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This time-honoured traditional procession – with its lavish deployment of symbolic elements, such as the display of the booty, prominent prisoners in person or in effigie, the soldiers marching in columns, praising their imperator and in turn mocking him – is a complex web of signs and messages. Its significance is by no means confined to the representation of a single military success somewhere on the farthest frontiers of the Imperium Romanum. This civic ritual is itself ‘an ensemble of texts’ about Rome and its empire, its past and present, myth and history, and about Roman notions of power and glory. It is also a medium of discourse (in the sense mentioned earlier in this section) about the complex and sensitive relation between a consul and commander, his peers in the political class and rivals in the Senate, and the thousands of ordinary Romans also involved in the ritual in a variety of roles: as civic spectators, being both scenery and the addressees of the message of power and glory; as legionaries, being part, and indeed co-actors, of the procession; and, last but not least, as members of a citizen body that had elected the victorious consul in assembly, and was going to elect future consuls as commanders and potential triumphatores. Or, to describe this central civic role in a postmodern kind of pun on a famous dictum attributed to William Shakespeare: if, as in this spectacle, legionaries and citizens were ‘actors and spectators, too’, they could be characterised as ‘specta(c)tors’.28
At the same time, for all its rich and meaningful complexity, the pompa triumphalis was also just one text in an ensemble in which the range of other pompae constituted texts in their own right: there were ritual processions during games at the Circus Maximus (pompa circensis) or as parts of numerous religious festivals (see Chapter 33),29 and there was the aforementioned similarly spectacular pompa funebris, the symbolic meanings and messages of which were equally rich and complex. But these spectacles were by no means the only important civic rituals – the many ordinary religious ceremonies before acts of state, meetings of the Senate and popular assemblies, were always more than just routine business. They – together with the complicated rituals and rules of these assemblies themselves – were all symbolically meaningful aspects or texts of an ensemble.
1.3 Application(s) II – Another Ensemble as Example: The Contio
The complex interconnectivity of these dimensions is best illustrated, and indeed typically represented, by a central institution of the Roman republican political system, recently discussed in this new light: the specific ensemble of the contio, as formal procedure and ritual rhetoric, performance, public stage (in the immediate as well as metaphorical sense) and meaningful text, played a particularly important integral part in the Republican sociopolitical structure as a communicative system uniting the populus Romanus and its elite.30 The various forms of comitia and the plebeian concilia, taking place on the Campus Martius, in the comitium or in the Forum, were of course among the most important spaces of direct political interaction between the elite and the people (see Chapter 16). The electoral, legislative or judicial assemblies – in their important expressive and symbolic function as rituals representing and affirming, on the one hand, sociopolitical hierarchies or, on the other, a kind of civic equality – were also instruments of communication, given that they provided the institutional as well as physical and spatial context of a regular and at times even frequent, if only implicit, (re-)negotiation of the relationship between the aristocracy and the people, and of their respective expectations and obligations to reaffirm each other’s position within the sociopolitical system of the Republic.31
As a matter of course, the contio as particular kind of assembly was also an integral part of the communicative system of this political culture of personal presence – and obviously a vital part. It was in this institutional context that the daily business of the populus Romanus, its empire (and therefore the business that its political class was permanently dealing with) was debated and, in a way, negotiated between persons and groups as parties involved in this business. It was also the institutional forum in which everyone who was, or wanted to become, a member of the political class regularly fulfilled his most important public function as an orator in public debate, arguing for (or against) motions or measures in controversies over urgent current issues on the political agenda, taking sides for (or against) other representatives of his class in the process, or acting as advocate in lawsuits, as prosecutor or defence counsel (see Chapter 32; Chapter 31).32 Every active member of this class was permanently obliged to fulfil this social role – young senators from old families as well as ambitious homines novi without an ancestral background, craving for the attention of the citizens (and potential electors) present, junior magistrates keen on rising into the higher ranks as well as established former consuls asserting (and sometimes defending) their dignitas. This role was pragmatically and structurally constitutive for membership in the elite and was no less important than the functions of senator and patron, magistrate and priest, or even military commander. After all, it was impossible to obtain any of the senior positions of the cursus honorum without being well known ([g]nobilis in the original sense of the word) through one’s public appearances, the resulting high profile and prominence as a public persona – this was an essential requirement for gaining promotion into higher honores with imperium and thus achieving or (re-)asserting one’s rank as nobilis (see Chapter 25). The role of the orator as a constituent part and prerequisite of social prominence, as well as the range of technical and expressive functions of oratory as medium and as an ‘instrument of personal self-fashioning and social apprenticeship’ (Connolly 2007: 131–132), was thus deeply embedded in the communicative system and thus in the political culture of this city-state, based as it was on permanent and intensive interaction between the political class and the people. This interaction manifested itself in two ways: as an appeal to, and negotiation with, the populus Romanus as the formal forum for decision-making and as the ultimate source of legitimacy; and as the reaffirmation, reproduction and renewal of the political class by the populus in elections and in other forms of asserting assent by acclamation.
In the institutions and procedures that permitted participation of the citizen body at large – such as the comitia and contiones, elections, legislation and popular jurisdiction – the ingrained publicity of politics, the perpetual presence and conspicuous visibility, audibility and activity of members of the political class in public and in all civic spaces are clearly evident, and it is clear that popular participation is therefore not restricted to a democratic political culture, as Fergus Millar would have it. We have seen that the media and forms of a hierarchical communication are structurally essential requirements of a specifically aristocratic political culture of a particular kind, with an institutionalised citizen body in a central position in the process of constituting and reproducing a particular variant of an aristocracy as a genuinely political class.
1.4 Concluding Remarks
This is exactly why reading Roman popular assemblies as complex webs of discourses is an important challenge for a modern discipline of ancient history that has now (re-)discovered the history of the Republic. In the last few years, the general character of this political culture and its peculiar complexity have only just been outlined – however, a detailed comprehensive account that would meet the new standards remains a desideratum. Nonetheless, at least some central points and coordinates seem to be established: the most important is the extraordinary combination – or rather complementarity – of the pervasive patterns of hierarchies deeply inscribed in this culture on the one hand, and the striking degree of ideological agreement and social coherence on the other. Such a combination is far from being self-evident, let alone natural: not only were hierarchy and dominance, power and its exertion deeply inscribed in the greatest of all social divides, namely between free and slave, as well as