authorial self and the work and the placing of both Rome and Roman authorial voices in earlier literature of the late third and second centuries bc. Most familiarly, we might think of the placement of Rome in relationship to Greek literature, history, language, and culture: the assumption of Greek literary models, dating the Roman past by Olympiads, the appropriation of Hercules as the mythological ancestor of Rome, and even in some cases the choice of Greek to write Roman literature. However, this placement is frequently far more complicated, involving also expressions of distance, competition, distinction, or tension. For example, notoriously, A. Postumius ‘apologized’ for his Greek while writing a Greek history of Rome, thereby emphasizing simultaneously aspiration and the gap between worlds.35 Ennius at the beginning of his Annals subjected Homer to a distinctly post-Homeric and more characteristically south Italian Pythagorean metempsychosis, imagining him reborn as a peacock.36 Plautus’ plays are announced to be ‘translations’, and in them Romans may be described as ‘barbarians’, playing with a distance between the perspectives of characters in the play and the perspective of the audience.37 In modern discussions, the articulation of Roman relationships to Greece and to Greek culture tends to dominate the discussion of Roman cultural identity in the third to the Wrst centuries bc, to 33

Cf. the collections in Keller 1877; Giannini 1966. Cf. Said and Rosellini 1978 for Herodotus’ interest in other peoples’ sexual relations. 35 Polyb. 39. 1. 5–9; Gell. 11. 8. 4, quoting Nepos De Ill. Vir. 13 (fr. 55 ORF 4); cf. Macrob. Sat. Pref. 14; Plut. Cat. Mai. 12. 5; Mor. 199 e–f. The fact that Polybius is the Wrst written source for this anecdote is fascinating, in view of Polybius’ own stance ‘between Greece and Rome’, explored later in this chapter. 36 Ann. 1. 3, 7–9 (Sk.). 37 Dench 1995: 71; Gruen 1993 is a little too rigid; Feeney 1998 has subtle and important things to say about Roman religion which have a much broader application. 34

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the exclusion of much else. For all the sophistication of some recent contributions, one can be left with the impression that issues of identity revolved around twin poles of ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’. However, it is worth noticing that even the earliest ‘Roman’ authors can be found reXecting notions of multiple identities, changing identities, identiWcation with and placement oV-centre from Rome. The best examples of such notions are, of course, to be found in Wrst-person pronouncements on the part of ‘Roman’ authors themselves, such as Aulus Gellius’ famous citation of Ennius saying that he had ‘three hearts’, glossed as speaking ‘in Greek, Oscan, and Latin’.38 This is a fundamental aspect not only of the history of Roman literature, but of the history of the shape of Roman society itself, and particularly of the citizenship and other modes of incorporation that I will explore in Chapter 2. I turn now to some of the issues raised by Lucian’s parody of traditional themes and the ethnographer’s gaze in the passage of True Stories quoted at the beginning of this section. Roman ethnography is in constant engagement with classical Greek and Hellenistic traditions, and it is in this engagement that we can see vivid illustrations of both the importance of self-conscious secondarity and some of the distinctive directions taken in Roman depictions of empire. My two very diVerent casestudies for this latter part of the section both concern the representation of ‘northern barbarians’ in Roman literature. The Wrst is Caesar’s portrayal of his Gallic and German opponents in his Gallic War, and the second is Ovid’s depiction of his Scythian neighbours in his elegiac poems Tristia and Letters from Pontus. Each account purports, albeit in a diVerent way, to be non-Wction, and each at the same time is very actively engaged with the manipulation of ethnographical tradition in literature. Each, Wnally, represents an important chapter of the distinctive Roman history of writing about empire. The ultimate ancestors of northern barbarian Wgures in Roman literature are the Scythians, placed on the northern extreme of the knowable world in Wfth-century Greek literature. The Scythians are a pre-civilized, scarcely urbanized and trouser-wearing people of the cold northern zone. In 38

Gell. 17. 17. 1 ¼ Enn. Operis incerti fragmenta I (Sk.).

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Herodotus’ complex geo-historical depiction of the world, they are by their own admission the ‘youngest people’, in some contexts ‘the opposite’ of the Egyptians, and prove a nearimpossible enemy to the Persians due to the literal intractability of their territory and, metaphorically, their cultural intractability. The Scythians’ geographical place towards the cold pole of the earth is mirrored very clearly by their medical problems, their physiognomy, their ways and their character in the late Wfth-century Hippocratic work Airs, Waters, Places. They are stunted, Xabby, moist and uniform in appearance, with a propensity for androgyny and cross-dressing and a tendency towards infertility.39 While Keltoi make a cameo appearance in Herodotus’ Histories, it is in the Hellenistic age that they begin to replace Scythians as the epitome of the northern barbarian, as well as becoming powerful anti-civilization Wgures, inevitably interpreted as anti-Hellenic civilization Wgures. This is to be explained largely in terms of the symbolic meaning given to the attack on Delphi by Keltoi/Galatai in 279 bc. The consequences of this symbolic meaning are best illustrated by the monumental complex of Attalus I of Pergamum, commemorating his defeat of some ‘Gauls’ and the Seleucids in warfare in the 230s and 220s, and featuring Wgures of ‘dying Gauls’ that we (think we) know about entirely from Roman ‘copies’. Attalus’ claims of victory over barbarism are extremely signiWcant considering the position of Pergamum, on the borders of the Greek world.40 In spite of this, however, it was the ignorance and lack of curiosity of the ‘armchair’ ethnography written by Greeks of the Hellenistic world on the subject of ‘northern barbarians’ that most impressed Momigliano in his classic Alien Wisdom.41 It is true that the Romans had rather more direct experience of ‘northern barbarians’ than did even the Greek-speaking peoples of the Hellenistic world. More profoundly, Roman interest in interacting with ‘Gauls’ is suggested even by the barest account of relations between Rome and the southernmost 39 Hdt. 4. 1–36 for the Scythian ethnography; cf. Airs, Waters, Places 17–23. It should, however, be made clear that when the reader is taken by Herodotus inside Scythia, however, the monolith breaks down and the types of Scythians and the landscapes they inhabit multiply. 40 41 For Pergamum, cf. n. 19, above. Momigliano 1975: 57–64.

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areas inhabited by ‘Gauls’ in the later Republic. This includes extended military campaigns, heavy colonization, the trade in slaves and other goods, the transformation towards the end of the Republic of ‘Cisalpine Gaul’ into proudly Roman ‘Cisalpine Italy’, and even the entry of such peoples into the Roman elite. As we shall see, these processes are accompanied—and, indeed, surely facilitated—by an interest in promoting a picture of variegation rather than a monolith. Amongst early examples, the most notable (and probably exceptional) is that of Cato’s Origines, written around the middle of the second century bc. Remarkably, the attribution of ‘Gallic’ fragments to the second book of the Origines suggests that Cato wrote the Celts on the Roman side of the Alps into the geography of Italy, an extraordinary thing to do to traditionally anti-civilization Wgures. He also ‘recorded’ topographical features, local peoples (in the plural), and agricultural production in precise (and perhaps over-precise) numerical terms: thus the area seems to be transformed into a very Roman landscape of exploitation.42 It remains interesting, however, that much appeal continues to be made in Roman literature to northern, anti-civilization Wgures that essentially pull us back to the generic Wgures of classical and Hellenistic art and literature. In part, this connection is fostered by the linking of the Galli of Roman thought with Greek Keltoi/Galatai, perhaps made as early as Fabius Pictor, as Jonathan Williams has suggested.43 The political capital made from such a connection within the Hellenistic world is clearest in the perceptions of Polybius, writing in the second half of the second century bc. He points out the remarkable achievement of the Romans, who actually succeeded in conquering Celts who had so threatened the Greek world, but with little eVective resistance: the identiWcation of ‘Celts’ as a common enemy implicitly promotes Rome’s standing as protector of civilization, Wt ‘therefore’ to rule the Greek world. Implicit here too is the notion of Romans as ‘doers’ that becomes such an important strand in Roman self-perception, and that I consider 42 See e.g. Or. 2. 8–9, 11–14 (Chass.); J. Williams 2001a: 52–3 for interesting discussion of the region as the Big Country for Rome, and also for Cato’s perceptions of change from Gallic past to Roman present. 43 J. Williams 2001a: 18–19.

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in Section 6. Polybius’ particular authority is vested in his status, a high-born Greek from Megalopolis, brought to Rome as a hostage, and there moving into high circles through his friendship with Scipio Aemilianus: he is thus admirably placed to explain the successful Roman mastery of the Greek world.44 It is precisely the traditional nature of these Wgures that gives them power, that lends veracity and authority to accounts because they play on deeply rooted, and indeed ‘scientiWc’ knowledge.45 In addition, their ‘traditional’ nature shows up the interesting ways in which these pre-seen images are manipulated and exploited, aspects of the distinctive nature of Roman imperial perceptions. Caesar’s Gallic War is, in a way, a monument of the campaign to which he harps back in his later work, Civil War, using his success in conquest as a rallying cry against Pompey.46 Overall, we are obviously looking at a justiWcation and gloriWcation of Caesar’s controversial campaign, with Caesar himself as the textbook—or exemplary—‘good general’. Notwithstanding this, however, we begin not with Caesar himself, but with Gaul and its three divisions: we do not encounter Caesar until the seventh chapter of the Wrst book in modern editions. We may immediately be struck by the attempt at the very beginning of the work to diVerentiate between three diVerent varieties of peoples in Gaul: Belgae, Aquitani, and Celtae, the latter known in ‘our’ tongue as Galli. The Hellenistic ethnographer was not, after all, as Wnely tuned as this when considering the pre-civilized masses of the north. There are, however, visible agenda here. Above all, the real point of diVerentiating between Gauls is suggested by the speedy introduction of the Germans: the character of the individual peoples of Gaul is determined by 44 Polyb. 2. 35; for evidence of Roman manipulation of such ideas in the 2nd cent., see J. Williams 2001a: 43–7. 45 For the transposition of ‘traditional’ ways of seeing other peoples in more recent centuries, see e.g. Alex Garland’s 1996 novel The Beach, where the (British) hero is made to see early 1990s backpackers’ Thailand through his ‘experience’ of Vietnam and Cambodia via American Wlms such as Platoon, The Killing Fields, and above all Apocalypse Now; a less trivial example would be that of 17th-cent. European travellers to and colonizers of the Americas, who perceived themselves to be journeying in the footsteps of classical heroes and writers: see e.g. Haas and Reinhold 1994: Part 1. 46 B Civ. 1. 7.

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relative proximity; to the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis on one side, with its culture and nearness to trappings brought by merchants and inducing eVeminacy; and to the Germans on the other, constantly testing the mettle of their neighbours. Above all, the traditional boundaries of ‘civilization’ have been shifted northwards in order to isolate the real, untouched menace of the Germans, here taking the place of Gauls in older ethnographical accounts. The immediacy of the situation, empire-building pretensions on the part of the Helvetii, nearest to the Germans, in more than ‘just’ geographical proximity, is suggested by the dramatic beginning ‘on location’, framed by the geography of divided Gaul. This, as well as the early introduction of a looming ‘German menace’, on the boundaries of the Helvetii, justiWes taking the war into areas not within Caesar’s remit, and is a nice illustration of the problems of taking too literally what used to be understood as a Roman ‘policy’ of ‘defensive imperialism’.47 The authority of tradition is also made to carry a great deal of weight in the shaping of Caesar’s actions: the ‘typical’ cruelty and savagery of his enemies becomes more marked when he is about to take drastic action against them. Perhaps more striking, however, particularly in a work of this nature, is some tendency towards the blurring of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in terms of ethics and characteristics. Although there is some authorial condemnation of enemy words and behaviour, most notably of Critognatus’ speech against surrender at Alesia, a speech of ‘remarkable and terrible cruelty’, elsewhere things are not so clearcut.48 To some extent, the activities and attributes of Gauls 47 B Gall. 1. 1–7; as the narrative ‘zooms in’ on Germany, this monolith too breaks down: see esp. 4. 1–2 for the Suebi, extreme northern barbarians who are barely agricultural, virtually nude through being hardened by the cold, resistant to imports and wine; with a nice symmetry, their counterparts, the Ubii, aVected both by merchants and proximity to Gaul are, not coincidentally, forced to pay tribute to the Suebi (4. 3). Other key ethnographical passages include: 6. 24 for corruption of Gauls by vicinity to the Roman provinces and knowledge of overseas goods leading to them gradually becoming used to being beaten; for the Germans compared with Gauls: 1. 31–3, 4. 2; cf. Walser 1956: 78–85; Vasaly 1993: 148–52; Bell 1995; Rives 1999b: 26–7; more generally, Trzaska-Richter 1991. 48 B Gall. 7. 77; it may be signiWcant that Vercingetorix, the noblest of the enemy, has the speeches put into his mouth reported rather than given directly

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at their most rebellious remind us of Romans. The desires of Orgetorix are in some ways dangerously close to home, with his designs on regnum and persuasion of his people that, given their superior virtus, it is easy enough to secure imperium over the whole of Gaul.49 With Gauls on both sides of the battle of Alesia, it is diYcult to tell who is friend and who is foe, a reported incident that seems highly symbolic of a more general confusion.50 This confusion takes us beyond even the general ancient rhetorical sophistication of worthy enemies or barbarian nobility, and alerts us to a peculiarly Roman emphasis on the potential to transform and be transformed that I shall discuss in the Wnal section of this chapter. Ovid’s Tristia and Letters from Pontus are obviously very diVerent kinds of works from Caesar’s Gallic War, but manipulate traditional images of ‘northern barbarians’ just as extensively. Ovid’s stance in both works is autobiographical: these are framed as poems from exile in Tomis, with ‘eye witness’ accounts of his barbarous neighbours. The acute reader will, however, soon suspect that Ovid’s apparently ‘wide-eyed’ observations are about as authentically autobiographical as is his love poetry. Ovid has demonstrably built his journey into exile and his exaggeratedly Scythian neighbours with frozen hair and beards, carrying arms on a full-time basis, wearing trousers and dressed in skins, out of allusions to literary traditions on a whole range of north-eastern peoples.51 His manipulation of literary traditions is as complete if slightly less explicit than Lucian’s in his True Stories. These literary games do not, however, detract from the cultural and political speciWcity of the poems. Ovid’s placing of himself in exile amongst the perpetually warlike Scythians, barbarian representatives of Mars, certainly works on the level of poetics as the inimical spheres and voices of love and war are brought more closely together to create a literary (see esp. 7. 89, for his last, highly composed speech, claiming the liberty of all until the end). 49

Ibid. 1. 2. Ibid. 7. 50, cf. 7. 22 for the Gauls as good at imitating and taking up suggestions: a very Roman trait, as we shall see in the Wnal section of this chapter. 51 Claassen 1990, with useful bibliography. 50

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amalgam. The writing of celebratory poetry for Augustus necessitates self-conscious poetic compromises as the poet moves into the barbarous sphere of military activity.52 It is, however, tempting also to trace here the development of a more broadly cultural theme. Once again, we Wnd a Roman author taking up a stance oV-centre, on the borders of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In Augustan elegy, the ‘central’ space is now frequently identiWed with the emperor, who is himself placed in the sphere of empire and warfare: this is symptomatic of the particular kinds of centralization that characterize much Roman thinking about empire at the beginning of monarchy. The elegists both propose separable categories, love and war, the life of leisure and the life of politics and conquest, conquest and enslavement, nonRoman and Roman, and simultaneously cross and combine these categories. The kinds of estrangement from a Greek centre, from a classical past, that some scholars have read in Alexandrian poetry, are transformed in Augustan elegy into ways of thinking about the extent to which boundaries are confounded in the Roman imperial experience.53 4. THE MAKING OF A ROMAN IMPERIAL WO RLD It has long been recognized that Homer’s Iliad is, in an important sense, the father of Wfth-century Greek historiography. The reception of epic plays a crucial role in the shaping of the kind of universal histories that become closely identiWed with histories of empires.54 According to Plutarch’s biographical account of Alexander the Great written in the Roman imperial period, the Iliad was his bedside reading: the connection between epic and empire by this period must have meant that this detail ‘had to’ 52

53 Barchiesi 1997: 15–39. Bing 1988; Selden 1998. I leave aside the complex issue of which—if any—‘real’ political world/s are represented in the Iliad (see, most recently Hammer 2002: I owe this reference as well as questions of this kind to Nicholas Hutton). However, a poem that has as its core the representation of more or less uniWed military action on the part of peoples who are never actually described collectively as ‘Hellenes’ is puzzling if it is to be assigned to the now commonly accepted date of composition in the early to mid-8th cent. bc, more or less as we have the poem. This seems easily as striking as the fact that the barbarization of the Trojans is almost completely avoided in the Iliad (E. Hall 1989: ch. 1). 54

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be true.55 Herodotus’ Histories takes the cause of the Trojan War, the snatching of Helen, as a foundation-myth for his own epic war, the Persian War, the most recent of conXicts between Greeks and barbarians, a centuries-old theme. The Histories sees the known world caught up in the growth of the Persian empire and its predecessors and the Greek response to this, looking forward to hints of the growth of the Athenian world: ethnographical ‘digressions’ given as the action reaches a new zone enhance the feeling of geographical comprehensiveness that stretches to the limits of reliable knowledge. The gods too are as important in this conXict as they are in Homer’s Trojan War: the divine sphere oVers one of the frameworks of causation, clearly not incompatible with non-religious explanations.56 Thucydides’ work, both a self-conscious ‘continuation’ of that of Herodotus, and a rejection of it, strengthens an implicit connection between warfare and the epic register by again choosing the Trojan war as the starting-point for arguing the unrivalled greatness of the war between Athens and Sparta. Whether Herodotus’ Histories was a ‘set text’ for the expedition of Alexander itself, or just for the writing of it, it is this work above all that was hugely inXuential on the writing of histories of empires and imperial expansion in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.57 However, the close link perceived between epic and warfare, the major theme of non-local history from its Wfth-century beginnings, apparently remains implicit until the end of the Republic. While Apollo, in the fragmentary preface of Callimachus’ Aetia, is made to prevent the poet from embarking on epic scale on the subjects of ‘kings’ and ‘heroes’, it is Vergil in the Eclogues who makes the speciWc equation of kings and battles.58 55

56 Plut. Alex. 8. 2. Harrison 2000. For the role of Ephorus in creating a genre of universal history, including both Greeks and barbarians, see Alonso-Nu´n˜ez 1990; Clarke 1999a: 100. 58 Callim. Aetia pref. 3–5; Verg. Ecl. 6. 3. Clausen 1970 curiously attributed to Callimachus a refusal to write about battles, which is nowhere apparent in the Aetia Preface. This is despite the fact that it weakens his argument about Roman ‘moral’ (as opposed to merely ‘aesthetic’) aversion to epic on the grounds of its military and political content. I would, however, tend to agree with Clausen that consciousness of war as a speciWc poetic sphere was sharpened by Roman experience of civil war at the end of the Republic. 57

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If the reception of epic plays an important role in the shapes of classical and Hellenistic historiography, so too does something approaching the scientiWc ‘naturalization’ of the perceived and desired political world-order: this is the context for the kinds of reXections on Scythians that I considered in the previous section. This scientiWc ‘naturalization’ is a theme that I will explore in more detail in Chapter 4. BrieXy, however, Herodotus’ ethnographical interest plays a role in the causation frameworks of the works: environment and character help to explain the patterns of building and resisting empires. It is no accident that the Histories ends with a Xashback to Cyrus’ advice to the Persians about the inadvisability of changing the seat of rule to a softer zone, thereby enfeebling the Persian people. Running through the work as a whole is also a suggestion about the connections between a readiness to adapt and incorporate customs and the building of imperial power. One way of explaining the imperial success of both Greeks and Persians is their Xexibility and tendency to adapt, in marked contrast with both the Scythians and Egyptians.59 At around the same time of writing, the author of Airs, Waters, Places explains success directly in terms of character more or less determined by the physical environment. Thus, he locates ‘Europe’ in a changeable zone: the variation in seasons is directly connected with the admirably warlike and steadfast spirit of the people. Success against the ‘Asiatic’ peoples, enervated and even emasculated by life in their too temperate zone, is thus ‘explained’.60 Epic is clearly one important register for some of the earliest Roman literature: one might think of the diVerent ways in which Homer is self-consciously interpreted, and indeed ‘translated’ into Latin in Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey and Ennius’ Annals. Ennius’ title, and his telling of recent Roman conquest of Greeks and other peoples in hexameters, the metre of Homeric epic, framed by a dreamed, Callimachean encounter with Homer and by romanticized Roman myths of origins, highlight 59

Hdt. 1. 135. 1; Lateiner 1989: Ch. 7, esp. 150–1. Airs, Waters, Places 23, 16; Jouanna 1999: 56 V. is sensible on the subject of the authorship of this work. It is important to emphasize that we are talking about aspiration rather than mere description here: the idea that ‘Europe’ was dominant over Asia is more or less a fantasy for this period: impact on Persian control of the eastern Mediterranean was short-lived. 60

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the marriage of epic and history, mediated by Alexandrian poetics. The title, Annales, underlines the self-conscious ‘Romanization’ of this epic history by signalling a wholly socio-speciWc means of constructing, ordering and recording the past, the priestly annals of Rome.61 Interestingly, too, Ennius explicitly sets up the expedition of Pyrrhus to Italy as the reversal of the outcome of the Trojan War. This is clearest in the prophetic ambiguity of Annales 6. 167, ‘Aio te Aeacida Romanos vincere posse’, ‘I say that you, descendant of Aeacus, the Romans can beat’. This time, however, the scion of Achilles is of course beaten by the inheritors of Troy.62 Ennius’ epic thus simultaneously connects the Roman imperial enterprise directly to Homer, the ultimate source of Hellenistic Greek culture, and the highlights its distinctiveness and estrangement. The earliest Roman literature of the late third and early second centuries might collectively be read as staking Rome’s claim to be both the true inheritor of the Wnest traditions of Greek culture, and the peculiarly Wt ruler of the Mediterranean, by virtue of her very distinctiveness.63 One important aspect of this distinctiveness, as we shall see in the next section, is the advertisement of Roman religious piety, her compact with the gods. Nevertheless, the explicit explanation of Roman success, in terms of virtually achieving the aim of world rule, is left to Polybius. A longer tradition of universal history is given a new kind of unity when ‘almost the whole of the known world’ is perceived to be under the rule of one people. This unity is not only of the earth, but cosmic, willed by the divine sphere.64 What is also explicit here, for the Wrst time in surviving literature, is a comparison between Roman rule and that of other Mediterranean powers, Carthage, Sparta, Macedon: Rome is decisively worthy of post-Aristotelian constitutional analysis and has, for the moment, come out on top. However, what everyone in the ancient world knew about imperial rule, at 61

62 Frier 1979. Skutsch’s numbering. These themes are arguably anticipated by Timaeus (FGH 566): see e.g. ‘proof’ of Trojan descent through contemporary customs (F36 ¼ Polyb. 12. 4b) and the presence of Trojan artifacts at Lavinium (F59 ¼ D.H. 1. 67. 4); cf. F60 ¼ D.H. 1. 74 for synchronization of foundations of Carthage and Rome. 64 For Polybius’ appeal to Stoic conceptions of the universe here, see Clarke 1999a: 126. 63

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least since Herodotus and arguably long before, was that decline, fall, and eventual collapse was not just possible but actually inevitable, a side-eVect of success itself.65 Polybius’ analysis of Roman rule certainly hints at contemporary decline as a direct consequence of knocking out the last of her real rivals: luxury and decadence following the successful conquest of Macedon are real danger signs. The threats to Polybius’ uniWed world are, furthermore, to be found closest to home. Within Rome’s admired tripartite political system, ideally the constituent parts, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, work in balance to check each other. However, Roman imperial success threatens this balance, and discord and disunity are very much signs of the time.66 From the last decades of the Republic, the writing of a Roman imperial world acquires rather diVerent emphases: the role of virtual monarchy in centralizing visions of the world, what seems to be a new focus in literature on the physical city of Rome as a centre of empire, and the identiWcation of Italy, sometimes a synonym for Rome, and sometimes her altera ego. By the time that he was writing his ideal state, the Republic, even Cicero explicitly theorized the awkward compatibility of individual pre-eminence with the continuation of the res publica, putting into the mouth of Scipio Aemilianus the image of the wise man as the tiniest of mahouts, steering with a delicate and gentle rein the vast and cumbersome elephant of state, quite unlike the spectre of dominatio or regnum that was to be raised by Pompey and Caesar.67 While I will argue that we should see the origins of Rome as a territorial state in the middle rather than the late Republic, the grant to an individual of imperium over a huge territory that is Wrst made to Pompey in 67 bc comes to be an important step in the process of conceptualizing a ‘natural’ connection between empire and monarch.68 It is in the Augustan period, with Strabo’s Geography, and Vitruvius’ On Architecture, that we Wnd assertions of the ‘natural’ connection between monarchy and world rule. Vitruvius imagines the Augustan principate in suggestively stretched ‘constitutional’ terms: Augustus’ imperium is co-extensive with the Roman 65 66

Cf. McGlew 1993 for archaic ideology of tyranny. 67 68 e.g. 31. 25. Cic. Rep. 2. 40. 67. Cf. Richardson 1991.

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empire itself, while he has triumphed and is victorious over the whole world.69 Strabo in an interestingly teleological fashion, suggests that father-like monarchy is necessary for an empire that would otherwise be hard to hold together.70 It is also in the late Republic that a new focus on the physical virtues of the ‘centre’—in the form of either the city of Rome or of Italy—is also visible. While such ‘praises’ are generally seen as conventional and formulaic, following long traditions of both ‘environmental determinism’ and praising cities in antiquity, it is worth looking more closely at the particular emphases and signiWcance of late Republican and early Imperial ‘praises’. For example, in Cicero’s imagined perfect Roman state in his Republic, the city of Rome is deliberately situated by her founders in order to determine her future political place as ruler of the world. But it is the comparative interest in this passage that seems particularly signiWcant: Rome is set slightly inland, avoiding the twin problems of decadence and decline that were associated with maritime cities such as Carthage, Corinth, and the Greek cities of south Italy. Moreover, had Rome been placed anywhere else in Italy, she could not so easily have maintained her position as mistress of the world.71 There is a powerful sense here of the particular time in which his Republic was written, with Rome not just the conWdent ruler of the Mediterranean world, but also newly the political centre of Italy. As we shall see below in Chapter 3, the relationship between Rome and Italy can be imagined in a number of diVerent ways in the late Republic. While Cicero’s insistence on the city of Rome as centre of empire is perhaps not ultimately surprising given the emphasis throughout much of his writing on the important but secondary status of the Italian upper classes, we frequently Wnd from the end of the Republic ‘praises’ of Italy as the ‘natural’, environmentally determined centre of empire. I shall discuss in detail in Chapter 3 the ways in which focus on Italy in all its variegation can enhance the sense of Roman identity as a plural phenomenon. It is in Vergil’s Aeneid that themes of monarchy, empire, Rome, and Italy are brought together with the strong cosmic 69 71

Vitr. De arch. 1 Pref. 1. Cic. Rep. 2. 3. 5–2. 6. 11.

70

Strabo 6. 4. 2 ¼ 288 C.

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presence that is characteristic of epic but that has also been found to be widespread in the Graeco-Roman history of writing about empires. The Aeneid powerfully dramatizes tension between unity and discord within the making of empire, and the fact that this tension is mediated through the language of myth enhances the sense of its existence as a permanent and constant pattern of Roman history and Roman nature. The lasting appeal of the Aeneid in the Wrst century of empire suggests its reception as a poem that deals with both the character and tensions of imperial rule (in both senses: the rule of an emperor and the ruling of an empire).72 5. ROME AS AN ETHNOGRAPHICAL SUBJECT Then I said, ‘Exactly so, Varro, for when we were wandering like strangers lost in our own city, your books brought us home, as it were, so that we could at last realize who and where we were. You have revealed the age of our fatherland, its divisions of time, its religious and priestly laws, its civil and military institutions, the placing of its regions, its sites, the names, types, functions and causes of all things of heaven and of earth . . . ’ (Cicero, Academica Posteriora 1. 9)

The Romans, according to the kinds of stories they told themselves, were descended from Trojan exiles, distinctively notquite-Greek Wgures who nevertheless had collectively (if not always individually) major roles on an emphatically Greek world-stage. They found the future site of Rome already settled by Arcadians, displaced persons from an older civilization. Romulus’ Rome was a community of shepherds, the Palatine named after the baa-ing of sheep that once roamed it.73 As Rome’s rivals for world power were knocked out and Rome’s leaders slid into eating caviar and competitions in excessive behaviour, the earlier days of the middle Republic, just before Rome’s imperial ambitions were more fully achieved, emerged as a golden age of heroic small farmers content with little. The 72 Hardie 1993; cf. also the Elder Pliny’s interesting problematization of the Augustan equation of monarchy and imperial harmony, NH 14. 2–5 with Conte 1994: 75. 73 For the naming of the Palatine, see Varro Ling. 5. 53, citing Naevius ¼ Bellum Punicum fr. 28 (Strzelecki); for Trojans, see now Erskine 2001.

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old elite and the city itself might be increasingly clad in luxury, but the Sabines, and subsequently Italians and other newcomers to the Roman elite, were stirring reminders of a simpler, more virtuous past. Romans were forever telling themselves stories about their own estrangement—from the land in which they lived, or from the Greek world—about the moral virtue that deWned their Roman-ness, even if they might temporarily have strayed from such high expectations, and about the simplicity and primitivism of their roots, so far from the glory of imperial Rome, and yet embedded in her very topography.74 In other words, Romans loved to tell themselves stories in which they viewed themselves, or aspects of themselves, as an ‘other people’: the ethnographer’s lens was turned onto themselves. As we have seen, this sense of estrangement that is such a striking feature of classical Roman thought is clearly visible in the earliest Roman literature, in which the Romans are selfconsciously distanced from the Greek world even as they so actively place themselves within its frameworks. In some ways, Roman literature of the late third and second centuries bc looks forward to the self-accounts of Jews in the Roman empire: the histories of Josephus, or Philo’s Embassy to Gaius, and also looks backwards to other barbarian self-accounts, such as Manetho’s account of Egypt or Berossus’ of Babylon.75 Roman selfaccounts, just like ‘barbarian’ self-accounts more generally, are excellent examples of what Mary Louise Pratt has described as ‘autoethnography’, the placing of selves as framed by the imagined gaze of others, one recurrent aspect of the transculturation that accompanies contact between cultures.76 One sign of Roman interest in autoethnography is the actual shape of Roman history: typically, historical treatments of Rome, ranging from Ennius’ poetic Annals or Cato’s prose Origins to Livy’s From the Foundation of the City, devote a disproportionate amount of space to the origins and early history of Rome. 74 Beard and Henderson 1995: 102–5 on the place of Arcadian ‘otherness’ in Vergil’s Aeneid, already embedded within Rome when Aeneas arrives, and one aspect of what Rome is imagined to be; cf. Alcock 1993: 226–7. 75 For more on this, see Ch. 5, below; cf. Henderson 2001 for the anticipation in Polybius’ history of the kinds of issues of cultural stance that are later raised by authors of the so-called Second Sophistic. 76 Pratt 1992: 7.

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We can explain this to some extent in terms of the inXuence on Roman history-writing of local history-writing, widespread in the Greek world, ranging from early Ionian accounts in the archaic period to the growth of accounts of Athens and Attica after the Persian Wars, all the way down to Pausanias’ antiquarian recreation of the Greek world in the Roman imperial period. Such local histories were strongly antiquarian in their interests, and heavily weighted towards local mythologies and foundation stories.77 The treatment of origins and early history in Roman accounts has, however, its particular slants: these are spaces within which ‘essential’ qualities of Rome can be staked out, however contradictory these might be. The succession of peoples involved in Rome’s foundation and early history has clearly been subjected to rational processes that attempt to make sense out of chaos. However, the tensions and contradictions remain: Rome (or the site of Rome) is successively inhabited, founded and/or improved by indigenous Aborigines, indigenous and/or Lacedaemonian Sabines, Latins descended from Saturn, Trojan exiles, twins fathered by Mars and nursed by a she-wolf, Arcadian exiles, Herakles, Trojan exiles and Etruscan kings. For all the modern complaints about the paucity of ‘traditional’ Roman mythology, these rich and contradictory accounts speak volumes about alternative and contested senses of Roman cultural identity, and more speciWcally about multiple versions of ‘otherness’: exiles from elsewhere, including the Greek world, primitive relics from the past, austere others, a people who are secondary to Greeks and a people who are emphatically nonGreeks. Within these accounts of the origins of Rome, broadly ethical considerations—setting up the Roman moral character—are also very important. These may be implicit in surviving literary evidence: for example, the ethically laden associations of the Romans’ primitive aspect. The equation of primitivism with moral superiority is one way of thinking about barbarians from classical times, and a particular feature of attempts to Wgure out the success of imperial powers from the perspective of Athens: 77 See esp. Pearson 1939, 1942; for Pausanias’ ‘pilgrimage’ to ancient Greece, see Elsner 1992, 2001.

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Xenophon’s reXections on the very beginnings of the Persian empire in his Education of Cyrus are a good example, as is his Constitution of the Lacedaimonians.78 More explicitly, there are striking examples of early Roman emphasis on the ethical desirability of their own beginnings: Anchises’ piety in Naevius’ Punic War and Ennius’ Annales, and L. Calpurnius Piso’s devotion of a monograph to the Life and Eating habits of King Romulus.79 To some extent, it is possible to contextualize Roman emphasis on the morality of their past within ideologies of Hellenistic Italy. From around 300 bc, we can trace a strong interest in central and southern Italy, originating in the Greek city of Tarentum and attributed to followers of Pythagoras, in ideologies of conquest and civic success more generally that emphasize a ‘Spartan’ model of austerity and the renunciation of pleasures, both on the part of whole communities and, in particular, on the part of individual ‘philosopher warlords’.80 Into the second century bc, there is very clear evidence of Roman interest in comparing themselves both with the Spartans as idealized by Xenophon and in later traditions, and indeed with Persians idealized in such a way that they became virtually indistinguishable from Spartans. For example, Cato the Elder in his Origins compared Q. Caedicius, hero of the Hannibalic War, with the Spartan hero of Thermopylae, Leonidas.81 Not only was Caedicius’ bravery the greater, but less fuss was made of it: Cato has his cake and eats it by both comparing Romans with Spartans and then raising a familiar complaint (more usually made against Athenians) of talking things up rather than just getting on with them. Given the emerging ideological position of the Sabines in the Wrst half of the second century bc when Cato was writing, it is no surprise to Wnd him citing the version of Sabine origins that makes them descendants of the 78

See esp. Gera 1993; on ‘hard primitivism’ as a feature of the ancient philosophical and anthropological tradition, see Lovejoy and Boas 1935, esp. ch. 11; Dodds 1973; Blundell 1986, esp. ch. 8. 79 Naevius Punic War 12 (Morel). Enn. Ann. 28–9 (Sk.); cf. Rawson 1985: 260. For Romans parading their pietas in the context of 2nd-cent. bc ‘imperial’ relationships, see esp. the Teos inscription of 193 bc: IG 4.1557; Syll.3 601 (tr. Beard, North, and Price 1998: 2. 13. 1a). 80 81 Dench 1995: 53–61. 4. 7.

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Lacedaimonians.82 It is to Cicero that we owe a tantalizing story about Scipio reading aloud Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus.83 These are excellent examples of both the Romans’ selfconsciousness of their post-classical identity and of the speciWc choices and appropriations made by Rome. When we look at classical Rome, it is all too easy to see ideologies in virtual isolation from Italy and the western Mediterranean world, to imagine her pitted solely against the world of the Greek mainland and the Hellenistic kingdoms. It is sometimes important to take a step back, to remember that Roman ‘subjugation of nearly the whole inhabited world’ as Polybius was to deWne it was not, in the middle Republic, a foregone conclusion.84 From around 300 bc, and right into the early second century bc, a number of states, all from outside ‘old Greece’, from Samnites, to Carthaginians, to Macedonians, to Tarentines, were all trying to place themselves within broadly similar ideologies of success, successions of empires. Of their own autoethnographies, their placing of selves within a broadly Greek framework for understanding the world, we have little more than glimpses. Even from what we have, we can Wnd parallels with Rome as well as a sense of distinctive developments.85 If we had a little more, I feel quite certain that we would want to remove Rome from the ideological isolation in which we have placed her. As ideological and military winner in the Mediterranean, Rome takes on Hellenism, both speaking through the languages of Hellenism, and inventing new ways of thinking about culture, superiority, and the nature of Roman rule. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has pointed out, there is no exact Roman equivalent to the Greek term paideia, the essential, ‘cultural’ deWnition in the Hellenistic world of what it is to be a Hellene rather than a barbarian, deWned by Greg Woolf as ‘the intellectual property of an educated and cultivated person’. The Latin term humanitas challenges the speciWc claim of Hellenes to be culturally superior, measuring ‘civilization’ in distance from 82

83 Origines 2. 22. Tusc. 2. 62; cf. Mu¨nscher 1920: ch. 3. Polyb. 1. 1. 5; for what Polybius meant, see Derow 1979. 85 See Dench 1995, ch. 1 for discussion of e.g. pro-Carthaginian and proSamnite histories. 84

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beasts. But alongside humanitas, the real emphasis in Roman thinking about the way of living that is speciWc to ‘us’ is on mores, a term that embraces notions of custom, morality, and lifestyle. We often encounter Roman mores (or mos in the singular) in a formula, coupled with maiorum, ‘our ancestral ways/ morality/custom’, and the existence and importance of this formula emphasizes the peculiar importance in Roman thought of notions of heredity and tradition, regularly stretched to include virtual heredity and tradition. Roman mores are far more all-embracing, and above all, despite their lack of stress on ethnic speciWcity, easily as hard to acquire as is Greek paideia. They are altogether a more emotive business than are Herodotean nomoi, cultural systems.86 It is, then, unsurprising that we most frequently hear about Roman mores when they are perceived to be threatened, or when their passing is lamented. It is in the context of a growing self-consciousness about imperial rule that we should see Roman interest in building up traditions about what it ‘really’ meant to be Roman: all the true values of civilization, but also distinctive moral and cultural virtues, piety, austerity, and self-control. It worked both ways, of course, and we can trace alternative, hostile versions of what being Roman was ‘really’ about: barbarous violence, pillaging, and looting.87 Polybius, on the other hand, as we have begun to see, set out rather to ‘explain’ the Romans and their success to the Greek world. To this end, he included a ‘digression’ accounting for Roman success observed very much from the stance of Hellenistic ethnography and understanding of political systems, expressed in terms that surely engage closely with contemporary Roman ‘autoethnography’. Polybius stands ‘between Greece and Rome’ in many senses, and his Romans in turn are located between contemporary Greeks and ‘barbarians’.88 Certainly, he picks up on aspects that illustrate the 86

Wallace-Hadrill 1997: 7–8; Woolf 1998: 54–60, esp. 55 for deWnition cf., for humanitas, see earlier Veyne 1993. The concept of ‘virtual heredity’ is hugely important in the renewal of the Roman elite: cf. Ch. 2, below. 87 e.g. Livy 27, 16; Plut. Fab. Max. 22. 4–5; cf. Fe´rrary 1988, 573–8. 88 For Polybius being ‘between Greece and Rome’ in other senses, see Walbank 1979; Millar 1987. For a suggestive, but ultimately unconvincing, treatment of the ‘Latinization’ of Polybius through his narrative, see Dubuisson 1985. For the diVerent stances and foci of Polybius, see Davidson 1991,

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distinctive qualities of Rome when compared with the contemporary Greek world: for example, the comparative lateness of Wnancial corruption, learned only through contact with Greeks themselves.89 His comments on the ‘superstition’ of the Romans, interpreted by him as a method of crowd control on the part of the upper classes, suggest his perception of the heightened importance of ‘correct’ cult and ritual when compared with the Greek world.90 In his extended political analysis of Rome, Polybius is willing and able to apply a broadly postAristotelian framework: he can interpret and assimilate Roman patterns to Greek political theory, just as contemporary Romans themselves were able and willing to conceptualise politics in Greek terms.91 Polybius uses the terms e¯the¯ kai nomima to characterize his selection of aspects of Rome that explain how she has come to achieve hegemony in the world: politics, religion, military matters, as well as the selection of improving cultural traits that he designates by the terms. Polybius’ Greek formula seems to grasp at the moral and cultural combination covered by the Latin term mores.92 In this last section of his appraisal of Rome, Polybius gets very close indeed to the sorts of stories that the Romans told about themselves in the later Republic, and the ways in which they told them: the brand of exemplary history that becomes so characteristic of Rome, Horatius on the bridge, and the institution of funerary speeches, itself a ‘living’ form of exemplary history.93 Polybius’ admiration for the Roman custom of telling uplifting stories about the remote past highlights the fact that one of the most frequent focuses for Roman autoethnographical interest was their own past. While this might at Wrst sight seem to characterize a highly traditional society in the modern sense of being reactionary, it is important to emphasize that the location of moral excellence ‘elsewhere’, either in the past or in more literally ‘another country’, could be used as means for and, now, Clarke 1999a: esp. 98 V. For Polybius’ location of Romans between Greeks and barbarians, see Erskine 2000. 89

90 Polyb. 18. 35 cf. 6. 56. 13–15. Ibid. 6. 56. 6–12. Nicolet 1983 for a collection of essays on precisely this topic. 92 Polyb. 6. 56. 1. 93 For Polybius and Roman traditions of exempla, see Chaplin 2000: 10–29, esp. 23–4. 91

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modelling change, which can include diVerent models of political behaviour, or even ‘outsiders’ claiming space at the political heart of Rome. The present was regularly imagined to have a dynamic relationship with past: the latter may be thought to be in some way embedded within, accessible to, or recoverable by, the present. We might think, for example, of the antiquarian interest in the city of Rome in the literature of the end of the Republic and the Augustan age, a kind of interest traditionally associated above all with ‘local histories’: names and topographical features are ‘explained’ by reference to local mythology. The ‘hut of Romulus’—or rather the two ‘huts of Romulus’, one on the Capitoline and one on the Palatine—stood as a monument to such a remote past, but at the same time represented one aspect of what Rome ‘really’ was, standing next to the marble splendours of imperial Rome.94 For individuals, the availability of exempla from the past challenges comparison and competition. In a society in which the direct or virtual descent of individuals was of overt political importance, the examples established by individuals were meant to be continued ‘naturally’ by their descendants. Alternatively, however, ‘new men’ with non-noble or even non-Roman ancestries (apparently a new category in the late Republic, but certainly not a new phenomenon), may be claimed to be the last, true inheritors of the tradition established by the most redoubtable nobiles of the past. This is a nice example of the Xexibility and innovation possible within a society that prided itself on its traditionalism. When examples from Rome’s past are held up in Polybius’ history or Cato the Elder’s speeches, one of the major problems associated with behaviour in the present is courting the people, or courting soldiers, or acting in another divisive fashion.95 At the end of the Republic, Sallust’s choice of the Wrst evil trait in the progress of decline, collective and individual ambitio, together with his interest in proto-psychologizing portraits of the moral fall of individuals, reminds us of the particular political concerns of his day.96 There is a twist to the tale when, at the 94

Edwards 1996: 32–42. Polyb. 31. 25–30; cf. the apparent prominence given to Cato’s own words and deeds in his Origines Books 5–7. 96 See esp. Sall. Cat. 11. 1 for the moral ambivalence of ambitio, ‘a vice quite close to virtue’: the Latin terms, vitium and virtutem are closer in sound than 95

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end of the Republic, the only hope for recovery of a ‘golden age’ seemed to be embodied in the Wgure of a saviour. Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue is the earliest and most striking example of this, setting the clock at the consulship of Pollio in 40 bc and, it has long been assumed, the pact of Brundisium, which brought together in marriage Antony and Octavian’s sister, Octavia.97 With the elimination of Antony and all plausible rivals Augustus Wtted the bill, and images of a return to the ‘golden age’—for the Romans the ‘age of Saturn’—abound in Augustan literature: in his political, religious, ‘moral’, and social reforms (i.e. his reforms of Roman mores) Augustus could be seen as restoring the true, ‘moral’ essence of what Rome ‘really’ was.98 The moral problems traditionally associated with the achievement of empire may or may not be alluded to: herein lie many of the problems of interpreting the tone of Augustan poetry, which regularly presents apparently contradictory pictures.99 6. W ORDS AND DE EDS In a famous passage of Vergil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas’ father Anchises is made to prophesy the future fortunes of imperial Rome, the addressed ‘Roman’ is assured that while ‘others’ (Greeks by implication) will always have the upper hand in the ‘artes’ of bronze-casting, sculpture, rhetoric, and astronomy, he is to pursue the ‘artes’ particular to him. These are: the rule of peoples, the imposition of mos—that peculiarly Roman, morally laden notion of ‘culture’ that we discussed in the previous section—on peace, sparing the conquered and vanquishing the proud.100 This dichotomy between the artistic culture of Greeks with their words and theories on the one hand, and the deeds and actions of Romans on the other is frequently are ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ in English, underlining the point made. Livy notoriously omits ambitio from his otherwise Sallustian conceptualization of decline in Pref. 11, but it is there very near to the beginnings of Rome, entering in a big way with the upstart Tarquinius Priscus in 1. 35. 97

98 Syme 1939: 217–20. Wallace-Hadrill 1982b; cf. 1997: 9–11. e.g. Martindale 1993: 50–1 on the ‘problem’ of the Aeneid. 100 Verg. Aen. 6. 847–53; for the reading of ‘paci’ rather than ‘pacis’, see Austin’s 1977 commentary ad loc. 99

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invoked in literature of the late Republic and early empire. Notoriously, it is nicely reversed in Horace’s so-called Letter to Augustus: ‘Captured Greece took into captivity her rude conqueror and brought arts to rustic Latium.’101 The idea that ethnographical knowledge was broadly thought to be a Greek scientiWc activity is the implication of Strabo’s reXection that ‘most of the most famous names [of places] are Greek’.102 The relationship of Roman action to Greek theory in ethnography is implicit already in the second half of the second century bc, in Polybius’ account of Roman conquest of the Gauls, as we saw above in Section 3.103 Greeks might ‘know’ the world through exploration, the conquests of Alexander, and the science of geography, but, from the end of the Republic, Roman individuals were keen to represent themselves as going further, precisely as going beyond the map of the known world: this is surely one of the implications of statements that Caesar or Augustus mastered peoples whose names were hitherto unknown.104 However, we need to avoid taking such dichotomies over and using them to create our own stereotypes of Romans as ‘doers’, as a practical people rather than thinkers or writers. In this section, I shall explore some of the connections between diVerent Roman modes of depicting and enacting conquest and empire, particularly between ethnographical literature and art on the one hand, and triumphs on the other. But in the examples of Roman self-representation I have just given, the line between ‘art’ and imperial action is already blurred: the ‘arts’ of empire are ‘arts’ nonetheless in the passage of Aeneid 6, while there is 101 Ep. 2. 1. 156–7; cf. Horace’s Art of Poetry 323–30 for the comic notion that Greek children learn the arts of speech and rhetoric, while Roman children learn to add sums of money; for a longer history of Roman literary secondarity, see below, Ch. 5, § 4. 102 103 Strabo 3. 4. 119 ¼ 166 C. Polyb. 2. 35. 104 Cic. Prov. cons. 19–36; Pis. 81; Q fr. 3. 6 (8). 2, with Brunt 1990c: 314; Nicolaus of Damascus 90 F 125; cf. 126, Jacoby; for diVerent modes of representing the inhabited world and the Romans’ mastery of it, see Brunt 1990c: 308; Richardson 1991; Nicolet 1991: 36–41. would want to emphasize that it is the representation of the mastery of world space that is remarkable here: I treat the long and important history of emphasis on the conquest of land and its transformation, very visible in the middle and later Republic in Ch. 3, below.

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deliberate irony in the notion of conquest by culture in the passage from the Letter to Augustus. The idea and, as we shall see, the practice of considering literature to be ‘useful’ is also of great importance in Roman culture. The idea of the usefulness of history in ‘practical’ terms was made explicit in Polybius’ emphasis on providing useful practical information, as well as vicarious experience, for ‘statesmen’, and these kinds of ideas achieve their own emphases within later Roman historiography.105 Sallust in the preface of the Catiline sets up a series of contrasts: the lack of Roman historical writing in an early period, in contrast with the Athenians, is to be explained by the Roman preference for using their minds in association with their bodies, leaving no time for mere mental exercises, while in the Jugurtha he ‘apologizes’ for the ‘indolence’ of writing rather than continuing a ‘busy’ political career on the grounds that his writing will be of more use to the country, and a far less ‘lazy’ option than politics as it is currently practised.106 As Roman ethnographical treatments and views are frequently integrated within historiographical accounts, the direct usefulness of these too is often stressed.107 An emphasis on the usefulness of literature, then, in a manner comparable with emphasis on deeds and actions, is a signiWcant aspect of Roman cultural self-deWnition. But there are grounds to push the subject of practical application beyond the world of texts by considering some of the ways in which we know texts were read in the Roman world. One of the obvious places to start thinking about possible connections between the written word and actions is an idea that recurs in Roman texts: members of the elite gain knowledge and experience not through Wrst-hand experience but through reading books. This is the view that Sallust makes his ‘new man’ consul Marius express in his speech before the people in Jugurtha 85: in contrast with Marius’ own supposed ‘hands-on’ experience, the Roman nobles, on election as consuls, start doing their homework by 105 e.g. 1. 1. 2, 3. 6. 6 V., 3. 7. 5, 3. 21. 9–10, 2. 3. 5–10, 3. 118. 12; and esp. 12. 259. 1–2 for the necessity of having some experience as a soldier or practical politician in order to write about Wghting or politics. Cf. Skidmore 1996: ch. 1, for the long history of the idea of learning lessons from literature. 106 107 Cat. 8; Iug. 4. Polyb. 3. 57. 9; Strabo 1. 1. 1 ¼ 2C.

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reading ‘Roman histories and Greek military manuals’.108 Brian Campbell’s valuable article on the contents of military ‘manuals’ emphasizes that it is generally not appropriate to interpret the ancients’ view of the usefulness of such literature anachronistically: such ‘manuals’ had less in the way of tactics, and more on the general conduct and virtues of military leadership, which might be drawn from speciWc exemplary Wgures.109 We need to think in terms not so much of a modern step-by-step do-it-yourself manual, but more of ‘improving’ Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, or indeed the use of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a 2,000-year-old Chinese military treatise, by business executives and aspirants at the end of the twentieth century. This emphasis on values and virtues obviously has a broader parallel in the emphasis on exempla institutionalised within Roman elite traditions, such as funerary elogia, and extended in written historiographical traditions to create less exclusive and more collective images of Roman virtue.110 In ethnographical terms, both literary evidence and, more generally, the patterning of Roman cultural and political activity in the diVerent provinces of the empire suggests the perceived importance of ‘understanding’ diVerent ethnographical types, and basing actions upon this ‘knowledge’. Most notoriously, we might think of Cicero’s advice to his brother Quintus when the latter is going out to govern the province of Asia Minor. Cicero puts great store by the speciWc ways in which Quintus will need to regard and treat his provincials: on the one hand, they already possess humanitas, and are thought to have civilized the Romans themselves, unlike Africans, Spaniards, or Gauls.111 On the other hand, Quintus should be wary of getting too close to the locals, as he will Wnd very few worthy of ancient Greece. The majority will be deceitful and unreliable, too sycophantic from their years of enslavement to Rome.112 The civilized character of Greeks, their unreliability, and the eVects of 108

109 Cf. Cic. Font; Pliny Ep 8. 14. 4–5. Campbell 1987. On possible tendencies of this kind in Cato’s Origines, see Astin 1978: 231–3; cf. Kraus 1994: 26–7, and now Chaplin 2000 for these sorts of issues in Livy. On the idea of getting exempla from reading, see Quintilian 12. 29–30; Cic. Amic. 10; OV. 2. 46–7. 111 112 Q fr. 1. 1. 27–8; cf. 1. 1. 6. Ibid. 1.1. 16. 110

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Roman rule are all ‘commonplaces’, but are framed here within the context of advice on how to govern.113 We might also think about the way in which the emperor Trajan ‘interprets’ Pliny the Younger’s news about the unsuccessful rebuilding of the gymnasium of Nicaea in Bithynia-Pontus. ‘Gymnasiis indulgent Graeculi’—‘Greekies love their gymnasia’—says Trajan, and we have a powerful sense of how ‘commonplaces’ about Greeks inform interpretations of their actions and of how in turn these may aVect something like what we would call ‘policy’.114 We might well expect such conscious use of literary ethnographical traditions of emperors and consular individuals whose literary writings, however ‘factual’, were an important means of self-fashioning, of promoting themselves as exemplary advisers and governors by parading their ‘scientiWc’ knowledge. There are, however, tantalising glimpses of a more widespread ‘ethnography in practice’. For example, at the slave market, sellers were obliged to declare the natio, the slave’s origins, apparently an important detail for buyers, no doubt because of the perceived value and character of certain nationes and their perceived suitability for particular kinds of work. One can only speculate on the prevalence of ‘improving’ on actual nationes amongst sellers, while within the household more prestigious and suitable roots could be hinted at by a new name.115 A fragmentary document found at Vindolanda, the purpose of which is unknown, the diminutive Brittunculi, to be compared with Graeculi, is attested in a depiction of the military peculiarities of the Britons. ‘The Brittunculi’, the fragment reads, ‘do not mount to throw javelins’. It is possible that this is a kind of ‘Weld’ ethnography, which might be compared with observations in Caesar’s Gallic War on how horses are and are not used by barbarians in battle.116

113

Cf. also Q fr. 1. 1. 19 for a justiWcation of not listening to ‘Paconius’ (identity unknown) on the grounds that he is ‘not even a Greek, but more of a Mysian or Phrygian’; cf. Vasaly 1993: 191–226 on the use of ethnic commonplaces in Cicero’s forensic oratory. 114 Pliny Ep. 10, 40, 2; Alcock 1993: 224; Woolf 1994. 115 Ulpian Dig. 21. 1. 31. 21; Noy 2000: ch. 8; for the reinvention of slaves as ‘Greek’ in the household, see below, Ch. 4, § 6. 116 Bowman and Thomas 1994: 164. 1. 5; Caesar B Gall. 4. 2.

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Texts also warned of the terrible things that could happen if someone did not ‘know’ their ethnographical types, reinforcing a sense of didactic purpose.117 Thus, Velleius Paterculus has the negative example of Varus getting into trouble by misunderstanding the Germans, imagining that they could be ‘tamed’ by the introduction of law. Of course, he comes to a sticky end: the Germans in a kind of role-reversal deceive him by pretending to go along with his plans, repeatedly bringing lawsuits and apparently becoming thoroughly Roman in their newly litigious bent, while in the meantime preparing rebellion on a massive scale. If Varus had taken advantage of available ‘knowledge’ about the Germans he would at least have ‘known’ their reputation for being far from peace-loving.118 On the other hand, this episode also dramatizes the complexity of putting ethnographical and anthropological lore into practice: the Germans, after all, subvert the expected results of ‘civilization’ and emphasize the fact that imaginative and perspicacious application of lore is the duty of the good general. There are, of course, suggestions in earlier Greek literature of a causal link being made between ethnographical information and a narrative of conquest. Herodotus was probably the Wrst to make a link in narrative between ethnographical ‘excursuses’ and conquest: the ‘excursuses’ zoom in on peoples reached by the progress of the Persian army. But he goes further than this, suggesting a link between ethnographical information—in this case, the particular nomoi of peoples—and what happens to them in historical terms. For my purposes, one of Herodotus’ most interesting suggestions is the link between imperial success and the adaptation to foreign ways and innovations that I have already mentioned. However, connections between 117

Cf. Livy Pref. 10 for the aim to set out not only examples to be followed, but also examples to be avoided. 118 Vell. Pat. 2, 117–18; the theme of cunning and deceitful barbarians able to cause trouble by adopting and manipulating Roman ways of doing things is a leitmotif in Velleius Paterculus’ second book as a whole. Caesar’s Gauls are perhaps more conventional in their simplistic understanding of ethnography: they Wnd it hard to take seriously Roman siege-machines, propelled by such tiny men (B Gall. 2. 30, cf. 4. 5 for the gullibility of Gauls, sounding here like bad ancient historians according to Thucydides, inclined to believe everything they are told).

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ethnographical ‘understanding’ and actions in the world of the late Republic and early empire seem to be very much more farreaching, partly due to the post-classical consciousness of the Romans, and partly due to changing Roman interpretations of what rule meant. From the end of the Republic at least, expressions of the meaning of Roman rule in heightened passages regularly suggest that it can be ideally conceptualised as proactive, able and willing to impose or transform mores, even a divinely inspired ‘mission’.119 It is possible to gain a vivid sense of the gap between the classical Greek and early Roman imperial worlds by comparing Tacitus’ ethnographical ‘excursus’ on the Jews in the Wfth book of his Histories with Herodotus’ ethnographical ‘excursuses’ in the course of his narrative of the Persian Wars. There are to some extent similarities, and Tacitus surely either knows Herodotus’ account of Egypt, or its reception, widespread in the Hellenistic world and clearly an important starting-point for ‘barbarian’ self-accounts. For example, the Egyptianness of the Jews of Judaea is frequently picked up on, whether by the introduction of a version of Jewish identity which makes the Jews ‘really’ Egyptian, or through making the Jews topsyturvy versions of Romans, in much the same way as Herodotus’ Egyptians were topsy-turvy versions of Greeks, or through direct comparison of Jews with Egyptians.120 Tacitus also picks up on the general idea of the problem of inXexibility of customs, an emphatic aspect of his ethnography of the Jews. Beyond this, however, there are striking shifts of emphasis: Jewish separatism is much more actively and explicitly implicated in the downfall of the Jews than the inXexibility of nomoi ever is in Herodotus’ Histories. The Jews both exacerbate the Romans in not yielding to them, and are ultimately tragically unable to save themselves when they receive bad omens because of their own inability to allow themselves to do what others do: to seek expiation through sacriWce or vows.121 While there is some irony in the ability of both Jews and Romans to interpret 119 Schmidt 1980: 97–104 for the argument that links between ethnography and Rome’s ‘mission’ of world-rule were made by Posidonius. Clarke 1999a: ch. 3 with Appendix B, for judicious treatment of ‘fragments’ of Posidonius. 120 121 e.g. Hist. 5. 2, 5. 4. Ibid. 5. 10, 5. 13.

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in their own favour a prophecy that people coming from Judaea will rule the world, the Jews’ separatism puts them in the way of the Romans’ ‘mission’: when Rome cannot naturalize, she can only destroy. Throughout this chapter, we have been discussing distinctively Roman ways of conceptualizing conquest and empire through ethnographical modes of thought. However, it has sometimes been suggested that, since ‘scientiWc’ literature— or, one might easily say, literature in general—is not ‘native’ to the Romans, we should look elsewhere in order to Wnd distinctively Roman ways of organizing and characterizing the world. In these discussions, the triumph is generally held up as a prime example of a ‘pure’ Roman means of enacting conquest.122 In fact, however, late Republican and early imperial antiquarian accounts of the triumph tended rather to think in terms of reception from other peoples, not just the Etruscans, but the Greeks too. It is worth emphasizing that, in Roman perceptions of this period, there was rarely anything hoarily ‘native’ about Etruscan, as opposed to Greek, culture. In both cases, it was possible to stress either its naturalization as a constituent part of a composite Roman culture, or its foreignness, or indeed—and commonly—both. It is rather the modern reception of Etruscan culture that has tended to seek in it the less ‘foreign’ and more ‘authentic’ aspects of Roman culture.123 Undoubtedly, however, the triumph was perceived in antiquity to be a prime means of characterizing a speciWcally Roman way of enacting power in conjunction with the display of the conquered. It is this perceived importance that is enacted in the Augustan inscribed list of triumphs that begins with that of Romulus and ends with the African triumph of L. Cornelius Balbus in 19 bc (the last individual outside the princeps or his family to celebrate a full triumph), raising questions about the relationship of Augustus and the Augustan principate to a past thus constructed.124 It is this perceived importance that 122

Rawson 1985: 257; Wiseman 1985b; Williams 2001a: 35–6. e.g. Varro Ling. 6. 68 for etymological links to the Greek thriambos; for attempts to convert Roman assertions of the Etruscan origins of the triumph into ‘fact’ by independent evidence, see Versnel 1970: 284 V.; see now Beard 2003: 28 for a brief critique of Versnel. 124 Ogilvie and Drummond 1989: 19–20; cf. Cornell 1989: 289–91. 123

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occasions the outsiders’ responses on which our own perceptions of ‘what really happened’ in the triumph are substantially based. Thus, Polybius singles out the triumph in the course of his cultural and ethical explanations of Roman success in his sixth book, a vivid spectacle that displays the general’s deeds before the gaze of the Roman people.125 In his Jewish War, Josephus anticipates the triumph of Vespasian and Titus and the fate that awaits the Jews plunging misguidedly into war, explains rituals and landmarks, and describes the terrible events, an interpreter of Roman custom, in this case the Roman punishment of the Jews.126 For Tertullian, the triumph provided a suggestive means to frame his arguments against the power of the emperor and Rome itself within the divine sphere.127 My own pre-literary history of the Roman triumph would seek to understand it within the context of cultural contacts with other peoples, and shifting processes of selection, appropriation, and distancing attendant on these. The display of bloodied spoils in fourth-century central Italian vase- and tomb-paintings of victorious individuals is certainly suggestive, particularly given the importance of ‘Greek’ motifs in the composition and execution of such paintings. The display of bloodied spoils is not something that we associate with ‘Greek’ culture. We might want to trace connections with the Roman institution of the spolia opima, the emphasis on displaying the subjected enemy that we shall see below, and even, at a slight remove, the attribution to individuals of hereditary cognomina—Africanus, Macedonicus, Germanicus, or in the case of Trajan, the triple formula of Germanicus Dacius Parthicus— whereby the name of the conquered people becomes a badge of individual success.128 Importantly, however, in the case of central Italian artistic representation of bloodied spoils, a distinctive cultural practice is depicted through a ‘Greek’ artistic 126 Polyb. 6. 15. 7–8. BJ 7. 121 V. and esp. 130, 145, 153, 154. e.g. Apol. 25. 5–7, 30. 2, cf. 33. 4 for the triumph as a Wgure in his arguments against the power of the emperor and Rome itself within the divine sphere. The development of a Christian literary stance by authors such as Tertullian, simultaneously engaging with Roman literary and cultural frameworks and asserting distinctiveness, should remind us in many ways of early Roman literature. 128 McCormick 1986: 21–2. 125 127

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‘language’.129 Indeed, particularly in central Italian tombpainting of this period, the imagery of victory more generally engages closely with that of the Hellenistic successors of Alexander: it is very dangerous to polarize ‘Greek’ and ‘native’.130 As the Roman historiographical tradition develops, the recording of triumphs over (sometimes multiple) named peoples within individual consular years seems to ‘continue’ modes of remembering and memorializing the past before Roman literature, in triumphal lists or funerary inscriptions. However, we should be wary of regarding pre-literary modes of recording the past as ‘purely native’ forms. For example, the archaizing inscription on the tomb of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul of 298 (probably dating to the early second century in its present form), and cataloguing his military successes in South Italy, praises his ‘forma virtutei parisuma’, his ‘beauty equivalent to his virtue’, a Latinized version of the wholly traditional, Greek formula kalos kagathos.131 Literary accounts similarly write the distinctively Roman triumph into older traditions on imperial conquest, and make triumphal displays enact ‘scientiWc’, ethnographical modes of thought. Such accounts emphasize the display of the conquered within his cultural context, and the lessons that are to be learned from this draw on old traditions about the order of the world and its geographical and cultural meanings. One powerful leitmotif in later accounts of fourth- to early second-century triumphs is the display of luxury, which may be interpreted simultaneously as an explanation for succumbing to conquest and a danger-sign for the Romans themselves, recipients of such wealth and such goods.132 While accounts of triumphs are imbued with these old historical lessons about the rise and fall of states, it is important also to note the emphasis on cultural and physical particularity in these stories: Marcellus’ display of enormous Gauls; Perseus of Macedon in dark robes and high 129

130 Nicolet 1962; Frederiksen 1968. Weinstock 1957. ILLRP 309, with the important article Zevi 1970, esp 70–1. N B: the startling nature of the very Greek virtues of an Alcibiades-like Wgure within a culture that self-consciously deprecated physical beauty, e.g. in cognomina based on physical peculiarity and ugliness. 132 See, succinctly, Purcell 1994a: 389–90. 131

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boots.133 The connection between the ‘science’ of ethnography and triumphal pageants is clearest in accounts of triumphs of the Augustan age and early imperial period, the depiction of a more or less comprehensive geography of the conquered land and ethnography of its people. Such pageants ‘described’ a conquered people and their land: mountains and rivers, peoples and individual leaders, wonders including exotic animals, labelled and interpreted for and by Roman audiences, framed by Roman defeat. An ethnographical perspective was reXected in the categories and interests of the triumphal procession: the interconnection of peoples and lands, the interest in topographical features, the display of ‘wonders’, and even the choice of ‘geographical’ categories of peoples within which individual cities were subsumed are features of the ethnographical tradition, while the symbolism of power is a more distinctively Roman feature.134 A further development in the display of conquered peoples emerges at the end of the Republic in both concrete and literary form. This is the representation of individualized personiWcations of the conquered peoples of the Roman empire, and is perhaps to be linked to the particular kinds of connections between individuals and world conquest and world rule that begin to be made from the age of Pompey. We know more about some of the earliest manifestations of this new phenomenon by report than by surviving material evidence, but it is surely no coincidence that these world parades are linked to the monuments of individuals: Pompey’s theatre, with its personiWcations of fourteen peoples, or Agrippa’s portico with representations of the peoples of the whole world.135 We have, of course, a famous literary version of such displays: the triumphal procession of Augustus represented on the Shield of Aeneas at the end of Vergil’s Aeneid Book 8, no longer a ‘mere’ triple triumph after Actium, but a world conquest over rivers and peoples of the corners of the earth, with all their variegated costumes and tongues.136 Bert Smith showed that the 133

e.g. Plut. Marc. 8; Aem. Paul. 33–4. e.g. Propertius 3. 4; Ov. AA 1. 177–228; Joseph. BJ 7. 133; for the Arch of Titus, see Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 223, Wg. 5.2. 135 Pliny NH 36, 41; Suet. Nero 46. 136 8. 724–8: see particularly the Morini, ‘extremi hominum’. 134

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spectacular early imperial personiWcations from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias were based on such models. These were labelled female Wgures, which originally included personiWcations of Jews, Egyptians, Dacians, and possibly Ethiopians, as well as Crete and Cyprus, their dress and hairstyles apparently diVerentiated with care to reXect degrees of barbarism and civilization. Smith’s arguments that this collection reXect Roman as opposed to Greek modes of conceptualizing the world are highly suggestive. While there is evidence for ethnic parades on the part of Hellenistic kings, there is none for the display of conquered peoples, a peculiarly Roman way of enacting and describing their position in the world that is such a striking aspect of the monuments of the imperial city.137 7. T RANSF ORMATIONS Towards the end of his Germania, while zooming in on distinctive features of the individual tribes that make up the Suebi, Tacitus identiWes the Naharvali (or Naharnavali: there are manuscript variations), a hill-tribe: ‘Amongst the Naharvali, a grove of ancient sanctity is shown. Over it presides a priest in female dress, but their names for the gods are, in Roman translation, Castor and Pollux. The divine attributes are the same, although their name is Alci. There are no images, no trace of foreign superstition; but they are worshipped as brothers, as young men.’138 The signiWcance of Tacitus’ phrase, interpretatione Romana, ‘in Roman translation’, within the contexts of the text itself, and of more general perceptions of the nature of empire in Tacitus’ work as a whole, has been little noted. This is largely because the phrase interpretatio Romana, and its invented cognate, interpretatio Graeca, have been appropriated by modern classical scholars as pseudo-technical terms to refer more broadly to any metaphorical ‘translation’ of foreign concepts or ideas in Roman and Greek texts. Thus, such vocabulary is commonly applied as often to Herodotus as it is to Tacitus. 137 Smith 1988: 70–7; Schneider 1986; Ferris 2000; cf. most recently Edwards 2003. 138 43. 4.

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Clearly, however, the phrase interpretatione Romana has peculiar signiWcance within the context of a text that is extremely interested in the transformation of Germany, the Germans, and German culture that signiWes the encroachment of Roman rule. Tacitus’ ethnographic gaze surveys a natural and human landscape in Xux, unshaped, lacking, and unattractive before experiencing the eVects of Roman contact: an almost ‘text-book’ appeal to traditional ethnographical categories and themes highlights his subversion of them.139 Thus, for example, on the Germans’ lack of silver and gold to be mined, he muses rhetorically as to whether this is through the mercy or the wrath of the gods.140 In his treatment of the ethnographer’s category of ‘marriage-customs’, and ‘social customs’, the Germans do not go in for shows, for billets-doux, or adultery; they do not use wet-nurses, or go in for legacy-hunting, or allow freedmen to enter into politics.141 With contact, the vacuum may be Wlled, the formless shaped, the poor enriched. One of Tacitus’ organizational principles is the relative distance of individual German peoples from Rome and Roman rule and the consequent degree of Roman inXuence. Above all, he is interested in the change in perceptions that is involved in the appreciation of ‘luxury’, beyond the mere spread of material goods. Thus, for example, certain Germans have been given silver vases, but do not know their value: they do not therefore distinguish them in the way they treat them from simple coarse-ware. In contrast, the ‘nearest ones’ both recognize the value of Roman money, and prefer certain coins to others: the implication is that these latter people are further down the route of corruption than the former.142 There is a poignant passage about the German collection of amber, which occurs naturally: they collect amber in its raw state, to be treated and ‘shaped’ by the Romans for their luxury use, ‘amazed’ at the price they are given for it. There is a sense of foreboding, as 139 The classic work on the Germania is Norden’s commentary of 1923; Dorey 1969 provides a useful introduction; Rives 1999b is indispensible. For my purposes, O’Gorman 1993 is a very suggestive reading. 140 Tac. Germ. 5; for the ‘problem’ of gold within Greek and Roman thought, see Rives 1999b: 133. 141 142 Tac. Germ. 19, 20, 25. Ibid. 5.

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one wonders how long German innocence of the value of luxury can remain in this instance.143 The ‘Roman translation’ of the gods of the Naharvali thus signals the potential transformation even of this emphatically strange and explicitly untouched, aniconic cult with its transvestite priest. The cult’s innocence of ‘foreign superstition’ emphasizes the ways in which Germany functions as a model of primitivism, constantly evoking the counter-example of contemporary, imperial Rome. Tacitus’ German primitives by no means always display morally ideal behaviour, despite the esteem in which the text was held in some quarters during the Third Reich. As quintessential ‘northern barbarians’, they are, for example, prone to drunkenness that can be encouraged by those who want to conquer them; unable to tolerate sustained hard work, thirst, or heat; and lazy when not actually Wghting wars.144 On the other hand, the Germans not infrequently evoke Rome’s own past, and particularly her Republican past. Most clearly in the Annals, both the system of empire and Rome’s domination of other peoples are ultimately inevitable necessities. However, a keen interest in libertas runs throughout Tacitus’ works and invites ironic links between the ‘enslavement’ of Rome’s subjects to her imperial rule and Rome’s own ‘enslavement’ to emperors in her recent past, as well as highlighting (with some nostalgia) challenges to this ‘enslavement’, both at home and abroad.145 The aniconic cult of the Nahavarli thus invites comparison with Rome and raises questions about moral superiority in the religious sphere. If ‘superstition’ was, in Tacitus’ day, most immediately the means of denoting ‘bad’—and indeed dangerous and threatening—religion from a Roman perspective, in this passage it is ‘good’ Roman religion with its Wgurative religious imagery that is thus perceived from the perspective of German primitivism.146 The depiction of the process of ‘translation’ as ‘Roman’ as opposed to ‘Latin’ is also signiWcant: here, as elsewhere, it denotes an emphatically political, rather than ‘just’ a cultural phenomenon.147 143 145 146 147

144 Ibid. 45. 5. Ibid. 23, 4, 15, respectively. See above all Pelling 1993; Ginsburg 1993. For superstition as ‘bad’ religion, see Gordon 1990; Rives 1999a. Cf. Ch. 5, n. 45, below.

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These reXections on the signiWcance of ‘Roman translation’ in the Germania invite comparison with a notorious passage of the Agricola, widely believed to be a more or less contemporary work. In the passage in question, Tacitus’ father-in-law, the Agricola of the title, and a case-study of both good generalship and life under tyranny, is made to ‘settle down’ the ancient Britons: For in order to accustom uncivilised, bellicose men who lived in scattered homes to peace and leisure through pleasures, he privately encouraged and publicly aided them to build temples, fora, houses, praising the keen and punishing the indolent: thus competition to be esteemed by him took the place of compulsion. Furthermore, he educated the sons of princes in liberal arts, and valued the native intelligence of the Britons above the hard graft of the Gauls, with the result that those who had recently refused to accept the Roman language desired to learn oratory. Thus even our dress was esteemed and the toga much seen; gradually, they descended to the seductions of our vices, to porticos, baths and the reWnement of dinners. This was called humanitas, civilisation, amongst the ignorant, although it was an aspect of their enslavement.148

It is the evocation of pleasures, as well as of enslavement, that should immediately alert us to the fact that Tacitus is writing within an ancient tradition of perceptions of the nature and eVects of imperial rule. It is this very appropriation of ancient traditions that, I would argue, enhances the interest of this text in the context of the present discussion. By exploring older traditions of the theme of imperial transformations, we can come closer to speciWcally Roman modes of characterizing identity and rule. There has recently been considerable unease, particularly amongst archaeologists of Roman Britain, about the use of Roman literature to frame and interpret provincials’ experience of Roman rule. The particular concern has been that using Roman literature entails reproducing ‘colonializing’ mentalities, Roman imperializing perspectives that are, it is often 148 On Agricola 21, see e.g. Liebeschuetz 1966; Clarke 2001. While the slipperiness of categories of Roman and non-Roman is emphasized in the latter article, I remain unclear about how exactly this morally ambivalent passage works within an account of Agricola’s Res Gestae.

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supposed, shared by traditionally trained classical scholars, and inhibits recovery of ‘the point of view of the colonized’.149 To some extent, this unease continues considerably older attempts to challenge a more Romanocentric view of empire: the agency and perspective of provincials was emphatic in Be´nabou’s important studies of resistance in Roman North Africa.150 However, it is also symptomatic of a disciplinary agenda peculiar to archaeologists of the classical period in the English-speaking world: the relatively recent attempt to establish archaeology as a discipline independent from classics. Such concerns implicitly (but, to my knowledge, never explicitly) raise larger problems about how one links material evidence to a (more or less known) historical narrative, and indeed what kind of alternative narrative might be written from material evidence. In practice, however, there is a tendency simply to replace the ‘biased’, Romanocentric narrative with one borrowed from a very diVerent chronological and political context. It is with considerable irony that Webster and Cooper, in their overt adoption of models of ‘postcolonialism’ to interpret the Roman empire, reject Roman literature for its ‘bias’, while enthusiastically accepting Edward Said’s reinterpretation of the British empire from the perspective of the subjects. They seem somehow to have overlooked the fact that Said’s study is based on his readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘English literature’ in the most old-fashioned sense, such as the novels of Jane Austen.151 The result is an understanding of empire based explicitly on polarized categories of ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’, and, by implication, a phenomenon that is constant across vast chronological, cultural, and political space, from the Roman empire to 149 Webster in her introduction to Webster and Cooper 1996. Alston’s article in this collection on the Roman ‘integrating mentality’ might be read as a quiet criticism of the volume as a whole, as his conclusions undermine all its central theses. Mattingly 1997 is to some extent similar in outlook to Webster and Cooper, but has the virtue of being interested in non-British intellectual traditions; Laurence 2001: 2 for a succinct critique of the assumed dichotomies of ‘Roman’ and ‘native’ (or ‘colonizers’ and ‘colonized’?); cf. Dench 2004 for perceptions of ‘classicists’. 150 Be´nabou 1976. 151 Said 1993, cited in Webster’s introduction to Webster and Cooper 1996.

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the postcolonial aftermath of the British. Roman literature itself is also hard to understand as the exclusive property of the ‘colonizers’. For example, the passage of the Agricola quoted above raises profound moral problems, and issues of perspective and sympathy. Agricola himself is a new man, traditionally in Roman thought an incorporated outsider who retains the moral qualities associated with his original distance from Roman corruption. To survive the tyranny of Domitian is to learn lessons of compromise, to endure slavery, even to be complicit in the crimes of tyrannical regimes. The doomed Wgure of Calgacus the Caledonian, outspoken critic of Roman domination and morality, is a nostalgic if not ultimately viable alternative to Agricola’s partial implication in the enslavement that is Roman imperial rule and the enslavement that is Domitian’s reign.152 The Agricola, then, powerfully exploits a sense of outsider and insider as relative categories, placed on a sliding scale rather than as mutually exclusive, polarized entities. Dramas of this kind recur in Roman literature, and it is perhaps this manner of representing Rome’s potential to integrate and incorporate that most clearly suggests the distance between the Roman and the British imperial models. It is interesting that literature of the British empire did in fact Wctionalize a permeability between rulers/colonists and subjects/colonized in the recurrent theme of ‘going native’. This is a nightmare that is the reverse of Roman dramas of integration/corruption, and that partially undermines the conWdence in racial and cultural superiority, the imperial mission as one of conferring material and spiritual improvement.153 The relatively new interest in moving beyond comparisons of Roman and British empires to write more general comparative accounts of the phenomenon of empire has explored the nature of the interface between rulers and ruled in terms of culture and personnel. A broad general conclusion about the nature of the Roman empire is that it is relatively ‘integrated’, certainly considerably less so than the Inca empire, seen as an extreme model of ‘integration’.154 The somewhat limited interpretative value of such Wndings might well 152 154

153 See esp. Agr. 1–4, 30–2, 42, 45. Colley 2002. See e.g. Alcock et al. 2001; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 316–17.

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encourage us to move on from these experiments in considering empire as a single phenomenon: indeed, any attempt to arrive at a universal deWnition of ‘empire’ is bound to result in banality. What has, however, emerged in this chapter is that Roman ethnographical thought appropriates, adapts, and subverts traditional ancient Mediterranean modes of thinking about empire: the Roman empire is both identiWed with a genealogy of empire and distinguished from it. I shall now brieXy explore this process of identiWcation and distinction. Agricola’s introduction of pleasures amongst the Britons closely, and surely consciously, recalls a passage of Herodotus’ Histories where Cyrus, on conquering Lydia, is advised by Croesus to ‘settle down’ the Lydians. He should do this by having them wear luxurious clothing and learn to play the lyre, dance, and become shop-keepers, thus making them more like women than men.155 Croesus’ advice here is linked to a broad explanatory framework of the rise and fall of imperial power in the Histories, the reception of pleasure and luxury, linked in turn to the thesis of cultural receptivity and resistance more generally, a thesis mentioned above, in Section 4.156 Thus, within the course of Herodotus’ narrative, the Persians are shown obliquely to learn pleasures. Before the conquest of Lydia, the Lydians perceive the Persians as a people who eat no puddings, and are warned that they will not be able to let go of the luxuries of Lydia once they have set eyes on them.157 In the ‘ethnography’ of Persia, we learn casually that the Persians go in for lots of afters, all served separately: a meal—speciWcally a Persian meal—is not a meal without such courses.158 I would emphasize two points in this discussion of Herodotus. The Wrst is related speciWcally to the Histories, and is that, while 155

Hdt. 1. 155. Cf. Lateiner 1989: 150–1; cf. Moles 1996 for the theme of empire and corruption in Herodotus more generally; cf. Dubuisson 1982 for the Greek vocabulary of ‘acculturation’. The Athenians are occasionally in classical thought maintained to be receptive to foreign languages and cultures: [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2. 8 for the idea that the Athenians draw on the languages of both Greeks and barbarians; the Byzantine scholar Photius claimed that Plato said that Greeks learn things from barbarians and improve on what they have learned, while Athenians do this more than any of the other Greeks: Cod. 249, 441a22 (Bekker). 157 158 Hdt. 1. 71. Ibid. 1. 133. 156

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Herodotus’ Persians are ‘naturally’ receptive to pleasures, the ‘oriental’ luxury that is so strongly associated with Persians in Wfth-century Athenian ideology is here learned, and the implication might well be that other ‘imperial’ powers can learn it too. The other concerns the relationship between Tacitus Agricola 21 and Herodotus Histories 1. 155. Within the context of the themes of cultural receptivity in general and the reception of pleasures speciWcally in Herodotus’ Histories, the emphasis on the agency of the conqueror is striking and highly unusual. Indeed, when, in the Hellenistic age, tryphe¯, ‘luxury’, becomes a major explanatory device for the decline and fall of, especially, the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily, ultimately to Roman imperial power, it is growing luxuriousness that precedes conquest.159 Conventionally, great powers bring disastrous decadence upon themselves rather than have it imposed by their conquerors. The emphasis on Agricola’s agency in Agricola 21, which, as we shall see, has tended to be played down in modern accounts of the modes of cultural change in northern Europe, thus represents a highly signiWcant selection from ancient traditions. The notion that Alexander the Great deliberately set out to ‘Hellenize’, ‘civilize’, and culturally unite the areas he conquered is, in itself very interestingly, one that belongs to the Roman imperial period rather than to his contemporaries.160 But it is clear that, in creating their imperial ideologies, the Hellenistic kingdoms used the cultural distance between rulers and ruled as much as they asserted their inheritance of ‘native’ modes of rule. Occasionally attested post-classical reiWcations of ‘Greekness’ as essentially an alien cultural and/or politico-religious entity in the eastern Mediterranean are a symptom simultaneously of this projected distance and of becoming acquainted—in the case of the Jews of Jerusalem, to some extent apparently forcibly so— with Greek culture as the possession of the powerful.161 Conversely, in the very diVerent political dynamics of the western Mediterranean, the reiWcation of ‘Greekness’ was played out by the drama of being under threat, in danger of forgetting language and customs, of becoming ‘barbarized’.162 159 161 162

160 See e.g. Purcell 1994a. Cf. Ch. 4, § 3, below. See, succinctly, Ma 2003. For Ptolemaic Egypt see Stephens 2003. Dench 1995: 50–3 with bibliography.

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For Polybius, Rome’s inheritance of imperial world rule is marked above all by changes to her nature attendant on the conquest of Macedon. While Polybius’ account leaves the reader in no doubt about the impact and eVects of Roman rule on the Greek world, interest in the morally-laden ancient Mediterranean version of ‘cultural change’ is focused exclusively on the Roman rulers themselves. As they become masters of the Mediterranean, Polybius’ Romans exhibit clearly a signiWcantly modiWed version of the morally ambivalent trait of imperial success, receptivity. Thus, the Romans, on recognizing the excellence of Greek shields, begin to ‘copy’ them.163 The notion of learning by imitation has a long history, and plays an important role in sophistic and later philosophical ‘anthropologies’ of the development of human culture and civilization, to a considerable extent challenging more traditional explanations based on gifts from gods to men. Polybius’ commentary on Roman reception of Greek arms reminds us most of all of Herodotus’ Persians: one of the Romans’ strong points is their willingness ‘to adopt new customs and to emulate what they see is better done by others’. The signiWcant modiWcation here is the Romans’ interest in selfimprovement, linked surely to Polybius’ desire to explain the extraordinary rise of Rome and in particular her domination of previous world powers. Here, as elsewhere, Roman imperial success seems altogether a more dynamic, more proactive business than that of her predecessors.164 Nevertheless, as we have already seen, within Polybius’ account Rome also becomes permeated with learned vices, such as Wnancial corruption, adopted from the Greek world. Most notoriously, Polybius gives a version of Cato the Elder’s speech before the people on the after-eVects of the conquest of Macedon and Rome’s newly unchallenged hegemony over the Mediterranean world. Prizing pretty boys and caviar above ‘traditional’, landbased Roman values is part and parcel of the political and social breakdown theorized in Book Six. It is not, incidentally, the mere ‘immigration’ of foreign vices but their use by elite men involved in the disreputable activity of ‘courting the people’ that is the problem.165 163

Polyb. 6. 25. Cf. Strabo 9. 22 for the Romans learning diplomacy when they began dealing with Greeks, and using it to become masters of all. 165 Polyb. 31. 25. 164

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As we have seen, the theme of corruption by pleasures and learned vices was long associated with over-success. However, apart from the isolated example of the advice to Cyrus to ‘settle down’ the Lydians, there is very little interest in the moral/ cultural eVects of conquest and rule on the conquered before the later Wrst century bc. It is, however, signiWcant that a precursor of Horace’s famous paradox of a captured Greece capturing Latium appears in a second-century fragment.166 As we have seen, within the Hellenistic kingdoms emphasis on the cultural superiority of Greekness sometimes replaced, and sometimes appeared alongside displays of mastery through the very cultural variegation of their subjects in a manner inherited from Achaemenid Persia. Thus, Rome’s new mastery of the Mediterranean was dramatized also as a culture war within which the outcome was very diVerent. It is, however, in the Jugurtha of Sallust, written at the very end of the Republic, and highly inXuential on Tacitus’ portrayal of the processes of empire, that the imperial experience of transformation is generalized in a single narrative to draw in both the Romans and their subjects. This narrative was written at a time when Roman perceptions of the potential and actual relationship between rulers and subjects were changing, due not least to the eVects of the enfranchisement of Italy, the progressive link between the citizenship and individual patronage, and grants of extraordinary and less circumscribed imperium to individuals. The imperial world of the Jugurtha is a gloomy and decidedly claustrophobic place, the eVects of Roman rule spilling over onto the ruled. The Roman ‘new man’ Marius and the Numidian prince Jugurtha function as virtual doubles, the corruption of each mirrored by that of the other.167 The corrupt environment of the Roman nobles sets oV a chain reaction, a knock on eVect that pulls in ‘outsiders’ to Rome. More accurately, Sallust’s narrative emphasizes a blurring of ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’, particularly in the moral dimension, and we are prepared for this process by his remarks in the Preface on the

166

Cf. Ch. 5, § 4, below. Kraus and Woodman 1997: 23–4. Amongst older works, Vretska 1955 remains very useful. On Sallustian geography, also highly relevant to perceptions of empire, see Scanlon 1988; Berthier 1976. 167

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contemporary corruption of even the new men.168 Thus Jugurtha arrives in Rome to be Wred up by the nobles’ talk, especially the catch-phrase ‘everything at Rome can be bought’.169 His own journey to moral, and ultimately physical, ruin is inextricably linked with the corruption and treachery of others, including the noble consul Metellus: in a striking passage, Jugurtha is made to become aware that Metellus’ double-dealing matches his own.170 Meanwhile, the noble Metellus is meeting his match in the new man Marius, whose own awakened ambition is kick-started into its evil progress by Metellus’ arrogance.171 In a structurally highly satisfactory way, Jugurtha is ultimately caught in a trap set by Marius that involves the treachery of the African Bocchus.172 There are no heroes free from moral corruption in the Jugurtha, and there is a blurring in the moral sphere in which so much of Sallust’s narrative operates, between Rome and Africa, new men and nobles. It is hard to overestimate the signiWcance of the Jugurtha for an account of the development of speciWcally Roman modes of writing imperial transformation. The narrative represents the dark side of what is progressively portrayed elsewhere—from Cicero’s advice to Quintus on the government of Asia Minor to Anchises’ advice from the underworld to the ‘Roman’ reader—as Rome’s moral, cultural and indeed religious ‘mission’ to transform her subjects. Within the context of ancient Mediterranean perceptions of empire, Rome’s imagined tendencies are decidedly proactive, intrusive. It is worth emphasizing this given recent tendencies in the writing of provincial cultural change. Agricola 21, read in the course of the twentieth century as support for quite diVerent models of ‘Romanization’ or ‘becoming Roman’, by, for example, HaverWeld, Millett, and Woolf, has most recently been cited in support of a shift of emphasis away from Roman agency towards that of the Britons, and particularly elite Britons.173 While I remain nervous of attempts to plot evidence of changes in provincial material culture simplistically on to a Roman literary ‘map’, I would nevertheless uphold the usefulness of the modes of thought that we have been exploring in this 168

Iug. 4. 7–8; cf. Oniga 1995: 9–10 for the importance of the theme of integration of foreigners throughout Sallust’s work. 169 170 Iug. 8. 1; cf. 20. 1, 28. 1, 35. 10. Ibid. 48. 1. 171 172 Ibid. 63. Ibid. 103. 173 HaverWeld 1915: 14; Millett 1990: 69–74; Woolf 1998: 68–72.

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chapter, and those that we shall explore in this book as a whole, as models, aspirations, targets, or indeed as ways of defending behaviour. Agricola 21 is, however, neither a charter nor a description of ‘do-it-yourself’ Romanization, but a morally problematic exploration of a ‘good governor’ who chooses to play down the ability to punish and compel that is available to him.174 8. CO N CL U S I O N A number of very diVerent chapters on ‘Roman Ethnographies’ could be written, and some eloquent examples have in fact been written. I would single out Elizabeth Rawson’s chapter on ‘Geography and Ethnography’ in her 1985 volume, Intellectual Life in the Late Republic (pp. 250–66), a discussion that is a particularly useful guide to the often highly fragmentary geographical and ethnographical information relating to (especially) the last decades of the late Republic. However, this chapter, like the work as a whole, is concerned with the ‘specialization’ of ancient intellectual traditions, emphasizes the association of such pursuits with leisure, and, while allowing for the impact of political and social change (such as the conquest of Italy, or the conquest of Greece) on intellectual developments, tends to view the latter as divorced from the conduct of politics, or from action in general.175 In addition, Roman intellectual interests are constantly measured by an implicit modern scientiWc standard, and inevitably found wanting in achievement and ‘seriousness’. There is little room here for an exploration of the kinds of emphases, interests, and enquiries with which the Roman traditions were concerned. It will, on the other hand, be obvious just how much I have gained from careful individual case-studies, particularly of individual Roman texts and passages of Roman literature, and from studies which juxtapose these to create a sense of particular kinds of tradition.176 My concerns and my ambitions have 174 Cf. J. Williams 2001b for putting agency back into our models of cultural change attendant on conquest. 175 See e.g. the assessment of Roman zoos (258): ‘But all this Roman interest was superWcial; there seems to have been little attempt to observe the animals closely, and many would probably soon have died in captivity.’ 176 For two very diVerent examples of the latter, see Richard Thomas 1982, a relatively historicizing study of, in particular, speciWcally Roman focuses on

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been rather diVerent, however. First, I have tried, by my own juxtapositions of examples (largely from Roman literature but also from other cultural forms) and by looking at broad diVerences from the classical Greek cultural traditions that are so frequently Roman cultural reference points, to identify some general tendencies not just in Latin, or even Roman literature, but in something approaching Roman ‘thought’ of the late Republic and early imperial period more generally. I recognize the potential dangers in ignoring or minimizing the particularities of artistic context, whether of diVerent genres, or of the concerns of individual artistic or textual works. I would also be quick to point out that we are dealing not with ‘facts’, but with (particularly elite) ways of thinking and talking about Rome’s place in the world that will always have a complex relationship with action and ‘policy’, let alone with broader, and especially non-elite and non-Roman perceptions of how things were. Nevertheless, I resist the ‘Latinist’s’ or art historian’s, or indeed traditional ancient historian’s tendency to view artistic production in a vacuum, in isolation from social and political contexts, from action and from ‘policy’. To the same extent that, for Denis Feeney, Latin literary texts are discourses on Roman religion, rather than ‘just’ literary exercises, and contexts and genres matter when reading them just as these considerations matter in relation to other, more ‘concrete’ forms of cultural expression, such as sanctuaries or inscriptions, I would very much want to see ethnographical literature taken as seriously as, say, the institutional structures of Roman rule.177 Taking seriously ethnographical ways of thinking about the world will not give us a complete picture of the divergent experience of the Roman empire: I Wrmly believe that only indepth local studies which combine material and textual knowledge and expertise will come anywhere close to doing that. But I have no doubt that it will help us to learn more about the speciWcs of Roman identity, aspirations, and self-perception: speciWcs that should contribute towards the creation of a clearer map of conquest, rule, and Roman history itself. primitivism and technology; and Clarke 1999a, who through her chosen casestudies (Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo), puts her Wnger on some crucial features of the genre as it develops within the context of the Roman empire. 177

Feeney 1998: 2, 7.

2 Romulus’ Asylum: the Character of the Roman Citizenship

1. I NTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE ROMAN CITIZENSHIP That it is much the best state of affairs for as many as possible to enjoy citizen rights, the city to be strong and the land not to lie shamefully deserted, as at present, I believe none of you would deny, and one may observe others who grant citizenship in the same way. Among these are the Romans, who when they manumit their slaves admit them to the citizen body and grant them a share in the magistracies, and in this way have not only enlarged their country but have sent out colonies to nearly 70 places. (Philip Vth of Macedon writing in 214 bc to the magistrates and people of Larisa in Thessaly.1)

A century after the death of Alexander, when the Romans had begun to make a serious impact on the balance of power in the Mediterranean world, Philip the Fifth of Macedon used the idea of the comparative permeability of the Roman citizenship as a model to encourage the people of Larisa in northern Greece not to prevent Greeks from neighbouring areas from joining their citizenship. This permeability of the Roman citizenship was a persistent source of fascination for the Greek world, although it was not always regarded in such positive terms. More hostile viewers of Rome could focus on the idea of profligacy with the citizenship leading to a citizen-body rooted in criminality and the dregs of society.2 But whether permeability was used to explain Roman expansion and success or Roman 1

Syll.3 543; IG 9. 2. 517; tr. Austin 1981: no. 60. Even Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in general an apologist for Rome (e.g. 2. 14. 6, cf. 2. 16 ff. for Roman success based on incorporation, in contrast with Greek exclusivity) worries about a contemporary tendency to free and enfranchise the wrong sort of criminal slaves for the wrong reasons: Ant. Rom. 4. 24. 8. 2

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degeneracy, Greek writers, like amateur anthropologists, were selecting out, interpreting, and at times exaggerating a feature that provided a striking contrast with the usually more restrictive attitudes of the Greek poleis towards their citizenships.3 The citizenship was the primary means of defining what it was to be specifically Roman, and, as we began to see in the Introduction, the peculiar permeability of the citizenship was worked out as an essential and permanent feature of Roman identity through the medium of myths of Rome’s beginnings. In addition, the incorporation of individuals and peoples within the citizenship, and even the broader idea of migration to the city of Rome, came to serve as an important metaphor for the incorporative character of Roman culture, for religion, and for language. At the end of the Republic and in the imperial period, the Roman citizenship became an increasingly extraordinary conceit within the classical world. For citizenship was traditionally imagined to be first and foremost all about the active participation in the obligations and privileges of one relatively small community, rather than a marker of social and juridical privilege wherever the citizen might travel within the Roman world.4 The extraordinary nature of the Roman citizenship is only emphasized by self-conscious use of the model of Athens, whether it is Rome’s distance from this model that is stressed, or her closeness to it. One classic example of this is to be found in the Roman Oration, a speech composed by Aelius Aristides, the Greek orator of the Antonine period. The speech itself is written within an ancient convention of the rhetorical praise of a polis, and Aelius Aristides’ Rome very quickly begins to strain at the relatively restricted boundaries of what a polis was imagined to be. For the image given of Rome’s politai, her citizens originating from the far corners of the earth, is one of physical participation in the institutions housed in the buildings of the city: ‘What a city is to its boundaries and its territories, so this city is to the whole inhabited world, as if it had been designated its common town. You would say that all the perioeci or all the people settled in different places deme by deme assemble at this 3 4

For the concept of amateur anthropology, see Dench 1995: 23. In general, Nicolet 1976: 20–1.

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one acropolis.’ Rome is explicitly imagined on the participatory model of the Athenian democracy, her territory merely magnified thousands of times.5 The model of classical Athens was not the only one into which Rome could be squeezed in the imagination: in the imperial period, the model of Italy, progressively outgrown as Roman citizens were to be found overseas in increasing numbers, is extraordinarily persistent. ‘Latin’ and ‘Italic’ rights come to define and circumscribe the rights even of far-flung communities, from Africa to Dalmatia. The term ‘Junian Latins’ describes a new category of freed slaves, who fail to meet the qualifications for full citizenship set by Augustan legislation on manumission. There is a strong sense of grappling with a gap between older, ethnically and geographically tighter models on the one hand, and an almost impossibly redefined universe on the other. The abstraction of ethnic and geographical models belonging to an older world is used to frame juridical identities in a new world. Innovation through conservatism is a familiar aspect of Roman institutions and Roman identity more generally: appeal to the mores maiorum, the ‘ways of our ancestors’, is the usual way to preface either innovation or reaction to change. This tendency is important and interesting, but can also give a misleadingly flat view of history that can help to obscure massive changes in the meaning and overtones of the Roman citizenship. For example, we must be careful how to use the various ‘songs of praise’ to the Roman citizenship that begin to proliferate especially during the early imperial period, such as Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration. Such ‘songs of praise’ are of their nature rosy: they give no sense that extensions of the citizenship were regularly and for different reasons heavily contested, often in strongly stated and downright chauvinistic terms. Similarly, as we saw in the Introduction, we should be wary of promoting Rome as the kind of ‘multicultural society’ to which liberal states in the modern world might aspire. It is as well to remember that ancient

5 Roman Oration 61 (tr. Behr 1981); for the complex intellectual environment of the ‘Second Sophistic’, see e.g. Bowie 1970; Anderson 1993; Swain 1996; Goldhill 2001b; Whitmarsh 2001.

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Rome could in living memory as convincingly be upheld as a repository of foundation myths for Italian Fascism.6 The comparative permeability of the citizenship is itself closely connected with a keen consciousness of status in Roman society, particularly from the late Republic. On the one hand, being foreign could be perceived as a transitional state, and the idea of social mobility, articulated through motifs of luck, ambition, and metamorphosis was a powerful cultural belief. On the other hand, highly restrictive ideas of what it was to be ‘really’ Roman were at times very loudly articulated, and hostile comments about foreigners could happily include large numbers of people who were resident at Rome or even Roman citizens. There are also important questions of perspective that need to be explored. Aelius Aristides’ speech offers a ‘centripetal’ perspective on the Roman citizenship, as befits a work written with the explicit purpose of praising Rome, but the concept of ‘dual’ citizenship, formulated by Cicero towards the end of the Republic, is an equally remarkable way of conceptualizing the Roman citizenship. One consequence of ‘dual’ citizenship is that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Roman citizenship was regularly exercised and exploited within purely local situations, as a juridical aspect of identity that could be asserted in order to claim differential legal treatment and penalties, relief from tribute or the civic obligations of the community in which someone lived. 2: A TALE OF TWO CITIES: ATHENS AND ROME In his particular version of the story of Romulus’ asylum, as we saw in the Introduction, Livy comments that it was a common ruse of city founders to collect a bunch of homeless and rootless people and pretend that they were ‘born of the earth’, giving a noble and sacred gloss to a seedy story. It is hard to resist the idea that Livy is alluding here to the story of the most famous of all ‘earth-born’ peoples, the autochthonous Athenians, born from the very soil that they had always inhabited.7 In the Livian 6 For Mussolini’s cult of Romanita`, see esp. Manacorda and Tamassia 1985; Visser 1992; Scriba 1995; Giardina and Vauchez 2000. 7 Cf. Moatti 1997: 265.

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version, the Athenians are ‘pulled down’, while the humility of Rome’s parallel origins, from which she would grow in a morally ambivalent fashion into her present, imperial state, is a leitmotif of his account of early Rome in general. Drawing contrasts with Greek poleis was, as we have seen, an important aspect of ancient discussions of the Roman citizenship, but making comparisons with Athens in particular had a peculiar resonance. While Aelius Aristides had his own reasons for stretching the links between classical Athens and contemporary Rome, it is nevertheless true that, for the Romans themselves, the idea of classical Athens periodically functioned as an important way of thinking about both what Rome was and what she was not. Athens was arguably used as a model for an ‘imperial’ power as early as around 300 bc, when the iconography of the head of Roma on Roman coins is clearly modelled on that of Athena.8 In the late Republic, Rome’s relationship with Athens (and, for that matter, the Athenians’ relationship with Rome) was clearly complicated. In the here and now, Athens’ status as a repository of cultural capital for Rome did not save either the inhabitants or the fabric of the city from severe treatment at Roman hands. Sulla’s siege of Athens in 87/6, as a result of her allegiance to Mithridates, left untold damage that was to be left unrepaired for generations, while the city was an attractive stopping-off point for disreputable late Republican magistrates hoping for some free antiques. On the other hand, it was surely Athenian pride in their distinctive ancient history, long before Roman domination, that enhanced its reputation in the minds of the Roman elite as a centre of learning and history. In the Augustan age, it was the classicism associated with the ‘golden age’ of Athens that served as a marker of the distance from the contemporary decadence of the Greek world, and also as a pointer for the moral and aesthetic values associated with imperial success: moderation and self-control.9 In Livy’s treatment of early Rome as a whole, the synchronization of Roman and Athenian history is an important leitmotif that 8

Burnett 1986: Dench 1995: 74. Hoff and Rotroff 1997; cf. Bowersock 1965: ch. 6; cf. Petrochilos 1974: esp. 63–4; Zanker 1988 for Atticism in the Augustan period; Wallace-Hadrill 1989a for continued tension between Atticism and other modes of selfrepresentation. 9

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both positions Livy within an ancient historiographical tradition and positions Rome within world history.10 This need to position Rome in relation to Athens continues well beyond the Augustan period. For example, writing at the beginning of the second century AD, Tacitus in his Annals made the emperor Claudius attribute Rome’s imperial success to her practice of growing in strength through enfranchising the peoples she had conquered, in marked contrast with the disastrous policy of both Sparta and Athens, who continued to regard the peoples they conquered as foreigners.11 As Aelius Aristides was pushing his comparison between Athens and Rome, he was on obviously shaky ground when he tried to find ways of linking classical Athenian exclusivity with regard to the citizenship and contemporary Roman permeability: the autochthonous Athenians are made to be the ‘foster fathers’ of the Romans, stretching the idea of descent to its limits.12 My choice of classical Athens as a foil for the distinctiveness of the shapes of the Roman citizenship and Roman society in general is thus not an arbitrary one. Livy’s allusion to the myth of the Athenians as the earth-born progeny of Erechtheus/Erichthonios takes us to the heart of modern debates about how ‘closed’ the Athenian citizenship, and Athenian society more generally, really were in the fifth and fourth centuries. Some recent works have doubted the extent to which attempts to limit the Athenian citizenship in the second half of the fifth century were based on the criterion of descent, and there is something of a backlash against the idea that the classical Athenian democracy was an exclusive society run by male citizens. The crucial passage here is the gloss by the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens on the Periclean law of 451/0, ‘that no one should be a member of the polis who was not born of two astoi’. There have been recent suggestions that connections between the myth of Erechtheus/Erichthonios the earth-born progenitor of Athenians, the idea of the Athenian citizenship as based on blood descent, and democratic egalitarianism have been overplayed, and that there was a considerable glide between the categories of citizens and 10 12

11 Ogilvie 1965: 194–5. Tac. Ann. 11. 24. Roman Oration 96; Panathenaicus 332.

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non-citizens.13 I shall have much more to say about the significance of ideas about blood descent in Chapter 4, and will merely summarize some points relevant to the discussion here. Most notably, we need to distinguish between the ideology of fifthcentury Athens on the one hand, and its reception in the later Republican and early imperial Roman world on the other: the distance between the two is in itself interesting. In brief, the notions of both the ‘purity’ of Athenian descent and the restrictedness of her citizenship are much repeated in the Roman reception of her history, although it should be emphasized that ‘pure’ descent is frequently argued to be peculiarly compatible with both Athenian hospitality to refugees and/or foreigners and with actual naturalization of outsiders within her citizenship. It might be observed that, especially in early imperial receptions of Athens, not only is Athens being held up as a measure, or counterpoint, for Rome, but Rome has (most often implicitly) become a measure, or counterpoint, for Athens. In other words, it would seem that the motif of naturalization of outsiders has a significance that is rather different from its ‘meaning’ within a fifth- and fourth-century bc Athenian context. The fifth-century significance and the ideological context of the law raise complex problems. Even if we are certain that the author of the Athenian Constitution is both deliberately and accurately differentiating between astoi (‘locals’) and politai (‘citizens’), the attempt to determine citizenship on the basis of both the mother’s and the father’s status, rather than that of one parent (normally the father) alone, is striking in the context of the classical Greek world.14 The requirement that both parents should be astoi still upholds the distinction from xenoi (‘foreigners’), even if the ‘in group’ is not as tightly defined as ‘citizens’ would be. The subsequent repetition of the citizenship law says as much about the strength of societal aspirations as it does about the ‘failure’ or non-observation of the law. And while restricting the citizenship to the offspring of astoi allows 13 Ath. Pol. 26. 4, tr. Crawford and Whitehead 1983: 244, with useful commentary on the problems. For recent reappraisal of the significance of the law, see esp. E. Cohen. 2000. 14 Herodotus 1. 173. 4–5 with Crawford and Whitehead 1983: 244.

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for the expansion of the citizen-body by a process of assimilation over one generation, within the structures of ancient thought this does not appear to be necessarily incompatible with an ideology of the ‘pure’ blood-descent of the citizenbody, just as emphasis on the ancestral connectedness of the earth-born Athenians to their land seems to be compatible with an awareness that naturalization takes place.15 However, what we do seem to have in surviving fifth- and early fourth-century texts is a sense of debate and the problematization of ideas of Athenians as the earth-born descendants of Erechtheus/ Erichthonios, as being of ‘pure’ descent, of the connection between democracy and the earth-born status, the kinds of notions that are played with in, especially, Euripides’ Ion and Plato’s Menexenus. That such ideas should be played with, doubted, or even parodied seems to me unremarkable within a culture that was intensely interested in argument (an interest that extended beyond literary and dramatic contexts) and that positively revelled in inversion and satire. In addition, it seems highly problematic to assume on this basis that such ideas were never taken seriously. One might in fact argue the opposite, that ‘playing with’ and perhaps particularly parodying ideas suggests their perceived importance and significance. It is certainly the case that there was a range of versions of Athenian origins in the fifth and fourth centuries: these included both the story that Athens was formed under Theseus by the synoecism of twelve, originally independent cities and the suspicion that the Athenians were in some sense originally themselves ‘barbarians’. Such versions hint at the broader promotion of Athens as, from some perspectives, a ‘plural’ society, or at least one that was more plural than Sparta according to fifth-century Athenian ideology: it is perhaps above all the study of the role and perceptions of metics in Athenian society that highlights most vividly this aspect of Athens.16 We might well contrast Claudius’ characterization of Athens as being as disastrous as Sparta in her exclusion of people. A Roman 15 See E. Cohen’s ultimate acknowledgement of gaps between myths and history, and between different mythological and historical traditions on the nature of Athenian identity, 2000: 103. 16 The classic account is Whitehead 1977.

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imperial perspective could bracket together societies that had thrived by stressing the differences between themselves, when an emperor advocated (very dubiously) a time-honoured practice that had made Rome uniquely great. The idea that the Athenians were actually originally a barbarian people might be considered in the context of questions about the permanence and confines of the undoubtedly important categories of ‘Greeks’ and ‘barbarians’.17 However, it is also undeniable that, as we shall see in Chapter 4, ideas of shared blood descent are a regular part of the language of both being Athenian and being Greek in the fifth and fourth centuries, and we can certainly find metaphors of the ‘purity’ of the Athenian citizen-body in works of this period. Such ideas can be seen in association with occasional expressions of barbarians as a single genos, or Thucydides’ attribution to Alcibiades of a speech about Sicily during the debate that preceded the ill-omened Athenian expedition in 415 bc: this multi-ethnic island is portrayed as weak, its ‘cities swollen with heterogeneous rabbles, and the citizen bodies constantly changing, growing’.18 Turning back now to Rome, the different versions of the myth of Romulus’ asylum constitute some of the distinctive ways of thinking about Roman origins at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial period. Like Athenian myths of origins, and indeed like all myths of origins relating to societies in the ancient Mediterranean world, they are complex in shape, and sometimes protean: contradictory versions coexist, and elements are hotly contested.19 For example, as we saw in the Introduction, Livy’s version differs from that of 17 For Theseus, synoecism and Athenian ethnic plurality, see von Reden 1998: 173–4. Attempts to link Erechtheus/Erichthonios and Theseus genealogically represent an attempt to reconcile contradictory myths that is typical of ancient mythography in general. Herodotus 1. 57 for the Pelasgians (the Athenians’ legendary ancestors) as originally speaking a ‘barbarian’ language, cf. Rosalind Thomas 2000: 117–22. 18 Thuc. 6. 17. 2; Alcibiades’ underestimation of the difficulty of the conquest of Sicily is surely being set up as one of the aspects of the tragic dimension of the expedition: Thucydides’ own ‘archaeology’ of the island, concluding with ‘these are the ethne¯ of the Greeks and the barbarians, so great is its size’ (6. 6. 1) overpowers the reader with a sense of dangerous vastness and complexity, cf. Harrison 2000. 19 Cf. more generally Veyne 1988 on the nature of Greek myth.

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Dionysius of Halicarnassus very strikingly at one point: for Livy, the asylum is emphatically populated by vagabonds, in contrast with Dionysius’ noble political refugees.20 While Dionysius’ early Rome is more generally a distinctly civilized place in keeping with the city’s truly Greek ancestry, Livy is working within a ‘developmental’ model that has some points of connection with Lucretius’ conceptualization of the development of early man, or Sallust’s theories about early Rome, despite their very different philosophical bases.21 There is a good deal of ambivalence both relating to the moral quality of this ‘development’ and to the relationship between early Rome and contemporary Rome. As Rome ‘develops’ and grows, ‘diseases’ of decadence and luxury become more serious.22 Immigration is tied closely to this morally ambivalent scheme of growth, a cause both of Rome’s growth and success and of her doom and instability.23 It is interesting to read myths of Romulus’ asylum alongside the story of Aeneas, of great cultural importance in contemporary Rome due to Vergil’s epic, imagined and anticipated long before it was finished.24 The idea of immigration is obviously a very important aspect of the figure of Aeneas himself, while the theme is also embedded within Vergil’s ancient history of Italy.25 Immigration is thus an integral part of the history of Italy as a whole in the Aeneid, and contributes to a sense of a complex and multi-layered culture. However, some 20

Livy 1. 8. 6, cf. 2. 1. 4; D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 15. 3–4 cf. 3. 47. 2; cf. Thuc. 1. 2. 5–6; on Dionysius and Thucydides, see Gabba 1991: esp. 102–3. 21 Cf. Ch. 1, § 7, above. 22 Cf. his treatment of the Bacchanalian affair in Book 39. NB: Livy also talks about his own work using the same conceit: from slim beginnings, it has grown so much that it is now burdened by its own hugeness (Pref. 4). 23 Livy 1. 34; cf. Numa, emphatically Sabine in Livy 1. 18. 1–5; cf. disputes over the ancestry of Ancus Marcius: 1. 39–40; cf. on a completely different note, the aetiology of the first slave freed by the vindicta, the aptly named Vindicius 2, 4–5; for more generalized tensions in Livy’s telling of early Rome, see Miles 1995: 148–78. 24 Propertius 2. 61–6. 25 Edwards 1996: 112 n. 8 cites Saturn, Evander, Aeneas, and Romulus: she is looking for the theme of exiles rather than immigrants. There are even more immigrants than exiles in the Aeneid: see e.g. the catalogue of Italian heroes at the end of Book 7.

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ambivalence is associated with this theme, and Aeneas’ Trojan ancestry in particular carries overtones of luxury and decadence which may carry over into the modern Roman character.26 One of the final ‘resolutions’ offered by the Aeneid is the mixing of Latins and Trojans anticipated in the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia, a mixing that anticipates others, such as the rape of the Sabine women. In Livy and Vergil, myths of these kinds are portrayed very much in the language of thinking about contemporary cultural and ethnic identity: Jupiter and Juno’s preoccupation with togas and Latin in the Aeneid is especially striking.27 But these are not anodyne stories of ‘multiculturalism’: the mythical marriages are fraught with violence, and aspects of cultural inheritance are problematic. This ambivalence about issues of immigration, mobility, and cultural fusion may be seen to have broad resonances in the Augustan period. The cultural and moral issue of ‘eastern’ decadence has had a good deal of emphasis in modern scholarship, but this is not the only one that was seen to be problematic. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of imagining that the ideological importance of Italy in the Augustan period, particularly in the sphere of myth and history, is a reflection of the ease of assimilation. On the contrary, much of Italy was still palpably ‘foreign’ in the Augustan period, and the allegiance of some Italians to Augustan Rome downright questionable. The visibility of Italy in the ideology of the Augustan age is a reflection of dramatic change rather than the final stage of an inevitable process. Altogether, this period of massive changes in power, status and membership of the citizen body was perceived in terms of general social, moral, and religious breakdown. It is against this background that we need to understand intense interest in the idea of what it was to be Roman. The contrasting stories of Athenian autochthony and Romulus’ asylum reflect societies that were very different in both political ‘shape’ and ideological outlook. The paraded restrictiveness of the Athenian citizenship should be seen in conjunction 26 Problematic passages include 4. 261–4 cf. 215–17, 9. 598–620 with Horsfall 1971; R. Thomas 1982: 98–100; for problems in the ‘reconciliation’ of Jupiter and Juno concerning the Latin and Trojan cultural components of Roman identity, see e.g. Feeney 1984; Lyne 1987: 82 ff. 27 Verg. Aen. 1. 281; 12. 825, 837.

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with (ideally, at least) relatively free access to political power within the citizen body. The comparative permeability of the Roman citizenship from the late Republican period needs to be understood in relation to a more overtly hierarchical society, within which mobility was extremely important but encountered legally and/or socially enforced check-points.28 In Athens during the so-called ‘radical’ democracy of the later fifth century bc, ‘equal right of speech’ on the part of all male citizens was an important slogan: technically, any citizen male could speak and propose motions in the ekkle¯sia, the sovereign assembly.29 Both in the boule¯, the representational council on which citizens served by rotation, and in the ekkle¯sia, each citizen had one, equal vote. Both formal and informal qualifications for duties and offices based on wealth were diminished in the course of the fifth century. For example, during the generalship of Pericles, eligibility for the office of archo¯n, the generic name for a magistracy that could cover a number of functions, was extended down the property-classes to which all citizens were assigned, to include the zeugitai, the hoplite class. Daily pay was introduced for jurors, the principle being that no one should be excluded from jury-service by poverty.30 When Aristotle produced his analytical account of the Athenian democracy in his Politics, he placed considerable emphasis also on the principle of the lottery that in many cases had replaced elections as the process by which selection for office, and indeed for jury-service, was made.31 In practice, of course it would be untrue to say that these measures removed a connection between wealth and access to power: participation was at all times favoured by comparative prosperity and of course proximity to the city, where assemblies 28 J. K. Davies 1977–8; for Rome, see Garnsey 1970; Millar 1998: 4–7 for a renewed emphasis on the importance of mobility with regard to understanding (and even finding appropriate terminology to talk about) the Roman elite. 29 Ath. Pol. 42. 1; ‘Old Oligarch’ 1. 6; Plato Rep. 557b. Sinclair 1988 for a clear account of the theories and practices of 5th-cent. democracy; Hansen 1991 for the 4 cent. 30 For opposition to jury-pay, see Ath. Pol. 27, 4; Plato Gorgias 515e; the issues are of course dramatized in the contemporary Wasps of Aristophanes, first performed in 422. 31 6, 1; for the coherence of Athenian democracy as a system, see Murray 1990.

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were held. The importance of powers of persuasion in political life resulted in uncomfortable questions about the ethics of paying to be taught rhetorical skills.32 The strate¯gia or generalship, the most prominent fifth-century office, remained an elected one, while the dangerously seductive power of the flamboyantly wealthy and well-connected Alcibiades is the most obvious example of the continuing importance of aristocratic values.33 If the boule¯ in some sense genuinely represented the geographical spread of the demes of Attica, it is clear that political influence was dependent on both wealth and prestige at a local level.34 More generally, the political, social, and even geographical cohesiveness of Athens can certainly not be taken for granted.35 Nevertheless, Athenian ideology of the fifth and, to a large extent, the fourth centuries is loud and clear: in Ober’s phrase, it was recognized that ‘the people ran Athens’.36 An interesting example of this is the unpopularity amongst the wealthy of a number of democratic measures in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries. Proposals made by the organizers of the coup of 411 to restrict participation in the democracy to those of means suggest vividly their resentment of poorer citizens perceived to benefit most from the ‘radical’ democracy.37 Any cynicism that we might feel about how equal opportunities really were for poorer citizens in the ‘radical’ Athenian democracy should not blind us to the strength of contemporary perceptions and ideologies, reflected (however imperfectly in practice) in the institutions of the day. The socio-political ‘shape’ of Rome is very different, strikingly so by the end of the Republic. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the role of the people in later and late Republican politics. The most significant contributions to recent debates about the character of Roman politics have been those of Fergus Millar, who has followed the theme of the 32

Guthrie 1971: 35–40. Thucydides 6. 15. On the problems and accommodation of wealth in the Athenian democracy, see esp. Ober 1989: chs. 5–6. 34 Osborne 1985: 6–92. 35 e.g. Ober 1993: 141; Cartledge 1998b: esp. 2–3; von Reden 1995, 1998. 36 Ober 1989: 299; cf. 332–3 for the ‘ideological hegemony’ of the masses. 37 Those who could provide a hoplite armour and weaponry: Thuc. 8. 67. 2; cf. Ath. Pol. 33. 1. 33

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role of the people from the middle to the late Republic. In a number of articles and in two recent monographs, Millar has examined the ancient theory and above all the practice of popular participation and indeed sovereignty, emphasizing the role of contiones, speeches given to the people in the hope of influencing voting in the assemblies, as well as the importance of the assemblies themselves. In addition to putting the role of the people at the centre of Roman politics, Millar has argued for the close connection between popular sovereignty and the rise of individuals, and ultimately the establishment of monarchy at Rome. He has also re-evaluated the closely connected theme of the composition and role of the Roman ‘elite’, a misleading characterization of a somewhat fluid body, rather than the rigid aristocracy controlling political events that is imagined in traditional works.38 Millar’s thesis chimes in with some other prominent recent work on the Roman people, such as some important articles by Nicholas Purcell, who would emphasize themes of social mobility, initiative, and fortune amongst the people, rather than the poverty, degradation, and squalor that are the major themes of some other influential modern works.39 While all this work has been very important in changing the focus of Roman politics and challenging notions of social rigidity, it risks overemphasizing the role and initiative of the people in politics and society. One problem, systematically explored by Henrik Mouritsen, is that it seems very likely that there was generally a considerable gap between the potential power of the people and actual participation in politics.40 The importance of ideas of democracy were, however, unquestionably important in ancient perceptions of Roman politics: de¯mokratia was, for a start, the regular Greek translation of res publica, while the classical Athenian democracy was an important reference-point for Roman self-imaging. But it is also important to remember that ‘democracy’ had, in the course of the Hellenistic period, become a very loose, aspirational term that had little to do with classical Athenian notions of a polis 38

Millar 1984b, 1986a, 1989, 1998, 2002. Purcell 1983; 1994b; 1995a.; for a rather different perspective, see e.g. Yavetz 1958; Scobie 1986. 40 Mouritsen 2001. 39

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essentially run by the people.41 Such aspirations are in themselves interesting and may regularly influence political behaviour, but it is important for us to appreciate the distance between, for example, late fifth-century Athens and late Republican Rome, a distance that is in fact frequently marked in the ancient sources themselves. In the next few paragraphs, I shall explore briefly two ancient theoretical treatments of Roman politics and society written in the Republican period: Polybius’ analysis in the sixth book of his history, and Cicero’s De Republica. Neither account is simply ‘descriptive’: in rather different ways, each author is modelling an ideal shape drawing heavily on Greek political theory. In part, one might say, each forms a case-study in the ‘Hellenization’ of Rome, in both the selection and appropriation of perceptibly Greek motifs to portray the unique character of Rome, and the location of Rome in relation to perceptions of Greek history and society. While both accounts are clearly idealizing, it is important to move beyond the urge to demonstrate ‘mistakes’. As we shall see, neither account can be dismissed as belonging to some lunatic fringe: each finds correspondence in ‘real-life’ political action and rhetoric. Polybius, as is well known, characterizes the Roman system as a tripartite system that partakes of all three major post-Aristotelian political categories, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. In Polybius’ ideal environment of the Roman state frozen in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous outcome of the battle of Cannae in 216 bc, the three elements check and counterbalance each other so that none can prevail and change into the debased form, tyranny, oligarchy, or ochlocracy (mob-rule).42 While this frozen state is the ideal, Polybius’ vision of Rome’s most recent history is very much one of a society undergoing profound political, social and moral change. Above all, the elimination in 167 of Macedon as Rome’s one remaining rival to sole rule in the Mediterranean is instrumental in disrupting the 41 De Ste. Croix 1981: 321–6 for the ‘devaluation’ of the terminology of democracy. 42 For emphasis on the chronological placing of this ‘digression’, see Polybius 5. 111. 8.

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relationship between prominent individuals and ‘the people’: the former make conspicuous display of the wealth and luxury goods that are the profits of empire, and ‘court the people’.43 We might ourselves want to see perceptions of a ‘disruption’ of the relationship between individuals and ‘the people’ as an important strand in the political history of the Republic over a rather longer time-frame. This might include at least the repeated legislative attempts to regularize senatorial office in the early second century bc and, looking forward a few years, the tribunates of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, serious attempts to act out the principles of popular sovereignty.44 Modern scholars are, however, generally very irritated by Polybius’ understanding of who is contained within his category of ‘the people’, the de¯mos, of Rome. For example, he gives as an example of the relationship between the senate and the de¯mos the latter’s involvement in public contracts, the financial business of which he attributes to ‘almost everyone’. There is a considerable glide here, since the de¯mos in this instance consists primarily of the equestrian publicani, and since at the time of writing equites were distinguishable from the senators first and foremost by the fact that they were not office-holders rather than by wealth or social status.45 Polybius is clearly ‘wrong’ in attributing to the de¯mos en masse the wealth and status necessary to be ‘stake-holders’ in the Roman state, but his ‘mistake’ is an interesting and significant one that is simultaneously a marker of distance from the model of the classical Athenian de¯mos and an indication of the strength of the desire to map the peculiarities of Roman politics onto traditional categories. Polybius’ ‘mistake’ is all the more significant when one considers it in relation to the so-called Tabula Bembina, a document that is almost certainly to be identified as Gaius Gracchus’ repetundae (extortion) law, issued about two decades after Polybius’ time of writing. Here, the classic ‘democratic’ principle of checking the power of office-holders by scrutiny before ‘the people’ is enacted by careful rules for the judgement of senators in a new standing-court. There is great emphasis on the function of the ‘people’ collectively as a witness to proceedings: for 43 45

Polyb. 31. 25. Polyb. 6. 17. 1–4.

44

e.g. Astin 1989: 174–96.

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example, the jury-list is to be published and read aloud by the praetor, and the fact that each juror votes must be made visible, while the nature of each individual vote must be concealed. The jury itself, however, is to be made up of equestrians: the role of the ‘people’ is strictly limited in comparison.46 There is some reminiscence here of the trial scene in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (the final play in the Oresteian trilogy, first performed in 458), a retrojected ‘foundation myth’ for the role of the Areopagus as a court for homicide trials. There are, however, some striking differences. The juridical powers of the Areopagus (made up of former archons) had recently been considerably diminished by Ephialtes, an action that was certainly in retrospect understood as a key event in increasing the power of the Athenian de¯mos. In contrast, trying senators by equestrian rather than senatorial juries was, in late second- and early first-century Rome, a highly controversial and at times dangerously radical move.47 Cicero’s De Republica of the later 50s bc is a treatise on Roman politics that is idealizing in very different ways from Polybius’ sixth book. It needs, for a start, to be understood within the context of Cicero’s own disaffection with Roman politics, following his own summary execution of the Catilinarian conspirators as consul in 63, and his perceptions of suffering great injustice at the hands of the popular tribune Clodius, who in the name of popular liberty apparently confronted issues of wealth and privilege to an unprecedented extent in Roman history.48 Cicero’s De Republica is, obviously, a self-conscious ‘Romanization’ of Plato’s Republic, and Plato is himself ‘Italianized’ by emphasis on the Pythagorean influence he had undergone in Sicily, as well as his legendary south Italian travels.49 In a letter to Atticus written in the summer of 60, Cicero had mocked Cato the Younger for a misjudged speech, that seemed to assume that his senatorial audience was the ideal society of Plato’s Republic, rather than ‘Romulus’ crap’.50 There is a 46

Sherwin-White 1982. On Ephialtes and the Areopagus, see Ath. Pol. 25–6. 48 For a narrative, see Wiseman 1994: 376–81. 49 Cic. Rep. 1. 10. 16; for the significance of legends surrounding Plato in south Italy, see Dench 1995: 52, 58–9 with bibliography. 50 Cic. Rep. 2. 1. 8. cf. n. 1, above. 47

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strong hint here of the kind of relevance Plato’s Republic held for an idealizing vision of Rome in Cicero’s eyes: order, hierarchy, and the rule of wisdom in marked contrast with his jaundiced view of a disordered and debased Roman state in which the ‘lowest’ elements were all too prominent. The perceived problems of democracy are often repeated: in classical Athens, the lack of distinctions in rank was extremely problematic, while democracy and tyranny are closely associated.51 Nevertheless, the distance between Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s De Republica is self-consciously marked: Cicero’s is a necessary ‘improvement’ on Plato, his ideal state the real one of Rome, or at least one that can be recovered by tracing the precorrupt values of her founders, in contrast to the imagined fantasy of Plato.52 This is another example of self-conscious Roman positioning of themselves as a ‘practical’ people, in contrast to the loquacious and ‘merely’ theoretical Greeks.53 Cicero’s setting is distinctively Roman, and pseudo-historical, a dramatized conversation between Scipio Aemilianus and his friends during the feriae Latinae (the annual festival of Jupiter Latiaris that enacted Latin kinship) of 129. The choice of Scipio Aemilianus as the primary character is not accidental: in addition to traditions of his philosophical interests, he was both the cousin by adoption and brother-in-law of Tiberius Gracchus and his arch political enemy, bitterly opposed to the latter’s enactment of popular sovereignty. Tiberius Gracchus’ tribunate is the instrument that divides the Republic into two factions, and it is the task of the De Republica to re-establish the unity that was the vision of Rome’s founding fathers.54 The choice of the feriae Latinae as an occasion for the dialogue also, importantly, suggests a tension between an ideal, carefully expanded state, and the dissension engendered amongst the allies by the Gracchan agrarian law.55 The ideal state of Rome is thus located in her past, the location of her essential character. Images of Rome’s early history in De Republica are markedly conservative, notably playing down the role of the people in contrast to other, more 51 53 55

52 Ibid. 1. 27. 43. See, in general, Zetzel 1995: 4–5. 54 Cic. Rep. 1. 22–3, 36–7. Ibid. 1. 19. 31, 3. 29. 41. Cf. Zetzel 1995: 8.

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‘popular’ versions written in the late Republic.56 Thus, for example, there is praise for the limited power of the tribunes in the early Republic, and the circumscribed power of the people, in obvious contrast to the perceived ‘problem’ of popular power in the late Republic. In early Rome, there is a place for all, but all know their place. Perhaps the most notorious passage of Cicero’s evocation of early Rome is his depiction of the centuriate assembly under the king Servius Tullius, a passage that is unsurprisingly overused in view of the limited surviving evidence we have of the functioning of this assembly. In Cicero’s idealizing account, the assembly conforms to the best, hierarchical principles of Rome’s founding fathers: Servius Tullius, in his wisdom, weighted the voting of the assembly heavily in favour of the wealthy, ensuring that the power of the masses did not prevail. As Millar has argued, Cicero is not here—or indeed elsewhere in the De Republica—describing a situation current in his day, but an ideal from which contemporary Rome has fallen short.57 Paradoxically, however, Cicero’s concern in the De Republica to draw sharp distinctions between the ‘faction’-based contemporary situation and the ordered ideal of Rome’s early history almost undoubtedly exaggerates contemporary Rome’s ‘democratic’ character. Unsurprisingly, Cicero elsewhere and for very different rhetorical purposes presents a very different view of the relationship between Roman and ‘Greek’ politics. In the Pro Flacco, he draws a clear distinction between ‘Greek’ and Roman assemblies: while ‘Greek’ assemblies have executive power, in Rome the voting assemblies with their ordered divisions are physically and chronologically separated from contiones, preventing the disorder and excess that characterizes the ‘Greek’ situation.58 Cicero’s ideals of an ordered society in which everyone knew their place are undoubtedly partisan, but find some important points of correspondence in other examples of the political rhetoric of the late Republic as well as in the framing of the selfrepresentation and idealizing portrayal of Octavian/Augustus. 56 Most notably the popularis historian C. Licinius Macer: see Ogilvie and Drummond 1989: 7–8. 57 Cic. Rep. 2. 22. 39; cf. Livy 1. 43; D.H. 4. 16–21; Millar 1998: 200–6. 58 Flacc. 7. 15–16; Millar 1998: 220–1.

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Augustus ‘solved’ the problem of ‘faction’ that is at the heart of the De Republica, as well as of other prominent contemporary ‘theoretical’ analyses of the late Republic, such as that of Sallust, by addressing the potentially opposed issues of popular power and distinction to a much greater extent than any other late Republican ‘politician’. He embodied popular sovereignty by assuming tribunicial power in 23 bc, the power (disconnected from office) that came soon to mark his years of rule and consequently to signal successors.59 Additionally, he established himself as prime benefactor of the Roman people, parading a personal link that emphasized simultaneously his own supremacy and his popular concerns. At the same time, the dignity of the ordines and social hierarchy were much publicized by, for example, the highly symbolic restoration of the censorship, with attention to moral criteria, as well as the introduction for the first time of a formal, census-based distinction between senators and equites. In addition, moral and social legislation formally denied legal status to marriages between those of senatorial rank and freedmen, delineated distinct inheritance laws for freedmen, and set limits on manumission, playing the role of a guardian of order and distinction.60 To some extent, the princeps’ embodiment of popular politics was to diminish the power of the people in making decisions: notoriously, after the death of Augustus, popular elections no longer determined the result of offices of state.61 Suffrage, in the Republican sense of energetically soliciting the votes of ‘the people’ came to seem in the high empire to be ‘ancient history’, and the multiple and complex bonds between candidates and people were loosened as the popular politics of the imperial period became primarily a matter of often loud and sometimes violent interaction between members of the imperial household and crowds outside the formal political spaces of the Republic.62 Advancement in the offices of state now comes to rest primarily on the interrelationship between favour, proximity, and patronage, although, in the eyes of the elite, advancement under ‘good’ emperors should follow distinction-based 59 61 62

60 Lacey 1979. e.g. Treggiari 1996. Tac. Ann. 1. 15. 1. e.g. Yavetz 1969; Veyne 1976; Hopkins 1983a: 14–18.

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‘qualifications’ for office.63 We should, however, not forget that, taking into account both major and minor civil and military Roman magistracies, assistantships at all levels, local offices and increasingly ‘paramagistracies’, such as the position of Augustales held by freedmen, the world of what one might call loosely ‘state careers’ in the Roman empire was a very large one within which there were a few, exceptional individual cases of extraordinary mobility. Within this world, it is clearly important not to overemphasize the power or indeed the omniscience of the emperor, despite the tendency of the ‘official’ discourse of imperial power to do precisely this.64 Patronage in the imperial period continued to be a complex game that involved many players, individual careers could themselves be far from linear or straightforward progressions, and competition might still be furious, as we can see for example from the ‘recommendation letters’ of the Younger Pliny. It is, above all, very wrong to see early imperial society as a static, pyramidal hierarchy topped by the emperor.65 It is significant that we can detect in Roman literature particular kinds of snobbery that are largely absent from the literature of classical Athens: these are disputes over shifting, fine points of accent and taste, and it is perhaps no accident that some of the greatest snobs, such as Cicero, would themselves be seen as obvious ‘newcomers’ from certain perspectives. This is a society which is acutely conscious of status, and in which this consciousness of status goes hand in hand with an equally marked incidence of, and insistence on, social and geographical mobility. Consciousness of status is reflected also in a highly developed social vocabulary, within which the distinction between nobles and new men is one of the more obvious examples. The Roman citizenship was one—and only one—of a number of ways in which status could be marked or declared, and other kinds of divisions, legal as well as social, existed within the citizen body. While distinctions were highly marked both legally and socially, the loudness with which they were articulated is a feature of the realities of mobility rather than of a static 63 64 65

Pliny Paneg. 69–70; cf. 88 on freedmen. The public image of the emperor is well served in Millar 1977. As does e.g. C. Barton 1993.

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society.66 As we have begun to see, mobility is enshrined in the myths of early Rome, and debates about its moral value are very much ways of thinking about Roman identity at the end of the Republic. The peculiar vocabulary of urbanitas is one means of articulating the incorporation of Italy at the end of the Republic and at the beginning of the imperial period, although it long predates the mid-first century bc as a means of asserting Rome’s dominant place as the only true urbs within what is asserted to be ‘rustic’ Italy.67 This is highly competitive vocabulary open to appropriation and manipulation in sophisticated ways. It is found extensively in the writings both of the ‘new man’ Cicero and of Catullus, whose northern Italian homelands were not even juridically part of the Roman state at the time of his birth, just as it can increasingly be claimed to be represented well outside any urbs, in the studiedly sophisticated villas of the Italian countryside.68 Claims to be acting in accordance with urbanitas can be a way of asserting the upper hand, but in this highly competitive rhetorical environment of one-upmanship engendered above all by a vastly expanded Roman elite jostling for position, ‘rustic’ paradigms, well supported by myths of early Rome, can as easily be claimed to be the true roots of Roman identity.69 The coexistence of ‘opposite’ values such as urbanity and rusticity provides mobility with a complex language of differentiation: Cicero, the ‘new man’, can in various contexts assert his sympathies and sense of kin with the distinctly non-urbane, while in other contexts claim to teach true ‘urbanity’ to the nobilis Appius Claudius Pulcher.70 Octavian/Augustus’ dual identity, to be assimilated alternatively to that of a new man or that of a noble, brings us to another issue crucial for understanding both the permeability of Roman society and the mechanisms by means of which this permeability was accommodated within traditional social expectations. In the Philippics, Cicero hedges his bets in answering Antony’s taunts about Octavian’s ignobilitas. On the one hand, Octavian is just about noble: he had after all been adopted 66 Mobility is emphasized in Purcell 1983, 1995a; Millar 1998: 4–7 for the Roman elite. 67 68 Dench 1995: 74–5. Purcell 1995b on villas. 69 70 See, in general, Ramage 1973. Cic. Fam. 3. 7. 3.

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into the Julian family which had, apparently in a creative moment of the first century bc, begun to trace its descent to Iulus, the renamed son of Aeneas. On the other hand, the ‘nobody’ status that is the subject of Antony’s taunt can be turned into a virtue: that would make Octavian rather like Cicero himself, as well as his projected, ideal audience of worthy new men.71 The family itself, that microcosm of the state, as Cicero saw it, and, in Roman ideology, a model of stability, continuity, and moral and cultural values, was permeable, surprisingly so when viewed in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world.72 Adoption is of course not unknown in the Greek world, but the vehemence with which Athenian orators could proclaim that the Athenians were neither bastards nor adopted marks a firm contrast with the prominence and visibility of adoption within the ‘best’ families of Rome. Adoption could ensure the continuity of prominent families, of great ideological importance as can be seen, for example, in the maintenance of the fiction of the ‘succession’ of Roman emperors. In some cases too, it could enable a highly controlled kind of mobility, involving either poorer relations or individuals from outside the family altogether.73 The family metaphors associated with patronage are also striking: mobility and above all the renewal of the elite and the Roman citizen-body itself is facilitated by the model of kin, and specifically that of father and son, that most traditional of relationships in Mediterranean thought. For example, a paterfamilias’ freedmen were not in a juridical sense precisely or even closely parallel to the condition of his sons: in a legal sense, a freedman had no kin at all, while a range of obligations to his patron, upheld in law, formalized the role of the patron as the 71

Phil. 3. 15–16; Weinstock 1971: 16–18; cf. 39; 81 for the otherwise unknown L. (?) Iulius Caesar who wrote about the origins of Rome and the descendants of Aeneas; Livy 1. 3 for doubts about whether Iulus and Ascanius are one and the same person. 72 Off. 53–5, 73 Rubinstein 1993 for adoption law and practice in 4th-cent. Athens; Gardner 1998: 114–208 reminds us that some well-publicized cases of adoption from outside the family in Rome were exceptional: the adoption of blood relations was far more normal; Hekster 2002 for adoption and imperial ‘succession’.

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freedman’s sponsor and even instructor within the Roman community. Nevertheless there are indications of associations in thought between fathers and former masters. These include the common practice of slaves taking the master’s name upon manumission, as well as ‘getting on’ in the world on the basis of these ‘family’ connections.74 To take now an example from relationships between those of less unequal social status, there is no real gap between Cicero’s figuring of the ideal relationship between praetor and quaestor as one of a father and his son and Pliny the Younger’s exhortation to Minicius Fundanus, soon to be consul, to look out for Asinius Rufus’ son, a quaestor, and to ‘treat him like a son given to him by the Res Publica, according to the customs of our ancestors’. The latter formula further underlines the allegedly ‘traditional’ nature of the gesture.75 Patronage, a whole nuanced vocabulary of social relationships which is, significantly, virtually absent in the classical Greek of democratic Athens, provides for increasing numbers of ‘new men’ in particular pseudo-family relationships crucial to their accommodation and advancement in Roman high society.76 In the history of Roman patronage as well as the history of the use of metaphors of fatherhood, the shift towards monarchy is

74

Y. Thomas 1986; Wallace-Hadrill 1989b: 73–7; cf. Wilkinson 1964; Rawson 1986: 13, 43; Lassen 1997: 108–9; for names, see Purcell 1983; Weaver1972; Dixon 1992: 114, Joshel 1992: 35–6; however, for some notes of caution, see Saller and Shaw 1984 for arguments based on epigraphical evidence from tombstones regarding the primacy of the ‘nuclear family’ and the rarity of freedmen being made heirs of the rich; Gardner 1993: 19–25 for modification of Wallace-Hadrill’s notion of the ‘conditional’ nature of the ex-slave’s membership of Roman society (1989: 76). It is important too to emphasize the real possibility that some slaves/freedmen actually were the biological sons of the master: see above all Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 38–9 for arguments based on the complex place of slaves within the space of the Roman house. On Badian’s arguments (1958), there are also comparisons to be made between the relationship between patron and freedman with that between Roman patron and foreign clients, broadening the model considerably. 75 Cic. Div. in Caecilium 61; cf. Fam. 13. 10. 1. Pliny Ep. 4. 15; cf. 10. 26. 1; these examples are discussed in Lassen 1997, 111; cf. D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 10 for a suggestive, more abstract discussion of Romulus’ institution of patronage as a quasi-blood relationship. 76 P. Millett 1989.

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of obvious importance.77 In 2 bc, Augustus finally accepted the title of pater patriae, ‘father of the fatherland’, a title long anticipated by the imagery of his rule.78 Some of the associations can be seen most clearly in the sphere of religious cults of the Augustan age. Most notably, in the reformed cult of the reorganized wards of Rome, Augustus’ own Lares and his Genius became the object of the cult, just as the Lares and the Genius of the paterfamilias would be the object of cult in every individual household. Augustus became, in effect, the paterfamilias of Romans, and the predominantly freedmen officials of the cult of the Augustan Lares and Genius were drawn in almost as extended members of the imperial household.79 For the descendants of these officials, the Augustales, this prominence and incorporation into the systems of benefaction and civic life on the part of their father or grandfather could be an important step in the direction of a local civic magistracy.80 These pseudo-familial relationships helped the assimilation of newcomers. It is these kinds of networks of obligations embedded within the fabric of Roman society that helped both to enable social mobility and to control it. 3. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROMAN CI T I Z E N S H I P , O R TE L E O LO GY AN D ITS LIMITS ‘My ancestors, the most ancient of whom, Clausus, a man of Sabine origins, was at the same time enrolled into the Roman citizenship and amongst the patrician families, encourage me to employ the same policy in governing the state, namely that of transferring to this city all outstanding persons, wherever found. I am fully aware that the Julian family came from Alba, the Coruncanian from Camerium, the Porcian from Tusculum, and, not to search into the past, that members have been brought into the senate from Etruria, Lucania, and the whole of Italy, that Italy itself finally was extended to the Alps, so that 77 For two classics on the transition to, and impact of monarchy, see Veyne 1976; Millar 1984a. 78 Lassen 1997: 113. 79 e.g. Liebeschuetz 1979, 70; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 184–6, with bibliography. 80 e.g. Garnsey 1975; Purcell 1983.

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not only individuals but even lands and peoples should coalesce into our name.’81

This is part of a speech that Tacitus put into the mouth of the emperor Claudius when he wished to persuade the senate to agree to the request of prominent individuals from the communities of what the Romans called ‘hairy’ or ‘trousered’ Gaul (in contrast with ‘nearer’ Gaul, ‘toga’d’ like the civilized human beings that ‘we’ are) to be made eligible for adlection to the Roman senate, or election to senatorial office.82 Unfortunately, we have only Tacitus’ version of the beginning of Claudius’ speech. For the later portions, we can compare with his version the version inscribed on the ‘Lyons Tablet’, the latter undoubtedly closer to the words Claudius actually spoke on the occasion. There are some very interesting and revealing differences between the two versions: Tacitus, perhaps forgivably, omits Claudius’ jokes but, more importantly, pushes the exceptional case of the trousered Gauls into an argument that breaks traditionally close links with Italy and ushers in ‘new men’ from the broader Roman world.83 In this portion of the speech, Tacitus’ Claudius presents the case of the trousered Gauls not as a break with the past, but as a continuation of the best principles of Rome’s predecessors: the emphasis is on Roman ‘generosity’ with the citizenship from time immemorial.84 Claudius’ argument was a specific one, but should also be understood within a broader tendency in the late Republic and early empire to emphasize the idea of Roman ‘generosity’ with the citizenship as a continuum from the beginnings of Rome. In a real sense this tendency is first clearly visible in the context of Cicero’s Pro Balbo, a speech of 56 bc: the Spanish Balbus’ claims to hold the Roman citizenship, decidedly dodgy in the eyes of his enemies, are bolstered up by Cicero’s sweeping 81

Tac. Ann. 11. 24. For the ideological significance of togas, see, famously, Jupiter’s ‘predictions’ to Venus about Rome in Verg. Aen. 1. 282, ‘rerum dominos gentemque togatam’, ‘masters of the world, the toga’d people’; on humanitas, see Veyne 1993. For the nature of the Gauls’ request, see, succinctly, Levick 1990: 101. 83 The Lyons tablet: ILS 212; Griffin 1982 for the gap between the Lyons tablet and Tacitus; cf. Sherwin-White 1973: Ch. 8. 84 Recent treatments of this aspect of Claudius’s speech include Giardina 1994; Moatti 1997. 82

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claims of unceasing ancestral generosity with the citizenship, all the way back to Romulus’ generosity to the Sabines, and bestowed even on slaves and former enemies of the Roman people.85 These are extraordinary claims to make only one generation after the Social War, and scarcely less outrageous is Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ claim that admissions to the citizenship are one of the ‘sacred and unchallengeable institutions’ of the Romans.86 Nevertheless, the most sustained surviving example of such a view of Roman ‘generosity’ is to be found in Velleius Paterculus’ Roman History. Although often dismissed as a sycophantic account of the reign of Tiberius, Velleius Paterculus’ treatise is remarkable in that it represents the most sustained attempt to write a collective history of Italy rather than of Rome alone. His own, peculiar, family history is embedded within this collective history: his great-grandfather, Minatius Magius of Aeculanum, himself the grandson of the Campanian princeps, Decius Magius was, he is proud to tell us, a famous person who had appeared in history-books. During the Social War, this individual had raised a legion from amongst the Hirpini to fight not on the side of the allies, but on the Roman side: as a reward, he had been granted the Roman citizenship, and his sons had been Roman praetors. Most recently, Velleius and his brother had both been praetors in ad 15, receiving the double honour of being nominated by Augustus and serving under Tiberius. Velleius’ family history is thus in microcosm the ‘success story’ of select members of the Italian upper classes, entering the Roman senate in the aftermath of the Social War (in many cases a number of generations afterwards).87 This triumph is anticipated in Velleius’ account by a number of excursuses, particularly those on colonies and on new men, both of which amalgamate examples spread over centuries of different social and historical contexts, giving the impression that the meaning of such actions remained the same.88 For Velleius, the Social War represents the one real hiccup in this steady progress: for him, it is an episode of patent injustice, when the Italians were forced to fight Rome for a right they both earnestly desired and fully deserved. According to Velleius’ formula, 85 88

86 87 Balb. 31, 24. Ant. Rom. 4. 23. 7. Vell. Pat. 2. 16. Ibid. 1. 14, 2. 128; for Velleius on Italy, see Gabba 1973a.

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although they guarded the Roman army with their weapons, and although of the same ‘race’ and blood they were despised as foreigners and aliens.89 It is unfortunate that this argument is too easily seen by modern readers as ‘natural’: we have our own problems with teleology because of our notion of Italy as a modern nation, and need to realize that Velleius is pushing a particular point of view rather than stating the obvious.90 Velleius’ account, like Claudius’ speech, is an exceptionally illuminating piece of evidence for attitudes towards the citizenship in the early empire, although as we shall see, such ‘centripetal’ attitudes are only part of the story. We should, in addition, be extremely careful about accepting without challenge their versions of the earlier history of the citizenship. For one thing, it is well worth being alert to the fact that, when Velleius expounds in one digression on ‘citizenships extended and the Roman name increased through sharing in rights’, the examples he gives explicitly juxtapose rather different statuses that are in fact distinct from the citizenship, above all the ‘Latin name’ and the citizenship sine suffragio, ‘without the vote’.91 More importantly, however, we should not be misled by such teleological accounts and make the assumption that the Roman citizenship, or lesser statuses, always held the same value that they did at the end of the Republic and in the early years of the imperial period, or indeed that they were at all times equally desired by non-Romans. Stories of early immigrants from other parts of Italy to Rome, such as Livy’s Lucumo, or Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Ancus Marcius, or the Julian family of Tacitus’ Claudius are conceptualized in the language of the end of the Republic and the early imperial period.92 We do not need to enter into questions about 89

It is a pity that we do not have rather more of Velleius’ early history of Rome and Italy: we have only tantalizing glimpses of foundations of individual Italian towns located within his ‘universal’ history. 90 Interestingly, the case of ‘nearness’ of Italians to Rome is made in the early rhetorical example Ad Herennium 4. 9. 83, which is apologistic in content: propinquitas and societas are the terms, which begin to hint at the concept of kin. 91 Vell. Pat. 1. 14. 1. 92 Cornell 1995: 156–9 is right to refuse to make a meal of ‘Etruscan kings’, but I am less clear than he is that the rule of foreigners at Rome is a phenomenon that is peculiar to Rome at this time.

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the historicity of any one set of events, or even of any one figure from Rome’s remote past in order to imagine archaic Rome within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean world. While we may be more reluctant to synchronize specific events in Roman history with ‘universal’ events than Roman historians traditionally were, it is certainly plausible to argue that central Italian material evidence suggests participation in much broader social and cultural tendencies within the Mediterranean. Mobility, and elite mobility in particular, was a normal state of affairs in the archaic Mediterranean world as families exercised social and economic networks in a world within which ethnic and state boundaries were still fluid.93 There is, in other words, nothing ‘special’ or abnormal about traditions of immigration in early Rome within the context of archaic society: what is ‘special’ is late Republican and early imperial interpretation of such stories as manifestations of Rome’s supposedly essential disposition towards incorporating foreigners. It might be added that, even in the later Republic, the institution of Latin status continues a sense of fluidity between certain communities through the expectation of reciprocal arrangements. In particular, the provision that it is possible to exchange one citizenship for another by transferring domicile to another Latin community is only challenged in the second century bc, when Latin communities complain of being unable to fulfil demands for manpower because of the migration of their citizens to Rome. Latin status in the second century must have seemed increasingly an anachronism, as expectations of reciprocity were increasingly challenged by the growing power and tightening boundaries of Rome.94 93

Ampolo 1970–1; Cornell 1995: 89, 158. More generally, on mobility as a Mediterranean phenomenon, see now Horden and Purcell 2000. 94 Sherwin-White 1973: ch. 3, esp. 99–103. NB: after the break-up of the Latin ‘league’ by Rome, Latin communities no longer retain reciprocal rights with each other: marriage and trade are overseen only with Roman citizens, under Roman law: see, succinctly, Cornell 1995: 349. It is, on the other hand, interesting that emphasis on a sense of Latin kinship, through the celebration of Latin religious festivals, is observable even in the early imperial period (Cornell 1995: 294–5; Price 1996: 842). Such emphasis should be understood in the context of the kind of generalized Italian antiquarian interest in origins and identity that is a striking feature of the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial period: see esp. Ch. 3, below.

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As we move into the fourth century bc, we should still be careful to understand Roman concessions of citizenship and intermediary statuses, as well as the extension of Roman territory, within the broader framework of contemporary societies. In particular, it is important to understand the peculiar conditions of societies in central and southern Italy in the fifth and fourth centuries. This era was one of high levels of competition for resources and for military supremacy in a culturally interactive world. The problems of the western Greek poleis of southern Italy and Sicily were particularly acute as they had restricted territories and, above all, restricted supplies of manpower. The most obvious solution to the problem of manpower was to recruit forces from neighbouring non-Greek peoples, and different poleis understood and formalized this relationship in different ways at different times. For the Tarentines in the latter part of the fourth century bc, the Samnite forces they had recruited were conceptualized as the long-lost Pitanate cousins of the originally Spartan Tarentines: the unfavourable image of using mercenary forces was avoided by appeal to the common ‘language’ of shared origins.95 The Deinomenids, tyrants of Syracuse in Sicily, on the other hand, appealed to the classical ideology of citizen soldiers by enfranchising the non-Greek forces they employed as manpower, reversing but retaining the ideological connection between citizenship and fighting for the polis. The extension of the citizenship both rewarded these forces by allowing access to privileges and formalized the obligation to fight for the polis.96 These are the general contexts within which we need to understand early instances of Roman concessions of citizenship and other statuses. Some instances in particular seem very close to the western Greek examples we have considered, such as the ‘citizenship without the vote’, possibly a Roman version of honorific, non-participatory citizenship, held in conjunction with one’s original citizenship, and acceptance in fidem.97 While being careful to think of early Roman concessions of the citizenship in appropriately comparative terms, it is 95 96 97

Dench 1995: 53–61. Frederiksen 1984: 193, with sources at p. 203 n. 120; Tagliamonte 1994. Frederiksen 1984: 193–8.

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nevertheless true that, after 338 bc, when the Romans secured the submission of all the neighbouring Latin peoples and some others, we can begin to see signs of peculiar developments. Significant leaps of imagination and experiments were required, and these were to provide the models upon which future developments were based. As we move into the third century bc, the Roman settlement of peninsular Italy after her wars of conquest begins to set Rome apart from her western Greek neighbours, partly in terms of scale. The treaties drawn up between Rome and individual Italian communities were largely based on the provision of manpower, and vast numbers were mobilized. Roman territory itself was also extended on a massive scale: at the beginning of the third century, the Roman general M’. Curius Dentatus carved from Sabine and Picene land a swathe of Roman territory all the way to the Adriatic, incorporating the inhabitants originally as cives sine suffragio, ‘citizens without the vote’. It seems most likely that this status, obliterating independence without giving access to decisionmaking at Rome, was in this instance envisaged as a punitive measure, perhaps reinterpreting earlier use of the status as an honorific, non-participatory citizenship. As we have seen, the scale of Roman colonization was noted by Philip V of Macedon, who, in his choice of the figure of seventy colonies (a ‘mistake’), may even be alluding to traditions about Alexander the Great, who traditionally founded seventy cities.98 There were few juridically Roman colonies: in the third and early second centuries, colonies were largely Latin in status. This reinterpretation of an ethno-geographical term to delineate a particular juridical status in relation to dealings with Roman citizens is extremely significant. In part, we might see here an attempt to manage the vastness of the new Roman world: the colonists, many of whom would originally have been Roman citizens, have a privileged relationship with Rome, but the communities in which they live are politically independent. This is the sort of conceptual leap upon which changing ideas of the Roman citizenship, and Roman identity itself, will be based. It is hard to overestimate the scale and consequences of the Roman settlement of Italy, the ethnically distinct peoples of a 98

Cf. Plutarch On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great 328 e.

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vast geographical area networked into a newly Roman idea of Italy. This relationship was acted out in a most concrete way in the intense Roman military campaigns fought against overseas enemies in the third and second centuries bc. While only Roman citizens fought in the legions, the Roman army had become a vast umbrella concept, with its numerous auxiliary units. The sense of variegation grouped together in a common cause is keenest in an alliterative fragment of Ennius’ historical epic, the Annals, when the defence of Italy against Hannibal is being described: ‘Marsa manus, Paeligna cohors, Vestina virum vis’—‘the Marsic band, the Paelignian cohort, the Vestine force of men’.99 The obligation of communities to provide troops to fight Rome’s wars did not, it seems, diminish the importance of the dynamics and individuality of the local unit, and it is in fact arguable that, for the allied communities, fighting in individual auxiliary divisions actually served to enhance a sense of specifically local identity.100 However, the success of Roman imperial ventures depended on the transformation of competing and ethnically diverse peoples of Italy into a Roman war-machine through the transformation of their statuses and lands and the enaction of treaties between individual communities and Rome. This model could scarcely be more different from the idealized images of the homogeneity of Athenian troops in hoplite formation that we find in fifth-century Athenian literature. In fact, the Roman army comes much closer to the picture of the Persian army as described by Herodotus, defeated peoples in their variegated dress swept up in a huge mass. This is a model of empire that is much closer to that of Rome.101 99

Ennius Annals 7. 15 (Sk.). I have not found it possible to reproduce the alliterative effect of the Latin in my translation. 100 Cf. in general Dench 2003a. 101 See the ‘Marathonomachoi’ (the Marathon-fighters, a Chorus of geriatric veterans) in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, or the constant play on Greek smallness versus Persian hugeness in Herodotus Books 7–9. It is, of course, important to recognize tensions, such as that between Athenian land-forces and rowers: e.g. Aeschylus’ Persae features predominantly Salamis, and emphasizes the rowers, the lower socio-economic group (see E. Hall 1996: 12–13). For the marvellously variegated troops of the Persian army, lined up ethnos by ethnos, see the quasi-Homeric catalogue at Herodotus 7. 60–99; for the limits of Persian integration, see Briant 1996.

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The issue of the extension of the Roman citizenship came to be hotly contested in the latter part of the second century bc. The ancient literary sources, taken as a whole, when describing the motives of the Italian allies in going to war with Rome in the Social War of 91 bc, repeatedly name the desire for the Roman citizenship, sparked off by individual Roman responses to Italian perceptions of being wronged by the Gracchan land commissions. This is the basic story that runs through from Diodorus, a significantly early, first-century bc narrative account, to Appian’s somewhat schematic, second-century ad account in his Civil War. Nevertheless, most ancient sources, and especially Diodorus, allow for the coexistence of what sounds at first to be a very different motive, that of ‘freedom’ and/or a desire to overthow Roman hegemony in Italy.102 Velleius Paterculus and Appian are the notable exceptions in their insistence on the idea that obtaining the citizenship was the sole motive of the allies in going to war. The apparent difference of this motive may, however, be related to differing perceptions of what the citizenship meant, which are dependent in large part on the different worlds within which Diodorus, Velleius Paterculus, and Appian were writing, and above all on their different world-views. It is worth dwelling briefly on this sense of divergence and difference in the literary accounts, not least because of some influential modern interpretations that tend to work backwards from the assumed naturalness of the (presumed) political and cultural ‘unification’ of Italy after the Social War. In its starkest form, found in Brunt’s article of 1965, ‘Italian Aims at the Time of the Social War’, the allies’ desire for the citizenship is based on what Brunt conceptualizes as ‘Romanization of sentiment’. In brief, the cultural and political pull of Rome, as demonstrated by the progressive ‘Romanization’ of the allies in the course of the second century bc, was such as to render the desire for the Roman citizenship more or less inevitable. This argument in fact rests on a series of 102 Desire for the citizenship: Diodorus 37. 13. 1; 15. 3; 18; desire to overthrow Rome/gain ‘freedom’: 37. 1. 6, 37. 14, 37. 22, cf. 37. 12; for the latter, cf. also Strabo 5, 4, 2 ¼ 541C; Plut. Mar. 32. 3; Florus 2. 6. 3 ff.; Eutropius 5. 3; Orosius 5. 18. 2; for this tradition, see Mouritsen 1998: 6–7. While I have found Henrik Mouritsen’s account highly stimulating and persuasive in many places, my emphasis is slightly different.

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assumptions that are highly questionable, and Henrik Mouritsen, in his 1998 book, Italian Unification, has mounted a sustained and serious opposition to the whole tradition on which such assumptions are based, which he would trace back to Mommsen’s interpretations rooted in nineteenth-century German theories of the nation-state. With the attractiveness of the Roman citizenship taken more or less for granted, the tendency has been to look for advantages to the individual in holding the citizenship: positive advantages might include political, economic, and social advantages to members of the Italian elite.103 It is worth looking further at the ‘double motivation’ in Diodorus, as well as scrutinizing the view of the citizenship that emerges in later literary sources, notably Velleius Paterculus and Appian. The idea that the Italians wanted to wrest hegemony from the Romans accords with the expressive imagery of some famous coin-types issued by the insurgent allies themselves in the course of the war. On the obverse of these types, an Italia is portrayed, iconographically modelled on Rome, but surely imagined rather differently from the Italia over which Rome had hegemony: we may or may not want to be reminded at this point of Italia/Italica, the alternative ‘capital’ which Diodorus alleges the Italians set up in the course of the war. As if to drive the message home, on the most famous reverse is portrayed the graphic image of the Italian bull poised to shaft the Roman wolf.104 There are many difficult questions here. One solution is to divide the motivation of the allies into two chronological stages, suggesting that ‘break away’ imagery belongs to a stage in the war when hopes of gaining the citizenship seemed remote. In other words, we might want to say that the allies began by desiring the citizenship, and subsequently some fought on for a world free from Roman hegemony. We 103

Recent standard accounts include: Keaveney 1987; Brunt 1988b; Gabba

1994. 104 Sydenham 1952: no. 628. The bull’s action is usually described more primly, e.g. as ‘goring’ the Roman wolf, but closer inspection confirms the prominent position of the bull’s large penis. This image in fact constitutes one of the clearer cases of threatened rape as metaphor for conquest in the GraecoRoman world (cf. E. Hall 1993 for discussion of Athenian examples). For Italia/Italica, see Diodorus 37. 2. 4–7; Strabo 5. 4. 2 ¼ 241C; Vell. Pat. 2. 16. 4.

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have to admit, however, that this argument can neither be supported nor challenged by reference to the evidence.105 However, even if we could succeed in proving this chronological sequence, we are still left with the ‘double motivation’ in Diodorus. We might want then to attack the text of Diodorus, and emphasize either its fragmentary and excerpted nature at this point, or argue that Diodorus had no overview at any one time, that he was juxtaposing different traditions without realizing that they contradicted each other.106 For all the modern challenges to Diodorus’ scholarly abilities, however, this seems to be a drastic set of measures to take, given the fact that such ‘contradictory’ views are also represented in the works of other individual authors, notably Strabo.107 It is perhaps at least worth wondering whether in fact Diodorus did not see the desire for citizenship and the challenge to Roman hegemony as contradictory. In accordance with a very ancient model of imperial relationships, it is probable that one of the contemporary perceptions of the ‘value’ of the Roman citizenship was precisely that it freed the bearer from the relationship of ruled to ruler, or, more emotively, slaves to a master.108 This would accord well with the drift of two famous anecdotes that appear within Diodorus’ account of events surrounding the Social War and which, taken together, begin to build up images of the ‘worth’ of the Roman citizenship that are rather different from the calculations of material benefit that are sometimes envisaged by modern scholars. In the first, a Cretan is offered the Roman citizenship as a reward, but refuses it, describing it as 105

Along the lines of e.g. Salmon 1967: 339. It is, however, worth emphasizing the fact that it is impossible to date these coins with any precision. 106 For very different assessments of Diodorus’ methods and abilities, see Sacks 1990; Stylianou 1998. 107 5. 4. 2 ¼ 241 C. 108 Cf. 37. 13. 2 for the perception of Servilius the praetor’s treatment of the Picentines not as if they were free men and allies, but as if they were slaves; cf. also the depiction of Rome at the height of her power in two fragments, which might recall Thucydidean imagery of tyranny: an apparent leitmotif of Book 37 as a whole: chs. 2. 1, 3. 1–3 cf. Ch. 17. Cf. also tales attributed to Gaius Gracchus’ speech ‘On the Laws that have been Promulgated’ of Roman abuse of Italians: Gellius 10. 3. 2, 10. 3. 5. Cf. for succinct and acute words along these lines on the concept of libertas, see Crawford 1992: Ch. 13; cf. Gabba 1973b: 216–17.

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the ‘silly thing fought for’ by (the implication is) the Italians: cash is his chosen reward. There are two particularly significant things here. One is simply the idea that the citizenship is not a universally obviously desirable prize, although it is true that the stereotype of mercenary Cretans gives the edge to this story. The other is the way in which the ‘consul Julius’ (probably L. Iulius Caesar, consul of 90 bc) phrases the reward of citizenship. As a citizen, the Cretan will be ‘honoured by me’: the prize is not the material benefits of citizenship conventionally assumed by modern scholars, but a shift in the relationship between Cretan and consul.109 It is interesting to note in this context the emphasis on the violence of Roman rule in a slightly earlier anecdote in which a Latin actor popular with the Romans narrowly escapes lynching at the hands of the Picentine locals by his desperate plea that he too is subject to the Roman fasces, the visible symbols of Roman imperium.110 The ius provocationis, the right of appeal to the people in the face of execution, flogging, or heavy fines, apparently offered in some proposals as an alternative to the Roman citizenship, perhaps hints at one of the major perceived benefits of the citizenship within the context of the late second and early first century bc: some legal protection against the arbitrary wielding of power by Roman individuals. The citizenship itself was apparently associated with profounder ambitions of ‘freedom’ in the face of Roman rule, freedom that might be achieved either by ‘partnership’ in, or by destruction of, Roman rule.111 In this respect, even Appian is revealing: despite his avoidance of themes of ‘freedom’ or the destruction of Roman hegemony as a motive for the allies, he makes Drusus promise that the Italians, through gaining the citizenship, will become ‘leaders’ rather than ‘subjects’.112 Leaving aside the difficult problem of the ‘double motivation’ in Diodorus, we might also want to scrutinize the views of the citizenship propagated by early imperial authors. Velleius Paterculus, as we have already seen, was pushing towards a 109

110 Diod. Sic. 37. 18. Ibid. 37. 12. I am not at all clear that the unrealistic nature of ambitions is a deterrent to having them. For arguments that the Italians were primarily interested in the ius provocationis, see Sherwin-White 1973: 135–7; Keaveney 1987: 30. 112 App. 1. 5. 35. 111

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‘unification of Italy’ that was to be fulfilled by his own example in the days of Tiberius. The styling of the conflict as essentially a civil war, by men of the ‘same race and blood’ as the Romans who nevertheless looked down on them as ‘foreigners and aliens’ not only gives a favourable gloss to his own ancestor’s support for Rome during the conflict, but also enhances a sense of the ‘natural’ justice of the allies’ cause which is absent in Diodorus. The emphasis is on the realization of a common history, and Italian participation after the Social War, rather than on a violent challenge to Roman hegemony.113 Appian, in turn, seems to take for granted the value of the citizenship, and does not admit any ‘darker’ motivation amongst the Italian allies. He could be forgiven for not entirely understanding the gap between perceptions of the citizenship in his own secondcentury ad society and perceptions of the Roman citizenship at the beginning of the first century bc. For most Roman citizens of Appian’s day, the citizenship would have had its primary social and juridical ‘meaning’ within the context of life in the local community: the idea of gaining some control within the Roman state, or even of exercising citizenship within the institutions of the city of Rome, would by now be alien to most.114 It is, ultimately, very hard to get behind individual literary accounts, and to recreate the ‘real’ motivation of the allies—or, for that matter, the Romans—step by step before, during, and immediately after the Social War. It seems important, however, to leave open the possibility of divergent motives and ambitions, only some of which might bear any correspondence to the drift of Diodorus, or the iconography of surviving coins. We might also wonder how far Italians and their friends might have been motivated soon after the war to rewrite actions and intentions that raised questions about their loyalty to Rome, particularly when they were wishing to pursue political careers at Rome.115 113 Vell. Pat. 2. 15. 2; it seems significant that Diodorus’ depiction of the recognition of friends and relations across the lines, and Marius and Pompaedius’ exchange ‘in the manner of kinsmen’ (37. 15. 3) is not glossed by an interpretation of the war as a civil war. 114 Mouritsen 1998: 9; cf. 87–91. 115 For some sense of attempts to shift the blame immediately after the Social War, see the rhetorical work Ad Herennium 4. 19. 13, where the case of

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While we might ultimately want to leave some questions about Italian motivation for going to war with Rome hanging, it has to be said that evidence both for late second–century proposals on the part of Roman magistrates to give the citizenship to the Latins, and for Latin interest in the citizenship well before the Social War, is somewhat less problematic.116 Perhaps most interesting of all is the fragment of a speech by Gaius Fannius to the Roman people, an attempt to rouse hostility against Gaius Gracchus’ proposal in 122 bc to grant the citizenship to the Latins: ‘If you give citizenship to the Latins, do you think that there will be room for you at rallies as there is now, or that you will be able to attend games and festivals? Don’t you think that they will take up all the room?’117 What is particularly useful about this scrap of evidence is that it presents a vivid, ‘grass roots’ view of what citizenship might mean—or, to be cautious, might be suggested to mean—to a non-select Roman audience towards the end of the second century bc. This role is hardly ‘democracy’ in anything like the classical Athenian sense, but it is imagined to involve closely the physical space of the city, to be directly participatory.118 Ultimately, of course, the Roman citizenship was what the Italians were offered and what, community by community, they voted to accept. Despite the fact that the citizenship had apparently been a hot issue for Roman ‘politicians’, for Latins and, perhaps to a lesser extent, for the Italian allies for several decades, it was not a foregone conclusion that Latins or Italians would reap any tangible benefit from it, in terms of exercising the allies’ attempt to take on Rome, incredible without external support, is used as a rhetorical example. It is nevertheless very interesting that, in this early example, the motivation ascribed to the allies is the attempt to ‘transfer to themselves the imperium Romanum’. 116

Mouritsen 1998: esp. 126–7. ORF 4 p. 144; Julius Victor 6; cf. Appian’s C. Gracchus (1. 23. 99) distinguishes between the syngeneia (kinship) between Romans and Latins on the one hand, and the position of the allies (treated as non-kin) on the other, cf. Giardina 1994: 30. 118 See especially Millar 1998: ch. 2 (with useful bibliography) for the spatial dimension of Roman politics; but see also Gabba 1986, cf. emphatically Mouritsen 2001 for the real problems of reconciling a hugely expanded citizen body with the restricted political spaces and traditional institutions of the city of Rome. 117

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much political influence: on the contrary, considerable efforts were made at Rome to minimize the political potential of the new citizens.119 The eventual enrolment of the Italians into the existing voting tribes of Rome once again squeezed a vastly different new situation into traditional categories. Tribes that had originally been named after new expansions of Roman territory were used to remap Italy within Roman political systems, an enormously complex process.120 In the handbook for consular election attributed to Cicero’s brother Quintus, the process of knowing how to exploit knowledge of tribal assignments throughout Italy is emphasized. Such an ideal would have been a feat of learning and memory.121 The mass enfranchisement of the peoples of peninsular Italy was unprecedented and extraordinary in the ancient world, given contemporary expectations of citizenship as the ‘active’ participation in the institutions of state. Its after-effects ricocheted throughout every area of life. As the example taken from the handbook for consular election suggests, the potential value of the Italians within Roman politics began to be realized quickly in the decades after the war, despite the geographical awkwardness that required a good deal of travelling on the part of ambitious politicians.122 In this context, the extent to which the direct participation of individuals in the tribal and centuriate assemblies was insisted upon is striking: the Augustan experiment with a ‘postal vote’ was on a very restricted scale. For all this, the decimation of Italy in the civil wars at the end of the Republic is paradoxically the clearest illustration of the degree to which Italy was integrated into the realities of Roman politics.123 119 e.g. for the limitations of the lex Iulia de Civitate of 89 bc, see App. bc 1. 214–15; Vell. Pat. 2. 20. 2. 120 Ross Taylor 1960, 49 for the naming of tribes after geographical features. 121 De Petitione Consulatus 30; cf. for thinking about the (new) Sergian tribe in an ideological way, Cic. Vatin. 36. 122 See e.g. the remarkable example of Caesar canvassing in Cisalpine Gaul (with which he of course had a special relationship) for the augurate of Antony, as well as some self-advertisement with regard to the elections of 49: [Caesar] BG 8. 50. 123 For the ‘postal vote’, see Suet. Aug. 46; cf. Gabba 1986 for more or less successful ways of incorporating the new citizens into the political institutions of Rome.

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Nevertheless, in the last decades of the Republic, the meaning of the citizenship was undoubtedly changing. Cicero in his Laws formulated an idea of dual citizenship, having rejected it out of hand in 56 bc in his speech Pro Balbo.124 This particular idea of dual citizenship is formulated in relation to Italy and applied to the example of the Elder Cato, the Roman consul and censor born in Tusculum.125 This is another example of the ‘flattening’ of history, the conceptualization of a changed situation through a reinterpretation of the past. The figure of Cato has a particular significance in Cicero’s work: to some extent, this foreshadows his role as one of the archetypes of the new man in a passage of Velleius Paterculus’ history, a spiritual ancestor of both Sejanus and Cicero himself.126 Cicero’s formulation is that there are two patriae, or ‘fatherlands’: one’s local patria, the place of native cults, the place where one’s ancestors lie buried, and the patria of Rome, ‘for which we give up our lives when necessary’. There is still a sense of struggle here: Cicero is pushing the significance of the local community into second place, and emphasizing the political and emotional significance of Rome in a manner that would surely have seemed alien to most Italians. We must not allow Cicero’s forcefulness to obscure the sense of vibrancy and meaning in the local civic and political life of individual communities that we gain even from other literary sources, let alone from the archaeology and epigraphy of Italian towns. Cicero’s relegation of the significance of the local town to a very secondary position is part of a much broader attempt to place the Italian upper classes within his own vision of Rome. Cicero’s attempt to formulate the relative significance of local and Roman citizenships introduces broader issues of the meaning of the citizenship within local contexts, increasingly relevant as the citizenship was expanded even beyond peninsular Italy. In the late Republic, and even in the Julio-Claudian period, the Roman citizenship and the idea of Italy are closely linked, although, as we have begun to see, Italy is increasingly stretchable in geographical and political terms.127 With Caesar’s grant of the citizenship to the Transpadani, Transpadane 124 127

Balb. 28–30. Giardina 1994.

125

Leg. 2. 2. 5.

126

Vell. Pat. 2. 128.

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Gaul was transformed into an emphatically Italian region, her passage smoothed by a long history of colonization, and even by a long-standing geographical vision of Italy as bounded by the Alps rather than the Apennines. Whether or not Italy could stretch to accommodate Sicily was a trickier matter, and Antony’s attempts to extend the citizenship here were more controversial.128 It is here that we can see very clearly the link between the rise of individuals and the expansion of the Roman citizenship. This is not a phenomenon that appears suddenly at the end of the Republic: questions raised by the prosecution in the trial of 56 bc about whether or not Pompey’s grant of the citizenship to Balbus was strictly legal give a strong sense of transition, of the beginnings of a serious challenge to the mechanisms of authority within the Roman state.129 Allegations that Caesar filled the senate-house with the more barbarous species of trousered Gauls are the stuff of scandalsheets, but Caesar in Transpadane Gaul and Antony in Sicily were undoubtedly ‘rewarding’ loyalty by the carrot of citizenship on a scale out of all proportion to that of the Deinomenids in Syracuse.130 Such grants of citizenship are strong indicators of shifts in the balance of power towards monarchy. While the extension of the citizenship to the Transpadani might be seen as the fulfilment in juridical terms of a more long-standing geographical understanding of Italy, the expansion of the citizenship and of the ‘Latin name’ overseas offered more of a challenge to strictly geographical definitions of Italy. Latin rights had long been abstracted from any narrowly geographical definition of Latium, and the beginning of the first century bc had even seen the extension of this idea overseas, in the form of Pompeius Strabo’s grant of Latin rights as a reward to Spanish cavalry on the battlefield.131 The long-term effects 128

Cic. Att. 14. 12. 1. 46–51, cf. Millar 1977: 477 ff. for commentary on a passage of Pro Archia, a speech of 62, in which Cicero imagines that Archias might have acquired his Roman citizenship by the agency of a number of named individuals. However, as Millar (1977: 478) emphasizes, such concessions were necessarily subsequently individually enacted by a law passed by each Roman general. 130 Suet. Iul. 80. 2; Sherwin-White 1973: 179, ch. 7. 131 ILLRP 515. 129

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of Marius’ enrolment in 107 bc in the army of individuals below the property qualification for service were to include the expectation that the general would provide land for his veterans on their retirement.132 Just as colonization in Italy had reinvented the concept of Latin status, abstracting it from its ethno-geographical roots, overseas colonies made up of army veterans settled on allotments of land were to make the notion of Roman citizenship an increasingly virtual community. These citizen communities of ex-soldiers, along with traders and other emigrants, would swiftly begin to challenge any connections between Italy and the citizenship in any strictly geographical way. During the Julio-Claudian period, expectations about the citizenship were modified significantly in the growing practice of granting the citizenship to veteran auxiliaries: as we have seen, there is a long tradition in Graeco-Roman history of using the citizenship as a reward for services rendered, but most of these veterans would never have been expected to exercise their citizenship in the city of Rome. Against this background, it is actually remarkable how long some degree of insistence on the connection between Italy and the citizenship, and office-holding in particular, persisted. As increased numbers of people living in communities ever more distant from Rome held the citizenship, we have to ask whether this status was progressively less important. It is probably too simplistic to imagine a linear decline in the importance of the citizenship in comparison with both local civic identity and status defined in other ways. For one thing, issues of perspective are always important. Cicero in his Laws, or Aelius Aristides in his Roman Oration could present different kinds of ‘centripetal’ visions, asserting the importance and primacy of the citizenship across more than two hundred years. We gain quite different impressions from other kinds of evidence that offer alternative perspectives on the meaning and value of the Roman citizenship at a local level. For example, the third ‘Cyrene edict’ from the Augustan period, one of a series of carefully worded (and, of course, carefully recorded) responses of the princeps to local problems, gives a strong impression of the strictly local uses to which Roman citizenship was being put 132

Brunt 1988a.

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in the politically and culturally mixed community of Cyrene, such as attempts both to escape financially onerous civic obligations and to seek distinction and privilege.133 In ad 168–9, the careful delineation in the Tabula Banasitana of the privileges that will and will not be allowed to the Mauretanian Iulianus Zegrensis, in association with his grant of the Roman citizenship suggests anything but the ‘cheapening’ of the citizenship at either the local level or in the eyes of the Roman authorities. While, in general, grants of the citizenship to entire communities had become more common by this period than grants to individuals, the Tabula Banasitana makes explicit the connection between loyalty to Rome and the citizenship, as well as the hope that this might encourage others to be similarly loyal. Within areas in which Roman rule was comparatively uncertain, the citizenship had a particular kind of political significance that was not universal by this period.134 Stories of people buying and selling the citizenship in the early imperial period may be framed as scandalous instances of the cheapening of the citizenship, but equally suggest the value of it as perceived by the buyers.135 As for the relative ‘value’ of the Roman citizenship in comparison with other ways of marking status, this must surely have varied according to individual circumstances. While later Roman law prescribes differential penalties on the basis of social status rather than citizenship, it is fully possible that we are seeing here a formalization of expected practice.136 If we move back to more ‘central’ perceptions of the worth and value of the Roman citizenship, even Caracalla’s edict of (not quite) universal citizenship can be read in a number of ways, depending partly on the interpretation of the identity of those excluded from the grant (along with slaves and Junian Latins), people described as dediticii in a difficult sentence of P. Giessen 40, a papyrus detailing the aims and scope of the edict. In brief, it is 133 SEG 9. 8 ¼ Riccobono no. 68; for general accounts of the significance of the Cyrene edicts, see Marshall 1980: 658 ff.; Lintott 1993: 64 ff. 134 AE 1971, no. 534, ll. 5–7; Sherwin-White 1973: 274; Millar 1977: 479–550; Shaw 2000: 363. 135 e.g. Dio 60. 17. 5 f.; cf. Acts of the Apostles 22: 28. 136 Garnsey 1970; Millar 1984b; Gardner 1993. 187 adds that the distinction applies only to criminal, rather than to private, law.

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possible to argue that exclusion from the citizenship continues to be as important as inclusion within it, and one particularly interesting theory is that Roman political identity is being defined against Christians excluded from the citizenship.137 4. I MPERIAL RELUCTANCE Claudius, in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, bumbled his way in death as he had in life, unable to find the door marked ‘exit’: it was time for him to be put out of the miserable existence he had endured since birth. So Mercury went to Clotho, the Fate who cuts off the thread of life, and suggested that she snip him off. She agreed, but gave her explanation for the delay: ‘I was going to give him a bit of time until he could grant citizenship to the very few left without it: he’d made up his mind to see every Greek, Gaul, Spaniard and Briton in a toga. But since you like the idea of leaving a few foreigners to start the crop and you insist on it that way, so be it.’138 If we had not already guessed that Claudius, as he appears both in the Lyons tablet and in Tacitus’ Annals, was engaging in special pleading, we are fortunate enough to have Seneca’s satire, written under Nero, an extended send-up of Claudius’ death and reception into the heavens. Seneca’s Claudius is a ludicrous, monstrous caricature of the earthly ruler, his mannerisms, policies, and character pilloried mercilessly. The passage I quoted alludes to Claudius’ speech in support of the trousered Gauls, and is as gross an exaggeration as we might expect to find in such a satirical treatment.139 The Apocolocyntosis itself was, after all, scarcely the work of a disinterested observer: Seneca had spent eight years of Claudius’ reign in exile on Corsica for alleged adultery with Julia Livilla, niece of 137 The standard discussion of the identity of the dediticii is Sherwin-White 1973: 282–7; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 241 for commentary on P. Giessen 40; cf. Buraselis 1989. Caracalla’s contemporary, Cassius Dio, at 77 (78). 9. 5 suggests rather that the grant was made in order to raise taxes by extending the numbers liable to the newly increased inheritance tax and tax on the manumission of slaves. This looks like an interestingly late example of critical traditions about emperors’ ‘generosity’ with the citizenship, in keeping with Dio’s essentially conservative historical stance. 138 139 Sen. Apocol. 3. Griffin 1982; cf. Sherwin-White 1973: ch. 8.

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Claudius and sister of Caligula. The work belongs to the immediate aftermath of the death of Claudius, a time of high hopes for the golden-boy Nero, to whom Seneca acted as mentor.140 The Apocolocyntosis introduces, albeit in an extreme way, the idea that imperial generosity with the citizenship might not always be regarded in favourable terms. As we have seen, the myth of unbroken Roman ‘generosity’ with the citizenship recurs in a number of rhetorical contexts supporting very different arguments within different political and social contexts. We could, however, with almost as much (or as little) entitlement write a history of Roman ‘reluctance’ with the citizenship. However, as I indicated above, it is probably inappropriate to talk of ‘reluctance’ before the Romans set themselves an extraordinary precedent by the mass enfranchisement of the peoples of peninsular Italy. ‘Reluctance’ with the citizenship is a concept that is more appropriately applied to the imperial period, as is the emphasis on moral and cultural criteria for citizenship. At the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial period, there was, as we began to see in the Introduction, keen interest in the reformulation of Roman cultural identity. This is a golden age of history-writing, from the prose and poetic epics of Livy and Vergil’s Aeneid to Velleius Paterculus’ Roman history. These works, like other literature of the age, show great interest in the idea of the plurality of Rome’s roots and early history. Myths of place associated particularly with the city of Rome sanctify the topography of a homeland: the peculiar Roman emphasis on topographical mythology is a symptom of the fact that a common urban geography cannot be taken for granted in the vastly expanded Roman world. The myths inscribe the motif of the arrival and incorporation of foreigners onto the very fabric of the city. Antiquarian enquiry of this period focuses on the roots of language and customs, often asserting the plurality of these roots while simultaneously defining and establishing the nature of Roman cultural identity. It is in fact interesting that, at this period, cultural markers tend not to be described as ‘Roman’ at all, but ‘Latin’, a point that is generally obscured by anachronistic, modern insistence on the 140 For a summary of arguments about the precise date of the Apocolocyntosis, see Eden 1984: 4–5.

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term ‘Romanitas’ in discussions of cultural identity well before late antiquity, when it first appears in ancient texts.141 This is perhaps because of two reasons that may appear to us to be contradictory: comparatively long traditions of ‘Latinity’ as an ethnic, descent-based identity, and equally long traditions of using ‘Latinity’ as a means of what one might think of as ‘franchising’ the Roman state, in the first place through colonization. The contradiction that appears to us is perhaps primarily a signal of the generally exclusive nature of ethnic identity in the modern world. In the ancient Mediterranean world, on the other hand, it is extremely common to use notions of ancestral kin as a loop to draw peoples in, rather than a fence to keep peoples out.142 In part, this acute interest in defining cultural identity is surely a response to a sense of a new, vastly expanded concept of the Roman state in the generations after the Social War. At the same time as there was emphasis on defining cultural identity, we can also see signs of the growing importance of criteria for the Roman citizenship. To the early empire belong anecdotes about emperors assessing and turning down foreign candidates for the citizenship. The most striking of these is an anecdote that Dio tells about Claudius, appearing in a rather different role from the one that he is made to play in the Apocolocyntosis, depriving a Lycian of the Roman citizenship when he discovers that the man cannot understand the question he is asked in Latin.143 As the citizenship is increasingly abstracted from its primarily polis-based and participatory aspect, questions about what it means—or ought to mean— to be Roman become increasingly urgent. It is worth noting at this point that attempts to conceptualize cultural identity suggest clearly the gulf between the Roman citizenship and a polis-based idea of identity. Despite intense post-classical interest in Atticism, there were no fifth-century Athenian attempts to pin down the Attic dialect, or to create a ‘national dress’, in contrast with interest in Latin and togas at the end of the Roman Republic. The scale of the problem of Roman identity finds a slightly closer parallel in attempts to pin down what it is to be Greek: in the famous formula put into the 141 143

142 Cf. Introduction, above. See, now, C. Jones 1999. Dio 60. 17. 3 f.; Poccetti 1999: 121.

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mouths of the Athenians by Herodotus, for example, the existence of a ‘common language’ or culture between Greeks is pushing a point rather than stating the obvious.144 Roman cultural identity is, as we saw in the previous chapter, heavily moral in its focus: that is to say that our own categories of culture and morality blur nicely within the Roman formula of ‘the ways of our ancestors’, the mores maiorum.145 Social and cultural change on a massive scale, coming to a head in the civil wars at the end of the Republic, was conceptualized in terms of a cosmic breakdown, the effects of which were felt through every dimension of life: neglect of the gods blurred into sexual misdemeanour, generalized sleaze, and feebleness in the military field. The age of Augustus in particular sees a heavy emphasis on the reordering of society that involves relations between gods and men, classes of men, men and women, and Romans and other peoples.146 With the benefit of both hindsight and the thematic arrangement of his biographical treatment, Suetonius pulled together Augustan renewal and reordering of the senatorial and equestrian orders, finishing this section with comments on Augustan legislation restricting manumission and the entry of ex-slaves into the citizenbody.147 While we might want to be wary of thinking of Augustan interest in the ordering and reordering of society in terms of a neat policy or package, it would be very hard to deny the degree of emphasis on these themes during the Augustan principate. In brief, emphasis on the reordering of society in the Graeco-Roman world was an expected response to what the Greeks called stasis, comprehensive societal breakdown (inadequately translated by the term ‘civil strife’) that was manifested simultaneously on the religious, social, moral, and political planes. 144 Hdt. 8. 144; cf. Poccetti 1999: 60–1 on differences between Greece and Rome in this respect; cf. Ch. 5, below. 145 We cannot, of course, claim to be wholly ignorant of the application of moral criteria in the self-definition of modern states: the moral/political concept of Macarthyite ‘unAmerican activities’ is the explicit starting-point of Macmullen’s 1966 study of deviancy in the Roman world. 146 Edwards 1993; Zanker 1988: ch. 4; Treggiari 1996: 886–97 on general juridical tightening up of who everyone is. 147 Suet. Aug. 40.

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This interest in re-establishing order in Roman society did not, however, destroy social mobility: it only advertised a rebalancing of it. For example, the Augustan concern for the dignity of the senate that we mentioned above (in Section 2) needs both to be understood within the context of a heated sense of social muddling, inversion, and disorder and to be imagined as not at all incompatible with acceptable kinds of mobility and renewal. The context of perceived social muddling is suggested by, for example, Octavian’s highly publicized ‘purge’ of the senate in 29 bc, which now allegedly numbered a thousand men.148 While we might well suspect that the removal of hostile elements would be an immediate priority of a newly established monarch, it is interesting that the story went round that ‘Orcus men’ enrolled by Antony following instructions in Julius Caesar’s will were included in the purge.149 ‘Orcus men’ were more traditionally slaves freed in the will of their master, named for the god of the underworld, an ostentatious walking advertisement in the funeral procession of the generosity and wealth of the dead master. The analogy of members of the upper classes with slaves highlights both one of the problematic aspects of monarchy, and a tendency to portray enemy elements in the most exaggeratedly lowly social terms. The ‘Orcus men’ are, of course, a joke, but there is a distinctly unfunny portrayal of a situation that one does not like in terms of social upheaval in Augustus’ curt allusion in the Res Gestae to his war with Sextus Pompeius as a ‘war with slaves’.150 It is interesting that one apparent response to such perceptions of social disorder and muddling seems to have been emphasis on the idea of qualification by birth: we can see in the Augustan principate a formalization of expectations that senatorial office was hereditary, as sons of senators were encouraged to wear the laticlave, the broad stripe on the toga that advertised senatorial office. On the other hand, the Augustan age was also in some ways a ‘golden age’ for upper-class mobility: as Italy began to be comprehensively written into the roots of Rome, so senators from even the remoter and recently enemy regions began their 148 ‘Traditional’ numbers for the senate include 300 (Dio 54. 1. 1), as well as the Sullan figure of 600: Talbert 1984: 131–4. 149 150 Suet. Aug. 35. Res Gestae 25. 1, 27. 3.

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careers. In addition, the hardening of formal distinctions in the Augustan age between senators and equites established more firmly the principle of a second rank from which senatorial vacancies could appropriately be filled.151 While the senatorial order was given an increased definition in both moral and social terms, there was also a well publicised concern about the manumission of slaves. The most important Augustan laws dealing with the manumission of slaves are the lex Fufia Caninia of 2 bc, and the lex Aelia Sentia of ad 4. These laws, along with the obscure lex Iunia of (?) 17 bc, are complex in scope, but for my purposes the most important provisions of the lex Fufia Caninia are that it sought to restrict the number of slaves manumitted in a master’s will, in proportion to the total number of slaves owned. The lex Aelia Sentia set minimum age restrictions both on the master wishing to manumit, and the slave to be manumitted, making available a grant of libertas (freedom) and Latin status in certain cases in which such restrictions had not been observed.152 In addition, it prohibited certain categories of criminal slaves from gaining the citizenship, allowing them instead the much lesser status of peregrinus dediticius, permitting them to live only at a distance of a hundred miles or more from Rome. The intentions behind and significance of this legislation need to be thought about carefully, particularly in view of modern readings of the passage of Suetonius’ Augustus in which intentions are discussed as indicating a ‘racist’ policy of Augustus. I will discuss the problems associated with such a view in Chapter 4, but for the moment it is sufficient to emphasize that Suetonius is clear that the legislation is directed towards the discriminate extension of the citizenship, rather than preventing the extension of it altogether.153 It is important also to add that, in the case of the ‘Junian Latins’, ex-slaves manumitted informally, barred from the full citizenship under the terms of the lex Iunia and the lex Aelia Sentia, the bar is not necessarily permanent. The ex-slaves are placed by the law only in a kind of limbo, from which they escape into the Roman citizenship in a number of defined ways, including public and 151 153

152 Nicolet 1984. For exceptions, see Weaver 1990. On all this, see Thompson 1981.

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military service. Perhaps most interesting of all is the provision of an apparently highly elaborate procedure whereby a Junian Latin may marry a Latin or citizen person in front of seven adult Roman citizen witnesses, with the express purpose of begetting a child. If and when the said child emerges and survives one year, the parents may appear with it before the praetor or provincial governor, claiming the citizenship both for the Junian Latin and (where applicable) Latin parents, and for the child itself.154 In the provisions for the ‘conversion’ of the Junian Latin, we are offered a tantalizing glimpse of a range of factors that is perceived to integrate an individual to a satisfactory level within Roman society, including carefully defined ‘good works’, postponement, and the family unit.155 In addition, linking full citizenship to the production of a child suggests that ‘new blood’, subject to legal processes, is to be encouraged rather than excluded. There is a deep irony about early imperial ‘reluctance’ with regard to the citizenship. As we have seen, grants of the citizenship quite clearly escalate at the end of the Republic, linked very closely to the emphasis on individuals that presages monarchy. Citizenship was just one of the kinds of privileges that came to be sought directly from the monarch. A popular contemporary song about Julius Caesar took this idea to extremes: he had, so the song went, led trousered Gauls straight from their place as ornaments of his triumph to the senate house, their trousers swapped for senatorial dress on the way.156 Moreover, just as the power and prestige of the individual encroaches on the organs of state, so with the Augustan monarchy we see the state encroaching on matters traditionally left to the arbitration of the individual, or rather the family. Just as the Julian law of 18 bc saw the establishment of the first standing-court for the trial of cases of adultery, so the lex Iunia, the lex Fufia Caninia, and the lex Aelia Sentia introduce a stronger presence of the state in the case of manumission. Early imperial ‘reluctance’ is, on the one hand, a well-advertised denial of late Republican models of power that were perceived to trample on the dignity 154 155 156

Gaius 1. 29; Ulpian 3. 3; with Weaver 1990, 277. Wallace-Hadrill 1989b, 73–7; Gardner 1993, 19–25. Suet. Iul. 80, cf. 76.

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of the Roman people, and especially of the upper classes, cheapening their sense of privilege by offering it wholescale to outsiders. It may be compared with the motif of refusal of personal honour, which comes to be so strongly characteristic of the selfrepresentation of the ‘good emperor’.157 It may be perceived as part and parcel of the restoration of social order, essential for the health of the state. But, on the other hand, ‘reluctance’ is itself symptomatic of monarchy: it is the monarch who is seen arbitrating over questions of worthiness for the citizenship, whether directly with regard to individual cases, or as the driving force behind legislation. 5. POSTSCRIPT: MOBILITY AND ME TAMORPHOSIS In this chapter so far, we have considered ancient traditions on the history of the citizenship alongside the institutional and political structures of Rome: rather than writing an authoritative and ‘real’ history of the progressive extensions of the Roman citizenship, in the masterful manner of A. N. SherwinWhite, I have been trying to write a history of stories told about the citizenship, in the hope that this too might shed light on its nature by showing how the Romans constructed its meaning. I want in this final section to consider some less obviously ‘structural’ features of Roman society: the importance of the ideas of metamorphosis and mobility (both ‘upwards’ and ‘downwards’ as culturally specific ‘truths’. The cultural importance of stories of metamorphosis and mobility should be considered alongside ‘historical’ narratives. Like ‘histories’ of the citizenship, these stories are interesting less as accurate representations of reality, and more for the range of cultural beliefs that they both mirror and foster. But it is also important to emphasize that such ‘cultural beliefs’ could themselves be closely intertwined with what we might call ‘political history’: the themes of metamorphosis and mobility were, after all, part of the very structure of Rome in Livy’s authoritative history, just as the ability of Rome to transform herself was a suitable theme for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And emperors 157

Wallace-Hadrill 1982a for the model of the civilis princeps, esp. 41–4.

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themselves were not only perceived as being all-seeing and alldoing instigators of change and initiators of action, but were themselves, by virtue of their very power and prominence, peculiarly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of fortune. These are important reminders to us of how misleading traditional narratives of Roman history can be, in their attempts to separate out the ‘political’, understanding this to mean something along the lines of objective ‘facts’ which are not culturally specific. One could choose to consider any one of a number of ‘real life’ case studies of the importance of advertising mobility: the study of freedmen in general, and indeed specific individual freedmen provides particularly rich examples of the potential of such people to embody kinds of social advancement that are important within Roman society more generally. Thomas Wiedemann argued that we should place less emphasis on (trying to recover) the number, or proportion, of slaves manumitted, and more emphasis on the idea of manumission as a possibility, a culturally specific, important belief, which might serve a number of functions.158 After manumission, freedmen are disproportionately visible in the epigraphic record of Rome and the Roman empire, suggesting the importance of marking their inherently transitional status through (literally) making a mark on the city or local community. The tomb of the baker M. Vergilius Eurysaces, dating from the end of the Republic, and still proudly visible at the Porta Maggiore in Rome, is one of the more unmissable examples of this phenomenon.159 Amongst a small, but highly visible minority, there is a perceptible mirroring of the activities and self-representation of traditional magistrates, which can sometimes be directly linked to the eventual entry of descendants to traditional local, and indeed Roman, magistracies. The institution of the Augustales, with its emphasis on benefaction, mirrors the behaviour of the older elite, and helps to create space for the further advancement of descendants, while progress through household or even what 158

Wiedemann 1985; cf. Hopkins 1978b. For a general discussion of motives behind written memorials in the Roman empire, see Woolf 1996: esp. 33–6; see Zanker 1988: 15–16 for the tomb of the baker in the context of self-representation at the end of the Republic. 159

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we would consider to be ‘public’ jobs may be delineated in the manner of a cursus honorum.160 The mobility of sons and (more generally) descendants of freedmen is the most traceable and remarkable aspect of a much broader phenomenon: it is no exaggeration to say that mobility was very much part of the ‘everyday life’ of the ancient Italian community.161 Countless visible records of social transformation are a prominent and well-advertised feature of Roman life, and not least the life of the upper classes. Examples include the Augustan Quintus Varius Geminus, commemorated by the townsmen of Superaequum as the ‘first of the Paelignians to become a senator’, or the biography of the Roman emperor Vespasian, whose household was allegedly so obscure that it did not even boast imagines, the ancestorportraits that no aspirant household would dream of doing without.162 We can glide from biography quite easily to dramas and the rags to riches (and vice versa) fantasies that are such a striking feature of the novels of the Roman imperial world, with the clear cultural importance of these themes to Roman society.163 Equally importantly, however, freedmen embody an anxiety about status that is also culturally important to Rome. This is particularly acute in the first century of the imperial period, and literary examples range from Horace’s ‘responses’ to slurs against his origins to the Younger Pliny’s and Tacitus’ expressions of horror at the inappropriate honours granted by Claudius to his freedmen Pallas and Narcissus.164 Freedmen, with their inherently transitional status, can both represent a challenge to an idea of continuity and stand as a symbol of the mobility that characterizes Rome from her very beginnings. Juvenal’s satirical lines on the pride taken by nobles in the family trees that, when scrutinized closely, reveal a highly ignoble past in Romulus’ asylum, present both aspects in a 160

161 e.g. Purcell 1983. See e.g. Mouritsen 1988, 1996, 1997. ILS 932; Suet. Vesp. 1; on imagines, see Flower 1996. 163 For novels, see e.g. Bowie 1985, for a helpful and judicious outline; most recently, Fitzgerald 2000, 93–4. 164 Hor. Ep. 1. 20–1, with Williams 1995 for a warning not to take too literally Horace’s claims to be a freedman’s son; for the horrors of Pallas and Narcissus, see Tac. Ann. 11, 38; Pliny Ep. 8. 6. 162

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nicely antagonistic form.165 While the legal statuses of freedmen and freeborn foreigners are not closely comparable, freedmen also can embody the idea of foreignness, and the relationship of foreignness to Rome, ranging from Philip V’s elision of foreigners and freed slaves in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, to the sorts of rantings satirically represented in Juvenal’s poetry.166 In this section, I have chosen to discuss more closely two literary examples of the motifs of mobility and metamorphosis: Sallust’s ‘new man’ consul Marius in his historical monograph The War with Jugurtha, and Petronius’ fictional freedman Trimalchio from his Satyricon. Each character has, in rather different ways, a complex relationship with ‘real life’. Comparison of Sallust’s Marius with his portrayal in other literary sources (such as Plutarch’s Life of Marius), and even with the military and political recognition that are concrete in ways that, for example, the ethical assessment of his character are not, suggests that Sallust’s Marius is moulded to embody a specific view of history: Marius is the beginnings of civil war that was to spell disaster for Rome. The treatment of Marius’ own mobility is profoundly affected by this framework.167 Ultimately, I would suggest that the real value of Sallust’s Marius for my purposes is precisely the inflation and manipulation of themes and associations of mobility: the fact that Sallust’s Marius is in fact larger than life makes a more visible and coherent story about mobility which plays upon and at times subverts cultural ‘truths’. Assessment of Trimalchio’s relationship with ‘real life’ is equally complex. The account of his outlandish and excessive dinner seems to satirize both the carnivalesque extravagance of the court of Nero and the behaviour of freedmen, and scholarly investigations of Trimalchio’s Dinner have ranged from analysis of the supposedly naturalistic speech patterns of the freedmen guests to the literary topoi of the cooked and overcooked.168 The value for my purposes of Petronius’ Dinner with Trimalchio is thus ultimately not so far from that of Sallust’s War with 165

Sat. 8. 272–5 for the de´nouement, with Henderson 1997. For legal statuses, see Gardner 1993: 16–19. 167 See esp. Scanlon 1987; Levene 1992; Wiedemann 1993. 168 For a range of readings, see e.g. Veyne 1961; Walsh 1970: 70, 137–9; Gowers 1994. 166

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Jugurtha. The emphases and overtones of the Dinner with Trimalchio have a particular significance that belongs first and foremost to the highly crafted Satyricon. Nevertheless, in order for the work to function as the clever and amusing entertainment it is clearly meant to be, these would have to have been naturalistic enough to ‘ring true’, probably on a number of different registers. Succinctly, then, both the War with Jugurtha and Trimalchio’s Dinner dramatize issues of mobility. In both Sallust’s and Petronius’ dramas, the idea of fortune is an important way of thinking about the advancement of the individual, although it is characterized in very different ways in each work. In the context of this discussion, this idea of fortune is significant because it is related to a range of cultural beliefs, such as expecting the unexpected, and indeed expecting social mobility. Although this range of ideas would seem prima facie to contradict equally important Roman cultural beliefs about heredity and continuity, it was perfectly possible to reconcile them if necessary, or indeed to push on the tensions between these ideas.169 Sallust offers an interesting combination of traditional moral philosophy and questions about the new man’s claim to embody the old moral values of the Roman elite, now abandoned by the nobles. To some extent, the War with Jugurtha provides a counterpoint to the work of Cicero, and the latter’s interest in stretching and subverting the traditional ideology of ‘nobility’ in order to find a place for the new man. Perhaps predictably, Cicero’s argument is ultimately rather conservative: it is not that new men can claim to have virtues that nobles, by their nature, lack, but that nobility itself is no more and no less than virtue recognized: emphasis is shifted from the fact of birth, while noble claims of virtue are not necessarily threatened.170 In Sallust’s monograph, the real problem is that the new man’s claims to embody traditional morality neglected by the ‘nobles’ are ultimately shown to be hollow: the new men are in fact no better than the morally corrupt nobles.171 Sallust plays with the 169

Cf. Ch. 4, below. Wiseman 1971: 109 ff.; cf. 111 for more radical opposition of virtus and nobilitas in e.g. Livy. 171 The gap between words and deeds is of course one of the self-consciously Thucydidean aspects of Sallust’s writing: see, in general, Scanlon 1980. 170

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relationship between virtue and fortune in his portrayals of Marius and Sulla, testing out an ideal of the inseparability of these attributes that he has set up in a grand, theoretical preface.172 Fortune is significant both inside and outside of the text: virtue and fortune were proverbially inseparable in the Roman theology of conquest and success (‘fortune favours the brave’), but their relationship had been tested in recent history by exceptional emphasis on fortune in public contexts.173 In Sallust’s narrative, however, what is striking is the way in which the fortune of Marius is played with in relation specifically to his ‘new’ status, and, with great significance and irony, is played off against the fortune of Sulla, who, in the dramatic time of the work is Marius’ noble counterpoint but, it is strongly hinted, will eventually embody the evil towards which Marius has merely pointed the way.174 Sallust’s concept of the relationship of virtue and fortune to the process of corruption is extremely relevant to his portrayal of Marius and Sulla.175 The specific overtones of fortune for Marius are highlighted by his encounter at Utica forte—by chance—with a haruspex, a soothsayer, who prophesies ‘great and wonderful things’, advising him to try his luck, his fortuna, as often as possible, as everything will turn out successfully.176 At this point, we are allowed to read Marius’ mind, to see his great longing for the consulship and the handicap of his status as a ‘new man’: Marius’ ambitio, the ‘vaulting ambition’ 172

Jug. 1. 1; reflections on human nature subjected to Platonic framework of relative moral and material attributes and importance of mind and body: see MacQueen 1981; for Sallust and fortuna, see Hellegouarc’h 1969: 424, with bibliography. 173 For Sulla’s cult of Tyche, with overtones of Hellenistic monarchy, as well as the role of fortune in delineating the exceptional natures and success of both Pompey and Caesar, see Hellegouarc’h 1969: 423. 174 The relative fortunae of Marius and Sulla might have had additional overtones for Sallust’s contemporary audience: see Wiseman 1971: 109, for hostile attribution of new man’s success to Fortuna, as well as associations made by new men themselves; for Sulla’s introduction of the cult of Tyche from the Greek East, with overtones of Hellenistic kingship, see Hellegouarc’h 1969: 428. 175 See, in general, Earl 1961: 78–9. 176 Jug. 63. 1; NB: the verbal echo here of Micipsa’s evil decision to try Jugurtha’s luck, in the hope that he can kill him off in battle: the mirroring of Jugurtha and Marius, both outsiders drawn into the web of Rome, is not a mere coincidence.

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that will be his downfall, is read in ‘class terms’ specific to his ‘newness’.177 The soothsaying incident highlights the drama of transformation, and Marius’ character as an upstart, a character who belongs to a long and ignoble historiographical tradition.178 Nevertheless, the motif of fortune does more than just provide a commentary on Marius’ social status: rather, it begins to provide a commentary on Marius’ moral status within the terms of the monograph, because Marius starts to take the prophecy literally and perform actions that are wholly reliant on chance, compromising his virtue. Simultaneously, Marius is made to proclaim loudly and stridently his own virtue and the nobles’ contrasting lack, while, with equal irony and a satisfying play on meanings, he asserts that the nobles scorn his fortune (the ‘fortune of his birth’ in this particular context).179 Marius’ fine-sounding claims are undercut by the narrative: here is a new man who is in fact increasingly, and dangerously, deficient in virtue and reliant on fortune. In contrast, there is the irony of the noble Sulla, who has fortune, but never unequal to his virtue: Sallust’s initial pen-portrait freezes him at the moment before his decline, overlain though it is with much foreboding. In this frozen state, the irony is that it is Sulla whose behaviour is much more in keeping with the kind of Roman moral tradition held up as a model within the monograph, the ideal coupling of virtue and fortune, than is the new man Marius.180 The further irony is that, from impeccable beginnings, Sulla is later to embody the ruin of the Roman Republic.181 The corruption in which Marius is implicated, both through his ambition and his reliance on fortune, in Sallust’s narrative has become increasingly world-wide in its scale. In an interesting spin on the idea of the new man’s moral integration as inheritor of the virtues of the nobility, Sallust’s new man protagonist is integrated, and initially prospers within the Roman system through his own corruption. 177

Jug. 63. 2. Ibid. 64; cf. e.g. McGlew 1993 for the imagery of the ‘upstart’ nature of Greek tyrants. 179 Jug. 85 passim and 85. 14 for the nobles’ attitude towards his fortuna; cf. also 90. 1, 92. 2, 93. 1, 94. 6. 180 181 Ibid. 95. MacQueen 1981: 88. 178

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In Trimalchio’s Dinner, the motif of Fortuna is of especial importance in delineating the status of Trimalchio and his freedmen guests. We glide easily from the role of Fortune in the passage from slavery to freedom, to the motif of Fortune and human destiny more generally. Such themes are played out most prominently in, for example, the depiction of the life of Trimalchio from slave-market to freedom and prosperity, the astrological dishes served up, and in the freedmen’s personal stories of both upturns and downturns in luck.182 Fortune is an important feature of the precise, transitional and often precarious position of freedmen as represented in the dramatized world of the Satyricon. Fortune in this context is firmly rooted in the gains and losses of the material world, rather than in moral philosophy and associations with virtue. This sense of a transitional and often precarious position is emphasized further by a preoccupation with dramatizing the act of manumission, and by emphasis on the minutiae of manumission and relationships between slaves and masters. In terms of social and political recognition, the position of freedmen is a terrible no man’s land, with its basis in advertised wealth, but its ability only to ape imperfectly the attributes of upper-class distinction. For example, Trimalchio’s funeral inscription, farcically read out at the dinner, goes so far that it not only mimics a magisterial cursus honorum, but also includes motifs of recusatio, stylized refusal of honours, and election to the college of Augustales in absentia, in the manner of a late Republican potentate.183 Trimalchio himself is a misfit, as demonstrated by his dress and get-up: he wears the freedman’s shaved head along with a napkin at his neck decorated with the senatorial broad stripe, and a gold ring to which he is not entitled, but which, on closer inspection, turns out to be decorated with iron stars that render it appropriate to his status.184 It is also no accident that motifs of illusion and transformation recur in the drama of the Dinner. None of the food is what it seems to be: there is a cook who can turn pork into what looks 182 Petron. Sat. 29, 35, 55; cf. discussion of Chrysanthus as Fortune’s favourite, and discussion of fortune in terms of kind of alchemy: lead into gold: 43; cf. Trimalchio’s epigram on Fortune 55; cf. the name of Trimalchio’s wife, Fortunata. 183 184 Sat. 71. Ibid. 32.

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like fish, pigeon, or fowl, while what appear to be raw, fertilized eggs are cracked open to reveal an artifice of pastry, yoke and a little cooked, seasoned bird inside.185 Transformation is an obvious motif of the story told about a werewolf/shapeshifter/ turnskin, and a changeling story told about a dead slave-boy swapped by witches for a straw boy, with emphasis on the witches’ ability to turn everything upside down.186 In this larger than life dramatization of freedmen at play, these motifs of transformation and illusion are metaphors for their transitional, misfit position in Roman society.187 185

Ibid. 33. Ibid. 37–8; cf. life of Chrysanthus: 43; cf. Ascyltus 57; for a more literary analysis of these elements, see Slater 1990: 60 ff. 187 Cf. also the peculiar emphasis on time and death in the drama: e.g. Sat. 26, 29, 42, with Arrowsmith 1966; Bodel 1994 for the significance of these motifs in the work. 186

3 The Idea of Italy

1. INTRODUCTION The importance of Italy within Roman history and Roman thought is to a modern audience so ‘obvious’ that we almost fail to notice its signiWcance. We are encouraged to overlook it partly by the sheer bulk of Roman literature written after the Social War, with its recurrent insistence on the new political entity of Roman Italy as ‘natural’, determined by geography, descent, or an unbroken history of immigration and cultural interchange. In addition, the ideology of the modern nationstate has profoundly aVected the contemporary historiography of Roman Italy. Within the writings of Mommsen, still in so many ways the father of the modern understanding of Roman history, there was clearly an intimate connection between the making of the German nation and readings of ancient historiographical traditions on Roman Italy before and after the Social War.1 The ‘uniWcation’ of Roman Italy in antiquity functioned also as a ‘foundation myth’ for the Italian nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the continued and largely unquestioned use of the term ‘uniWcation’ to describe Roman Italy after the Social War tends to encourage the equation between ancient ideology and the ideology of the modern nation-state. An alternative late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century emphasis on the proud and distinctive histories of pre-Roman peoples of Italy, which was to be found particularly amongst the central and southern Italian bourgeoisies, also, somewhat ironically, served to exaggerate the drastic consequences of Roman conquest and subsequent incorporation for local identities. This ideological strand is to some extent continued in a tendency to emphasize origins and pre-Roman local 1

On Mommsen, see Mouritsen 1998.

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identities in the modern Italian presentation of the ancient past for popular audiences.2 The main result of these complex processes is that, in the modern historiography of ancient Italy, the admission to the Roman citizenship of the peoples of peninsular Italy in the aftermath of the Social War is traditionally viewed as something of an anticlimax. According to such views, enfranchisement is the inevitable conclusion of the Italian aspiration to become Roman that was experienced over the course of decades or even a century or more, and expressed by the adoption of the Latin language, Roman culture (such as the names of magistracies or ‘urbanization’), or even by ‘sentiment’ (in which case Italians ‘felt’, or ‘identiWed with’ Romans). Once we begin to question the notion that the enfranchisement of Italians was ‘natural’, however, we can begin to see that the idea of Italy has a unique value for the study of the peculiarities of Roman ethnic, cultural, and political identity. For during the Republic and at the beginning of the imperial period Italy was both the site and itself the end product of distinctively Roman modes of growth, expansion, and self-perception, of the accommodation and rewriting of ethnic and cultural diversity. From the last century of the Republic, we can see an explosion of interest in writing and rewriting histories of Rome that accommodate Italy, and that, above all, explore through myths of origins the partially Italian roots of the Roman people, the city of Rome, Roman institutions and customs. As we saw in the Introduction to this book, myth in antiquity can perform some of the functions of history: issues of identity can be explored through the microcosm of a narrative of origins. In addition, Roman notions of Italy are intimately linked with the conceptualization of provinces, the government of empire. The development of peculiarly Roman notions of Italy, beginning to be clearly visible by the end of the third century bc, increasingly distinguishes it from provincial space. Roman 2 For the formation of modern Italian historiographical traditions on the ancient Italian past, see Torelli 1999; for ‘uniWcation’, see e.g. the title of Keaveney 1987, Rome and the UniWcation of Italy; meanwhile, 19th-cent. perceptions of e.g. Italian ‘uniWcation’ are themselves subject to reappraisal and critique: see, succinctly, Riall 1994; for reXections on the contemporary presentation of Molise, ancient Samnium, see Dench 1995: 8.

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geographical, religious, and political conceptualization of Italy suggests a peculiarly proprietorial attitude that is rather diVerent from the conceptualization of overseas peoples and places under the imperium of Rome. Put somewhat simplistically, while the Romans expected and exacted obedience from overseas peoples under their power in the late third and second centuries bc, it is not the case that places regarded as being under the imperium of Rome were yet conceptualized as being, in some sense, an extension of Rome itself. Particularly from the end of the Republic, however, the idea and experience of Italy were to provide conceptual models for both political incorporation and a more closely integrated empire. For example, in Chapter 2 we explored the signiWcance of the abstraction of the concept of ‘Latinity’ from its ethnically speciWc origins rooted in the history of Rome’s domination of Latium, the development of ‘new man’ ideology that can ultimately embrace the elites of the western empire as embodiments of the most traditional values of the Roman upper classes.3 We should also add not just the Ciceronian notion of having two patriae that struggle to formulate the relationship between allegiance to Rome and allegiance to one’s family-seat, but also the whole issue of hyphenated identities that is such a visible aspect of elite life at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial period.4 At the end of the Republic and the beginning of the imperial period, we can observe equites, senators, and other prominent Romans making a feature of their distinctive, Italian origins through the iconography of coins, through cognomina, and through literature. Through these 3 For Italy in the context of Roman conceptualization of provinces, see Crawford 1990; for the striking lack of institutional infrastructure in Italy, in comparison with the provinces, see Millar 1986b: hence my stress on conceptual models; cf. Nicolet 1994 for the intermediary juridical status of Italy in the early imperial period, between Rome and the provinces. Brunt 1990b: 115, focuses more on the establishment of conceptual patterns: he sees the ‘uniWcation of Italy’ as setting ‘the pattern for the wider unity that was to follow’. My own thoughts about the accommodation of diversity would lead me to avoid too much emphasis on images of ‘unity’. 4 As with numerous other ideological aspects of Italian incorporation, there are Sabine precedents for this phenomenon: e.g. for the signiWcance of Albucius who, in a satirical poem of Lucilius wishes to be recognized as Greek rather than ‘Roman and Sabine’ (88 M.), see Dench 1995: 92.

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media distinctive identities may be advertised, and these are sometimes perceived to be expressed through personal style, behaviour, politics, or moral stance: for example, much was made of Maecenas’ Etruscan descent, contributing to his lush persona.5 At times, the existence of hyphenated identities raised the possibility of dislocation or tension, a phenomenon that is, in diVerent ways, an important feature of the poetry of both Catullus and Propertius. More generally, the aftermath of the mass enfranchisement of Italians in the Wrst century bc contributed to a more selfconscious reXection on what it meant to be Roman: besides complex myths of descent and immigration, it is at the end of the Republic that we see a heightened interest in ‘cultural’ criteria, in Latin and togas above all.6 In the meantime, the increasing Roman political focus on individuals and the reception of the phenomenon of virtual and actual monarchy overseas contribute to the articulation of a more closely integrated empire.7 We might think, for example, of ties of patronage (Caesar and Cisalpine Gaul, Antony and Sicily, Claudius and longhaired Gaul), the kinds of geopolitical expressions of Roman centrality and empire as a territorial entity that were explored by Nicolet in his Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, and the ‘imperial cult’.8 Additionally, there is the scale of the development of communities of Roman citizens overseas, largely the product of veteran settlement, itself a phenomenon closely connected with the rise of individuals. In terms of culture, the late Wrst century bc sees a shift towards a greater consciousness of Rome’s cultural and moral ‘mission’ with regard to her overseas empire: Sallust’s Jugurtha, with its interest in the international spread of corruption originating in the old Roman elite, like a disease, is a much darker version than 5 For Maecenas, see e.g. Hor. Carm. 1. 1. 1; Prop. 3. 9. 1–2; Elegiae ad Maecenatem 1. 13, cf. 21–6, 2. 23; for a sense of the cultural life of the northern Etruscan elite ‘at home’, cf. Terrenato 1998a on the environs of Volaterra. 6 This seems to be a clear-cut case of the coexistence of ‘ethnic’ and ‘cultural’ criteria for Roman identity, although J. Hall 2002, esp. 202, assumes their incompatability in the case of ‘Hellenicity’ in classical Athens. For the problematization of the idea of dress as ‘just’ cultural, see Ch. 4, below. 7 For reception of monarchy, see above all Millar 1977, 1984a. 8 I cite the title of the English translation (1991) of the work (1988).

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Cicero’s encouragement to Quintus to moderate the behaviour of provincials according to a perceived scale of humanitas.9 We might think ultimately of the most well-trodden examples of cultural interchange and complex self-positioning in the Roman empire, from the so-called Second Sophistic under Hadrian. It is here that we can Wnd interesting examples of proprietorial behaviour on the part of Rome: the most famous example is Hadrian’s extensive involvement in recreating an Athens that fulWlled Roman historical and cultural fantasies.10 However, it is not merely frivolous to think also about the signiWcance of the appropriation of the archaizing, philosophical, essentially ‘Greek’ beard in the creation of the distinctive persona of the Antonine emperors.11 While the use of classical Greek history and culture as ‘cultural capital’ by Rome might actually encourage emphasis on a glorious past before the Roman conquest, we could also think about the signiWcance of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as an attempt to write the histories of the golden ages of Greece and Rome into some kind of integral whole.12 It is precisely the articulation of a more integrated empire (the limitations of which, in terms of the eYcacy of Roman power, should never be underestimated) that in turn stimulates in the latter part of the Wrst century ad new reXections on the place of Italy, which are worked out both institutionally and theoretically. We might compare Cicero’s formulation of two patriae in his Laws in the latter part of the Wrst century bc with Pliny the Elder’s Xamboyant (and even somewhat bizarre) paean to Italy’s place in the Roman imperial world a little over 9

Q fr. 1. 1. 27–8; cf. 1, 1, 6; cf. Ch. 1, § 7, above. e.g. Spawforth and Walker 1985–6; Levick 2000, with bibliography; cf. Walker 1997. 11 For the signiWcance of beards, see e.g. Dio Chrysostom 36. 17; Habicht 1985: 127. 12 It is of course true that Latin ‘parallel lives’ considerably pre-date Plutarch’s Lives: Varro’s Hebdomades (for which, see Pliny NH 35. 11) and Nepos’ De Viris Illustribus, both written at the end of the Republic, suggest the intensity of Roman interest in putting their own biographical histories on the international and ‘classical’ map. For a Greek writer to posit such parallels is a signiWcant development that seems distinct also from the comparatively long history of universal (and, more recently, exclusively Roman) histories written by Greek authors: systematic comparison represents a new stage in conceptualizing an integrated history. 10

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a century later in his Natural History: Italy is ‘a land which is at once the nursling and the mother of all other lands, chosen by the providence of the gods to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make manners gentle, to draw together in concourse by community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of so many nations, to give mankind civilization, in a word to become throughout the world the single fatherland of all races’.13 Cicero’s formulation struggles to harmonize local particularities with a larger, dominating Roman theme, but is wholly focused within Italy. Pliny formulates, by his paradoxical imagery, an Italy that encapsulates the essence of Rome, that is simultaneously a symbol of unity and variegation, of the reception of plural culture and the projection of a more monolithic civilization on the vastness of empire. This is an extraordinary ‘reconciliation’ of the relative places of Italy and empire, one that simultaneously asserts the plural, Italian nature of ‘Roman’ culture and the limitations of this plurality.14 The appearance from the Hadrianic period of magistrates appointed to govern Italy is an important turning-point in perceptions of political balance: the very sensitivity of the idea until well into the third century suggests the perceived signiWcance of treating Italy as if it were a Roman province. This sensitivity is an indication of the continued symbolic value of Italy as the centre of Roman political, cultural and historical identity, a quality that extends well beyond the period when Italians dominated the citizenship and the senate.15 2. CONTEXTS: ITALY BEFORE THE ROMANS Strabo’s succinct history of the name of Italy quickly abandons any attempt to write an account of who called which region Italia when in the past. He begins by saying that ‘the ancients’ called only ‘Oenotria’—the area of south Italy running from the 13

NH 3. 5. 39 (Loeb tr.). It is hard not to be reminded of the recent introduction of a linguistic criterion for the British citizenship: applicants must demonstrate an acceptable knowledge of English, Welsh, or Scottish Gaelic. As British journalists have pointed out, it is unclear why e.g. Punjabi and Hindi are not to be included on the grounds of numbers of speakers within Britain. 15 Purcell 2000: 425 with n. 104; cf. Millar 1986b: 296. 14

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Sicilian Strait to the gulfs of Tarentum and Poseidonia—Italy, but subsequently the question of who did the naming drops out of the sentence altogether. Instead, ‘the name’ itself becomes the subject of his sentence, ‘proceeding’ and ‘advancing’ up the peninsula, and Wnally taking in even Liguria and Istria up to Pola. Before the Romans, the spread of the name is not so much a question of power, but of the prosperity of those who Wrst partake in the name, the prosperity that encourages it to be handed on. It is only with the advent of Roman hegemony that the Romans decide who is to be allowed to bear the name.16 This is an interesting example of Strabo’s own version of ‘Romanization’, his tendency to view the Romans as peculiarly proactive in their making of geography.17 Strabo’s thesis perhaps exaggerates the contrast between Roman Italy and Italy before the Romans, although it is common in modern historiography too to emphasize the role of Rome in the creation of a newly political notion of Italy. It is extremely hard to suggest a convincing linear scheme for the spread of the name of Italia before the Romans, and it may indeed be misguided to seek to do so. We might want rather to emphasize the existence and coexistence of conXicting traditions on the limits of Italia, reXected in fragments of the works of Greek authors, suggesting the complex dynamics of power between the poleis of south Italy in the Wfth and fourth centuries bc.18 If we look instead for overall patterns within fragments, we can detect hints of attempts to reXect the ethnic diversity of south Italy. In geographical terms, one obvious example is the choice of conceptualizing Italia as an isthmus, with diVerent boundaries described by diVerent sources. Thinking of Italia as a chunk of territory including the hinterland eVectively includes the local peoples of the interior as well as the poleis of the coast.19 In mythographical terms, this can be seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ attribution to the early Wfth-century writer Antiochus of Syracuse a tradition on the names of kings Strabo 5. 1. 1 ¼ 209c–210a. Cf. Ch. 1, above; for Strabo on Roman geography and history, see especially Clarke 1999a: 294–336. 18 See e.g. Antiochus of Syracuse, On Italy: FGH 555, F 2–13. 19 e.g. Antiochus of Syracuse FGH 555, F3a ¼ Strabo 6. 1. 4; F2 ¼ D.H. Ant. Rom. 1. 12. 3; F5 ¼ Dionysius 1. 35; Prontera 1986; cf. Lepore 1963. 16 17

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of south Italy, in the context of Dionysius’ lengthy (and signiWcantly Augustan) discussion of Roman roots. Their names are, progressively, Italus, Morges, and Siculus, and the people of the land, once Oenotrians, take the name successively of Italians, Morgetes, and Sicels. This tradition surely reXects an attempt to make sense of ethnic complexity by creating an orderly line of successors, a neat, pseudo-historical linearity.20 Hellanicus of Lesbos, the Wfth-century mythographer and geographer, is credited by Dionysius with an account that oVers a diVerent variation. Here, the name of Italia arises through Herakles’ conversation with the local people of south Italy when looking for his bull-calf, an animal referred to by them as ouitoulos: the story mythologizes some of the realities of both the foundation and the survival of the Greek colonies of southern Italy.21 Taken together, these more discursive accounts of the extents and naming of Italia suggest important aspects of the ethnically interactive conditions of southern Italy. It is perhaps less important to try to pin down the extent of Italy at any one time than to recognize the signiWcance of trying to talk about what is literally some sort of common ground. At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate any sense of ethnic harmony in the naming of Italia. For example, for Antiochus of Syracuse, the extent of Italia is not so much a growing as a shrinking matter: we might catch a glimpse here of the competitive and often fraught relationships of southern Italy, not least between the ‘Greek’ poleis themselves.22 We should also take seriously the possibility that other, nonGreek conceptualizations of Italia coexisted with the kind of geographical and mythographical formulations that we have been discussing. These are, inevitably, far less easy to track before the third century, and must remain on the level of suggestion, but there are dangers too in writing oV the possibility of early non-Greek perspectives. The bull-imagery of the coinage of the Samnite insurgents of the Social War, as well as Oscan versions of the name Italia, is interesting in this context: D.H. Ant. Rom. 1, 12, 3 ¼ Antiochus FGH 555, F2. FGH 4, F111 ¼ Ant. Rom. 1. 35; Lepore 1985; Dench 1995; 1998. 22 Cf. also Timaeus’ Greek etymology for Italos, in marked contrast with that of Hellanicus of Lesbos: FGH 566, F42b. For the 5th- and 4th-cent. vicissitudes of southern Italian states, see Purcell 1994. 20 21

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is this in part a ‘recollection’ of the sort of ‘local’ tradition on ouitoulia that is attributed to Hellanicus of Lesbos?23 Perhaps even more suggestively, Roman thought and institutions may ‘continue’ an archaic, central Italian notion of sacred space that emphasizes water as the boundary of sacred eYcacy. It seems to be such a notion that is behind the debate in 205 on whether or not the pontifex maximus is allowed to leave Italy.24 More generally, such a delineation of Italia as a sacred space bordered by water may be behind indications of the peculiarly proprietorial character of Italy in Roman perceptions. These include the idea that ager Romanus can exist only in Italy, or the link between expansion of the pomerium and the expansion of Roman territory speciWcally in Italy.25 Ideas of Italia are one of a number of notions of collectivities of diVerent kinds that are attested in early Italy before the completion of the Roman conquest of peninsular Italy in the Wrst few decades of the third century bc. Other early notions of collectivities include that of Magna Graecia or, in Greek, Megale¯ Hellas, usually ascribed to varying areas of southern Italy. As is the case of Italia, there is a sense of competing versions of the term, leading to intense debates amongst both ancient authors and modern scholars. When we are not dealing with frontiers in the modern sense, or concepts of the territory of nations, we should surely expect that deWnitions and delineations will vary at diVerent times, according to diVerent perspectives, and indeed according to diVerent cultural concepts. One of the more suggestive interpretations of the term Magna Graecia/Megale¯ Hellas is its association with fourth-century south Italian Pythagorean thought. Megale¯ Hellas was, according to this interpretation, an expandable ideal that could (in some versions) bring in non-Greek leaders, and even whole

23

For a much fuller discussion, see Dench 1995: 213–16; Dench 1997. Crawford 1990: 950. 25 Gabba 1978: 12; for the pomerium, see Seneca De Brevitate Vitae 13. 8, with Giardina 1994: 22 for the idea that this traditional association exclusively with the expansion of Roman territory within Italy is challenged by Claudius; the classic exposition of this archaic (Etruscan? ‘Italic’?) notion of land, see Catalano 1978: esp. 528–37. 24

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peoples, accommodating them through ideologies of good government and moral behaviour.26 For my purposes, then, the most interesting aspect of notions of Italia and Megale¯ Hellas is their potential to span a number of diVerent ethnic groups and communities. What is also striking is the basis of such terms in an idea of space, however much these concepts may shift or be disputed. This emphasis on space is particularly striking in contrast with the traditional Greek emphasis on descent as a primary marker of identities larger than the polis: of Greekness, or, rather more commonly, of a more speciWc ethnic identity based on the notion of being ‘Ionian’ or ‘Dorian’ for example. While an idea of Hellas as a space occupied by Hellenes does exist in classical Greek thought, it seems somewhat abstract in comparison with the emphatic spatial entity of these southern Italian topographical concepts.27 This spatial conceptualization is one important aspect of experiments in new ways of thinking about identity and links that in fact coexists in Hellenistic Italy with older frameworks to which novel twists are given, such as the idea of the barbarian, and links based on claims of common descent.28 The concept of Italia before Roman hegemony is only one range of ways of thinking about links between the various communities. Nevertheless, the very existence of such a concept is signiWcant, as it suggests a desire to formulate new entities, with a particular emphasis on the idea of land held in common by diVerent peoples. There is sometimes a tendency in modern scholarship to play down pre-Roman concepts of Italia: these are ‘just’ geographical, very restricted in both territorial terms and in terms of impact on peoples, in comparison with Roman hegemony exercised through the exploitation of manpower, through the emphatic organization of this vast territory including the reconWguration of the land itself and the relationships 26

For the unusual inclusion of Sicily, see Strabo 6. 1. 2 ; for Megale¯ Hellas as including the whole Greek world, see Pind. Pyth. 1. 146; Eur. Med. 439–40; for the term as referring to the whole of Italy, see Justin 20. 1; for Pythagorean notions of Megale¯ Hellas, see Calderone 1976; Musti 1988; Dench 1995: 60. 27 J. Hall 2002: 125–9, 131–2. Cf. also the Thucydidean perspective on Sicily as fragile as a result of the ‘fault-lines’ produced by the co-existence of diVerent peoples, see T. Harrison 2000. 28 Dench 1995; cf. Ch. 5, below.

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and orientations of peoples within it. But interest in conceptualizing common ground, literally and Wguratively speaking, is itself suggestive of the peculiar, ethnically interactive conditions of ancient Italy. These are, moreover, the conditions within which Rome ‘grew up’, within which she was to formulate her own distinctive ideas of Italy.29 3. THE MAKING OF ROMAN ITALY We can probably begin to think about speciWcally Roman notions of Italia in the early third century bc, towards the end of a long period of intermittent warfare with both the Greek and the non-Greek peoples of peninsular Italy. However ancient the idea of sacred space bounded by water might be, it may be no accident that the earliest notices suggesting the application of this idea to peninsular Italy refer to the end of the third century.30 Huge boundaries are thereby set for the potential eYcacy of Roman ritual practice, while this is in addition a highly proprietorial expression of what Italy means. Strabo’s perceptions of a distinctively Roman response towards Italia that is far more proactive than pre-Roman conceptualizations make a certain kind of sense here: from the third century, we can begin to Wnd indications that Italy was in some sense thought to be peculiarly Roman territory.31 Such indications should really be considered in connection with modern discussions about the distinctive nature of Roman rule. In recent scholarship, it has become most common to argue that the idea of empire as the control of space on a large scale is a relatively late phenomenon. Most inXuentially, Nicolet proposed that we should begin only in the Augustan age to 29

For the metaphor of ‘growing up’ cf. Wiseman 1989. See above all Crawford 1990 for the interrelationship between conceptualization of Italy and conceptualization of provincial space. My guardedness relates to obvious problems of evidence: (a) these notices are comparatively late, and (b) the quality of memory seems to improve markedly from around 300 bc, probably because events are now within reach of memory of the Wrst written accounts of Roman history: see e.g. Millar 1989: 139. 31 For diVerent perspectives on Italian identities in the second and Wrst centuries, and the ways in which expressions of being ‘Italian’ work in relation to other identities, see Ch. 5, § 5, below. 30

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think about the Roman empire as ‘a territorial state’ in the sense of the imagination and articulation of an emphatically spatial geo-political entity centred on Rome.32 Such discussions of the nature of Roman rule focus primarily on the provinces rather than on the conquest and management of Italy. With a few notable exceptions, there is a tendency in modern scholarship for Italy in the fourth to second centuries bc and the provinces in the late Republic and early imperial periods to be treated as separate ‘subject areas’.33 In addition, it is perhaps the intimacy of the relationship of Rome with Italy that has deterred discussion of Roman intervention within the context of the distinctive character of Roman rule, as well as determining the intensity of intervention at this early date. The Roman conquest of Italy in general was emphatically directed not only towards the subjugation of peoples but towards the transformation of land on, ultimately, a very large scale. It is this emphasis on the transformation of land that makes it Wt Nicolet’s understanding of the ‘territorial state’ of the Roman empire, while pre-dating the Augustan age by several centuries. This was the argument of Nicholas Purcell in an article on the ‘provincialisation’ of the ager Gallicus in the early second century bc, in terms of the reconWguration of space. In fact, he suggested that an emphasis on the conquest and reconWguration of land, as opposed to peoples alone, is already apparent around 300 bc, in traditions on the conquest of Sabinum by the Roman general M’. Curius Dentatus. EVectively, M’. Curius carved a swathe of Roman territory all the way to the Adriatic, incorporating the local inhabitants originally as cives sine suVragio, ‘citizens without the vote’, a status perhaps now reinterpreted as a punitive measure. In his reported boast of victory over so many men and their land, we might want to see echoes of the ideology of

32 1991: 1–2; cf. Richardson 1991 for a rather more subtle notion of a shift towards territoriality on the grounds of shifts in meaning in key Latin vocabulary of empire: according to his arguments, provincia acquires a territorial meaning by the late 2nd cent. bc, and imperium a territorial meaning only in the late Republic. 33 Keay and Terrenato 2001 largely misses opportunities to do useful comparative work on these issues: see my review, Dench 2003b.

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Hellenistic kingship, with its legitimation based on victory and ‘spear-won territory’.34 Early hints of an interest speciWcally in the reconWguration of the land of conquered peoples can, then, already be observed from the early third century bc. Moreover, two major examples taken from the next decades suggest the beginnings of an idea of peninsular Italy as an organic whole, a whole that can be redrawn according to a pattern determined by Rome. One is the building of a network of huge, permanent roads, all leading outwards from the city, in the course of the third and into the second century. The building of roads is apparently closely connected to the foundation of colonies. If we consider foundation-dates of Latin colonies, we can see some interesting examples of the foundation within a single year of colonies in geographically very distant parts of the peninsula: we might think, most notably of Cosa and Paestum, both in 273, or of Ariminum and Beneventum, both in 268. It is tempting to make something of the geographical symmetry and balance implied in such foundations, and to wonder how far we should see this as beginning to imply an overall geo-political vision of Italy, and a will to reWgure its landscape. However this may be, the end-result of colonization certainly is the reconWguration of the landscapes of both the peninsula as a whole, and the immediate locality of the colony, through conWscation, centuriation, and redistribution.35 The roads themselves alter forever the ways in which individual areas interconnect, while defying what would seem to be topographical constraints, such as rivers and even mountains.36 There are some limited comparisons to be drawn here with the ‘Royal Road’ of the Achaemenid Empire. In both cases, a vast line is drawn that reWgures the connections between ethnically diverse peoples and symbolizes 34 Purcell 1990a; Sherwin-White 1973: 38–53; for ancient sources on M’. Curius Dentatus, see, most conveniently, Marina Torelli 1978: 52–4. 35 Misurare la terra 1983; for fascinating insights into the historical perspectives of (interestingly non-senatorial) land-surveyors, which emphasize violence, the display of power, and the humiliation of the enemy, see Campbell 1996, 2000, although such writings do not resolve problems in distinguishing between intention and hindsight. 36 Chevallier 1976; Coarelli 1988; Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996: 174–5, 186–8; Laurence 1999.

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in a very visible way the power of the rulers.37 A second major example is that of the resettlement of populations in the third and second centuries bc: for example, in 269 bc, Picentes were moved to the territory just outside Paestum. It is hard to overestimate both the impact of the rearrangement of huge numbers of people and the will behind the impulse to do this.38 In speciWcally human terms, as we saw in the previous chapter, the peoples of Italy were much more profoundly involved in the structures of Roman rule than the ‘allies’ or ‘subjects’ of any other ancient Mediterranean ‘empire’, through the systematic levy of men, in addition to the payment of tributum. Conquered peoples were required to send troops to Wght Rome’s wars with her and for her, while from the fourth century, the Romans had begun to experiment with the whole scale incorporation of peoples or towns, at Wrst more usually—as in the case of the Sabines conquered by M’. Curius Dentatus—sine suVragio, ‘without the vote’, than with it.39 This intimate involvement of Italian peoples should not, however, suggest that the picture is primarily one of assimilation. The ideologies and institutions of Roman Italy suggest a much greater complexity. The reconWguration of land and peoples of Italy involved Rome’s assignment of diVerentiated statuses to individual communities by individual treaties. In addition, the creation of colonies on land conWscated from defeated peoples could drive wedges between old neighbours, involving the severance, or at least the major disruption of economic, ritual and cultural links between peoples. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the case of Samnium in the Central Apennines, home of peoples who had constituted some of Rome’s most redoubtable enemies in Italy. The Latin colonies of Beneventum and Aesernia, sent out in 268 bc and 263 bc respectively, seem to be placed in such a way as to disrupt links between three ‘Samnite’ peoples: the Hirpini, the Caudini, and the Pentri.40 According to what has become virtually a modern orthodoxy amongst ancient historians, the period from the end of the third 37

Purcell 1990a; 1990b; Briant 1996: 67–82. J. Patterson 1988: 77–83; Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996. 39 For tribute as the primary means by which the Achaemenid empire exercised hegemony, see Kuhrt 1995: 2. 689–701; Briant 1996: 399–487. 40 Dench 1995: 209, with bibliography. 38

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century bc up to the Social War sees the progressive ‘Romanization’ of Italy. This process of ‘Romanization’ is understood as the appropriation of Roman cultural and political motifs on the part of Italians, interpreted in the most extreme versions as a growing desire on their part to become Romans, and elsewhere presumed to be an indication of the magnetic power of Rome. Belief in this magnetic power of Rome leads to a tendency to imagine a kind of ‘do-it-yourself’ Romanization, and to minimize Roman action and intention.41 My own emphasis on the proprietorial behaviour of Rome in the conquest and management of Italy would suggest much more in the way of Roman agency in the physical and economic reconWguration of the Italian peninsula. I will also argue that emphasis on cultural and ethnic variegation in Italy well after the Social War is a crucial strand in the ideology of ‘Roman Italy’, and one that is arguably even enhanced by incorporation into the Roman state. Recent archaeological accounts of third to early Wrst century Italy have, very importantly, moved on a long way from the Romanocentrism that still tends to characterize ancient historical narratives of Italy between the Roman conquest and the Social War. Since the publication in 1976 of a classic collection of archaeological essays on diVerent regions of Italy, Hellenismus in Mittelitalien, it has been hard to maintain a Romanocentric perspective at least in discussions of culture. This volume simultaneously established Hellenism as the cultural language of the whole of central and southern Italy (including Rome, of course), and emphasized the plurality of cultural identities through its focus on the very diVerent uses and interpretations of Hellenism in diVerent regions. There are lessons to be learned from such an approach also for the analysis of local appropriation of Roman motifs. One interesting example is the persuasive theory that the primary eVect of introducing titles of Roman magistracies into Oscan-speaking areas in the secondcentury bc is the expansion and increasingly the diVerentiation of the oYce-holding elite. In other words, the appropriation of Roman political language is aimed at and reXects local dynamics 41 See, above all, Brunt 1965; the argument has been toned down considerably in Brunt 1988; Mouritsen 1998: Chs. 2–3, have sharp things to say about ‘cultural’ Romanization in modern historiography.

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at least as much as commenting on the centrality and dominance of Rome: we are clearly looking at cultural change, but not necessarily at a situation in which local distinctiveness is somehow lost, or compromised, through the appropriation of the ‘Roman’.42 Ultimately, however, it will not do to restrict discussion of local cultures in Italy to the analysis of ‘Hellenism’ and (to coin a concept) ‘Romanism’: ideally, we should be thinking of the true complexity of cultural interchange, taking into account the tiniest local variations as well as ‘Etruscanism’, ‘Lucanianism’ and so on.43 Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, the study of early Roman literature can also helpfully modify the belief that a model of Roman centre and Italian periphery is a simple depiction of cultural and political reality in the second century bc. This becomes obvious partly through the demonstration that bipartite models that imagine Romans and Italians as two monoliths—urban/e Romans and rustic Italians, for example, or Romans as Greeks to Italian barbarians—are only one available mode of representation, and one that, moreover, runs in tension with interest elsewhere in intense local variegation, relying on close local knowledge. In some cases, the assertion of bipartite models is comically inappropriate (even deliberately so, as seen in the comedies of Plautus), although in a modern western world that seems intent on writing oV Islamic society as barbaric oriental fanaticism, we are hardly in a position to deny the potential political force of what can easily be used as comic material. As we shall see, however, an emphasis on local variegation is surely as much a mode of ‘writing empire’ as is the construction of bipartite models of Rome and Italy.44 The early writing of Italy raises the same kinds of complex issues about both the self-positioning of individual authors and the selfpositioning of Roman culture and history that we discussed in relation to Hellenism in Chapter 1. Self-positioning in relation to Hellenism is, additionally, closely linked with self-positioning 42

Campanile 1979. Curti, Dench, and Patterson 1996: 188; Terrenato 1998b; I would emphasize that such approaches are in their very early stages, best judged as a ‘good idea for further research’ rather than the report of systematic analysis. 44 ‘Writing empire’ is, of course, an activity that is more conventionally associated with the imperial period. 43

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in relation to Italy. In the case of Ennius’ tria corda, glossed by Aulus Gellius as speaking three languages, Greek, Oscan, and Latin, the authorial persona is an embodiment of the kind of cultural bricolage that we have just been discussing in relation to the archaeology of second-century Italy.45 More generally, Rome’s particular accommodations of herself within the language of Hellenism are directly associated with her emergence as a superpower within the Mediterranean world, including Italy. This language of power is, in turn, directed towards delineating Rome’s place within, and her relationship with, Italy. The most famous and striking example of Roman literary interest in Italy is the Elder Cato’s Origines.46 The Origines survive only in ‘fragments’ that purport to be quotations or citations in the works of later authors. They begin with one book on the origins of Rome, and end with four on contemporary history, with particular regard to the political career of Cato himself, including extensive quotation from his own speeches. Up to this point, we have the conventional ‘hour-glass’ shape of Roman history: the extensive treatment of beginnings, the extensive treatment of contemporary and recent history, and very little in between. However, Cato followed up his book of Roman origins with two books of the origins, ethnography, and lore of Italian communities, apparently arranged according to geographical considerations. Book 2 begins with the far north of what had probably only recently been recognized even as geographically part of Italy—including Liguria, Gaul-on-this-side of the Alps, and the Venetic lands to the east—before moving down to the towns, topographical features, and peoples of the centre. Book 3, of which very few geographically identiWable fragments survive, is concerned with the south. What is remarkable about the fragments of the Italian books that are preserved by later authors is the sense of freshness and precision. The account was apparently comprehensive, both in terms of geographical coverage, town by town, or people by Gell. 17. 17, 1 ¼ Enn. Operis incerti fragmenta I (Sk.). For the Origines, see Astin 1978 for a solid treatment; Cornell’s unpublished thesis of 1972 is a provocative and interesting attempt to uncover from the work alternative perspectives to a Romanocentric account of ancient Italy; Chassignet 1986 is an extremely useful edition. 45 46

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people, and in terms of scope. There is a range of diVerent kinds of information, and an emphasis on detail, almost as if a catalogue were being made. This is especially striking in the case of (what will be) north Italy: for example, we learn the size of lake Larius, the number of towns inhabited by Euganeae, and the number of Boian tribes.47 But it is undoubtedly a more general tendency within the Italian books, as seen by the recording of the height jumped by goats on Mounts Soracte and Fiscellus.48 It is partly the sense of abundance of detailed information and partly the fragmentary nature of the work that make it diYcult, and probably misguided, to Wt the fragments into any reductive formula of what Cato might have been ‘doing’ with Italy. Leaving aside unitary explanations given both in antiquity and by modern scholars, this precision suggests some sort of reassessment of Italy, perhaps partly invited in the aftermath of the Hannibalic War and during Cato’s own Ligurian campaigns, both of which challenged the boundaries of Roman Italia.49 More survives of Cato’s account than of the accounts of other second-century authors interested in antiquarian details about Italian peoples and communities, such as Coelius Antipater and Gnaeus Gellius, but there are indications here and elsewhere of a similar impulse to measure and set down detail. For example, a Servian citation of Coelius Antipater Wnds him, intriguingly, measuring the height of a wooden statue of Apollo within the god’s temple at Cumae, recording it as being ‘no less than Wfteen feet high’.50 Cato’s account is obviously both much more and much less than the sort of list of conquered peoples that is characteristic of Mediterranean traditions of monarchy, from the near-eastern 47

48 Orig. 2. 8, 11, 13 (Chass.). Ibid. 2. 20 (Chass.). Serv. ad Aen. 9. 600 ¼ Origines 3. 9 (Chass.) for the idea that Vergil’s praise of the moral conduct of Italy is anticipated by Cato and by Varro. There is very little indeed on praiseworthy morality in the surviving fragments of the Origines: the enigmatic statement, ‘I will not write about peoples unless they are good and energetic’ (Gellius 17. 13. 1 ¼ Origines 3. 8 Chass.) is given without context. For the signiWcance of the north in the Origines, see Dench 1995: 18–19, with bibliography and, most recently, J. Williams 2001: 20–2, 49, 52–8, 73–9. 50 e.g. Coelius Antipater fr. 54 (Peter) ¼ Serv. ad Aen. 6. 9; for Gnaeus Gellius on mythological lore of the Marsi, hardly mainstream in the mythography of Roman Italy, see frs. 7, 8, 9 (Peter). 49

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kings to Augustus, a list that proclaims mastery by its very presence, and by its toll of names: Augustus’ imperial geography in the naming and ordering of subordinate peoples is an important example in Nicolet’s thesis of the ‘territorial state’.51 It does, however, suggest the ‘logging’ of Italy according to Roman mentalities, in a manner that seems wholly distinct from the particular variety of Hellenocentric geography that one encounters in Herodotus’ Histories.52 It is the ‘sandwiching’ of the Italian books between Roman antiquities and contemporary history that is most suggestive: the implication is that Italy, considered as a whole, in some sense ‘belongs to’— or at the very least is peculiarly relevant to—Rome and Roman history. It is perhaps worth reXecting that such a work on Greece, considered as a whole, is unimaginable before Pausanias, whose writings need to be read essentially as an antiquarian construction of Greek identity within the very particular context of the Second Sophistic.53 Herodotus, it is true, includes mini-geographies and even ethnographies of some Greek peoples: the excursus on the strangeness of Spartan kings is perhaps the best example, but this is an isolated example rather than a general phenomenon.54 For anything closely comparable before Pausanias, we would have to go to the individual local histories of Attica, for example, the comparatively tiny and ethnically more homogeneous ‘territory’ of Athens.55 Such comparisons highlight the fact that the Origines reXects a strong sense of a proprietorial attitude towards Italy, albeit in comparatively subtle and complex ways. This is very far from 51

Kuhrt 1995: 676–8, and esp. 677–8 for the idea that the Achaemenid royal inscriptions tend to ‘dwell on the variegated nature of the king’s subjects’. Nicolet 1991, 17–24 for the naming, renaming and reordering of peoples in Augustus’ Res Gestae. 52 Hartog 1988. 53 See e.g. Habicht 1985; Elsner 1992, 2001; Alcock 1996; Konstan 2001. 54 Hdt. 6. 56–60: note especially comparison of the Spartans with Persians and Egyptians, further enhancing their exotic nature and providing a subtle interrogation of the notion of Greeks and barbarians that is in keeping with the sophistic taste of Herodotus’ age. 55 Cf. e.g. Pearson 1942; despite an important degree of interchangeability between the concepts of Athens and Attica (for which see E. Cohen 2000: chs. 1–4), classical Athenian ideology seems very much more centralizing in its focus on the city of Athens.

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saying that Italy is thought of in any kind of unitary sense: it is, on the contrary, the sense of diversity, in terms of individual histories, geographical features, myths and mores that is the one most prominent aspect of the fragments. Nor do I mean that the political ‘uniWcation’ of Italy was preWgured in Cato’s work: such an idea would have been unimaginable to Cato and his contemporaries. Other second-century literary evidence for perceptions of Italy and Italians can begin to suggest more about this sense of diverse peoples and places centred on, or contained by Rome. We have already remarked on the fragment attributed to Ennius that itemizes the army, or at least part of the allied forces of the army, in apparently highly positive terms, as a series of ethnic names: ‘Marsa manus, Paeligna cohors, Vestina virum vis.’ This variegation enhanced by the alliterative language, this ethnic plurality has become one way of thinking about the ‘Roman army’.56 Food and commodities linked speciWcally to individual Italian peoples or towns are a feature of Roman comedy as well as the antiquarian tradition: Praenestine stuVed wombs, Lanuvian nuts, Lucanian sausages.57 There is a sense here of Rome from a Roman perspective as the economic centre of Italy, as recipient of goods from all over this land. As goods and commodities are received and consumed, so too a notion of individual specialities enhances and creates new distinctions. It is nevertheless important not to overemphasize a sense of Roman identity centred on Rome. For example, Cato’s famous ‘shopping list’ from his On Agriculture, covering an interestingly large area of central and southern Italy in a quest for ropes, spades, ploughs, buckets, and other farming equipment, recommends that certain items are purchased in Rome, but is not centred on Rome. Its multiple focal points are locations in Italy—from Alba [Longa] south as far as ‘Lucania’, and to the south-east as far as Venafrum—in the vicinity of places where Cato’s addressees might have land: Roman hegemony in Italy creates not just one, centripetal pattern, 56

Enn. Ann. 229 (Sk., with Sk.’s note ad loc.); cf. Ch. 2, above. For Praenestine nuts and Lanuvian stuVed wombs, see Naevius Ariolus ll. 25–6; for Lucanian sausages (which of course survive as the modern Greek loukanika), see Varro Ling. 5. 111; cf. also Cato’s interest in prosciutto from Gaul, in his Origines: Varro Rust. 2. 4. 11 ¼ 2. 9 (Chass.). 57

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but dozens of new economic, social, and cultural rearrangements.58 These are some of the kinds of imagery that coexist with more unitary visions that polarise Italy and Rome, and it is in such unitary visions that we can see most clearly Rome’s use of the language of Hellenism to express hegemony. These starker visions are once again often to be found in comedy and satire, genres within which there is much play on contemporary attitudes and expectations. It is no great surprise in the context of Hellenistic Italy to Wnd the Romans appropriating for themselves the role of ‘Greeks’, relegating Italy to that of the ‘barbarians’. This timehonoured way of asserting superiority has become stretched, almost beyond recognition. For example, the precision with which regional dialectal Latin and Italic institutional terminology is reproduced in second-century Roman literature Wnds a closer parallel in the imitation of other Greeks than in that of ‘barbarians’ in Athenian comedy.59 Elsewhere, as we saw in Chapter 2, Italians are relegated to rustics, foils to the ‘urbane’ possessors of the city, Rome, a model quite diVerent from that of Greeks and barbarians. The urbane–rustic idea is modelled rather on the classical idea of the city and its dependent territory. In their juxtaposition of models for ways of seeing a variety of very diVerent situations, Roman writers were grappling with ways to imagine essentially new relationships within the ancient world. Perhaps the most obvious symptom of wholly new ways of imagining selves and other peoples is the emergence in the course of the second century bc of a particular kind of interest in the Sabines and the Sabine landscape. As fully enfranchised Roman citizens by the end of the third century, the Sabines and their landscape come to provide an alternative way of thinking about idealized Roman behaviour away from the city and away from excessive, indulgent and corrupt behaviour that is associated with the Roman elite. Despised ‘rusticity’ thus becomes an alternative way of thinking about idealized upper-class behaviour.60 As we pick up traces of this tendency in fragmentary 58 Cato Agr. 135; cf. 22. 3–4 for mill equipment; 136 for variations on tenancy agreements in Venafrum and Casinum. 59 Cf. Colvin 1999. 60 For much more detailed discussion of Sabines in Roman ideology, see Dench 1995: 85–94.

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contemporary literature of the second century, we should be aware of the signiWcance of this ideological development for the much longer history of conceptualizing a vastly expanded Roman identity. The idea of the ‘worthiness’ of Sabines and their environment will provide a model for the accommodation of ‘new men’ within the elite, and will contribute to the future complexity of codes of elite behaviour. We have already seen, in the Introduction to this book, that fragments of second-century literature suggest contemporary interest in traditions of the rape of the Sabine women. While Ennius even wrote an entire play, Sabinae—‘The Sabine Women’—which must have dealt with this theme, reconciliation speeches of the women after the rape seem to have been something of a second-century speciality. We might reasonably guess the contemporary resonance of such themes, as Roman mythological traditions were shifted to reXect new understandings of the world. SpeciWcally, the beginnings of a new sense of Roman identity as a plural concept were being worked out through the medium of traditional stories about the foundation of Rome.61 4. ITALY AFTER THE SOCIAL WAR So much surviving writing about—and, indeed, the writing of—Roman Italy belongs to the decades following the Social War. The works of Cicero, disproportionately preserved in post-classical times, account for much of the volume of this. The concept of Italy and Italians is undoubtedly important in the literature of the late Republic and the Augustan period, although it is not a straightforward matter to work out the degree to which, and the ways in which, this is a new development. We are simply not able to compare like with like, before and after the Social War. One problem is quite simply the limited survival and largely highly fragmentary nature of literature before Cicero. Another problem is that so much of what we think we know about the history of Rome and Italy before the Wrst century comes precisely from works written in the late Republic and Augustan periods, such as that of Livy. It is 61

Cf. Introduction, above.

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hazardous to assume wholescale ‘invention’ of themes in the late Republic and early imperial period on the grounds that there is no surviving contemporary evidence for them beforehand. For example, histories that integrate the pasts of Rome and of Italy, and themes such as ‘new man’ ideology, are attested for the Wrst time in surviving literature of the late Republic, but we should be cautious about simply asserting that these are late Republican inventions. It is, however, equally important to acknowledge emphasis when there is clear and recurrent interest in such themes. The self-consciously rhetorical nature of most of Cicero’s writings is arguably helpful rather than a hindrance when we are trying to gain a sense of what is contested and controversial in the Wrst century. Cicero was writing to convince and persuade, rather than to state the obvious, and a number of ‘hobby horses’ is clearly apparent.62 Leaving literary evidence aside for the moment, it is important to acknowledge the impact of incorporation into the Roman citizenship on local communities and mentalities, ranging from the construction of administrative buildings and civic centres to the regular adoption of the practice of dating by Roman consulships.63 In some cases indications of integration within Roman political life are very obvious: one might think, for example, of the implications of honoriWc monuments to Roman patrons in the campus (the Latin equivalent of the gymnasium) in Italian towns such as Herdonia, Pompeii, and Alba Fucens.64 In other cases, we can see signs of more general social and political change at a profound level. For example, in remoter areas of the Central Apennines, where indications of ‘urbanization’ were limited even in the second century (despite a boom in sanctuary building), it is not until the end of the Republic, and above all the early imperial period that we can begin to trace new building patterns. These include an increasing emphasis on the use of wealth in private contexts, along with the trappings of urban ‘civilization’, such as baths and aqueducts. It is certainly tempting to see a connection between such 62 See, in general, Vasaly 1993, for the signiWcance of place in Ciceronian rhetoric. 63 Crawford 1996, with appendix 1, pp. 979–81. 64 Torelli 1991.

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changes and the entry of signiWcant numbers of the local elites to the Roman senate in the early imperial period.65 It is, nevertheless, far from clear that we should emphasize the loss of a perceived sense of local distinctiveness in the Wrst century bc. While Italians must go to Rome if they wished to vote in the Roman political assemblies, or participate in any of the other institutions of Roman political and social life, local communities remained largely autonomous: institutional centralization is thus strictly limited.66 We have in fact already begun to see that participation in the political and social life of Rome is directly linked with emphasis on the local community, whether in the form of dedications to patrons or in the form of benefactions that focus on the urban good life. We might also think of what is implied by the monumentalization in late Republican Italian towns of Roman municipal and colonial laws, texts conventionally described as ‘municipal charters’ of which the longest surviving examples are the lex Tarentina and Tabula Heracleensis. Each text apparently contains a rather diVerent selection from a number of Roman laws on municipia and coloniae, and the applicability of clauses to the speciWc local situation is somewhat variable. The creation of municipia implies a high level of intervention on the part of the Roman state and its oYcials, in the choice of which communities should become municipia, eVectively administrative centres of the surrounding territory, in making individual constitutions, and indeed in passing laws concerning municipia: one should certainly not deny the cultural, political, and legal impact of the new relationship with Rome. However, it is interesting that these monuments of municipal obligations, the relationship of Rome and the status of the community are at least as much ‘purely’ symbolic (as implied by the inclusion of clauses that seem wholly irrelevant to the local situation) as they are useful and applicable to the individual town. This reXection should discourage us from overemphasizing the impact of Roman authority on day-to-day life.67 That being said, it is also interesting to note some of the concerns of the Roman laws themselves. For 65 66 67

J. Patterson 1991; Dench 1995: 140–53. Crawford 1996: 423–4 for examples and exceptions. Frederiksen 1965; Gabba 1994: 127–8; Crawford 1998.

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example, the lex Tarentina suggests considerable concern to tie local magistrates to the town and make them responsible for its fabric. Such clauses might well suggest the temptations of a life elsewhere (perhaps in Roman politics above all), but at the same time they show that the ‘Roman’ model emphatically upholds the dynamics of local society.68 There are numerous other ways in which local identities, dynamics, and rivalries are reconWgured and actively fostered in the process of ‘incorporation’ into the Roman state. We might think, for example, of the obvious competitive pride taken in the honoriWc statuses granted by Rome, especially those of municipium and colonia: this is clearest within the towns of the north in the last decades of the Republic, the newest and most recently Roman part of Italy.69 It is in fact possible to argue that the institutions of ‘Roman Italy’ enhance rather than diminish a sense of local, and sometimes even ‘tribal’ identity that we might be tempted to treat as romantic antiquarianism were we to Wnd it in literature alone.70 For example, as late as the war between Pompey and Caesar, the Marsi and Paeligni are mentioned as Wghting within distinct ‘ethnic’ units.71 It is clearly possible to imagine the Roman voting tribes to which Italian peoples were admitted in the moral and ideological ways that we might associate with the older Italian ‘tribal’ names in the late Republic, so here too we can see ‘centralization’ and a sense of local particularism clearly coexisting within an undoubtedly changed universe.72 68 For the text and translation, see Crawford 1996: no. 15, esp. ll. 26–31, 32–8. 69 Rudd 1972; Wiseman 1985a; Cenerini 1989; Criniti 1994. Cf. Horsfall 1997, 2001 for a good sense of the continued importance in Roman literature of the idea of diversity in Italy well beyond the Social War. 70 It is, more generally, interesting to speculate about the extent to which it is the Roman conquest of Italy that enhances ‘tribal’ consciousness in Italy by the insistence on e.g. celebrating triumphs over entire ‘tribes’. Cf. J. Williams 2001: 214–15 for the possibility that Roman treaties with Transpadane peoples based on essentially Roman categories of ‘Insubres’ and ‘Cenomani’ might in fact have created these as meaningful categories of ethnic self-ascription. 71 Caesar B Civ. 1. 15, with Giardina 1994: 56; for more general discussions of how the recruitment of Latin and allied troops worked before the Social War (and, indeed, the surprisingly limited evidence for this), see Toynbee 1965: 1. 479–502; Brunt 1971: chs. 4 and 6; Ilari 1974: esp. chs. 3–4. 72 For the Sergian voting tribe, see Cic. Vatin. 36.

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With regard to less institutional spheres, we have tantalizing glimpses from the ritual and mythological traditions in Rome which suggest, for example, the delineation of ‘Etruscan’ and ‘Sabine’ areas: the vicus Tuscus—‘Tuscan Street’—and the Quirinal respectively.73 The most common modern scholarly positions on such a problem would probably be either to accept such delineation as ‘survival’ from the successive ethnic realities of archaic Rome, or to think of it as being entirely later Republican antiquarian ‘invention’ encouraged by contemporary interest in the concept of Rome as a multi-ethnic city and multi-ethnic state.74 But so long as we substitute the more cautious ‘emphasis’ for the term ‘invention’, we might prefer to admit the possibility of more than one, even multiple, layers of tradition and signiWcance, which would certainly not preclude shifts of meaning in the late Republic. For example, it can be plausibly argued that the Quirinal was designated ‘Sabine’ in the early years of the third century bc, in the context of both Pythagorean emphasis on the Wgure of (in this context Sabine) Numa, and plebeian interest in demarcating space within the pomerium, capitalizing on the ‘alternative’ nature of the Quirinal. It is hardly a coincidence that a new voting tribe, named the Quirina, was created in 241 bc, and that it is to this tribe that the conquered Sabines were at least ultimately assigned.75 Roman customs of naming are also interesting in the context of a discussion of ways in which distinctive Italian roots are very much part of the way in which both Rome and Roman identity is imagined in the late Republic and early imperial period. Roman citizens have, of course, Roman names, three in the classic formulation that begins to be widespread in the late Republic. These are: the praenomen (the variety of which was very limited), the gentilicium (marking descent, but in what could be a very broad way), and the cognomen, the name that 73

Varro Ling. 5. 46; cf. 5. 159 on the Vicus Cyprius as the area where Sabines who were taken into the citizenship settled, on the basis of the belief that ‘cyprum’ is the Sabine word for ‘good’. 74 Cf. Curti and Dench forthcoming for discussion of Carandini’s reconstructions of archaic Rome; literary attestation of the Vicus Tuscus goes back to the second century: see Plaut. Cu. 482 for the area as a by-word for male prostitution. 75 Curti 2000: 83–91; Ross Taylor 1960: 59–68.

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can act as a distinctive ‘qualiWer’, marking out something more individual about either an ancestor or the man himself, and frequently used as a means of informal reference and address. One subcategory of cognomina is geographical, reXecting either place of origin or place of association, and we see a proliferation of names referring to Italian localities in the aftermath of the Social War. These include cognomina based on names of Italian ‘tribes’ (e.g. Sabinus, Marsus), but perhaps equally interesting is the broad range of cognomina based on individual Italian towns. The pattern of known examples suggests something of the realities of geographical perceptions. The percentage of cognomina based on town names is particularly high for Latium, and slightly less high for Etruria, reXecting perhaps both a greater precision based on greater proximity, and the perceived importance and prestige of towns in such areas of central Italy. We shall shortly begin to see the especial importance of neighbouring areas of central Italy in the ideology of a plural Roman state at the end of the Republic and in the early imperial period.76 This discussion of the continued importance—in an undoubtedly changed universe—of a sense of variegation, regionality, and the speciWcs of local identities, should make us hesitate before reading as simply descriptive the monolithic concepts we Wnd in literature, such as the highly emotive, and sometimes politically eVective tota Italia. We should, instead, read such expressions as eVorts to create a shape for new realities, perceived or desired. Interestingly, there is a sense of diYculty in establishing perspectives and terminology, and a continuing ambivalence about how to write about Italy and Rome in a single narrative. At times, we will Wnd them as monoliths facing each other, complements or mirror opposites, but their separateness from one another can equally be questioned. There are obvious issues of perspective too when we consider the personae of authors themselves. The kinds of issues that begin to be raised by, for example, Ennius are writ very 76 Kajanto 1965: 43–5. It is striking that all ‘classes’ (including slaves and freedmen) are represented in Kajanto’s examples of cognomina based on Italian ethnics and town-names (cf. Solin 1996); for an excellent, concise history of Roman naming practices, see Salway 1994.

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large in the complex self-positioning of Cicero, Catullus, Propertius, and Livy: such issues of perspective in ‘Roman’ literature can never be reduced to identifying ‘Roman’ as opposed to ‘Italian’ ways of seeing. Despite long recognition of the fact that the vast majority of Latin authors have origines outside the city of Rome, to the extent that this is something of a cliche´ in modern textbooks, surprisingly little attention has been given to the complex issues of gaze and voice raised in such works, in comparison with recent scholarly interest in such themes within the works of Greek authors of the Roman world, including Polybius and Strabo. While Cicero identiWes both Marius and the Elder Cato as ‘new men’ like himself, the late Republican resonances of this depiction are very obvious. The moral high ground of the ‘new man’, such a central aspect of this Wgure, can be compared with much broader experiments in the idea of Italian ‘worthiness’ on the part of Cicero. Cicero, whose origo, or family seat, like that of Marius before him, was Arpinum, the inhabitants of which had held the full Roman citizenship since 188 bc, attempted to create a distinctive political and ideological place and space for the Italian elites newly incorporated as Roman citizens after the Social War. Cicero’s writings are highly Romanocentric: this is to some extent surprising, given that his own ‘newness’ was frequently the subject of vitriolic comment amongst the older Roman elite.77 Although he was perfectly capable of playing the ‘new man’ card for himself when the occasion suited him, he frequently places himself in the Roman ‘centre’ and looks outwards at ‘Italians’. This Romanocentric vision of Italy reXects the political potential that other members of the Roman elite also became keen to realize and exploit. As we saw in Chapter 2, the presence of newly enfranchised, wealthy Italians could be usefully courted and manipulated in the major Roman political assemblies. This was the case both in the centuriate assembly, where the votes of the (comparatively) wealthy counted for proportionately more 77 See e.g. Sallust’s attribution to Catiline (Cat. 31) of the tag, ‘inquilinus civis urbis Romae’, ‘immigrant citizen of Rome’; cf. for slurs on Cicero’s origo Cic. Att. 1. 16. 10; [Sallust] in M. Tullium Ciceronem Oratio 4; cf. in general Dio 38. 12 for the profound unpopularity of Cicero.

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than the votes of the poor, and in the tribal assembly, where knowledge of the new political geography of Italy could be used to target certain towns and areas.78 The shape of Roman politics came to be altered irrevocably. Cicero himself lamented to Atticus in a less guarded moment on 1 March 49 bc, within the context of civil war between Pompey and Caesar, that both townsmen and countrymen in Campania rushed to follow Caesar, no longer caring about the particular variety of ‘higher’ collective interests that Cicero himself held dear, but for their ‘lands, their little villas, and their petty fortunes’.79 Most obviously, this clearly partisan aside reXects Cicero’s disappointment that parochial interests were being held above what he saw as the interests of the Roman state as a whole: this is not the careful balance of priorities advocated in his Laws.80 Beyond this, however, the aside in fact suggests the potentially very close integration of local and ‘Roman’ politics that was both encouraged by the increasing dominance of individuals in Roman politics and that in turn contributed to this dominance.81 We might well want to see this incident in connection with the archaeological evidence that we considered above for the reconWguration of urban space in Italian towns to honour Roman patrons in the latter part of the Wrst century bc. Decades before the Social War, Roman individuals were exploiting ‘local’ Italian concerns and seeking to increase their own political weight by advertising their willingness to address the wrongs of Latins and allies, but the concrete reality of the Roman citizenship undoubtedly accentuated the usefulness of political connections.82 78

For modiWcation of the orthodox view of the economic standing of the prima classis in the late Republic, see Millar 1998: 203. 79 Cic. Att. 8. 13. 80 Caesar, of course, consistently claims to be acting in the best (and particularly the popular) traditions of the Roman state in his Bellum Civile: see esp. 1. 5. 7. 81 In some cases too, tensions within individual towns were clearly exploited: see e.g. Cic. Sull. 60–2. 82 There are limited comparisons to be made with Pisistratus’ use of the geographically evocative ‘Hyperakrioi’/‘Diakrioi’, both expanding the potential basis of support and addressing their grievances: see Hdt. 1. 59. 3; Ath. Pol. 13. 4–5, 16. 2–3, 5–6.

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We should, however, be clear that active interest in speciWcally Roman political issues is potential rather than automatic. In a letter of 55, Cicero berates a Campanian friend, Marcus Marius, for staying in Pompeii to take part in local politics, what Cicero frames as a parochial interest in the ‘Oscan farces’ (Osci ludi) of local government.83 There is much to unpack here. Cicero’s joke almost certainly turns on perceptions of what were more commonly known as ‘Atellan farces’ (fabulae Atellanae): the joke obviously works better for Pompeii if they become generically ‘Oscan’ rather than speciWc to the Campanian town of Atella, while ‘Oscan’ has an added punch, given that this ‘ethnic’ had long occupied a place somewhere near the bottom of the hierarchy of Italian barbarian ‘types’, the least civilized of peoples.84 The existence of a genre known as ‘Atellan farces’, apparently long known as a form of comedy in Rome, is itself interesting: these were masked plays with stock characters, performed in Latin (our knowledge of them is restricted to some references in Latin literature and a few written fragments from the early Wrst century bc), and seem to have largely been set in studiedly rustic, small-town Italian environments. This exportation of a ‘product’ marked explicitly as ‘local’—which might be compared with the type of gladiator known already in the Republic as a ‘Samnis’—raises important issues about both the projection and reception of local identities in Italy, and about authenticity and the reinterpretation of meaning within the new Roman context.85 Cicero’s remark is, then, to some degree comparable with the overtones of something like ‘village pantomime’ for urbane sophisticates in modern Britain: the contested political scene of late Republican Pompeii that is attested in graYti and 83

Cic. Fam. 7. 1. 3. with Crawford 1996, appendix 3, p. 984. I specify ‘active’ interest, because the increasing emphasis on feuding individuals at the end of the Republic, meant an increasing likelihood of being drawn into the Roman political scene. Cf. Cicero’s remarks on his own trips to Arpinum: e.g. Att. 2. 11, 15, 16 for weekending at rugged, Ithacan Arpinum amongst the ‘rustici’; cf. his grandfather’s life’s work at home in Arpinum, the opposition to a local ballot-law as a ‘storm in a wine-ladle’: Leg. 3. 16. 84 Dench 1995: 52–3, 77–8. 85 The earliest contemporary reference to a ‘Samnite’ gladiator is Lucilius 149–52 M.

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epigraphy is relegated to a rustic, barbarian farce.86 At the same time, however, there is also just a little nod to cultural speciWcity in the ‘Oscan’ label: while there is little if anything visible of the Oscan language in surviving evidence within one generation after the Social War, Pompeii in recent memory of course used Oscan in public documentation.87 In overtly political contexts, Cicero imagines ‘worthy’ Italians playing a key role in his visions of the maintenance of an essentially conservative status quo. He uses an intensely moral vocabulary for these wealthy and ‘right-thinking’ people, depicting them as ‘boni’ and ‘honesti’, and thus reappropriating the language of nobilitas that, as is common in the Graeco-Roman world, elides a narrowly deWned criterion of birth (in this case, descent from a consular—or sometimes praetorian—ancestor), wealth and moral worth. These people are the domi nobiles, ‘noble’ in their hometowns if not at Rome.88 By these means, he pitches them against the moral turpitude of the plebs and the proXigacy of his own political opponents: Cicero’s version of an expanded body of political agents is distinctly horizontal rather than vertical.89 In his visions, these worthy Italians are made to play a supporting role, rather than claiming for themselves the prizes of state, rallying behind Cicero himself: this can be apparent both in his representations of actual events, or in his fantasies of the creation of opposition to ‘tyranny’.90 ‘Tyranny’ 86

Mouritsen 1988, 70–89. Subsequently, the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 was to catch the vibrancy of local Pompeiian politics: Mouritsen 1988: 90 V.; Gabba 1994: 27. Cf. Cicero’s remarks on his own trips to Arpinum: e.g. Att. 2. 11, 15, 16 for weekending at rugged, Ithacan Arpinum amongst the ‘rustici’; cf. his grandfather’s life’s work at home in Arpinum, the opposition to a local ballot-law as a ‘storm in a wine-ladle’: Leg. 3. 16. 87 For the complexities of dating and interpreting Oscan electoral texts, see Mouritsen 1988, 85–6. 88 For deWnitions of nobilitas, see Brunt 1982. 89 For Cicero’s political visions, including the concordia ordinum (Wrst attested in the Pro Cluentio of 66) and the consensus bonorum (e.g. Sest. 97), see in general especially Wood 1988: ch. 10; cf. more generally Stockton 1971; E. Rawson 1975a. 90 Rallying behind Cicero: e.g. Pro Plancio for the support of tota Italia for Cicero on return from exile; cf. Sest. 26, 32, 128–31; Red. Sen. 24–5; Fam. 9. 13, 9. 16; Mur. 47 for the imagined support of the municipales for the maintenance of the politically hierarchical status quo in the centuriate assembly. For the strongly idealizing nature of Cicero’s versions of Roman politics,

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in the late Republic is a highly emotive, highly used term, one of the armaments of the ubiquitous political virtue of ‘freedom’, libertas.91 This terminology is symptomatic of the perceived growth of personal power. It is used by Clodius in reference to Cicero’s consulship of 63: the allegation is that Cicero Xouted the principle of the sovereignty of the people by ordering the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators without trial. Equally, Cicero uses it in reference to Clodius’ perceived threat to the interests of the ‘good’ through his championship of the people.92 Cicero’s provision of a political supporting role for Italian worthies picks up on a theme of morally upright rustics, ‘natural’ opponents of the excesses and indulgences of urbane life. To some extent, this is a traditional theme: an emphasis on austerity and the avoidance of pleasure and indulgence on the part of both the elite and the state operated as one signiWcant model for the assurance of success in late fourth- to second-century Italy.93 This is the sort of imagery through which the Elder Cato defends himself in fragments of a speech against the accusations of Thermus, and through which Polybius endorses the behaviour of Scipio Aemilianus, who unlike his peers turns his back on the excesses that follow empire.94 But Cicero’s construction of worthy Italians also picks up on second-century Roman ideology of both rustic Italians and morally virtuous Sabines, and it is this additional strand that formulates for them a supporting—rather than a starring—role in Roman politics. The irony of Cicero’s relegation of Italians to a rustic foil for Roman politicians is of course underlined by the central importance of the values of urbanity in the home towns of the Italian upper classes at precisely this period.

cf. Millar 1998: 200 for the representation of the centuriate assembly in the De Republica. 91

For the central importance of libertas as an (originally optimate) basis for political action in the late Republic, see Arena 2003. 92 For Clodius on Cicero, see e.g. Att. 1. 16. 10: ‘quousque, inquit, ‘hunc regem feremus?’ (‘For how long must we put up with this tyrant?’); cf. Sull. 7. 21 ; for Cicero on Clodius, see e.g. De Domo Sua`; Post Reditum in Senatu, Pro Milone. 93 Dench 1998. 94 Cato: Festus p. 350 L. ¼ ORF 4 no. 8, 128; Polyb. 31. 25.

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This idea of Italian worthiness Wnds expression also in Cicero’s highly emotive slogan of tota Italia, ‘the whole of Italy’. This is a characteristically Ciceronian vision of unity that gains particular emphasis in the aftermath of Pompey’s mobilization of Italian support in 57 for Cicero’s recall from exile, both in the form of petitions and in the form of votes in the assembly, and from which he milked political capital in his speeches of the 50s. Nevertheless, his rhetorical, propagandist writings against Mark Antony, the Philippics of September 44, in which he ultimately musters support for Octavian, constitute the most extensive example of the Ciceronian rhetoric of Italian worthiness and tota Italia. In one of the climaxes of the work, Cicero declares that tota Italia wants libertas, freedom from the tyranny of the Tarquin-like Antony, who has been painted throughout the work in the glaring colours of physical excess and the exclusion of ‘the good’. As Cicero warms to his theme, he portrays Antony drinking and vomiting over Varro’s signiWcantly Sabine villa, and surrounding himself with prostitutes and other low-lifes, even becoming a prostitute himself, rather than keeping the company of ‘the good’.95 Salvation appears in the form of Octavian himself, transformed from the ignobilis, the ‘low born’ of Antony’s own rhetoric, into a new man, true moral heir of the best aristocratic traditions of the Republic.96 The idea of tota Italia is picked up and is of key importance in Augustus’ own rhetoric: ‘Tota Italia’, he says in his Res Gestae, the account of his rise and reign that was left at his death to be inscribed on his Mausoleum, ‘spontaneously swore allegiance to me, and demanded me as its general for the war I won at Actium.’ Augustus transformed his somewhat dubious legal standing and his role in a bitter civil war into a necessary, morally desirable vindication of a comparatively new and 95 Phil. 10. 19, 2. 103–5 for the incident in Varro’s villa, cf. e.g. 2. 44, 63, 67, 77, 96; 3. 9; 12; 13. 24; 26; 31; cf. Att. 10. 13 for Antony summoning representatives from the municipia, only to sleep until nine, before telling them to return the next day, because he wanted to take a bath and a laxative, a prime ‘tyrannical’ display of bodily indulgences; cf. also his execution of the citizens of Parma at Phil. 14. 8. For Antony’s image in ancient historiography, see Pelling 1988. 96 Phil. 3. 15–17, 4. 44 for Octavian coming to the salvation of ‘the whole of Italy’.

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emotive alternative image of the Roman state.97 The idea of Italy, like new man ideology, becomes an alternative way of thinking about Roman ideals. Yet it is hard to Wnd sustained and unselfconscious expressions of new man ideology: this is, after all, a stance that insists on its true traditionalism while facilitating the accommodation of the new. Cicero’s own self-portrayal is an interesting case in point. When it suits his purpose, he is, of course, a new man himself: in the Philippics he places himself amongst the ranks of the municipales, the ‘townsmen’ like ‘all of us’, sneered at and despised by Antony when he sneers at Octavian’s obscurity of origins.98 The new man’s claim that his outsider’s austerity gave him ‘clean hands’, his reputation based on his own deeds and the best traditions of the Republic rather than laurels gained by his ancestors, could have political uses. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, even in Sallust’s Jugurtha, the earliest comprehensive treatment of ‘new man’ ideology, promises are shown to be belied by actions: the corruption of the nobles rubs oV on new men, and new men become indistinguishable in their moral characters from nobles. In Cicero’s own case, particularly in the more ‘private’ contexts of letters, he seems distinctly less assured of his new man identity, and more obviously interested in assimilating himself to the nobles. There is a hurt tone in his attempts to teach Appius Claudius a Stoic lesson on the ‘true’ meaning of nobilitas, with a basis in virtue rather than birth, after an apparent misunderstanding when Cicero failed to meet him on his arrival in Cilicia. This is also apparent when he complains to Atticus about the slur he receives from Clodius—what would a man from Arpinum want with the hot springs of Baiae?99 As we shall see in Chapter 5, in his discussions of accent and language in his rhetorical works, the Brutus and Orator, he distances himself from the non-‘urbane’. Cicero was quite clear about the kind of accent

97 Res Gestae 25. 2; cf. 10. 2 for their support for his election as pontifex maximus in 12 bc. 98 Phil. 3. 16; cf. Pro Plancio passim. 99 Fam. 3. 7. 5; Att. 1. 16. 10, but 14. 9. 1, cf. Phil. 2. 105 for laughing about the incident later.

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that sounded best: Latin as spoken by the truest and bluest blooded, the most anciently ‘urbane’ of Rome.100 For all Cicero’s periodic certainties on the subject, there are no simple dichotomies here between new man and noble, Roman and Italian: Cicero seems to be constantly negotiating his own role, and sees—and resents—others, like Lucius Cotta, who aVects a ‘rustic’ accent—doing the same.101 ‘New man’ ideology is becoming one possible way of presenting oneself as a member of the elite: there seems genuinely to be a shift and an edge of uncertainty in the discourse of power at Rome. Cicero was by no means the only famous Roman individual who represented himself in a combination of diVerent ways. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is of course the emperor Augustus himself, self-consciously wearing homespun and with a public image of living simply, but at the same time partaking in the (equally ‘traditional’) Xamboyant and selfindulgent lifestyle of the Roman elite.102 The coexistence of alternative models of elite behaviour in the late Republic is itself a symptom of Roman tendencies to incorporate and accommodate. New members of the elite are transformed just as their presence contributes to the transformation of elite selfrepresentation. While block characterizations of Italy and Italians are of great importance throughout Cicero’s writings, and in fact remain remarkably static within his rhetorical works, he also makes great use of characterizations of individual Italian towns and peoples, and we can see here the importance of variation according to context.103 One good example of this is the characterization of Larinum in his speech in defence of Cluentius. Cluentius has been charged with a number of heinous crimes, the murder of Cappadox, and the attempted murder of his stepfather, Oppianicus. Larinum, the family seat, lies in the territory of the Frentani, peoples who might most obviously be associated with the austere values of Central Apennine peoples. In Cicero’s speech, however, it becomes simultaneously the setting 100

101 102 Ch. 5, § 1, below. De Or. 3. 42. Dench 1998. On this theme, see esp. Vasaly 1993; it is of course true that we cannot recover what Cicero actually said on any given occasion, only the versions that he chose to preserve of each speech: cf. Millar 1998: 9–10. 103

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for a hyper-urban hotbed of sex scandal, child murder, abortions, Wsh-ponds, and extortion and for exemplary Italian uprightness and worthiness. While Oppianicus and Cluentius’ terrifying mother Sassia are engaged in their hair-raising and anti-social romps, Cluentius’ ‘noble’ and venerable local supporters, who have elected him to the town-council in absentia are on hand weeping for the unfairness of the charges brought against Clodius, and brandishing testimonials.104 Town and country are beautifully manipulated within a single geographical location.105 At the same time, the speech on another level addresses issues of local speciWcity, the interrelationship of local and Roman identities, and the possibilities of manipulating tensions between them. For example, Cluentius is portrayed as the advocate of local tradition when Oppianicus declares that the attendants of Mars in the local cult are ‘all free and Roman citizens’: the people of Larinum appoint him to represent their case for keeping local tradition at Rome.106 This is a fascinating example of the potential impact of the Roman citizenship on local social structures during a period of profound social change.107 There is a powerful sense here of the management of identities, one reXection in the ideological sphere of the process of incorporation. The physical and political deWnition of Italy itself is also in Xux at the end of the Republic: in particular, what is contained, and what is not contained within Italy? On the most obvious level, as we have seen, her very geographical boundaries were 104

Pro Cluentio e.g. 12–16, 27–8, 33–5, 40, 180; vs. 5, 192, 195, 197. Cf. also the shameless manipulation of images of worthy Italian rusticity in Cicero’s Pro Roscio Amerino: the defendant, with his family’s thirteen estates in the prime farming country of Umbria in central Italy and social connections with the socio-political A-list of Rome, has been represented by the prosecution as a doltish country-bumpkin incapable of social skills. Cicero does not even try to challenge the ‘rusticity’ of Roscius Amerinus, but turns the prosecution’s attack into homilies on the moral virtues of country-living, and indeed its enshrinement in some of the most sacred myths of Roman identity. Such a person would be incapable of being involved in anything as wickedly urbane as patricide (e.g. 6; 14; 17–18). 106 Cic. Clu. 43–4; cf. Cicero’s portrayal in Pro Plancio 30 of the defendant’s rape of an actress in Atina as a hoary local rite associated with dramafestivals. 107 Crawford 1996 evokes very well the sense of transition in this period. 105

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subject to change. They were reassessed in the aftermath of Hannibal’s invasion via the Alps, and redrawn politically at the end of the Republic, with Caesar’s long-mooted enfranchisement of Transpadane Italy, Italy ‘on the other side of the River Po’, in 46. The status of Sicily too was subject to question: Caesar had granted the Sicilians Latin status in 44, and Antony’s claim was that Caesar had intended to grant them the citizenship.108 In a less literal sense, precisely because of the intimacy of her relationship with Rome, Italy seems to be hard to represent visually. Is she an entity in herself, separate from Rome, is Rome part of her, or is she part of Rome? There are very few secure visual representations of Italia, and both those that are Italia and those that may be Italia are remarkable for their iconographical vagueness: it is possible that the very blandness of imagery is a reXection of the diYculty of representation.109 The very few secure visual representations of Italia are themselves interesting. In particular, on a single coin issue minted at Rome in, it is suggested, 70 bc, Italia and Roma—both conveniently labelled—are conceptualized as separate entities, shaking hands.110 Beyond this genteel gesture, there is no doubt about power relations: Roma has her foot on a globe and her hand on a spear in a gesture of world domination that becomes familiar in the late Republic, while Italia holds a cornucopia, a vision of fertile abundance. It is tempting to see this portrait as a studiedly peaceful image of reconciliation, even if we are left in no doubt about the hegemony of Rome. The expression of duality by a separation into two Wgures is very suggestive: Italy remains a monolith that can be imagined as separable from Rome.111 There is only circumstantial evidence to date this interesting coin precisely. Michael Crawford has suggested 70 bc, the occasion of the Wrst census of Roman 108

Cic. Att. 14. 12. 1; Sherwin-White 1973: 230. The major candidate is the so-called ‘Tellus’ relief, an image of female fertility, on the Ara Pacis: see e.g. Simon 1967; Torelli 1982: 39–42 for identiWcation with Pax; Zanker 1988: 172–8. There are no clues oVered as to the form taken by the representation of Italia painted on the wall’ of the temple of Tellus at Varro Rust. 1. 2. 1: is this a personiWcation rather than a map? 110 Sydenham 1952: 797, with suggested dating of 71–67 bc. 111 Compare the very diVerent iconography of Antonine coins, discussed in ‘Postscript’ at the end of this chapter. 109

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citizens after the enfranchisement of Italy following the Social War.112 Considering literary versions of Italia, we have seen that, on the basis of surviving fragments of Cato’s Origines, it is easier to gain an impression of the precision and range of Italy’s parts than it is to detect any clear concept of Italy as a whole. It is at the end of the Republic, more precisely against the background of civil war, and in the early imperial period that we can see the emergence of stylized laudes Italiae, ‘praises of Italy’. The use of this phrase by Vergil’s commentator, Servius, suggests that this was recognized as a stock theme even within antiquity.113 Major laudes Italiae appear in the chronologically close De Re Rustica—‘On Country Matters’—of Varro and in Vergil’s Georgics; in the Augustan writings of Vitruvius and Strabo; and also in the rather later ‘geographical’ section of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.114 The laudes Italiae draw on several related traditions: most notably, on the rhetorical praise of a city which itself has a close relationship with the ethnographical tradition. Once again, we shall see signs of a creative and stretched use of older traditions to convey the sense of a new reality. The fact that laudes Italiae Wnd their closest formal parallel in the praise of a single polis is particularly interesting, as if the model of the polis is the way of thinking about any kind of imagined social entity in the Graeco-Roman world. In important ways, as we shall see, the laudes Italiae can represent new ways of thinking about Rome and Roman-ness, in a manner that is not unlike the occasional substitution of the Wgure of Italia for that of Roma in Augustan iconography. Thus, Rome can be superimposed on Italia, or Italia can be superimposed on Rome. Italy is an important structural device in Varro’s De Re Rustica as a whole, a work written in the mid-30s bc.115 112

113 Crawford 1974: no. 403. Serv. ad Verg. Georg. 2. 136–76. For a general discussion of the motif of the laus Italiae, see Thomas 1982, 1988. 115 Rust. 1. 1 for reference to the author being in his eightieth year; Richardson 1983 for 54 bc as the most plausible dramatic date of Book 3. For general discussions of Varro and the de Re Rustica, see e.g. Skydsgaard 1968; Martin 1971. The sophistication of the text as a whole, rather than its use as a mine of information about Roman farming, has hardly been noticed: there is much to be done along the lines of Purcell 1995b. 114

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Throughout, there is interest in the relationship between Rome and Italy, while the idea of Italy as an entity seems to have been important in other works of Varro. The De Re Rustica is ostensibly a work of advice to his wife about agriculture, divided up into appropriate sections in time-honoured antiquarian fashion. In fact, the work is framed by reportage of symbolic and occasionally harrowing late Republican events that push an exploration of the themes of town and country, or rather Rome and Italy. Book I is framed by the theme of waiting for the sacristan of the temple of Tellus to return, and ends with news of his murder, a ‘mistake’ at the hands of an unknown person in the crowd. The authorial voice laments human fortunes, unsurprised that such a thing should happen at Rome.116 The third and Wnal book is framed by a happier, but nevertheless resolutely urban, Roman scene: the companions are waiting, and making appropriate conversation about villa agriculture, in the Villa Publica for news of election to aedileships, and the book concludes with the entrance of the successful candidate.117 The work opens with a dramatic scene in which the characters contemplate a painting of Italia on the wall in the temple of Tellus, the goddess of earth who clearly has a particular relevance to a treatise on farming and the countryside. The dramatized debate begins with a laus Italiae: a number of the themes set out here are picked up elsewhere in the work. In particular, in agricultural terms, Italia is a composite, a balance of complementary parts: the best spelt comes from Campania, the best wheat from Apulia, the best wine from Falernum, the best oil from Venafrum.118 This theme of the way in which the diVerent parts of Italia complement each other is a leitmotif of the work as a whole. In a typical passage, the plains of Apulia are balanced by Mount Vesuvius.119 Another striking example of this theme is the idea of connections through transhumance (the seasonal transportation of animal Xocks and herds, in this case the long-distance transportation) between the plains of Apulia on the one side, and the hills of Sabinum or the mountains of Samnium on the other. This example receives a particular 116 117 118

Rust. 1. 69. 3. Ibid. 3. 17. 10; Purcell 1995b: 151–4 for the tone of Rust. 3. 119 Rust. 1. 2. 6. Ibid. 1. 6. 3.

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emphasis. It is not only mentioned three times, but a vivid visual image is used of the procedure. The second time Varro mentions this practice, he imagines the public calles or animal ways forming a link between the distant plains of Apulia and the mountains of Sabine Reate ‘just as a yoke links buckets’.120 A further hint that Varro was imagining Italy as an interconnected whole is his idea of the Welds of Sabine Rosea as the ‘udder of Italia’.121 He is referring partly to the fertility of this part of Italy, in which he had a particular interest. He is perhaps also referring partly to the centrality of Rosea within the imagined whole: it is surely signiWcant that in another work he referred to lake Cutilia as the ‘umbilicus’, the navel of Italy.122 Varro’s Italia is an organic whole, sometimes even a body, an ordered composite with variegated parts.123 Varro’s treatment of Italy in his De Re Rustica has a fair amount in common with Vergil’s laus Italiae in his Georgics. Both writers allude to, but actually move beyond, the idea of Italy as some sort of rural backdrop to Rome. Both Varro’s and Vergil’s Italiae are ultimately inseparable from Rome, bound up in her history, her problems, and her future. Varro introduces the issues of landbills and colonisation into his treatment of the Italian countryside: here is a historicized idea of Italy as aVected by and transformed by Rome, which to some extent preWgures Velleius Paterculus’ view of Italy in his Roman History.124 Town and country, or Rome and Italy, Xow in and out of each other. For example, luxury, which in traditional thought belongs most naturally to the urban and urbane, to the lush Roman rather than to the worthy Italian, enters the ‘countryside’, the Italian landscape in the form of a bizarre comparison made within the context of a discussion of luxury Wsh-farming. Lucullus, the quintessentially 120

Ibid. 2. 1. 16, 3. 17. 9; for the image of the yoke linking buckets, see 2. 2. 9. 121 Ibid. 1. 7. 10. 122 Cited by Pliny in NH 3. 109; the reference comes from an unnamed work, perhaps the Res Humanae: della Corte 1954: 301; cf. Ling. 5, 71. 123 Cf. for early imperial metaphor of Rome as the caput of the imperial corpus, Nicolet 1991: 204 n. 9; Varro is of course, interestingly pre-Augustan, however. 124 For the exploits of the ancestors of Stolo and Scrofa, see 1. 2. 9–10; for Velleius Paterculus, cf. Ch. 2, above.

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self-indulgent late Republican bon viveur, is said to have cut through a mountain to let sea water Xow into his Wsh-ponds. Thus he can ‘lead his Wsh to cooler places because of the hot weather, just as Apulian pecuarii (‘sheep tycoons’) lead their sheep over the sheep-paths to the Sabine mountains’. We need to appreciate the full horror of the image: cutting through mountains and letting sea water into domestic ponds is not a random extravagant gesture. It is wholescale interference with nature, ‘mixing up’ nature in the sort of way that would invite comparisons with the hubristic behaviour of Persian Xerxes. Likening this behaviour to the transhumance practised by the sheep tycoons Xoods the countryside with dangerous urbanity. Varro’s Italia provides no sustained rustic escape from the problems and vices of contemporary Rome but has these written within its own landscape. Italia has become ‘Romanized’, but in the morally laden way understood in antiquity rather than in the cultural manner understood by modern scholars.125 Vergil’s Georgics self-consciously alludes to traditions of ‘didactic’ works on farming, such as Varro’s De Re Rustica. The Georgics is again ostensibly a work about the countryside and farming, largely based in an explicitly Italian landscape, but the ritual of farming provides a means of exploring Rome’s recent past, present, and future. Just as Varro’s narrative is jerked out of timelessness by references to contemporary events, so the Georgics refers, albeit in a more poeticized way, to recent events, such as the ascendancy of Octavian, the death of Caesar, and the horror of civil war. The Georgics is infused with a contemporary sense of upheaval, and is highly moral in tone: large themes include the importance, and sometimes the futility of work, death and renewal, and the inter-relatedness of everything on earth and in the heavens. While there is a self-consciousness of didactic traditions on farming that go back to Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Georgics as a whole also has strong overtones of the ethnographical tradition: the idea of Italy is central to the structure as well as to individual passages.126 Within the laus 125 Rust. 3. 17. 9, cf. Ch. 1, § 7, above, for the discussion of Tacitus’ Germania. 126 Thomas 1982, 1988; Nelson 1998; see now Morgan 1999 for the controversial thesis that the Georgics tends towards redemption and optimism.

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Italiae at the end of Book 2, much of the complexity of ideas of Italy in the Georgics is explored on a large scale. For one thing, we see again the importance of what the Romans called, in rhetorical terms, variatio in the depiction of Italy: this is a land of many aspects, many parts. Richard Thomas’ careful examination of the passage within the rhetorical patterns and expectations of the ethnographical tradition suggests ambivalence. On the one hand, Italy is imagined in terms of the Golden Age imagery of the Hesiodic tradition mediated through Lucretius.127 On the other hand, however, this is a landscape that is intruded upon and changed by human actions. For example, walled cities hint at a more troubled and violent age, while mention of the Lucrine lake favoured by the proverbially high-living Wsh-pond tycoons alludes straight back to the passage of Varro quoted above. Ironically, in the Georgics, Italia as a totality has become less of a moral alternative for Rome than other locations on which Vergil bases excursuses: the extremes of Scythia, on the fringes of civilized life, or Tarentum, Rome’s old, wealthy Greek opponent in the deep—and conventionally luxurious—south of Italy.128 Both the De Re Rustica and the Georgics reXect particularly troubled times for Italy, especially through the devastating civil wars. Paradoxically, in ideological terms, this sense of trouble does a great deal to integrate and overlay images of Rome and Italy, just as in political terms the eVorts of dynasts to muster support in diVerent regions of Italy did much to link individual Italian communities into Roman political life.129 5. LOOP THE LOOP: IMAGINING EARLY IMPERIAL ITALY In my discussion of the ideological themes of ‘new men’ and ‘tota Italia’ above, I glided into the age of Augustus, and it is 127 See now Gale 2000 for the importance of Lucretius within the Georgics as a whole. 128 For Scythia, see Georg. 3. 349–83, cf. 1. 240–1; for Tarentum, Georg. 4. 125–45. NB: however, the importance of allusion to the Laconian roots of Tarentum, rather diVerent from more conventional late Hellenistic images of tryphe¯. 129 Cf. Ch. 2, above.

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questionable how far the Augustan age really marks the beginning of a new chapter. The assertion of new beginnings, a new state heralded by the violence of the civil wars, was accompanied by assertions that the Augustan age, and the princeps himself, marked not so much the end as the climax of the Republic. These questions about how to imagine the Augustan principate are very relevant to important issues of continuity and change in Italian cultures and identities at the end of the Republic and beginning of the principate. For example, how far should we emphasize the ‘impact of monarchy’ as a centralizing element in terms of both cultural expression and ‘sentiment’, involving the loss of local particularity?130 In modern historiographical treatments of both Augustan politics and Italian culture, there has frequently been a tendency to seek to distinguish between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and ‘Wction’—or ‘antiquarianism’—on the other. For example, Augustus’ appeal to Republican precedent may be dismissed as a mask for the ‘realities of autocracy’, or late Republican and early imperial interest in individual myths of origins and preRoman histories for Italian peoples—the richness of the latter part of the Aeneid, of the Wrst book of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, the beginning of Velleius Paterculus’ book, continued in both epic and encyclopaedic traditions in Silius Italicus’ Punica, or Pliny the Elder’s Natural History— may be viewed as ‘mere’ antiquarianism that is belied by the ‘realities’ of cultural homogeneity.131 This tendency reXects in part the impatience amongst some modern intellectuals with certain uses of the past, in particular in service of the creation and maintenance of ethnic or national identities, of political regimes and rituals. We might think most immediately of 130

See, more generally, Woolf 1992 for the compatability of both continuity and change and unity and diversity in understanding the Roman empire. 131 e.g. Purcell 2000: 423 identiWes early imperial Italian interest in distinctive pasts as characteristic of ‘learned sentiment’ rather than any more genuine sense of roots, on the grounds that the elites conspiring to perpetuate such histories were much more often than not ‘the descendants of triumviral veterans or Augustan slaves’. I am not conWdent that we can make any clear distinction between the genuine and the contrived, and uncomfortable with the implication that ethnicity is so closely tied to cultural continuity and biological descent.

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Syme’s Roman Revolution, Wrst published in 1939, written and published in Oxford, and forming an oblique commentary on the use of ‘propaganda’ in the dictatorships of 1930’s Italy and Germany, ‘propaganda’ that made heavy use of images of Augustan Rome. It is above all the inXuence of Syme that is responsible for a modern tendency to want to ‘unmask’ Augustus, as well as for somewhat monolithic visions of Italy and Italians as the true beneWciaries of the Augustan ‘revolution’ that eVectively inaugurates the new Roman ‘nation’.132 Syme’s authority is in turn based not least on his appropriation of the gaze of Tacitus in his Annals, of Tacitus’ concern, in his piercing analysis of the system of imperial power, with the discordance between appearance or words on the one hand, and deeds or reality on the other.133 Alternatively, we might think of The Invention of Tradition, a highly inXuential volume of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Wrst published in 1983. Its broad thesis, the more or less wholescale ‘invention’ of ostensibly hoary ritual and tradition in very recent times, has been largely unchallenged and applied to situations far beyond the relatively short chronological focus of modern European nationalism and monarchical ritual laid out by the editors. While the role of ritual and tradition in bolstering regimes, dynasties, and nations is taken very seriously, there is nevertheless a sense that it is viewed from the ‘rationalizing’ perspective of, not least, Marxism with its focus on systems of power and wealth. Ritual and tradition are imposed from above, more or less invented from scratch, and their status as ‘fakes’ primarily reveals truths about power relations.134 To an extent, the ‘invention of tradition’ is suggestive for historians of late Republican and early imperial 132 For Syme on Italy, see Wallace-Hadrill 2000: esp. 287–91; for analyses of the Roman Revolution in the context of 1930’s Europe, see e.g. Galsterer 1990; Linderski 1990; G. Alfo¨ldy 1993. 133 This is, of course, no coincidence: see Syme 1958 on Tacitus; 1964 on Sallust. Interest in the gap between words and deeds is part of a long and noble ancient historiographical tradition within which Tacitus is self-consciously writing. We should think above all of the inXuence of Sallust and Thucydides; e.g. on Thucydides, see Parry 1981. 134 There is, on the other hand, currently profound scholarly interest in e.g. myths relating to female groups and postcolonial societies, precisely because they are interpreted as kinds of ‘non-hegemonic’ discourse.

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Rome: in general terms, it is hard to dispute the idea that interest in descent-myths, early history and archaic ritual is intimately linked with the interconnected issues of the newly expanded Roman state, the entry of Italian upper classes into Roman political and social life, and the establishment of monarchy at Rome. Nevertheless, the case of Roman Italy raises a whole series of questions that are both socio-speciWc and of more general relevance. These include the status of ‘belief’ in myth in the ancient world (and, with profound relevance also to the modern western world, the status of ‘belief’ in myths of common ethnic descent in particular), the extent to which ‘tradition’ can eVectively be imposed from above, the possibility that multiple (even sometimes conXicting) traditions can coexist, the extent to which ‘Roman’ and ‘local’ are separable categories, and the extent to which the authority of tradition may draw on long, complex processes of ‘invention’ and ‘reinvention’.135 In general, ‘political’, ‘religious’, and ‘descent’ mythology of classical antiquity has been the subject of sophisticated discussion in recent scholarship, especially in the context of the Greek world. It is now almost universally taken seriously as an integral part of the articulation of shifting ideas and beliefs and identities, rather than as something divorced from the concrete ‘realities’ of political institutions, religious rituals, or cultural entities.136 Comparable mythological expression in the Roman world is in general treated somewhat diVerently. One major issue is that very little in the way of mythological expression survives in Italy before the middle Republican/Hellenistic period. Moreover, the comparatively rich literary treatments of mythological themes are of course all late and obviously conscious of and able to appropriate and manipulate in a sophisticated fashion archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek literary themes. With regard to mythology relating directly to the city of Rome, and, more broadly, traditions about the regal period and early Republic (which clearly also functioned in historical Rome as a resource of general truths, ideals and 135

For the enduring power of descent-myths, see J. Hall 2002: 228. A selection of recent works would include Veyne 1983; J. Hall 1997, 2002; R. Fowler 1998; C. Jones 1999. 136

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essential Roman qualities), there is some dispute amongst modern historians about the period to which it most directly relates. Some would insist on its essential historical value for the reconstruction of archaic or early Republican Rome, although there is considerable diversity in the kinds of materials ‘historicized’ and the degree to which details are pushed, rationalized, or avoided.137 Others would emphasize rather the ‘invention of tradition’ within the periods in which works portraying or telling myth are produced, that is primarily the late Republican and early imperial periods. The real value of this emphasis can be seen in, for example, the holistic approach to the culture and society of Augustan Rome that is characterized above all by Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus.138 Ironically, however, Zanker’s classic has not encouraged similar subtlety and sophistication in approaches to the myths, histories, and identities of Italy outside the city of Rome. Zanker’s Augustus tends to live up to ancient ideals of the princeps’ ever-present and all-seeing nature within the city of Rome, inhibiting the possibility of variant readings and uses of myth, and Zanker’s Italy looks more or less exclusively both to Rome and to the imperial household for its cultural vocabulary, and, by implication, its political and even ethnic identity.139 Such emphasis on cultural homogeneity and unity of political focus serves to uphold very much older treatments of local Italian cultures and societies that are interested more or less exclusively in the period before the Roman conquest and the ‘loss’ of local distinctiveness.140 The tendency within such treatments is to read late Republican and early imperial versions of, for example, the ethnogenesis of Italic ‘tribes’ as ‘survivals’ of iron age ritual and history rather than as having any real ‘meaning’ 137 See e.g. the very diVerent treatments of myth by Cornell 1995; Wiseman 1995, Carandini 1997; cf. Curti and Dench (forthcoming). 138 Cf. e.g. some very diVerent ways of approaching Ovid’s Fasti: Beard 1987; Wiseman 2002; (but see also Wiseman 1974 for the functions of genealogical myth in the late Republic). It is, however, highly desirable to complicate a ‘periodization’ of myth, allowing for the possibility of multiple ‘inventions’ and ‘reinventions’: use of material evidence above all encourages attempts to do this for ‘pre-literary’ Rome. 139 Cf. Wallace-Hadrill 1989a, 2000. 140 e.g. Pallottino 1991; for the history of ideas of this kind, see Momigliano 1950; Torelli 1999: 2.

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within the period in which they were written. A readiness to treat late Republican and early imperial interest in traditions of local Italian distinctiveness as not only ‘fake’ but unimportant for understanding the ‘realities’ of ethnic identity in the early imperial period is encouraged by a tendency to minimize the cultural importance of Roman literature.141 Certainly, I would want to acknowledge the importance of shifts in cultural emphasis and focus in Italy that are especially profound in the last decades of the Republic and the Wrst century of the imperial period. It would be perverse to deny this, but it is equally important to acknowledge that one of the most characteristic ways of managing change in the Roman world is by ‘integrating’ it through the vocabulary of tradition, by reference to a timeless past and preferably to myths of origins. The generation that followed Syme has taken very seriously the ‘power’ of mythological references within Augustan Rome, but the ‘power’ of local identities outside Rome belongs on the whole to specialist archaeological publications on Italian regional culture rather than to the mainstream of Roman history. In fact, asking questions about received views of a ‘uniWed’, homogeneous Italy in the early imperial period will also lead to questions about received views of Roman cultural identity in this period: the plural roots of Rome are actively written into history, epic and ‘technical’ works, selected local ‘archaic’ cults are sponsored directly by Roman oYcials, and civic pride of favoured towns is reinforced by Roman benefactors. It is, for a start, worth considering how much we might learn from the subtle treatment of ‘Hellenism’ in Hellenistic Italy, now quite well integrated into mainstream Roman history. After all, in more traditional works on ‘Italic tribes’, ‘Hellenism’—or rather ‘Hellenization’—was either intimately connected with the ‘death’ of local identities and distinctiveness or contributed to a progression towards nation-like unity in a manner that we might Wnd reminiscent of more recent treatments of Italy after the Social War.142 Clearly, ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Romanism’ are ultimately very diVerent phenomena: in the case of ‘Romanism’ we have to factor in questions of political 141

See Introduction, above.

142

Pallottino 1991.

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and ‘imperial’ intent on the part of Rome that are not an issue in the case of ‘Hellenism’. Here, however, late Republican and early imperial Italy is obviously a special case in comparison with, for example, Gaul, where Roman contact and conquest were much more recent, and where perceptions of Gauls as undercivilized to some extent conditioned relationships.143 In contrast with overseas provinces, as has often been remarked, structures of Roman rule or government are remarkable only for their absence in Italy.144 An increasingly long tradition of thinking about Italy in a proprietorial fashion means that Italy can readily be thought of as more or less an extension of Rome. Apart from the Roman voting assemblies, this seems clearest in the religious sphere: for example banning rites from Italy or explicit formulations of the principle that (in theory, at any rate) local sanctuaries come under the authority of Rome.145 Nevertheless, there are no indications that Roman control or ‘rule’, whether potential or actually experienced, were perceived in the manner that is suggested either in accounts of the immediate background of the Social War or in Polybius’ thesis on Roman rule.146 In addition, as we have already seen, the geographical, ethnic, and cultural variegation of Italy is an important strand in the self-perception of the newly expanded Roman state. In the case of the actions and self-representation of emperors themselves, we may to some extent see the sponsorship of the more 143

Woolf 1998; J. Williams 2001. e.g. Nicolet 1994: esp. 378; Millar 1986b. 145 Expulsions from ‘Rome and Italy’ as the norm in the imperial period: Price 1996: 84. Local sanctuaries under the authority of Rome: Tac. Ann. 3. 71; Frontinus 56 L.; with Crawford 1996: 426–7; it is, however, important to note the Tiberian context of the ‘discovery’ that ‘rituals, temples and images of the gods in Italian towns’ belong under Roman jurisdiction: the equestrian order, having made a vow to place a dedication at the temple of Fortuna Equestris for Livia, Wnds that there is no such temple in Rome; the ‘discovery’ that they may place it in the appropriate temple in Antium sounds like special pleading. While even the theory that Italian towns came under Roman religious authority (cf. also the isolated early example of the Bacchanalian cult in 186 bc) is suggestive, it is very unclear that there was any kind of systematic ‘policing’ of local religious practice in Italy. 146 For Polybius and 2nd-cent. perceptions of what Roman rule felt like, see Derow 1979; Kallett-Marx 1995: 22–9. 144

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‘globalizing’ ideals of an Italy that is a showcase of towns and urban values, although of course the particularities of local pride are an intrinsic part of this picture. Thus, for example, Italy in Augustus’ Res Gestae is a mosaic of municipia and coloniae, towns tied in to Rome by their diVerential statuses, but diVerential statuses that also generate vibrant local dynamics.147 Direct imperial patronage was also to have a profound eVect on the fabric of Italian towns. We might think, for example, of the town of Saepinum in the remote Central Apennines, which received spectacular walls, towers and gates with representations of captive northern barbarians, built in the Augustan age with the Wnancial assistance of the future emperor Tiberius and Drusus. The symbolic importance of walls in the conceptualization of urban ideals is only underlined by the representation of barbarians excluded from civilization. These barbarians are Germans: Saepinum is drawn into a shared world-view that now places barbarism well beyond the Alps. There is, however, an interesting irony in ‘Samnite’ Saepinum’s engagement in such a graphic display of the exclusion of barbarism, given the long history of ‘barbarization’ of Samnites in Roman ideology.148 It is, however, very doubtful that we should imagine that such imperial sponsorship was directed against local particularity. One of the most frequently cited examples of identiWable Augustan ‘interference’ in Italy is the creation of eleven new, numbered administrative regiones. It has to be said that the purpose of these regiones is extremely obscure. They are occasionally mentioned as administrative units, for example for the census carried out by Vespasian and Titus in ad 73–4, but make little impact on the way in which Italy is imagined in Roman literature. The regiones frequently overlap with the older, more evocative ‘tribal’ names of Italy (such as ‘Umbria’ or ‘Lucania’), although occasionally regrouping seems to have a purpose: for example, Regio IV groups together Sabines and Samnites in a manner that suggests antiquarian traditions of Samnite descent from Sabines, traditions that seem to have been particularly important for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the Samnites in the 147 148

Res Gestae 21. 3. CIL 9. 2443; Matteini Chiari 1982: 57–8; Whittaker 1997.

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aftermath of the Social War. If the Augustan regiones were intended to replace the old tribal denominations, the continued, universal tendency to think in terms of tribes rather than regiones (or at the very least regiones in association with tribal names) in the nomenclature, literature, and mythology of the early imperial period suggests that such a move was very unsuccessful.149 In addition, local cultural and religious particularity is both an emphatic part of the early imperial telling of Rome’s Italian past through epic and history and directly sponsored by Roman magistrates and the emperors themselves. There is particular interest in remembering Rome’s legendary roots in central western Italy. Clearly this is not exclusively an early imperial phenomenon: most notably, there is the example of the annual celebration of the feriae Latinae, the Latin Festival on the Alban Mount, which all Roman magistrates and magistrates of ‘old’ Latin towns were required to attend, representing thirty states in all. Whatever the realities of its roots and signiWcance in archaic history, it is most probably a reliable feature of the annalistic tradition on the third century, while its importance in the late Republic is vividly attested by Cicero and even Caesar.150 Notoriously too, the Alban king-list bridges a convenient gap between the attributed date for the arrival of Aeneas in Italy and the Romulean foundation of Rome.151 Claims of descent from Alban kings on the part of prominent Roman families are not coincidental here: the festival in historical times remembers and ritualizes the Latinity of Rome as well as the closeness of selected Latin towns to Rome. We might in this context recall the coin-types of late second- and early Wrstcentury bc Roman moneyers, celebrating their origins in 149

For various interpretations of the purpose and signiWcance of the regiones, see e.g. Thomsen 1947; Nicolet 1991: 202–4; Laurence 1999. Pliny the Elder’s composition of a peculiarly post-Augustan account of Italy stands out as a lonely attempt to write the Augustan regiones in to the geographical and historical imagination: see § 6, below. 150 See e.g. Cicero Q Fr. 2. 4. 2; Att. 1. 3, 1; Div. 1. 11. 118; Planc. 9. 23; Caesar B Civ. 3. 21; Varro Ling. 6. 2. 5; Livy 32. 1. 9; 37. 3. 4; 41. 16. 1–2, 5; 42. 10. 15; 45. 3. 2; Pliny NH 3. 5. 68–70. For theories about archaic signiWcance, see e.g. A. Alfo¨ldi 1965: 34–46. 151 Second-century bc historians seem already to be aware of the tradition, although the names of the kings are not attested before the 1st cent.: Ogilvie 1965: 43–5.

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precisely the towns of ‘old’ Latium.152 Both the perceived seriousness of the festival and the way in which it was arranged suggest this dual aspect: the date was set by decree of the Roman consuls, and the sacriWces were overseen by each member-community in turn. While early imperial antiquarian interest in Alba and sponsorship of the feriae Latinae is marked, the early imperial revival of Lavinium is undoubtedly more striking.153 The Roman imperial calendar celebrated two distinct festivals relating to Lavinium. At the opening of each new year, Roman magistrates sacriWced Wrst to Capitoline Jupiter at Rome and then to Jupiter Indiges and Vesta at Lavinium, the metropolis of all Latin peoples, where the Penates, the ‘household’ gods of Rome brought by Aeneas from Troy, had their seat. On a diVerent occasion, the Lavinian pater patratus was charged with renewing the treaty of alliance between Lavinium and Rome that had been concluded initially in 338 bc. The duties of this priest included both the care of the cult of origins of the Roman people and the renewal of the treaty between Lavinium and Rome. While the Roman tradition suggests that the new year sacriWces took place under the Republic, the creation—or ‘revival’—of a ‘Lavinian’ priesthood to represent a by now scarcely existent Lavinian people is clearly attested as an early imperial phenomenon, alongside great emphasis on Lavinium in early imperial literature and art.154 A body of Roman knights, the Laurentes Lavinates who took the role of patres patrati, is attested in the early imperial period: an inscription of Claudian date, complete with digammas for ‘v’s, following the emperor’s antiquarian revival, commemorates the renewal of the treaty between Rome and Lavinium.155 Interestingly too, the early empire 152 e.g. Crawford 1974: nos. 312 (Lavinium), 316, 379, 384 (Lanuvium), 405 (Praeneste), 499 (Terracina). 153 For the feriae Latinae in ad 29, see CIL 14. 2227. 154 See e.g. Aeneas and the Penates represented on the Ara Pacis; Varro Ling. 5. 144, 152; Livy 1. 14. 3; Verg. Aen. 12. 161 V.; D.H. 1. 55. 2–57. 1; cf. 3. 31. 4 (with Torelli 1984; de Cazanove 2000). 155 For the cult of the Lavinian Penates in the Republic, see Livy 14. 2. 5, 52. 8; Val. Max. 1. 6. 7; Cic. Dom. 57. 144. The inscription of Claudian date is CIL 10. 797 ¼ ILS 5004. For the obscurity of the relationship of the ager Laurens to Lavinium even in antiquity, emphasizing the antiquarian quality of the formula Laurentes Lavinates, see Ogilvie 1965: 39.

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sees the revival of Lavinium itself, and from the second century ad local individuals are named as patres patrati.156 Yan Thomas has emphasized the double nature of Lavinium in Roman thought, both as an intrinsic part of Rome in housing and caring for the Roman Penates, and as an individual body with whom a treaty of alliance must be renewed, a formulation that is rather suggestive in the context of early imperial Italy more generally.157 Also signiWcant in the context of the deliberate revival of sites important within stories of Rome’s roots and early history is the Augustan and early imperial rebuilding of south Etruscan Veii, so signiWcant in the context of ancient traditions of the beginnings of Roman ‘imperialism’, and well into the early imperial period a cliche´ of abandonment, a once proud town now grazed by sheep.158 With regard to remoter parts of Italy, Syme long ago pointed out (with some irony) the signiWcance of the use of M. Papius Mutilus’ name in the lex Papia Poppaea of ad 9, a revival and modiWcation of the earlier lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, that had been passed in the name of the princeps himself. It seems signiWcant that both Papius and his (similarly central Apennine) Picene colleague Q. Poppaeus Secundus were suVects, perhaps increasing the likelihood that their names primarily lent ‘cultural capital’ to the law. In particular, ideological traditions on the austerity of Samnites were lent to a law proposed by an individual whose name recalled that of the notorious leader of the Samnites in the Social War, C. Papius Mutilus.159 Within the context of imperial sponsorship of local particularity, we might also think of aspects of the local dynamics of the ‘imperial cult’ in Italy.160 At Naples above all, sacriWces to Augustus are clearly attested within the context of games held in his honour, and it is far from clear that such sacriWces were made to the dead emperor. It may be that this is an example of how Naples acted

156

Purcell 1983: 167–79; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 323–4. Y. Thomas 1990. Dionysius’ account of the Lavinian sow (cf. above, n. 154) is also exceptionally interesting in its emphasis on Rome as the thirtieth and Wnal original Latin colony: Rome is simultaneously the last-born of Latins and the mother of Latins. 158 159 Liverani 1987. Syme 1939: 452. 160 In general, see now Gradel 2002. 157

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out her spectacular cultural distance from Rome.161 This distance extended well beyond the religious zone and was undoubtedly encouraged by Roman sponsorship of a comparatively nearby ‘genuine’ Greek city: Suetonius’ anecdote of Augustus encouraging his Greek and Roman guests on Capri to swap clothes and languages underlines in the manner of a carnival the great importance of Greek culture as an alternative linguistic, cultural, and behavioural register for early imperial Rome.162 Naples’ Greek identity is surely not a straightforward case of ‘survival’: it is to some extent as ‘fake’ as is interest in distinctive roots and history in other regions of early imperial Italy. Put less provocatively, it too is a reXection of changed and changing times, rather than a simple ‘continuity’. It is for such reasons that we should attempt a little more subtlety in characterizing both ‘Romanism’ after the Social War and the ‘impact of monarchy’ in early imperial Italy. We might also want to complicate the supposed centralizing eVects of the ‘impact of monarchy’. The phenomenon of theatre-building in Italian towns in the early imperial period, and particularly the Augustan period, in fact provides very interesting case studies for considering the supposed centralizing eVects of both late Wrst century bc-early Wrst century ad ‘urbanization’ and the ‘impact of monarchy’. One of the best preserved and most carefully studied examples is the theatre of Volaterra in north Etruria.163 The building of this theatre is quite closely datable by inscriptions containing the names of members of the gens Caecina, a prominent local family that is one of the more traceable Italian ‘success stories’ in terms of Roman political life after the Social War. A large dedicatory inscription on the architrave of the theatre names two Caecinae, A. Caecina Severus, whom we know from the consular fasti to have been a suVect consul in 1 bc, along with another member

161 Price 1980: 34; cf. attestation of immolatio Caesari at Cumae, again signiWcantly ‘Greek’: ILS 108 ¼ Inscr. It. 13. 2. 44. 162 Suet. Aug. 92. 2; Wallace-Hadrill 1998; for the institutions and culture of early imperial Naples, see e.g. de Martino 1952; Ghinatti 1967; Miranda 1985; Lomas 1995. 163 Cateni 1993; Bejor 1979; Sommella 1988: esp. 132 V., 154 V.; Gros 1994.

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of the gens, C. Caecina Largus.164 Theatres had long been a prominent feature of the communities of Hellenistic central Italy: notoriously, the monumental theatre–temple complex of Pietrabbondante, at an altitude of approximately one thousand metres in the mountains of Samnium, predates by around Wfty years the Wrst permanent stone theatre built at Rome by Pompey and dedicated in 55 bc. Such theatres are excellent illustrations of local appropriation of the language, prestige, and perhaps even to some extent the social and political ideals of Hellenism in the reinterpreted form of ‘democracy’ that prevailed in the Hellenistic world. What we see at Volaterra, however—as characteristically in northern Italy and the western provinces, at Fiesole, Aosta, Orange, or Me´rida—is the appropriation of a diVerent model. The building of permanent, monumental theatres in Rome was for a long time controversial, but Pompey had set a new (and, to Cicero, regrettable) example that was followed enthusiastically by Augustus.165 Augustan and early imperial theatres in Italy and the western provinces follow Roman models in terms of both typologies (particularly the imposing architectural backdrop to the stage, rather than the open view) and decorative motifs. However, the ‘model’ is more profound than this: from the spectacle of Dido’s doomed town-in-progress in Vergil’s Aeneid to Vitruvius’ more overtly ‘theoretical’ treatise on architecture, the theatre has become a prime symbol of new urbane values, placed ideally at the political centre of the town, next to the forum.166 The perception of the Augustan theatre as a prime civic—and indeed quasi-political—space is reinforced by the lex Iulia theatralis, with its concern for ordered seating and appropriate clothing in the cavea of the theatre. The theatre became a prime meeting-point for emperor and people, but the ‘problem’ of popular assembly was addressed in part by an exaggerated concern for order and public measures to prevent 164 CIL 11. 6689; Not. Scav. 1955: 123 with Wg. 9b; cf. Torelli 1969: 295 V. 165 Cic. OV. 2. 17. 60; for Augustus’ theatre-building and encouragement of theatre-building, see RG 20. 1, 21. 1. 166 Verg. Aen. 1. 427–9; Vitr. 5. 3–9; for topographical distinctions between Hellenistic and Roman theatres, see Munzi 1993: 41; Gros 1994.

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the kind of ‘muddling’ that raised deep-seated social, political, and religious fears.167 The Augustan theatre at Volaterra undoubtedly participates in this new and emphatically Roman model of urbanism. It is no coincidence that both Volaterra and the Caecinae were the object of Julio-Claudian favour: Volaterra was granted the status of colony and, as we have seen, A. Caecina Severus was suVect consul in the Augustan period. The initial building and the upkeep and use of the theatre are to some extent a monument to the individual and collective relationship with Rome. The imperial family is very much present: four marble imperial heads associated with the theatre, two identiWed as Augustus, one as Livia and one as Tiberius, apparently to be dated between the early Augustan and Claudian periods, of course on one, obvious level suggest both the ‘impact of monarchy’ and the association of the imperial family with theatre.168 Very prominent too, as we have begun to note, is the gens Caecina: what is particularly signiWcant here is their continued presence long after they had clearly made it into the highest parts of Roman social and political life.169 It is of course far from clear how often their presence was anything more than symbolic, represented only by slabs marked with their family-name, generally identiWed as seat markers. The theatre was in some sense a commemoration of the gens Caecina, their position between Rome and Volaterra. It is worth remembering that one of the more ironic aspects of the ‘impact of monarchy’ is that the virtual monopolization of monumental space in the city of Rome by the imperial family gives an added impetus to monumental building projects in Italian towns on the part of both the new and the not-so-new Roman elite.170 The latter simultaneously parade their familiarity with Roman models, the connections of the local town with Rome and the imperial family, and 167

Suet. Aug. 44; Rawson E. 1987; for what was actually regularly performed in early imperial theatres, perhaps ‘pantomime’ above all, see Gros 1994: 290 V.; for a broader view of the theatre, see Horsfall 2003: ch. 5; for the problematisation of theatres at Rome, see Edwards 1993: ch. 3. 168 Pizzigati 1993: 65. 169 Cf. Cic. Caecin. 104; Asconius p. 23 for their house on the Palatine, from the age of Claudius. 170 Eck 1984.

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the (very Roman) cultural ideals of benefaction at a local level, in emblematic building projects of this kind. These are indeed the kinds of processes by which a much more homogeneous material culture is generated in Italy. However, it is far from clear whether we should equate this with the lessening of the signiWcance of local identities. Importantly, the theatre of Volaterra begins to look somewhat diVerent when considered in the broader context of the territory of the town. Culturally and socially, Volaterra is exceptionally ‘conservative’ compared with other Italian towns, well into the imperial period: one might think, for example, of distinctive funerary urns, social structures, and indeed the presence of the Caecinae, ‘remembered’ even in modern times in the name of the river Cecina.171 Such ‘conservatism’, however, arguably itself reXects the impact of Rome as much as the dynamics of local society, given the great cachet associated in Roman society with being a member of the Etruscan upper classes. The increasing involvement of members of old elite families in the social and political life of Rome has, as has long been noted, a profound impact on the demography of Italian towns: in the theatre at Volaterra, for example, we Wnd the increasing involvement of less well known families, as well as slabs marked with more obscure names (the Aelii, Laelii, and Persii). This is part of a broad phenomenon within which the increased prominence of freedmen and their descendants has been most remarked upon in modern scholarship. Such mobility is encouraged above all by the creation of new ‘para-magistracies’ in the Augustan period, including the Augustales, collegia of freedmen devoted to the ‘imperial cult’. Augustales are interestingly well represented as benefactors of Italian towns: although barred from holding oYce on local councils, they participate very actively in the culture of euergetism, enhancing the political careers of sons and grandsons who were allowed to hold oYce.172 Such mobility raises major questions about continuity and change in early imperial Italy. There has long been discussion of the signiWcance of the entry of considerable numbers of ‘new 171 172

Terrenato 1998a. Duthoy 1978; Purcell 1983; Ostrow 1990; cf. Garnsey 1975.

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men’ from the newly enfranchised Italian towns to the Roman senate in the age of Augustus. It is important not to overstate the signiWcance of this, to see it as an Augustan ‘policy’ of renewing the senate at the expense of the older Roman elite, speciWcally the nobiles who are sometimes imagined to be less natural supporters of the Augustan regime.173 On the contrary, nobiles continue to be disproportionately successful in securing consulships, and above all the ordinary consulships during the Augustan age, while there is good evidence for direct, deliberate sponsorship of the nobiles on the part of the princeps.174 While patently not every ‘new man’ lived up to the austere stereotype of the municipal, a key theme in ‘new man’ ideology is of course the true traditionalism of their morals and values: ‘new men’ were looped up to the essential Roman past as securely as the princeps himself in his descent from Aeneas and Romulus.175 It is, at the same time, important to give due weight to the signiWcance of the newly regular use of the suVect consulship from the Augustan period. We should surely think of this in relation to a more general interest in expanding the number of oYce-holders in the early principate. At the highest level of society, this includes the creation of new oYces for Roman senators themselves and a limited number of prominent and well-advertised oYces for equestrians.176 Further down the social hierarchy are the Augustales, apparitores, a broad category of ‘assistants’ to prominent Roman individuals, including the imperial household itself, apparently to some extent systematized into a hierarchy in the Augustan age, and the vicomagistri, relatively lowly individuals who were in some sense ‘in 173 Syme’s interest in the theme of ‘new men’ and ‘provincials’ at Rome was considerable: part of his central thesis in The Roman Revolution, it is also very visible in his work on Tacitus (esp. 1958), and in other book-length treatments (see esp. 1982, 1999), as well as in numerous essentially prosopographical articles. Clearly this interest stems in part precisely from prosopography and its engagement with descent and interconnections, but it is also tempting to see it as reXecting Syme’s own background and career, as a New Zealander in Oxford. But in his published work and writings, Syme gives very little away: the ‘personal voice’ is not a very noticeable feature in scholars of his generation. 174 Cf. also Brunt’s careful 1961 analysis of the purpose and implications of the lex Valeria Cornelia. 175 176 Syme 1939: 453–8. Brunt 1983, 1984.

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charge of’ their Roman neighbourhoods as well as of the cult of the emperor’s genius. Both the increased numbers of Roman oYcials and the creation of the Augustales have, as we have seen, a signiWcant impact on who holds oYce at the level of the individual town, while the benefactions of Roman oYcials and Augustales are directed primarily towards the municipia. This is a period in which opportunities are dramatically expanded and active participation in and rewards from both ‘state’ and individual community are broadened. Nevertheless, as I have begun to suggest, the degree to which continuity is asserted is highly important: ‘new men’ continue the essential values of Rome, Augustales and vicomagistri both behave and portray themselves like the more traditional magistrates of Rome.177 We should certainly hesitate to think about the increased prominence of ‘new’ families or indeed the descendants of freedmen in the politics of local towns as a sign of cultural or social ‘decline’ as much as we would now hesitate to describe the ‘renewal’ of the Roman senate or equestrian orders in such terms.178 There are, in fact, notable examples of apparitores returning home to their town of origin: in the Augustan age, Clemens who had been scribe to the vigintisexviri at Rome returned home to Carsulae and honoured his town with the Wrst gladiatorial games it had ever seen. In other cases, a freedman who had no family seat in Italy might return to the town of his patron: the articulation of quasi-familial ties is an important consideration in demographical issues, just as it is for understanding social mobility more generally. Nicholas Purcell’s studies of apparitores also suggest that the choice of where to retire—generally within one hundred miles of Rome—may on occasion have nothing to do with towns of origins, but rather more to do with perceptions of the ‘interconnectedness’ of Rome with her central-western Italian environs. This ‘interconnectedness’ is expressed in ‘traditional’ terms of, for example, the ‘archaic’ cult of the Penates at Lavinium that we considered above. Far from revealing them to be ‘upstarts’, the apparitores’ choice of places to retire closely reXects Roman elite 177

Duthoy 1978; for the fasti of the vicomagistri, see Ru¨pke 1998. The classic article on early imperial ‘renewal’ of the senate is Hopkins 1983b. 178

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emphasis on ‘reviving’ Rome’s roots in nearby towns, and may simultaneously suggest that when we consider the place of myth and history of towns in early imperial Italy we are dealing with rather more than antiquarian fantasy conWned to literature.179 Within ancient ethnographical thought, if descent-myths are the primary means of demarcating individual peoples, language (along with social organization, eating habits, and marriage customs) is an important means of distinction as well as a possible means to gauge the level of ‘civilization’. With the notable exception of Naples once again, the language of public documentation in Italy is universally Latin remarkably soon after the Social War, even in, for example, the Oscan-speaking areas of Italy that had a strong ‘epigraphic habit’ in the local language. The reasons why Latin eVectively replaces local languages in public documentation are clearly complex, but must include demographic changes of a more drastic nature than those discussed above, such as the introduction of colonies in the late Republic. In part too, this linguistic change must reXect the reception of new kinds of urban ideals that connect the display of wealth in both particular kinds of ‘private’ ways (such as ornate housing) together with benefaction that focuses on, for example, theatres and baths, particular kinds of political aspiration, and particular ways of commemorating the dead. In short, I would want to suggest that the use of Latin accompanies a participation in the ‘Roman dream’, of which only Latin can be the language.180 There are, however, other very important ways in which we should think about Latin. We shall consider in detail in Chapter 5 late Republican ways of conceptualizing Latin, including a Ciceronian hierarchy of ‘urbane’ and ‘rustic’ usage and pronunciation and Varro’s assumptions about the linguistically plural roots of Latin. Both of these very diVerent ways of thinking about Latin engage with very timely questions about whether Latin is a uniWed or in some sense a 179 Purcell 1983: esp. 163, 165, 167. We might think also of the nature of benefactions on the part of ‘new’ individuals. See Patterson 1994 for the role of collegia in making distributions, an increasingly important mode of benefaction after the Italian ‘building boom’ of the Julio-Claudian years, and the argument that such activity promotes ‘community coherence’ rather than being a sign of urban decline. 180 Woolf 1996 for a more universal explanation of the epigraphic impulse.

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plural entity. It is also obviously the case that the use of Latin does not necessarily imply ‘feeling Roman’ in any uncomplicatedly universal way. We might think, for example, of the very diVerent ways in which distinctive local identities are articulated in the Latin poetry of Catullus or Propertius, or in the so-called elogia of Tarquinia, also a Latin body of texts, the signiWcance of which we shall consider shortly. Spoken language is another issue altogether and clearly diYcult to recover, but it is at least interesting that a consciousness of dialectal variation continues to be apparent in ‘antiquarian’ works.181 As for the articulation of ‘roots’ through myth and history, we can see similar trends at both the ‘local’ and the ‘Roman’ level. For a start, interest in the distinctive local myths and histories of Italian peoples is very much part and parcel of the ‘Roman’ writing of epic and history in the early imperial period. We might think of the very diVerent examples of Livy, Vergil’s Aeneid, and Velleius Paterculus: even the origines of each author, most self-conscious in the case of Velleius Paterculus, of course instantly subvert any easy distinction between ‘Roman’ and ‘local Italian’.182 Livy’s Wrst book, covering the regal period from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, presents Roman history in microcosm, with considerable interest in themes of immigration and plural roots, Greek, Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan. Notoriously too, the chronology of the work begins with the arrivals of both Aeneas and Antenor, ‘twinning’ the foundations and destinies of Rome and Livy’s native Patavium.183 Patavium reappears later in the narrative too, when Livy mentions the exhibition of ship beaks in the Patavians’ temple of Juno, still visible within living memory. These beaks were supposed to have been taken from the ships of Cleonymus of Sparta, who had made a hostile expedition to Italy in 302 bc. The Patavians commemorated their noble role in seeing him oV in an annual festival held on the anniversary of Cleonymus’ 181 Horsfall 1997, 2001; for vernacular languages in the provinces, see Woolf 1998: 93–4, with bibliography. 182 On Italy in early imperial literature, e.g. Sordi et al. 1972 is now very dated; Habinek 1998 registers, but does not particularly develop, the importance of Italian themes in Augustan literature. 183 Livy 1. 1. 1.

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defeat, with a mock naval battle as a centrepiece.184 Patavian local pride, commemorating both ancestral links with Rome and a proudly pre-Roman history, is thus woven into Livy’s essentially ‘Roman’ history. Livy’s simultaneous interest in the local and the Roman might perhaps remind us of the people of Superaequum’s dedication, honouring their patron, the Augustan proconsul Quintus Varius Geminus. He is the ‘Wrst of all the Paelignians to become a senator’: the local resonances are particularly striking here, suggesting the pride of Superaequum in winning a competition amongst the Paelignians, as well as pride in the notion of being Paelignian.185 The second half of the Aeneid is notable for the intensity of its antiquarian interest both in the future site of Rome and in Italy. Most immediate is the ‘Latin’ dimension, evoked above all by the Trojans’ tour of the eponymous king Latinus’ palace, where they Wnd the king’s parade of ancestors, eYgies made out of cedar-wood, placed ‘in order of antiquity’: Italus, Sabinus the vine-planter, Saturn, Janus, war heroes and their weapons and, Wnally, Picus, once Circe’s husband, wearing the ceremonial robes of a Roman magistrate.186 This is simultaneously a selfconsciously ‘primitive’ version of familiar Roman practice and a brief folk-parade of Italy that corresponds both to the parades of Roman history from Romulus to Augustus that we Wnd elsewhere in the Aeneid and, of course, to the myth-historical scheme of the Forum of Augustus, in progress long before its inauguration in 2 bc.187 Latinus’ display simultaneously preWgures Roman practice and suggests a parallel, potentially separable, Italian past. Equally signiWcant are the references to central Italian peoples made within the context of the catalogue of Italian heroes at the end of Book 7. While no explicit mention is ever made of the Social War in the Aeneid, peoples who fought on the ‘wrong’ side of the war—‘Sabellians’, ‘Osci’, and Marsi—are intriguingly woven in, with evocative antiquarian detail, to the more traditional framework of peoples constituting the plural Italian roots of Rome, such as Latins, Greeks, 184

185 Livy 10. 2, esp. 14–15. CIL 9. 3305; IlS 932. Cf. Zetzel 1997. 187 Cf. Horsfall 1980; Luce 1990 for discussion of possible connections between late Republican/early imperial literary history and the historical perspective of Augustus’ forum. 186

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and Etruscans.188 The catalogue eVectively mythologizes in subtle ways the whole history of Rome’s wars in Italy, including the Social War. In the latter part of the Aeneid, questions are raised about the war—Aeneas’ war—in Italy, through the multiple perspectives of the characters. It is hard to avoid issues of the relevance of these to readings of the Social War in the Augustan age. In particular, is the war a civil war, Trojans and Italians intimately connected through Aeneas’ return to the land left by Dardanus, his forefather, or is it a war provoked by the arrival of foreigners, decadent and eVete foreigners at that?189 The perception of Italians as ‘foreign’ in Roman eyes seems, as we have seen, to be comparatively long-standing, a strand readily apparent in the second century. In contrast, the theme of the Social War as a civil war is comparatively late, and is probably best imagined as a rewriting of motivation and meaning after the event of the political integration of considerable numbers of upper-class Italians.190 This theme is certainly apparent in Velleius Paterculus’ narrative, but it seems entirely possible that we have an earlier hint of this idea in the Aeneid.191 If so, it is interwoven with other events—civil war, the advent of monarchy, the whole history of Roman warfare and ‘imperialism’—in a poem that considers questions of Roman identity to a perhaps greater extent than any other in the history of Roman literature.192 It is, as I have begun to suggest, interesting to read the Aeneid in some sort of aYnity with Velleius Paterculus’ Roman History. The latter is, of course, very much less subtle than the Aeneid. As we saw in the previous chapter, Velleius Paterculus pushes a line on the ‘generosity’ of Roman expansion within Italy to the exclusion of other possible readings and interpretations, 188

Verg. Aen. 7. 665, 729–30, 750–60, with Horsfall 2000 ad loc. 190 Cf. Zetzel 1997. Cf. Ch. 2, Section 3 above. 191 Cf. Ch. 4, below, for the idea of Italians sharing the same blood and ‘race’ (gens) as the Romans. 192 Cf. also the importance of the antiquarian detail of Italian distinctiveness in Silius Italicus’ ‘reception’ of the Aeneid: his Punica thereby interestingly ‘Italianizes’ the Hannibalic War: see esp. 8. 353–621, for the catalogue of Italians at Cannae, but there is also great interest throughout in mythologizing Italian topography and in marking deaths of individuals with descent-myths. For Silius Italicus in general, see Hardie 1993. 189

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whereas the darkest of questions remain open in the Aeneid. Both works, however, albeit in very diVerent ways, by pulling together histories and traditions, make composite histories of Roman Italy or Italian Rome in ways that reXect the distinct preoccupations of the eras in which they were written.193 On the other hand, interest in ‘shared’ history of a rather diVerent kind is strongly apparent in local Italian contexts: in the more centralizing mythologies of, simultaneously, the Julian household and Rome, and indeed in the history and commemoration of the Roman Republic. Such ‘centralizing’ tendencies are perhaps clearest in the calendars of early imperial date. While, not insigniWcantly, the ‘memory’ of distinctive local calendars in Italian communities is well preserved in the Roman antiquarian tradition, such calendars themselves barely survive after the Social War, in marked contrast to multiple surviving versions of the Julian calendar.194 Such evidence is highly suggestive for perceptions of both present time and shared memory: on some level, the Roman Republican past that is essentially evoked in the new calendars has become a collective Italian past.195 The obvious three-dimensional example of the commemoration of a collective past for the Roman people and the Julian dynasty in the city of Rome is of course the Forum of Augustus. The arrangement of Wgures suggests a relationship between Augustus and the parade of heroes of the Republic, each with a brief elogium, a caption to focus the imagination, as well as the elision of what had comparatively recently become an emphatically used dynastic myth with the myth of the origins of Rome and the Roman people themselves, through the portrayal of Venus and Mars, Romulus, and Aeneas.196 At the local level, it is hard to escape the impact of these dynastic/Roman myths, and obviously variant interpretations are hard to Wnd: the wall-painting from Stabiae that portrays the Aeneas-group as dog-headed apes with comically 193 This phenomenon can be observed elsewhere in literature of the early principate: see e.g. Wallace-Hadrill 2000: 301–5 for Vitruvius’ self-consciously ‘Italian’ rather than ‘Roman’ architecture. 194 e.g. Ovid Fasti 3. 87–8 for Mars; 6. 59–63 for Juno. 195 Crawford 1996: 426, with bibliography and Appendix A; cf. Purcell 2000: 429. 196 Zanker 1968, 1988: 194–5.

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large penises, and Anchises with a gambling-board, is an exception, albeit a salutary one in the face of the blander sort of modern assumptions about imperial ‘consensus’, loyalty, and shared focus.197 A rather less dramatic—but no less suggestive—example of a speciWcally local focus would be the early imperial interest in the Wgures of Lavinia and Silvius Aeneas at Lavinium.198 The elogia of the Augustan forum, with their particular selection of Republican Wgures, were also appropriated in Italian contexts.199 The closest parallel comes from Arezzo, where the surviving collection of elogia for seven triumphatores was so close to the Roman set that it is actually used to help to reconstruct the original. The possible local ‘meanings’ of such elogia are as tantalizing as are possible local ‘meanings’ of the Julian calendar. In the case of Arezzo, there is no evidence for local ‘adaptation’, but it is intriguing to consider what the locals might have made of Appius Claudius the Blind who is described, just as he is in the Forum of Augustus, as ‘routing the army of the Sabines and Etruscans’, given that the Arretines thought of themselves as Etruscan.200 As we see from Velleius Paterculus’ history, even aspects of Rome’s conquest of Italy could be ‘spun’ as steps towards the eventual result of Italian incorporation, so interpretation along these lines may be a possibility.201 Then again, one might think of the speciWcs of recent Arretine history: Arezzo was, after all, colonized under Sulla and Caesar, and the colonists distinguished themselves from the older inhabitants by calling themselves, respectively, Fidentiores and Iulienses, as opposed to Arretini Veteres.202 One might thus imagine a situation in which the history of the Roman conquest had particular resonance for colonists who had displaced ‘Etruscan’ locals. Zanker 1988: 209, with Wg. 162. Torelli 1975: 99, with bibliography. 199 Cf. Pompeii and Lavinium: Inscr. It. 13. 3. 85–8. 200 Inscr. It. 13. 3. 79; cf. 13. 3. 12. 201 I would want to contrast the minimal coverage of Rome’s Italian wars in the Museo della Civilta` Romana at EUR, a collection of casts rooted in the particular ideologies of both Italian uniWcation and Romanita` of the early 20th cent. and the fascist era (the museum itself was eventually opened in 1955). 202 CIL 11, 1849; 11, p. 336. 197 198

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The early imperial elogia of ‘Etruscan’ Tarquinia, documents displayed next to the ‘Ara della Regina’ temple, at Wrst sight constitute a very diVerent kind of example. These fragmentary texts seem to fall into two distinct categories: one body consists of the so-called elogia of the Spurinnae, a prominent family of Tarquinia, and the other of the fasti of the magistri of the college of haruspices, a Roman priestly college distinguished by their studiedly ‘Etruscan’ identity, and linked with the Caesennii family.203 They are hard to date with any exactitude, although there is a tendency to argue that they are either of Claudian or of Hadrianic date, on the basis of both emperors’ attested interests in Etruscan antiquities. The elogia of the Spurinnae, as far as we can see from the longer fragmens that survive, those commemorating V[elth]ur Spur[inna] and A(ulus) S[pu]rinna, are notable above all for their apparent interest in the independent history of Tarquinia before the Roman conquest.204 It is, however, far from clear that we should read these elogia, which seem studiedly to have nothing to do with the Roman conquest of Etruria, or indeed Roman traditions on the Etruscans, as being in any sense ‘anti-Roman’. Tarquinia seems to have been relatively enthusiastic and early in setting up dedications to Divus Augustus, while some decades later, both the Spurinnae and the Caesennii were active and successful in the political life of later Wrst-century ad Rome.205 The connection between local pride and Roman success for the prominent families of Tarquinia is manifested by some studied ‘traditionalism’ that at Wrst sight looks very diVerent from the example of the theatre at Volaterra. In general terms, we should probably read the elogia of the Spurinnae in conjunction with the haruspical fasti, as an indication of local pride in ‘traditional’, distinctively local history and institutions that were perfectly compatable with being 203 Romanelli 1948; Torelli 1969, 1975. For the studiedly ‘Etruscan’ nature of haruspices, cf. e.g. E. Rawson 1978; North 1990b: 65–8. 204 Questions of how far this is ‘fake’ Etruscan history or traditions that go back to the archaic period are considered from very diVerent perspectives by Harris 1971: 29 V. and Cornell 1978: 172–3, but are not particularly relevant to my arguments here. 205 Torelli 1975: 97, 150 V.

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a prominent member of the Roman political and social elite.206 Indeed, even in formal terms, both the elogia of the Spurinnae and the haruspical fasti evoke the example of Augustan Rome, although clearly put to distinctive use. 6. P OSTSCRIPT: ITALY AND BEYOND We have seen in this chapter the great importance of the idea of Italy in the crucial stages of the Roman imperial experience. In characterizing both the ideological place of Italy in Roman thought and processes of change, modern historians have recently questioned the extent to which Italy is conceptually separate, and separable, from Rome on the one hand and the provinces on the other. Thus, for example, in an important article on the ‘incompleteness’ of the notion of Italy, Giardina pointed to the comparatively short life of Italia as a privileged notion within Roman thought. The shortness of this life is to be directly related to the constant blurring of Italia with notions of Rome and Roman identity, and this is increasingly noticeable in the early imperial period.207 Nicolet has argued that, for a comparatively short period after enfranchisement, Italy formed a distinctive juridical category, between Rome and the provinces, before becoming elided with the provinces in the Antonine age. It can, however, frequently be hard to conceptualize Italy ideologically on a linear scale between Rome and the provinces even well before the Antonine age. The use of Italy as a site within which Roman identity and above all plurality is so actively worked out suggests its use as a model for the provinces, and the increasing integration of the provinces in turn narrows their distance from Italy.208 Some of this complexity is suggested in the positioning of Italy within the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, a work addressed to Titus. At the beginning of this chapter, we considered his notorious conceptualization of Italy as ‘at once the nursling and the mother of all other lands’, but we might think also of the geographical analysis that follows. Redeploying highly traditional 206 NB: also the consideration that even local magistrates of Tarquinia with Latin names appeared to have been keen to continue traditions of local history: Torelli 1975: 101. 207 208 Giardina 1994. Nicolet 1994.

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and ‘timeless’ ways of seeing, such as myths of descent and indeed the idea of Italy itself, Pliny’s Italy is overtly Augustan and postAugustan, reconWgured uniquely in surviving literature by the numbered regiones, and populated by Augustan colonies.209 It is especially interested in the newer peoples of Italy, and glides easily over older geographical and political boundaries, into the Alps and across the sea to Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and on to Malta and Gozo.210 The consequences of these processes for both the ‘external’, monolithic conceptualization of Italy and the ‘internal’, variegated conceptualization raise major questions. For example, is the juridical and ideological elision of Italy and provinces to be associated with a mobile, mixed-up world, something along the lines of some prominent scholarly views on the progression in modern western history from state to nation-state and onwards towards ‘globalisation’? With its basis in the politics, economics, and culture of capitalism and multinationalist consumerism, as well as instant global communication networks, ‘globalization’ is clearly an anachronistic concept, a phenomenon far more aggressive, divisive and all-seeing than anything of which the Romans were capable even in their wildest dreams. But in so far as the concept is at all suggestive, it is becoming increasingly clear in the modern world that, just as the creation of the modern nation-state fostered smaller ethnic or religious identities (such as being Breton, Catalan, or Catholic in northern Ireland), so ‘globalization’ has frequently led to the reformulation and bolstering of national, ethnic, or religious identities, ranging from the self-consciously new to the studiedly traditional.211 In the case of the Roman empire, we might think of Christianity from around the later second century ad, a new, comparatively large-scale, and suggestively exclusive way 209

Pliny NH 3. 46. Ibid. 3. 131, 133, 134, 137, 80 V., 92 V.; cf., one generation later, Pliny the Younger Ep. 9. 23. 3 reports the question allegedly asked if Tacitus by an eques at the games: ‘Are you Italian or provincial?’ Calling anyone ‘Italian’ in the early imperial period is rare: this is a question that belongs at the borderlines where large polarities come most immediately to mind. It simultaneously conveys the perceived prestige of being Italian and the possibilities of confusion. 211 Witcher 2000 for some interesting reXections, but I would be very reluctant to see ‘globalisation’ as anything approaching a ‘model’ for Roman 210

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of characterizing identity, framed in opposition to Roman identity.212 In turn, such ways of thinking about being Christian perhaps did much to formulate a monolithic idea of what it was to be ‘Roman’, as we have suggested, although it would clearly be problematic to assume that such monolithic ideas did not coexist with smaller, far more localized identities. From the second half of the Wrst century ad, when both the inevitability of links between Italy and the citizenship, let alone between Italy and senatorial origins, was increasingly questionable, and the notion of imperial succession as that of a descent-group became somewhat strained, emphasis on the idealized centrality and primacy of Italy is striking.213 For example, the age of Trajan sees the introduction of the alimentary scheme for the raising of poor Italian children, to Wll up ‘the legions and assemblies’, and the requirement that all senators should own one-third of their land in Italy.214 Antonine coinage makes signiWcant use of the iconography of Italia: most interestingly, a coin-type of Antoninus Pius represents Italia as both mistress of the globe and holding a cornucopia.215 If we compare this with the representation of Italy and Rome as separate entities in the coin dated by Crawford to 70 bc, the attribution of world mastery to Italy suggests an important development in the potential of Italy to ‘stand for’ Rome. Italy has become an essential part of the language of traditionalism and continuity, of the political, Republican roots of Roman monarchy and empire, as well as of imperial self-legitimization. As we have seen, however, ‘local’ and ‘Roman’ perspectives are hard to separate at the local level, while the more ‘universal’ imperial culture; Purcell 2000 is very much more subtle, but I am uncomfortable with the equation implied between ethnicity and actual family descentgroups; cf. J. Hall 2002: 228 for acute remarks that are pertinent to questions about the ‘end of ethnicity’. 212

For the signiWcance of Decius’ decree, see Rives. 1999a. See esp. Brunt 1977 for the signiWcance of the lex de imperio Vespasiani. 214 Pliny Ep. 6. 19 (cf. SHA M. Ant. 11. 8 for Antoninus’ signiWcant modiWcation, requiring only one quarter of total estate to be held in Italy); for motivations behind the alimentary scheme in particular, and the privileged position of Italy, see e.g. Duncan-Jones 1982: ch. 7; lo Cascio 1979; Millar 1986b: 300; Giardina 1994: 21; M. GriYn 2000: 115–17. 215 BMCR 4. 213, 234, 246, 1719; cf. also M. Aurelius as restitutor Italiae: 1449, 1450, 1451. 213

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images of Italy that are associated with the writing of epic, history, or geography, or with imperial ideology tend to emphasize the local particularism that is an important basis for the plural character of Roman identity. Thus, for example, Pliny the Younger, the self-consciously ‘good’ senator who attained the peak of his career under Trajan, reveals himself to be ‘regional’ in his ‘networking’, the advancement of careers in the ‘centralizing’ spheres of Roman government and army: his letters of recommendation reveal his main areas of interest, and his benefactions were in turn directed primarily towards the area of his origins in Transpadane Italy.216 Mobility is indeed problematized in the way in which he depicts to his friend Tacitus his key role in mustering support and funds for a school in Comum, to avoid the need for children to travel all the way to Mediolanum and preserve their love for their patria.217 Or again, Antonine coinage celebrates places in the vicinity of Rome that are resonant with notions of Rome’s origins and early history, along with the more monolithic ‘Italia’: these include the cult of Juno Sospita at Lavinium, signiWcantly and conveniently the birthplace of Antoninus, as well as the cult of Diana Lucifera of Aricia, and the rape of the Sabine women.218 There is no doubt that both ‘universal’ images of Italy and Italian particularism undergo dramatic changes between the middle Republic and the second century ad, as we have seen in the course of this chapter. Ideally, of course, such changes need to be mapped alongside changes in perceptions of, and self-perception within, the Roman imperial world more generally. For example, Rome’s relationship with Greek culture (itself to be linked to ideas about Italy) has been extensively explored in modern scholarship as well as in other chapters of this book. Examples ranging from periodic emphasis on notquite-Greek, Trojan roots to the self-conscious formulation of graecus ritus in the later Republic, a patently Roman interpretation of what ‘Greek ritual’ was and to which gods it should be applied, to early imperial use of Greek culture as one register 216

217 e.g. Syme 1978, 1985. Pliny Ep. 4. 13. 9. Juno Sospita: BCMR 4. 1248, 1249, 1250, 1251; Diana Lucifera: BCMR 4 s.v. ‘Diana holding torch’; rape of the Sabine women: Medallion of Faustina: BCMR 4, medallion 1, no. 25 (p. xcvii). 218

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within which to explore what it was to be Roman, to Hadrian’s refoundation of Athens tell a similarly complex, and at some points closely related, story about changing ideas of Roman identity and the integration of empire.219 Hadrian’s choice of ‘traditional’ local oYces is highly suggestive in this context. In a passage that, in time-honoured Roman fashion connects these with benefactions, the author of the Historia Augusta lists them: he was praetor Etruriae (a revived ‘archaic’ magistracy), dictator, aedile and duumvir in (unnamed) Latin towns, demarch of Naples, quinquennalis at Italica, ‘his own patria’, and also at Hadria, ‘his other patria as it were’, as well as archon of Athens.220 It would be a mistake to see here a parallel with the kind of ‘pick and mix’ culture of postmodernism, within which the meaning of cultural motifs is so closely tied to the processes of capitalism, marketing, postcolonialism and ‘globalisation’. Hadrian’s choices in fact reXect a profound kind of ‘traditionalism’, as well as increasing consciousness of multiple diVerent ways of being Roman—place/s of origins, plural Italian roots of Rome, and Rome’s own altera ego, Athens—a consciousness that itself has a long history, as we have begun to see. 219 e.g. (amongst recent works) Erskine 2001; Scheid 1996; WallaceHadrill 1997. 220 Hist. Aug. 19. 1; Purcell 2000: 436–7; for the oYce of praetor Etruriae, see Liou 1969; Torelli 1971; for juxtaposition of Italy and the provinces, see also the ‘crown’ series of coins issued under Antoninus Pius in ad 139, depicting personiWed provinces which include Italia alongside e.g. Scythia, Phoenice, and Asia, cf. the ‘province’ types of 143–4.

4 Flesh and Blood

1. INTRODUCTION ‘Was Socrates black? Was Cleopatra black? I shall show that there is no evidence for thinking so. I shall discuss the ancient perception of ethnicity and race. Here once again we can learn from the ancients. To them, culture was a far more important factor in human behaviour than skin colour or other ‘racial’ characteristics.’1 Mary Lefkowitz’s response to a student’s concerns about racism in the classroom take us to the heart of both late twentieth-century race politics in the United States and the problems associated with attempts to correlate ancient and modern criteria, taxonomies, and meaning ascribed to bodies and descent. There is considerable political irony in Lefkowitz’s insistence that ‘the ancients’ based meaning on culture as opposed to race-based physiognomy. In the decades following the Second World War, such insistence was often based on liberal revulsion for the race-based historiography that had been acted out in the policies of the Third Reich and Italy under Fascism: in other words, talking about race was something that was associated with assertions of the superiority of the majority. In the late twentieth century, on the other hand, its signiWcance was entirely changed within the profoundly racially polarized society of the United States, rooted in the persistent economic, social, and educational inequality of black people and of certain ethnic minorities: thinking that race

1 Lefkowitz 1996: 9. Isaac 2004 appeared too late for me to engage with its arguments, but it will emerge that my position is very diVerent; for a basic account of the problem of attributing racism to the ancient Greeks see Tuplin 1999.

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was ‘not an issue’ or ‘did not matter’ might well seem precisely to mark out the privilege of the white majority.2 The problem of correlating ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ worldviews is considerably more complex than Lefkowitz’s proposed ‘answer’ admits. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, neither the questions about whether Socrates or Cleopatra were ‘black’, nor Lefkowitz’s answer to them would have made any sense in the terms in which they were intended. The question makes sense only when considered in relation to the peculiar historical, political, and social context of the late twentieth-century western world. The most cursory summary of the historical basis of this peculiar context would include the circumstances of European conquest and colonization of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Antipodes that came to be seen as the subjugation of technologically ‘primitive’ ‘black’ people by ‘white’ people; the institution of exclusively black chattel slavery; and the ‘scientiWc’ development of racial categorization that posited supposedly permanent biological entities, attributing to ‘Caucasians’ natural and inborn intellectual, moral and technological superiority.3 The signiWcance of mutually exclusive categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’, and above all the reclaiming of the label black in positive self-ascription, has been enhanced by historical events speciWc to the United States, including the American Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and other political and/or religious organizations based on race (such as the Ku Klux Klan, Black Power, and the Nation of Islam), as well as by debates surrounding positive discrimination on the basis of race. ‘Black’ identity may or may not, in the acutely identityconscious and multi-ethnic western world of the late twentieth and early twenty-Wrst centuries, be claimed or ascribed exclusively on the basis of skin colour and/or physiognomic features. In addition, it may certainly also be claimed or ascribed to someone who does not look ‘black’, on the basis of descent

2 On the post-Second World War academic climate in classics, see J. Hall 1997, 2002. 3 On the changing signiWcance of ‘race’ in the early nineteenth century, see Banton 1977, 1987.

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such as a single black grandparent.4 Thus, ‘black’ in its complex and charged late twentieth- and early twenty-Wrst-century meanings will not, as we shall see, correspond at all closely with terminology and taxonomies of Graeco-Roman antiquity with their emphasis on appearance rather than descent, their interest in variegated ethnographical labels (e.g. Moor, Garamantian, Egyptian, Ethiopian), their characterization as ‘black’ of a broad range of colours ranging from a suntan to the skin of a sub-Saharan African, and their ability to elide ‘Egyptians’ and ‘Ethiopians’.5 Lefkowitz’s answer, on the other hand, begins with an argument from silence and leads on to a dubious assertion that confuses ancient and modern taxonomies in the implications of the contrast she draws between ‘cultural’ criteria on the one hand and ‘racial’ (presumably physiognomic) characteristics on the other. As I shall argue in this chapter, ‘culture’ and physiognomy, or ‘culture’ and descent are by no means universally treated as mutually exclusive categories in ancient explanations and judgements of human diVerence. Notoriously, in the Athenian intellectual environment of the later Wfth century, 4 For the continued signiWcance of racial polarization and indeed segregation in the contemporary US, see especially Finnegan 1998: xiii–xxiii. It is worth noting that the ‘Black Athena’ debate that has caused so much furor in the USA has met with a degree of complacency in Britain and elsewhere in Europe: for example, few British scholars feel that they can engage in a debate that has at its foreground issues of racial identity, which are often perceived to be marginal to the intellectual and institutional environments within which British scholars live and work. Such feelings partly reXect the environment of British (and indeed other European) universities, which are on the whole less engaged with popular debate than the academic establishment of the USA (cf. van Binsbergen 1997, although I am unsure how far this still holds true in the age of the ‘media don’), and partly British traditions of political liberalism, including recent insistence on ‘multiculturalism’. Nevertheless, the appropriation of race as the primary marker of identity is highly important amongst many black British people, and is a major facet of modern British culture. There is a potentially embarrassing gap between the culture of British universities and that of her inner-cities. For suggestions about ways in which the problems of an intimate connection between race and social and economic prosperity are not restricted to the United States but very relevant to Britain, see Younge 1997. 5 The elision of ‘black’, ‘Egyptian’, and ‘African’ is, however, important in much Afro-centrist history and in popular culture, and is of course suggested by Bernal’s title, Black Athena.

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there was intense debate about the relative contributions of nomos (nurture/culture) and physis (nature) in accounting for human diVerence, and there is evidence of extreme assertions of the primacy of one or the other.6 Nevertheless, as so frequently in Greek thought, poles can demarcate a sliding scale that certainly allows for the presence of both, and in both Greek and Roman theories and judgements about human diVerence, ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ are regularly found together, or indeed can overlap. For example, ‘blood’ or shared descent is regularly found alongside shared culture or language in ‘proofs’ of shared ethnic identity in ancient literature, while what we might want to distinguish as ‘natural’ and ‘assumed’ frequently overlap on the body and its attributes. Clothes, deportment, ‘table manners’, gestures, and sexual behaviour are, as gender historians have shown, not ‘just’ cultural matters, but important signs of diVerence and distinction, of who everyone ‘really’ is in the Greek and Roman worlds: these are societies within which display is a key element of social identity.7 Our own sensitivity to any discourse of race in the modern western world puts us in danger of misunderstanding and misinterpreting the speciWcs of ancient taxonomies. The roots of Greek culture, and of the Greeks themselves, have been hotly contested in recent years, partly in explicit response to the publication of the Wrst two volumes of Bernal’s Black Athena, and partly within the context of a much more general scholarly interest in ethnicity as a construct that emerges from an engagement with global political and social changes in the later twentieth century. Debates about Rome have been somewhat quieter, but have also been profoundly aVected by late twentieth- and early twenty-Wrst-century discourses on race and heritage in the western world, as well as by the particular concerns of modern identity politics more generally. Figures from Roman history, especially Cleopatra ‘the African queen’, and Septimius Severus the ‘African emperor’, have been pulled into the modern popular debate about western ‘racial’ heritage, while scholarly interest in Roman bodies has been focused almost exclusively on issues of gender and 6 7

Guthrie 1971; Kerferd 1981; Rosalind Thomas 2000: 122–34. e.g. Gleason 1995.

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sexuality, ‘race’ and ‘disability’. While it is obvious that the problems raised by modern sensitivities to the discourse of ‘race’ are at the heart of this chapter, we shall also need to consider the problems associated with the assumption that the ‘disabled’ were any kind of meaningful group in antiquity, either by their own claims or by ascription.8 Interestingly, however, questions about the ways in which being and becoming Roman were understood in antiquity have in recent years been treated very diVerently. There seems to be a widespread modern tendency to assume that the body and descent are not important for the construction and perception of identity in the Roman world because they could not have been important in a multi-ethnic society within which mobility was a well-advertised cultural possibility: it is striking to observe this fallacy within an intellectual environment that is now generally very conscious that the relationship between aspiration and description is highly problematic.9 However, as we have begun to see, it is hard to deny the importance of ideas of descent in Roman perceptions of identity. To extensive literary reXections—on the ethnic identities of the Wrst settlers and rulers of Rome; on immigration, rape, mixing and mingling as the very essence of Roman origins; on the formation of the Roman people and its relationship with Italian peoples—we can add institutions and legislation that reXect, project and/or can in antiquity be explained by reference to blood or descent. Here we might think, for example, of Latin status with its 8 Bernal 1987, 1991, 2001; van Binsbergen 1997; Levine and Peradotto 1989; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996; for Roman ‘racial inclusiveness’, see e.g. Snowden 1983: 217–18: ‘There is nothing in the evidence . . . to suggest that the ancient Greeks or Romans established color as an obstacle to society. The relationship of blacks and whites continues to be a critical problem of the twentieth century. Not without meaning for this vital question is the experience of the Ethiopian in classical antiquity—the Wrst major encounter in European records of blacks in a predominantly white society. The Greeks and Romans counted black people in’; for gender, ‘race’ and ‘disability’ and Roman bodies, see e.g. L.A. Thompson 1989; Edwards 1993; C. Barton 1993; Gleason 1995; Garland 1995; Hallett and Skinner 1997; for historians on ethnicity, see above all Tonkin, McDonald, and Chapman 1989; Sollors 1989. 9 e.g. J. Hall 2002: 23 on ‘Romanitas’ as ‘the cultural communication of a legal-juridical status that lacked any concept of a common ethnic core’.

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interest in the legal standing of intermarriage with Roman citizens, Augustan adultery and social legislation, and even Caracalla’s grant of (near) universal citizenship, which can be framed as the global extension of the Roman genos.10 In the course of this chapter, I explore the history of ideas of this kind with an emphasis on the socio-speciWc nature of taxonomies and meanings, which we should expect to confound and cut across our own categories easily as often as they happen to coincide with them. For example, we shall Wnd that the language of ‘pure’ blood is asserted on the basis of what, from a modern perspective, seem very temporary exclusions based on a single generation and low levels of ‘policing’; or the regular association of ‘Aethiopes’, the benchmark ‘blackest’ of all peoples, with human ‘freaks’, such as pinheads, hunchbacks or dwarves, on the basis of their shared hideousness, cutting right across modern western categories of ‘race’ and ‘disability’. 2. MODE RN D EBATES ON ROMAN ‘RACE’ A brief survey of modern debates about the ethnic character of the Roman people makes for an interesting case-study of theories and debates about ‘race’ in the modern western world. Rome has functioned as such an important reference point for the political self-image of many societies in the modern western world that discussions of her ethnic character are Wred with the aspirations of modern states, nations, and empires. It is worth taking a brief look at the contexts for these discussions, at the criteria and taxonomies at play as well as the methodologies applied. One important theme that has recurred in very diVerent intellectual and political contexts has been that of the ‘race mixture’ of the Roman empire. Judgements about ‘race mixture’ have played a signiWcant role in explanations of both the ‘success’ and ‘decline’ or ‘fall’ of Rome: this is not a matter of ‘identity politics’, but of the very destiny of Rome, a paradigm 10 See, in addition, C. Jones 1999 for the persistent assertion of kinship in Roman ‘diplomacy’. While it is often supposed that such claims ‘could not’ have been taken seriously given the intellectual sophistication of the Roman imperial period, it is hard to explain their persistence if they were not.

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that was perceived to have great bearing on the natures and futures of the worlds within which and about which these authors were writing. Interest in the physical health of the collective body of Rome, and in its mixed ethnic and cultural parentage, with consequences for the character of the western inheritors of the classical world both predates and runs in parallel to the emergence of the speciWc ‘science’ of race in the early nineteenth century, with its biological typology of racial superiority. Notoriously, Edward Gibbon perceived ‘decline’ as having aVected the Roman body politic: he could scarcely wait for the northern barbarians to come and put the manliness back into what had become ‘a race of pigmies’.11 For Droysen, Rome’s fusion of Greek and Oriental roots was crucial for the creation of the kind of universalism that would ultimately be achieved in Christianity.12 Moving into the twentieth century, Tenney Frank’s judgement on the basis of the fall of the Roman Republic, the displacement of ‘real Italic people’ by men of ‘Oriental, Punic and Iberian stock’ who came, in his view, to make up the majority of the Roman plebs in the late Republic, is an interesting and not unsubtle example of the processes by which ancient sources are made to speak with modern resonances. Frank, with the essentially philological training that characterizes ancient historians of his generation, presumably bases this theory on a combination of ancient texts and speculation. This combination might include the notorious utterance attributed to Tiberius Gracchus on the land being worked by ‘imported, foreign’ slaves, speculation on the ethnic identity of these slaves on the basis of a selection of Roman campaigns in the later Republic, and essentially late Republican and early imperial ideology of Italy as both a moral and a geographical homeland of Rome.13 There is no question that Frank, if asked, could have defended his position by reference to ancient evidence, but it is the selection and juxtaposition of evidence that raises problems. Perhaps most striking is Frank’s ethnic selection of slaves: after all, the most 11

Gibbon 1776–88: ch. 2, end; cf. Bowersock 1977. Droysen 1836–43; cf. Cartledge 1997: 2–3. 13 Frank 1920: 128; his Wrst book was Attraction of Mood in early Latin (1904); such beginnings are most unusual amongst ancient historians around the beginning of the 21st cent. 12

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famous second-century pronouncement on the problem of ‘imported slaves’ within a context that indeed suggests ‘decline’ of very speciWc kinds, is Polybius’ citation of the Elder Cato’s lamentation on the relative prices of pretty boys and land.14 This lament is consequent on the fall of Macedon in 167 bc, and the slave pretty boys in question are most obviously ‘Greek’. And it is not the importation of the pretty boys that is blamed in itself for moral decline here, but the wholescale corruption of values through Rome’s achievement of unrivalled hegemony over the known world. It might be argued that Frank’s ‘Orientals’ (itself a rendering of the Latin ‘Asiatici’/ ‘Orientes’ that pushes a correspondence between signiWcantly diVerent world-views) stands also for ‘Greeks’, but that would beg questions about ethnic and political hierarchies in the 1920s rather than shed further light on Roman history.15 A. M. DuV’s explicit parallel drawn in his 1928 book on Roman freedmen between ‘alien immigration’ in contemporary America and the ‘bastard brood’ more or less responsible for the ‘ruin’ of the Roman Empire is somewhat easier to unpack, and takes considerably more liberties with ancient evidence than does Frank.16 While expressions of social snobbery concerning freedmen are easy enough to Wnd in the literature of the Roman imperial period, it is hard to Wnd any evidence of the kind of condemnation that is associated with, say the incorporation of ‘criminal slaves’ within the Roman citizen body. Within diVerent socio-political contexts, both before and after the Second World War, the ‘race-mixture’ of Rome could be held up as a positive model for modern ‘mixed’ societies, although it is important not to confuse such expressions with late twentieth-century liberal sentiments. For example, according to one strand within the somewhat tortured history of the identiWcation of the British with the Roman empire (within which the undeniable episode of the Roman occupation of ancient Britain threw up particular problems), the greatness of Britain resided in her ‘mixed’ roots, Romano-British and/or Anglo-Saxon ‘just like’ the ‘mixed’ roots of the Roman empire. Thus, for example, Humfrey Grose-Hodge, headmaster of 14 16

Polyb. 31. 25. DuV 1928: 206.

15

On ‘Orientals’ cf. in general E. Said 1978.

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Bedford School, a Loeb translator of Ciceronian speeches, published at the end of the war his school textbook, Roman Panorama, a Background for To-day, within which he includes some fascinating paragraphs on the appearance of ‘the Romans’. They were ‘of mixed race (like ourselves and everybody else) and they became increasingly mixed as conquest outside Italy brought hordes of foreign slaves and adventurers into Rome’. Despite this, the author identiWes a ‘typical Roman face’, the ‘type’ being ‘Nordic rather than Latin, more British than Italian’, and concludes that ‘the living image of many a Roman bust may be found to-day in the bar-parlour of an English public house’.17 Such passages illustrate, within the context of a discussion of ‘everyday’, ‘private’ life that had recently become a feature of respectable scholarship, the literal, physical identiWcation of the British with the Romans, as well as hints of a new pride in admitting to be of ‘mixed race’, in implicit contrast to assertions of being of ‘pure race’ under the Third Reich.18 It is, however, doubtful that such pride would encompass ‘mixture’ with non-European peoples, such as Afro-Caribbean peoples or those from the Indian subcontinent: the particular combination of imperial history and racial theory would make this a problematic supposition. It is in this context worth noting that even the most intellectually respectable authors writing in the mid-twentieth century can attribute Rome’s ‘openness’ to the absence of ‘negroes’ within the empire, an assertion that is both factually inaccurate and problematic in its assumption that racism is a ‘natural’ or at least a historically constant phenomenon.19 It is thus not very surprising that both the Wrst and second editions of HaarhoV’s, The Stranger at the Gate, Wrst published in 1938, received favourable notices in 17

Grose-Hodge 1944: 98; in the front of his 1927 translation of Cicero’s speeches, he is described as ‘assistant Master at Charterhouse, sometime scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge and late of the Indian civil service’. 18 Cf. Hingley 2000. 19 See esp. Brunt 1965b: 287 ¼ 1990: 132: ‘But the ever increasing importance of provincials, even from the east, demonstrates that occasional expressions of racialism were of no great moment. Certainly there was no colour bar, perhaps because the empire contained no Negroes and because the physical characteristics of some Italians do not diVer much from those of most Syrians.’

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the Journal of Roman Studies. The book advances the union of Romans and Greeks in the Roman empire as a paradigm for a South Africa that unites Britons and Boers, leaving ‘negroes’ out.20 It is at this point worth emphasizing that these examples of the search for the root causes of Roman imperial success or failure are glaring above all because the causes identiWed are downright politically embarrassing within the context of the early twenty-Wrst century. However, the search for explanations of ancient historical phenomena in terms that satisfy modern tastes that are clearly socio-speciWc is very widespread: one might think, for example, of relatively recent theories of the ‘causes’ of archaic tyranny, and preoccupations with class, race, and military or technological ‘developments’ that claim to be based on ancient evidence.21 I have so far considered more or less exclusively the interpretation of ancient literary sources.22 However, the new discipline of archaeology, together with linguistic studies, was very important in attempts to identify the ethnic character of the Roman people. The focus was on origins, reXecting that of the ancient literary sources themselves, as if origins would reveal most about the true character of the Roman people. In a number of cases, studies of material culture were used to substantiate ancient literary accounts: thus, for example, until comparatively recently the identiWcation of Sabine strata within early Rome was common, material evidence used to uphold literary and antiquarian traditions. This was despite the fact that it is highly questionable that archaic Sabine material is recognizable as distinct from other central Italian cultures, not to mention the problematic nature of equating culture with people.23 In other cases, the racial identity of the modern 20

J. P. V. D. Balsdon JRS 30 (1940), 219–20; P. A. Brunt JRS 39 (1949),

212. 21

e.g. Ure 1922; Andrewes 1956; J. Salmon 1977. Grose-Hodge 1944: 98 discusses Roman statues in order to illustrate the points he makes about physiognomy; for late 19th-and early 20th-cent. debates about whether archaeological material was a useful kind of evidence in its own right, or whether its function was solely to illustrate text-driven narratives, see Stray 1998: esp. 207. 23 Cornell 1997; cf. Dench 1995: 157–8; Poucet 1967 for a pioneering ‘deconstruction’ of later literary traditions. 22

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Italian people was itself at stake: this is most noticeable in early twentieth-century debates about the nature of the Etruscans, who were variously claimed to be autochthonous or immigrants from Lydia as the Herodotean tradition suggested. On both sides of the argument, appeal was made to language and literary traditions, as well as to material culture and physical anthropology.24 The postwar period, and particularly the 1960s and 1970s, saw, especially in the English-speaking world, for a combination of intellectual reasons and reasons to do with academic politics, the development of archaeology as a discipline that claimed not to be dependent on ancient literary texts. One of the most positive outcomes of this development was a much clearer deWnition of the nature of material evidence and the kinds of questions that it could be used to answer. Through the engagement of the ‘new’ archaeology with sociological and anthropological theory, relationships between material culture and systems of power, ethnic, social, and gendered identities were explored and complicated.25 It was perhaps above all ‘new’ archaeology’s ability to engage with the more ‘silent’ worlds of women, the poor and the countryside that revealed it as such a useful tool to those engaged in the more traditional Welds of classical history and philology. These were in the 1970s and early 1980s Welds that were themselves beginning to change dramatically, especially through a growing interest in Marxist and feminist theory that engaged with the problems of representation, challenging perspectives of both ancient evidence and modern scholarship.26 The engagement with the problems of representation and perspectives that are raised by studies of ‘race’ in antiquity has much in common with 1970s and early 1980s feminist revi24 For a critique of such approaches and some modiWcation, see Pallottino 1947, itself a far from dispassionate account. 25 For histories of archaeology, the recent proliferation of which itself suggests the writing and construction of a discipline, see e.g. Greene 1983 (cf. 3rd edn. 1995); Barbanera 1998; Morris 2000. 26 e.g. Pomeroy 1975; de Ste. Croix 1981; Kampen 1981; Peradotto and Sullivan 1984; Culham 1986; Barbanera 1998: 168–9 on Andrea Carandini; cf. more recently Joshel 1992; Rabinowitz and Richlin 1993; Scheidel 1995, 1996; Kampen 1996.

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sionist approaches to classical history, but the diVerent trajectories of the two subject-areas are revealing. While it is important not to underestimate the diYculty and controversy associated with introducing women’s studies into the hitherto conservative discipline of classics, this is in retrospect a success story that has involved the full integration of the Weld within classics departments. The comparatively recent, partial ‘rebranding’ of the Weld as the study of gender and sexuality itself hints at the political importance of integration, at the potential vulnerability of ‘women’ studies as a ‘marginal’ or ‘niche’ subject.27 This is all the more striking given the explicitly or implicitly political stance taken in early works, clearly inXuenced by modern political manifestos on the oppression of women and the repression of sexuality, the methodological problems raised by the study of ‘women in antiquity’, as well as the use of the personal voice.28 In contrast, the study of ‘race’ in antiquity (as opposed to the much less controversial ‘ethnicity’), for a long time the focus of popular books before the Wrst two volumes of Bernal’s Black Athena were taken as a serious challenge to the cultural focus and indeed the political identity of classics, has remained almost entirely outside classics departments, being perceived as the province of Black Studies.29 The diVerent trajectories of studies of gender and ‘race’ in the Graeco-Roman world have much to say about race politics in the USA.30 It might be added that the recent preoccupation with ‘multiculturalism’ amongst scholars of classical antiquity is itself potentially highly charged politically, but has met with no complaints about the abuse of the past.31 27

e.g. Skinner 1987; Hallett and Skinner 1997; see also Haley 1993. See McManus 1997; cf. in practice e.g. Braund 1997; Zajko 1997, heirs of a much longer tradition. 29 See above all G. James, Stolen Legacy: The Greeks Were not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, but the People of North Africa, Wrst published in 1954, but little known in classical academia. 30 Cf. the very diVerent story that could be told about Great Britain, where Black Studies barely exists as an academic discipline: the rather diVerent choices of ‘African Studies’ (3 universities) and ‘race studies’ (3 ‘new’ universities) were available to undergraduates beginning their studies in Britain in 2003. 31 Johnson 1992; Galinsky 1992; Rogers 1996; Cartledge 1998a; Beard and Henderson 2001: 5. 28

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3. RACE, PURE BLOOD, AND MIXTURES The Augustan author Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as is well known, has an intense (and perhaps vested) interest in the ethnic identity of the Romans. In the course of his attempt to prove that the Romans are ‘really’ Greek, and in fact very Wt to be rulers of Greeks, he spells out his criteria for demonstrating Greek identity far more extensively, explicitly, and unambiguously than does any classical Greek author. What is very striking in his account is the degree of emphasis on descent, an emphasis that has frequently been overlooked, perhaps because it seems to run counter to modern expectations that ancient criteria of Greekness should reXect the ‘realities’ of the culturally expanded world of the Hellenistic age and the Roman empire. It is often assumed that ‘becoming Greek’ during this period was achievable by the mastery of Greek culture alone, that myths of shared descent were devalued when Hellenism was the cultural koine of the Mediterranean, and that descentmyths, in their appeal to monstrous ancestors or etymological sleight of hand, occasioned incredulity in this intellectually sophisticated environment. In this section, however, I shall explore the importance of ancient debates about descent, and indeed ‘pure blood’ as a primary marker of ethnic identity and the moral health of a people, even and perhaps especially in the Hellenistic and early imperial periods. First of all, then, it is worth spelling out Dionysius’ criteria and arguments about the identity of the Romans. In a passage that rounds oV the Wrst book of the Roman Antiquities, and that is frequently cited by modern scholars, Dionysius spells out signs of what he calls to helle¯nikon, that is ‘Greekness’, as speaking the Greek language, using Greek customs, acknowledging the same gods, and seemly laws, ‘in which the Greek nature (physis) is most distinct from that of the barbarian’, and agreeing with Greeks in other indications.32 So far, leaving aside the awkwardness of invoking physis at this point, it might well appear that Dionysius is characterizing ‘Greekness’ as an exclusively cultural phenomenon, and this is how the passage is normally interpreted.33 However, the particular con32 33

D.H. 1. 89. 4. Dubuisson 1982: 10; S. Saı¨d 2001: 290; J. Hall 2002: 224.

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text is all-important and considerably modiWes the thrust of his argument. This ‘deWnition’ of ‘Greekness’ is in fact a list of what is no longer apparent amongst many ‘Greeks’ who live amongst ‘barbarians’: the grand climax of the passage is the wonderful rhetorical paradox of those Achaeans living around the Black Sea who by genos, by ‘descent’ are Eleans, members of the most Greek people, but who are now the most savage of all barbarians.34 Dionysius is positing two stages of ‘being Greek’: the Wrst stage is ‘Greekness’ ‘by descent’, and the second concerns signs of forgetting (according to his own metaphor), or, by implication, remembering that ‘Greekness’.35 It is worth pointing out that his scheme does not allow for barbarians to ‘become’ Greek, which would very seriously undermine his arguments about the essential ‘Greekness’ of the Romans.36 For the whole point of the discussion of peoples who have ‘forgotten’ their ‘Greekness’ is to highlight what is remarkable—indeed a thauma, a ‘wonder’—about the case of the Romans: that, despite the admixture of ‘barbarians’ that made them ‘forget’ many of their ancient institutions, and mispronounce their largely Aeolic dialect of Greek, they preserve the indications of Greek descent to an extent displayed by no other Greek colonists.37 The relative importance of descent in characterizing the Romans as essentially Greek is of course highlighted by Dionysius’ lengthy enquiry into the ethnic identities of all the earliest settlers of Rome, Wndings that are summed up in the conclusion that we are discussing here: ‘For one will Wnd no people that is more ancient or more Greek.’38 Of course neither Dionysius of Halicarnassus nor any other ancient author can be assumed to present views that are ‘representative’ of the society within which they write. For a start, Dionysius represents himself as being engaged in an argument 34

D.H. 1. 89. 4. For the motif of ‘remembering’ Greek identity in the context of the ‘barbarization’ of the Greek city of Poseidonia through the arrival of ‘Tyrrhenians or Romans’, cf. Aristoxenus of Tarentum fr. 124 Wehrli (2) ¼ Athenaeus 14. 632 a; cf. Dench 1995: 52–3 with bibliography. 36 This certainly complicates the more usual emphasis of recent scholarship on ‘becoming’ Greek in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: see most recently the optimistic picture drawn in J. Hall 2002: 220–6, with bibliography. 37 38 D.H. 1. 89. 3, 90. 1. Ibid. 1. 89. 2. 35

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against those who hold Rome to be a retreat of ‘barbarians, runaways and vagabonds’. As we have seen, his near-contemporary Livy is in contrast very interested in Rome’s socially and ethnically ‘mixed’ origins and history.39 While the notion of ‘mixture’ is potentially problematic in ancient contexts, it is worth noting that, in Roman literature, there can be unambiguous praise for Rome’s ethnically plural nature.40 On the other hand, the clarity of Dionysius’ ‘proof’ of the ethnic character of Rome, as well as his self-conscious identiWcation with Thucydides and Thucydidean ideas about Athens, is eloquent testimony to some of the ways in which the reception of Athens could be articulated within the early imperial period. Dionysius’ interest in genos, in ‘descent’ or ‘origins’ is deeply rooted within ancient Mediterranean and indeed near-eastern thought. We might think of the striking emphasis on telling and retelling family-trees in classical literature, a way of writing family and local histories and mapping the world more broadly that the Old Testament and the origins of Greek historiography have in common. Such lists are intolerably tedious to most modern readers, and there is a tendency simply to leave them out, with the result that we may be in danger of missing the cultural importance of citing who begat whom amongst the children of Israel who came into Egypt, or of the intricacies of the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad.41 Such ‘family-trees’ have the potential to be used primarily either in an ‘aggregative’ way, to write peoples into the world of the beholder, or with more of an eye to the consequences of inclusion or exclusion. Importantly, the degree to which claims of common descent are made to have consequences for ethnic ascription is variable: speciWcally, claims of common kin certainly do not necessarily imply claims of common Greek identity, but can seem ethnically indiVerent or neutral. Thus, for example, Bickerman’s classic article ‘Origines gentium’, explored the widespread impetus in Greek literature to write all known peoples 39

Ibid. 1. 89. 1. e.g. Tac. Ann. 11. 24. 6; cf. Florus 2. 6. 1 epitomizing Livy with a wonderful body and blood metaphor: ‘quippe cum populus Romanus Etruscos, Latinos Sabinosque sibi miscuerit et unum ex omnibus sanguinem ducat, corpus fecit ex membris et ex omnibus unus est.’ 41 Genesis 46: 8–27. 40

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into the world populated by the descendants of heroes and survivors of the Trojan War, with family-trees regularly positing relationships of kin between Greeks and ‘barbarians’.42 More recently, Jonathan Hall has speculated that ‘Greekness’ in the archaic period was originally an aggregative concept, focusing on claims to be descendants of Hellen, the emphasis being on writing oneself in rather than on distinguishing oneself from barbarians.43 Assertions of kinship are very persistent within the ancient world, and, as we shall see, play an important role in a world in which non-Greeks have increasingly to be recognized as powerful and dominant. The language of kin, along with the reformulated iconographic and literary language of Greeks and barbarians provides a universally understood common vocabulary of prestige and connection for the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Within Greek thought about descent, the model is clearly that of the individual family, and the resulting ideology of descent groups approximates the idea of ‘race’ in its older usage within the English language, as in precisely the ‘race of Jesse’ in the King James Bible, before the development of the ‘science’ of biologically determined, permanent, and hierarchical racial categories in the early part of the nineteenth century.44 Ideologies of shared descent, which can sometimes be expressed explicitly through the metaphor of shared blood, were appropriated within the pseudo-biology of racial groups in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are common also to romanticism, nationalism, and other systems of thought in post-classical history. The idea of sharing blood is not, then, a marker of any one particular system of thought, but has diVerent associations and overtones within each speciWc context.45 One Greek word that is regularly used of the descent group, and which becomes one of the major ways of denoting a ‘people’ such as the ‘Attic’ people, the ‘Ionian’ 42

Bickerman 1952. J. Hall 1997, but note the diYculty of establishing a genealogical stratigraphy that becomes obvious at pp. 47–51. 44 Banton 1987: ch. 1. 45 See L. Thompson 1981 for useful discussion of the use of imagery of pure and impure blood descent in numerous diVerent premodern ideological systems. 43

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people, or even the ‘Hellenic’ people—genos—is a noun cognate with the verb gignesthai, ‘to be born’, and emphasizes the connection in thought between ‘real’ descent within families and a people’s belief in descent from a common ancestor. Within the Greek world, there will be any number of variant and competing ways to express membership of a group by reference to descent from heroes, ranging from assertion of descent from the sons of Hellen right down to the much more speciWc membership of tribe or phratry.46 Clearly the reception of Wfth- and early fourth-century Athens in Roman contexts is more relevant than our own, modern attempts to reconstruct classical Athenian self-perception when we are trying to understand ancient arguments about Roman identity that draw on Athenian models or comparisons, such as those of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nevertheless, a brief reXection on ideas of descent within the context of Wfthcentury Athens is worthwhile partly in order to understand something of the speciWcs and shifts of emphasis within individual societies in the Graeco-Roman world, and partly because of some interesting recent shifts of emphasis within the modern debate. In the context of this section, the major issues at stake have to do with the perceived nature of the divide between Greeks and barbarians that for the classical period we know about more or less exclusively from the case of Athens. In speciWc terms, they concern the interpretation of new, Periclean legislation on qualiWcations for Athenian citizenship passed in 451/0 raising questions of how far it was possible to ‘become Athenian’, as well as broader matters of how far the categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ were perceived as mutually exclusive. The modern debate has been quite heated, perhaps not least because of the peculiar resonance for the western world today of the terms in which the relationship between ‘Greeks’ and ‘barbarians’ was debated in classical antiquity, that is both blood and descent and ethics and culture. In addition, these sets of criteria are not 46 Walbank 1951 for close and careful analysis of the range of meanings of both genos and ethnos, and implications for how we should think of Greek identity, in terms neither of a ‘nation’ nor of a purely ‘cultural’ concept; cf. C. P. Jones 1996 for a discussion of Herodotean usage.

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infrequently juxtaposed within ancient accounts. Furthermore, the language and meaning of blood and descent simply does not function as we would expect it to do from our vantage point and familiarity with recent race-based political history, including, most startlingly, forms of racial policing in the Third Reich or apartheid-era South Africa. It is therefore not particularly surprising that modern writers frequently complain about the ‘illogicality’ of ancient thought, or else that they seek to ‘rationalize’ ancient thought by seeking to undermine the force of expressions of blood and descent in particular when these seem to be ‘contradicted’ by expressions of culture. Some of the heat of these modern discussions surely arises from the continued use of Athens as a reference-point for western politics and society, and the debate seems to have become somewhat stuck as a result of its value as a model to uphold or deplore: can we see in Athens the roots of modern racism, or alternatively of a much less sinister kind of cultural chauvinism, or is she even, according to most recent analyses, something of a model of inclusiveness? The subject of Athenian ethnicity, just like that of Athenian democracy (easily as laden a concept given its reception in the modern western world as a universally positive value), would beneWt enormously from the systematic study of its projection and reception in both the ancient and the modern world, something that is clearly well beyond the scope of my project here. Since the ancient language of the descent of a people has its basis in the model of the individual family, questions are raised about the relationship between the articulation of family descent and that of ethnic descent within any given ancient society. These include issues of ‘class’ and political ‘shape’. The assertion of descent from heroes as well as ‘kinship diplomacy’ is frequently, but by no means inevitably, essentially aristocratic in its tendency to elide the ‘roots’ of a whole people with those of an individual family. This phenomenon of elision characterizes the genealogical boasts of the elites of Roman Italy as well as the spectacular example of the Julian family’s identiWcation of their own roots with those of Rome itself in their claim to be descended from Iulus, son of Aeneas. The intensely competitive, status-conscious, and aspirational aspect of Roman society is reXected in these genealogical assertions, as well as in the

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historical traditions of individual ‘clans’ or family branches, gentes, that form the basis of much of the composite, later Republican narratives of the early Republic.47 The earliest recorded examples of cognomina belong, signiWcantly, exclusively to patricians, while they are used extensively by the senatorial and equestrian classes long before they become common amongst the plebs. Both inherited ‘clan’ or gentilicial names and cognomina advertise the memory of ancestral deeds as do funerary rituals and public speeches. The oddity of Roman nomenclature is highlighted by comparison with other Indo-European systems, which habitually use a single, noninherited name.48 It is, however, important not to equate this status-consciousness and emphasis on descent with a closed society: as we have seen, at least as early as the third century bc traditions on the duality of earliest Rome, both Sabine and Roman, allowed space for newcomers to assert their roots in Rome’s beginnings, while in the late Republic a Wctive genealogy of ‘new men’ could be imagined, going back at least to M’ Curius Dentatus via the Elder Cato. With regard to the collective myths of the origins of the Roman people, Romulus’ Asylum is, as we have seen, a strikingly impersonal version of the foundation of the Roman citizen-body, while there is no evidence that any family claimed descent from the unions that began as the rape of the Sabine women. These are two stories woven into a narrative that broadly combines an emphasis on the individual with that on the Roman people collectively. The memory of the Roman past reXects the complex and indeed hotly debated political and ethnic character of the present. Within Athenian history, and even within the Wfth century, the elision of claims of individual descent with the myths of origins for the people collectively is clearly visible as a public phenomenon. One might think above all of the connection of kin asserted by Cimon with Theseus, a hero with a crucial role in the synoecism of Athens. On the other hand, public expressions in Athens of the later Wfth-century ‘radical’ democracy self-consciously create a distance from aristocratic expressions of keeping power within the family. For example, the ‘Spring47

Wiseman 1974, 1983; cf. Flower 1996.

48

Salway 1994.

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house Decree’, commemorates the refusal of the Athenian de¯mos to accept the provision of a springhouse to be funded privately by the Pericles, his sons Paralos and Xanthippos, and their sons. While the family is thanked for its generous oVer (and of course honoured by being named in the inscription), the springhouse will instead be provided for from public funds, the tribute of the Athenians.49 Nevertheless, ‘class consciousness’ in the later Wfth century was far from dead, and emerges as a major source of tension in the background of the political coups of 411 bc, with their emphasis on restricting membership of the state (according to what was stated publicly) on the criteria of property and bodies.50 Aristophanic comedy of the 420s, within which of course no one is exempt from satirical treatment, makes great play on the tensions of politics, class, and style: accusations of ‘tyranny’ on the basis of dress or which foods are bought at the market; the lampooning of the demagogue Cleon as a ‘sausage-seller’; the obsessive litigiousness, literal-mindedness, and state-dependence of the waspish jurors.51 The probably contemporary so-called ‘Old Oligarch’ reXects without humour on the problems of satisfying and rewarding ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, ‘the few’ and ‘the many’, and interestingly complains about the lack of visible social distinction in a world within which it is hard even to distinguish slave or metic from citizen.52 In the work of both authors, there is a strong impression simultaneously of the power of the sense that the ‘people ran Athens’ and actual or desired social and ‘class’ distinction that might or might not be interpreted as being compatible with democracy. 49

SEG 10. 47; for translation and commentary, see Crawford and Whitehouse 1983: no. 152. 50 See the signiWcantly diVerent interpretations of the aims of the conspirators in Thuc. 8. 67 (cf. 8. 66. 1, 63. 4) and Ath. Pol. 29–31. 51 See, above all, Aristophanes Wasps, Acharnians, Knights; cf. Thuc. 8. 81. 2 for the importance of private clubs in the ‘politics’ of the supporters of the coup of 411 bc. 52 [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1. 10–12; on ‘class’ in general in classical Athens, see Davidson 1997: 227–38; for the problem of bodily distinction in democratic Athens and attempts to ‘democratize’ the body as in the example of Cleon who notoriously hitched up his clothing to achieve this eVect, see Humphreys 1999.

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Notoriously, as we saw in Chapter 2, the relationship between the descent of individual families and the membership of the Athenian citizen-body is emphasized by the Periclean law of 451/0, which, according to the author of the Athenian Constitution, restricts membership to those who are the oVspring of two astoi, ‘locals’.53 For all the insistence in recent scholarship that this law does not imply that the citizenship became tightly sealed, it is hard to sweep aside reXections in later Wfth- and early fourth-century Athenian literature on the importance of blood, purity, and true birth as opposed to bastardy and foreignness. For example, Aristophanes’ Frogs has the Chorus advise the Athenian people to take as their leaders the kaloikagathoi, the true born, rather than red-headed foreigners, a passage laden with the metaphor of the desirability of pure gold over bronze or alloyed coinage. The Chorus is, it is true, being made to speak about choosing leaders rather than citizens, but this passage nevertheless oVers a commentary on generalized anxiety about foreigners, and the metaphor of ‘purity’ is very suggestive in the aftermath of legislation concerning marriage and citizenship.54 There is an added and ironic edge in the depiction of the ideal leaders as kaloikagathoi, ‘beautiful and good’, the traditional heroic, moral, and physical naturalization of upper-class power: upper-class individuals were the most visibly connected with ‘foreignness’, by ancestral ties and indeed by marriage. We might well think of the interesting shift of meaning and association that the language of ‘good birth’ takes on, shifting from an emphasis on ‘noble’ status to what Ober styled the ‘democratization’ and ‘communalization’ of an ideology of birthright, such that kalokagathia and eugeneia might plausibly be claimed to be the property of all Athenians.55

53 Ath. Pol. 26. 4; cf. Plut. Per. 37. 2 for a less precise formula: only those born of ‘two Athenians should be Athenians’. 54 Ar. Ran. 718–33 with Dover 1993 ad loc. on the coinage metaphor and the association of red hair with Thracians; cf. Ach. 507–8 for characterization of foreigners as the ‘chaV’ that is removed (while metics are the complementary ‘bran’ of the citizens); for anxiety about whether individuals are foreigners or not in the late classical and Hellenistic periods, see Ogden 1996: 174–80. 55 Ober 1989: 259–66. For the place of the ideology of autochthony here, cf. Ch. 2, above.

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Characterizing Athenian descent as ‘pure’ has, then, a series of internal dynamics, but also needs to be considered within the context of ideas of Greekness in general as based on descent. No amount of special pleading can really remove ‘blood’ from the deWnition of Greekness that Herodotus’ Athenians are made to wish to uphold: how far the validity of blood or any of the other criteria is questioned in the account as a whole with reference to either Athenian claims or ‘Greekness’ itself is not something that detracts from the importance of the proposition.56 It is in the context of Athenian claims of hegemony over the Greek world that the ‘purity’ of Athenian descent makes most sense: the competitiveness of such claims is well brought out by Demosthenes’ use of the myth of Athenian autochthony as upholding the status of Athenian citizens as uniquely (he claims) legitimate children of their land, in contrast to adopted children.57 There seems not infrequently to be confusion in modern works about how far Athenian projection of blood ‘purity’ or ancestral autochthony is ‘really’ a description of the ethnic make-up of the Athenian population. However, even the explanation for the law given in the Athenian Constitution characterizes it as a response to the ‘swelling’ of the citizen body. And we should also acknowledge that assertions of ‘essential’ characteristics of the present by reference to myths of origins regularly compress and select from received historical traditions, creating inconsistencies that are themselves regularly explored in ancient literature. It is of course also true that neither sexlives, issues of legitimacy of birth, nor admission to the citizenship were policed ‘adequately’ by the standards of modern western societies (not to speak of explicitly racist regimes), although we should not underestimate the potential of denunciation in social control. Ideas and ideals of the ‘purity’ of Athenian blood are, then, aspirational rather than descriptive. But the ‘purity’ of Athenian descent and the notion that blood is the basis of Greekness are both available for scrutiny in later Wfth- and fourth-century literature and only some of a number of possible bases for assertions of superiority. The image of Athens as an education for the world that Thucydides attributes 56

Hdt. 8. 144.

57

Dem. Or. 60. 4.

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to Pericles is not in itself incompatible with the idea of a tighter membership of the community. It is thus very distinct in many ways from Isocrates’ assertion that being Greek is now to be considered a matter of paideusis—‘education’ and ‘nurture’ rather than of sharing in physis, in ‘nature’, the Greek name now a matter of dianoia, of ‘character’ and ‘mindset’, rather than of genos, ‘birth’ and ‘descent’.58 A number of observations are apposite here. For one thing, it is signiWcant that Isocrates explicitly addresses a counter-argument of the blood-basis of Greek identity: he is representing himself as making an argument rather than stating either the obvious or some common contemporary deWnition of Greekness. In addition, there is a pointedness to this formulation in the context of the perceived necessity that Greeks should bond together against Macedon. Such an expansive variety of ‘panhellenism’ might indeed be more politically desirable than the hotly competitive and potentially exclusive criterion of blood. The Athenians were not by any means the only people in the archaic and classical Greek world to have claimed to be autochthonous, nor was an ‘unmixed’ descent the only kind that could proudly be boasted. For example, other Greek peoples, such as the Thebans and the Arcadians claimed to be autochthonous, while Pindar’s Pythian 9, written in 474 bc to celebrate Telesikrates’ victory at Delphi in the race in armour, commemorates the foundation of his city Cyrene by the mythological paradigm of Apollo’s rape of the untamed eponymous nymph: here as elsewhere, the rape dramatizes the striking clash and union of cultures that can be ‘remembered’ in the variegated culture of the present. However, given the Athenian bias of surviving classical literature, most of our ‘counter-examples’ are of course framed by Athenian ethnic judgements and perceptions, and are often patently functioning as a ‘mirror’ of Athenian concerns. Most strikingly, the ‘ethnic’ nature of Athenian society itself and its contradictions is frequently explored in tragedy, along with the complex position of women. Tragedy, devoid as it is of anything that could count as an authorial voice, resists 58 Thuc. 2. 41. 1, cf. 2. 37. 1; Isoc. Paneg. 50. I have in each case given two English words for each Greek term, to try to suggest the range of meaning that does not correspond closely to any individual English word.

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closure of meaning more completely than any other genre, and is the prime context for dramatizing diYcult questions. Alongside Euripides’ Ion and the penetrating questions posed about the nature of myth, birth, and Athenian identity, one might think of the tortured descent and hybrid nature of the Danaids in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, which combines Egypt and impeccably Greek origins, animals, gods, and humans: this hybridity is especially pertinent and problematic given their claims to Greek soil.59 And the potentially negative overtones of autochthony itself are also explored in Athenian tragedy: Thebes, so frequently Athens’ altera ego, a little too close for comfort, ‘keeps it in the family’ to the extent of incest and brothers who kill brothers.60 Much more generally, tragedy stages a sophisticated play with possibilities of inverting the ethical characteristics of Greeks and barbarians, but it is unclear that the force of these organizational categories is in any way undermined by such an exercise. We need both to acknowledge the complex ways in which ‘polarities’ operate and to recognize the signiWcance of maintaining them as mutually exclusive categories: this signiWcance is undoubtedly clearest from the perspective of the plurality that comes to characterize being Roman.61 Ancient theories about whether barbarians were born or made are explored later in this chapter, but for the moment it is worth noting the signiWcance of Aristotle’s will to attempt a theory of natural slavery, as much as his failure to be able to work it through successfully.62

59

Zeitlin 1986; cf. discussion of Sicily in Thucydides, Ch. 2, above. Zeitlin 1990. 61 It is, of course, true that individual ‘barbarian’ types are regularly distinguished: for Greek tragedy, this was well brought out in E. Hall 1989, while Herodotus’ ‘close up’ ethnographical enquiries are both highly individualized and emphasize to an extent that is remarkable in classical Greek thought the mutability of ethnic character: Rosalind Thomas 2000: 102–34. But the clarity of the symbolism of oppositional ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ roles remains striking in the postclassical world. 62 Arist. Pol. 1254b 28–34, with Garnsey 1996: 113–14; De Ste. Croix 1981: 416–18; for Roman versions (which represent rather clearly the tension between the twin Roman focuses of ‘imperialism’ and incorporation at the end of the Republic and early imperial period), see Cic. Prov. Cons. 10; Livy 35. 49. 8; 36. 17. 5; Lucan 4. 575 V. 60

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Traditionally in modern scholarship, the Hellenistic kingdoms mark a new beginning in criteria for Greekness, with the emphasis now much more Wrmly on culture rather than descent.63 However, fourth- and third-century historical, geographical, and ethnographical writing regularly persists in mapping the world by genealogy, and by diVerentiating between Greeks and barbarians, but signiWcantly emphasizes categories of ‘mixed’ peoples outside the traditional boundaries of the Greek world.64 Thus, for example, Ephorus notoriously (and to the signiWcant annoyance of Strabo) divided the inhabitants of Asia Minor into the categories of Greeks, barbarians, and hoi migades, ‘mixed peoples’: such a tripartite arrangement interestingly both attempts to account for an expanded and ethnically complex world, and maintains the value of absolutes and positively enhances the hierarchical prestige of Greekness by giving a collective name for those in between.65 We should think of such attempts to characterize hybridity alongside the more familiar language of Hellenistic and Roman ‘diplomacy’, including that of ‘philhellenism’, perceived as an apposite way of characterizing non-Greek powers.66 Insofar as Rome was noticed at all in the Greek writings of the sixth to early third centuries, what we largely see is a combination of accounting for peoples in the vocabulary of kin and increasingly bookish etymological games that model the name of the city’s founder on the name ‘Rome’. I would cer63

See above all the use of the term ‘culture-Greeks’ in Tarn 1927. ‘Mixtures’ are quite frequently observed by Herodotus, part of his interest in the nature of the boundaries between peoples (especially between diVerent ‘barbarian’ peoples). His is, we should remember, an exceptionally nuanced ethnography. Elsewhere, ‘mixtures’ are rare in the literature of the 5th and 4th cent., and interestingly characterize peoples within or just on the boundaries of the traditional Greek world: see e.g. Eur. Ph. 138, where Antigone remarks on the appearance of the Aetolian, spear-bearing Tydeus as meixobarbaros (half-Greek, half-barbarian): this is very much the territory of E. Hall’s ‘boundaries of Hellas’ (1989: 165–72) rather than anything more remote; cf. Hellanicus of Mytilene FGH 4 71a on mixelle¯nes (half-Greeks) on Lemnos, with J. Hall 2002: 196; right at home, the Athenians in Plato’s Menexenus (245 d), in contrast with other Greek peoples, are emphatically not mixobarbaroi, but ‘pure Greeks’. 65 Strabo 14. 5. 23–5 ¼ 678–9 C. 66 For back-projections of the philhellenism of Alexander I of Macedon, see C. P. Jones 1999: 15–16, with bibliography. 64

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tainly want to stress the lateness of any signiWcant interest in Rome at all: such notices as there are were already in antiquity exhaustively picked over in the search for recognition of the future ruler of the world, and this very process of selection and excerption in itself very probably exaggerates the appearance of interest in comparison with that shown towards other central and southern Italian ‘barbarian’ peoples. Thus, in a sixthcentury interpolation of the Hesiodic Theogony, the children of Odysseus and Circe are named as ‘Latinus, Tyrrhenus, and Agrios’. Early Greek ethno-geography tends to cling to the coasts, and presumably the ‘Wild Man’ Wlls in the more amorphous hinterland: the signiWcance of the ‘omission’ of Rome ultimately depends on how far back one wants to project clear Roman hegemony in central Italy. Here we also see the potential of ascribed genealogies to nuance perceptions and relationships in both the choices of parents and the given names of peoples, choices that can of course also be reXected upon in later versions. Thus, ‘writing in’ can be a far from bland or Xat process.67 It is somewhat ironic that so many of the earliest Greek literary notices referring explicitly to Rome should claim her as Greek or at least apparently assume nothing unusual or untranslatable about her. In comparison with, for example, the rather richer early traditions on the origins of the ‘Tyrrhenians’ or on southern Italian peoples, Rome in early Greek traditions is perhaps Greek by default, unremarkable except for the sense of completeness and erudition its mention might lend to these accounts. Even the earliest ‘historical’ recognition of Rome, reXections on the attack of ‘Gauls’ on the city (traditionally in 390 bc), and notoriously on its capture, seem to reXect a sense of great remoteness. For example, Heracleides Ponticus apparently described Rome as a polis helle¯nis captured by ‘Hyperboreans’ in his work On the Soul: Rome seems to be a more or less Wctional outpost of Hellenism threatened by mythologized barbarians, an account of far-Xung events both as remote and as self-referential as battles with Amazons or Centaurs.68 67 In other words, ‘Othering’ and ‘writing in’ are not mutually exclusive processes. 68 Fr. 102 Wehrli ¼ Plut. Cam. 22. 2–3.

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It is when, rather later, the Romans were really beginning to have an impact on the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy in particular, that a more heightened interest in their ethnic roots and identity in relation to ‘Greekness’ begins to become noticeable in Greek texts. In the fraught and competitive world of later fourth-century central and southern Italy and Sicily, the Romans were of course not the only non-Greek people who were actively ‘positioned’ in relation to ‘Greekness’. Given the importance within this context of the essentially mutually exclusive language of Greeks and barbarians, languages of ethnic ascription that explore in some depth the possibility of a status ‘in between’ Greeks and barbarians are highly suggestive. For example, around the 330s–320s bc, the Tarentines discovered that the Samnites were connected with them by kin. We can see again here the considerable subtlety that is possible in appeals to kinship. The Samnites are not precisely identiWed with the Spartan Tarentines, and not precisely identiWed as ‘Greek’: the story went that the Samnites had been ‘joined’ by Laconian colonists, that they became ‘philhellenes’, and that some were called ‘Pitanates’ in memory of the legendary crack guard that served the Spartans. In a world within which Greek credentials were supremely charged, this mini-history, suspected even in antiquity to have been fabricated, places Samnites very speciWcally in relation to Tarentum as well as between Greeks and barbarians.69 While, as we have seen, the association of Rome with Troy is older than the third century, and while the ‘barbarization’ of the Trojans, and their reframing as ‘Phrygians’ is as old as the later Wfth century in Athenian literature, it is from the early third century that we can begin to see the signiWcance of this association for contemporary relationships with Greek powers pushed into service. Most notably, the expedition of Pyrrhus of Epirus (itself signiWcantly on the boundaries of Hellas) that brought him into direct conXict with the Romans was allegedly framed at the time as a re-enactment of the Trojan War, the 69 Strabo 5. 4. 12 ¼ 250 C, with Dench 1995: 53–4 with bibliography for date of this tradition. It should be noted that the ‘proofs’ of Samnite ancestry are ‘cultural’: the scheme here, within which ‘cultural’ signs are ‘proof’ of descent is very closely comparable to that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ discussion of the ethnic character of Rome.

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descendant of Achilles marching against Trojan colonists.70 The neat irony of reversing the outcome of the Trojan War in fact becomes an important aspect in the creation of an identity for Rome that is closely connected with the roots of the Greek world but also distinct from them. It was apparently Timaeus of Sicilian Tauromenium who Wrst undertook a more thorough ethnographical investigation of Rome, proving Trojan origins by continuation in cult and custom.71 Elsewhere, ethical judgments made about the Romans might characterize them as more or less sympathetic towards the values of civilization, sometimes equated explicitly with sympathy towards Greek values. A new emphasis on pistis/Wdes within the language of philhellenism suggests both the new vulnerability of the Greek poleis within a world increasingly dominated by ‘barbarian’ powers such as Samnites, Carthaginians, and Romans, as well as the universal acceptance of the importance of a primarily Greek ethical language of international relations.72 In the later second century, Polybius’ explanation of Roman success eloquently plots out for them spaces between Greek and barbarian ends of the pole: for example, in his sixth book, they are near enough to civilization to merit political enquiry and simultaneously near enough to being ‘other peoples’ to be subjected to essentially ethnographic enquiry.73 But speeches put in the mouths of others repeatedly raise the possibility that the Romans are not just barbarians, but in ethical terms the worst of barbarians, a perspective that is just occasionally visible in ‘fragments’ of other Greek historians.74 It should also be recognized that the Romans themselves could exploit their emphatically non-Greek identity as readily as they could claim philhellenism, as for example when they apparently claimed kin, homophylia, with the Mamertines.75 The slippage between Greeks and barbarians that could be explored on the Wfth-century Athenian stage or ethnographical imaginings is in fourth- to second-century Italy a dynamic, lived space. 70

Paus. 1. 12. 1. FGH 566 F 36 ¼ Polyb. 12. 4 b.1; Momigliano 1959; more generally, see now Erskine 2001. 72 e.g. Crawford 1984: 33; Polyb. 1. 7. 9–10. 73 74 Cf. Erskine 2000. Dench 1995: 69, with bibliography. 75 Ibid. 71. 71

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While we have begun to see the importance of the ‘in between’ nature of the Romans, what we have not encountered so far is any perception of the ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ ethnic nature of Rome, anything corresponding to Dionysius’ language of ‘mixing’ and ‘tangling’ in the contrast that he draws between the pristine nature of her Greek roots and the inXux of ‘barbarian’ peoples at signiWcantly later points in her history. We have not, indeed, found any reXections either on the potentially related themes of Rome as an ‘open’ city. While we should of course be wary of placing too much emphasis on arguments from silence, it is interesting that Philip V of Macedon, in his letter of 214 advocating to the people of Larisa the beneWts of not being too restrictive in grants of the citizenship, does not Wnd precisely what he is looking for in the paradigm of Rome that he upholds. The reason that he gives for Roman expansion through colonies, the manumission of slaves, does not Wt the problem of Larisa as well as the assertion that the Romans were in general open to foreigners might have done.76 The question of whether or not Philip is turning around hostile criticism by Greeks of the Romans for admitting manumitted slaves to the citizenship is also very hard to answer, not least because so little survives of Greek criticism beyond what is attributed to speakers in ancient historical narratives of Rome. It is indeed also possible that the kind of remarks made by Philip on the Roman admission of slaves to the citizenship were subsequently turned round and viewed from a hostile perspective, such as the claim that Romans are descended from ‘barbarians’ or ‘slaves’ that Dionysius imagines (without attribution) as a possible critique of Rome. Perhaps the most that we can say for the moment is that we have not found any surviving contemporary evidence to suggest that ethnic plurality or hybridity featured within exchanges with the Greek world regarding the nature of Rome before the Augustan age. We might think also in this context of one of the ‘problems’ of Polybius’ conceptualization of Rome in her imperial prime, his near silence on Italy and her relation76 Syll.3 543; IG 9. 2. 517; I am not persuaded that there is evidence to support Scheid’s 1996 argument that the Roman institution of Graecus ritus serves to advertise Rome’s ethnic openness, although I Wnd other aspects of this article very compelling.

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ship with Rome.77 It would perhaps be unfair to use as a point of contrast Cato the Elder’s very remarkable Origines, with its ‘sandwiching’ of ethnic and ethical accounts of Italy between Roman origins and her history, but I shall emphasize below the more widespread interest that we can see in second-century Roman literature in the dual, Roman–Sabine nature of Rome. It will already be clear that fourth- to second-century Roman ethnic self-positioning is by no means wholly separable from the ‘Greek’ perspectives explored above, and the issue is often complicated by the extreme diYculty of reconstructing priority or the processes whereby, for example, mythological traditions were claimed: the roots of Rome’s Trojan origins are peculiarly tortured and contested in modern scholarship. However, it is also important not to give the impression that the idea of Greeks or the Greek world was the only or even a constant cultural reference point for Rome, while the peculiarities of self-positioning in the intensively interactive world of Hellenistic Italy will undoubtedly highlight some of the processes of selection and narrowing of historical perspective amongst authors of the so-called Second Sophistic. Once we move away from an exclusive focus on Rome and the Greek world, plurality and hybridity become very quickly part of the picture. The idea of duality, for example, is deeply rooted in Roman myths and historical traditions. It is plausible to reconstruct historical circumstances within which both the socially and ethnically dual nature of Rome was emphasized through stories of origins in the fourth to second centuries bc. If, for example, the delineation of the Quirinal as both a plebeian and a Sabine space can be ascribed to the early third century, an argument that we considered in the previous chapter, the idea of the social duality of Rome is perhaps even earlier: the attribution of a twin, 77 The exceptions are: 6. 13. 4–6; 21. 4–5; 26. 3; 26. 5–10; 39. 6, 14, 40, 50. 6, i.e. predominantly as the ‘allies’, adjunct to the Roman citizen army. NB: above all 6. 52, esp. paragraphs 4–11 where Polybius’ synkrisis of Carthage and Rome and argument of the superiority of Rome on military grounds and speciWcally her avoidance of the use of mercenaries pushes him to elide the categories of ‘Roman’ and ‘[Italian] ally’. This is especially striking in his comments on the Roman troops being ‘local/of the soil’ and ‘citizens’ (52. 5; as opposed to ‘foreign’ and ‘paid’) and on the superiority of ‘Italiot’ ‘bodily strength and courage of the soul’ (52. 10).

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Remus, to Romulus might have been emphasized in the context of fourth-century debates about the political inclusion of plebeians alongside patricians, if it was not actually invented at this time.78 Alongside such expressions of hybridity, there are in addition other kinds of Roman ethnic self-positioning that do not speak directly to the Greek world. For example, there are complex questions relating to emphasis on the Latinity of Rome in the late fourth century, and the articulation of links between Latin towns, notably Lavinium and Alba, and Rome. At the very least, the signiWcance of Latinity was reconWgured after the Roman ‘settlement’ in 338 bc of her wars with her Latin neighbours, her assignment of diVerential statuses and in particular the invention of an extendable ‘Latin’ status through the creation of new, ‘Latin’ colonies. The rather indirect relationship of Aeneas to the foundation of Rome, and his somewhat closer relationship with both Lavinium and Alba Longa, must surely owe something to fourth-century reinvigoration of ‘Latinity’ even if many modern scholars resist the idea that Rome in fact Wrst appropriated her Trojan origins only in the aftermath of the Latin ‘settlement’.79 Given the very active interest in ‘Latinity’ during the last century of the Republic and indeed the early imperial period, it is exceptionally hard to tie any particular traditions, or aspects of traditions, to the late fourth century speciWcally. We can do no more than hypothesize the possible resonances of aetiologies of the ius conubii and common Trojan roots alongside the earliest notices of the celebration of the feriae Latinae during this period.80 Perhaps a little more tangibly, Torelli has emphasized the importance of ‘Trojan’ resonances in the early histories of some Latin colonies in southern Italy. For example, an emphatically ‘Trojan’ cult of Athena Ilias was celebrated at Luceria, a Latin colony founded on the borders of Samnium and Apulia during the Samnite Wars of the late fourth century. This cult appealed both to the ‘Trojan78

For arguments for the invention of Remus, see Wiseman 1995. Much turns on the interpretation of archaic evidence at Lavinium, and whether or not it relates to the cult of Aeneas. For very diVerent perspectives, see A. Alfo¨ldi 1965: 246–68; Torelli 1984: 189–236; Ampolo 1988b. 80 Cf. Introduction, above, for the tantalizing fact that the rape of the Sabine women is in fact also the rape of the Latin women. 79

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ness’ of Rome and to historical assertion in the local Daunian culture of descent from the Greek hero Diomedes, who was linked with the ‘Palladian’ cult of Athena, that was ‘recalled’ in the cult of Athena Ilias.81 The earliest Roman literature, as well as setting chronological schemes for the various very diVerent kinds of tradition on the beginnings of Rome, and showing considerable interest in relative dating and foundations, is also concerned particularly with the Sabine–Roman roots of Rome. Certainly this duality is not always easy: Titus Tatius, Romulus’ Sabine partner in rule, is something of a second Remus, an uncomfortable alter ego who must be eliminated. Second-century versions of the rape of the Sabine women are very suggestive, however, in the ways in which they reXect on the hybridity of the Roman people. Most notably, the one surviving fragment of Ennius’ play Sabinae underlines the consanguineity of Romans and Sabines established by the rape, along with the horrors of civil war: ‘when the spoils you have taken are from a son-in-law, what label will you put on them?’ Sabines are in general in the second century increasingly ‘naturalized’ as one of the faces of Roman identity. Nevertheless, in the last decades of the second century, particularly in the context of the proposals of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, we can gain a sense of the articulation of conXicting ideas about the nature of the Roman citizen-body through the rather more monolithic language of ‘foreignness’. Notoriously, Gaius Gracchus attributed to his brother a speech in which he observed the ‘emptiness’ of land worked by ‘imported, foreign slaves’. Plutarch also cites a speech of Tiberius that laments that the ‘Roman’ poor ‘who Wght and die for Italy’ have ‘not a single clod of earth of their own’, let alone an altar or a tomb of their forefathers. There is other evidence to suggest Tiberius’ interest in promoting the connectedness of the Roman poor with the land. This connectedness with the land is very interesting in the context of the apparent engagement of both Tiberius and Gracchus with ideas of democracy: it is tempting to think of ideas of Athenian autochthony.82 81

Torelli 1984; cf. 1999: 172. Plut. TG 8. 7; 9. 4–5; cf. also the opposition in Polyb. 6. 52. 5 and 10 (n. 77, above); NB: Plutarch’s Tiberius in the latter passage is exclusively interested in Romans: contrast the very diVerent insistence of Appian on the Italians as ‘kin’ of the Romans at bc 1. 23. 99. 82

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When challenged to comment on the death of Tiberius Gracchus, on the other hand, Scipio Aemilianus famously refused to be threatened by the crowd, for whom Italy was only a ‘stepmother’, a noverca. He was, presumably, commenting provocatively on the servile origins of the Roman ‘crowd’. His language seems to echo the perceived importance of descent and connectedness with the land, but obviously reverses Gracchan ideology. It is this kind of ‘anti-democratic’ language that will form the basis of much Wrstcentury bc incorporation ideology following the enfranchisement of Italy.83 Given the general cultural importance of ‘virtual kinship’, including adoption in Roman society, there is a powerful sense here of the tense debates about political legitimacy within the Roman state, about the role of popular politics in particular, that seems to push for tighter, more exclusive deWnitions of the citizen body. It is less clear, however, that such language of connectedness with the land is yet developed with reference to Italy. Perhaps the most suggestive material concerns the Latins, in all probability the major focus of early citizenship proposals, and whose common kinship with the Romans is demonstrable at least as early as the Wrst Roman literature. The perception of the Picentes on the eve of the Social War that the Latin actor was indistinguishable from Romans, according to Diodorus’ anecdote, emphasizes the potential for association. Clearly, however, the idea that Latins were legitimate members of the Roman citizen-body was not universally upheld: Gaius Fannius’ implication that the Roman people would be crowded out of the games by the presence of Latins pushes in quite a diVerent direction.84 From the end of the Wrst century bc, as we have seen, there is intense interest in a number of quite diVerent models of the Roman ethnic character. On the one hand, we can see emphasis on the ethnically and socially accretive nature of Rome: we would be very hard put to Wnd even a remote match for the heavy emphasis on meeting, conXict, and mating between peoples that we have in Augustan mythologies of Rome any83 Vell. Pat. 2. 4. 4; cf. Demosthenes (n. 57, above) on the Athenians as ‘legitimate’ as opposed to ‘adopted’ children. 84 Diod. 37. 12; ORF 4 144; Julius Victor 6.

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where else in the history of the ancient Mediterranean. It is in these late Wrst-century histories that we Wrst see a full exploitation of the ‘ethnic charge’ of diVerent Italian peoples, including a wider selection than the Greeks, Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans more traditionally associated with Roman foundation stories. Mating, genealogy and, more speciWcally rape, form together one mode of thinking about the dynamics of cultural, social, and ethical clashes, and war, alliance, and rule form another. While new models of Roman hybridity can be naturalized through the ethno-geographical model of a variegated Italia, Italia can also, as we have seen, be Wgured as a monolith, sometimes separate from Rome, sometimes coextensive with her. The limitations of this imagined monolith are, however, themselves interesting. Vitruvius’ idea of the perfect placing of Italian bodies in the world, in terms of both bodily limbs and mental vigour, curbing the physical prowess of barbarians by wise counsel and southerners—all talk and no action—by strength of arm, reinterprets the kind of theory of bodies in physical environments that we can Wnd in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places.85 However, despite his historically signiWcant interest in the work as a whole in the idea of an ‘Italian’ architecture, the Italian bodies so perfectly placed to rule the world are those of the Italian gentes, in the plural: Vitruvius cannot ultimately sustain the idea of an Italian ‘race’. While there is clearly some Augustan Xirtation with the notion of an Italian gens, notably in Vergil’s Aeneid, Velleius Paterculus’ representation of the motivation of the Italian allies on the eve of the Social War is an exceptional thesis: they went to war with Rome in protest at being despised although ‘being of the same gens’.86 The Augustan age also sees considerable interest in the sometimes overlapping motifs of heredity, purity, continuity, and hierarchy that project the new age of restored political, social, and ethnic health. I would want to stress the concern about wholescale cosmic disorder, to be addressed by a variety of ‘cures’, religious and moral, political and legal (categories that 85 Vitr. 6. 1. 10–11. For the signiWcance of ‘Italian’ architecture in Vitruvius’ work, see Wallace-Hadrill 2000. 86 Mouritsen 1998 for arguments that this is not a view that is contemporary with the events that Velleius purports to describe.

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are by no means necessarily separable from the ‘religious’ and ‘moral’, if we think, for example, of the oYce of censor). While, as we have seen, ‘class’ continued to be an important undercurrent and frequently a source of heightened tension within the Athenian democracy, the prominence of concerns about social heredity and hierarchy within the Augustan age seems strikingly diVerent. For example we might think of the very diVerent kinds of anxieties that are raised by, respectively the Periclean citizenship law of 451/0 and the Julian law on adultery of (probably) 18 bc. It is hard to overestimate the signiWcance of Augustan legislation against adultery, which establishes a standing court for this crime, in common with poisoning, assault, and even treason.87 In the case of the Periclean citizenship law, we can note the more or less exclusive anxiety about ‘foreignness’ that underlies scrutiny of descent in later Wfth- and fourth-century Athens. In the case of adultery in Augustan Rome, this crime is a sign of cosmic disorder redressed by the good princeps. The language used is of something approaching ‘sin’ that has much in common with the archaic Mediterranean language of bad rule, of tyranny.88 While the theme of children looking like their fathers is repeated, the detail of the legislation is concerned in part with social order, prescribing severer penalties for a lower-class male caught in the act.89 Satire, Wction, and rhetorical set-pieces considerably Xesh out imagined possibilities and socio-speciWc horrors. One brilliant example is Martial’s satirical treatment of the case of Cinna’s wife, whose liaisons with household slaves, including a ‘Maurus’ (a ‘Moor’), her husband’s catamite, and even the pet ‘moron’, are shown up by the various and monstrous oVspring produced: the obvious visibility of these oVspring makes a nice counterpoint with the covert action of the adulterers, Wnally exposed.90 It is, however, the extreme physical diVerence of the oVspring on which the joke, or horror, turns, rather than any blanket introduction of ‘foreignness’ into Roman stock. In fact, satirical treatments are not infrequently concerned about 87

e.g. Raditsa 1980; G.K. Galinsky 1981; D. Cohen 1991. Wallace-Hadrill 1982b. 89 See esp. Hor. Carm. 4. 5. 21–4 for the return of the all-seeing princeps who has restored cosmic order. 90 Mart. 6. 39. 88

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boundaries jumped in these unions, but these are ‘social’ boundaries at least as much as they are ‘ethnic’ ones: it has become obvious that this is the child of the groom, or the valet, of a slave or freedman.91 I would, however, be wary of minimizing this horror of the products of adulterous unions as being ‘only’ about crossing social boundaries. It is dangerous to assume that social boundaries are perceived to be less important than ethnic ones, and indeed that these are perceived to be two wholly separable categories. We might think, for example, of Livy’s characterization at the beginning of his fourth book of debates surrounding the lex Canuleia concerning intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, in terms of the legitimacy of blood ‘purity’ as a marker of belonging. Despite, or perhaps rather precisely because of the possibilities of social mobility, the rhetoric of social boundaries can be very strong. In fact, the rhetoric of crossing social boundaries regularly uses the language of ‘foreignness’ to suggest, primarily, ‘class’, above all in the competitive environment of elite self-positioning: thus, as we have seen, Cicero’s ‘foreign’ origo was the source of much invective.92 Suetonius’ interpretation of Augustan legislation that sought to tighten up the conditions for freeing certain categories of slave, and that concerned itself both with the status of the slave-owner and his/her estate as well as with that of the slave him/herself should certainly give us pause for thought. In the course of discussing Augustus’ concern for the Roman people and the Roman citizen-body, what Suetonius writes is this: ‘Thinking it of great importance to keep the Roman people pure and unsullied by any mixing in of foreign and servile blood, he both very infrequently granted the Roman citizenship and set a limit to manumission.’93 In Chapter 2, I discussed the importance in the Augustan age of the idea of care and restriction with regard to grants of the citizenship, as part of a much broader ideology of the reordering of society after the cosmic and social chaos of the end of the Republic. In this chapter, however, my concern is with the language of blood and descent: 91 92

L.A. Thompson1989: 26 V. for critique of Wiesen 1970. 93 Ch. 2, n. 76, above. Suet. Aug. 40. 3.

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this is a rare example of the perception of Roman identity in terms of ‘pure’ blood. Lloyd Thompson was quite right to point out that the (emphatically modern) idea of ‘Augustus as racialist’ does not Wt well with the actual clauses of the law, which of course do allow for abundant manumission of slaves, and which seem to have concerns diVerent from those of ‘miscegenation’, or the perceived danger of polluting ‘pure’ Roman blood. For example, proportional limits are set for slaves freed by their owner’s will, which might in this case suggest that one aspect of the perceived problem is elite self-advertisement getting out of hand. In addition, certain kinds of criminal slaves, and slaves freed under conditions now outlawed may not become citizens, but they will become Junian Latins. They may, however, ‘graduate’ to the citizenship if they pass certain conditions, which include age, the production of children, and service to the state.94 Nor is the (modern) idea of ‘Augustus as racialist’ compatible with Suetonius’ own anecdote of the princeps requesting to see and interview the Greek candidate for the citizenship sponsored by Tiberius, in order to be sure of his worth.95 Nevertheless, the obvious fact that Augustus could not be a ‘racialist’ in a world in which expectations were not framed by the idea of ‘race’ in the sense of pseudo-biological permanent categories of ranked superiority still leaves hanging the perception—whether only that of Suetonius or that of Augustan contemporaries as well—that Augustan legislation was ‘about’ preventing the ‘mixing in of servile and foreign blood’. No matter how contradictory and awkward it might be for us, it is hard to deny that blood and an uncomplicatedly linear idea of descent were one available way of thinking about being Roman. It is, indeed, certainly possible that the imagery of blood could have been perceived in antiquity to be problematic given the future potential for crossing boundaries into the citizen-body. The inherent contradiction between the two equally important cultural ‘truths’ of parading noble genealogies and social mobility was clearly apparent to Juvenal, who could ‘expose’ the ultimate roots of such a quest, the disreputable origins of Rome.96 Two considerations are, however, important here. 94 96

Cf. Ch. 2, § 4, above. Juv. Sat. 8. 272–5.

95

Suet. Aug. 40; L.A. Thompson 1981.

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The Wrst is that the permanence of blood descent can certainly be suggested in Graeco-Roman antiquity by reference to (and sometimes very strong assertion of) myths of origins, but this permanence is clearly never scrutinized in the manner that it has been according to a system of thought that relied heavily on the emerging science of genetics. The second is that ‘cultural truths’ in any society are regularly falsiWable by lived experience or indeed by contradictory ‘cultural truths’. Literary critics have long been coming to terms with this problem that seems to be at the heart of Augustan literature, and analogies are not hard to Wnd: the dual pull of the roaming, western cowboy on the one hand and the fulWlment of modernist urban society on the other is central to the self-fashioning of the United States.97 If we are indeed to locate an advertised concern to maintain the ‘Roman people pure and unsullied by any mixing in of foreign and servile blood’ in the Augustan age, then we should probably think of this extreme rhetoric within the context of a more general concern about tightening up and deWning identities, hierarchies, and the Roman people itself. There is a sense of grasping at deWnitions here, that we see also in the Augustan rhetoric of ‘foreignness’, a singularly problematic way to think about the boundaries of belonging in Rome, but one that is nevertheless used emphatically during this period.98 While the language of blood ‘purity’ is clearly part of Latin discourse in the early imperial period, it is the Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus who, as we began to see at the beginning of this section, places most emphasis on the impeccably Greek genos, ‘descent’, of the Romans at their very beginnings. In his exposition of the remarkable aspect of Roman ‘memory’ of this primordial ethnic nature, displayed through 97

Martindale 1993 for this acute comparison. On the other hand, Roman treatments of ‘other peoples’ who practice endogamy or have ‘pure blood’—the African Psylli, whose power to send snakes to sleep can be used to test the legitimacy of children born to them, since ‘snakes do not Xee from those born from an adulterous union’ (Pliny NH 7. 14; NB: the cultural signiWcance of adultery), Tacitus’ lustful Jews who nevertheless shun sleeping with foreign women (Hist. 5. 5), and his Germans (Germ. 4. 1)—suggest that these are extreme cases in comparison with Roman norms, although the ‘pure blooded’ Germans may in turn reXect back on a heterogeneous mixed race mess. 98

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ritual, culture, and language, he spells out his perception of Rome’s later history of incorporation, involving ‘the admixtures of barbarians’. The ‘wonder’ of not forgetting is compounded by the quantity of peoples, some of whom are named in a discordant list that begins with the ‘Opikoi’, the arch barbarians of Italy, and ends with the ‘Celts’, for so long in Greek thought the barely distinguished antithesis of civilization itself, while emphasis on the idea that this list is far from exhaustive is compounded by the addition of ‘countless myriads besides, both from Italy itself and from other places’. Dionysius’ evocation of the threat to Rome by the diVerent languages and habits of her multi-ethnic inhabitants, a tangled, dissonant mess, is expressed in extremely pejorative language.99 While we cannot think of Dionysius in isolation from contemporary Latin debates about ‘pure’ blood, it is equally clear that his literary stance is self-consciously ‘Greek’, not least in the evocation of Thucydides, and that the Roman Antiquities is ostensibly directed towards the ‘correction’ of Greek views on Rome. Dionysius’ treatment of the issue of Roman ‘race’ dramatizes the interplay between ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ perspectives.100 Ultimately, however, Dionysius’ preoccupation with the pure Greek blood of Rome (and, to a lesser extent, with the ‘barbarian’ character of various central Italian peoples) looks downright odd within the context of Augustan Rome.101 However, the idea of ‘pure blood’ as a marker of Greekness more generally recurs in Greek literature of the Roman imperial period. For example, Polemon, the Hadrianic physiognomic writer, whose work survives in Latin and Arabic translations, distinguishes ‘pure’ Greeks as those ‘with whom no other genus mixed’. These are people ‘who stayed in their own land’, although peregrini, ‘foreigners’ (presumably barbaroi in the original) came subsequently, attracted by the moderate natural 99

D.H. 1. 89. 3. Cf. K. Clarke 1999a: 342–3 for sophisticated comments and questions about how far Strabo is a ‘Roman’ author. For the Greekness of Dionysius, cf. also Introduction, above. 101 Italian peoples were, of course, regularly perceived as barbarians in the later Republic, but even and especially the Samnites were considerably rehabilitated at the end of the Republic and during the Augustan period (Dench 1995: ch. 2). 100

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environment or by their way of life, letters and mores. This package of blood ‘purity’ and the reception of ‘foreigners’ is close to Dionysius’ conceptualization of Rome, which in turn draws on certain Wfth-century ideas about Athens.102 It might be noted that Aelius Aristides’ Athens in his panegyric is emphatically the ‘purest of the Greeks’ in genos, ‘descent’ as well as in language. It is precisely this ‘purity’ that legitimizes the Athenians’ naturalization of others: the author falls over himself to make a positive connection out of potentially contradictory traditions.103 More generally, Greek writers of the Roman imperial period can be very emphatic about the polarities of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’. Strabo, for example, is distinctly impatient with Ephorus’ category of migades, ‘mixed’ peoples: surely either the ‘Greek’ or the ‘barbarian’ component must predominate. Notoriously, Plutarch judged Herodotus a philobarbaros, a ‘barbarian lover’, as if the ‘relativism’ of Herodotean ethnography resembled a kind of treachery from a secondcentury ad perspective.104 We are not, then, witnessing a ‘mere’ continuity of Wfth-century Athenian ideas about identities of selves and others, but a particular selection of ideas that in turn suggests their resonance amongst early imperial Greek writers. Such insistence on mutually exclusive identities does not, of course, constitute the whole story of ethnic positioning and selfpositioning in early imperial Greek writing. The category of ‘Roman’ itself raised considerable problems in an essentially bipolar conceptual universe, both overlapping frequently with ‘Greek’ and belonging to non-Greeks. At the end of the Republic, and more emphatically by the end of the Wrst century of the imperial period, the conceptualization of ‘civilization’ becomes more proactive and directed, linked with the notion of a Roman ‘mission’, but it concerns Wrst and foremost peoples of the north and west, non-Greeks above all. The explicit ‘ethnic’ equation of ‘humanitas’ (the peculiarly Roman and implicitly universalizing concept of ‘civilization’) with ‘Roman’ or ‘Latin’ language above all is comparatively late: prime examples include Pliny the Elder’s conceptualization of the Latin language and Taci102 103

D.H. 35. 37n–37v; cf. Thuc. 1. 2. 5–6. 104 Ael. Aristides 13–14; 27; 29; 62. De Malign. Herod. 12–15.

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tus’ ambivalent account of the deliberate ‘civilization’ of the ancient Britons.105 And the ‘universalism’ of the Roman empire is clearly an important feature of Strabo’s geographical account and a key element that contributes to the complexity of authorial self-positioning, implicitly raising questions about identity in the Roman world.106 But it is really in later imperial Greek literature that Roman universalism becomes explicitly a mode of exploring and rethinking Greek identity. Aelius Aristides made something of a sophistic virtue out of the coexistence of ‘Roman’ with civilized humanity, so much more inclusive than the categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’, but it should also be remembered that he too coined the idea of a single, Roman genos, coextensive with the citizenship. Emphasis on the ‘purity’ of Athenian descent in his panegyric of Athens makes it most unlikely that this is a mere Wgure of speech.107 The roots of Aelius Aristides’ ideas about the inclusiveness of Rome are to be found in part precisely in the kind of explicit use of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ as ethical rather than ethnic categories that we Wnd chronologically nearest to hand in Plutarch.108 While Athens’ role as educator of the world, and indeed the basis of Greekness in paideia and dianoia rather than in genos and physis was certainly entertained in some classical contexts, it is, somewhat ironically, only in the Roman imperial period that such ideas are self-consciously acted out, most notably by Favorinus and Lucian. Such Xirtation with numerous cultural perspectives as well as motifs of changing identity, shape-shifting and hybridity, in these contexts precisely playing with the idea of becoming Greek, is an experience centred in the kinds of universalism that reXect the Roman empire.109 It is possible that insistence on hard and fast categories, not least on the hierarchy of blood ‘purity’, is also closely connected to this sense of ‘universalism’. If ‘becoming’ Greek, or ‘playing’ Greek is an increasingly recognized cultural possibility, and a game in which the stakes are high, then a (literally) innate superiority claimed by birth speaks to this competition. This is not, 105 106 107 108 109

Pliny NH 3. 5. 39 ; Tac. Agr-21. 2.; for humanitas, see Veyne 1993. K. Clarke 1997; cf. 1999a: ch. 6. To Rome 63; cf. n. 102, above for Athens. Whitmarsh 2001: 117–18. e.g. Favorinus Cor. 27, with Whitmarsh 2001: 120.

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then, a ‘relic’ of the classical past, but a dynamic mode of selfpositioning in the greatly changed world of the Roman empire. The reception of Alexander the Great in Greek writings of the Roman imperial period also seems to speak to issues of universality relevant to the second century ad, and suggests still other ways of thinking about blood and Greekness in the Roman imperial period. While Greek geographers of the Hellenistic and Augustan periods mapped the emphatically Roman universality of the world within the frameworks of Greek literary traditions, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus fashioned himself into the Thucydides of a Rome that improved upon Athens, it is tempting to see Plutarch and Arrian plotting onto the Wgure of Alexander the civilizing ‘mission’ that became associated with Rome in the imperial period, along with suggestive interpretations of cultural exchange and indeed marriage between Persians and Macedonians. Plutarch’s Alexander, for example, is not precisely a proto-Roman, but in the Life, he and his men slip between being described as ‘Macedonian’ and being described as ‘Greek’ in a manner that recalls to some extent the awkward ethnic status of Rome in Greek writings of the Roman imperial period, while Plutarch is also interested in the canonical (Greek) status of Alexander’s reading-list.110 Alexander’s deliberate education of Persian boys in the Greek language, and the considerably more pointed praise for his achievements in civilizing and Hellenizing barbarians in On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander might remind us above all of Pliny the Elder’s praise for Italy’s civilization and Latinization of barbarity, written a generation earlier.111 However, Plutarch’s version is of course as emphatically Greek as much as Pliny’s is emphatically Latin: here as elsewhere, Pliny is emphatically appropriating, claiming, translating ‘Greek’ tradition, in this case the very Greek notion of paideia.112 On the other hand, the notion of a deliberate ‘mission’ of civilization belongs, as we saw in Chapter 1, emphatically to early imperial Roman perceptions of empire. Both Pliny and Plutarch are writing between Greek and Roman cultural and historical traditions, with very diVerent 110 111 112

Plut. Alex. 84. 4, 8. Plut. De Alex. Fort. 328 a–329 f, cf. Pliny NH 3. 5. 39. Cf. Wallace-Hadrill 1990.

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‘resolutions’. In Plutarch’s Life, furthermore, deliberate cultural exchange works both ways: Alexander dresses up in a barbarian frock, a stole¯, perhaps, suggests Plutarch, in the belief that ‘uniting custom and blood sharing’ is the way to tame men.113 We might certainly think of the self-conscious receptivity of Rome and the connection between this and her ‘mission’ that is again clearly apparent in Pliny the Elder’s praise of Italy. ‘Blood-sharing’, spelt out in Alexander’s paradigmatic marriage to Roxane, interestingly underpins deliberate cultural exchange, and suggests a set of ideas very diVerent from early imperial Greek interest in the blood ‘purity’ of Greeks, something that is rather closer to Aelius Aristides’ conceptualization of the expanded Roman citizenship as a single genos.114 Aelius Aristides’ praise in his On Rome for the incorporation of the whole of humanity, and his praise in his On Athens for the purity of both language and blood of Athens dramatizes the availability of ‘active’, radically diVerent ways of thinking about ‘race’ within the Roman imperial period, and usefully associates each idea with its most appropriate context. 4. B ODILY M EANINGS: THE GOOD, THE B AD, AND THE UGLY In this section, I move on from ideas of blood and descent to the meaning and signiWcance of the body and physical features in Graeco-Roman thought. This will involve us in part in a consideration of the ‘boundaries’ of the body, given the importance of theories of interplay between bodies and the geographical environment, and indeed the whole cosmos, as well as the potential connectedness of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, of clothing and gender or ethnicity, of behaviour and physiques. Some of the most prominent and recurrent Roman expressions of inter113

Plut. Alex. 45. 1 cf. De Alex Fort. 330 a; Arrian, Campaigns of Alexander 7. 29. 4; compare and contrast e.g. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia for conceptualization of the relative uses of ‘Median’ and ‘Persian’ culture. 114 Plut. Alex. 47. 3–4. It was with reference to such passages that modern theories of cultural and racial fusion of East and West were of course formulated. Traditions of Alexander’s interest in world unity, attributed to Eratosthenes, were much overstated by Tarn 1939: see the brisk riposte of Badian 1958.

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est in bodily meanings include the competitive self-positioning of members of the Roman elite, ‘realistic’ late Republican portraits, the intense ethical interest of imperial biography, the display of variegated ethnic ‘types’ in literature, sculpture and triumphs, ‘name-calling’ on the basis of physiognomy that is featured in many cognomina, in some slaves’ names, and in invective, and the portrayal, display, and collection of ‘extreme’ Wgures, namely ‘freaks’ and ‘Aethiopes’. Within the Graeco-Roman world, the interpretation of the body and theories that emphasize interaction between body, environment, ethics, and culture, are very ancient. The use of the body as a site for reading, revealing, and concealing character, and for assigning and asserting status, is certainly as old as the beginnings of Greek literature. We may trace to at least the later Wfth century the kinds of theoretical interest that systematize and make explicit the ‘rules’ and logic of interpretation. Undoubtedly, such accounts are the most alluring for modern scholars, but they certainly do not constitute the only examples that imply the attribution of meaning to bodies. Outside of theoretical texts, we have to work harder to understand the logic and signiWcance, while we also encounter the dangers of clinging to what is most clearly spelt out but not necessarily ‘representative’. The traditional Greek vocabulary of status, as is well known, elides social standing, wealth, ethical worth, and physical appearance. Thus, the adjective kalos denotes ‘Wne’, ‘good’, and, not least, ‘beautiful’: individual members of the Athenian jeunesse dore´e advertised themselves on pots into the middle of the Wfth century bc, their names and portraits accompanied by the caption kalos.115 As we have seen, the elided formula kaloikagathoi, the ‘beautiful and good’, clearly denotes a ‘class’ of person in classical Athenian thought. The opposite extreme, represented in the Iliad by the Wgure of Thersites who carps against authority, is ‘naturally’ hideous in his deformity and base in character.116 Physical appearance and attributes are, of 115 For developments in the mid-5th cent., and the argument that the inclusion of the patronymic is associated with the Periclean citizenship law of 451/0, see Shapiro 1987. 116 Il. 2. 216–29 for a description of the lame, bandy-legged, hunchbacked, balding and pointy-headed Thersites.

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course, also an important source of invective amongst archaic aristocratic individuals and can serve to demarcate the tyrant: Alcaeus’ Pittakos of Mytilene is ‘Pot-Belly’, ‘Big-Belly’, presumably revealing on his person the greed of the archetypal tyrant, the descendant of Hesiod’s ‘gift-devouring kings’.117 While, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, motifs of being deceived by appearances are important in the Odyssey and throughout the history of classical literature, the intriguing possibilities of deception in part serve to emphasize the expectation that physical appearance ‘ought’ to be a reliable gauge of status and identity. For Aristotle, indeed, slaves ought to have ‘worse’ bodies than free men, but nature’s intentions are frequently thwarted by the fact that, in practice, free men frequently have ‘worse’ bodies than slaves.118 The motif of the power of clothing both to reveal and to conceal ‘real’ identities frequently recurs: as we have seen, the lack of distinction in the clothing of slaves clearly disappoints the ‘Old Oligarch’, while the equation of long cloaks and long hair with ‘tyranny’ is satirized in Aristophanic comedy. From their beginnings, ethnographical typologies in Greek literature tend to characterize diVerence in terms of the ‘care of the body’, with particular interest in dress and hairstyles: even the Iliad takes an interest in the beltlessness of Lycians, and the Thracians’ top-knots.119 However, we should be wary of talking about diVerence being ‘only’ marked in clothing or hairstyles. For one thing, physiognomic diVerence is sometimes represented as well as diVerentiated clothing: this is the case, for example, in the representation of Persians on red-Wgure vases.120 More profoundly, both clothes and ‘culture’ are regularly considered in close association with questions of identity that turn on issues of blood and descent: clothes may be a true or false ‘indication’ (to use the terminology of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on ‘culture’) of who a people or an individual ‘really’ is. 117 Alcaeus 129. 21 (Lobel–Page); Diog. Laert. i 81 (p. 35 Long) ¼ Sud. S 118; Hes. Op. 38–9. Cf. Ogden 1996. 118 Arist. Pol. 1254b 28–34. 119 Il. 16. 419; 4. 533, with E. Hall 1989: 41. 120 Bovon 1963: it is very interesting that Greek depiction of Persian faces apparently follows self-representation within Achaemenid art: the pronounced nose with a sharp bridge, small eyes, moustache and pointed beard.

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Late Wfth-century enquiry into human diVerence is particularly interested in the relationship between nature and culture, refers explicitly to historical experience, the Persian Wars, and formulates theories of historical causation that explain outcomes as well as having implications for the future. It is worth dwelling brieXy on two major examples, the Hippocratic text, Airs, Waters, Places and Herodotus’ Histories, not least to highlight the subtlety of each as well as its distinctiveness. Both texts engage in, and contribute to, a dynamic sophistic debate about the nature of human diVerence, and seem in diVerent ways and to diVerent extents to question the permanence of human diVerence, with profound implications for the commonplace division between ‘Greeks’ and ‘barbarians’. We should in particular note the distance between these treatments and those of Plato and Aristotle, who both tend to emphasize permanent diVerence ‘by nature’.121 Airs, Waters, Places, through its primarily medical focus, posits an intimate connection between the geographical environment, human physiques, and characters.122 This work simultaneously maps susceptibility to disease and the moral/ethical character of inhabitants with reference to the climate and environment in which they live. It raises questions about whether particular human types are born or made, or a combination of both. While environmental and human variegation is certainly a feature of the work, interest at certain points in the division of the world into ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’, with appropriate character traits ascribed to each, obviously locates the text in its reXections on the aftermath of the Persian Wars. Immigrants to Asia Minor ‘become’ Asiatic in physique and temperament through their exposure to the environment, although the author also demonstrates that it is not the environment in itself that necessarily engenders their unwarlike temperament, but the political institution of despotism.123 121

Rosalind Thomas 2000: 71, 93, 133. For theory of ‘humours’ in the missing parts of the Airs, see, concisely, Rosalind Thomas 2000: 47 V. 123 Hippoc. Aer. 12, 16. We may note that the author is interested in ‘becoming Asiatic’ rather than ‘becoming European’, contrast J. Hall 2002: ch. 6. 122

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Indeed, not only can ‘cultural’ practices change the body of an individual: they can also change that of future generations. For example, while the ‘Long Heads’ of the Makrokephaloi were once achieved by head-binding, ‘cultural practice’ (nomos) forcing its eVect on ‘nature’ (physis), as time went by, the condition occurred by ‘nature’ (physis).124 This glide between nomos and physis is enabled by the author’s theory of biological inheritance. Because seed comes from ‘all parts of the body’, longheadedness, even when achieved by cultural practice, will enter the seed, just as baldness or squinting will. In turn, the seed itself will be aVected by the environment within which the body is situated: in eVect, children can be born ‘European’ (or, by implication, ‘Asiatic’), less uniform in appearance and, presumably, conditioned in character by the eVects of constant change on the seed.125 Thus, Airs, Waters, Places understands the body in an intimate relationship with the environment, and simultaneously allows for transformation of body and character by changing environment and the establishment of body and character from conception. We should certainly note the distance between this example of ancient perceptions of the role of physis in creating human diVerence and the emphasis on permanence associated with modern theories of race. While Herodotus in his Histories shares some ideas with the Airs, Waters, Places, human diVerence is imagined to reside even more emphatically in nomoi, cultural systems, as opposed to physis, nature. As suggested by the story of Darius’ experiment, and the reported horror of Indians and Greeks alike at the idea of considering the customs of the others on disposing of parents, Herodotean nomoi can at the same time demonstrate the ‘relativism’ of diVerence and function as deep indicators of identity.126 These nomoi can be strikingly persistent. For example, the troops of Xerxes’ army, consisting of individual peoples under the Persians’ sway, are described as distinguished each from the other by clothing and arms, from the Ethiopians clad in leopard-skins to the Libyans dressed in leather. Herodotus’ catalogue preserves in microcosm the book’s concern in general with distinct ethnographies, here presented in elliptical 124

Ibid. 14.

125

Ibid. 23.

126

Hdt. 3. 38.

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form.127 On the other hand, nomoi are not intrinsically unchangeable: on the contrary, they may be adopted, as in the case of Persian pederasty, learned from the Greeks, changed deliberately by conquerors or assumed in the process of conquest and rule, or taken on as living memories of historical circumstance.128 The Wrst surviving formal physiognomic treatise, the thirdcentury bc Aristotelian Physiognomica, has clear links both with the general assumption that character can be read from the physical appearance of the body and, more speciWcally, with the Wfth-century systematization of ethnographical theory. Formal physiognomic theory oVers a whole series of animal, gender and ethnic ‘types’ to which an individual’s features and parts of the body may be assimilated, and from which his or her character may be read. Changes to the soul alter the appearance of the body, while in turn bodily changes alter the character of the soul. Such theory illustrates the potential complexity of location of ‘selves’ in relation to ‘others’. What we see here is not the use of animals, women and barbarians to deWne the male ‘insider’ by his distinction from such classes of being, but multiple graded typologies according to which he can be categorized. ‘Ethnic’ features include those associated with individual Greek peoples as well as with Egyptians, Thracians and Scythians. While on the one hand the labelling of features according to ‘ethnic’ type encourages a Wxity of physiognomic and moral stereotypes, on the other hand the emphasis of the manuals is obviously on the individual, who may be a composite of a whole variety of ethnic, animal, and gender types. Physiognomic theory also claims the detection of identity as a complicated matter that is the task of a specialist practitioner. While broadly physiognomic ways of thinking are in part very ancient, we really begin to see the impact of formal theory and the attestation of named practitioners during the Hellenistic period and 127 Ibid. 7. 60–87; cf. the Carians who dwell in Egypt who can be distinguished as ‘foreigners, not Egyptians’ by their custom of cutting their foreheads with knives at the festival of Isis. 128 For Persian pederasty, see Hdt. 1. 135; for conquerors and conquest, cf. Ch. 1, § 7, above; for history and memory, see e.g. 1. 146 for the Carian women’s custom of eating apart from their husbands and not addressing them by name, because long ago Athenian settlers killed their menfolk.

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particularly under the Roman empire. We might want to relate its impact during the Hellenistic period in part to a broader cultural phenomenon of the development of intellectual specialization, and perhaps also in part to a combination of a new consciousness of a kind of universalism on the one hand, and status and ethnic anxieties associated with an expanded and sometimes precarious Hellenism on the other. As we saw in Chapter 1, Roman ethnographical writing engages closely and self-consciously with classical and Hellenistic traditions, patterning the Roman imperial experience according to Greek theoretical frameworks, and giving emphasis to diVerent cultural preoccupations. For example, the interplay of nature and culture are in general less signiWcant as agents of human diVerence and change within Roman literature than the motif of moral and cultural transformation occasioned by encounters with ‘other peoples’ and experienced by Romans and imperial subjects alike. Physiognomic theory Wnds particular kinds of resonances and uses within the Roman experience of monarchy, as we shall see. Patterns of Roman thought about bodies are, of course, not exclusively responses or reactions to Greek theoretical traditions, but what we might at Wrst sight style ‘traditional’ Roman modes of thought are sometimes more complicated and almost always more self-conscious than they initially appear to be. For example, as we saw in Chapter 1, the Roman triumph, details of which were traced by Roman antiquarians to their supposedly Etruscan ‘roots’, in the historical period clearly engages with ‘Greek’ ‘scientiWc’ ethnographical thought. We began this chapter by considering the archaic and classical Greek language that elides beauty and status, an elision appropriated in the distinctive traditions of Hellenistic royal portraiture, youthful with well-kept long hair, aspiring to divinity and removed from their subjects.129 The best-known sculptural and coin portraits of late Republican dynasts are undoubtedly very diVerent in their deliberate portrayal of wrinkles and other signs of ageing, in the close-cropped hair, and even ugliness. Austere portraits of Pompey, Caesar, and Antony too have precedents in later second-century Roman portraits 129

See, above all, Smith 1988b; Stewart 1993.

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from Delos, and perhaps as early as portraits of Flamininus on early second-century Greek gold coinage. Such portraits might well be considered to represent an engagement with and a response to Hellenistic royal portraiture, but they do not inevitably and invariably exclude the possibility of comparison. For example, it seems hard not to see Pompey’s quiV as an allusion to that of Alexander, but the fact that it sits on top of an aged, jowled, and austere face accentuates the fact that this is an engagement in a very Roman language of portraiture. The very diYculty of deciding whether portraits of Flamininus suggest his assimilation to Hellenistic kings or to the distinctive brand of Roman ‘realism’ with which we are familiar from late Republican portraiture perhaps also suggests the complexity of Roman Xirtation with Hellenistic monarchy in the last two centuries of the Republic. Notoriously, this Xirtation is partially ‘resolved’ in the creation of a very speciWc Roman language of monarchy, and portraits of Augustus move towards the appropriation of classicism, creating a distinctive new (and signiWcantly more ‘beautiful’) typology.130 While Roman ‘realism’ seems in part to turn its back on Hellenistic royal ‘beauty’, and to some extent on the awkwardness of assimilation to the divine sphere, it is important also to emphasize the individualism of these ‘ugly’ portraits. We might well want to see a link here with a considerable number of Roman cognomina that advertise physical features, almost always in a derogatory fashion, such as Naso, Dentatus, and Strabo, ‘Nose’, ‘Toothy’, and ‘Squinty’, branding their descendants for all time. It is unfortunate that we know so little about the original circumstances within which cognomina took hold. We can thus really only guess what they say about the relationship between elite and people, and what they say about 130 Smith 1988b: chs. 14–15; Zanker 1988; on Romans and kingship in the Republic, the classic work remains Rawson 1975b; NB: here as elsewhere the extent to which the Augustan age by no means represents a whole-scale resolution of cultural tensions or styles (cf. Wallace-Hadrill 1989a, and, for portraiture speciWcally, Stevenson 1998): in the present context, we might think above all of the coexistence of diVerent genres of portraiture, and above all of the memorable ‘physiognomic ‘portrait’ of Augustus at Suet. Aug. 79–80, ‘unusually handsome’, undoubtedly, but with poor teeth, eyebrows that met in the middle, and a mottled, calloused and short body.

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relations amongst the elite themselves, but at least there is a clear sense of banter, of competition, of jostling for recognition. More generally, the Roman vocabulary of status does not normally elide beauty and social standing, although moral virtues are of course strongly associated with good rule, government, and military command.131 We shall consider below the one remarkable exception to this rule. It seems reasonable to suppose that older, culturally speciWc ways of thinking about power and status gained a self-conscious ethnic speciWcity when the Romans were directly competing with Hellenistic rulers in gaining hegemony over the Mediterranean. Clearly, however, whatever the nature of the traditional ‘roots’ of this particular, Roman kind of ‘realistic’ portraiture, it was not always and in all contexts the only appropriate way of representing status Roman-style. As we saw in Chapter 1, the inscribed funerary elogium for Scipio Barbatus, consul of 298 bc, praised his ‘forma virtutei parisuma’, his ‘beauty equivalent to his virtue’, a straight lift into Latin of the Greek formula kalos kagathos. This is a reception of aristocratic Greek ideals that is very suggestive in association with the placing of a statue of the most ‘lordly’ of Wfth-century Athenian politicians, Alcibiades (along with one of Pythagoras), in the Roman comitium at around this time.132 And while there are no surviving sculptural portraits of middle Republican Roman generals, what appears to be contemporary language of austerity, self-control, and wisdom is by no means claimed exclusively by the Romans at this time: while literary evidence links these values with Tarentine ideology of good government, Paestan tomb-painting shows a clear interest in the ordering of society.133 Such considerations perhaps enhance the impression of distinctive and self-conscious cultural choices in second- and Wrst-century Roman portraiture giving a particular kind of ethnic meaning 131

Smith 1988: 127–8; NB: however, Roman interest in ‘benchmarks’ of ‘ugliness’, e.g. the Aethiops as well as the notorious sanctioning in the Twelve Tables (4.1 ¼ Cic. Leg. 3. 19) of the right of the paterfamilias to dispose of the ‘deformed infant’. For name-calling in Roman society more generally, and its signiWcance in a highly status conscious society, see L.A. Thompson 1989. 132 ILLRP 309. 133 Rouveret and Pontrandolfo Greco 1985: 91–100, 103; Dench 1998: 135–7.

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to Roman ‘realism’ as the antithesis of Greek beauty and aloofness.134 We might compare here the formula Graecus ritus that enters Roman religious language at the end of the third century bc, an entirely Roman invention of ‘Greek religious ritual’, the major marker of which is that priests have their heads uncovered. In its attribution to an entire ethnos, ‘the Greeks’, the Graecus ritus stands out in contrast with the city-based ritus Albinus or cinctus Gabinus, other self-consciously ‘borrowed’ rituals. While the Romans had long been deeply familiar with Greek ideological language, the overarching conceptual frameworks of ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ seem to receive a particular emphasis just as Rome comes into direct conXict with the Hellenistic kingdoms.135 We have already noted the importance of motifs of variegation in Roman conceptualizations of both Roman Italy and the whole world. Variegation can thus be alternatively what Rome represents or what Rome rules: at times, the distinction between the two is suggestively unclear. Late Republican interest in images of Italian variegation is reXected in a physiognomic version in Catullus 39. In a poem that plays with ethnographical modes of thought in the deadpan assertion that Celtiberians brush their teeth each morning with their own urine, Egnatius’ never-failing smile is studiedly not ‘urbane’, even if he were ‘of the urbs, or Sabine, or Tiburtine, or a fat/thin Umbrian or an obese Etruscan or a black and toothy Lanuvine, or a Transpadane to touch on my own people too’. This suggestive catalogue of Italian ‘types’ has occasional correspondence with attestation elsewhere in Roman literature, and gives a sense of the possibilities of invective that frequently centres on physical appearance.136 The ethnic parades that are a particular feature of the Augustan age but that featured also on the Theatre of Pompey and on Antonine coins are rather diVerent: these are female personiWcations and have their own typology, but their dress 134 Cf. the statement attributed by Plutarch to Cato in 6. 2 that the ethos of men is conveyed much more by their speech than by their prospon, itself an interesting comment on Plutarch’s biographical stance. 135 Scheid 1996; contrast the reluctance in recent scholarship to contemplate ‘Greek religion’ as a single entity: see, above all, the plural title of Simon Price’s 1999 Religions of the Ancient Greeks. 136 For MS variation in the depiction of the Umbrian, see Ch. 5, § 5, below.

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suggests grading according to the degree of barbarism or civilization associated with each.137 A third example of interest in the variegation of ethnic ‘types’ is very relevant to modern preoccupations with race. In the Wnal section of this chapter, we shall consider the Wgure of the Aethiops as representing extreme diVerence: in some examples, this blackest ‘type’ is in fact paired with his polar ‘opposite’, the freakishly pale northern barbarian, each ‘type’ as hideous and disgusting as the other.138 Certainly, the Aethiops in Graeco-Roman thought is proverbially black, a wonder of blackness, a freak who pops up unexpectedly, whose very birth may be out of the blue, who looks like a ghost, a Wgure from another world. However, Roman ways of thinking, in satire as well as ‘scientiWc’ ethnography, are drawn to ‘ethnic’ variegation, the assignment of pseudo-ethnic labels on the basis of appearance, to the minor distinctions in (‘black’, ‘dusky’, ‘dark’) skin-colour and details of physiognomy that distinguish ‘Egyptians’, ‘Moors’, and ‘Garamantians’, of whom ‘Egyptians’ are most closely associated with ‘Ethiopians’ in their tendency to inhabit otherworldly locations, and to pop up unexpectedly.139 While Italian variegation is positively celebrated in the Augustan age, so too, as we have seen, are much more unitary projections of Roman identity, not least blood, Latin, and togas. We have already suggested the ancient perception of clothing as potentially or ideally a deep reXection of ethnic identity, and diVerentiated ‘Asiatic’ clothing and armour, notably patterned trousers and bows and arrows, becomes part of the stock typology of Greeks against barbarians. Wearing trousers is in itself an ‘alien’ thing to do, as can be illustrated by a fascinating passage in Airs, Waters, Places that relates the Scythian tendency towards impotence partly to the fact that men ‘do not handle their genitals’ when wearing trousers.140 However, a positive and unitary deWnition of what constitutes ‘Greek’ clothing interestingly belongs to the Roman period: if anything, heroic nudity is perhaps the most obvious and selfconscious marker of generic ‘Greekness’ in the classical 137 139 140

138 Smith 1988b. Juv. 13. 162–6; Sen. On Anger 3. 26. 3. L.A. Thompson 1989: 62–85; for ‘Egyptians’, see e.g. Winkler 1980. Hippoc. Aer 22. 60.

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period.141 The pallium, a Latin rather than a Greek term, marks out speciWcally ‘Greek’ dress in Plautus: the clearest indication of this is a passage from Curculio in which a character refers to ‘Those palliate Greeks with their heads covered’, philosopher types pretending to be lost in their own, higher thoughts, but in fact up to no good.142 The ‘formula’ that typiWes Greek dress in Latin texts from Plautus onwards surely has its basis too in the binary Roman perspective on the world that seems to be emphatic in the later third and early second centuries, and may indeed have some relationship to perceptions of Graecus ritus. The fact that the earliest contemporary attestation of the Greeks as palliati comes from early Roman drama, with its overt interest in ‘translation’, in the Greek gaze and ‘barbarian’ Rome, as well as more generally in the theatrical context of dressing up and assuming diVerent identities, is itself very interesting. The earliest contemporary explicit reference to the Romans, and probably their allies, as ‘togate’ in the sense of an ‘ethnic’ marker belongs to the tag ex formula togatorum (‘according to the list of the togate’) attested in the lex agraria of 111 bc.143 The question of whom the tag denotes is, however, somewhat ambiguous: is the list ‘of the togate’ in the sense that it is imposed by the togate [Romans], or (as it is usually understood) in the sense that it is shared by the togate Romans and allies alike?144 Certainly, however, the propagandistic late Republican formula Gallia togata for Transpadane or Cisalpine Gaul implies its 141 e.g. Bonfante 1990 for a general overview; Stevenson 1998 usefully complicates Roman reception of nude self-portrayal; most recently B. Cohen 2001. 142 Plaut. Curc. 288 (with repetition of their covered heads at line 293); while the muZed heads of these palliate Greeks clearly complete the picture of shifty, philosopher types, I do wonder whether we can see here a play on the characteristic uncovered heads of priests in the Graecus ritus: aperto capite and its opposite given here, capite operto, are suggestively close in Latin; the formula fabula palliata (as opposed to ‘togata’) to denote the Latin ‘translations’ from New Comedy, was attributed in antiquity to Varro Gram. Fr. 306 (Funaioli) ¼ Diom. P. 489. 14. For Scipio Africanus ‘going Greek’ in Sicily in pallium and crepidae, see Livy 29. 19. 12. The word pallium has sometimes been claimed to be of Greek origin (see Wilson 1938: 79 n. 6), but such arguments seem far-fetched. 143 Crawford 1996: 2, 21 ¼ FIRA 8 ¼ Bruns 1909: 11. 144 See, however, Lo Cascio 1991–4 for the argument that togati denote the civilian population of Italy, the opposition being to armati.

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assimilation to a togate Italy, although the primary emphasis is perhaps on drawing a contrast with Gallia Bracata or Comata, ‘Trousered’ or ‘Long-Haired’ Gaul.145 The use of togas as an emphatic symbol of speciWcally Roman identity belongs, however, to the Augustan age. We might well think of the symbolic importance of clothing in Vergil’s Aeneid. Characterization of the Romans as the gens togata is set in a prominent position within Jupiter’s prophecy in Book 1 of what is to emerge eventually from periods of crisis—the abandonment of Dido that preWgures the Punic Wars and war in Latium that preWgures Rome’s Italian wars, the Social War and Civil War. The composite and oppositional nature of what was to become the Roman gens is dramatized in part through commentary on clothing within the course of the poem: various characters’ perceptions of Aeneas’ clothes are given at key moments.146 In Book 4, Mercury spies Aeneas sporting an ornate scabbard, a gift from Dido, and a laena, a cloak that had religious signiWcance, worn hanging from his shoulders and dyed with Tyrian purple, marking his distance from his mission to lay the foundations of the Roman people in Italy, as he inspects instead the building of Dido’s city, Carthage, whose people will in the future be the arch-enemies of Rome.147 In Book 7, Aeneas’ men are viewed from Latinus’ palace, distinctive in their ‘foreign’ dress: this is, initially, a happy accident for the Latins, whose princess, Lavinia, must marry a ‘foreign’ man, but ‘foreignness’ is ultimately a complex and unsettling theme woven through the latter books of the Aeneid, a charge levelled at Aeneas’ Trojans, but a quality that is also at the heart of the 145

J. Williams 2001a: 124; Gallia Bracata, and its inhabitants, the bracati, is Wrst attested in Cicero: Font. 33; Fam. 9. 15. 2; Pis. 53; cf. also Sallust’s depiction of Italians as togate at B Iug. 21. 2; 26. 1; for the potent symbolism of Gauls and Greeks as archetypal enemies in the late 3rd and 2nd cents., see Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 80–2, with bibliography, for discussion of the burial alive of two Gauls and two Greeks in the Forum Boarium in 228, 216, and 113 bc. 146 Bender 1994 for a basic account; Heuze´ 1985 is a comprehensive study of bodies in the Aeneid, but has nothing on clothes; Bowie 1998 is interesting on Dido, but has nothing on Aeneas, whose clothes do not appear to him to be signiWcant in the way that Dido’s are. 147 Verg. Aen. 4. 260–6; Bender 1994: 150.

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ancestors of Rome, and even her very topography.148 In Book 9, Numanus Remulus in his ‘vaunting’ speech presents a hostile view of the ‘Asiatic’ decadence of the Trojans’ eVeminate attire, all ribbons, bonnets and frilly frocks, in keeping with their eunuch priests of Magna Mater, and in contrast with the manly nature of the Italians.149 Where authorial depictions of Aeneas’ clothes are given, however, Aeneas is amictus: to avoid anachronism within the scope of the poem, he cannot be togate, but his draped garment does a reasonable impersonation of Roman dress.150 Nevertheless, perceptions of Aeneas’ clothes within the Aeneid contribute to questions about ‘foreignness’ in Roman identity. In the ‘resolution’ at the end of the same work, in the course of her ‘reconciliation’ with Jupiter, Juno expresses her compromise solution for the union of Trojans and Latins destined by fate. Very signiWcantly, she expresses her wish that the Trojans are to be represented in the newly created Roman people ‘only’ gente, ‘in blood’ or ‘in family descent’. It is Latin and togas, the visible (and in fact transferable) signiWers of Roman identity that are to be the ‘memory’ of the Romans’ parentage. Unlike Tenney Frank or A. M. DuV, Juno was worried not by the ‘bastard blood’ or ‘oriental descent’ of her Romans, but by their clothing. Suetonius gives a hint of the resonance of the Aeneid when he refers to Augustus’ ironic quotation from Jupiter’s prophecy to Venus in the Wrst book— the Romans as gens togata—at a public meeting, on seeing a crowd of pullati, people dressed in the drab, dirty clothing of the ‘common’ people and his instructions to the aediles not to allow anyone in the vicinity of the forum unless dressed correctly in the ‘ancestral’ toga, and without a cloak.151 As well as underlining the importance of the reception of the Aeneid as an authoritative work on the roots of Roman identity and ancestral tradition, the anecdote highlights the extreme artiWciality of the toga, which was certainly far from the ‘everyday’ dress of Roman men, a high maintenance, hard to wear and deeply coded garment that was capable of revealing all

148 150 151

149 See esp., Zetzel 1997. Horsfall 1971. Bender 1994: 149. Suet. Aug. 40. 5; for distinction from pullati, cf. Aug. 44. 2.

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sorts of truths about the wearer, including his moral and sexual character.152 If wearing a toga at all was a mark of ‘class’ aspirations, not all togas were equal: together with footwear, rings, and other attire, togas in combination with tunics delineated status; and Augustus encouraged sons of senators to wear the laticlave (a broad, purple stripe), the sign of senatorial oYce, marked on the toga as a ‘memory’ of descent and heredity.153 Any notion that the toga was by the Augustan period even in idealized, ceremonial contexts, any kind of homogeneous elite ‘uniform’ throughout Italy is complicated by, for example, the existence of the so-called ‘Arringatore’ statue, whose dress is a hybrid of Roman knight and Perugian magistrate.154 But the very fact that togas were not ‘normal’ dress only underlines the signiWcance of making them into an idealized, highly ‘class’ conscious, ‘ethnic’ marker. If in the Augustan age togas were promoted as suitably Roman wear for the quintessentially Roman political space of the forum, under Claudius, non-citizens were apparently forbidden to wear the toga, emphasizing the exclusive nature of the garment and suggesting signiWcant changes in the nature of the Roman citizenship, while reinforcing the expectation that dress should properly reXect identity. One was, ideally, what one wore.155 In two interesting early imperial passages, the symbolism of Roman citizens laying aside the toga, signifying casting aside or indeed ‘forgetting’ their Roman identity, is evoked. Horace imagines Marsus and Apulus—each quintessentially Roman in their evocation of old Italian morality—‘forgetting shields, name and toga’ on the Parthian defeat of Crassus, ‘under a Median king’. In a passage of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, the sophist Athenion, returning to Athens in pomp in a reversal of fortune, celebrates the victory of Mithridates and the fate of Roman citizens in the East: ‘some prostrate themselves before the images of gods, others having changed their dress to the square himation [what in Latin was called the pallium], once again name themselves by the fatherlands to which they origin-

152 154 155

153 Vout 1996; cf. Juv. 3. 171–9. Nicolet 1984: 93. Crawford 1996: 418, with bibliography. Suet. Claud. 15, 2; Pliny Ep. 4. 11. 3.

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ally belonged.’156 Elsewhere, however, the idea of others ‘becoming Roman’, putting on the toga, was entertained. In Jupiter’s prophecy in the Aeneid, the togate people were identiWed as the ‘masters of the world’, and the implications of not just civilized but also civilizing superiority are played out from the late Julio-Claudian period in the fascinating Roman fantasy of transforming barbarians into toga-clad Romans.157 While the possibility of dressing northern barbarians (Britons in the most extreme case) in togas was clearly peculiarly shocking and/or intriguing given their notorious lack of civilization, it is, as I have suggested, the Roman imperial encounter with mainland Greece that fundamentally creates the opposition of pallium as the quintessentially ‘Greek’ garment, and the Roman toga.158 5. FRE AK-S HOW We have already begun to touch on the signiWcance of aesthetics in the creation of idealizing self-images, ranging from the kaloi kagathoi to stern later Republican Roman ‘realistic’ portraiture, to expressions of disgust for the extreme hideousness of whitefaced northern barbarians and black-faced Aethiopes. It is in the ancient language of aesthetics that we can perceive the distance from our own taxonomies of, for example, ‘race’ and ‘disability’. Perhaps the sharpest indicator of this distance is the tendency to elide physical ‘deformity’ and the appearance of very diVerent ethnological types, such as Aethiopes. The Latin root of our word ‘deformity’ highlights the aesthetic nature of judgement: both Aethiops and hunchback (or dwarf, pinhead, or moron) are classed together as malformed, ugly.159 156 Athenaeus 5. 213; Hor. Carm. 3. 5. 10; cf. also the moralist’s gaze at changed fashions at Rome at Juv. 3. 67–8. 157 e.g. Tac. Agr. 21; Sen. Apocol. 3. 158 In an ironic reversal, Tertullian was to advocate the wearing of the pallium, with its philosophical associations, by Christians in his De Pallio. He praises its practical simplicity, as opposed to the cumbersome, complicated and high-maintenance toga (5). 159 NB: the very diVerent nature of elision in modern western societies based on the notion of ‘minorities’, engendered especially by employment law governing discrimination on the grounds of, gender, race, sexuality or disability. An example of such elision in popular usage is a poster often

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Just as we have problematized the application of modern notions of ‘race’ in the course of this chapter, so too the modern western concept of ‘disability’, with its basis in concepts of state welfare, legal entitlement, discrimination, and self-ascription, is fundamentally at odds with ancient taxonomies. In Roman law, for example, there are occasional strictures based purely on bodies, and these in themselves give interesting insights into Roman mentalities, not least in view of the importance of law in education and self-deWnition. Roman law was preoccupied both with mental capacity (thought to be limited in women and wholly absent in lunatics) and the ability to participate in verbal contracts. Lunacy, deafness, and muteness can make a person incapable in Roman law; blindness and lessened physical mobility do not.160 On the other hand, the sacred sphere is, as we shall see, concerned with particular kinds of ‘strange’ bodies, such as hermaphrodites, ‘Siamese’ twins, and human and animal mixtures, while also regulating the bodies of priests and sacriWcial animals. Animals and priests must be free from certain kinds of markings, the priest’s body must be preserved from certain kinds of contact, such as with dead bodies, and the bodies of priests and priestesses may be further marked out by regulations concerning sexual relations as well as by the clothing that signals their distance from the human sphere.161 ‘Deformity’ was regularly the subject of humour, invective and name-calling in Roman society: notoriously, the emperor Claudius in Seneca’s satirical Apocolocyntosis was portrayed as a head-wagging, foot-dragging, unintelligibly mumbling monstrous moron, his body a sign of heaven’s anger.162 Regarding ‘ethnically’ distinct physiognomies, in Roman satire, there is an expectation that, for example, ‘curly-haired’ or ‘black’ or ‘painted’ ‘Mauri’, or indeed ‘trousered’ or ‘painted’ Britons, are either slaves or servants or belong still to the fringes of empire. Thus, Juvenal’s stand-in for a household’s paledisplayed in London cre`ches around the year 2000, portraying children from around the world saying ‘welcome’ in their mother-tongue and including one wheelchair user, as if disability were a ‘nationality’ or a ‘racial’ type. 160 Gardner 1993: 155–60; cf. Suet. Aug. 38. 3 for Augustus excusing elderly or inWrm knights from riding in the ‘revived’ equestrian procession. 161 Beard 1980, 1990, 1995. 162 Sen. Apocol. 5, 7, 11.

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skinned, eVeminate ‘Ganymede’ is, most inappropriately, a ‘Gaetulian’ groom, ‘a black Moor with hard hands’, while Martial’s household of Marulla contains seven children born from the mistress’s liaisons with the servants, who include a curly haired ‘Moor’, the Xat-nosed, swollen lipped son of the wrestler, and one ‘black’ and one ‘red’ daughter.163 There is consequently some elision in expectations between ‘class’ and ‘ethnically’ diVerent physiognomies: those of ‘exotic’ appearance were most likely to have entered Italy as slaves, but on the other hand by no means all or even the majority of slaves were of ‘exotic’ appearance.164 Failed proposals in the imperial period to institute a uniform for slaves underline the heterogeneity of slave appearances, as well as simultaneously the desire to make clothing denote ‘real’ identity and the resistance to thinking of slaves as a single ‘class’ in the particular kind of status-conscious society that the Roman empire represented.165 At the other extreme, bodies, ‘shapes’ and comportment were regularly the subject of elite invective, and read as signs of the suitability to rule. The fact that this invective appears in dialectical form, with appeal to a range of familiar tropes on either side, is a sign not so much of the intolerance and rigidity of Roman society but of an intensiWcation of competition, a jostling for position and indeed even a shifting of the grounds of success and belonging. We might think, for example, of the competition between Antony and Octavian at the end of the Republic, with its interest in drunkenness, vomiting, buggery, uppity women, and depilation.166 In this section, I am not interested primarily in legal or other kinds of incapacity, or in writing a history of ‘disability’, but in a particular category of human diVerence that was a source of Roman fascination and reXection on social and political change, what I am calling ‘freaks’, a term that covers a number of Latin terms including prodigia, monstra, and mirabilia, ostenta, Juv. 5. 52 V; Mart. 6. 39. L.A. Thompson 1989: 114, 142–56. 165 SHA Alexander Severus 23. 3; cf. 27. 1; cf. Sen. De Clem. 1. 24, 1; this lack of oYcial distinction underlines the signiWcance of tattooing criminals in the Graeco-Roman world, seeking to mark their bodies permanently: see C.P. Jones 1987. 166 Edwards 1993; Dench 1998. 163 164

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ludibria, miracula.167 Pliny the Elder’s pronouncement on Hermaphrodites ‘once called androgynes and considered to be prodigies, but now considered to be pets’, draws a sharp and moralizing rhetorical distinction between the old and the new.168 The ‘old’ was the consuls’ compilation of a list of possible signs of divine anger, including the very Roman preoccupation with ‘monstrous’ animal and human births (such as hermaphrodites, or humans giving birth to animals), some of which seem to symbolize the muddling and disorder of the natural universe, a Roman anxiety that elides social, political, and religious concerns.169 The senate would review the list and, after deciding which were genuine ‘signs’ that should be expiated, would usually refer these to the priests or haruspices. Cicero’s De Responso Haruspicarum is a vivid illustration of the seriousness of senatorial debate surrounding the highly political interpretation of a portentous ‘strange noise’ in 56 bc. We may indeed see some distinctive developments towards the end of the Republic: notably, as John North put it, ‘prodigies began in the late Republic to shift from their traditional ground and to cluster—not within senatorial proceedings and minutes—but in signiWcant moments in the lives of great men.’170 It is, the implication would be, important to note indications of developments, continuities, from the end of the Republic into the imperial period, as well as the sort of change and disruption that Pliny is keen to emphasize. We can indeed trace some, and sometimes self-conscious, continuity of tradition. This includes, on the most obvious level, the reporting of prodigies in Tacitus’ historical works, stylized and manipulated as commentary on imperial rule and recollection of Republican annalistic historical tradition.171 But it also includes the some167

While it is hard for us to avoid being squeamish, and focussing on the humiliations and oppression of the deformed, it has to be said that the 20thcent. emphasis on pathologies of disability, projected onto the classical past in an attempt to be sensitive by e.g. Garland 1995, is itself regarded by many to be humiliating and dehumanizing: see e.g. interview with Robert Wadlow, the 8 ft. 11.1 in. ‘gentle giant’ (1918–1940), in Bogdan 1988. 168 169 Pliny NH 7. 3. 34. e.g. Brisson 1997: ch. 1. 170 North 1986: 256. 171 MacBain 1982; Rosenberger 1998; Jason Davies 2004 for prodigies in Tacitus, signiWcantly absent in Ammianus Marcellinus.

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times self-consciously ironic continuity of vocabulary, the application of the ‘religious’ terms monstrum, prodigium, or androgyne to refer to freaks of nature, Valerius Maximus’ boundary breaking Maesia of Sentinum, who spoke in her own defence and had herself acquitted, or human pets.172 While North was referring speciWcally to the reporting of prodigies as portentous signs increasingly clustering around individuals, we shall see that there seems to be a more literal clustering of human ‘freaks’ around the emperor. The general connection in Roman thought between freakishness and the person of the emperor includes the idea of the collection and display of freaks, the prominence of freaks within the imperial court, and the emperor himself as freak. Perceptions and uses of this freakishness draw both on Roman ‘religious’ traditions and on broader traditions within the Graeco-Roman world.173 The collection and display of strangeness in the form of animals, human monsters, and other wonders by Roman potentates and emperors is part of a long tradition. Homer’s Odyssey, a proto-ethnographical text, places monsters in diYcult and dangerous travel situations, but is peculiarly genteel in the expression of strangeness. For example, while Homer’s Cyclopes are as tall as mountains, we are only in passing told that the Cyclops protagonist has only one eye, when Odysseus and his men direct their stake into ‘the one eye’. This might be seen as one aspect of the self-conscious gentility that seems to be the register of the Homeric epics throughout, and is perhaps also to be connected to the lack of ethnographical precision in the Odyssey.174 Visual displays of dwarves and pygmies on drinking cups from the archaic age suggest the importance of the other-wordly within the setting of the symposium: through drinking, one enters and becomes one with this other world.175 Moving into the Wfth century, Herodotus’ preoccupation with 172

Val. Max. 8. 3. 1. I have found C. Barton 1993 suggestive, although I am not always clear that the connections that she draws are fully followed through in ancient thought, and I have some real problems with the pathological approach to the Roman empire. 174 J. GriYn 1980, esp. p. xv for the value of comparative ancient epic in appreciating what is distinctive about the Homeric poems; Murray 1989. 175 Lissarague 1990. 173

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‘wonders’ of the animal and human worlds seems restrained in comparison with the Xights of fancy associated with writing that came to be classed as ‘paradoxography’, ‘believe it or not’ tales of the unexpected masquerading as travelogues.176 It is surely no accident that we Wrst hear about the actual collection and display of objects, animals, and birds from around the world in the context of the Hellenistic kingdoms: Ptolemy Philadelphus’ aviary is an early example.177 The journeys of Alexander beyond the world so vividly imagined and mapped in Herodotus were accompanied and written by his personal ethnographers, Nearchus, Megasthenes, and Eratosthenes: the human wonders of India, where, according to Megasthenes (cited with contempt by Strabo), some people slept curled up in their own ears, others had no mouths but lived on smells alone, and the Monomatti had dogs’ ears and, true to their name, one eye in the middle of their forehead.178 Within the Hellenistic monarchies of the heirs of Alexander, ethnographical and geographical knowledge became the intellectual property of a self-consciously scholarly mentality, alluded to and dropped ‘lightly’ into the highly crafted and urbane poetry that grew out of a new culture of libraries and textual criticism: Callimachus, author of ‘Barbarian Customs’ and father of the genre of paradoxography, is the obvious example.179 The Hellenistic age saw also the collection of human grotesques associated in moral discourse with tryphe¯, indulgence in luxury that in ancient thought both denotes ‘bad’ forms of rule such as tyranny, and anticipates ruin. The best example of this is Athenaeus’ citation of Timaeus on the habits of the Sybarites, who, ‘because of their tryphe¯’ (their decadence) kept dwarves, skopaioi, stilpnes, and Maltese lapdogs, ‘delighting in Maltese lapdogs and non-human humans’.180 Skopaioi and stilpnes are 176

e.g. Schepens and Delcroix 1996. Frazer 1972: 1. 15. 178 For ethnographers in the footsteps of Herodotus and Alexander, see Murray 1972; for Megasthenes going too far, see Strabo 15. 1. 57 ¼ 711 C; Pliny NH 7. 25. 179 Phlegon of Tralles, writing under Hadrian, is the most obvious surviving ‘inheritor’ of this tradition. 180 Timaeus FGH 566, F49 ¼ Athenaeus 12. 518 e–f, 519 b. 177

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hard to translate, as they only ever appear in this passage.181 The rarity of this terminology is signiWcant: a point is being made about a certain kind of problematic reWnement, the specialization in categories of human oddities, alongside rare breeds of lapdogs, in the same way that problematic Roman reWnement in the second century bc is conveyed not least in the recondite vocabulary of furniture, Wttings, and new kinds of slaves.182 For Timaeus, as well as for later authors, Sybaris was the archetypal example of south Italian decadence precipitating the ruin of a civilization.183 The importance of display and conspicuous consumption within Hellenistic models of monarchy was not, however, a mere invention of moralizing authors. It is possible to understand the collection and display of human grotesques partly in terms of a new emphasis on the person of the monarch: Hellenistic monarchs seem self-consciously to have displayed themselves according to the expectations of tryphe¯ as the ability to indulge in excess became a badge of power.184 As we saw in Chapter 1, Roman generals considered themselves the heirs of Alexander the Great and, from the middle Republic, there are abundant signs of the self-conscious transformation of the city of Rome into a Hellenistic capital. As the Romans came progressively to proclaim themselves masters of the world, Roman institutions such as the triumph and circus games came to involve displays of their mastery over the wonders of the world.185 In other words, the Romans interpreted the fascination with wonders on the part of the Hellenistic kingdoms through the frameworks of local institutions. In Chapter 1 we saw how the triumphs of Roman generals displayed in graphic form mastery over local populations and lands by the procession of the exoticized inhabitants and representations of rivers, mountains, and cities. Rome’s successive defeats of the Carthaginians in the third and second centuries bc, and subsequently her conquests in the Near East resulted in 181 See LSJ for suggestion that these are perhaps names for Sybarite varieties of dwarf. 182 In general, J. GriYn 1985: 1–31. 183 Purcell 1994a for the south Italian context. 184 Smith 1988b: 52; Wallace-Hadrill 1982a: 34, with n. 16. 185 Fraser 1972: 1. 62–74.

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bringing exotic animals to Rome in quantities and numbers of species never seen before, including lions, panthers, ostriches, crocodiles and hippopotami. The favoured way of exhibiting such animals was in venationes, staged hunts in the circus, with emphasis on skill combined with large-scale slaughter. Modern studies emphasize the culturally speciWc nature of Roman displays of this kind, although it may be possible to make limited comparisons with the culture of zoos in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial and national capitals such as London, Rome, or Berlin.186 Displays of this kind were the focus of much competition amongst the elite. This competition was institutionalized: for example, it was a requirement that junior magistrates should stage games for the people of Rome. This requirement demanded considerable eVort and expense, as well as friends in the right places, as we can see from Marcus Caelius Rufus’ letter to Cicero in Cilicia in 51 bc, exhorting him to see to sending some panthers for Caelius’ show.187 As competition increased amongst a diminishing number of individuals with a disproportionate amount of power in the late Republic, we see an escalation in displays of wonders on the part of individuals. An unprecedented permanent display of human wonders was presented by Pompey as part of the decoration of his stone theatre, part of a complex dedicated in 55 bc. Wonders mentioned include Alcippe who gave birth to an elephant, alongside the appropriately named Eutychis (‘Fortunate’) of Tralles, who had given birth thirty times.188 This display is of great signiWcance on a number of counts. For one thing, Pompey’s theatre was the Wrst stone theatre to have been erected in the city of Rome. The building of such a permanent structure had hitherto been avoided, apparently because of Roman fears of popular assembly.189 Pompey’s theatre symbolizes the beginnings of new models of power, evoking images of the monarch and his 186 Coleman 1990; Hopkins 1983a; Beacham 1999; for modern zoos, see Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier 2002. 187 Cic. Fam. 8. 4. 5; cf. Tac. Hist. 1. 4. 14 for the perceived importance of shows to the people, characterized on the death of Nero as ‘plebs sordida et circo et theatro sueta’. We see here the theme of the pampered plebs on the Hellenistic model of tryphe¯-ridden rulers: M. GriYn 1991. 188 189 Pliny NH 7. 34. See esp. Tac. Ann. 14, 20.

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populace. The making of Alcippe who gave birth to an elephant into a work of art commissioned by eminent artists and used as the decoration of a building bearing Pompey’s name is also very suggestive. For Pliny the Elder, Alcippe’s delivery of a bestial oVspring is the sort of thing that is a monstrum or ostentum, an omen that warns of, or reXects some terrible state of things in the world. He is alluding, surely intentionally, to the traditional Roman perception of such phenomena as matters of collective religious importance to Rome, the signiWcance of which and any subsequent remedy to be determined by priests. Such a thing has become a decorative motif in the manner of displays of the grotesque in the courts and wealthy households of the Hellenistic kingdoms. This is an early example, albeit in a ‘public’ context, of a new Roman fashion in the use of the grotesque as decoration of courts and aspirant households alike.190 The principate of Augustus sees some elements of continuity with the late Republican dynasts, despite the princeps’ professions of disapproval of having human freaks about him: as always, the persona of Augustus is complex and contradictory. Suetonius applauds Augustus’ style of household decoration on Capri as further evidence of his austerity and avoidance of luxury. Augustus favours the collection of dinosaur skeletons and the practice of landscape gardening in preference to the collection of statues and paintings, and seems to reserve the desirably wondrous and fascinating for public display rather than private luxury: a vast snake in front of the comitium; the bodies of the giants Pusio and Secundilla displayed in Sallust’s Gardens; the dwarf knight Lycius exempted from the emperor’s own ban on knights appearing on stage.191 With the perception of the centrality of the emperor within the Roman 190 For the 16th-cent. discovery of grotesque decorations in Nero’s Golden House and the Baths of Titus, resulting in the invention of the concept, see C. Barton 1993: 87 n. 9. 191 Statues and paintings: Suet. Aug. 72, 3; the snake and the dwarf Lycius: Aug. 43. 4; bodies of giants: Pliny NH 7. 75. It is, however, important not to be too reductive in interpreting Augustus’ avoidances: for example, he is said by Suetonius to avoid the company of freaks because of a loathing for ugly and ill-omened things, preferring the company of pretty Moorish and Syrian boys. Being attracted by beauty as opposed to being drawn to the hideous forms part of Plutarch’s heavily moralizing discourse on hanging out at the ‘freak market’ (Mor. 520 c), and Suetonius’ emphasis on Suetonius’ love of beauty may itself

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universe comes the expectation that he is the obvious recipient of oddities of the world, just as he is the focus of petitions of all kinds.192 In an example that nicely combines the categories of ethnological, ends of the earth oddities, and freaks of nature, Nicolaus of Damascus in 20 bc saw at Antioch a human freak— an armless and legless ‘living herm’—which envoys from India were bearing to Augustus.193 The ‘good’ princeps puts great emphasis on distancing himself from the indulgent luxuries and excesses of the contemporary upper-classes, who marked their distinction by the collection of freaks. With the sort of irony that characterizes their behaviour in general, Augustus’ own daughter and granddaughter, the two Julias, are the earliest named Roman keepers of human pets: the younger Julia kept a record-breaking male dwarf named Conopas, while the elder Julia kept a recordbreaking female dwarf named Andromeda.194 For all Augustus’ self-proclaimed austerity and civilitas, a recognizable court culture was developing, and Suetonius’ Lives of subsequent emperors suggest the familiarity of a court peopled with pets and clowns.195 As in other respects, the households of the wealthy aspired to the tastes of the rulers: satirical literature suggests the familiarity of dwarfs and morons in the stock farcical scenes of this genre.196 Petronius’ freedman character Trimalchio, the archetypal absurd mimic of the excessive tastes of the Neronian upper-classes, displays a hideous pet favourite as part of the Xamboyant entourage in which he travels.197 If the archetypal ‘good’ emperor is thus distanced from freaks, anecdotes about relative relationships between emperors, freaks, and the elite usefully suggest some of the perceived problems of monarchical power at Rome. For example, Domitian could allegedly be overheard discussing the business have ethical overtones. For the signiWcance of Sallust’s Gardens and their overtones of private luxury and immorality, see [Cic.] in Sallustium 7. 19–20 for the hortos pretiosissimos, bought from the proceeds of Xeecing lower Africa as governor. 192

193 On the latter, see Millar 1984a. Strabo 719; cf. Dio 54. 9. 8. 195 Pliny NH 7. 75. Wallace-Hadrill 1996; Turcan 1987. 196 Mart. 3. 82; 7. 38; 8. 13; 12. 93; for the content of actual farces and mimes, see Bieber 1961. 197 Satyricon 1. 2. 8; Gowers 1994 for Neronian taste. 194

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of the political elite with his pinhead at the gladiatorial games. ‘Can you guess why I have just appointed Mettius Rufus Prefect of Egypt?’ he was scandalously heard asking his pet.198 The story might be calibrated on a scale that would include at the marginally ‘better’ end the excessive and inappropriate prominence of Claudius’ freedmen, Pallas and Narcissus, at the expense of the upper classes: the shock and disgust expressed by Tacitus and Pliny suggest elite reactions to such catastrophic social and political muddling.199 There is particular signiWcance here in a chain of connections between freaks, emperors, and ‘muddling’: if freaks themselves can be imagined as a kind of ‘muddle’, and certainly at the bottom of the heap, with their ill-omened persons, the Apocolocyntosis represents the reign of Claudius as one big Saturnalia, a festival of inversion, when a freakish fool rules.200 Ironically, given Nero’s eVorts to discredit his predecessor in the early years of his reign, Nero’s own reputation turned out to be that of the archetypal muddler, who confounded the ‘normal’ rules of society by making sideshows of public displays on stage of the elite, scandalously Xouting laws restricting acting to those untouched by expectations of decency and morality, a further class of outsiders, in this case people whose bodies were not protected by laws of rape or adultery.201 If the emperor’s display of his ability to muddle ‘normal’ categories and conventions of society could suggest deep truths about the arbitrary nature of his power, other stories about emperors and freaks suggest in addition the quality of reWnement gone berserk, like the excesses of tyranny. For example, the story went that Commodus served up to his guests two hunchbacks covered with mustard on a silver dish, subsequently rewarding them.202 Food is in itself an area of rules and 198

Suet. Dom. 4, 2. Cf. Pliny Paneg. 47–9, 83–4, 88 for the company kept by Trajan, the ‘good’ emperor, and his relationship with his freedmen. 200 Apocol. 8; Plut. Mor. 520 b for the animal terms in which some human bodies at the ‘freak market’ are discussed, e.g. the weasel armed and ostrichheaded; those fascinated in these beings are said to be on the look out for those of ‘mixed appearance’. 201 Tac. Ann. 14. 14–15, with Woodman 1993, cf. Suet. Nero 11; on acting, see e.g. Edwards 1993: chapter 3. 202 His. Aug. 9. 2; cf. 9. 6 for do-it-yourself freaks by plucking out eyes and cutting oV feet. 199

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risks, compounded here by the more speciWc problem of the dignity of elite guests oVended by inappropriate contact with freaks.203 To serve up the ill-omened in a parody of the reWned and the recondite, involving the tricking and deceit of friends, is to Xout conventions on any number of levels. If one mark of the ‘bad’ emperor, representative of the worst excesses of monarchical power, is a muddling of categories of elite and freak, at worst, the distinction between emperor and clown is itself lost, as in traditions hostile to Claudius.204 Carlin Barton is surely right in The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster to emphasize the problem of trampling on the rules of distinction within Roman society, norms of social order that are only upheld by the festival of Saturnalia when masters wait on slaves and the world is turned topsy-turvy for a brief interval. The atmosphere created by moralizing contemporary discourses on bad emperors is indeed that society is permanently in a topsy-turvy state, that distinctions are lost.205 It should, however, be remembered that this elite moralizing discourse is only one side of the story. Like scandalous freedmen inhibiting easy contact between emperor and the elite, or loathed parasites, hangers on at the tables of the elite, these stories are about boundary crossing, which is one aspect of a society in which social mobility is a constant ideological possibility.206 As we have seen, such boundary crossing is itself one important aspect of myths of the origins of Rome and the Roman people. In the last part of this section, I will consider the connection between freaks and luck and fortune. The portentous nature of prodigia within Roman religious tradition was, as I have suggested, apparently continued or echoed in perceptions of freaks kept as pets: for example, Suetonius spells out Augustus’ dislike 203

See, in general, Gowers 1992. The Fool’s Rise to Power; cf. Apocolocyntosis. 205 C. Barton 1993: esp. ch. 6, 176 V. 206 Purcell 1995a on parasites. For the notion of ideological possibility, that is something that is repeatedly held out as an expectation, whether or not this is actually very frequently achieved cf. Wiedemann 1985 on the ideology of manumission. In modern Britain, the statistically highly unlikely possibility of winning the national lottery certainly functions as an important ideological possibility in many sectors of society. 204

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of ‘dwarfs, cripples and everything of that kind, as freaks of nature and of ill omen’.207 Paradoxically, it seems that such ‘ill-omened’ beings could be perceived to function as ‘lucky charms’, averting evil by their very presence. Suggestive evidence in this respect is a certain category of small bronze Wgurines that were evidently popular throughout the Roman world of the late Republic and early empire. The form taken by these Wgurines varies, but favourite types include hunchbacks, dwarves, and ‘living skeletons’. A further type elides the categories of Aethiops and freak, by the addition of a freakishly large phallus or a pronounced hunchback.208 These Wgurines seem to be the probaskania, the ‘ridiculous’ humanoid apotropaic mascots described by Plutarch and by second-century ad grammarians as being hung up in workshops to avert the evil-eye and envy.209 One notable example is a caricature of a misshapen Aethiops with a huge penis depicted making the obscene sign known in modern Italy as ‘la Wca’.210 It is possible that the emperor’s freak companions were perceived to function as a kind of living lucky charm, perhaps averting the peculiar danger associated with the emperor’s preeminent position, a frozen version of the notoriously perilous position of the triumphant general.211 More broadly, the baskania suggest the importance of fate and fortune within society. Nicholas Purcell’s work on the game of alea and its symbolism is highly suggestive in this context. He puts particular emphasis on alea as a ‘popular’ game, and connects the game’s stress on chance and competition with more general, culturally speciWc ideas about the importance of windfalls in the acquisition of wealth, as well as with the overall idea of mobility and the hope and opportunism of expectations of mobility engendered.212 As we have seen, Carlin Barton 207

Suet. Aug. 83. Snowden 1970: 272–3, with bibliography. 209 Plut. Mor. 681 f–682 a; Phrynichus Arabius of Bithynia, Anecdota Graeca (ed. Bekker), 30. 5; Pollux 7. 108; C. Barton 1993: 168. 210 Wace 1903/4: 110–11; cf. Ovid Fasti 5. 1. 33. 211 For Octavian’s extraordinary assumption of ‘Imperator’ as a praenomen before 36 bc, see Syme 1958; Millar 2000: 2–3; for Caligula’s use of triumphal garb as everyday dress, see Suet. Calig. 52 ; for examples of remarks made in antiquity about living lucky charms, see C. Barton 1993: 171. 212 Purcell 1995a; cf. 1994b. 208

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tends to suggest that the freak, like the gladiator with whom she draws comparisons, shows up the rigidity of Roman society through confounding categories in his own person, acting as a kind of let-out clause that can alternatively console those caught in shackles of social rigidity and point up the ridiculous qualities of imperial rule. However, while the use of such apotropaic mascots indeed suggests a preoccupation with fortune, loss and gain, such a preoccupation certainly need not necessarily reXect the rigidity of society. On the contrary, the presence of the freak that suggests both a ‘muddling’ of order and the workings of fate might raise both hopes and fears of the unexpected in life. If we consider brieXy interest in fortune-telling in the early imperial period, we might in fact see that there is more here too than a reXection of the rigidity of imperial life and consequent upper-class despair. To take a famous example, Tacitus uses as a prime ‘test case’ of the new imperial application of the crime of maiestas to oVences against the person of the emperor the example of the knight Libo Drusus consulting astrologers, magi, and interpreters of dreams. While Tacitus has his own reasons for belittling the charge, in the case as he presents it, it certainly seems as if what primarily interests the prosecution, his proximity to the imperial household and therefore by implication his designs on imperial rule, is the least of Libo Drusus’ concerns: he is interested in his personal fortune, in the possibility of paving the Via Appia all the way to Brundisium with gold.213 I am far from clear that this case constitutes upper-class despair at the closing of healthy Republican competition, or rather the hope of gain, a foolish reXection of the real opportunities for gaining from the monarchical system that were certainly open to members of the upper classes and to restricted numbers of outsiders as well. 6. SHAPE-SHIFTING In a famous passage of Petronius’ Satyricon, the characters Encolpius and Giton frantically plot ways to escape from their enemies on board a ship. After rejecting one idea, Encolpius 213 Tac. Ann. 2. 30. 6–7; for the signiWcance of astrology under monarchy, see T. Barton 1994a, 1994b.

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decides to get some ink from their learned companion Eumolpus, and use it to dye themselves head to foot and thus assume the identities of ‘servi Aethiopes’, ‘Ethiopian slaves’. Giton ridicules the idea: Why don’t you circumcise us while you’re at it so that we can look like Jews, and pierce our ears so that we can pretend to be Arabs, and chalk us white so that Gaul thinks we are her own citizens; as if this colour alone could change our shape and as if it were not the case that many things in combination are necessary to make a good lie on all accounts . . . come on, tell me, can we swell our lips to a hideous thickness? Can we change our hair with curling-tongs? Or break up our foreheads with scars? Or make ourselves bow-legged? Or turn our ankles over to face the ground? Or cut our beards in a foreign fashion? ArtiWcial colour stains the body, but does not transform it.214

Alongside its particular signiWcance within a text that is in general very interested in disguise, artiWce, impersonation and shape-shifting, this passage raises a number of more general cultural issues that are of great relevance to the themes of this chapter. It is no accident that Encolpius wishes to transform himself and his companion into Aethiopes in order to escape their foes. While variegation of (what we would probably call) ‘black’ ethnic type was one important mode of Roman thought in particular, within the Greek and Roman worlds, there was undoubtedly persistent interest, at least from the archaic period, in the extreme and ‘opposite’ nature of the ‘Aethiops’. This Wgure inhabited a category all of his own, characterized by his extreme blackness, his extremely woolly hair, his extremely snub nose and broad nostrils, and his extremely broad lips: Giton’s labouring of physiognomic detail accentuates the comprehensive strangeness of the Aethiops and emphasizes the diYculty of passing as one. Fascination with the Aethiops is eloquently suggested in, for example, archaic ‘Janiform’ jugs decorated with two ‘opposite’ heads on their opposite sides, one black and one white, or by the proverbial, unchangingly black, Aethiops of both the Mediterranean litoral and biblical

214

here.

Petron. Sat. 102; I follow the Teubner edn. (Mueller 1995) for the text

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lands.215 The Aethiops can mark one of the poles around which thought may be organized, inhabiting in ethnographical thought the extreme south, often the limits of hearsay about Africa, but occasionally also India. In ancient thought, ghosts are as frequently Wgures of extreme blackness as they are a ghastly white: this has partly to do with the ‘colour symbolism’ through which black is identiWed with dirt and evil, but partly to do with cosmic geography: once again, the Aethiops inhabits one of the extremes of (in this case) the cosmic world.216 Importantly, the Aethiops does not correspond at all closely to the modern Anglo-American use of the term ‘black’ in the description or self-ascription of individuals, groups or culture. While it is the Aethiops who is of proverbially extreme appearance in antiquity, a considerable range of ‘ethnic’ terms is used to describe individuals whom we might describe as ‘black’, and it is not only the Aethiops whose skin colour associates him with dirt or evil. Moreover, a range of colour adjectives that we might translate as ‘black’ are regularly used in a derogatory sense to refer to skin darker than the aristocratic ideal.217 Being an Aethiops is a matter primarily of appearance that can alternatively reveal ‘real’ descent, or be argued to have nothing to do with descent, the primary criterion of being ‘black’ in modern Anglo-American thought. Thus, the child of an Aethiops and a non-Aethiops will only be referred to as an Aethiops if he looks like one: as Pliny the Elder puts it in his Natural History, ‘An undoubtable example is that of the famous boxer Nicaeus born at Byzantium, whose mother, despite being the oVspring of adultery with an Aethiops, was no diVerent in colour from the rest, but who himself was the living image of his grandfather, an Aethiops.’218 The idea of a ‘white’ woman giving birth to an ‘Aethiops’ infant is a scenario Wt either for 215 ‘Janiform’ jugs: Snowden 1970: 25; ‘to wash the Aethiops white’: Lucian Adv. indoct. 28; Corpus paroem. Graec. 1. 18, 146, 187; 2. 184, 258; ‘can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ Jeremiah 13: 23; for early Christian versions of such proverbs, Snowden 1970: 197–8. 216 L.A. Thompson 1989: 63, 212 n. 99. 217 Cf. L.A. Thompson 1989: 18–19, 47–8 for ‘colour symbolism’ and the absence of a framework for permanent inequality based on ‘race’ in the ancient world. 218 Pliny NH 7. 51, with L.A. Thompson 1989: 73 V.

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ancient farce or exercises in legal rhetoric: the extremeness of the Aethiops’ appearance can make his birth a proverbial sign of adultery, behaviour that is associated not merely with social, but with cosmic disorder in the early empire.219 Rhetorical examples oVer suggestive ways out of such a situation. Maternal impression is one solution: the mother had seen a black animal, person, or object when pregnant. Atavism oVered a diVerent solution: somewhere in her past, the mother had had an Aethiops forebear, and the Aethiops appearance had skipped one or more generations to re-emerge in the infant.220 The issue of the ease or diYculty of transforming oneself into an Aethiops raises further cultural themes. As we have seen in the course of this chapter, there was considerable ancient interest in the role of clothes as well as in ritual, language, and custom and these have relevance to questions of both revealing and disguising real identities of individuals and peoples. The motifs of dressing up, of disguising and revealing ‘real’ identities are central to Homer’s Odyssey, a work that functions as an important reference-point for so many genres of Greek and Roman literature, including ethnography and the novel, as well as (most obviously) epic. As we have begun to see, dress and dressing up were peculiarly important in the strikingly status conscious, competitive and increasingly decentralized Roman world of the late Republic and imperial period.221 We have seen the signiWcance of the invention of a notion of ‘global’ ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ dress, a notion that is beautifully played out in Suetonius’ anecdote of Augustus’ game on Capri at the end of his life, having Greeks wear togas and speak the ‘Roman’ language, and the Romans wear pallia and speak Greek.222 We have also seen, at the end of Chapter 2, the example of Petronius’ Trimalchio, the freedman with great pretensions, whose 219

L.A. Thompson 1989: 60 with n. 17. Calp. Flacc. 2 (Lehnert); Quintilian fr. 8 (Lehnert). 221 For ‘decentralization’, cf. the joke attributed in the Apocolocyntosis to Varro (presumably in the Saturae Menippeae) about the physiognomy of the Stoic, ‘rotundus, sine capite, sine praeputio’, ‘all round, with neither head nor foreskin.’ 222 Aug. 98. 3; Wallace-Hadrill 1998; for problems associated with Romans wearing the pallium, see e.g. Livy 29. 19. 12 for Scipio in Sicily; Cic. Rab. 9; Suet. Tib. 13. 220

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dress maps his life’s progress, his aspirations, and his status as an impostor. The strongly ethical potential of ‘reading’ dress is brought out in imperial biographies: Augustus wears homespun, the labour of the imperial women, while Caligula has a wardrobe of god and goddess outWts, including, most scandalously, that of Venus, as would beWt one who so grossly overstepped the mark in demanding to be worshipped as a god.223 While dress so often revealed the aspirations of the wearer, in the funerary portraits of freedmen and freedwomen celebrating their changed status, of togate provincials, elsewhere they revealed much more about the pretensions of others. We saw at the beginning of Chapter 1 a farcical version of this, in the form of Caligula’s triumph over rigged-up ‘northern barbarians’, but we can see hints of more prosaic versions of this in aspirant households. It is notoriously diYcult to quantify the ‘real’ ethnic origins of slaves in Rome, partly because these seem frequently to be ‘lost’ through the choice of slave or freedperson, who generally prefers to commemorate him or herself by reference to work, emphasizing status within this environment, but partly also because new names and identities were regularly assigned by the masters and mistresses. Thus the proliferation of servants named Pallas, Paris, or Aphrodite could just as easily suggest that they were being made to play ‘Greek’ roles in the household as it could suggest ‘real’ Greek origins.224 But the passage from the Satyricon about the possibility of passing as an Aethiops interestingly turns on the limits of transformation. The skin-colour and physiognomic appearance of the Aethiops were, in ancient Mediterranean thought, proverbially unchanging and inimitable, a boundary that cannot be crossed by any individual: this is the thrust of the proverbially impossible task of ‘washing white an Aethiops’, a proverb that comes very close to the biblical Ethiopian who cannot change his skin, like the leopard who cannot change his 223 Suet. Aug. 73 (but cf. also 70 for the scandal of the dinner of the ‘Twelve gods’, when Octavian and his friends dressed up, Octavian assuming the guise of Apollo); Calig. 52. 224 Contrast the more prevalent use of ethnic names for slaves in the Greek world: Gordon 1924.

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spots.225 Within the passage in question, being an Aethiops was not ‘just’ a matter of changing colour: the catalogue of ‘matching details’ emphasizes the diYculty of achieving credibility. There are also interesting implications here also for Roman perceptions of the physiognomies of Jews, Arabs, and Gauls. Although this passage has regularly been used to demonstrate that there was no physiognomic stereotype of Jews in antiquity, the inclusion of Jews, Arabs, and Gauls in the list surely looks forward to the ‘matching details’ of the Aethiops, even if Jews and Arabs are perceived to have the same skin colour as Romans. In other words, the implication seems to be that passing as a Jew, an Arab, or a Gaul as well as the extreme Aethiops would require extensive physiognomic alteration, more than the ‘cultural’ markers of circumcision and ear-piercing.226 The issue of the limits of transformation that we see played with here has perhaps something in common with imperial Greek interest in ‘pure Greek blood’: such limits are peculiarly fascinating in a world within which the motifs of transformation and hybridity were of such central importance.227 225

See n. 210, above. Contra L.A. Thompson 1989: 64–5; cf. S. Cohen 1993. It remains true that, while Arabs are elsewhere in antiquity attested as a distinct physiognomic type (De Compos. Medic. Per Gen. 4. 1 ¼ Foerster 1893: 2. 102; Galen De Temper. 2. 6 ¼ Foerster 2. 90), there is no surviving positive attestation of perceptions of Jews as a distinct physiological type in antiquity. 227 Cf. Galinsky 1999 for the juxtaposition, especially in the Augustan age, of the slogan of Roma aeterna on the one hand and change written into the fabric of what Rome is, challenging Hardie 1992, who emphasizes the Wxity of Rome in Augustan ideology. 226

5 Languages and Literatures

1 . INTRODUCTION: CICERO ON RHETORIC AT ROME In a passage of Cicero’s rhetorical work Brutus, staged as a discussion of the state of Latin oratory on the part of ‘Cicero’, ‘Brutus’, and ‘Atticus’, the subject of non-urban Latin orators—that is, orators with origins outside ‘the’ city of Rome—is raised. ‘Brutus’ asks, ‘What characteristics do you attribute to these in some sense foreign orators?’ ‘Cicero’ replies, ‘What do you think? The same as the urban orators, except in one respect, which is that their speech lacks a certain urbane colouring, as it were.’ When asked to explain the nature of this ‘urbane colouring’, ‘Cicero’ replies, I don’t know exactly. I only know that there is such a thing. But it is something you will soon understand, Brutus, when you come to Gaul. Then you will hear some words which are not current in Rome, but these can be changed and learned; what is more signiWcant is that in the voices of our orators there is a more urbane intonation and resonance. This is not apparent only in our orators but in the rest of the people as well.’

‘Cicero’ goes on to tell an anecdote about Theophrastus, born in Eresus, who asked an old woman a question in the Athenian agora, and who was in response addressed by her as hospes (Cicero is ‘translating’ here the quintessentially Greek concept of xenos, ‘stranger/guest’). No matter that he ‘had spent his whole life in Athens, and was the best speaker of all’: ‘foreign’ origins can apparently never entirely be lost in speech.1 This passage of the Brutus, a work of 46 bc, suggests a keen interest in setting up hierarchies of Latin language use, an 1 Brutus 169–72 (Loeb tr. with adaptations); for discussion of some of the implications of this passage as evidence for Latin orators and their relationship

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interest that is also apparent in the two other rhetorical works that Cicero considered to form a trio with Brutus, the De Oratore of 55, and Orator, also of 46.2 These rhetorical works, like Cicero’s other ‘academic’ works, are highly conscious of the place of Latin, and Roman culture, in relation to Greek. Even the concept of ‘Latinitas’, which Cicero uses to express the idea of ‘correct’ Latin, is itself a ‘translation’ of ‘Hellenismos’, a term used in the tradition of Hellenistic rhetorical works to express the idea of the ‘good’ Greek which ‘we’ speak and write.3 For my purposes, key passages of the De Oratore and the Brutus, in which Cicero sets up models of ‘correct’ Latin particularly by reference to what he claims to be in some sense ‘inferior’ Latin, are particularly interesting. He acknowledges both a plurality of Latins and, variously, the learning and eloquence of some nonRoman speakers in a catalogue much mined by modern scholars of ancient Italy that takes us among the Marsi, to Sora, Bononia, Asculum, and Fregellae, moving between past and present time. ‘Cicero’ ’s suggestion that ‘Brutus’ is about to experience the lack of ‘urbane colouring’ at Wrst hand in his governorship of Cisalpine Gaul is an acknowledgement of a large and expanding educated Latin elite that was potentially part of the community of Roman society.4 In the late Republican context within which these works were written, Cicero’s hierarchical formulation and restrictive deWnition of ‘good’ Latin represents one approach to an increasingly destabilized and potentially decentralized Roman political and social world. Others were to suggest diVerent resolutions: a Rome that was rooted in the variegation and heterogeneity of Italy, or a heavy emphasis on local particularity that may or may not be in tension with Roman identity. with Rome, see David 1983; D’Arms 1984. I have placed literary characters and authorial personae in quotation marks throughout this chapter, since I am highlighting the construction of both. 2

Cic. Div. 2. 4. Cf. more explicitly De Optimo Genere Oratorum, also of 46, written as an introduction to the translation of Demosthenes’ De Corona. For Hellenismus and Latinitas, see Versteegh 1986; Baratin 1988. 4 For the anomalous position of Cisalpine Gaul, still a Roman province until 42 bc, some seven years after the grant of the citizenship to the Transpadani, and in ideological terms hovering between ‘Gallia’ and ‘Italia’, see J. Williams 2001a: 16, 120. 3

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In ‘Cicero’ ’s comments on non-Roman orators, there is nothing particularly unusual about the insistence that Rome is the only centre of urbanity in Italy or about the characterization of Italy outside Rome as ‘foreign’, in terms of language, culture, and even descent. Such characterizations are certainly to be found in second-century Latin literature, and are still very much alive in the Wrst. In Plautus’ Truculentus, for example, ‘rustic’ Latin is, hilariously, a ‘monstrosity’, barely human let alone barbarian, while Cicero’s own ‘foreignness’ was the subject of invective against him.5 But we need to pay closer attention to the particular terms that Cicero uses to analyse nonRoman Latin speech here. For a start, ‘Cicero’ dodges precise criteria: ‘I don’t know exactly. I only know that there is such a thing.’ He eliminates vocabulary that can be learned and resorts to the language of visual metaphor—‘a certain urbane colouring’—and vague comments on the sound of urban speech. It is in fact rare that Cicero oVers any speciWc detail on accent and pronunciation, despite his considerable interest in the subject: the description of a Wnal –s is once described as characteristic of ‘rustic’ pronunciation in the Orator, while the ‘broadened letters’, presumably vowels, of L. Cotta are said to mark an undesirable distance from the ideal, Graecizing pronunciation.6 The anecdote about Theophrastus, whose ‘foreign’ origins were always detectable in his speech, is highly suggestive, not least because it has implications for Cicero’s own status as a ‘new man’ from Arpinum.7 Throughout Cicero’s explorations of speech and accent, his own (by his own criteria) ‘in some sense foreign’ status that elsewhere in his writings is important both theoretically and rhetorically is never raised explicitly. However, the Theophrastus anecdote has major implications for speech as a permanent marker of origins, even as birthright. Later in the Brutus, Cicero sets up a historical decline scheme Plaut. Truc. 687 V.; Dench 1995: 74–5; for invective against Cicero, see Ch. 3, n. 76, above. 6 Or at. 161; Brut. 137. 7 For this anecdote, cf. Quint. 8. 1. 2, where Theophrastus’ ‘problem’ is speciWcally over-correction; Quintilian interestingly draws diVerent conclusions from the anecdote, namely the desirability of losing all trace of local speech: see below, Section 4; for an academic biography of Theophrastus, see Diog. Laert. 5. 36–57. 5

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for the Latin speech of Rome. The golden age is located at the end of the second century, and identiWed with speakers such as Gaius Laelius, L. Furius Philo, and the younger Scipio. The speech of these individuals was determined partly by antiquity, partly by individual character, and partly by their domicile in the city of Rome. In more recent times, however, ‘polluted’ speech has been introduced to Rome by a ‘Xood’ of people from diverse origins.8 The metaphor of ‘pollution’, familiar too in the imagery of blood descent, only emphasizes the elision here of birth and language. The nebulous nature of Cicero’s discussion of non-Roman Latin orators, and the circularity of his argument on the basis of ‘urbanity’, suggest that we are entering the realm of taste, of ‘class’-based snobbery, seemingly innocuous but a potentially very powerful weapon in elite invective.9 His remarks represent one strategy for creating order in the midst of the dramatic geographical mobility and accompanying questions about the role and deWnition of the elite in the aftermath of the Social War and the entry of the domi nobiles of Italy into Roman political life. Cicero’s ‘solution’, one that seeks to undermine the possibility of learning and education, which might include rhetorical teaching, association with elders and ‘betters’, and the exemplary nature of a collective past, all fundamental to the shaping of late Republican and early imperial Roman society, is extremely conservative. However, in its very extremity, and by 8

Brut. 258; cf. 261 for ‘eloquence’ as the quality that ‘ought’ to be shown by any ‘freeborn Roman citizen’. 9 One might make some very limited comparisons with Nancy Mitford’s satirical edited volume Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, published in 1956. This volume represents a lighthearted debate on the deWnition of upper-class use of language (the distinction between ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ that includes ‘napkin’ versus ‘serviette’), and arguably had the merit of partially undermining social snobbery by cataloguing ‘rules’ that had worked primarily because they were unwritten and undeWned. The ‘arguments’ within the volume about authentic upper-class usage themselves suggest the essential arbitrariness of criteria of taste and distinction, the fact that they are highly subject to change. Professor Ross’s comments in the volume on ‘Changing One’s Voice’ suggest also the signiWcance of social mobility, an important dynamic within snobbery of this kind. Bourdieu’s classic (and wholly serious) sociological study of French taste and culture (1984) looks rather static in comparison.

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virtue both of subject-matter and literary context, it alerts us to the importance of both speech and written language in the selfpositioning of the Roman elite. The very ‘elitism’ of Roman literature (in terms of both authors and audience) that occasions modern complaints about how far it is ‘representative’ of Roman society in general contributes to its importance and desirability as a stage for elite aspirations, and potentially even for writing oneself into the Roman world. We will probably think most immediately of ‘classical’ literature, of Catullus or Propertius writing the relationship of Rome and local Italian identities, or of the complex cultural perspectives and authorial personae of Strabo, Josephus, or Lucian within a newly global Roman world. But we should also think in terms of the much more widespread aspirational character of reading and writing literature that is suggested particularly by the discovery of poetic fragments in military contexts far from Rome: fragments of the inXuential elegist Gallus were found in the African desert at Qasr Ibrıˆm; centurions amused themselves by writing poetry at Bu Njem; at the infamous siege of Masada, the thoughts of somebody in the Roman camp turned to a line from Dido’s speech to her sister at the beginning of Aeneid Book 4; at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, a body of letters found in the praetorium contain a perfectly remembered or copied line from Aeneid Book 9, written on the back of a writing-tablet, while the epistolary compositions in the name of the prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians himself, Flavius Cerealis, attest to the literary taste of a man whose family may only recently have become Roman citizens.10 2. LINGUISTIC SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD: CICERO IN CONTEXT Cicero’s conceptualization of ‘urbane’ Latin should be understood within the context of intense interest in the Latin language and its relationship with Roman identity during the late 10 Gallus: Anderson, Parsons and Nisbet 1979; Bu Njem: Adams 1999; Masada: Doc. Masada 721; Vindolanda: Tab. Vindol. II (1994), 118, 225–90; Bowman 1994: 91–2; for epigraphical attestation of Vergil, see Hoogma 1959; literary aspirations are of course also sometimes highly visible in the commemoration of the dead: see e.g. Woolf 1996.

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Republic and early principate. This is a highly charged debate that takes place not just in ‘specialist’ works on language and oratory, but also in literature much more generally, ranging from Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ antiquarian and apologistic books on early Roman history, Roman Antiquities, to the emphasis on Latin, as well as togas, in key passages of the Aeneid. Questions of language are closely linked to questions of the ethnic origins of the Roman people, the essential nature of what it is to be Roman: like clothing, language spoken and written can alternatively reveal and conceal descent, can be changed or self-consciously assumed in an act of self-positioning.11 Roman debates about language are frequently overtly ‘political’, in a number of senses. For example, works on language and oratory were written by prominent Wgures (of whom Julius Caesar, author of the lost work De Analogia with its surely ideological emphasis on elegance through plain speech, is only the most obvious example); the use of language, particularly ‘accent’ is a regular target of elite invective; questions about the relationship between Latin and Roman identity are raised by the progressive extension of the citizenship beyond Latin-speaking communities and individuals; in the course of the Wrst century of empire, increasing interest in the peculiar history of Roman oratory is linked to debates about the meaning of libertas under monarchy, a prominent theme in the selfdeWnition of the later Wrst-century Roman elite; while literary culture was accumulated and actively collected by the Ptolemies and the great households of later Republican Rome alike; from the end of the Republic we see rhetorical education begin to move away from the individual household, until, in the reign of Vespasian, the emperor himself sponsors ‘chairs’ of rhetoric in Athens and Rome, assuming a paternalistic role in the promotion of culture and education that is mimicked by others.12 It is very important to emphasize both the diversity of ‘solutions’ and ‘conclusions’ in Roman debates about language and the normalizing dynamics of, for example, the insistence on 11

D.H. Ant. Rom. 1. 89, with Gabba 1991; Cf. Ch. 4, above. For Caesar’s De Analogia, see Gell. NA 1. 10. 4; E. Rawson 1985: 122–3; for imperial sponsorship, see Suet. Vesp. 18; cf. Pliny Ep. 4. 13. 9, with Ch. 3, § 6, above; for honours and exemptions granted to teachers by Julius Caesar and Augustus, see Wallace-Hadrill 1983: 35–6. 12

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Latin as a qualiWcation for citizenship, the priority of ‘urbane’ Latin, or early imperial fantasies about the empire-wide extension of Latin. On the one hand, the association of Latin with urbanity must partly explain very real phenomena such as the dramatic shift towards Latin epigraphy in the public life of the Italian town, particularly within the last century of the Republic. On the other hand, we must also remember that relationships between spoken and written language raise complex questions of social class and context; that even attested written languages (other than Greek and Latin) within the Roman empire experienced very diVerent rates of ‘survival’; that ‘bilingualism’ of many diVerent kinds, manifested as, for example, ‘errors’ in Latin that suggest its status as a second language rather than a mother-tongue, or paraded to suggest the authority and stance of a writer of literature between two cultures, raises numerous issues of identity, expected audience, and world-view.13 The Wrst ‘explosion’ of formal interest in the nature of the Latin language in the Wrst century bc reXects broad cultural concerns about the connection between language and identity in a changing world that has begun to appreciate the eVects of social mobility, the political incorporation of Italy, Roman expansion northwards, beyond the Mediterranean, and the progressive loosening of the expected political relationship between Rome and Roman citizens, along with the beginnings of the redeWnition of the citizenship in ‘cultural’ terms.14 Cicero’s ‘translation’ into Latin of the Greek concept Helle¯nismos alerts us to both the Roman appropriation of Greek as the prime alternative language, emphasized by the emergence in the mid-Wrst century bc of the formula utraque lingua, and the self-conscious use of Latin even and especially within genres that were considered to be Greek Wrst and foremost, such as philosophy and technical and theoretical writing of all kinds.15 13

For deWnitions of ‘bilingualism’ within a Roman imperial context, see Adams 2003: 3–8. 14 See, especially, Wallace-Hadrill 1997: 18–20. 15 Dubuisson 1991; Kaimio 1979. The signiWcance of appropriating Greek as a ‘Roman’ language is highlighted by the rare occurrence of the oYcial use of other languages, despite plentiful evidence of actual bilingualism in many parts of the Roman world: the trilingual inscription of Gallus, in Greek, Latin and Egyptian, is rich in imperial symbolism (Adams 2003: 637–41).

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The existence, alongside the constant production, of Latin literature is in itself a remarkable phenomenon, the emergence of which only makes sense within the context of Roman imperial claims and the self-positioning of members of the Roman elite in the late third and second centuries bc.16 The emphasis on the relationship between Roman and Greek literature, to the extent that both Fabius Pictor and Aulus Albinus wrote their histories in Greek, underlines Hellenistic perceptions of Greek as the language of cultural capital and of increasingly global histories within which Mediterranean and Near Eastern peoples positioned themselves, and which they sought to refocus. The history of Roman linguistic self-consciousness is thus intimately linked to the development of Greek linguistic selfconsciousness and the reception of Greek language and literature in the Mediterranean world. The common modern assumption that the earliest notions of the ‘barbarian’ are based primarily on foreignness and incomprehensibility of language is not unshakeable. The earliest attested ancient etymology of ‘barbarian’ based on linguistic criteria is provided by Strabo in the Augustan age: he suggests that barbaros is an onomatopoeia, based in earliest times on perceptions of the language of those who spoke ‘harshly’ and ‘raucously’, and subsequently applied as a ‘common ethnic name’ to all foreigners. Before taking Strabo’s testimony at face value, we should remember that, at the time when he was writing, the notion of ‘a’ Greek language had been entertained for more than four centuries within the particular historical and political circumstances that we are about to explore: his theory of the primary meaning of barbaros may thus be less self-evident than is generally believed by modern scholars.17 In the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad, the earliest attested use of barbaros in the compound barbaropho¯nos, the Carians’ barbarian identity is qualiWed: they are barbarian ‘in their speech’, as if ‘barbarian’ by itself was not suYcient to signal their foreign speech to the audience. Thus it seems entirely possible that ‘foreign speech’ was neither the earliest nor 16 For emphasis on the political signiWcance of Roman historical writing, a distinctive form of memory-making, see the essays in Eigler et al. 2003. 17 Strabo 14. 2. 28 ¼ 661–2 C.

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the primary criterion of belonging or not belonging.18 In the Wfth and above all the fourth centuries, however, the linguistic unity of Greeks is a recurrent idea, and may have arisen primarily in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, just like the heightened image of the barbarian himself. ‘Aspasia’ ’s over-the-top funeral speech in Plato’s Menexenus makes explicit the connection: the Athenians are said to have fought against barbarians ‘on behalf of themselves and those who share their language (homopho¯noi)’.19 The locus classicus for a more self-conscious declaration of ‘Greekness’ being based in sharing a common language, alongside blood, common shrines and sacriWces, and ‘the same ways’, is the speech put into the mouth of an Athenian by Herodotus.20 Given the problems of reading this passage, which, as we have seen, is apparently somewhat undercut by Herodotus’ interesting depiction elsewhere of the Athenians as originally a ‘Pelasgian people’—that is, a barbarian people—who changed their language when they became ‘Greek’, our problems are hardly over at this point.21 However, the appearance in heightened passages of Wfth- and fourth-century Athenian literature of notions of ‘a’ Greek language might suggest that Herodotus is at least playing with contemporary ideas. This notion that he is playing with such ideas is enhanced by the fact that the explicit link forged between language, blood, and other criteria is the boldest in surviving literature of the classical period. In what is surely a deliberately controversial passage, the Athenians are made to go way over the top in their assertion, protesting a little too much. In other contexts, the relationship is subtler: it is, interestingly, only in Greek writing of the Roman imperial period that we shall see a very strong equation between ‘blood’ and language. Thus, for example, the ‘Old Oligarch’, who worries elsewhere about the lack of distinction between slaves and free men in Athens, is unhappy about the fact that Athenians ‘mix’ the language of ‘Greeks’ and ‘barbarians’, un18

Iliad 2. 867, with C. Jones 1999: 15; J. Hall 2002: 112. 20 Plato Menex. 242a. Hdt. 8. 144. 21 Cf. Ch. 2, n. 17, above; we might add that, despite Herodotus’ interest in the interplay between language and identity, his terminology maintains no hard and fast distinction between what we would call ‘dialect’ and ‘language’: T. Harrison 1998: section 3, with bibliography. 19

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like other peoples who use ‘their own’ language. The language of ‘mixing’ which, to a Greek audience, would also suggest the idea of sexual intercourse, implies, but does not state, the assumption that language (like cookery, another cause for concern) should properly reXect the ‘real’ ethnic identity of a people based in their descent, in this case ‘Greek’.22 While Plato, as we saw in the previous chapter, is, like Aristotle, interested in arguments that human nature is based on blood and/or nature, in the Cratylus, the Wrst extant Greek discussion of the origins of language, emphasis on the problem of the relationship between names and things only brieXy touches on the broad issues of ‘relativism’ raised by diVerent ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’ vocabularies, as well as diVerence within ‘Greek’. The debate’s initial focus on whether naming is based on physis ‘nature’, or ¯ethos/nomos, ‘culture’ or ‘norms’, does not lead into any general discussion of human diVerence.23 If Herodotus is pushing an equation between blood and language far further than was usual within Wfth-century contexts, Isocrates, in a famous passage of the Panegyricus that we considered brieXy in the previous chapter, pushes the debate in the opposite direction. He uses the notion of a common Greek language as the basis of an unusually expansive sense of Greekness, beyond the individual polis, and even potentially beyond the poleis that were normally accepted as ethnically Greek, that is, by descent. In other words, language is made a primary basis of identity, and any loose assumption of a link between language and descent-based identity is provocatively severed.24 Classical interest in ‘a’ Greek language runs in parallel with a more speciWc interest in what Herodotus refers to as the ‘Attic language’, glo¯ssa, the exact word he uses elsewhere, this time at the Greek–barbarian interface, to depict the ‘Greek language’.25 Within Wfth-century Athenian comedy, Stephen 22

[Xen.] 2. 8. Plato Cra. 383a; 385e; cf. questions about the priority of languages at e.g. 410a; 421d; 425e–426a; cf. Classen 1976; Baxter 1992; Aristotle Rhet. 1407a 19–20 equates ‘bad’ Greek with ‘barbarism’, to some extent anticipating the concerns of Alexandrian scholars: see Too 1998a: 138–9. 24 Isoc. Paneg. 50. 25 ‘Attic’ language: 6. 138. 2; ‘Greek language’ e.g. 2. 154. 2; for similar usage in other Greek authors, see T. Harrison 1998: section 3. 23

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Colvin’s work on the representation of what we would distinguish as Greek ‘dialects’ and foreign ‘languages’ in Aristophanes also suggests that any distinction that there is between two such groups is subtle. Both ‘Greek dialects’ and ‘barbarian language’ are played for laughs, but ‘dialects’ seem to be reproduced more accurately than ‘barbarian language’. He concludes that the representation of ‘barbarian’ speech as, essentially, ‘bad’ Greek, might have enhanced the derogatory eVect that is not associated with ‘Greek dialects’.26 Given the subtlety of this distinction, I am far from clear that I would want to downplay the fact that ‘Prodicus’ in Plato’s Protagoras is made to describe what modern scholars would normally refer to as the ‘dialect’ of Lesbos as ‘barbarian’: insofar as language was concerned, the boundaries of Hellas were not always clear.27 For Herodotus, language raised interesting questions about the nature of human diVerence and the relative antiquity of peoples, as well as issues of variant cultural perspectives and transformations. These take us to the heart of his broader enquiry into the relative importance of nomoi, ‘norms’ or ‘customs’, as opposed to physis. He may share this interest in part with sophistic questions about language: Plato’s tantalizing allusions in the Cratylus to issues of nomos and physis in naming may be considered together with the more familiar themes of language as learnt by mankind, as something that distinguishes him from beasts and that is associated with civic life, and of the power of language, an acquired ability that can—of course—be taught by sophists.28 Herodotus’ ‘Psammetichus’, the Egyptian king who conducts his own experiment to discover the Wrst language of mankind, is himself a mirror of the historian who confounds the assumptions and expectations of his people by scientiWc enquiry. ‘Psammetichus’ isolates babies from any linguistic inXuence and waits to discern their Wrst word, which is bekos, allegedly the Phrygian for ‘bread’, thus discovering that ‘the’ Wrst language is not, as his own people claimed, Egyptian,

26

27 Colvin 1999. Plato Prt. 341c. Soph. Ant. 353–5; Plato Prt. 322a; cf. Gorgias (where the problems of Plato’s representation of Protagoras and Gorgias are of course considerable). 28

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but Phrygian.29 Alongside the interesting implications of conXating the origins of human language tout court with the development of individual infants, ‘Psammetichus’ ’ experiment highlights linguistic themes that are important elsewhere in the Histories.30 These include issues of cultural perspectives that suggest that even ethnocentrism itself is relative: the Egyptians, implicitly mirroring the Greeks, call everyone who does not speak the same language ‘barbarians’ (incidentally exposing the limitations of Herodotus’ interest in reproducing foreign terms).31 In addition, like nomoi more generally, language can be a very powerful indicator and deliberately maintained reminder of descent: the Athenian women kidnapped and brought to Lemnos teach their children the ‘Attic language’, maintaining their distinct roots but also contributing to their deaths at the hands of ‘native Pelasgian’ children. Such resistance to more usual processes of change and learning ends badly in this case.32 Elsewhere, Herodotus’ linguistic interests play with the conventional opposition of Greeks and barbarians: his detailed ethnographies nuance distinctions and map the world as, substantially, a continuum by positing ‘mixtures’ of languages; the Greeks are said to have learned their letters from the Phoenicians, making ‘slight alterations’; the Athenians, most remarkably, originally spoke a barbarian language, Pelasgian, only subsequently changing their language and their identity to Greek.33

29

Hdt. 2. 2. 2–3; Christ 1994; Munson 2001: 141–2; for debates about the validity of Psammetichus’ experiment even in antiquity, see Dissoi Logoi 90 B6 (Diels–Kranz). 30 In more general terms, the conXation of infancy with human origins suggestive model for ancient philosophical schemes of human ‘development’ that distance themselves from overt divine intervention: see Dodds 1973; cf. Blundell 1986. 31 Hdt. 2. 158. 5. 32 Ibid. 6. 138. 2; the fact that the Athenians were, as we heard at 1. 57, originally Pelasgian, and learned Greek when they ‘changed’ their identity, makes this story particularly ironic; it is signiWcant that the Scythians, the least culturally receptive of peoples in Herodotus’ scheme of ‘imperialism’, have a particular problem with those who learn foreign languages: see esp. 4. 78–80; 1. 73. 3–5. 33 For ‘in between’ and ‘mixed’ languages, see e.g. 2. 42. 4; 4. 108. 2; Phoenician letters: 5. 58; to provide further nuance between peoples, language and cultural practices may or may not coincide as markers of distinction, or

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Despite some Wfth- and fourth-century interest in ‘a’ Greek language, our tendency to believe in such an entity is undoubtedly enhanced by post-classical developments. Much more is known about the linguistic deliberations of Alexandrian grammarians than about the processes and the degree of selfconsciousness involved in the establishment of Attic as what linguists refer to as the ‘target language’ of the expanded Greek world that was the legacy of Alexander. Widespread modern usage of the term koine¯ refers loosely to a ‘common [Greek] language’ (as well as, by extension, to cultural ‘Hellenism’ in general) of the post-classical Mediterranean, above all in its colloquial and popular forms, although it is also regularly used to denote formal speech as well as written, literary language. However, when Hellenistic grammarians used the term koine¯, their usage was neither descriptive nor popular but idealizing and very signiWcant within the history of Greek linguistic selfconsciousness. The koine¯ is the ideal, hypothetical genus that may alternatively be considered to include the four ‘dialects’, or as distinct from forms used within an individual ‘dialect’. Somewhat confusingly, however, grammarians also regularly refer to the koine¯ dialektos, the ‘common dialect’, as the aspirant language that they consider themselves to use. In this discussion of the meaning and signiWcance of koine¯, we have moved into the realm of status distinction and self-conscious postclassicism based on the assemblage and criticism of archaic and largely Athenian classical literary texts that characterizes the intellectual activity within the Alexandrian court. This is also the background to the development of further specialist vocabulary, including the term Helle¯nismos, which carries little of the ecumenical meaning that it has generally suggested in modern usage after Droysen, but is again aspirational and normalizing in its distinction from ‘barbarism’ and ‘solecism’, in its overtones of ‘correctness’. In other contexts, the aspirations are explicitly focused: the goal is to recover and reproduce ‘old’ Attic by reference to the Athenian literary ‘canon’, with Attic prized as the ‘purest’ Greek.34 language may coincide with some cultural practices and not with others: e.g. 4. 23. 2; 4. 106; 7. 70. 1. 34

e.g. Diogenes of Babylon SVF 3. 214. 13–14; cf. 3. 214. 20–1, with Versteegh 1986: 264–6; cf. Droysen 1836–43 with Momigliano 1970.

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Within Alexandrian claims to deWne, reWne, control, and propagate not only an Athenian or even a Greek cultural heritage, but the literary wisdom of the world, tensions emerge between restriction and receptiveness: the Library of Alexandria was to contain also Jewish scriptures, signiWcantly translated into Greek, commissioned by Ptolemy II according to the famous story of the origins of the so-called Septuagint.35 The process of claiming, codifying, and producing ‘Greek literature’ could certainly provide a focus for elite literary and social selfpositioning, competitiveness, and self-distancing, but Alexandrian literature also pulls out of ‘the Greek tradition’ kinds of plurality, divergence, multiple voices. A prime example of this phenomenon is the poetry of Theocritus, its use of a literary Doric dialect, its engagement with, and complication of, notions of urbane and rustic, the court and ‘ordinary people’, centre and periphery in the form of Alexandria and Syracuse. In Idyll 15, for example, we are invited to witness the Ptolemaic court’s festival of Adonis from the perspective of two studiedly ‘ordinary’ Syracusan women, Gorgo and Praxinoa. On one level, we might be expected to be amused by their mundane lifestyles, their complaints about the inadequacy of their husbands, their ‘Dorian’ speech signalled by a ‘local’s’ complaints. On another level, however, the poem plays complex games with literary criticism and reception that signal the breadth of the Greek literature (and, indeed, ethnic diversity) governed by the Alexandrian court: in some sense, Praxinoa and Gorgo play the role of the poet, Syracusan Theocritus, the signalled interplay of artiWce and realism suggesting the entry of the Syracusan mime to Alexandria.36 If Alexandrian grammarians concerned themselves above all with arguments about ‘correct’ Greek, their codiWcation and focus on language and culture is closely interlinked with a 35

NB: the importance of this story for Jewish/Christian authors, who are responsible for preserving it: Joseph. AJ 12. 4–7; cf. 1. 10 V.; Tert. Apol. 18. 5; Isid. Etym. 6. 4. 1–2; for other, contemporary indications of the globalizing pretensions of Alexandrian literary culture, see n. 75, below and Too 1998a: 125–6; for the Library in general, see Canfora 1986, a vivid if puzzling book. 36 e.g. Goldhill 1991: 216–23; Hunter 1996: 116–38. For acute comments on the poem’s dramatization of ethnic heterogeneity presided over by a single ruler, see Stephens 2003, esp. 243, 246–7, 255.

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much more general projection and reception of cultural prestige that had demonstrable social and even political eVects on nonGreek peoples of the Hellenistic world, particularly on those within, or in close proximity to, the Hellenistic kingdoms. This impact is well illustrated by the occasional appearance of a terminology of alien ‘Greekness’ in ‘barbarian’ contexts closely at the interface of the Greek political culture of the kingdoms and poleis. The fact that both examples are written in Greek provides an additional layer of commentary on the mechanics of cultural life in these contact zones. The conceptualization of Helle¯nismus as an undesirable, alien political–religious package is worked out in a notorious passage of 2 Maccabees, written in the second half of the second century, to which we shall return later in this chapter. However, already in the mid-third century, a camel-driver working between Syria and Philadelphia complained in a comparatively well-written Greek letter to Zenon that the latter’s agents were underpaying him, and that he was in danger of starving because of his inability helle¯nizein, by which he must surely mean something quite general, such as to behave as a Greek.37 The explicit conceptualization in culturally speciWc terms of the grounds of the man’s exclusion not just from privilege but from anything remotely resembling fair treatment suggests much about the possibility of understanding Greekness as primarily a marker of cultural and social status rather than of origins, something that can only have been encouraged by early exemption from the obol-tax for ‘Hellenes’ (as well as ‘Persians’) in Egypt.38 The mechanics of both becoming and being Greek are to be discerned in the post-classical self-consciousness implicit in fragments of school exercises, with their emphasis on absorption and ‘imitation’ of a Greek cultural heritage.39 37

P. Col. Zen. 2. 66 (tr. Bagnall and Derow 2004, no. 137). For the fascinating insights into Egyptian society provided by tax documents, see e.g. Clarysse 1992; D. Thompson 1997: 247–56. NB: ‘Greekness’ functions very diVerently in such zones from its place in e.g. south Italian society, suggesting much about the ‘imperial’ character of the Hellenistic kingdoms. 39 T. Morgan 1998: chs. 3–4; Cribiore 2001: 179–80 for the striking lack of reference to anything referring speciWcally to Egypt or Egyptian culture in local educational fragments, and chapter eight for complication of the notion of ‘imitation’ in rhetorical training. 38

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However, any assumptions that we might harbour about the homogeneity of Hellenistic literature in Greek are quickly challenged by the emergence of ‘barbarian’ self-accounts in Greek, which include such diverse examples as the post-Herodotean accounts of Berossus of Babylon and Manetho of Egypt, as well as Hellenistic Jewish writing such as 2 Maccabees and Daniel. Such examples suggest that the idea of Greek as the language of history and self-positioning in the Hellenistic world was broadly held. Above all, Greek seems to be perceived as the major language of a universal history, just as ‘Greek’ mythology had from earlier times been received as the conceptual ‘language’ of origins and placing oneself upon a world map.40 Nevertheless, there are some very interesting exceptions in the history of ancient Mediterranean literature, which include Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish scriptures, the (lost) Punic books of Mago on agriculture, and last, but not least, Latin literature.41 Roman interaction with the Greek poleis and culture of Magna Graecia is undoubtedly as old as the archaic period, while the story of the Tarentines mocking the halting Greek of the Roman ambassador L. Postumius Megellus in 282 bc was by the Augustan age a morality tale that played on familiar imperial themes of reversal of fortune, cultural receptiveness versus insularity, and (in this case) Greek ethnocentrism.42 Nevertheless, it is from the late third century that ‘Greek culture’ is demonstrably conceptualized as a single block, a ‘signiWcant other’ for Rome as in the religious example of ‘Graecus ritus’, and that the Greek language is demonstrably conceptualized as the major counterpart to Latin.43 As we have seen, the self-conscious ‘secondarity’ of Rome is a constant feature of early Roman literature in both Greek and Latin, and the complexity of self-positioning anticipates some of the strategies that 40

For ‘Greek’ myth and the beginnings of historical thought, see e.g. Curti 2002; cf. Dench 1995: ch. 1. 41 I consider the more plentiful examples of non-literary texts in neither Latin nor Greek that persist even within the Roman imperial period brieXy in § 4, below. 42 D.H. 19. 5; cf. Appian Samn. 7. 2; for the same story without reference to speaking Greek, see Val. Max. 2. 2. 5; Florus 1. 13. 4; Orosius 4. 1. 1; Dio fr. 39, 5–6; cf. Kaimio 1979: 95–6 for Valerius Maximus’ adaptation of the story to suit his own agenda of the avoidance of Greek in the senate. 43 Cf. Ch. 4, § 4, above.

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have been more closely studied in modern scholarship on the Second Sophistic. For example, Aulus Albinus’ apology for his Greek, as (in Aulus Gellius’ Latin rendering, raising linguistic issues of another age altogether) ‘homo Romanus natus in Latio, Graeca oratio a nobis alienissima est’ (‘being a Roman born in Latium, Greek speech is most foreign to me’), anticipates the signalling of cultural distance, a between-ness of cultures, an ability to play between cultures, that we will later Wnd in Lucian (as well as in Josephus, of course).44 Elsewhere the signalling of works as ‘translations’ from Greek is persistent and alerts the reader to the complex interplay of reception and innovation, of closeness and distance. But neither Roman preoccupation with ‘Greek’ cultural heritage nor our own scholarly history of regarding Roman culture as a poor imitation of Greek should blind us to the signiWcance of either the use of a language other than Greek to write literature or the description of this language as ‘Latin’: describing language as ‘Roman’ is rare in early texts.45 In respect of the former, the heterogeneity of language in Italy is an inadequate explanation of the adoption of Latin as the lingua franca of either literature or more general usage: if Roman authors were primarily concerned with expressing themselves in a broadly understood language, then Greek, well received as an international language of prestige within the Mediterranean, would be by far the most obvious choice.46 Rather, we should think of Gell. NA 11. 8. 3 ¼ fr. 15 Peter; for Cato’s mockery of the absurdity of Albinus’ apology see Polyb. 39. 12; for linguistic issues in Gellius, see Marache´ 1952; Holford-Strevens 1988. 45 For an exceptional 2nd-cent. depiction of language as ‘Roman’, see Enn. Ann. 471 (Sk.), with Sk.’s note ad. loc., ‘Hispane, non Romane, memoretis loqui me’: the context is most probably Roman diplomatic overtures in Spain; however, although Festus understood this as a reference to ‘the Roman language’ (p. 362 L.), it is much more probable that the sense is the manner of speech, meaning something like, ‘remember that I speak in the Spanish, rather than the Roman interest’, or ‘in the Spanish rather than the Roman manner’; we should certainly note the political nature of the fragment; for discussion of these issues as well as early examples of references to the Latin language, beginning with the epitaph of Naevius (fr. 64, Morel), see Poccetti 1999: 30–40; for the emphatic use of the formula lingua Romana from the mid-1st cent. bc, see Versteegh 1986, cf. n. 66, below. 46 Pace Poccetti 1999: 42–3. 44

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the use of Latin in literature as a deliberate choice that has to do with Roman imperial self-deWnition, a decisive non-Greek that may be used to emphasize the process of ‘translating’ the Greek cultural heritage: Rome is simultaneously a cultural heir of the Greek world and set at an angle, at a slight distance from that world, as beWts a new ruling Mediterranean power. The description of the language of Rome as ‘Latin’ evokes the ethnic Latinity of Rome, roots her in Italy and hints at Rome as an expandable concept, both in Latium and beyond, through her ‘colonies’.47 But if Roman Latinity can hint at her expansion, it can also already be used against other Latins as well as other Italian languages: while second-century Latin literature can reproduce accurately Oscan vocabulary and diVerent Latin accents, it can also, as we have seen, characterize even other Latins as ‘rustic’ or even barbarian.48 As we shall see, while such characterization has a profound impact on modes of selfpositioning, and even on the ‘survival’ and ‘loss’ of written local languages in Italy, it does not entail the end of plurality in selfrepresentation, the signalling of cultural distinctiveness: arguably, the prestige of Latin (like that of Greek, largely but not exclusively in the eastern Mediterranean) actively encourages its literary use precisely by the ‘new’, those whose urbanity and centrality is most questionable.49 47 The ancient theory of Latin as a dialect of Greek (cf. Gabba 1963) evokes a by now familiar mixture of heritage, kin, and distinctiveness. 48 Cf. Titin. Fr. 104 (Ribbeck) for a fragment of a togata play implying linguistic hierarchy: ‘Obsce et Volsce fabulantur, num Latine nesciunt.’ 49 References to literary works written in Italian languages other than Latin or Greek are very thin on the ground. Varro’s mention of Volnius, a writer of ‘Tuscan tragedies’ cited as an authority for original Roman tribal names (Titienses, Ramnenses, Luceres) as Etruscan names, at Ling. 5. 55: this enigmatic reference gives a fascinating insight into grammatical works that might challenge the apparent idiosyncrisy of Varro’s Sabinizing explanations. Nevertheless, it is, of course, not clear in what sense the tragedies were ‘Tuscan’: it is very doubtful that they were written in Etruscan. It may be worth comparing AlWus, author of a pro-Mamertine work, The Carthaginian War, who perhaps originated from an Oscan-speaking area: Festus 150L with E.T. Salmon 1967: 124 n. 4; Dench 1995: 56. For Cumae’s request to use Latin in public contexts, see Livy 40. 42. 13; e.g. Brunt 1965a: 93. NB: ‘Latinization’ of Italian languages does not inevitably point towards emulation of Rome: Campanile 1979. For the continued linguistic heterogeneity of Italy, see Horsfall 1997, 2001, particularly in terms for food, farming etc.

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The partially extant books (5–10) of Varro’s twenty-Wve book treatise On the Latin Language, presumably ‘published’ before the death of Cicero, constitute by far the longest grammatical account to survive from the late Republic. The middle decades of the Wrst century bc are a period in which specialist studies of Latin abounded, numerous grammatical treatises on the origins and ‘correct’ use of Latin. Little of these survive, but both fragments and mentions of these works in surviving literature suggest that they were more than recondite, academic studies written with reference only to the traditions and concerns of grammarians.50 Rather, they were clearly connected with much broader contemporary cultural and political concerns. Some, like Caesar’s On Analogy, were written by Roman ‘politicians’ themselves, while others, like Varro’s De Lingua Latina, Books 5–10, and On the Origins of the Latin Language, were dedicated to Roman ‘politicians’, to Cicero and to Pompey respectively.51 The partially extant books of the De Lingua Latina are eloquent on questions of Roman identity and her relationship with Italy, Greekness, and the Mediterranean world more broadly. As such, like other kinds of ‘specialist’ literature, they have been under-exploited as a source for enquiries about Roman selfperception.52 Varro’s earlier antiquarian work had been praised by Cicero in the Academica for the way in which it had taught the Romans ‘who had previously wandered like strangers in their city, who they were and where they came from’.53 For all the hyperbole of this statement, it suggests the importance of such antiquarian enquiry within the context of late Republican concerns. Books 5, 6, and 7 of the De Lingua Latina are particularly valuable as they are primarily concerned with etymology, and give actual examples, arranged by themes. Thus Book 5 is concerned with the names of places, Book 6 for words relating to time and its measurement, and Book 7 with poetic 50 For the fragments, see Funaioli 1969; for Latinity in the age of Caesar, Poccetti 1993. 51 Cf. De Latino sermone, written by Caesar’s teacher, M. Antonius Gniphon: Moatti 1997: 276. 52 For a diVerent treatment of Varro, see Bloomer 1997: ch. 2. 53 Cic. Acad. 1. 3. 9, with E. Rawson 1985: 236.

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words.54 Varro’s approach is to some extent in sympathy with notions of a ‘natural’ link between a thing and its name now associated with Stoic theories of language.55 However, he is very interested in the fact that diVerent languages have diVerent names for things: for example, in a passage from Book 9, he juxtaposes Greek, Syrian, and Latin names.56 Most importantly for our purposes, he emphasizes the plural basis of Latin, a theory inextricably linked to views of Roman history and Roman identity. For example, Latin was composite from its very beginnings, and in fact tripartite, being made up of Latin, Sabine, and Aeolian. Varro uses the metaphor of linguistic ‘roots’ when positing plural origins for the names of certain gods, which have ‘roots in both languages’ (in this case, Latin and Sabine), ‘like trees which have sprung up on a boundary line and creep about in both Welds’. In addition to the sense of the original physical closeness of Latin and Sabine, we should note the provocative use of the formula utraque lingua, most usually used to denote Greek and Latin. Varro’s emphatic positioning of Sabine is already clear.57 He has a general tendency to prefer Sabine as is clearest in his list of the origins of the names of the gods. Amongst his claims of Sabine derivation, the most peculiar by either ancient or modern criteria are the names Minerva, Fons, Fortuna, Vulcan, and Vertumnus.58 Sabine is also a ‘bridge’ into other languages: at 7. 28, Varro is explicit that Sabine begat Oscan. It is worth comparing Varro’s perception of Sabine with other contemporary or near-contemporary hints that, at least 54

For detailed accounts of Varro’s particular etymological theories, see especially Collart 1954; la Penna 1976; for a useful summary, see Fox 1996: 245. 55 As we have seen in the context of Plato’s Cratylus, which engages with earlier but broadly similar theories, the consequences for broader world views of selves and other peoples are not necessarily explored. 56 Varr. Ling. 9. 34; E. Rawson 1985: 126. 57 Ibid. 5. 74; cf. 73. 58 The diYculties experienced by modern archaeologists in identifying distinctive Sabine cultural traits can scarcely be overestimated: see e.g. Dench 1995: 157–8 with bibliography. The major work on Sabine cults, Evans 1939, is of course very dated now: her approach, which entails judging the likelihood of Sabine origins from historical attestation in the Sabine territory, is obviously problematic.

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from the late Wrst century, Sabine identity could be imagined to ‘stand in’ for other, more newly incorporated peoples. For example, the coinage of the ‘ethnic’ Sabellus seems to ‘draw in’ the more newly Roman Samnites as well, while Livy’s account of the rape of the Sabine women seems to incorporate more general features of Roman ‘imperialism’ in Italy.59 In other words, we should perhaps not see Varro’s interest in Sabine as a preoccupation peculiar to himself. Rather, we should see it as part of a more general contemporary interest in the symbolic quality of Sabine identity at precisely the time when the eVects of the political incorporation of Italy were most keenly felt.60 More speciWcally, Varro might be seen to move towards the ‘rehabilitation’ of Oscan-speaking Italy that will be most clearly visible in the Augustan period, with the entry of upper-class individuals from these regions to the Roman senate. Varro is exceptionally interested in changes and development in the language, apparently rather more so than were his contemporaries. His theories of the composite nature of the origins of Latin are of course in keeping with widespread ‘historical’ views about the composite ‘ethnic’ nature of Rome’s beginnings. We have already contrasted the respective theories and emphases of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in this respect, both writing within a few decades of the completion of On the Latin Language. Varro’s perception of the connection between history and language is clearest in, for example, his explanation of the term Quirites on the basis of the name of the Curenses, who came to Rome with king Tatius in societatem . . . civitatis, ‘in partnership over the state/citizenship’.61 Varro’s interesting and apparently original views of the ongoing development of Latin seem similarly to reXect views of the history of Rome itself, and in particular its ‘openness’ to inXux and inXuence. For all this, however, the perception of a ‘correct’ use of Latin remains important in Varro, and his concerns are very contemporary ones. For example, he worries about linguistic 59 Cf. Pascucci 1979 on the role of Sabine as a ‘mediator’ of Greek and Etruscan. For the ‘ethnic’ Sabellus, see Dench 1995: App. B; for the rape, cf. Introduction, above. 60 Cf. Horsfall 2000 for Vergil’s catalogue of Italian heroes drawing in peoples who do not play a part in the traditional foundation stories of Rome. 61 Varr. Ling. 5. 68.

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innovation in the naming of luxury goods such as jewellery and slaves, and uses the image of the ‘corruption’ of language.62 In this respect, there are some comparisons with Livy’s theories of Roman history, within which ‘openness’ has historically been both a cause of success and the harbinger of doom.63 Varro’s comments on the development of Latin after the origins of Rome are in themselves interesting and revealing, particularly when he comes to treat ‘foreign’ words, which can include the vocabulary of Italian languages other than Greek, Latin, and Sabine. Early on in Book 5, when he is addressing the problem of the origin of words, his etymological explanations require that he divides up words in Roman use into three categories: ‘nostra’—‘our words’; ‘aliena’—‘other peoples’ words’; and ‘oblivia’—words out of contemporary everyday usage.64 ‘Our words’ are, in this context, Latin (Latin in its earliest, composite, manifestation), but not necessarily Latin as spoken and written currently in Rome. Etymological research into the origins of Latin words may require Weldwork in Latium, in order to shed light on origins which are obscured by contemporary Roman pronunciation.65 On the subject of ‘aliena’ words, Varro has plenty to say, although the distinction between ‘our’ words and ‘other people’s words’ is sometimes drawn by a refusal to discuss the etymology of a ‘foreign’ word. For example, in a discussion of rivers in the context of a longer treatment of place-names, the name for the river Tiber is debatable (is it Etruscan, derived from the name of Thebris, chief of the Veians, or is it Latin, after Tiberinus?) while the Samnite Volturnus is labelled ‘Samnite’ and simply not discussed further. Rather interestingly, however, the place-names derived from the rivers, Volturnum and Tiberinus, have ‘become’ Latin: words, like people, can acquire Latin (or perhaps rather Roman?) status.66 62

63 64 Ibid. 9. 21–2. Cf. Miles 1986, 1995. Ling. 5. 10. e.g. Ling. 5. 21. 66 Ibid. 5. 29; NB: Volturnum is styled ‘our colony’, apparently highlighting the ‘Romanization’ of this town. Cf. Versteegh 1986 for the signiWcance of the formula lingua Romana (as opposed to lingua Latina), which seems to be used emphatically from the end of the 1st cent. bc, perhaps highlighting the new politics of culture based on an increasingly far-Xung Roman citizenship, and an increasingly culturally self-conscious Roman empire. 65

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Varro’s neat divisions into ‘our words’ and ‘other peoples’ words’ do not prevent him from building up a theory of Latin that is every bit as permeable as the Roman citizenship was becoming by the time of writing. The Latin language as used in Rome is highly interactive, made by Varro to reveal her ‘imperialist’ past and her present status not just as the centre of the world, but as physically embodying elements, primarily from Italy, but from much of the rest of the known world as well. Varro glides easily from the migration of individuals to change in the linguistic landscape of Rome. For example, it is the arrival in Rome of the ‘noble Etruscan leader’, Caeles Vibenna, which occasions the naming of the vicus Tuscus, ‘Etruscan Street’. This is part of his topographical tour of Rome in Book 5, which retrojects Roman ethnic and linguistic pluralism to her very origins. For example, the Tarpeian Rock named after Tarpeia, killed for treachery by the Sabines; the Aventine possibly named after Aventinus the Alban, or maybe after the ‘adventus’ of Latins sharing rights to the temple of Diana; the Argei after the Argive companions of Hercules; the Palatine perhaps after the Pallantes, companions of Evander, or perhaps after Palatium, the Reatine district of Sabinum, or perhaps after Palanto, the wife of Latinus.67 Regarding more recent history, Rome’s imperial past and present status as a world capital are revealed also in names. They are revealed in the sausages named ‘Lucanica’, whose name ‘barely conceals’ the fact that Roman soldiers learned the recipe from Lucanians, and the arrival of the camelus himself in Rome, bringing with him his Syrian name.68 In Quintilian’s signiWcantly later work, the analogy between Roman political and cultural history and the history of Latin that is implicit in Varro is made concrete and explicit. In the later work, foreign words come into Rome of their own free will, as do men. Certainly, this idea builds on earlier associations, such as the punning conceit of urbs and orbis that emerges in the late Republic. However, the conceit in Quintilian is best seen against a background of the developing interest in the Roman citizenship as ‘universal’ from the age of Claudius.69 67

68 Ling. 5. 46, 41, 43, 45, 53. Ibid. 10. 111, 100. Quintilian 10. 1. 5. 3; 1. 5. 55–8; for a useful discussion of Varro and Quintilian in the context of Roman ‘openness’, see Moatti 1997: 276. 69

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While Varro’s investigations of Latin write the contributions of other peoples into the history of the language in ways that sometimes compare closely with a more ‘inclusive’ rewriting of Rome’s history by contemporary authors, his focus remains very Romanocentric. For example, while Varro is happy to claim to investigate the roots of Latin words—and indeed of customs and practices—in Latium and amongst the Sabines, these areas are seen eVectively as museums preserving bygone usage at Rome. On the other hand, his investigations of ‘foreign’ words reveal a curiosity that extends only to their ‘consumption’ at Rome.70 For example, when Varro wants to know about Oscan, he goes to the Atellan farces, and picks up his information from the names of the characters, and, apparently, the odd dialect word.71 It is doubtful that there was anything authentically ‘Oscan’ about the farces by Varro’s time. We might want rather to compare this ‘research’ with the reconstruction of the garb of Samnite warriors from that of the socalled ‘Samnite’ gladiators popular in contemporary Rome, ‘Weldwork’ of the kind apparently undertaken by Livy.72 These are, of course, both interesting examples of Roman reception and promotion of self-consciously ‘foreign’ aspects of culture in the late Republic. 4. ROMAN LITERATURES IN CONTEXT As we have seen, one ironic eVect of Hellenistic emphasis on the cultural capital of the Greek literary past is the emergence of ‘barbarian literatures’. These include the accounts of Berossus and Manetho, critics and correctors of ‘Greek’ interpretations of their worlds, and especially that of Herodotus, who present themselves as local priestly authorities. The distinctive voices of Berossus and Manetho are heirs in part of the exercises in ventriloquy that are to be found in classical Greek literature, 70 e.g. Ling. 5. 85 for use of term fratria as a division of people; 10. 123 for the vasa vinaria ‘even now’ placed on the tables of the gods at Sabine festivals. For the centripetal nature of Rome, cf. Strabo’s treatment of goods: K. Clarke 1999a: 219–26, cf. Ch. 1, above. 71 e.g. 7. 29, 84; for the Atellan farces, a distinctively Italian, and self-consciously rustic form of drama, see Frassinetti 1953. 72 Samnite gladiators at 10. 142.

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including such examples as Euripides’ ‘Medea’, an embodiment of a deliberately ‘alternative’ female and barbarian perspective, or, more directly still, Herodotus’ Egyptian priests, introduced as ‘witnesses’, as ‘proofs’ of the error of ‘Greek’ versions of Egyptian history.73 As these forensic metaphors suggest, this ventriloquy is encouraged by the central importance of rhetoric, with its emphasis on the creation of multiple persuasive arguments representing diVerent perspectives, within the cultural, social and political life of Athens from the mid-Wfth century. Herodotus’ authoritative Egyptian priests are also embodiments of the ‘alien wisdom’ that is a striking feature of speciWcally Greek ethnocentrism, including the attribution to ‘barbarians’ of a special closeness to the gods (an aspect of their primitivism), traditions on the travels of Greek sages, and the notion of the priority of other peoples in making cultural discoveries, such as writing.74 While, then, there was in classical Greek literature considerable interest in both representing other cultural perspectives and linking ‘Greek’ thought and culture back to that of other peoples, it was, as we have seen, Ptolemaic Alexandria that was claimed to house a physical assemblage of written wisdom, ‘all the books in the inhabited world’—translated into Greek, of course. The Alexandrians allegedly styled themselves ‘the educators of all Greeks and barbarians’.75 The allusion here to the Athens of Thucydides’ Pericles emphasizes the promotion of Alexandria as cultural centre of the world and representative of the prestige of Greek culture, rather than any more literalminded aspiration to practical instruction. What is important here is the social and even political premium placed on culture and education. While we can only sketch in very general terms the mechanics of learning Greek and, rather more importantly, becoming ‘educated’ in the Hellenistic world, what is noteworthy in evidence for both educational theory and its practice is the reverence for ‘classical texts’, to be memorized and written out, the frequent recurrence of particular works such as the 73

On this aspect of Medea, see the judicious account in Allan 2002: Ch. 3. E. Hall 1989: 211–12; 1992; the classic on ‘alien wisdom’ in the Hellenistic period is of course Momigliano 1975. 75 Aristeas Ep. 9 ¼ Euseb. Praep. Eu. 8. 2. 2; Andron FGH 246 F1 ¼ Athen. 184b; Whitmarsh 2001: 8–9. 74

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epics of Homer, and an emphasis on ethical maxims distilled from ‘classical texts’.76 But it is always important to emphasize the gap between what is taught and what is learned, the complexity of the relationship between any text and its ‘models’: even and especially in antiquity such complexities were well recognized, and these issues are particularly germane to the self-consciously post-classical culture of both the Hellenistic world in general and the Roman Republic and early empire. We might think further of the selfplacing of Berossus’ Babyloniaca and Manetho’s Aegyptiaca as well as their reception in later literary tradition.77 As I have already begun to suggest, while both make heavy use of their credentials as local authorities, as priests like those introduced as ‘witnesses’ in Herodotus’ account, they engage closely with both Greek ethno-geographical frameworks and Greek discussion of both the priority of civilizations and the ‘succession of empires’. By casting themselves as embodiments of the ‘alien wisdom’ that is in itself a feature of Greek ethnocentrism, such works, along with some Hellenistic Jewish works, play up the role of their own civilizations as the ancestors of Greek culture: no fundamental questions are asked about an essentially Greek scheme of world history.78 For example, the ‘king-lists’ that are attested in a number of fragments of both Berossus and Manetho are, in chronological terms and in the varieties of myth with which they begin, oV the ‘Greek’ historical chart; on the other hand, such accounts were already ‘naturalized’ within the Greek historiographical tradition by Herodotus’ very inXuential account of Egyptian kings.79 Ame´lie Kuhrt’s persuasive argument that these works, like Hecataeus of Abdera’s Aegyptiaca, were written not in ‘resistance’ to the Hellenistic 76

T. Morgan 1998: Chs. 3–4; Cribiore 2001: chs. 5–8. See, in general, Burstein 1978; Verbrugghe and Wickersham 1996. Eddy 1961 emphasizes ‘resistance’ much more than I would wish to. 78 Cf. Gruen 1993; cf. Millar 1997. Interestingly, such accounts preWgure Afrocentrist historians’ curious acceptance of a traditional European preoccupation with western and classical civilization. 79 Berossus FGH 680 F 3–13; Manetho FGH 609 F 3a–15; Hdt. 2. 99 V.; for the length of near Eastern genealogies, see Drews 1965. The largely Jewish and Christian provenance of the fragments of these historians arguably exaggerates the ‘near-eastern’ character of their writing, such as it is, due to their interest in locating references to Jews and correspondences to biblical history. 77

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kingdoms of Antiochus I and the Ptolemies, but in part to suggest that these monarchies could be seen as a continuation of the best traditions of local dynastic rules and culture, powerfully conveys the particular dynamics of the ‘contact zone’.80 The afterlife of Berossus and Manetho includes fantasies about Berossus setting up a school of astrology on Cos and fathering the Campanian Sybil, while references to these works are restricted more or less exclusively to Jewish and Christian writings alongside those of other ‘barbarian’ histories, of which very little survives.81 We can sense here both the limitations of literary ‘globalization’, the unlikelihood of even the most ‘Hellenized’ of ‘barbarian’ authors entering the mainstream, and the coexistence of parallel traditions with distinctive cultural perspectives on a more or less shared perception of world history. In marked contrast, we have already considered the ways in which early Roman literature claims and controls the ‘secondarity’ of Roman identity, her sometimes oblique relationship to the Greek world. Thus, for example, the Trojan opponents of Pyrrhus the descendant of Achilles are made to reverse the fortunes of the Trojan War, while Rome’s ‘barbarian’ status is explicitly one of the poles of comedy in Plautus’ self-conscious ‘translation’ of Greek ‘models’. But Roman literary and cultural production was itself from an early date imagined to be directly related to her overseas imperial conquests, to issues of power and hegemony. The question of whether Rome should be perceived primarily as military conqueror or as conquered by culture was pondered from an early date. Horace’s notorious paradox of ‘captured Greece’ that had itself ‘captured its untamed victor and brought arts into rustic Latium’ is already anticipated by a fragment of Porcius Licinus from the late second century bc, where the Muse intulit se ‘brought herself 80 Kuhrt 1987; for other ‘barbarian’ histories of the Near East, see e.g. Josephus AJ 1. 107; Tertull. Apol. 19. 4–6. 81 e.g. Berossus FGH 680, T1a–b; T5; T8; T12. I am not at all convinced that the distinction between a ‘true’, or primary, Babylonian Berossus, writer of history and a ‘fake’, or secondary, Berossus of Cos, writer of astrological lore, is either necessary or desirable, since the lives of even the most solidly ‘Greek’ of writers (for which, see Lefkowitz 1981) can tend towards the fantastical and the contradictory. Graeco-Roman fantasies about Babylon and Babylonian lore are surely at work here.

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to’, or indeed ‘invaded’ Rome in the second Punic War, bellicosam: the poet leaves hanging the question of whether it is the Muse or Rome that is ‘bellicose’.82 These ambivalences should be seen in a long tradition of ancient discourse on ‘empires’, on the tense relationship between imperial success and culture that may so quickly turn to decadence, and indeed on the deliberate introduction of civilization—or luxury—as part of the process of ‘taming’ a people within one’s power, from Herodotus’ lyreplaying, frock-wearing, shop-keeping Lydians to Tacitus’ Britons, who, with Agricola’s active encouragement, take to rhetoric, togas, and the vices of civilization.83 In Roman engagement with this traditional range of ideas, we should note that the identiWcation of civilization/luxury with literary culture is speciWc to Rome, while the double process of conquest and ‘invasion’, along with the projection of a simple and rustic past, suggests the possibility that this civilization is as much alien and potentially alienable as it is an ‘internalized’ part of Rome. If we look beyond the personiWcation of abstract ‘literary culture’ in second-century Rome, we might think in more literal terms of the extent to which Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean ‘captured’ Greek literate culture, in terms of philosophers, poets, and historians brought to Rome as slaves, or captives, or otherwise waylaid in Rome.84 But any epigrammatic polarization of ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ quickly breaks down when we look a little closer, highlighting the symbolic importance of such a formula, which no more accurately describes a process than the formulae ‘Greek’ rite or ‘Greek’ dress describe cultural practices that self-evidently pre-date or exist outside of the peculiar dynamics of the Roman conquest and rule of mainland Greece. Thus, for example, a Greek history of Rome can be written by Fabius Pictor, a member of one of the oldest Roman families, while Livius Andronicus and Ennius, whose epics were henceforth canons of Latin literature, came not from ‘Greece’ but from south Italy. The potentially 82 Hor. Ep. 2. 1. 156–7; Porcius Licinus fr. 1 FPL; Whitmarsh 2001: 9–12; the imagery of ‘invasion by culture’ in the use of the verb inferre is common to both passages. 83 Hdt. 1. 155; Tac. Agr. 21; cf. Ch. 1, § 7, above. 84 On the motif of the ‘accidental’ acquisition of culture at Rome, see Bloomer 1997: 38–40.

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complex juxtaposition of political and linguistic identities that could be conveyed by Greek literary learning within the context of Roman Italy is suggested both by Ennius’ fragmentary reference to his linguistic ‘three hearts, Greek, Oscan, and Latin’, and by his proclamation that ‘we are Romans who were once Rudini’.85 In the latter example, we should note that Roman identity is imagined to supersede that of Rudiae: we should note the overtly political sense of ‘becoming Roman’ here. In the former example, however, by implication ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ Roman coexists with multiple ‘local’ cultural identities, diVering in their prestige, and preWgures themes of identity that are brought to the foreground in, particularly, some Greek literature of the Roman imperial period. In terms of the shape of Roman society in the second century bc, literary culture, in the form of both books and practitioners, was ‘collected’ both in the circles of great houses and in cultural institutions with prominent patrons such as the Aedes Herculis Musarum, a signiWcant ‘transportation’ of ‘Greek’ Muses to Rome.86 Plutarch pursues his interest in the formative aspect of education in his biographies of second-century Roman Wgures such as the Gracchi, formed by the inXuence and care of their widowed mother Cornelia, once courted by Ptolemy, and by Diophanes the rhetor and Blossius the philosopher. Cicero’s ironic treatment in the mouth of ‘Scaevola’ of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ use of their ‘education’, an idealizing Ciceronian combination of birthright and the best that money could buy, in order to ‘ruin’ the Republic, is echoed in the more generally mixed reception of traditions on the brothers, with one foot in the ‘traditional’ austerity of the middle Republic, and one in the self-consciously sophisticated ‘modern’ history of Rome.87 Cicero’s De Oratore, as we have seen, should be understood within the context of an intense Wrst-century bc Roman interest in the ‘naturalization’ of rhetoric—as well as philosophy, with which rhetoric is intimately connected—that follows the beginnings of Roman epic, history, drama, and poetry in the late third and second centuries bc. What we see here in part is the 85 86 87

Gell. 17, 17, 1 ¼ Enn. Operis incerti fragmenta I (Sk.); Ann. 524 (Sk.). Horsfall 1976; White 1982; Gold 1987: ch. 2. Plut. Ti. and C. Gracch. 1. 4–5; 8. 4–5; Cic. De Or. 1. 38.

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translation, both literal and Wgurative, of Greek linguistic and rhetorical theory into Latin and the socio-political world of Rome, a translation that encourages the beginnings of a selfconsciously Roman rhetorical history based on examples from the past, and debates over issues of the uses of such enquiry, their ‘practical’ applications or their association with ‘leisure’: the debate is framed in the familiar, peculiarly Roman terms of self-deWnition and interpretation of ‘Greek’ culture.88 But also relevant to the context of such enquiry is profound social and political change that is implied by the fact that it is in the course of the Wrst century bc that the study of grammar is moved outside the environment of the individual wealthy and aspirant household, and becomes increasingly formalized, prescriptive and conservative in tone with its emphasis on basing early education on ‘classical’ literature and ‘correct’ language.89 The movement of even early education away from the family, and the prescriptive and conservative tone of works on grammar with their emphasis on ‘correct’ speech highlights the fact that this is a period of dynamic change regarding the geographical and social make-up of an increasingly mobile elite. In older modern works, the oratorical training in particular is sometimes imagined to be a ‘qualiWcation’ for membership of the Roman elite, something akin to a modern vocational diploma or degree. It is, however, preferable to imagine oratorical training, along with educatedness in general, as being regarded as an indicator of ‘class’, the deliberate fostering of what ideally should come by birthright, not least speech-accent and ‘urbanity’, to be displayed in rhetorical exercises, in conversation, or in the writing of letters or literature.90 It is the abstraction of a sense of ancestral values from the domain of individual noble families that Bloomer has posited as one of the major driving forces of Valerius Maximus’ collection of themed exemplarity written under Tiberius, but in a more general sense this story of the 88

89 See e.g. Cic. Tusc. 1. 1–7. Kaster 1988: 153–4. For continued emphasis on birthright, albeit with modiWcations, see ps.Plutarch De Liberis Educandis 1–2d, 5d, with Whitmarsh 2001: 98; cf. also the emphasis on close parental involvement (not least that of the mother) in idealizing accounts of ‘education’: e.g. Tac. Dial. 28–9; Quint. 1. 4–11; Plut. Cat. Mai. 20. 2–6, including the extraordinary story of Cato’s wife breastfeeding slave children to bond them to her own son, a quasi-blood relationship. 90

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changing politics of memory goes back to the beginnings of Roman historiography.91 In this context, we can note Pliny’s habitual inclusion of ‘educatedness’ in his very generic ‘letters of recommendation’: the candidate is, or has become, ‘one of us’.92 Of course to claim to be educated was also to up the stakes of the competition: accents, even those of emperors, were fair game, while it is commonplace in rhetorical works to sneer at contemporary taste, contemporary culture, at actors, horses, and gladiators.93 Quintilian’s particular concern that, ‘if possible, both our words and our voice should give us the scent of an oVspring of the city, so that our speech may seem to be absolutely Roman, not just given to us by our citizenship’ is remarkable testimony to the fear of detection, the desirability of mimicking birthright through education.94 If, however, the ideals of Roman ‘educatedness’ were ‘centralizing’ in their increasingly artiWcial focus on the urbs and its ancient history, arguably rhetorical training invited the inversion of norms, encouraging the creation of the persona of the new man, and even experiments on the part of L. Cotta in appropriating a ‘rustic’ accent. The poetry of Catullus elides the oppositional poetics of Alexandrian Callimachus, with a premium on learning lightly handled, and the Roman language of urbanity with its emphasis on taste, accent, and table-manners. In appropriating the studiedly personal voice of Greek lyric, the poems also construct an intimate and ‘realistic’ world that is ‘about’ both love and love poetry, both poetics and politics and society. ‘Catullus’ ’ claims to arbitrate on questions of urbanity exploit the irony of a studiedly dislocated persona strung out between towns of north Italy, Rome, and the Greek world. The persona of Catullus sets up a peculiar intimacy with the reader, but we should certainly consider the importance of foregrounding a complicated authorial persona in Roman literature of the late Republic and early empire much more gen91

92 Bloomer 1992; Flower 2003. Wallace-Hadrill 1983: 26–9. For Hadrian’s accent, see SHA 3. 1: when Hadrian is laughed at for reading Trajan’s speech in the senate agrestius pronuntians, ‘with a rather rustic pronunciation’, he goes oV and works hard on his Latin; popular pursuits from which students of rhetoric are to be discouraged: e.g. Tac. Dial. 29; Quintilian 1. 3. 8–12 for the place of play and leisure, inside and outside the classroom. 94 Quint. 8. 1. 2. 93

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erally, in the self-consciously personal stance of elegy, but also in the writing of history, geography, and other kinds of ‘technical’ works. Both the ‘personal’ voice of the elegist and the ‘authoritative’ voice of the geographer or historian can serve to complicate perspectives on the ‘Roman’ world that is being written, and the interplay of, and tension between, the ‘global’, Roman world and local perspectives—that of the authorial persona, or speaking characters—is a recurrent feature that only becomes more striking as the sole power comes under one ruler.95 Examples range from Propertius’ introduction of a stark, Umbrian perspective on the civil war that created Roman monarchy, the ‘personalization’ of the poetics of epic and anti-epic, to the unsettling and destabilizing eVect of Tacitus’ speaking barbarians and their acute criticism of empire.96 5. R O M A N L IT E R A T UR E S : C A T U L L US AND JOSEPHUS Two case-studies, one on Catullus, a Transpadane-Roman writing in Latin in the late Republic, and one on Josephus, a ‘Hellenized’ Jew writing in Greek, paraded as his non-native language, during the Flavian period, will illustrate some of the peculiarities of Roman literatures.97 I have chosen these examples partly because the explicit interplay between perceived ‘local’ and ‘centralizing’ perspectives, in the form of what are signalled as ‘Roman’ world-views and/or ‘Greek’ mythological and historical traditions, accounts of origins that are fundamental for the conceptualization of ethnic identities in the ancient world, is very important in the works of both authors. I also intend the juxtaposition to be provocative, to beg questions about how far it is appropriate to place late Republican and early imperial Italy on the same spectrum as the provinces of the Roman empire when we are exploring questions about the relationship between local and Roman identities. There are obvious dangers in pushing this idea too far, and in fact one of the more useful outcomes of such a comparative exercise is that 95

K. Clarke 1997; cf. Hardie 1993, xi. Prop. 1. 21–2; 4. 1, esp. ll. 61–70, 121–34. 97 For romantic fantasies about Catullus’ passionate, Celtic personality, if not his language, see e.g. Highet 1957: 6. 96

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it highlights the peculiarities of each context. Josephus’ representation of his multifaceted identity, as a Jewish priest who had been educated in Greek, who played an important role in the Jewish revolt of ad 66–73, and who was granted the Roman citizenship by Vespasian for services rendered, raises problems of compatibility, of loyalty. Historically heightened ethnic and cultural consciousness of what it was to be Jewish could sit uncomfortably with being and becoming Roman, with parading a Greek education, while allegiance to Jerusalem, or even at some times observance of the Jewish Law, could be read as subversion, as anti-Roman activity. Catullus’ representations of snobbery, taste, and status, political lampoon of prominent Roman individuals, the game of Xeecing provincials, write a very diVerent world that is remote from the experience of being ruled. And yet in ‘twinning’ Catullus and Josephus, we can also see more clearly the strangeness of the perspectives on local identity with which Catullus is so obviously playing. The poems of Catullus can be read as reXections on the relationship between local and Roman identities which are ultimately rather diVerent from Cicero’s reductive formulation in the Laws of two patriae, with the local patria relegated to second place, behind Rome which is owed allegiance unto death.98 In the poems of Catullus, the relationship with Rome is represented as being more directly embodied in the local self-image (and vice versa) than ever before in Roman literature. One striking feature of literature of the last decades of the Republic and of the early principate is the idea that a Roman identity is superimposed directly upon, and intrudes within, a local Italian identity. This phenomenon bears some relationship to some later second-century bc conceptualizations of identity. For example, Lucilius’ satire on Albucius, who supposedly preferred to be greeted in Greek, juxtaposes the double nature of his ‘real’ identity as ‘Romanum atque Sabinum’ (‘Roman and Sabine’). In this case, the ethnic ‘Sabine’ seems to act as an intensiWer, to root Albucius all the more Wrmly in a comparatively humble and emphatically home-grown, Italian context.99 98 99

Cic. Leg. 2. 2. 5; cf. Ch. 2, § 3, above. Lucil. 88–94 M. with Dench 1995, 92–3.

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It is no accident that it is the ethnic ‘Sabine’ that appears Wrst in surviving literary fragments as a ‘modiWcation’ of ‘Roman’, since the Sabines constituted an early paradigm in Roman thought of a foreign people incorporated en masse.100 It is this phenomenon that we see explored more broadly from the late Wrst century bc. SpeciWc local Italian identities are played with in a number of poems of Catullus. In fact, Poem 1, the dedicatory poem of the (or a) book, seems to emphasize Italian identity in what most scholars read as a gently teasing address to Cornelius Nepos as unus Italorum, ‘the only one of the Italians’, to have thought Catullus’ nugae—his ‘triXes’—to be worth something, an interesting and signiWcant use of Italus applied to an individual. The use of the ethnic ‘Italus’ (or ‘Italicus’) to describe people— selves or others—or ‘culture’ in the later second and Wrst centuries bc frequently has a loaded meaning, either because it has been chosen as signiWcantly not quite a synonym for the more usual ‘Romanus’ (or, in some contexts, ‘Latinus’), or because it stands emphatically in opposition, or as a counterpoint to ‘Romanus’. Thus, for example, ‘Italian’ traders on Delos in the later second century bc described themselves alternatively as Rhomaioi or Italikoi/Italici, and the choice of label seems to be partly connected to the language of the inscription and partly to considerations of how to designate groups of traders on the one hand and individuals on the other. Above all, as has long been noted, the tendency of Greek, single-language inscriptions to refer even to an individual who was apparently not a Roman citizen as a Rhomaios suggests the comparative desirability and prestige of being Roman within a Greek political and cultural context. This is suggested by the collective Greek formula on Delos of ‘Athenians, Romans, and other Greeks’. On the other hand, groups of Roman and Italian traders tend to be 100

There are limited comparisons to be made with hyphenated identities in late 20th/early 21st-cent. US formulae such as ‘Italian-American’, ‘AfricanAmerican’, but we should note the particularities of both ‘race’ and social class in the USA that are very diVerent from ‘class’ dynamics within Roman society: hyphenation is rarely paraded in the highest social circles, while one large, almost entirely working-class, sometimes conspicuously unassimilated (and non-English-speaking) group, Hispanics, do not appear to merit the hyphenation of ‘American’ at all.

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designated by the collective Italikoi/Italici, while plural Rhomaioi are the embodiment of the Roman political state, the Roman people rather than a non-political group of traders.101 If ‘Italia’ in a geographical, religious, and imperial sense that extended potentially up to the Alps was a Roman invention, Italia or Italica or (in Oscan) Viteliu were to be claimed as an emphatically unRoman and even anti-Roman slogan by the central Apennine insurgents during the Social War, while a Roman coin probably of 70 bc was to personify ‘Roma’ and ‘Italia’ as separate individuals joined in a handshake. From the late Wrst century bc, as we have seen, there is increasing emphasis on evocations of an expansive, variegated Italia in stylized laudes, or the evocation of Rome as rooted in an often rustic and morally upright, and sometimes an emphatically non-foreign Italian past: in both cases, the identiWcation of Rome with Italy may reveal tensions, antipathy, a lack of Wt.102 Such ideological experiments in reconceptualizing Roman identity are to be contrasted with the tendency of individuals to focus on ‘tribal’ or town identities, those that qualify and give a distinctive edge to the Roman status that they share with other ‘Italians’. But for Transpadana in the middle of the Wrst century bc, the situation is clearly diVerent, and Cornelius Nepos seems to have written erudite accounts of Transpadane mythological origins, dredging up a proud, respectably Hellenistic heritage for north Italy, thus putting this region on the map of civilization, and writing it into Roman Italy. He is perhaps being gently prodded here for his distinctive, north Italian pride in being newly a part of Roman Italy, as distinct from Gaul.103 Catullus’ poems are often located in the north in precisely this very newly ‘Italian’ region beyond the River Po, in locations such as Verona, Sirmio, and Brixia. This was clearly the region of the historical Catullus’ own origo, although the impressive and romantic ruins of a villa at Sirmione, the so-called Grotte di Catullo, are to be considered as a case-study in the romantic quest for the ‘real’ Catullus, the making of local le101 Adams 2003: 651–58; Solin 1982: 114, 116; cf. Gabba 1973b: 208–18; Hatzfeld 1919: 242 V. 102 See Ch. 3, § 4, above. 103 Wiseman 1987: 324–34; cf. Horsfall 1982.

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gend, rather than as any kind of biographical evidence.104 The poems also engage with Italy and Italians south of the Po. For example, stereotypes of Italian peoples are manipulated in Poem 39, a list to which the Transpadanes are added, in contrast (on one level, at least) to the foul Spaniard who grins after brushing his teeth with his own urine; the napkin-stealing Asinius is emphatically, and perhaps ironically, Marrucine in the Wrst line of Poem 12; ‘Catullus’ hopes at the beginning of Poem 44 that his farm will be denoted Tiburtine rather than Sabine; the deluded and shagged-out Amaena, girlfriend of the ‘decoctor’ of Formiae, has an unenviable cameo role as the rival of ‘Lesbia’ in Poems 41 and 43. Modern scholars of Latin literature have traditionally been embarrassed by the Italian references in the poems of Catullus. This is in stark contrast to treatments of the Hellenism of the poems, which is considered either in the context of poetics and literary traditions, or as part and parcel of the ‘real’ culture and outlook of mid-Wrst-century Rome.105 When it comes to the Italian references, however, the treatment tends to be rather diVerent. For example, Ross compiled a list of ‘places to which no special poetic signiWcance should be attached’, such as Sirmio, Bithynia, and ‘Colonia’, presumably on the grounds that we are in the realms of ‘autobiography’ rather than ‘art’.106 Fordyce was apparently more baZed still: he suggested that, ‘the provincial side of Catullus’ life, and allusions to local scenes, personalities and scandals may well have been as obscure to a Roman reader as they are to us’, which sounds something like despair.107 While the more traditional literary scholar may wish to pass over the Italian references in the poems of Catullus, the approach of his or her historian counterpart is, at Wrst sight, rather diVerent. Traditionally, historians have been happy to identify individuals and explain allusions to incidents and practices, to correlate events mentioned in poems with ‘reality’. In other words, what the traditional literary scholar excludes on the 104 For the likelihoods of Catullus’ own family background, see Wiseman 1985a; for the ruins at Sirmione, see e.g. Wiseman 1990; Boschi and RoYa 1987. 105 106 e.g. Fordyce 1961: xviii–xxii. Ross 1969: 96. 107 Fordyce 1961: 140.

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basis of its supposed relationship to ‘real life’, the traditional ancient historian mines in pursuit of historical and biographical ‘fact’.108 This approach raises a set of problems that we need to address. One problem is that, as literary scholars have shown with particular reference to Hellenism, Catullus’ poetry is highly stylized, highly artistic. The aspect of Catullus’ poetic voice that is so dangerous to historians is its apparent directness, its closeness to ‘real life’: we can begin to forget that we are reading poetry. The other major problem for my purposes is Catullus’ cultural perspective: if the poetry engages so closely with the social and political scene of Rome, with the Romanocentric language of urbanity, does that mean that we are looking at a Roman, as opposed to an Italian perspective? It is, however, precisely by facing these problems that Catullus’ poems become most valuable for a historian interested in issues of identity. Catullus’ very stylization, the tendency of the poems to play games with the reader’s expectations, can make him a potential source for contemporary attitudes that is not very far away from the manner in which ancient historians have recently treated ancient comedy, such as Aristophanes or Plautus.109 The second ‘problem’ that I addressed, that of issues of perspective within the poems of Catullus, might in fact be bound up in the Wrst ‘problem’, that of stylization. For one of the ‘issues’ selfconsciously raised in the poems is that of divergent ‘local’ and ‘Roman’, ‘rustic’ and ‘urbane’ perspectives. If we try not to be too literal-minded, and do not insist on trying to pin down what Catullus ‘really’ thought, we might at least get close to a representation of various possible perspectives on identity in Roman Italy. We might begin with the theme of urbanitas, an important leitmotif within the poems as a corpus.110 The concept of urbanitas is very signiWcant in Catullus’ poetry as a whole: it is a key word in the vocabulary used to stake out Catullan poetics, that includes venustas, elegantia, and sal, the arbitration of taste 108 Wiseman represents best practice and sophistication in studies of this kind: see e.g.1969, 1985a. 109 Cf. for Athenian comedy, see Davidson 1997; for Plautus, see e.g. Segal 1987. 110 The concept of urbanitas is of course extremely important in Roman culture generally: see Ramage 1973.

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that can slide between verse, social life, and sexual attraction. The discussion of poetics is thus self-consciously interchangeable with the ostensible discussion of ‘real life’.111 One neat example of this interchangeability is Poem 50, where, with an almost postmodern degree of self-reference, a poetic letter to ‘Licinius’, ‘recollects’ an evening lightly spent in play on tablets, reciprocating verse, telling jokes, and boozing, ‘Licinius’ ’ wit ultimately Wring up ‘Catullus’ with lovesick desire. The poem is framed as a witty, clever, lightly handled response to ‘Licinius’ and the poetic eVect engendered by the ‘recollection’, ending with a prayer for reciprocity, an urbane love poem that is all about urbane love poetry and urbane poets at play. The Catullan reception of the poetics of Alexandrian Callimachus involves the ‘translation’ of stated preferences for lightness, slenderness, and learning into the representation of ‘lifestyle’ as well as poetry itself.112 The language of poetics ‘translates’ into a language of taste, and the poet himself becomes arbiter of taste and fashion, as well as poetry. In the process of ‘translation’, concepts are shifted: for example, in Poem 51, the world of desire evoked by ‘translating’ a poem of Sappho looks very diVerent when deliberately framed—just as in Poem 50 the ‘recollection’ is framed by the depiction of the pair as ‘otiosi’—by the quintessentially Roman concept of otium, ‘leisure’, with its accompanying risk of moral, political, and cosmic decline.113 Thus, a gap is sometimes signalled between the world of the ‘model’ and the present poem, just as the poet’s own claims as arbiter of taste and fashion are, as we shall see, sometimes challenged. When ‘Catullus’ judges the urbanitas of characters, reference is frequently made to their supposed ethnic or geographical origins, which inevitably detract from their urbanity. In this respect, it is not unlike Cicero’s use of the vocabulary of urbanity and rusticity in his assessment of language: the benchmark of taste and sophistication is indisputably Romanness in the narrowest sense. For example, in Poem 39, the reader is invited to 111

For an historicist reading, see Quinn 1959. For Catullan poetics, see Clausen 1970; for issues of the ‘personal’ voice more generally, see Goldhill 1991. 113 Sappho fr. 31 (Lobel and Page 1955). 112

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‘see through’ the urbane self-image of the Celtiberian Egnatius, and in particular through his apparently charming smiles. His ‘real’ self is, interestingly, revealed by a pseudo-ethnographical detail, some ‘learning’ lightly and wittily handled: Egnatius, as is the custom in the Celtiberian land, brushes his teeth with his own urine. What in Herodotean terms would be his nomos, his cultural practice, is as outlandish as the ethnic origins with which it is associated: he is very far from being ‘urbane’ in terms either of the geography of his origins or his behaviour. To take a rather diVerent example, it is no accident that, in Poem 12, Asinius (traditionally identiWed as the brother of C. Asinius Pollio) becomes emphatically ‘Marrucine’, when charged with the distinctly non-urbane habit of stealing napkins and is threatened with the aptly poetic punishment of a too long poem, in three hundred hendecasyllables.114 His cognomen Marrucinus, recalling the traditionally extremely rustic Central Apennine tribal name of his ancestry, works on a number of levels.115 A Marrucine in Roman thought was exaggeratedly non-urbane, and in this context, on one level, the rusticity associated with such a person renders him the antithesis of sophistication that is held up as an ideal. On another level, however, Marrucine Asinius is belying the worthiness and upright behaviour associated with rustic origins, and thus there are hints of multiple perspectives on, and the ambivalent value of, urbanitas. In poem 95, Volusius’ Annales will not make it to the exotic landscapes of Alexandrian learning, in contrast with Cinna’s Zmyrna, which will reach the river Satrachus in Cyprus, a river that the most erudite audience would know was associated with the legend of Adonis, son of Zmyrna. Instead, the Annales will die ignominiously in the place where they were produced, beside the Po, making tunics for Wsh. Here, we can see again an easy glide between poetics and geographical or cultural identity. The sophisticated subject-matter of Alexandrian poetry is contrasted with the humdrum quality of Volusius’ poetry, the homely Po with the exotic near East. In such poems, then, the ‘rustic’ identities and landscapes of 114

For the family’s Marrucine origins, see Fordyce 1961: 128–9. Cf. Livy Per. 73 for Herius Asinius, the ancestor who had commanded the Marrucini in the Social War. 115

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Italy—and, interestingly, beyond in the case of the Celtiberi— provide a foil for urbane sophistication. There is a rather more complex treatment of perceptions of, and particularly perspectives on, urbanity in the ‘long’ Poem 68. Although the history of manuscripts and editions of this poem is a complicated one, I would follow the majority of modern scholars in reading this as a single poem, united by common themes.116 Ostensibly, the poem is framed as a ‘thank you’ letter to Allius/Mallius/Manius/Malius (there are extreme textual diYculties here), who has lent his house as a rendezvous for ‘Catullus’ and his married mistress. On another level it represents notions of conXicting identities and emotions, through the medium of the myth of the marriage of Laodamia and Protesilaus, doomed from its very beginnings, through rhetorical examples from mythology and the animal world, and above all through the self-conscious intrusion of ‘personal’ outbursts on the theme of his brother’s death. Commentators have long noted the manipulation of gender in the course of the poem, as we enter and leave the Laodamia myth. We enter the myth as the mistress’s foot touches the threshold, an ill-omened bride, like Laodamia. We leave the myth through a reXection on Laodamia’s loss of Protesilaus, in Troy, the place that brought death to ‘my brother’. In eVect, ‘Catullus’ has himself become Laodamia, and established a tradition of the assimilation of the besotted male lover to a woman, which will be hugely important in the tradition of Roman elegy, and in European romantic poetry in general.117 But if gender identities are deliberately confused in the poem, so too, equally strikingly, is the concept of ‘home’: here, we have an illustration of the centrality of diVerent perspectives and identities in mid-Wrst-century bc Italy. One set of associated themes in Poem 68 is that of journeys, homes, homecomings, and displacement, located variously in Rome, Verona, and Troy. Troy itself is heavy with signiWcance in the context of Italian identities. In burying both Catullus’ brother and Protesilaus in Troy, the poem twists around the concept of nostoi, homecomings after the Trojan War, a concept of great 116 117

See e.g. Macleod 1974: 82; Most 1981; Tuplin 1981. Catull. 68. 70–148; Macleod 1974.

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importance for the self-deWnition of many Italian peoples—as well as for the Romans, of course—for whom descent from Greek and Trojan heroes was a key motif in myths of origins.118 In Poem 68, Troy is the place of death, of the end, rather than ‘home’. Verona and Rome are also played oV against each other, with Rome emphatically ‘my domus’, ‘my home’, and Verona at Wrst sight seems to come oV rather the worse, a distinctly nonfun-loving place where one sleeps alone.119 But this poem ultimately works on a much more subtle level: Verona and Rome work as poetic counterpoints, with Verona arguably coming oV the stronger. Verona is identiWed as a place where ‘I’ have no great copia scriptorum, ‘supply of writings’, with me, but only a capsula, a ‘little box’.120 In the coded language of Catullan poetics, which, as we have seen, appropriates a Callimachean tradition of staking out poetic identities, the smallness of the capsula ought to signify a desirable smallness and lightness, to be contrasted with a heavy-handedness and weight associated with a too obvious display of learning. In other words, the very fact that Verona can be dismissed from the perspective of the urbane lends to it the desirability of being recondite, rather in the manner of Vergil’s claims about the subject-matter of sheep and goats in the third book of the Georgics, a self-consciously non-lofty subject.121 The irony is that Verona becomes in some sense the locus of real sophistication. In terms of ‘real life’, too, Verona is perhaps not quite what she has seemed at Wrst sight, a place to be dismissed, in contrast with the desirable urbanity of Rome. At the end of the poem, the urbanity associated with adultery and casual sleeping around at Rome is made to compete with the agonies of what might be seen as distinctly ‘provincial’ romantic love and marriage.122 There is a subtle challenge here to the presumption of hierarchy set up at the beginning of the poem.123 If we return now to Poem 39, we might now see some greater complexity here too. Egnatius is Wrst advised that his habit of constantly smiling is not urbanum:

118 120 123

See most recently Erskine 2001. 121 l. 36. Verg. G. 3. 286–94. Cf. Fitzgerald 1995: 201–3.

119

ll. 34–5; ll. 27–30. 122 ll. 129–48.

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so this is my advice to you, Egnatius: ‘if you were an urbanus [literally: there is a play here on the double meaning of urbanus as ‘urbane’ and as ‘coming from the city of Rome’]—or a Sabine or a Tiburtine, or a skinny Umbrian, or an obese Etruscan, or a black and toothy Lanuvian, or a Transpadane, to mention my own people, or anyone who washes his teeth with clean water, I still wouldn’t want you to be smiling on each and every occasion. But as it is, you’re Celtiberian, and in the land of the Celtiberi . . . ’ they clean their teeth with their own urine.124

A number of diVerent perspectives on identity are oVered here. On one level, we have a list of Italians, who brush their teeth in the ‘normal’ way, lined up against the outlandish Celtiberi. The list has something in common with the images of a variegated tota Italia that is emerging in the last decades of the Republic, and something that we would most immediately associate with praise rather than with blame. But this sense of a neatly catalogued tota Italia is, of course, immediately undercut both by the use of urbanus in its laden sense—a Roman—and by the epithets attached to three groups of Italians. The Umbrian, Etruscan, and Lanuvian are depicted in the language of invective against barbarians, really no better and no worse than the Celtiberi.125 It is as if a sentiment ‘we’re all Italians now’ is being played oV against an exaggeratedly hostile, Romanocentric perspective: the power of the eVect lies in juxtaposing these two diVerent perspectives. In the light of this, it is worth wondering about ‘Catullus’ ’ ostensibly ‘proud’ introduction of the deeply borderline Transpadani, emphatically ‘my people’, into the catalogue. The very use of this name to describe the peoples of the extreme north of Italy is laden with signiWcance. It reXects the contemporary signiWcance of drawing parallels with the Cispadani, those on ‘this’, that is Rome’s, side of the Po, a politically integral part of the Roman state since the end of 124

Catull. 39. 10–17. There has been much dispute over the description of the Umbrian: the manuscripts all agree that he is ‘parcus’, but many would emend the text to ‘pinguis’ on the basis of other ancient traditions on Umbrians, and the fact that ‘pinguis’ is cognate with ‘obesus’, the adjective used to describe the Etruscan: see esp. Lindsay 1919. I do not Wnd these arguments convincing, and would prefer to follow the more diYcult reading. In any case, however, the reading does not aVect my argument here. 125 For Italians as barbarians, see Dench 1995: 73–80.

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the Social War. By including the Transpadani in the catalogue, ‘my people’ are drawn into Italy by the act of juxtaposition. We might want to compare this treatment of ‘my people’ with the introduction of northern Italian Nepos in the Wrst poem as ‘unus Italorum’. Catullus is perhaps once again gently digging at a distinctive aspect of contemporary local pride, pride in, precisely, being so newly and so narrowly ‘Italian’. Catullus’ treatment of local myth also oVers tantalizing glimpses of local perspectives: once again, we are, of course, looking at something highly stylized and ‘artiWcial’. We could take, for example, Poem 31, a ‘homecoming’ poem addressed to Sirmio, almost a love-song in which she is addressed in terms that might be used to a lover. The more traditional literary commentary might talk with some embarrassment about Catullus’ ‘sincerity’. In fact we have here a playful (and essentially eroticized) version of the form of epideictic oratory known in the language of ancient rhetorical form as an epibate¯rion, the ‘speech of a man who writes to address his native land on arrival from abroad’. This is a playful version of a form as real to Italy as it was to other parts of the Mediterranean world. It is a stylized celebration of local pride in origins and civilized identity, as well as a celebration of the political status quo: this is the world of the domi nobiles.126 In Catullus’ version, Alexandrian learning deals allusively with contemporary Hellenizing local mythology in Sirmio’s ‘Lydian waves’, ‘Lydian’ because of the supposed Etruscan past of this area of the north.127 Local pretensions seem rather to be satirized in the use of mythology of Brixia myth in Poem 67. Here, the personiWed door and lock share local gossip about adultery and ‘cheating wombs’. Structurally, this poem mirrors the subject-matter of the lock of Berenice, the previous poem in the book, a selfconscious reception of Callimachus’ version.128 Poem 67 is, then, a hoary north Italian version: we might be reminded here of the distance in sophistication between the Po and the Satrachus evoked in Poem 95. It is Brixia herself, the perso126 For the problem of ‘sincerity’, see e.g. Fordyce 1961: 170. For epideictic rhetoric, see e.g. Russell and Wilson 1981 for Menander Rhetor; for rhetoric, theatres and the domi nobiles, see Wiseman 1983. 127 Cf. Cairns 1974. 128 Call. Aetia 4, fr. 110 (PfeiVer 1949: 112–23).

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niWcation of the town (modern Brescia), who plays the part of the gossip in Poem 67. She is introduced as ‘Brixia, lying underneath the watch-tower of Cycnus, by whom yellow Mella Xows past with gentle stream, Brixia, adored mother of my Verona’.129 We assume that, if Brixia is the mother of Verona, then Cycnus, legendary king of the Ligurians, is the father: it seems to be the case that Catullus is playing with suitably Hellenized mythological ancestries here, stuV Wt for the work of Nepos. The noble-sounding mythologized local topography is undercut by a double-entendre: Brixia ‘lies under’ Cycnus in more than one sense. The naughtiness of Catullus’ reading is emphasized by the positioning of this line, unfortunately and suggestively between small-town tales of incest and adultery. The oVspring of this farcical union, Verona, is, by implication, no noble child, but an upstart colony.130 Catullus is wearing his learning characteristically lightly, and in doing so gives a spin on ‘local pride’ by oVering an outside perspective on it. In Poem 17 we can see local mythology interwoven with the more tangible, material aspects of an identity newly refocused on Rome. The poem, addressed to a personiWed ‘Colonia’, which is normally identiWed as Verona, is written in the form of a clever spoof vow. ‘Colonia’ is to gain a new bridge on which even the enigmatic sacra Salisubsali, the ‘rites of Salisubsalus’ can be celebrated, in place of her rickety old bridge. For her part in the bargain, Colonia is asked to pitch oV the bridge a certain ‘municipem meum’, precisely ‘a man from the same municipium as me’, a carelessly cuckolded man. The Rome-given terminology is important and signiWcant. This poem works on a number of levels, and includes a number of obscene double entendres. But it is also a play on a ‘poem of place’, the signiWcance of which is lost to some older commentators who suppose that Catullus is merely recalling a memory of a country festival that he witnessed as a child. There are certainly some puzzles in this poem: in particular, the identity of the Salisubsalus 129

Catull. 67. 31–6. Cycnus, at l. 32, is Voss’s amendment of the incomprehensible Chinea in the manuscripts. For Catullus’ spin on local mythology here, see Wiseman 1987; Fitzgerald 1995: 205–7. 130

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has been much discussed, and no convincing answer has emerged. It is, however, not clear that even a contemporary audience was expected to have heard of the ‘sacra Salisubsali’, some hoary local festival. The use of ‘Colonia’ as a term of address for Verona is also worthy of note, as Verona was certainly not a Roman or Latin colony in any oYcial sense. It is possible that Verona was a self-styled colonia, proudly asserting herself as an ancestral colony of Rome, the mother-city. Catullus is playing for laughs, but the poem surely works through the recognition of a new variety of local pride: a boast of status that both resonates with Roman connections and is tied into a rootsysounding local festival. The vow itself is a self-consciously hoary, literal-minded, ‘local’ version of the Roman proverb ‘chuck the over-sixties oV the bridge into the Tiber’. In this poem, however, the old man is to be chucked from a new bridge that would be exactly the sort of tangible sign of new status hoped for or achieved, in towns all over Italy in the last decades of the Republic. We surely have here a gentle play on contemporary Transpadane pretensions of the kind that can also be seen in the invitation in Poem 35 to Caecilius to ‘come to Verona from the city-walls of New Comum’, the latter a real colony marked by new wall-building.131 While I have focused here on the poems of Catullus, this is not a phenomenon peculiar to literature, let alone to one particular corpus of poems: issues of local perspectives and local voices in late Republican and early imperial Italy are very ‘real’ in the sense that they are expressed in other forms of evidence. Coinage is just one example.132 The use by moneyers in the late Republic of allusions to their origines, to Tusculum, Lanuvium, or Formiae, makes an interesting and tantalizing case-study.133 These coins were minted by junior Roman magistrates, who frequently used the reverses for self-advertisement. In these particular cases, they have chosen to do so by reference to their origines, their family-seats in towns of Latium and Campania, and speciWcally by reference to local mythology. What is 131

For Poem 17, see esp. Cenerini 1989; cf. Wiseman 1987: 333–4; Rudd

1972. 132

See Ch. 3, n. 152, above.

133

e.g. Sydenham 1952: 964; 1081 etc.

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very interesting here is that these speciWc local references have become a means by which members of the Roman elite can talk about themselves, and indeed advertise their ambitions. A number of earlier coins issued by one Lucius Titurius Sabinus, perhaps in 89 bc, are particularly interesting, if diYcult to interpret. These, reXecting Sabinus’ cognomen, ‘the Sabine’, portray suitably Sabine themes from traditions on early Rome. A number of types have Titus Tatius, the legendary Sabine king with whom Romulus shared his reign following reconciliation with the Sabines, portrayed on the obverse. Two of these types have portrayals of particularly violent images from Sabine–Roman mythology on their reverse. One bears a rape of the Sabine women, and the other the crushing of Tarpeia by Sabine shields. Taken altogether, these are curious images. Reading them is no easy business, particularly given the intricate nature of the multiple versions that exist in literature. Some are harder than others: on Titus Tatius, for example, there are long and strong traditions of animosity with Romulus. On the other hand, as we have seen in discussion of Varro’s De Lingua Latina, Titus Tatius could be a symbol of sharing the citizenship between communities, of Rome’s plural origins.134 The Wgure of Titus Tatius might, then, evoke either overtones of hostility towards Rome, or overtones of ethnic pluralism, or indeed both of these aspects. The representation of the rape of the Sabine women here seems less ambiguous. While there was again a long and varied series of literary traditions on the rape, including a long-standing interest in reconciliation speeches, with a focus on one Sabine matron, Hersilia, the scene represented on the coinage focuses on the carrying away of the women by the Romans.135 There were also multiple stories of the fate of Tarpeia, a byword for treachery, whose name was ‘recalled’ in that of the Tarpeian rock because she had given up the Roman Capitol to Titus Tatius and his Sabine troops. Several versions of the Sabines’ motives in crushing Tarpeia coexist in early imperial literature. One version was 134

For Titus Tatius the tyrant, see Enn. Ann. 104 (Sk.). e.g. Fabius Pictor fr. 7 (P.); Enn. Ann. 99 (Sk. with note ad loc.); the one surviving fragment of Ennius’ play Sabinae (Vahlen Scenica 370–1); Gnaeus Gellius fr. 15 (Peter) ¼ Gell. NA 13. 23. 13; Livy 1. 13; D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 45–7; Plut. Rom. 14. 135

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that the Sabines were covering up the fact that they had taken the Capitol by treacherous means. Another was that the Sabines preferred to take the Capitol honourably, by force of arms, and crushed Tarpeia in punishment.136 We are not really entitled to pin down any one reading of the Wrst and last images in particular. Even if we wanted to emphasize Sabinus’ intentions, whatever we might imagine them to be, we cannot be at all sure that the images would be received in one way rather than another. We cannot even merely assume that Sabinus was in fact Sabine, although it does seem most likely that he was advertising his origo in the manner of other Roman moneyers. Highly important questions about the dating of the coin and its possible connections with the Social War must remain tantalizingly open.137 What we can say about the images on the coins is that they oVer a speciWcally Sabine perspective on Roman identity, as well as the possibility of an ‘edge’ suggested by traditions of violence and hostility between Sabines and Romans. It would certainly have been possible to use far more reconciliatory versions of Sabine angles on early Roman mythology: a reconciliation scene after the rape would be an obvious example. The actual or potential tension or violence between Romans and Sabines in all of the images selected is an important aspect. Sabinus’ references to Sabine angles on Roman myth both embed him within the myth-history of the city of Rome itself and allow him to pose as alternative.138 My Wnal case-study, on Josephus’ Against Apion, will bring together many of the aspects of language and voices that we have been discussing in this chapter, as well as picking up on some themes that have been important in the book as a whole. We have in general been imagining the making and remaking of Roman identity as a dynamic, contested, and competitive process within which writing literature has an important role. In writing literature, the cultural prestige of heritage may be 136

e.g. D.H. Ant. Rom. 2. 38–40 for variant 2nd-cent. traditions. For diVerent interpretations, see e.g. Morel 1962; Crawford 1974: 355–6. 138 We might want to compare the Wgure of Augustus’ prominent friend Maecenas, ‘born of Etruscan kings’, as Propertius and the anonymous writer of elegies in honour of Maecenas put it: cf. Ch. 3, § 1, above. 137

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claimed, and distinctive selves may be written in a reconWgured, global world, local origins and local perspectives represented as more or less in tension with projected ideas of what it is to be Roman. Josephus’ Against Apion is the latest of a substantial body of work within which the relationship of Jewish, Greek, and Roman identities was worked through, and, not least, Josephus’ own self-representation as an ‘educated’ (in Greek and Greek culture, of course) Roman Jew was staked out. Josephus’ self-portrayal as an intermediary between the Jews and the Romans, a Jewish priest who was made a Roman citizen, is particularly important in his earliest work, the Jewish War, ‘published’ in 75–9, a few years after the Jewish revolt against Roman rule that had culminated in the destruction of the Temple, a key part of the self-representation of the new Flavian dynasty. Josephus’ emphasis on his own conduct in the war, a subject to which he was to return in his Life of 93/4, his insistence on the excesses of both Roman governors and Jewish ‘rebels’, and his attempt in the Jewish War to read Roman victory as willed by God, just as he himself had prophesied the future greatness of Vespasian, all suggest the huge religious, political and cultural gulf that Josephus sought to bridge. The Against Apion takes up more concisely and more polemically themes of the Jewish Antiquities, and mounts a fascinating challenge to the Greek monopoly on ‘world’ history before insisting on the constitutional and moral superiority of the Jews to the Greeks, and above all on their religious piety, based on the tenets of their lawgiver, their nomothete, Moses. The result is a surely deliberate and suggestive mirror of Roman idealizing self-representation that may indicate something of the purpose of the work, the rehabilitation of the Jews after the end of the Flavian dynasty.139 I have chosen to focus on it here above all because of its implications for both the breadth and limitations of what can be encompassed within ‘Roman histories’. In the degree to which the writings of Josephus actively engage with Greek frameworks of thought, seek to negotiate between Jewish and Roman world-views, and audience (above all to create a Jewish theology of Roman conquest), they 139 For the diYculty of dating the work with any precision—the last years of Domitian, under Nerva, or even under Trajan—see Goodman 1999: 50; for the intellectual relationship between AJ and Against Apion, Rajak 1998.

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constitute a kind of Jewish literature with which little other than the Greek-Jewish writings of Philo, ambassador to the emperor Gaius from Alexandria in 39/40, may be compared.140 As a ‘barbarian’ literature of the Graeco-Roman world, Jewish writings are exceptional in their extent, their continuity through and beyond the Roman imperial period, and in the variation of both the languages in which they are written and the extent to which they engage in Graeco-Roman frameworks of thought. This variation reXects in part the cultural diversity of the diaspora, an imagined community as physically far removed from the Temple of Jerusalem as the majority of Roman citizens were from the city of Rome by the early imperial period.141 The very persistence of literary languages other than Greek or Latin, most notably Aramaic and Hebrew, despite the extensive use of Greek in other contexts even amongst Jews in Palestine, underlines the signiWcance of self-consciously independent theological, historical, and literary traditions. The use of Hebrew is particularly interesting, a language of distinction and distinctiveness that was not commonly spoken but artiWcially fostered in the Hellenistic and Roman periods through emphasis on the Temple and the Law as symbolic centres of Jewish identity and a Jewish religious elite.142 The ‘survival’ and prominence of Hebrew raises profound questions about the ‘survival’ of written and especially written literary languages in the Roman empire, and above all about ancient perceptions of the use of ‘native’ languages. For example, Fergus Millar is surely right to argue that ‘survival’ in public contexts of Punic-Phoenician well into the imperial period, including a Sardinian building inscription referring to (what would be in Latin) Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (whichever emperor is meant) is highly signiWcant, despite the 140 Goodman 1994: 40; for the history of Jewish politics, culture and selfconsciousness within the context of Palestine and the diaspora, fundamental works include Schu¨rer, Vermes, and Millar 1973–87; Tcherikover 1959; Hengel 1980, 1989a; Millar 1993; Lieu, North, and Rajak 1992; Rajak 2001; my view of relationships between Jews and Gentiles is somewhat less optimistic than Gruen 1998, 2002. 141 For the importance of symbols of the Temple of Jerusalem amongst diaspora Jews, see Schwarz 1995: 42 with bibliography. 142 Schwarz 1995.

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fact that it is very rarely attested. In this case, what is most pertinent to ‘survival’ seems to be local pride and linguistic selfconsciousness based on perceptions of both cultural priority and an ancient, imperial past.143 The inXuence of especially Greek thought on Jewish writings, both in Greek and in other languages, is hard to deny and unsurprising, given near universal acceptance within the Hellenistic and Roman worlds of Greek as the language of cultural capital and above all self-placing in history.144 It is, however, the extent to which even explicitly ‘oppositional’ Jewish writing about the Roman empire uses ‘traditional’ and non-Greek modes of expression, whether works are written in Greek or in other languages, that is the more striking phenomenon, given that Graeco-Roman rhetorical modes of thought positively encourage the development of alternative perspectives.145 These modes of expression include particular kinds of moral critiques of empire: while some criticisms, such as the greed and lust of Rome are also central aspects of the ‘problem’ of empire in Roman literature, more traditional Jewish modes of thought envisage Rome speciWcally as a harlot decked out with luxuries procured from her paramours.146 Perhaps most striking of all is 143 Millar 1983; cf. Old Egyptian, with Lichtheim 1973–80, vol. 3; for other examples, cf. Neumann and Untermann 1980; Harris 1989: 175–90; Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1992: 149–61; Schwarz 1995: 19. 144 See above all Hengel 1980, 1989a: the debate engendered by these works has been Werce, however: for a brief and helpful assessment of the arguments, see Rajak 2001: 3–10. Of course ‘inXuence’ works both ways: while, as we have seen, Jewish writings were appropriated by the Alexandrian court in the famous translation of the Septuagint, and while the Jews were certainly repositories of ‘alien wisdom’, see also Wallace-Hadrill 1982b for Roman concepts of ‘sin’ within a broad Mediterranean and Near-Eastern context. 145 Goodman 1991: 223 for the suggestion that these stark visions should be read as rhetorical exercises in self-deWnition rather than at face value as examples of ‘political’ opposition. 146 For Jewish traditions of harlotry as a metaphor for empire, see de Lange 1978. It is nevertheless important to see such claims for the moral high ground for what they are, rather than at face value, which Judaeo-Christian scholars sometimes do. See e.g. Williamson 1989: 278–82 for Philo being shocked by ‘the sexual laxity prevailing in the Hellenistic world to which Philo belonged’. There is, however, abundant evidence for emphasis on sexual and other forms of physical self-restraint in the Graeco-Roman world: the classic on such issues is Brown 1988.

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the insistence that enemy powers are in fact agents of God bringing punishment for the sins of the Jews. Josephus’ theology of Roman conquest in his Jewish War is far from extraordinary in the general context of Jewish writing, although his perception of the destruction of the Temple in such terms is highly unusual. We should note the signiWcance of denying the will (evil or otherwise) of any other people, an astonishing means of interpreting repeated subjection to foreign powers, as well as the gap between this means of accounting for world history and the more prevalent moralizing Mediterranean explanation of the rise and fall of empires in terms of growth, overgrowth and decline, a pattern that locates the causes of success and failure in the behaviour (including religious behaviour) of each individual power.147 It is surely not the case, then, that the great quantity of surviving Jewish writing and the maintenance of considerably independent Jewish literary traditions has led us to overemphasize the Jews as an exceptional case within the Roman empire; on the contrary, this very quantity is an indication of the remarkable tenacity of Jewish selfconsciousness. The self-consciously separate or even oppositional nature of Jewish identity has its basis above all in the composition of the Pentateuch (the Wrst Wve books of the Old Testament) by around 400 bc, and in the symbolic place of both the Pentateuch and the Temple during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The Pentateuch, with its account of origins, founding fathers, and law, is a highly idealizing narrative of genealogical, religious, and cultural separation, constituting a description neither of the realities of life in early Israel nor of religious practice beyond the direct control of the high priest of Jerusalem.148 Somewhat ironically, both its composition and the reverence with which it was regarded were both actively encouraged by Achaemenid rulers, while their successors, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, largely continued to encourage emphasis on the law, the Temple, and the elite that upheld them.149 The major exception was Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 147

e.g. Josephus BJ 2. 345–404; for correspondences in the Qumran texts and rabbinic literature, see de Lange 1978. 148 Schwarz 1995: 23, with bibliography; cf. Bickermann 1988. 149 Blenkinsopp 1992.

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whose ban on Jewish observance of the Law and whose desecration of the Temple were remembered as some of the actions that provoked a major revolt, culminating in the cleansing of the Temple in 152 by Judas Maccabaeus.150 It is in the context of depicting relations with Antiochus in 2 Maccabees, a Greek text written a generation after the events it describes, that we Wnd for the Wrst time the concept of Helle¯nismos, a remarkable and unparalleled idea of a ‘package’ of Greek culture that is inimical to Jewish religious custom, an exception to the more usual, traditional world-view of Jews and generic Gentiles. The context is the story of the corrupt means by which Jason obtained the high priesthood, by bribery and by undertaking to institute a gymnasium and ephe¯beion and to enrol a group of ‘Antiochenes’ in Jerusalem. Once appointed, he turns his kinsmen towards the Greek ‘character’, instituting the gymnasium and making the best of the ephebes wear the petasos. ‘Thus’, comments the author, ‘the highpoint of Hellenism and the prosbasis of foreign customs were reached through the boundless wickedness of sinful Jason, no high priest.’ The net result is that the priests neglect their religious duties, sponsoring wrestling in deWance of the Law, and preferring ‘Hellenic honours’ to their native oYces.151 That the ‘Hellenism’ of 2 Maccabees is not Greek culture tout court, and emphatically not the broad appropriation of Greek cultural motifs that modern scholars mean by ‘Hellenism’, is obvious even from the language and style of the work itself. We should emphasize the political nature of the ‘package’, from the network of friendship, favour, privilege and perhaps also proof of loyalty that is implied by Jason’s alleged ‘deal’, to the political–religious– ‘educational’ institutions of the polis in the form of gymnasium and ephe¯beion, major mechanisms for gaining participation within the Greek city in the Hellenistic and Roman age, and the career aspirations of the priests.152 We have here a clear and quite speciWc picture of what ‘becoming Greek’ was perceived to mean in these contexts, one 150 151 152

1985.

1 Macc. 1: 41–64; cf. Dan. 9: 27, 11: 31, 12: 11; S. Cohen 1990. 2 Macc. 4: 7–13. For evidence of Jews enrolled as ephebes at Cyrene in ad 3–4, see Rajak

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that surely owes something to the place of 1 and 2 Maccabees as foundation texts for the Jewish monarchical dynasty, even for a Jewish state, and one that is to contribute to heightened Jewish political consciousness within the Roman empire, a test case for the delicate balance of involvement with the centres of empire that long before and long after would be a key feature of the political life of Palestine. It is interesting to compare the perception of a Greek ‘package’ in 2 Maccabees with the newly charged nature of aspects of Greek culture in late third- and second-century Rome, but the prime example of a ‘labelled’ motif Graecus ritus, is strikingly diVerent. Rome’s imperial style of signalled incorporation is very diVerent from the exclusive stance of the Jewish state.153 The complex history of Jewish interaction with Roman power in the Mediterranean, and the network of privilege and distinctions by which that was partly exercised, began in 161 bc when the Maccabean dynasty sent ambassadors to the Roman senate.154 From a Jewish perspective, the Romans’ status as non-Greeks and conquerors of Greeks could initially make them useful and admired friends, while, as we have already begun to suggest, a Jewish theology of the world was capable of interpreting as the will of God the encroachment of Roman rule (in the arrival of Pompey in 63 bc) and even the destruction of the Temple, although more prevalently in Jewish texts Rome is Edom, the epitome of wickedness.155 The direct relationship with Rome and the much-touted grants to Jews individually and collectively of privilege and exemption were to be the cause of serious friction both amongst the Jews themselves and in their relationships with other peoples. One Roman ‘solution’, direct rule in Judaea from 6 ad, following the death of Herod and the division of his territory ten years before, was only to exacerbate pre-existing tensions, leading ultimately to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the symbolic religious centre for Jews within Palestine and of the diaspora, and the foundation under Hadrian of a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina 153 S. Cohen 1990 argues that perception of selves as a politeia invites the idea of incorporation, in this case conversion. I am not convinced that this becomes an emphatic aspect of self-promotion: cf. Goodman 1994. 154 1 Macc. 8; AJ 12. 414–19; cf. 1 Macc. 14: 24, 15: 15–24; AJ 14. 145–8. 155 See, succinctly, Goodman 2000 on rabbinic texts.

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in its place, an attempt to obliterate the memory of the holy city, for the Romans a place of political-religious insurrection. The Roman tradition of favouring prominent, wealthy, and educated local ‘friends’ that was empire-wide to exacerbate social and economic divisions raised particular problems in the case of the Jews, given long-standing and bitter debates about the compatibility of being Jewish with civic participation, the duties and privileges of both Roman and Greek citizenships and oYce-holding, precisely the stuV of social and political aspirations and prestige in the Roman world. Particular points of tension included military service and provisions for the observance of the Sabbath, contact with pagan sacriWcial meat and libation wine, the swearing of oaths to pagan gods, idolatry, and nudity. But the gap between rabbinic prescription and practice is vividly illustrated by, for example, attestation of city councillors and gymnasiarchs with Jewish names.156 Josephus’ depiction of the Jewish revolt that broke out in Jerusalem and Caesarea in 66 in ‘class’ terms, blaming the ‘basest’ elements, and in the terminology of anti-social menace, ‘brigandage’, is clearly an over-simpliWcation of the social structure of Judaea, with a vested interest in telling an international elite audience what they wanted to hear. However, strong Jewish traditions of, for example, the revolt of Judas Maccabaeus as essentially a peasant revolt suggest that both Roman and Jewish perspectives might have conspired to read events in such terms.157 In both Palestine and the diaspora, Roman court politics, political favours, and preferential treatment exacerbated tensions particularly between Jews and their neighbours. Two anecdotes illustrate these dynamics. In the reign of Tiberius, so the story goes, a Jewish charlatan extorted gifts ‘for the Temple’ from a prominent Roman woman, before pocketing them. Her husband duly informed Tiberius, leading to a mass expulsion of Jews from Italy. In the second example, Agrippa, on being made king of Judaea by the emperor Caligula, made a show of himself in Alexandria. The response of the Alexandrian ‘mob’ 156

Rajak 1985. e.g. Rajak 1983: chs. 4–6; Schwarz 1990 for division between the proRoman High Priests and the de¯mos in the BJ; for actual involvement of the wealthy in the Bar Kochba War, see Goodman 2000: 672 with bibliography. 157

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was to dress up a lunatic as their own ‘king’ in mockery of the Jews, exacerbating a situation that was already very tense.158 ‘Alien wisdom’ was to be much promoted in the legitimization of the new Flavian dynasty and the somewhat unorthodox beginnings of Vespasian’s rule, based in the Wrst instance on the acclamation of soldiers rather than senate.159 Such ‘alien wisdom’ included Josephus’ own prophecy and, somewhat more prominently, miracle-working as the agent of Serapis with a little help from the prefect of Egypt, Ti. Julius Alexander, an apostate Jew.160 However, the destruction of the Temple and victory over ‘the Jews’ were also strongly emphasized, somewhat undermining Josephus’ claim that the Temple was destroyed by accident.161 Notably, Vespasian’s and Titus’ joint triumph displayed holy objects taken from the Temple, including the Menorah, the shew-bread and a copy of the Law, a permanent memorial of which was set up in the form of the Arch of Titus, while coins advertised the unprecedented nature of the capture of Jerusalem.162 The emphasis on the religious symbols of the Jews is no accident, as is suggested by Vespasian’s redirection of the Temple tax of two drachmas per person to the Wscus Iudaicus, a fund that was used to pay for the rebuilding of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome.163 The extraordinary emphasis on oracles, prophecies, and the quasi-divinity of Vespasian is surely not unconnected with translating the suppression of a revolt into a victory of cosmic signiWcance. Funds of an enemy god linked to subversion would henceforth be directed towards the god of Roman ascendancy in the world. If Augustan precedent was central to the ideology of Vespasian’s rule, ‘victory over the Jews’ was to some extent 158

Josephus AJ 18. 81–4; Philo In Flacc. 5, 29–35. Again, such tensions were more broadly a part of provincial life, even if they did not lead to such intense violence: e.g. on the Greek cities of Asia Minor, see C. Jones 1978. 159 Suet. Vesp. 6. 3; the formalization of powers that were, signiWcantly, not voiced before, together with heavy emphasis on ‘good’ Julio-Claudian precedent, in the lex de imperio Vespasiani (Brunt 1977), is an important sign of the need to legitimize Vespasian’s rule. 160 Tac. Hist. 4. 81 f; Suet. Vesp. 7; Heinrichs 1968; Levick 1999: 67–9. 161 BJ 7. 148–9; Goodman 1999: 55–6. 162 Kraay 1978: 52–6. 163 Goodman 1989; cf. 1994, 42–7; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1. 341, with bibliography.

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Vespasian’s version of Actium, a cosmic realignment after civil war that simultaneously diverted attention away from the fact that the reign was founded in civil war.164 While the destruction of Jerusalem encouraged further breakdown in the relationships between diaspora Jews and their neighbours, the tax on Jews was also to have long-term eVects, an example of the increasing intrusiveness of Roman rule. Anecdotes relating to the collection of the tax constitute ugly examples of ‘ethnography in action’. When a procurator under Domitian insisted that an elderly man be stripped to reveal whether or not he was circumcised, debates about the relationship between descent and culture, about how far clothes, bodily modiWcation, and language could be used to reveal or conceal origins, might seem remote from the ‘real’ world.165 However, such stories belong particularly to the context of Nerva’s modiWcation of the law, which suggests intellectual sophistication and introduces a new way of deWning being Jewish, on the basis of self-profession. This movement away from the criteria of origins and culture, towards the profession of ‘voluntary religion’, marks an important step in the recognition of possible means of primary identiWcation based on religion rather than origins.166 Turning to the Against Apion, I want to begin with the question of linguistic self-positioning. Josephus’ major statement about language within this work is made in the context of a brief autobiographical passage that sets out the historian’s authority and is ostensibly directed towards criticisms of the Jewish War and the Jewish Antiquities as a gymnasma en schole¯, a ‘school exercise’ for children.167 This very interesting expression on the one hand recalls Thucydidean distancing of his work from rhetorical exhibition, ago¯nisma, as a kte¯ma es aei (possession for all time) despite the latter’s appropriation of, and interest in, the language and techniques of sophistic argumentation.168 164 Cf. the emphasis on pax in the coinage of Vespasian: Levick 1999: 70 with n. 16 for this and Augustan precedent. 165 Suet. Dom. 12. 2. 166 Cf. North 1992, an important article. 167 The critics are unnamed, encouraging the suspicion that this ‘defence’ is itself a tried and tested rhetorical device. 168 Thuc. 1. 22. 4.

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Josephus’ ‘autobiography’ in itself claims a position for his work within the traditions of Graeco-Roman historiography, as does his repeated claim to have been concerned with uncovering the ‘truth’, as eyewitness, interviewer, and translator.169 However, Josephus’ claims that the accusation of writing a school gymnasma is false surely also have a culturally laden point, given historically heightened Jewish consciousness of the alien and potentially compromising nature of gymnastic education, a consciousness exempliWed by and enshrined in 2 Maccabees, as we have seen. It is Josephus’ credentials as a Jewish authority that are particularly at stake here, and it is particularly within this context that we should read his assertion that he learned Greek only after coming to Rome and having got ready all the materials for his book on the war.170 Josephus’ linguistic identity as a ‘learner’ of Greek in later life is also repeatedly mentioned in his Jewish Antiquities.171 In contrast with the development of multiple Englishes in twentieth-century post-colonial literature, there seems to have been no question that writers of formal, ‘literary’ Greek in the Roman empire would do anything other than seek to write ‘good’ Greek in the sense of the current linguistic emphases of the Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean.172 However, linguistic distance could be signalled, by apology for ‘bad’ Greek, as in the notorious case of Postumius Albinus, or by signalling the tension between origins and the Greek language that has been acquired, as in the cases of Josephus or Lucian or Favorinus.173 Somewhat unlike Lucian or Favorinus, however, Josephus’ claims for historical authority, as well as his historical persona, are largely based on his non-Greek credentials. The Jewish War is said to be a ‘translation’ into Greek, or perhaps an ‘adapta169

170 e.g. Ap. 1. 55; Marincola 1997. Ap. 1. 50. AJ 20. 263; 1. 7. 172 For Englishes, see e.g. Bauer 1994; Go¨rlach 1995; Smith and Forman 1997; Swain 1996 for what was invested in debates about language during the so-called Second Sophistic period in the Greek cities. 173 Cf. Whitmarsh 2001: 116 V.; Gleason 1995; I wonder also how far Josephus may be imagined to have chosen Greek rather than Latin, for its signiWcance as the primary language of ‘barbarian’ histories: for the importance of language-choice in Roman literature, cf. Luraghi 2003 for a very interesting study of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ pose of addressing a Greek audience. 171

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tion’, of a version previously written ‘in my own language’, and sent to ‘the barbarians of the interior’.174 We do not need to know anything about this supposed predecessor, or even to believe in its existence, in order to understand the signiWcance of this statement as an assertion of the historian’s authority. We might also think of his repeated insistence that he is using etymologies based on ‘the language of the Hebrews’.175 The role of ‘translator’ is claimed also in the passage of the Against Apion that we have been discussing, while his Antiquities are said to represent a ‘translation’ into Greek of ‘Wve thousand years’ of history, taken from the ‘sacred books’.176 Josephus’ claims about the linguistic relationships of his writings and their audience (including Vespasian and Titus; Julius Archaelaus, Herod, and Agrippa) mirror his representation of his life, between Jewish, and Graeco-Roman culture.177 The Roman dimension of his writings is nicely brought out in his Life, where he claims that, with Vespasian’s permission, he was able to move ‘sacred books’ from Jerusalem to Rome, a relocation that mirrored his own existence.178 This is a particularly loaded version of the game of cultural perspective, centre and home that we observed in Catullus 68, with ‘Catullus’ apologizing for having brought only a capsula with him to Verona from Rome, rather than a copia scriptorum, an ‘abundance of authors’. Josephus’ placing of himself and his work has important consequences for the scope of Greek historical writing and the idea of a Greek monopoly on world history. Clearly, the Against Apion, and all of Josephus’ surviving works are addressed primarily to an ‘educated’ audience and apologetic in purpose. In his characterization of those who read and approved his history in the Against Apion, he speciWes that those of ‘my own people’ 174

BJ 1. 6. For references, see Rajak 1983: 230–2, but given the peculiar ideological importance of making a nod to Hebrew even amongst those Jews who clearly did not know it (Schwarz 1995), it is problematic to deduce from this anything about the depth of Josephus’ knowledge of this language; n.b. also his lack of precision in referring to ‘my own language’—presumably Aramaic. Naming a language so barbarous might be perceived to undermine the ‘high’ texture of history, unlike the symbolic antiquity and authority of Hebrew. 176 177 AJ 1. 1. Ap. 1. 51. 178 Vi. 418, with Rajak 1983: 174–5. 175

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to whom he sent the work were those learned in Greek wisdom.179 Thus, he is at least as concerned to write the Jews into Greek history as he is to assert both their priority, and their distance and superiority, not least as keepers and writers of history. In particular, Josephus contrasts the existence of very ancient, uncontested written documents amongst Egyptians, ‘Chaldaeans’ (Babylonians), Phoenicians, and Jews with the Greeks’ catastrophic and memorial-erasing past, the lateness of their learning to write, the contradictory nature of their accounts, and their lack of concern with the truth. As examples of the reliability of Jewish history, and reverence for the past, he cites the importance of investigating the descent of priests’ wives, by consulting written records in order to keep the lineage ‘unmixed’ and ‘pure’, and the fact that the prophets were inspired by God when they wrote.180 This highly rhetorical passage combines appeal to a very Greek catalogue and notion of practitioners of alien wisdom, through insistence on uncontested divine authority a novel take on an older theme of Greek historiography, a Thucydidean emphasis on the authority of the historian as a judge of truth, and a challenge to particularly Athenian pride in autochthony and their ‘unmixed’ descent.181 Josephus’ extensive use of writers of ‘barbarian’ histories, useful if misleading and partisan ‘witnesses’ to the antiquity of the Jews in the Against Apion, is interestingly double-edged. On the one hand, hierarchies of Greek literatures are upheld: Manetho, Berossus, and others like them are qualiWed as ‘barbarian’, not worthy enough to write Jews into international, Greek history on their authority alone.182 On the other hand, we should acknowledge the signiWcance of not just using but also naming such ‘barbarian’ histories at all, given the fact that they were largely ignored by Greek historians, even and especially by those writing on the Near East.183 Josephus’ extensive use of ‘barbarian’ historians as ‘witnesses’ to the antiquity of the 179 Ap. 1. 51; Cf. Josephus’ use in the preface of his Jewish Wars of the word ‘barbarian’ in an entirely Greek way: Rajak 1983: 53. 180 Ap. 1. 1–46. 181 See esp. Ap. 1. 21, cf. 1. 22 for the Arcadians, traditionally also autochthonous (cf. Hdt. 8. 73). 182 183 Ap. 1. 161. Kuhrt 1987: 33.

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Jews helps to establish the distinctiveness of his own authority and perspective by complicating the historiographical tradition within which his own work is to be read and with which it is competing in its ‘corrections’. Josephus’ own persona as an authoritative Jewish priest, dreamer of prophetic dreams, and writer of a history ‘based on ‘‘sacred books’’ ’ also mirrors his own depiction of Manetho as ‘a man versed in Greek paideia, who wrote in the Greek language a history of his land from sacred tablets’.184 Given the antipathy towards the Egyptians in the work, there is a nice irony in the fact that, when Josephus takes on the role of the authority on ‘alien wisdom’, he must to all intents and purposes dress up as an Egyptian priest. The original ‘type’ for this role is, as we have seen, to be found in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories Book 2, where the ‘correction’ of Hellenocentric views on the relative antiquity of Greeks and Egyptians is based on the authority of Egyptian priests, guardians of speciWcally Egyptian historical knowledge in the form of king-lists.185 The complex cultural genealogy of Josephus’ persona as an authority on ‘alien wisdom’ may be compared also with the engagement in his work with a speciWcally Roman interest in speaking barbarians who give voice to the dark side of empire, to the problems of enslavement, luxury, and corruption that are in fact part and parcel of ‘mainstream’ ancient historiographical thinking about empire.186 While Caesar’s barbarian outbursts are somewhat controlled by authorial judgements, in Tacitus in particular, important and unsettling questions about the nature and moral problems of emperors and empire, about Rome’s encroachment on and moral and cultural transformation of her subjects, are left hanging by barbarian characters who recall the Republican Roman past, a past to which return is neither possible nor desirable, but which is a repository of lessons and models for the Roman present.187 The works of Josephus 184

Ap. 1. 73; cf. Rajak 1983: 18. e.g. Ap. 1. 54; Hdt. 2. 99 V; cf. Plato’s Timaeus 22b–c, where an Egyptian priest is introduced in to inform Solon about the relative youth of the Greeks. 186 For the rather diVerent spectre that haunted the British Empire, being captured and above all ‘going native’, see Colley 2002. 187 Pelling 1993; Ginsburg 1993. 185

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provide a suggestive counterbalance to the kind of voice-throwing that we observe in Caesar and Tacitus, although the limits of potential radicalism are enforced both by Josephus’ own intermediary stance and perhaps also by the decorum of historiography itself. In the Jewish War, the speaking role that he gives to himself as well as the speech attributed to Agrippa II, an acceptance of empire in the ‘realist’ terms of inevitable necessity, give an ultimately frustrating sense of the limits of Roman literary pluralism.188 One of the most interesting ways in which the works of Josephus suggest a speciWcally provincial angle on empire is in their engagement with the dynamics of Roman self-positioning within a Greek cultural world, as well as with the closely related subject of the dynamics of local self-positioning within a Roman imperial world. In the Against Apion, as we have begun to see, there is considerable emphasis on the Jews as an ‘other people’ within the terms of primarily Greek ethnographical, political and historiographical discourse. Some of this ‘otherness’ is expressed in the form of the priority of ‘alien wisdom’: thus, for example, the Jews are inventors of philosophy, and the ethical ‘good life’ in general.189 Elsewhere, the Jews are portrayed as a people who would be a subject of ‘wonder’, a thauma, to an unprejudiced audience: there is appeal here to the ‘levelling’ aspect of the ethnographical tradition that is of course in itself a kind of ethnocentrism, the universe of wonders that was increasingly viewed as collectable, a commodity even, in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.190 The most signiWcant part of Josephus’ claims for the Jews as an ‘other people’ is, however, to be found in his discussion of the ideal nature of their politeia, their ‘state’ and/or ‘constitution’ and its founder, Moses. This is a deliberate recollection of idealizing politeia accounts such as Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians and Plato’s imaginary Republic, on which Moses’ politeia is said to be an improvement. The ideal aspect of the Jewish politeia is, of course, peculiarly appropriate, to say the least a favourable

188 BJ 2. 345–401; for a general account of Josephus’ life and perspectives, see Rajak 1983: esp. 1–9; for Agrippa II’s speech to the Jews, see Rajak 1991. 189 190 Ap. 2. 281–2. Ap. 2. 221.

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spin on a ruined and now increasingly virtual ‘state’.191 The traditional emphasis in politeia texts on the mind of the individual lawgiver, such as the Spartan Lycurgus or the Athenian Solon, is also used to advance the image of the Jews: not only is Moses the archetypal ‘nomothete’ (‘lawgiver’), but the binding code of the Law was Wxed amongst all, not just the few, by compulsory weekly instruction.192 Josephus’ Jewish politeia, furthermore, surpasses all earthly—or Greek—categories of government, being a theokratia, a ‘theocracy’, a term coined by Josephus.193 The competitive tone of Josephus’ political–ethnographical discussion of the Jews is enhanced by the ‘attack’ on Apion that frames the second book of the Against Apion. That the ‘attack’ is a rhetorical device is suggested by the fact that the Alexandrian Apion was not a contemporary of the work: the ostensible context, Jewish-Alexandrian animosities under Caligula, during which Apion was a delegate sent to Rome by the Greeks of Alexandria, is a ‘dead’ one that is used to frame a much larger, ‘international’ case for the position of Jews within the world.194 The mainstay of the argument of the second book is that Apion is an impostor, not an Alexandrian by birth at all, but an Egyptian from Oasis, whose ‘real’ identity is exposed in a number of ways, including by his attitude towards Jewish animal sacriWce, proving that he is not Greek at all.195 The argument manipulates well-known Roman prejudice against the Egyptians, in its emphasis on their animal gods, unholiness, exclusion from citizenships, and Cleopatra, who here as elsewhere glides into an ‘Egyptian’ rather than a ‘Greek’ character.196 At surface level, then, the force of the invective is directed primarily against Egyptians, old and comparatively easy targets of prejudice, the lowest ethnic group in the social ranking of Alexandria. However, it rapidly becomes clear that the Greeks 191

Ap. 2. 220–31; Plato’s Republic is dismissed by Polybius (6. 47. 7–10) in his comparison of Rome with other politeiai on the grounds that, like a beautiful statue, it never functioned as a ‘living, breathing’ organism. 192 193 Ap. 2. 171–8. Ap. 2. 165. 194 Goodman 1999; for Apion as delegate, see Josephus AJ 18. 257–60. 195 Ap. 2. 137–42; cf. 2. 29–32. 196 Animal gods: 2, 81; 86; exclusion from citizenships: 2. 41–2; cf. 72; Cleopatra: 2. 56–60.

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are implicated as well: while the superiority of the Jews to the Greeks was already important in the Wrst book of the Against Apion, the second book also pushes this issue. For example, the Alexandrian Greeks are accused of having become contaminated by mixing with Egyptians, unlike the Jewish genus that remained ‘pure’, while Josephus also plays Roman perceptions of the Greeks as morally corrupt, homosexual, lazy, and Wckle.197 This competitiveness is surely aimed in part at rehabilitating the Jews within the Roman network of privilege and favour, at the end of the Flavian dynasty: far from being at the bottom of the heap, the Jewish kings alone were the loyal friends of Rome, while the claimed virtues of the Jews at times come very close to ideals ascribed to or claimed by the Romans, including piety and philanthropia.198 Interestingly too, Josephus’ ‘reply’ to Apion’s supposed astonishment that Jews could be called Alexandrians allows Josephus—with visible manipulation of the direction of the argument—to expand on the ‘philanthropy’ of the Romans, who granted their citizenship not just to individuals, but to entire, great ethne¯: ‘those who were once Iberians, Tyrrhenians, and Sabines are now called Romans.’199 In addition to being an implicit comment on Josephus’ personal history, there are interesting implications for both Rome’s potential to integrate, and, more subtly, the possibility that even the Jews, whose separate nature is an important aspect of both idealizing apologetic and gentile invective, could be integrated. Perhaps, however, the arguments of Against Apion are hinting at something more. In allegedly countering ‘Apion’ once again, Josephus expands on the mutability of human fortune, with particular regard to empires, a traditional Greek historiographical motif. ‘Apion’ ’s argument that the injustice of the Jews’ nomoi, and their lack of reverence for God are proved by the fact that they have been repeatedly slaves to one nation after another is addressed by the point that historically even imperial powers have been enslaved, and that the Jewish kings David and Solomon once held sway over many peoples.200 The 197

Ap. 1. 69–70; Goodman 1999: 57. Ap. 2. 134, 2. 145; Goodman 1999 for rehabilitation as the primary purpose of the work; Rajak 1998: 204–6 for Jewish virtues. 199 200 Ap. 2. 40. Ap. 2. 125–34. 198

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Romans are ostensibly left out of the equation, distanced from universal subjection, but if the implications of the passage are followed through, and particularly the claim that not even the pious are immune to subjection, then the possibility arises that Roman domination too might one day be superseded.201 While, as we have seen, Josephus in the Jewish War makes the Romans the agent of an angry God, he does occasionally elsewhere leave other possibilities hanging, again no more than the subtlest of hints. For example, in a passage of the Antiquities, traditional apocalyptic thought on the succession of kingdoms again quietly implies the possibility of a successor to Rome as well.202 In this context, it is worth pointing out that, while Josephus’ emphasis on Jewish morality and religiosity in the Against Apion does indeed recall the values ascribed to Romans and claimed by them, he does push certain aspects that would emphasize the distance between Jews and Romans, not least the status of the Jews as a ‘pure’ and ‘unmixed race’. Although as we have seen Josephus is comfortable with the idea of ‘becoming Roman’, he can scarcely have been unaware of the advertised heterogeneity of Roman roots. Given the importance of ‘purity’ in the reception of Athens as a great imperial power, are the Jews thus an improvement on the Romans, even a potential rival? I leave hanging the question, and its implications for the limits of history-writing in the Roman imperial world.203

201

Ap. 2. 126 (with some textual diYculty); 2. 131. AJ 10. 210 with Rajak 1998: 206. 203 The genre of prophetic texts, within which Sibylline Oracles (see especially Potter 1990) are an interesting example of cultural and intellectual fusion, surely encourages intimations of doom rather more. 202

Epilogue: Closure? Romulus lied, Livy suggests: his ruse, following the lies of other ‘city founders’, was that the mixed and motley gathering in his asylum was earth born, autochthonous. The asylum itself, interestingly, remains intact from Livy’s rationalization, suYciently human, banal and unromantic to stand within his selfconsciously historical account.1 Roman myths of origins were no less, and indeed (given peculiar Roman emphasis on origins and exemplarity), arguably more subject even than myth in the Greek world to intense debates about veracity of detail, to ampliWcation, to satirical treatment and revisionist interpretation.2 But this energetic engagement serves to reinforce rather than undermine the perceived power of these myths as a means of staking out the essentials of Roman character, played out, ‘remembered’ or forgotten in her history, and above all in her present. While Livy himself placed the traditional stories that are the conventional conWnes of myth in a particular category, telling a kind of truth distinct from an historical narrative, many of the issues of truth and belief raised by myth are of course not peculiar to it. The processes of selection, construction, and interpretation that are intrinsic to the writing of the past or of other societies in antiquity as well as in the modern world are similarly dynamic and contested, prompting anxious debate about the historian’s—or ethnographer’s or anthropologist’s— authority, the nature of proof, and the nature, or indeed the very existence, of absolute truth. The importance of origins and descent within both Roman historiography and ethnography constantly reinforces the status of myth within self-consciously 1

Livy 1. 8. 6. For ancient deliberations about Wction and belief, see e.g. Gabba 1981; Veyne 1983; Feeney 1993; Bowersock 1994. 2

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‘scientiWc’ treatments. Modern scholars of antiquity have sometimes been keen to distance themselves from what they perceive ancient historiography to have been, a rhetorical exercise, written and read as Wction.3 And the ‘invention of tradition’ on roots is often associated amongst western intellectuals with a more socially polarized and credulous age, or indeed with manipulative tyrannies that foster hatred and division on the grounds of ethnicity and race. However this perceived distance is signiWcantly undermined by the recent passions unleashed in the Black Athena debate. The energetic quest in classical antiquity for mirrors of our own societies on both sides of the debate reinforces the sense that deeply held beliefs about our own roots, past and present identities are at stake. The subject of my story has been Roman self-perception as well as more recent perceptions of Roman identity, and if it has been somewhat non-empirical, I apologize only a little. To present a study of perceptions and self-perception in terms of a division between ‘representations’ and ‘reality’ is to beg questions. These include the major problem of whose perspective on ‘reality’ is being described, sometimes a rather unexamined set of anachronistic criteria, such as those declared or implied in the long modern tradition of revisionist treatments of Roman emperors. Thus, for example, Claudius’ problematic emphasis on his freedmen, and his awards to them of honours that deeply oVended the oYce-holding elite, has been reread as an innovative bureaucracy, the creation of a professional civil service.4 The division of ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ has traditionally also entailed a methodologically dubious division of evidence, a preference for supposed ‘hard’ evidence—archaeological and documentary material—over literature. While I have repeatedly defended the use of Roman Wction and rhetoric in the chapters of this book, it is valuable also to signal good practice in using archaeological and epigraphic evidence to address questions of ethnic identity. While the problems of confusing material 3

The classic is, of course, Woodman 1988. Momigliano 1961 (based on 1934 version, but with updated bibliography), Eng. tr. and expanded; for a more recent attempt to identify senatorial bias as the cause of misunderstanding of Commodus’ aims to become the ‘people’s princeps’, ‘Hercules incarnate’, see Hekster 2002: esp. 197–202; rehabilitation of Commodus is, however, ultimately resisted. 4

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cultures with peoples have long been recognized, classical archaeologists have developed increasingly sophisticated methodologies to explore questions of cultural choice, criteria of diVerentiation, aspiration, and self-perception, resolutely ‘subjective’ and socio-speciWc issues.5 Additionally, recent work on the papyri of Roman Egypt increasingly builds up a ‘real life’ picture of individuals adopting diVerent ethnic personae, diVerent languages, as they play out diVerent roles: the implications are easily profound as those drawn from literary games of self-placing.6 On the other hand, diVerent problems can be raised by the now very prevalent focus on ‘construction’, ‘invention’, and ‘representation’ in the ancient world. Studies of the construction of sexuality, the invention of the Roman past, and, most relevant to my own study, the representation of other peoples have been enormously useful in moving scholarship beyond the essentialism of race and sex—or, indeed, Greeks and barbarians—and beyond reading depiction—of luxurious eastern barbarians, or animal-like northern barbarians—as simple description. At best too, such studies repeatedly challenge more traditional readings that see such depictions as ‘mere’ literary topoi, with the unexplored implication that ‘real life’ is conducted in some parallel universe, with (presumably) its own, more ‘real’ language. Such sophistication has contributed to the expansion of some of the most traditional areas of interest within the discipline of ancient history. For example, as the study of politics has been reinvented as the study of political culture, the focus is as likely to be on Athenian litigation, Roman houses, or allegations of immoral behaviour as it is to be on ‘constitutions’, the powers of ekkle¯sia or comitia, or the role of senate or boule¯.7 Sometimes, however, the value of perceptions for increasing our understanding of the political and social culture of the ancient world has been overstated: there is a risk that ‘rhet5

See e.g. C. Morgan 1991; 2001 on the archaic Greek world; 2003. e.g. Clarysse 1992, 1993, 1997. 7 Athenian political culture, and particularly the culture of law and the courts, has been the subject of intense scholarly activity in recent years; the subject of Roman political culture has been somewhat quieter, but see, to an extent, e.g. Edwards 1993; Wallace-Hadrill 1994. 6

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orical’ representations of the world, rather than begging questions about some external universe, have become the entire universe. While wanting to avoid falling into the trap of dividing material naı¨vely into ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, I have been concerned throughout this book to challenge ancient perceptions. This process is not infrequently started on our behalf by conXict, argument, and debate amongst the ancient themselves, and encourages us to ask questions about who is talking, in what mode, for which audience, for what purposes and from what perspective, about historical speciWcity. Historical speciWcity is peculiarly vexed in the study of Roman history, given the clustering of continuous narrative sources from the end of the Republic, which has led to very diVerent assessments of the value of such narratives for the reconstruction of ‘what really happened’ in the early, and even the middle, Republic. Despite the diYculties of trying to extrapolate diVerent historical ‘layers’, it seems to me essential to attempt to identify changing traditions, not least to gain a clearer insight into how, by whom, and why the history of the Republic was substantially ‘invented’.8 This exercise is particularly necessary given the impression of unchanging essentialism that Roman myth and mythologizing history frequently seeks to aYrm. To give an example of the value of challenging one ‘set’ of ancient perceptions, I have explored the cultural importance of unifying visions of the Roman empire: the citizenship as a single community, even a single, togate race with, increasingly, a shared and universal history. Such visions project important ‘truths’, and the identity of authors and initiators—Greek rhetors, local priests of the imperial cult, Augustus attempting to delineate a quintessentially Roman political space in the city of Rome, Claudius admitting long-haired Gauls to Roman political honours, individual Roman citizens in towns of the Greek East seeking privilege and distinction—suggest the breadth, complexity and controversial nature of the Roman imperial 8 It will have become clear that I Wnd it hard to envisage any historical period or society within which tradition is not ‘invented’ in the loose sense in which Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983 have been received by historians of premodern societies.

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project. Once we begin to raise questions of perspective, we engage in all-important issues of individual contexts: the maintenance of Republican calendars in communities of the Greek East during the imperial period, where exercising the Roman citizenship was far removed from the ideal of participation in political assemblies; the local speciWcity of the imperial cult and its expression of historical continuity at a local level, as well as of change; satirical treatments that suggest that toga-wearing was the pursuit of a tiny minority, on high days and funerals; that the city of Rome, the centre of empire itself, might be regarded as a pole of attraction for peoples and objects from every corner of the empire, a variegated vision of world mastery or an eyesore, or—depending on the context—a cacophany of foreigners, their languages and religions. Such alternative perspectives do not, however, undermine centralizing visions of Rome, but, conversely, reinforce their status as the symbolic expression of a geographically and culturally fractured virtual community. Questions of perception and self-perception in the Roman imperial world are frequently somewhat diVerent from those raised in relation to other societies in the ancient world, such as classical Athens, given the tendency towards incorporation and integration. Above all, the boundary between those who represent and those who are represented is far less rigid than it is in, for example, the case of portrayal of Persians in Athenian tragedy. Clearly, however, the issues are not wholly dissimilar, particularly in the case of perceptions of unincorporated peoples before the late Republic, when any general expectation of incorporation was, at best, extremely fragile. In such cases, it seems preferable to place a study of perceptions at the interface of Roman and local, using evidence of local self-perception to build up an alternative vision, within which points of contact and conXict can be explored and explanations attempted. Elsewhere, abundant evidence exists for the successful manipulation and reinvention of roles assigned to ‘other peoples’ by incorporated ‘other peoples’ themselves.9

9 Dench 1995 was my own attempt to examine this interface; for the manipulation of assigned roles, see also Cooper 1996, a very suggestive study of women’s appropriation of idealized imagery in late antiquity.

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The projection of an increasingly international, and speciWcally Roman, identity involved in the third and second centuries bc emphasizing both Rome’s local particularity and her place within the civilized, educated, international Greek community from time immemorial. And, as we have seen, one of the most peculiar aspects of ‘Roman’ literature is the way in which authors repeatedly both dramatize the ethnic plurality that can be encompassed and played out within Roman identity, and a sense of a small world. This image of a small world says something ‘real’ about the distinctive, incorporative nature of the Roman empire, the degree to which aspirational tendencies, a kind of ‘Roman dream’ were shared, possibly even contributing to the success of empire.10 For all the more fashionable insistence on the ‘polyvalence’ and ‘slipperiness’ of aspects of Roman cultural and social life and elite self-positioning, the parameters of mythical and historical discourses on origins are in some sense strikingly narrow. As we saw in discussion of Josephus’ positioning of the Jews, no substantial challenge was ever mounted against Herodotean terms of accommodating ‘other peoples’ within an international framework, such as relative antiquity. Nevertheless, I share recently expressed concerns about the extent to which studies of the Roman empire have concentrated on the elite.11 In particular, I wonder how far my predominant focus on ethnic identities and the Roman citizenship has tended to obscure the importance of constructing other kinds of group membership and social position, such as work, collegia, subelite magistracies, and army units. While clearly elite statuses were regularly expressed in non-ethnic terms, Sandra Joshel’s exploration of the relative importance of work as opposed to distinctive ethnic origins for the expression of non-elite identities might imply some ‘class’—or perhaps more accurately ‘group’–diVerences in self-representation.12 10 Cf. early 21st-cent. surveys that repeatedly Wnd strong belief in the aspirant ‘American Dream’ amongst the poorest and newest immigrants to the United States, above all Hispanics. 11 See e.g. Alcock 2001. 12 Joshel 1992; but see also e.g. Hope 1998; Goldsworthy and Haynes 1999.

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In terms of chronology, my end is harder to justify than my beginning. I have chosen to tell a particular story that centres on Italy and the shifting balance between the peninsula, the Greek world, and broader spheres of Roman imperium, tracing the particular dynamics of Rome’s emergence and hegemony, conquest, rule, and incorporation. My choice of around 300 bc for the beginning of the story reXects my belief that it is then that we can begin to write more conWdently a history of Rome and that we can begin to see distinctive imperial behaviour. Any notion of an ‘end’ to my account of Roman identities is obviously problematic. We have, it is true, hinted at the emergence of strikingly diVerent formulations of identity at the end of the period considered: the importance of individual profession rather than descent that arises as a result of determining who is a Jew in accordance (paradoxically) with Roman imperial structures; more emphatic (but still, importantly, variant) deWnitions of ‘Roman’ identity thrown into light by notions of Christianity, as suggested by use of the noun Romanitas, or the construction of ‘paganism’ as a system. On the other hand, I would be very wary of positing a decisive break with the past, or a deWnitive shift towards ‘global’ identities, or anything of the sort. The terms and categories of ethnic deWnition and self-deWnition are peculiarly subject to ‘revival’, given the perceived authority of antiquity in these matters.13 13

See Amory 1997: esp. ch. 4, for the appropriation of classical ethnography as a means of structuring the very new world of the 5th and 6th cents.

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GENERAL INDEX

Aborigines 63 accent, see language, Latin Achaeans 235 Achilles 58, 249, 324 Actium, battle of 79, 184, 353 Adonis 311, 336 adoption 110, 115, 254 adultery 81, 136, 289, 294–5, 338, 340–1; Julian law on 142, 227, 256–7 Aedes Herculis Musarum, Rome 326 Aelia, gens 207 Aelia Capitolina, Hadrianic colony at Jerusalem 350–1 Aelius Aristides: On Athens ‘purity’ of Athenians 261–2; Roman Oration praise for Roman citizenship and comparison to classical Athens 94–8, 134, 262, 264 Aeneas: arrival of 201, 211; brings Penates from Troy 202; clothes of 276–7; in Forum of Augustus 214; -group in wall-painting at Stabiae 214–15; immigration of and marriage to Lavinia 102–3; princeps’ descent from 208; relations with Alba Longa and Lavinium 252; shield of 24, 79; Silvius Aeneas, at Lavinium 215; war of, in Italy 213 Areopagus 109

Aeschylus: Eumenides 109; Suppliants 245 Aesernia, Latin colony 165 Aethiopes, see Ethiopians Africa 43, 84, 90, 95, 294, 302 Africans 72, 90, 224–5 Afrocentrist, perspectives on Greek civilization 7; see also Bernal, Martin ager Romanus 160 ago¯nisma 353 agora 298 Agricola (Cn. Iulius Agricola), legate of Britain 83, 85–7, 325 Agrios, in Hesiod 247 Agrippa (M. Julius Agrippa), ‘Herod’ 351, 355 Agrippa (M. Vipsanius Agrippa), portico of 79 Agrippa II (M. Julius Agrippa) 355, 358 Airs, Waters, Places, Hippocratic text: on character, body, and the physical environment 57, 255, 267–8; on Scythians 50, 274 Alba Fucens 174 Alba Longa 117, 171, 201–3, 252; king-list of 201 T. Albucius, in Catullus 330 Alcaeus 266 Alci, divinites of the Naharvali 80 Alcibiades 101, 105; statue in the Roman comitium 272

416

General Index

alea, popular game 291 Alesia 53–4 Alexander the Great 78, 271: civilizing aims of 87, 123, 263–4; conquests of 39, 70, 284–5, 310; ‘set texts’ for expedition of 44, 55–6 Alexandria: Agrippa of Judaea at 351–2; Apion sent to Rome by Greeks of 359–60; cultural centre of the world 322; embassy to Gaius from 62, 346; Library of 311; literature and learning at 55, 58, 310–11, 336, 340 Alps 33, 51, 117, 133, 168, 188, 200, 218, 332 Amaena, in Catullus 333 Amazons 247 ambitio 68, 148 Ammianus Marcellinus 42 Anchises 64; on Rome’s talent for conquest and rule 26, 69, 90; with gamblingboard 215 Ancus Marcius 23, 120 Antenor 211 Antioch 288 Antiochenes, in Jerusalem 349 Antiochus I Soter 324 Antiochus IV Epiphanes 348–9 Antiochus of Syracuse 158–9 antiquarianism 176, 194 Antony (M. Antonius): Cicero against 184–5; drinking, vomiting, and buggery of 184, 281; marriage to Octavia 69; on Octavian’s ignobilitas 114–15, 184; ‘Orcus men’ enrolled by 140; portrait of 270; and Sicily 133, 155, 188

Aosta 205 Apennines 133, 165, 174, 200 apes, dog-headed 214 Apion 359–60; see also Josephus apparitores 208–9 Appian Civil War: on the Social War 125–6, 128–9 Apollo 56; Delphic 17; and foundation of Cyrene 244; wooden statue of at Cumae 169 Apulia 190–1 Apulus, in Horace 278 Aquitani 52 Arabia 44 Arabs in Petronius’ Satyricon 293, 296–7 Arcadians 2, 61, 63, 244 archaeology: discipline of 7, 29, 84, 231–2, 232, 364 archo¯n 104, 109, 221 Arezzo: Caesarian and Pompeian colonists, Fidentiores and Iulienses 215; elogia of seven triumphatores at 215; Etruscan 215 Argei 320 Argives, companions of Hercules 320 Ariminum 164 Aristophanes 241, 308, 334; Frogs 242 Aristotle 104, 245, 266–7, 307 Arpinum 179, 185, 300 Arrian (Lucius Flavian Arrianus) 263 ‘Arringatore’ statue 278 Asculum 299 Asia: and Europe 42, 57, 267–8; Minor 72, 90, 246, 267 Asiatic peoples 57, 267, 229, 267–8; clothing of 274, 277

General Index Asinius Marrucinus, brother of C. Asinius Pollio 333, 336 C. Asinius Pollio 69, 336 Asinius Rufus, son of 116 Aspasia 306 astoi 98–9, 242 asyla 16–17 asylum, of Romulus: 1–5, 11, 14–21, 25, 35, 96, 101–2, 103, 145, 240; as aetiology of civil war 25; as foundation myth for Roman citizenbody 4, 25, 101–2; as loanword from Greek 16–17; as precedent for Divus Julius’ asylum 17–18 Atella 181, 321 Athena 97: Ilias, cult of 252–3 Athenaeus Deipnosophists 278, 284 Athenian Constitution 98–9, 242–3 Athens: class consciousness and the political coup of 411 bc at 241, 256; Hadrian at 156, 221; local historical accounts of 63; as a model for Rome 20, 94–5, 97–9, 238; Old Oligarch on 241, 266, 306; as a reference-point for western politics 239; Sulla’s siege of 97; Theophrastus of Eresus at 298, 300; of Thucydides 20, 236, 243, 322; Vespasian promotes rhetoric at 303; see also autochthony; citizenship; democracy Attalus I 44, 50 Attica 63, 105, 179, 237; see also language, Attic Atticism 138

417

Atticus (T. Pomponius Atticus) 15, 109, 180, 185; in Brutus 298–9 Augustales 113, 117, 144, 150, 207–9; see also freedmen Augustus, Emperor (C. Octavius) 39, 55, 70; austerity of 186, 287–8, 296; and clothes and language swapping on Capri 204, 295; in competition with Antony 281; and concern about adultery and mixing of blood 141–2, 227, 255–9; and dislike of freaks 291; dual identity of 114–15, 186; Forum of 212, 214, 215; Lares and Genius, cult of 117; mausoleum of 184; modern historiography on the age of 193–5, 197; as pater patriae 117; and public display of wonders 287; on pullati and the gens togata 13, 277; reorders Roman society and politics 69, 111–13, 139–43; Res Gestae 38, 45, 140, 184, 200; sacrifices to at Naples 203; statue of at Volaterra 206 Aulus Albinus 305, 314 Aulus Gellius 49, 168, 314 Austen, Jane 84 austerity/primitivism: Augustan 287–8; Germany as a model of 82; Italian 183, 185; Roman 61–4, 66, 272, 326; Sabine 64; Samnite 203; Scythian 193; Spartan 64; Tarentine 193

418

General Index

autochthony: Arcadian 244; Athenian 4, 19, 20, 96, 98, 100–1, 103, 243–5, 253, 356; Cyrenean 244; Romulus’ claim of Roman 18–19, 96, 361; Theban 244–5 autoethnography 62, 65–6 Aventine 320 Aventinus, the Alban 320 aviary, of Ptolemy Philadelphus 284 Babylonians 356; see also Berossus Bacchanalian affair 19 Baiae 185 Balsdon, J.P.V.D. 31 Barton, Carlin 290, 291 barbarians; see Greeks and barbarians barbaros, early use of the term 305 Basilica Aemilia 14 Batavians 302 Battus, tomb of 43 Behistun monument 38 Belgae 52 Beneventum, Latin colony 164 Berenice, lock of 340 Bernabou, Marcel 84 Bernal, Martin Black Athena 7, 9–10, 225, 233, 363 Berossus Babyloniaca 62, 313, 321, 323–4, 356 Bickerman, Elias 236 bilingualism 304 Bithynia 73, 333 blood, ‘pure’ 227, 234: Athenian 100, 242–3, 261–2, 361; Greek 260, 297; Jewish 360–1; Roman 27,

257–60; see also autochthony; descent-myths, Athenian Bloomer, Martin 327 Blossius of Cumae 326 Bocchus, king of Mauretania 90 body: ancient interpretation of the 264–74, 279–81; scholars on the Roman 225–6; see also circumcision; disability; freaks Boers 11, 231 Boii 169 Bologna 1–2 Bononia 299 boule¯ 104–5, 364 boys, pretty 88, 229 Brescia 341 Britain, Roman 39, 43; modern scholarship on 83–4 Britannia, personification of 39 Britons 37, 90, 136; Tacitus on 83, 86, 262 Brittunculi 73 Brixia, in Catullus 332, 340–1 Brundisium 69, 292 Brunt, P. A. 125 Brutus, in Brutus 298–9 bull: Italian 126, 159; Samnite 159 Byzantium 294 Caecilius, in Catullus 342 Caecina, gens 207 C. Caecina Largus 205 A. Caecina Severus 204, 206 Q. Caedicius, hero of Hannibalic War 64 Caeles Vibenna 320 M. Caelius Rufus 286 Caesar (C. Iulius Caesar) 25, 59, 70, 180; Civil War 52; clemency of 18; De Analogia 303, 316; expedition to Britain

General Index 39–40; and feriae Latinae 201; Gallic War on barbarian use of horses 73; Gallic War portrayal of Germans and Gauls 49, 52–4, 357–8; grants citizenship to Transpadani 132–3, 142, 155, 188; grants Latin status to Sicily 44 bc 188; portraits of 270 Caesarea 351 Caesennia gens 216 calendars: local and Julian 214, 366 Calgacus the Caledonian 85 Caligula, Emperor (Gaius Iulius Caesar Germanicus) 137; antics in northern Gaul 37, 39–41; appoints Agrippa king of Judaea 351; god and goddess outfits of 296; Jewish-Alexandrian animosities under 359; triumph of 37, 40, 296 calles 191 Callimachus 57, 328, 335, 338, 340: Aetia 56; father of paradoxography 284 L. Calpurnius Piso 64 camelus, Syrian word 320 Campania 180–1, 190, 342 Campbell, Brian 72 campus 174 Capitol 37, 68, 202, 343–4, 352 Cappadox 186 Caracalla, edict of 135–6, 227 Carians 305 Carracci, Agostino, Annibale, and Ludovico 1–3 Carthage 58, 60, 276 Carthaginians 65, 249, 285

419

Cassius Dio 17–18, 138 Castor, and Pollux 80 Cato the Elder (M. Porcius Cato) 68, 240; austerity of 183; in Cicero 132, 179; Gallic fragments of Origines of 51; On Agriculture 171; Origines on Italy 168–71, 189, 251; Origines on Rome’s virtuous origins 62, 64–5; Polybius’ version of, on after-effects of conquest 88, 229; of Tusculum 117, 132 Cato the Younger (M. Porcius Cato) 16, 109 Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) 43; Grotto di Catullo 332; interplay between local Italian and Roman identity in 155, 179, 211, 302, 329–42, 355; on Egnatius and variegation of Italians 273, 336, 338–9; reception of Callimachean poetics in 335, 338, 340; rusticity and urbanity in 28, 114, 334–9 Caudini 165 cavea 205 caviar 88 Cecina, river 207 Celtae, see Celts Celtiberians 273, 336, 339 Celts 40, 50–2, 260 census: 70 bc 188–9; ad 73–4 200 Centaurs 247 Flavius Cerealis, prefect of ninth Batavian cohort 302 Chaldaeans 356 Christianity 136, 218–19, 228, 368

420

General Index

Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero) 173–4; Academica Posteriora on Varro’s antiquarian work 61, 316; advice of, to brother Quintus 72, 131, 156; in Cilicia 286; De Oratore on ‘crap of Romulus’ 3, 15–16, 109; De Responso Haruspicarum 282; foreign origii, Arpinum 179, 257, 300; Laws on two patriae 96, 132, 154, 156, 330; on accent 185–6; on Campanian parochial interests 180–1; on the feriae Latinae 201; on the Gracchi 326; on new men 114, 147, 179, 185; on oratory and hierarchy of Latin language use 298–301; on Pompey and Caesar’s ambitions for empire 39; on rhetoric 326; on urbanity, rusticity, and worthy Italians 114, 182–3; Philippics support for Octavian 114, 184; Pro Balbo 118–19, 132; Pro Cluentio on Larinum 186–7; Pro Flacco 111; Republic 59, 60, 109–12; Romanocentric views of 179 Cilicia 185, 286 Cimon: asserts kinship with Theseus 240 cinctus Gabinus 273 Cinna (C. Helvius Cinna) 336 Circe 212, 247 circumcision 293, 353 circus: exotic animals and venationes at the 285–6 Cispadani 339 citizenship, Athenian: exclusivity of 98, 100, 103; as model for

Roman citizenship 94–5, 97–9, 138; modern debate on 98, 238; Pericles’ legislation 451/0 on qualification for 98, 238, 242, 243, 256 citizenship, dual 96, 132; see also Cicero, Laws citizenship, Roman: and army veterans overseas 134, 155; ‘centripetal’ attitudes towards 120, 134; compatibility of with being Jewish 351; foundation myths for 25, 94; generosity with 5, 10, 118–19, 137, 360; imperial reluctance with 136–43, 257; and Latin language 303; local uses of 134–5; more exclusive notions of 31, 95–6, 130, 253–4; peculiar developments of 123; permeability of 20, 93–4, 96, 98, 104; proposed grant of to Latins 130, 254; and the Social War 125–31 citizenship, sine suffragio 120, 122–3 civilitas 288 Classics, study and politics of 7–8 Claudius, Emperor (Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus): conquest of Britain 39; deprives a Lycian of Roman citizenship 138; forbids noncitizens to wear togas 278; freakish fool in Seneca 280, 289–90; grants honours to his freedmen, Pallas and Narcissus 145, 289, 363; on Gaul and extension of citizenship 5, 98, 118, 120, 136, 155, 365

General Index Ap. Claudius Caecus 215 Ap. Claudius Pulcher 185 Clemens, of Carsulae 209 Cleon, as ‘sausage-seller’ 241 Cleonymus of Sparta 211 Cleopatra VII 7, 222, 223, 225, 359 Clodius (P. Clodius Pulcher) 109, 183, 185 clothing: of Aeneas, ornate scabbard and Tyrian purple cloak, amictus 276; of Aeneas’ Trojans, effeminate 277; of Alexander, barbarian frock 264; of ‘Arringatore’ statue, hybrid 227–8; of Asiatic peoples 274; of Augustus, homespun 186, 296; of Britons, trousers 280; of Caligula, god and goddess outfits 296; of ephebes in Jerusalem, petasos 349; ethical reading of 296; of Ethiopians, leopardskin 268; of Gauls, toga 275; of Gauls, trousers 118, 133, 136, 142, 276; of ‘Greeks’, pallium / himation 275, 278–9, 295; of Ionians, petasos 28; of Libyans, leather 268; of Lycians, beltless 266; of Lydians, frocks 325; of Perseus of Macedon, dark robes and high boots 78; of Persians, variegated 124; of personifications 80, 273–4; of pullati at Rome 277; as reflection of true or false identity 266, 295, 353; of Scythians, trousers 49, 274; of slaves 241, 266, 281; swapping of, on Capri 204,

421

295; of tyrants, long cloak 266; see also toga Cluentius (A. Cluentius Habitus) 186–7 L. Coelius Antipater 169 cognomina: advertising ancestral deeds 240; advertising derogatory physical features 265, 271–2; badge of success 77; distinctive qualifier 177–8; earliest exclusive to patricians 240; indicator of Italian origin 154; Sabinus 343–4; see also names coinage, Antonine 220, 273; of allies in Social War 126; alluding to Italian origines of moneyers 342–4; depicting Roma and Italia 188, 219, 332; Flavian 352; portraits of Flamininus on gold 271 colonia, see colonies colonies, colonization: in Cisalpine Gaul 51, 133; at early Rome 24; Greek 14, 159, see also poleis, western Greek; Latin 123, 134, 138, 164–5, 191, 252, 315; overseas veteran 134; in post-Social War Italy 175–6, 200, 210, 333, 341–2; Philip V on Roman 93, 123; Velleius Paterculus on 119 ‘colour symbolism’ 294 Colvin, Stephen 307–8 comedy: Athenian 172, 307; Aristophanic 241, 266 comitium 272, 287, 364 Commodus, Emperor (Lucius Aurelius Commodus) 289 Comum 220, 342 conspirators, Catilinarian 109, 183

422

General Index

consulship, suffect 204, 208 contiones 106, 111 Cooper, Nicholas 84 Corinth 60 Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi 326 L. Cornelius Balbus, African triumph of 76 Cornelius Nepos, in Catullus 331–2, 340–1 L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, elogium of 78, 272 Corsica 218 Coruncania, gens of Camerium 117 Cos 324 Cosa, Latin colony 164 L. Cotta 186, 300, 328 Crassus (M. Licinius Crassus) 278 Crawford, Michael 188, 219 Crete 80 Cretans 127–8 Critognatus 53 Croesus 86 Ctesias of Cnidos 47 cult, imperial 27, 155, 365–6; in Italy 203, 207 Curenses 318 M. Curius Dentatus 123, 163, 165, 240 cursus honorum 145, 150 Cutilia, lake: umbilicus of Italy 191 Cyclops 283 Cycnus, Ligurian king 341 Cyprus 80, 336 Cyrene: third edict of 134–5; Pindar Pythian 9 on 244 Cyrus the Great 57, 64–5, 86, 89 Dacians 80 Dalmatia 43, 95

Daniel 313 Darius I the Great 268 Daunia 253 David 360 decadence: ancient discourse on empire and 325; Greek 60, 87, 97; Roman 59, 102; Sybaritic 284–5; Trojan 103, 277 Decius Magius, Campanian princeps 119 Deinomenids, tyrants of Syracuse 122 Delos 271, 331 Delphi 17, 50, 244 democracy, Athenian 95, 98, 100, 104–5, 239–41, 256 democracy, ideas of at Rome 106, 111 de¯mos 108–9 Demosthenes 243 descent-myths, Athenian: from Erechtheus/Erichthonios 98, 100; from Pelasgians 306, 309; from synoecism under Theseus 100; see also autochthony; blood, ‘pure’ descent-myths, Roman 4, 13–14, 25, 196–8, 226–7, 235, 239–40, 254–5; see also Aeneas; asylum; identity, Roman; rape; Romulus dialect: Aeolic 235, 317; Attic 138; Doric 311; Greek 308, 310; Latin 172, 211; of Lesbos 308; Oscan 321; see also language Diana: Lucifera, of Aricia 220: Aventine temple of 320 dianoia 244, 262 Dido 205, 276, 302 Diodorus Siculus 254, on the Social War 125–9

General Index Diomedes 253 Dionysia, Athenian civic festival 44 Dionysius of Halicarnassus: centripetal account of aftermath of the rape, on immigration and admixture of barbarians 22, 24–5, 120, 250, 259–60, 266, 318; identification with Thucydides and the model of Athens 20, 236, 238, 260–1, 263; on Greek origin of Rome 20, 102, 234–5, 259–60; on Greekness, by descent 234–6; on Herodotus 42; on Latin language 303; on pre-Roman Italy 158–9, 194; on Roman citizenship 119; on Romulus’ asylum 17–20, 102; on Sabine marriage rites 22 Diophanes, rhetorician 326 disability, modern western concept of 226–7, 279–80 Divus Julius, temple of 17–18 domi nobiles 182, 301, 340; see also nobiles Domitian, Emperor (Titus Flavius Domitianus) 85, 288–9, 353 dress, see clothing Droysen, J. G. 228, 310 drunkenness 82, 184, 281 Drusus (Drusus Iulius Caesar) 200 Duff, A. M. 6, 229, 277 dwarves 227, 279, 283–4, 287–8, 291 Edom, Rome as 350 education: Greekness based upon 244, 262; gymnastic 354; in the

423

Hellenistic world 322; of Persian boys under Alexander 263; Roman 13, 29, 35, 302; Roman, grammar, oratory, and rhetoric in 45, 83, 298–303, 325–8, 340; see also language, Latin; oratory; paideia; rhetoric Egnatius, Celtiberian in Catullus 273, 336, 338–9 Egypt 9, 42, 62, 236, 245, 289, 312, 352, 364 Egyptians 80, 224, 269, 274, 356; Herodotus on 44, 50, 57, 75, 309; Josephus’ antipathy towards 357, 359–60; see also Manetho ekkle¯sia 104, 364 elogia 72, 78, 211, 214–17, 272 emperor: ‘bad’ 37, 290; ‘good’ 112, 143, 256, 288 empire: comparative studies of 34; British and Roman 85–6, 229–30 empire, Achaemenid 28, 89, 164, 348 empire, Inca 85 empire, Roman: as control of space 45–6, 155, 162–3; integration of 85, 156; Jewish moral critique of 347–8; modern scholarship on 5–6, 11, 32, 34, 83–5; Rome’s cultural ‘mission’ in 75–6, 90, 155, 261, 263–4 Q. Ennius: Annals 48, 57–8, 62, 64, 124, 325; on variegated Italian defence against Hannibal 124, 171; Sabinae 15, 173, 253; tria corda of 49, 168, 178, 326 ephe¯beion 349 Ephialtes 109

424

General Index

Ephorus of Cyme 246 epibate¯rion 340 epigraphy, Latin 132, 182, 304 equites 108, 112, 141, 154 Eratosthenes, ethnographer to Alexander 284 Erechtheus/Erichthonios 98, 100 Ethiopians 9, 44, 80, 224, 227, 265, 268; incompatability of Aethiops with modern Anglo-American ‘black’ 294; physical appearance of 274, 292–4, 296–7; as physically deformed 279, 291; Pliny the Elder on 294–5; slaves 293 ethnic identity, ancient: articulation of family descent and 239–40; based on ‘culture’ and blood descent 224–5, 238–9; complexity of 8; descentmyths, common Mediterranean language for expression of 12–14, 138, 153, 196, 234, 234–8, 313, 329 ethnicity 12, 26–7, 222, 225, 233, 239, 264, 363 ethnocentrism 8, 26, 38, 309, 313, 322–3, 358 ethnographies: meaning of 41–3; usefulness of 72–6 Etruria 117, 178, 203–4, 216 Etruscanism 167 Etruscans: area of Rome named after Caeles Vibenna, noble leader of the 177, 320; of Arezzo and Tarquinia 215–16; cachet of in Roman society 207; of Lydian descent 232, 340; obese, in

Catullus 273, 339; Roman descent from 2, 20, 23, 63, 155, 211, 213, 255; and the Roman triumph 76, 270 Euganeae, tribe of the 169 eugeneia 242 Euripides Ion 100, 245; Medea 322 Europe: and Asia 42, 57, 267–8; northern 39–40, 87 Evander 320 exempla 68, 72 Q. Fabius Pictor 51, 305, 325 fabulae Atellanae 181 faex, see Romulus, crap of Falernum 190 C. Fannius 31, 130, 254 farces, Oscan and Atellan 181–2, 321 fasti 216–17 Favorinus 262, 354 Feeney, Denis 92 feriae Latinae 110, 201–2, 252 fides 249 Fiesole 205 Fiscellus, Mount 169 Fiscus Iudaicus 352 fish: farming 191; ponds 192, 193 Flamininus (T. Quinctius Flamininus) 271 Flavians 329, 345, 352, 360 food 150–1, 289–90; fish 191–2; nuts, Lanuvian 171; oil, Venafrum 190; sausages, Lucanian 171, 320; spelt, Campanian 190; stuffed wombs, Praenestine 171; wheat, Apulian 190; wine, Falernum 190; Fordyce, Christian 333

General Index Formiae 333, 342 fortune: and alea, popular game 291; and freaks 290–2; motif of 106, 144, 147–150; -telling 292 Forum of Augustus 212, 214 Frank, Tenney 6, 228–9, 277 fratricide 1, 2 freaks 227, 265, 281–3, 287–92 freedmen 81, 112–16, 144–6, 207, 209, 257, 296; as ‘bastard brood’ 6, 229; of Claudius 289–90, 363; Trimalchio 147, 150–1, 288, 295; see also Augustales; manumission Fregellae 299 Frentani 186 L. Furius Philo 301 Gaetulians 281 Galatai 50–1 Galli, see Gauls Gallus (G. Cornelius Gallus), elegist 302 Garamantians 224, 274 Gaul 199: ager Gallicus 163; Cisalpine 51, 155, 168, 275, 298–9; as Gallia togata 275; Narbonensis 53; Transpadane 132–3, 188, 220, 273, 275, see also Transpadani Gauls 40, 72, 136: Caesar’s portrayal of 49, 52–4; depicted at Attalid Pergamum 44, 50; ‘dying’ 50; enormous 78; long-haired 5, 155, 276, 365; modified appearance of 37, 40–1; in Petronius’ Satyricon 293, 296–7; reminiscent of

425

Romans 54; trousered 118, 133, 136, 142, 276 Genius, cult of 117, 209 genos 101, 236; Greek 235, 238, 244, 259, 261; Roman 227, 262, 264 gens togata 276–7 gentilicium 177 Germans 37, 41, 74, 200; Caesar’s portrayal of 49, 52–3; Tacitus on 80–2 Giardina, Andrea 217 Gibbon, Edward 228 gignesthai 238 Giton, in Petronius 292–3 gladiator, Samnite 181, 321 globalization 218, 221, 324 Cn. Gellius 169 Gorgo, in Theocritus 311 Gozo 218 C. Gracchus (Gaius Sempronius Gracchus) 108, 253; education of 326; proposed grant of citizenship to Latins, 122 bc 130; repetundae law of 108 T. Gracchus (Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus) tribunate and land law of 108, 110; death of 254; education of 326; on foreign slaves 228, 253; on Roman poor and land 125, 253; Graeculi 73 Graecus ritus 28, 220, 273, 275, 350 grammarians, Alexandrian 310–11 Greekness: ‘aggregative’ concept 237; applied to Rome and other non-Greek peoples by Greeks 246–8; based on descent-myth 98–101, 161,

426

General Index

Greekness: ‘aggregative’ concept (Contd.) 196, 236–8, 243; cultural superiority of 89; defined by Herodotus 138–9, 243, 306–9; defined by Isocrates 244, 307; Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ theories on 234–6, 260; Ephorus on hybridity of 246; in imperial Greek literature 262–4, 274, 306; and language 306–12; as a marker of culture, not descent 244, 307, 312; modern debate on 26, 225, 236–7; ‘packages’ of in ‘barbarian’ contexts 28, 87, 312, 349–50; of Roman origins 20, 24, 211–12, 255 Greeks and barbarians 31, 44, 101, 237–8, 245–6, 267, 363; Alexandrians as educators of 322; in between 248–9; in Hellenistic Italy 44, 172; Herodotus on 47, 56, 267, 308–9; in imperial Greek writers 261–4; and language 305–9 Grose-Hodge, Humfrey 229 Grotto di Catullo, Sirmione 332 Gruen, Erich 28 gymnasium 73, 174, 349 Haarhoff, Theodore 10, 230 Hadria 221 Hadrian, Emperor (Publius Aelius Hadrianus): at Athens 156, 221; local offices held by 221; Roman colony of at Jerusalem 350 Hadian’s Wall 13, 302 hair 80; close-cropped 270; dyed red 37, 40; of foreigners,

red 242; of Gauls, long 5, 155, 276, 365; hairy 119; of Mauri/Moor, curly 280, 281; of Pompey, quiff 271; of Scythians, frozen 54; of Thracians, top-knot, 266; of tyrants, long 266 Hall, Jonathan 237 haruspices 148; fasti of the 216, 282 Haverfield, Francis 90 Hecataeus of Abdera Aegyptiaca 323 Hecataeus of Miletus 42 Helen of Troy 56 Hellanicus of Lesbos 42, 159–60 Hellas 161, 248 Hellen 237, 238 Hellenes 31, 65, 161, 238, 312 Hellenism: cultural 310, 349; as ‘cultural capital’ 97, 156, 305, 321, 347; decline of contemporary 60, 72, 97; in Hellenistic Italy 166–8; 198–9, 205; and Jewish identity 28, 87, 312, 349–50; Latin language and literature and 48, 304–5, 313–14, 326–7, 334–5; modern discussion of Rome’s relationship to 28, 48–9, 220; Rome accommodates herself within the language of 20, 24, 28, 39, 65, 167–8, 172, 204, 211–12, 255, 367; Rome as an outpost of 247; Roman identity as distinct from 26, 39, 62, 65–6, 69–71, 110; Roman ‘secondarity’ to 4, 12, 27, 324; see also Second Sophistic Helle¯nismos: and Jewish identity, see Jews; term indicating

General Index ‘good’ Greek 299, 304, 320; as used by Droysen 310 Hellenization: Alexander the Great and 87, 263; barbarian authors 324; of Italic tribes 198; of Rome 107 helle¯nizein 28, 312 Helvetii 53 Heracleides Ponticus: on Rome as polis helle¯nis 247 Herakles, Hercules 48, 63, 159, 320 Herdonia 174 hermaphrodites 280, 282 Herod the Great 350 Herodotus Histories: ethnography and empire 22, 41–3, 47, 56–7, 59, 74–5, 86–7; local priestly authorities in 321–3, 357; on Egyptians 44, 50, 57, 75, 309, 322, 357; on Greekness 138–9, 243, 306–7; on human and animal wonders 283–4; on Lydians 86–7, 325; on nomos/ physis, culture, and language 268–9, 306–9; on Persians 38, 42, 50, 56–7, 86–7, 124; on Scythians 50, 57; on strangeness of Spartan kings 170; philobarbaros according to Plutarch 261; set text for expedition of Alexander 44, 56 Hersilia, Sabine matron 343 Hesiod: Theogony 247; Works and Days 192, 193, 266 Homer: Hellenistic reverence for 322–3; Iliad bedside reading of Alexander the Great 55; Iliad Catalogue of Ships 236, 305; Iliad father of

427

fifth-century historiography 55–6, impact on Roman literature 55–7; Iliad on deformity of Thersites 265; Odyssey deception by appearances in 266, 295; Odyssey model for travelogue 41, 47; Odyssey one-eyed Cyclops in 283; on Ocean 40 Hirpini 119, 165 hoi migades 246, 261 homophylia 249 Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) 145, 278: Letter to Augustus 70–1, 89, 324 Horatius Cocles 67 hospes 298 hunchbacks 227, 289, 291 humanitas 32, 65–6, 72, 83, 156, 261 Hyperboreans 247 Iberians 6, 228, 360 identity, Greek, see autochthony; blood, ‘pure’; descent-myths, Athenian; ethnic identity, ancient; Greekness; Hellenism identity, modern 8, 138 identity, Roman: in between nature of 250, 261; Christianity and 218–19, 368; hyphenated 47, 154–5; modern study of 26–30, 225–6, 231–2; plurality/ variegation of 3–5, 10, 11, 15, 21–3, 25, 28, 30, 49, 137, 173, 178, 198, 220, 221, 236, 250, 253–5, 273, 343, 367 ignobilitas 114, 184 imagines 145 immigration, to Rome 6, 15, 25, 102, 103, 120–1, 155, 211

428

General Index

imperium 54, 59, 89, 128, 154, 368 India: 41, 44, 284, 288 294 Indians 268 interpretatio: Romana 80–1; Graeca 80 Isocrates Panegyricus 244, 307 Israel, children of 236, 348 Italia: on Antonine coinage, with globe and cornucopia 219; on coinage of allies 126; on coins with Roma as separate entity, holding cornucopia 188, 219, 332; or Italica, alternative capital of allies 126, 332; painting of in temple of Tellus 190 Italians: in the Aeneid 212, 277; as foreigners 23, 103, 213, 300; mass enfranchisement of 131, 153; on Delos 331–2; as part of Roman identity 20, 22–4, 153, 211–21, 255; of pre-Roman Italy 159; Romanization of 166; ‘rusticity/worthiness’ of 62, 114, 167, 172–3, 179, 181–4; and the Social War 119–20, 125–30; variegation of in Catullus 273, 331–39; see also Italy Italica: allies capital in Social War 126, 332; in Spain 221 Italikoi/Italici 331–2 Italus 159, 212; or Italicus, used as an ethnic 331 Italy, modern notions of 120, 152–3 Italy, pre Roman: Augustan period interest in 194–5, 197; conceptualization of 157–62, 194; see also poleis, western Greek

Italy, Roman: absence of Roman government in 157, 199; Augustan regiones of 44, 200–1, 218; Cato’s reassessment of 168–171; and conceptualization of empire 153–7; conceptualization of Roman identity via the idea of 59, 157, 185, 189, 192, 217, 219, 332; conquest and incorporation of 21, 23–5; extent of 117, 132–3; monolith separate from Rome 188, 218, 255; as an organic whole 152–3, 164, 191; Roman proprietorial attitude towards 154, 160, 162, 166, 170, 199; variegated nature of 51, 124, 166–7, 171, 178, 199, 218, 255, 273, 299, 332, 339; see also Italians Iulianus Zegrensis, of Mauretania 135 L. Iulius Caesar, consul 90 bc 128 Iulus, renamed son of Aeneas 115, 239 ius: conubii 23–4, 252; provocationis 128 Jacoby, Felix 41 Janus 212 Jason, high priest 349 Jerusalem 87, 330, 348, 350, 353, 355; Temple of 345–52 Jesse, race of 237 Jews 75, 80: defined by religion 353; diaspora of 346, 350–1, 353; and Hellenismos 28, 87, 312, 349–50; in Petronius’ Satyricon 293, 297; as ‘pure’,

General Index unmixed race 360–1; revolt of the ad 66–351; Roman victory and tax on the 352–3; state of the 350, 358–9; Tacitus on 75–6; writings and selfaccounts of 62, 311, 313, 323 346–8, 350; see also Josephus Josephus (Flavius Josephus) 62, 77, 314; Against Apion challenge to Greeks and assertion of superiority of Jews 344–5, 353–61; Jewish Antiquities 345, 353, 361; Jewish Wars on Jewish theology of Roman conquest 77, 345, 348, 350, 352, 361; Life 345, 355; on mutability of empire 360–1; self-positioning of 329–30, 345, 353–8; writing Jews into Greek history 356–8, 367 Joshel, Sandra 367 Judaea 75–6, 350–1 Jugurtha, Numidian prince 89–90 Julia, Augustus’ daughter 288 Julia, Augustus’ granddaughter 288 Ti. Julius Alexander, prefect of Egypt 352 Julius Archaelaus 355 Juno 24, 103, 277; temple of, at Patavium 211; Sospita at Lavinium, on Antonine coinage 220 Jupiter 24, 103, 277, 279; Capitoline 202, 352; Indiges 202; Latiaris 110 Juvenal 281: warning to ancestor-paraders 19, 35, 145, 258

429

kaloi kagathoi 78, 242, 265, 272, 279 Keltoi, see Celts koine¯ 310; dialektos 310 Kuhrt, Ame´lie 323 Laelia, gens 207 G. Laelius 301 language, Aramaic 313, 346 language, Attic 138, 307, 309–10 language, foreign/ ’barbarian’ 305–6, 308–9; see also barbaros language, Greek 306–15, 354; see also Greekness language, Hebrew 313, 346, 355 language, Latin: and accent 113, 185–6, 300, 313, 327–8; Cicero on hierarchies of use of spoken 298–301; elite aspirations and use of the 302–3; and humanitas 261–2; as lingua franca in Italy 314; as marker of Roman identity 35, 103, 138, 155, 274, 277, 302–4, 315; permeability of 318–20; plural basis of the 210–11, 299, 317–18; pollution of 301, 319; of public documentation 210; rustic, ‘inferior’ 210, 298–301, 315, 328; urbane, ‘good’ 186, 210, 298–302, 304, 327; use of as decisive display of non-Greek identity 315; used within Greek genres 304–5; see also Varro language, Oscan: 49, 159, 166, 168, 181–2, 210, 315, 321, 326, 332

430

General Index

language, Sabine: Varro on Latin and 21, 317–19, 321 Lanuvians: black and toothy in Catullus 273, 339 Lanuvium 171, 342 Laodamia 337 Lares, cult of the 117 Larinum 185–6 Larisa, Thessalian polis 5, 93, 250 Larius, lake 169 Latin name, as a juridical status: 120–1, 123, 133–4, 141, 226–7, 252 Latinitas 299 Latinity 138, 154, 201, 252, 315; see also Latins Latins: C. Fannius on 31, 130, 254; ‘Junian’ 95, 135, 141–2, 258; Roman shared descent with 2, 24, 63, 103, 137–8, 201, 211–12, 252, 254–5, 277, 315; submission of, 338bc 123; see also citizenship, Roman; urbanity and rusticity Latinus: in Hesiod 247; king in Latium 212, 276, 320; used as an ethnic 331 Latium 14, 70, 89, 133, 154, 178, 315, 319, 321, 324, 342 laudes Italiae 60, 189–93, 332 Lavinia 215, 276 Lavinium 24, 202–3, 209, 215, 220, 252 Law, Jewish 330, 346, 349, 352, 359 Lefkowitz, Mary 222–4 Lemnos 309 Leonidas, Spartan hero 64 Lesbia 333 Lesbos 308

lex: Aelia Sentia 141; agraria 111 bc; Canuleia 19, 257; Fufia Caninia 141; Iulia de maritandis ordinibus 142, 203, 256; Iulia theatralis 205; Iunia 141; Papia Poppaea ad 9 203; Sempronia Agraria 110; Tarentina 175–6 libertas 82, 141, 183, 184, 303 Libo Drusus, knight, accused of maiestas 292 Licinius, in Catullus 335 L. Licinius Lucullus 191–2 Liguria 158, 168–9 Ligurians 341 Livia Drusilla: statue of at Volaterra 206 Julia Livilla, niece of Claudius 136 L. Livius Andronicus 57, 325 M. Livius Drusus 128 Livy (T. Livius): Ab urbe condita libri 1, 42, 143, 173, 179; antiquarian interest in Rome’s mixed origins 14, 62, 120, 137, 211–12, 236, 318–19; on asyla 16; on asylum of Romulus 18–21, 25, 96, 101–2, 362; on Athenian autochthony 96–7, 98; on Bacchanalian affair 19; on lex Canuleia 19, 257; on rape of the Sabine women 21–3, 318; Patavium, home town of 211–12; synchronization of Roman and Athenian history 97–8 Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus) Civil War 25 Lucania 117, 171, 200 Lucanianism 167 Lucanians 320

General Index Luceria, Latin colony: Trojan cult of Athena Ilias celebrated at 252–3 Lucian True Stories 46–8, 49, 262, 314, 354 Lucilius (C. Lucilius) 330 Lucretius (T. Lucretius Carus) 102, 193 Lucumo 120 Lycurgus 359 Lydia 41, 86, 232 Lydians: and Etruscans 232, 340; Herodotus on 86, 89, 325 Lyons tablet 5, 118, 136 Maccabaeus Judas 349, 351 1 Maccabees 350 2 Maccabees 28, 312–13, 349–50, 354 Macedon 58–9, 65, 78, 88, 107, 263 C. Maecenas 155 Maesia, of Sentinum 283 Magna Graecia 160–1, 313; see also poleis, western Greek Magna Mater, eunuch priests of 277 Magnani: Lorenzo 2; Palazzo 1–2 Mago, Punic books of 313 Makrokephaloi, LongHeads 268 Malta 218; lapdogs of 284 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare 1 Mamertines 249 Manetho Aegyptiaca 62, 313, 321, 323–4, 356–7 manumission 3, 5, 93, 95, 112, 116, 139, 141–2, 144, 150, 250, 257–8 Marcellus (M. Claudius Marcellus) 78

431

Marcus Marius, Campanian friend of Cicero 181 C. Marius: abolishes property qualification for army 134; new man of Arpinum in Cicero 179; in Sallust’s Jugurtha, 71, 89–90, 146–9 marriage: of Aeneas and Lavinia 103; of Antony and Octavia 69; Athenian 242; between Persians and Macedonians 263–4; concern about, between those of different status at Rome 112, 227, 257; customs of Germans 81; of Laodamia and Protesilaus, in Catullus 337–8; and rape of the Sabine women 2, 15, 21–3, 25, 103 Marrucini 333, 336 Mars 54, 63, 187, 214 Marsi 20, 124, 171, 176, 212, 299 Marsus, in Horace 278 Martial (M. Valerius Martialis) 256, 281 Masada 13, 302 Mediolanum 220 Megale Hellas, see Magna Graecia Megasthenes, ethnographer to Alexander 284 Mercury 136, 276 Me´rida 205 Metellus (Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus) 90 Mettius Rufus, prefect of Egypt 289 Millar, Fergus 105–6, 111, 346 Millett, Martin 90 Minatius Magius, of Aeclanum 119

432

General Index

Minerva 317 Minucius Fundanus 116 Mithridates, king of Pontus 97, 278 mobility, social and geographical 96, 104, 106, 113–15, 117, 140, 290–1; of apparitores 209; in the archaic Mediterranean 121; between Latin communities 121; concerns about 256–8, 301, 304; in fifth- and fourthcentury Italy 122; of freedmen and their descendents 144–5, 150–1, 207–9; and metamorphosis 143, 146–51; and myth of Romulus’ asylum 4, 19, 25, 35, 114 Momigliano, Arnaldo 50 Mommsen, Theodor 126, 152 monarchy: in the early imperial period 288–9, 303; in early Rome 19; and empire 46, 55, 59–61, 155, 271; establishment of at Rome, via patronage and popular sovereignty 25, 106, 116–17, 133, 142, 155, 329; Hellenistic 271, 285; impact of Augustan 140, 143, 194, 204, 206; as part of the Roman constitution 107 Monomatti 284 Moors 224, 256, 274, 281 mores 48, 66–7, 69, 75, 171, 261; maiorum 66, 95, 139 Morges, king of Morgetes 159 Moses 345, 358–9 Mouritsen, Henrik 106, 126 multiculturalism 5, 9–10, 95, 103, 233 municipales 185

municipia 175–6, 200, 209, 341 Mussolini, Benito 10 G. Naevius Punic War 64 Naharvali/Naharnvali, German hill-tribe 80, 82 names: derogatory 265–6, 271–2; of slaves and freedmen 296; see also cognomina; gentilicium; praenomen Naples 203–4, 210; Hadrian as demarch of 221 Narcissus 145, 289 nature and culture 225, 264, 267, 268, 270, 307–9; see also nomos; physis Nearchus, ethnographer to Alexander 44, 284 Nero, Emperor (Nero Claudius Caesar) 136–7, 146, 289 Nerva, Emperor (M. Cocceius Nerva) 353 new men: Agricola 85; Augustus 114–15, 184; Cato the Elder 132, 179, 240; Cicero 114–15, 179, 184; from broader Roman world 118; ideology 68, 113–15, 147, 154, 173–4, 185–6, 207–9, 328; Marius 71, 89–90, 146–9, 179; in Velleius Paterculus 119, 132 Nicaeus, boxer born at Byzantium 294 Nicolaus of Damascus 288 Nicolet, Claude 45–6, 155, 162–3, 170, 217 nobiles 68, 208; see also domi nobiles nobilitas 182, 185

General Index nomos 66, 74–5, 225, 268–9, 307–9, 336, 360; see also nature and culture North, John 282–3 nostoi 337 Numa Pompilius, of Cures 23, 177 Numanus Remulus 277 Oasis 359 Ober, Josiah 105, 242 Ocean 37, 39–40 Octavia, sister of Augustus and wife of Antony 69 Odysseus 247 Oenotria 157 Old Oligarch 241, 266, 306 Old Testament 236, 348 Opikoi 260 Oppianicus, step-father of Cluentius 186–7 Orange 205 oratory, Latin 83, 298–303, 327, 340; see also education; rhetoric Orcus men 140 Orgetorix 54 Orientals 6, 228–9 origines 179, 211, 257, 332, 342, 344 Osci 212; ludi 181; see also language, Oscan ouitoulos 159 Ovid: Fasti 25; Metamorphoses 143; Tristia and Letters from Pontus, on Scythians 49, 54 Paelignians 124, 145, 171, 176, 212 Paestum, Latin colony 164, 165; tomb-painting at 272 paideia 65–6, 262–3, 357

433

paideusis 244 Palanto, wife of Latinus 320 Palatine 37, 61, 68, 320 Palatium, in Sabinum 320 Palestine 346, 350–1 Pallantes, companions of Evander 320 Pallas, freedman of Claudius 145, 289 panhellenism 244 Pannonia 43 pantomime, village 181 C. Papius Mutilus, leader of Samnites in Social War 203 M. Papius Mutilus 203 paradoxography 48, 284 Paralos, son of Pericles 241 Patavium 211–12 pater patriae 117 paterfamilias 115, 117 patres patrati 202–3; Laurentes Lavinates take on role of 202 patria, patriae 132, 154,156, 220–1, 330 patronage 25, 89, 112–13, 115–16, 155, 200; dedications of thanks for 174–5, 180, 212 Paul of Tarsus 33 Pausanias 63, 170 pecuarii, Apulian 192 pederasty, Persian 269 Pelasgians 306, 309 Penates, Roman 24, 202–3, 209 Pentateuch 348 Pentri 165 peregrini 31, 260 peregrinus dediticius 141 Pergamum 44, 50 Pericles 104, 241, 244, 322; 451/0 law of 98, 238, 242–3, 256 perioeci 94 Perseus of Macedon 78

434

General Index

Persia, gens 207 Persia 86, 89 Persians 41, 63–4, 192, 263, 266–8, 306, 312, 366; empire of 6, 28, 56, 64, 89, 164; Herodotus on 38, 42, 50, 56–7, 74–5, 86–7, 88, 124 Petronius 146–7, 150, 288, 292–3, 295–7 Philadelphia, Fayum 312 philanthropia 360 philhellenism 246, 248–9 Philip V of Macedon 5, 93, 123, 146, 250 Philo Judaeus Embassy to Gaius 62, 346 Phrygians 2, 248, 308–9 Physiognomica, Aristotelian treatise 269 physis 225, 234, 244, 262, 268, 307; see also nature and culture Picentes 128, 165, 254; cives sine suffragio 123 Picus, ancestor of Latins 212 Pietrabbondante 205 Pindar Pythian 9 on foundation of Cyrene 244 pistis 249 Pittakos of Mytilene, BigBelly 266 Plato 267, Cratylus on origins of Greek language 307; Menexenus 100, 306; Protagoras on Lesbian ‘barbarian’ dialect 308; Pythagoraean influence on 109; Republic 16, 109, 110, 358 Plautus (T. Maccius Plautus) 48, 167, 324, 334; Curculio on ‘Greek’ dress 275;

Truculentus on ‘rustic’ Latin 300 plebs 182, 240 Pliny the Elder (C. Plinius Secundus) Natural History: laudes Italiae 156–7, 189, 194, 217–18, 263–4; on adultery and Aethiops 294–5; on hermaphrodites 282; on Latin language and humanitas 261; on Pompey’s theatre and Alcippe 287 Pliny the Younger (C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus) 73, 113, 116, 145, 220, 289, 328 Plutarch (L.? Mestrius Plutarchus) 262; Life of Marius 146; on Alexander the Great 55, 263–4; on cultural exchange in aftermath of rape 22; on Gracchi 253, 326; on Herodotus philobarbaros 261; on probaskania 291; on Romulus’ asylum 1–2, 17; Parallel Lives 156 Po, river 188, 332–3, 336, 340 poleis, western Greek 64, 87, 122, 159, 160, 193, 248, 313; Sybaris 284–5; Syracuse 122, 133, 311; see also Tarentines Polemon (Marcus Antonius Polemon) 260 politeia 358–9 Pollux, and Castor 80 Polybius 42, 52, 68, 179; cites Cato the Elder on the after effects of conquest 88, 229; on Alexander the Great 55; on austerity of Scipio Aemilianus 183; on Roman conquest of Celts 51, 70; on Roman political system 59,

General Index 67, 107–9; on Rome’s imperial success 58–9, 65–7, 77, 88, 199, 250; on usefulness of history 71; Rome, between Greeks and barbarians 249 pomerium 160, 177 Pompeii 174, 181–2 Cn. Pompeius Strabo 133 Pompey (Cn. Pompeius Magnus) 25, 39, 52, 176, 180, 316, 350; grants citizenship to Balbus 133; imperium of 59; mobilizes support for Cicero 57 bc 184; portraits of 270–1; theatre of 79, 205, 273, 286–7 pontifex maximus 160 Q. Poppaeus Secundus, Picene 203 Porcius Licinus 324 portraiture: of Augustus 271; Hellenistic royal 270–1; Repbulican ‘realistic’ 265, 270–3, 279 postcolonialism 84–5 A. Postumius Albinus 48, 354 L. Postumius Megellus, at Taras 313 praenomen 177 praetor Etruria, Hadrian as 221 Pratt, Mary Louise 62 Praxinoa, Syracusan woman 311 primitivism, see austerity/ primitivism probaskania 291 Prodicus, in Plato’s Protagoras 308 prodigies, prodigia 281–3, 290–1 Propertius (Sextus Propertius) 155, 179, 211, 302, 329 Protesilaus 337 Psammetichus, Egyptian king 308

435

Ptolemies 303, 311, 324, 348 Ptolemy II Philadelphus 284, 311 Ptolmey VIII Euergetes II 326 publicani 108 Punic: people 6, 228; Phoenician language 346 Purcell, Nicholas 106, 163, 209, 291 Pyrrhus of Epirus: descendent of Aeacus 58; and reversal of the Trojan War 58, 248–9, 324 Pythagoras: and Numa 177; and South Italian thought 48, 64, 109, 160; statue in the Roman comitium 272 quinquennalis, Hadrian as at Italica and Hadria 221 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 320, 328 Quirina, voting tribe 177 Quirinal 177, 251 Quirites 318 race: modern theories of and the study of antiquity 5–9, 222–33, 237, 239, 268, 279, 363–4 race-mixture 5, 6, 10, 227, 229–30 rags to riches 19, 145 Ranger, Terence 195 rape: as foundation myth for the Roman citizen-body 15, 20–1, 25; function of in ancient thought 21, 255; laws on 289; as paradigm for Roman expansion 23; in Pindar Pythian 9 244; of the Sabine women 2, 4–5, 11, 14, 15, 20–5, 173, 220, 240, 253, 318, 343

436

General Index

Rawson, Elizabeth 91 Reate, Sabine 191 recusatio 150 Remus 252 Res Gestae, see Augustus rhetoric: epideictic 340; Greek 38, 69, 105, 322; Roman 29, 45, 298–303, 325–8, 363; Vespasian promotes 303; see also education, Roman; language, Latin Rhomaioi, at Delos 331–2 ritus Albinus 273 roads: in Italy 164–5; ‘Royal Road’ of Achaemenid Empire 164 Roma: image modelled on Athena 97; on coin with Italia, foot on a globe 188, 229, 332; provincial cult of 33 Romanism 167, 198, 204 Romanitas/Romanness 31, 138, 335, 368 Romanization 11, 30, 90–1; of epic by Ennius 58; of Italy 125,166, 192; of Plato by Cicero 109; Strabo’s version of 158 Romanocentrism, modern challenges to 30, 32, 84, 166; in Catullus 334, 339; of Cicero’s writings 179; of Varro 321 Romanus 331 Rome: archaic mobility and 121; as centre of Italy and empire 60; as centre of ‘urbanity’ 300; modern history of ancient 26–30; as a reference point for the western world 227

Romulus 64, 201, 208, 211–12, 253, 343, 362; asylum of, see asylum; ‘crap of’, 3, 15–16, 109; cycle, Palazzo Magnani 1–2; in Forum of Augustus 214; generosity to Sabines 119; hut of 68; Rosea, Sabine 191; triumph of 76; tyranny associated with 16 Ross, D. 333 Roxane 264 Rudiae, south Italy 326 Sabellians 212 Sabellus 318 Sabines: and archaeology of early Rome 231; in Catullus 273, 333, 339; conquest and cives sine suffragio imposed on 123, 163, 165, 177; cultural distinctiveness of 21–2; Lacedaemonian origins of 63–5; and the Quirinal 177, 251; in Regio IV– 200; Roman shared descent with 22–3 62–3, 117, 211, 253, 255, 330–1, 343–4, 360; Romulus’ generosity to 119; rusticity/worthiness of 62–5, 172–3, 183; symbolic of incorporated peoples in Roman thought 15, 317–18, 331; and Tarpeia 320, 343; see also language, Sabine; rape, of the Sabine women; L.Titurius Sabinus Sabine women, see rape, of the Sabine women Sabinum 123, 163, 190–2 Sabinus, ancestor of Latins 212 sacra Salisubsali 341–2 Saepinum 200

General Index Said, Edward 84 Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus): Catiline 71; Gardens of 287; Jugurtha 43, 71, 102, 112, 155, 185; on ambitio 68, 148; on new man Marius 89–90, 146–9 Samnites 20, 44, 65, 181, 249, 318; austerity of 203; barbarization and rehabilitation of, in Roman thought 200; as Pitanate cousins of Spartan Tarantines 122, 248; see also gladiator, Samnite Samnium 165, 190, 205, 252 Sappho 335 Sardinia 218; Punic-Phoenician script of inscription from 346 Sassia, mother of Cluentius 187 Satrachus, river 336, 340 Saturn 63, 69, 212 Saturnalia, festival of 290 Scaevola (Q. Mucius Scaevola) 326 Scipio Aemilianus (P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus) 52, 59, 65, 110, 183, 254 Scipio the Younger (P. Cornelius Scipio) 301 scriptures, Hebrew and Aramaic Jewish 313 Scythians 49–50, 57, 269; as a moral alternative for Rome 193 Sebasteion of Aphrodisias 39, 80 Second Sophistic 22, 47, 156, 170, 251, 314 Seleucids 38, 50, 348

437

Seneca Apocolocyntosis 136–8; on Claudius as freakish fool 280, 289 Septuagint 311 Septimius Severus, ‘African Emperor’ (Lucius Septimius Severus) 225 Serapis 352 Servius (M. Servius Honoratus) 169 Servius Tullius 16, 23, 111 Shaw, Brent 30 Sherwin-White, A. N. 26, 143 Sicily 101, 122, 133, 155, 218, 248 Siculus, king of Sicels 159 Silius Italicus (Tiberius Catius Asconius Silius Italicus) Punica 194 Sirmio, in Catullus 332–3, 340 skopaioi 284–5 Smith, R.R.R. 79 Snowden, Frank 9 Socrates 222–3 Solomon 360 Solon 359 Sora 299 Soracte, Mount 169 Spaniards 72, 136, 333 Sparta 56, 58, 98, 100, 211; model of austerity 64; strangeness of kings of 170 speech, Latin, see language, Latin spolia opima 77 Springhouse Decree, Athenian 240–1 Spurinna, gens 216–17 Stabiae 214 stilpnes 284–5 Strabo Geography 17, 43, 45, 70, 127, 179, 271, 284, 302; laudes Italiae 189; on Ephorus and polarities of Greeks and

438

General Index

Strabo Geography (Contd.) barbarians 246, 261; on etymology of ‘barbarian’ 305; on monarchy and empire 59–60, 262; on preRoman Italy 157–8; on Roman Italy and ‘Romanization’ 158, 162 strate¯gia 105 Suebi, German tribe 80 Suetonius (C. Suetonius Tranquillus) Augustus: 139, 141, 204, 257–8, 277–9, 287, 290–1, 295; see also Augustus Superaequum 145, 212 superstition, Roman 67, 82 Sybaris 284–5 Sybil, Campanian 324 Syme, Sir Ronald 195, 203 Syracuse 122, 133, 311 Syria 312 Tabula Banasitana 135 Tabula Bembina 108 Tabula Heracleensis 175 C. Tacitus 42, 195, 220; Agricola on empire and enslavement 82–3, 85–7, 89, 91, 262, 325, 329, 357–8; Annals on Claudius, extension of citizenship and the Gauls 6, 98, 117–18, 120, 136; Germania 80–2; on honours granted by Claudius to his freedmen 145, 289; on Jews 75; on Libo Drusus 292; on prodigies 282 Tanaquil, wife of Tarquin the Elder 23 Tarentines 65; ideology of good government 272; mock L. Postumius Megellus 313; as a moral alternative for

Rome 193; Spartan kinship with Samnites, Pitanates 122, 248 Tarpeia 320, 343–4 Tarpeian Rock 320, 343 Tarquin the Elder (L. Tarquinius Priscus) 23 Tarquinia: Ara della Regina temple at 216; dedications to Divus Augustus at 216; elogia of gens Spurinna of 211, 216–17; fasti linked to gens Caesennia at 216–17 L. Tarquinius Superbus 211 Tellus, temple of 190 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus) 77 thauma 235, 258 Theatres: in Augustan Italy 204–7; Dido’s 205; of Pompey in Rome 79, 205, 273; -temple complex at Pietrabbondante 205; Vitruvius on 205; in the western provinces 205 Thebris, chief of the Veians 319 Theocritus 311 theokratia 359 Theophrastus, born in Eresus at Athens 298, 300 Thermopylae 64 Thersites 265 Theseus: and Athenian synoecism 100; Cimon asserts kin with 240 Thomas, Richard 193 Thomas, Yan 203 Thompson, Lloyd 258 Thracians 266, 269 Thucydides 20, 56, 101, 236, 243, 260, 322, 353, 356 Tiber, river 319

General Index Tiberinus 319 Tiberius, Emperor (Tiberius Iulius Caesar Augustus) 43, 119, 200, 327; explusion of Jews from Italy under 351; statue at Volaterra 206 Tiburtines 273, 339 Timaeus of Tauromenium 249, 284–5 L. Titurius Sabinus, coinage of 343–4 Titus, Emperor (Titus Flavius Vespasianus) 77, 200, 217, 355; Arch of 352; sponsors ‘chairs’ of rhetoric 303; triumph of over Jews 352 Titus Tatius 23, 253, 318, 343 Toga: marker of Roman identity 13, 35, 103, 138, 155, 274–9, 295, 303, 366; with laticlave 140, 278 tomb-painting, central Italian 77–8; Paestan 272 Tomis 54 Torelli, Mario 252 tota Italia 178, 184, 193, 339 tradition, invention of 5, 14, 195–7, 363–4 tragedy, Athenian 12, 244–5 Trajan, Emperor (Marcus Ulpius Traianus) 73, 77, 220; alimentary schemes of 219 transhumance 190–2 Transpadani, distinct from Gauls 329, 332–3, 339, 342 tria corda 49, 168, 178 tributum 165 Trimalchio 146, 150, 288, 295–6 triumph, Roman 27, 44, 76–80, 265, 270, 285; of Caesar 142; of Caligula 37,

439

40, 296; of Vespasian and Titus 77, 352 Trojans 212–13, 276–7, 324; early Greek views on Roman descent from 248–9; Roman descent from 24, 61, 63, 103, 220, 248–9, 251–3, 277; see also War, Trojan Troy 202, 337–8 tryphe¯, see decadence Q. Tullius Cicero, brother of Cicero 72, 131, 156 Tusculum 117, 132, 342 tyranny: accusations of in Aristophanes 241; archaic 231, 256, 266; association of Romulus with 16; and democracy 110; of Domitian 83, 85; in the late Republic 182–3, 184; long cloaks and hair equated with 266; Polybius on 107; tryphe¯ and 284, 289 Tyrrhenians 20, 247, 360 Tyrrhenus, in Hesiod 247 Tzu, Sun 72 Umbrians, in Catullus 273, 339 urbanitas 114, 334–6; see also urbanity and rusticity urbanity and rusticity 24, 167, 172–3: in Catullus 28, 114, 334–9; in Cicero 114, 181–4 in Theocritus 311; in Varro and Vergil 190–3 urbanization, in Roman Italy 174, 204–7 utraque lingua 28, 304, 317 Valerius Maximus 283, 327 variatio 193 Q. Varius Geminus, Paelignian senator 145, 212

440

General Index

Varro (M. Terentius Varro): De Lingua Latina interest in Sabines 21, 317–18, 343; De Re Rustica: laudes Italiae 189–191, 193; on corruption of ‘correct’ Latin 318–19; on ‘foreign’ words and permeability of Latin 319–21; on plural origins of Latin 316–17, 320; Sabine villa of 184 Varus (P. Quinctilius Varus) 74 vase-painting, Italian 44, 77 Veii 203, 319 Velleius Paterculus 43, 74, 137, 191; Cato in 132; on Italian allies of same gens 255; on preRoman history of Italian peoples 194; on Social War and Roman ‘generosity’ 22, 24, 119–20, 125–6, 128, 213, 215 Venafrum 171, 190 Venetia 168 ventriloquy 321–2 Venus: Claudius’ outfit of 296; in Forum of Augustus 214; Genetrix 40; Jupiter’s prophecy to 277 Vergil, Aeneid 13, 14, 302; Anchises on Rome’s talent for conquest and rule 26, 69; antiquarian interest of 212; Dido’s theatre in 205; emphasis on Latin and togas in 303; on Aeneas and immigration 102; on Aeneas’ war 213–14; on Italian peoples 194, 255; on monarchy and empire 60–1; on reconciliation of Juno and Jupiter and mixing of Latins and Trojans 24, 103, 277; on

Shield of Aeneas 24, 79; on Trojan ancestry and decadence 103; symbolic importance of clothing in 276–7 Vergil: Eclogues 56, 69; Georgics 338; laudes Italiae 189, 191–3; on civil war 192 M. Vergilius Eurysaces, tomb of 144 Verona, in Catullus 332–3, 337–8, 341–2 Vertumnus 317 Vespasian, Emperor (Titus Flavius Vespasianus) 77, 145, 200, 330, 345, 355; fiscus Iudaicus of 352; quasi-divinity of 352; triumph of over the Jews 352–3 Vestini 124, 171 Vesuvius, Mount 190 Via Appia 292 vicomagistri, in charge of cult of the emperor’s genius 208 vicus Tuscus, area of Rome 177, 320 vigintisexviri 209 Villa Publica, at Rome 190 Vindolanda 74, 302 Viteliu 332, see Italia Vitruvius On Architecture: laudes Italiae 189; on Italian bodies 255; on monarchy and empire 59; on theatres 205 Volaterra 204, 206–7 Volturnum 319 Volturnus, river 319 Volusius Annales, in Catullus 336 Vulcan 317 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 65

General Index war, civil: in the late Republic 25, 52, 125, 131, 139, 146, 180, 184, 189, 192–4, 276, 329, 353; Rome’s beginnings and 1, 15, 253; see also War, Social War, Hannibalic 64, 124, 169, 188, 276, 325 War, Social: 119–20, 125–30, 159, 199, 203, 212–14, 276, 332, 344; as civil war 22, 129, 213–14 War, Trojan 56, 58, 237, 248–9, 324, 337 Webster, Jane 84 Wiedemann, Thomas 144

441

Williams, Jonathan 51 wisdom, alien 50, 322–3, 352, 356–8 wolf: she-wolf 2, 63, 126; werewolf 151 Woolf, Greg 65, 90 Xanthippos, son of Pericles 241 Xenophon 64, 358 xenos 298 Xerxes 192, 268 Zanker, Paul 197 Zenon 312 zeugitai 104 Zmyrna 336