Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg RupkeЧитать онлайн книгу.
animal, is to our knowledge unclassified in Roman divinatory practice but is definitely negative. It is connected to the precise classification of a bad public omen (ostentum) (668–72 D):
. . . nam id quod de sole ostentum est tibi,populo commutationem rerum portendit fore perpropinquam. haec bene uerruncent populo! nam quod [ad] dexterumcepit cursum ab laeua signum praepotens, pulcherrume auguratum est rem Romanam publicam summam fore.
. . . for that which was shown to you concerning the sun portends that an upheaval soon awaits the people. May it turn out well for the people! For the fact that the mighty sign shifted its course from left to right is a most splendid omen that the Roman state will rise to greatness.
The astronomical abnormality is, according to its reference and direction, the object of the teaching on augury.40 Here we see once again Accius’s concern for insuring the success of divinatory practice by applying several techniques simultaneously to the interpretation of signs.
Conclusion: Strengthening Probability
We should not expect to be able to extract a coherent or universalizing position from scattered passages deriving from diverse dramatic contexts and characters. The material is not sufficient to identify Accius’s own views, let alone to reconstruct anything like an Accian “theology.” Taken as a whole, however, the findings do allow us to recognize across the totality of the fragments specific modes of critique and interpretive presuppositions. These I interpret as primarily determined by the context of their production, rather than viewing them as evidence of some narrow process of reception of a philosophia perennis or as the mere report of a foreign view. (That said, this last category might well serve to characterize the religious-philosophical statements of Ennius.41)
Understood in this way, Accius appears closer to the type of rationality on display in works of the first century normally termed philosophical than to the form of rationality in play in antiquarian literature. Accius distances himself alike from criticism for the sake of criticism and also from pleasing the audience.42 He takes up the position of one integrated into the Roman upper class, to whom the “probable” of Greek philosophical argumentation has become not verisimile, but probabile. The theoretical judgment that something is “close to absolute truth” is replaced by the concept of positive social sanction, the socially acceptable that “could be given assent.”43 Accius’s near contemporary, Pacuvius, while not sharing Accius’s social position, did share his attitude.44
Accius, it should be remembered, was primarily a playwright. His reflections are part of dramatic discourse, which is to say, a distinctive form of public discourse. It did not have to be accepted, but it had to be witnessed by the audience. Public ritual thus offered space for explicit rationalization in a theoretical mode. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, ritualization itself could come to the service of rationalization.
Chapter 5
Ritualization and Control
Symbolic Communication
The findings of the previous chapters invite us to apply a historicizing analysis to a ritual that took on many different usages in the late Republic but is said to be a remnant of a very early layer of Roman religion, surely predating the period analyzed here: the triumph.1 From the formation of the republican nobilitas onward, Rome’s imperial success depended greatly on the efficient channeling of potentially disruptive internal rivalries into externally directed imperialist action. In this context, the triumph constituted one of the media through which the Roman nobility could display military success and its rewards to the Roman populace, thereby helping to ensure the future participation of the populace in aristocratically directed warfare.2 Hence the importance of the display of booty and military feats: thus were the fruits of empire made visible.3 It is one of the most interesting aspects of this system of communication that it furnished hardly any institutionalized outlet for communication concerning, and public recognition of, military defeats. The Romans did not even have a parallel to the Greek cult of those who died during a victorious campaign.4 The significance of the triumph can be further deduced from the fact that, among the alternative means available to successful generals for the display and investment of booty—such as temples, buildings, and games5—the triumph offered a prestige that, from the second century onward, some tried to exploit far beyond the temporal framework of the ritual proper.6
Even after the triumphator’s death, the deceased received conspicuous recognition for his achievement. In the funeral of a Roman noble, those of his ancestors who themselves had reached magistracies were represented by actors who, in addition to a wax mask, wore the insignia and clothing of the highest office reached in life by the person they were impersonating. Each “magistrate” was accompanied by the appropriate number of lictors, and counting them was the only means by which one could differentiate between former consuls, praetors, and aediles. All of them were dressed in the toga praetexta, the white toga with a stripe of purple worn by Roman magistrates. For triumphatores, on the other hand, such arithmetic was unnecessary: their all-purple garment set them apart from the crowd of mere officeholders.
But what are the semantics in the political communication performed by the triumphator or, for that matter, in the procession of masks? Do we have to postulate a change from a predominantly religious meaning to a predominantly political one? That is to say, was there some earlier period in which the triumphator was meant to be, or at least represent, Iuppiter, and in which not representations, but the dead ancestors themselves, rumbled through the city during the pompa funebris?7 As regards the triumph, one could imagine that such a change occurred at the end of the fourth century, during the formative phase, that is, of the new nobility. In this case, the change in signification seems to have left the basic elements of the ritual unaltered. For the pompa imaginum, Harriet Flower has argued for the transformation, at about the same period, of some unknown earlier (religious) ritual into the later, well known, and primarily political event.8 Yet in order to save the hypothesis of a more religious earlier version of the aristocratic funeral and the cult of the ancestors—one completely unknown to us—she has to argue that the entire complex of funeral speech and commemorative use of masks, as well as their storage in the atrium of the aristocratic house, is a nonreligious addition dating to that period.9 The only evidence for the postulated prior stage is statuary from that period of (what are supposedly) ancestors. Fully convincing parallels for that type of ancestor cult are lacking.10
This chapter offers a new hypothesis to explain the form and the significance of both rituals, by relating them to the practice of erecting honorific statues. The hypothesis is not supported by direct ancient evidence. Yet it better explains and provides fuller historical contextualization of the odd features of both rituals, in particular of the triumph, than previous attempts at understanding them. As processional rituals that offered space for differentiated communication by plays and speeches, respectively, and by their combination with ludic elements, they no longer appear isolated, but can be understood as participants in the ritual development of the middle Republic described in the previous chapters. In the case of the triumph in particular, ritualization turns out to be a medium of public control. This rests on the assumption that by the fourth century the display of private statues in public space—owing more to their associations than sheer numbers—was seen as threatening the stability of the nobility.
Iuppiter or Rex?
Our knowledge of the Roman triumph derives mostly from literary sources, especially from Livy onward. The written sources on which these historians, antiquarians, or poets relied could not have gone farther back than the end of the third century; usually they are later. The astonishingly few images relating to the triumph all come from imperial times. As a matter of method, every attempt at reconstruction of the ritual for earlier periods is therefore necessarily antiquarian in approach: one picks out and interprets individual elements, or combinations thereof, as nonfunctional survivals from a period when they would have possessed greater pragmatic meaning and value. This heuristic procedure is operative in every study of the republican