Augustus and the destruction of history: The politics of the past in early imperial Rome

By Ingo Gildenhard, Ulrich Gotter and Louise Hodgson

Augustus and the Destruction of History explores the intense controversies over the meaning and profile of the past that accompanied the violent transformation of the Roman Republic into the Augustan principate. The ten case studies collected here analyse how different authors and agents (individual and collective) developed specific conceptions of history and articulated them in a wide variety of textual and visual media to position themselves within the emergent (and evolving) new Augustan normal. The chapters consider both hegemonic and subaltern endeavours to reconfigure Roman memoria and pay special attention to power and polemics, chaos, crisis and contingency – not least to challenge some long-standing habits of thought about Augustus and his principate and its representation in historiographical discourse, ancient and modern. Some of the most iconic texts and monuments from ancient Rome receive fresh discussion here, including the Forum Romanum and the Forum of Augustus, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Fasti Capitolini.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780956838186

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Attending to the Past: On the Politics of Time in Ancient Rome

¹

Ingo Gildenhard, Ulrich Gotter, Wolfgang Havener, Louise Hodgson

1 Time, History, Memory

‘Once they choose to reflect on their lives at all, human beings have no alternative but to conceive and imagine them in the dimension of time.’² Yet even such apparently universal coordinates of human existence as time (and space) have increasingly come under analytic pressure in the modern knowledge industry, with its impulse to historicise, its tendency to turn aggregated entities into relations, and its enthusiasm for the cultivation of meaningful complexities (often in deliberate violation of common sense).³ With regard to the temporal dimensions of human existence the last three decades have witnessed particularly intense activity.⁴ Historians and social theorists nowadays break down the seemingly universal notion of ‘time’ into system-specific times or temporal modalities.⁵ Increased interest in the phenomenon of ‘collective memory’ has sharpened our awareness of the different ways in which societies throughout history have commemorated (and fabricated) their past, from embodied practices to material culture to historical narratives preserved in the form of texts (or in oral traditions): time may be an ineluctable (and hence universal) dimension of human experience, but it manifests itself in culturally contingent ways.⁶ And investigations informed by narratological theory have revealed the fundamental importance of diverse modes of temporal ordering for the (literary) scripts we rely on to endow our world with meaning.⁷

Scholars of antiquity, too, have contributed their share of publications, with studies on ancient conceptions of time and modes of temporality in Near Eastern and classical cultures (and their continuing resonance in the Western cultural tradition). Research across all the sub-disciplines of Ancient Mediterranean Studies has explored how societies or specific groups therein conceived of time, not least to plot and construct their past, in both discourse (historiographical and otherwise) and (material) practice.⁸ Calendars have attracted a significant amount of critical attention⁹ – but also a broad range of other media involved in keeping (a version of) the past present: not just legendary tales, commemorative oratory (such as the epitaphios logos), or historiographical narratives, but also other literary genres (lyric, tragedy, comedy), visual media (inscriptions, vase-or wall-painting, coinage, statues, architectural sculpture), places (the so-called lieux de mémoire), practices (such as rituals), or, indeed, children (and their socialisation).¹⁰ The field has moved confidently beyond ‘the positivistic question of what actually took place’ and towards ‘the investigation of the beliefs that members of a society hold about their past’, putting ‘the socio-political function of memory’ very much at the centre of current research agendas¹¹ – which also includes the ways in which postclassical cultures have negotiated their position in time and their historical identity with reference to the Graeco-Roman past.¹² In short, time (and space) have become leading heuristic categories: in Classics, too, the ‘spatio-temporal turn’ is in full swing.¹³

As a time of transition, transformation and consolidation (and further evolution) of a ‘new normal’ preceded by decades of internecine bloodshed, (the run-up to) the so-called ‘age of Augustus’ – in itself a problematic label, however catchy and widespread it might be – saw particularly intense and wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and the profile of history.¹⁴ As John Henderson put it, ‘sorting out how the past, and its past, was to be told, lay at the heart of the politics of the Augustan present’.¹⁵ More specifically, the last decades Before the Common Era offer particularly fertile ground for exploring the phenomenon to which we allude with the phrase ‘destruction of history’. Such destruction can take various forms – from outright forgetting of inconvenient facts to deliberate distortions of the factual record. But in its most pregnant sense, the phrase refers to the apparent elimination of contingency from the historical process in the service of power – the transformation of historical time, in other words, from a realm of kaleidoscopic unpredictability with ever-shifting re-configurations, in which, in principle, (almost) anything is possible and nothing is (entirely) certain, into a realm of necessity that manifests the unfolding of an at least partially predetermined script, which includes the imaginary possibility of history coming to an end altogether. Augustus, according to Philip Hardie, was ‘a ruler who sought to legitimate his power largely through what one might call an ideology of timelessness: the claim to have ended once and for all the interminable sequence of civil wars, to have brought about a return to the stable social and moral values of a mythical Roman past, in short, to have introduced in the present a Golden Age, that dream of a state of perfection before history, before time.’¹⁶

Coincidentally (or not?), the reign of Augustus also provided the historical matrix for the birth of the religious mega-plot that underwrites the way in which a significant portion of humanity situates itself in time by means of BC (or BCE) and AD (or CE). In this plot the geopolitical realities of the reign of Augustus enable the prospect of ultimate salvation, as the ecumenical reach of Roman power guarantees a Sure Start for Christian eschatology. In the opening of his gospel, Luke famously exploits the synchronicity of the birth of Christ and the reign of Augustus by turning the pax Augusta into the secular variant and enabler of the eternal peace that Christ’s second coming would inaugurate:¹⁷

1.33: καὶ βασιλεύσει ἐπὶ τὸν οἶκον Ἰακὼβ εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, καὶ τῆς βασιλείας αὐτοῦ οὐκ ἔσται τέλος. | et regnabit in domo Iacob in aeternum et regni eius non erit finis. ‘And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.’

2.1: Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις ἐκείναις ἐξῆλθεν δόγμα παρὰ Καίσαρος Αὐγούστου ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην | Factum est autem in diebus illis, exiit edictum a Caesare Augusto ut describeretur universus orbis. ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.’

In Christian hindsight, Augustus ensured the perfect geopolitical conditions for the birth of Christ and the dissemination of the Christian message: a unified and peaceful empire spanning the entire (Mediterranean) world. Luke employs the same idiom of timelessness, eternity and spatio-temporal universality, of history coming to an end, that pervades the plotting of the past and the prophetic anticipation of the future in late-republican and early-imperial thought and could, mutatis mutandis, be readily applied to the Christian project.¹⁸ Writers and artists down the ages eagerly exploited the striking synchronicity as a veritable godsend to align salvation history with the story of Rome.¹⁹ Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Age of Augustus, the Birth of Christ (c.1852–4; our cover image) stands in a long tradition of world-historical myth-making that overlays and imbricates the figures of Augustus and Christ, combining the secular and the religious, the classical and the biblical, in a grand triumphalist vision of Christian Providence. The providential panoramas and teleological plots articulated across late-republican and Augustan literature, not least in the oeuvre of Virgil, from the ‘messianic’ Eclogue 4 to the Aeneid, fortified and energised the affinity between the spatio-temporal coordinates of Augustan ideology and the Christian imaginary²⁰ – a thematic nexus that has continued to inspire.²¹

In fact, the surviving historical record of the Augustan principate offers a ready-made set of such extraordinarily suggestive and appealing scripts to plot this chapter in Roman history that modern scholars have often colluded with the first princeps and perpetuated his destruction of history. As Anton Powell points out, accounts of this period tend to gloss over moments when things stood at a knife’s edge or which were too problematic for propagandistic recuperation – such as the sequence of ‘timely’ deaths (Hirtius and Pansa, M. Oppius, Tiberius Claudius Nero, Domitius Ahenobarbus), the treaty of Misenum (39), Agrippa’s victory at Naulochus and Octavian’s defeat at Tauromenium (36), the infanticide of Caesarion and Antyllus after Actium – and focus on those that the regime decided to endow, hyperbolically, with world-historical significance – such as the skirmish at Actium or the apparent suicide of Cleopatra.²² A related habit is the switch from diachronic narrative to thematic treatment from the moment Augustus is deemed to be securely installed in power: ‘The temptation is for chronological narrative to be given up – for time, as it were, to stop – at the beginning of the Principate (whether that be put in 27 or 23 or 19 B.C. or in some other year) giving way to thematic accounts of institutions of the Roman Empire as initiated by its founder.’²³ ‘Fictions of historical necessity’ hover over both the first princeps and his adoptive father as scholars debate such questions as how to place Caesar within wider historical processes (did he kill off a still functioning republic with his ‘military coup’ or simply accelerate a trend towards autocracy that would have eventually happened no matter what?) or whether Augustus or something like Augustus’ autocratic regime were the only possible solution to the civil bloodshed and perceived structural deficiencies of the senatorial tradition of republican government.²⁴ Augustus, then, presents a particular historiographical challenge: if nowadays we know that the writing of history inevitably involves the application of contemporary concepts, analytic procedures and modes of thought in the re-presentation of past phenomena and recognises (and tries to minimise) the dangers of anachronism and mis-re-presentation, analysis of the Augustan principate has had the tendency to suffer from the inverse problem:²⁵ some of the self-descriptions promoted by Augustan culture, not least the notion that his ‘reign’ as princeps or even his entire life constitute an internally coherent ‘age’ (with its own ‘culture’, ‘poetry’ and ‘literature’), have continued to inform the ways in which this chapter in history gets configured – a practice that runs the danger of turning the explicandum into the explicans (or, rather, collapses the distinction).²⁶

At the same time, the evolving protocols of the modern knowledge industry, which ask us to resist easy teleology, to turn reifications into contingent relations, to embrace contestation, to acknowledge coincidences, and to celebrate a multiplicity of possible perspectives – and, conversely, to shelve predetermined scripts, the notions of providence and linear progress, or the presence of a divine signature in history – nowadays also inform work on the first princeps and the years of history he dominated: this span of time, too, calls for a ‘genealogical’ approach (in Foucault’s definition of the term), designed to reveal that any historical entity (such as a science or a historical period), manifests ‘several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies’.²⁷ An idiom that recognises complexity, ambiguity, negotiation, dialogue, evolution, stimuli (rather than directives) and non-linearity has become commonplace, registering not least in the paradoxical formulations that scholars employ to capture the Augustan response to the republican past (‘creative destruction’, ‘destructive preservation’).

Nowadays, it is a given that each label we employ to refer to this stretch of time – such as res publica restituta, ‘age of Augustus’, principatus or ‘early imperial period’ – comes with its own inbuilt ideology.²⁸ Likewise, it hardly needs emphasising any longer that periodization tends to be the work of hindsight and is anything but a straightforward affair.²⁹ Each way of parceling up Octavian’s rise to (and years in) power comes with its own history and agenda. The tripartite scheme ‘late republic – triumviral period – Augustan principate’, for instance, is first found in Cassius Dio.³⁰ Recent accounts make it obvious that the years 27 BCE–14 CE do not form a coherent unit in their own right and become frazzled at the beginning and the end.³¹ Likewise, emphasis on ‘defining’ events of importance to Augustus (such as the battle of Actium in 31 BCE, the settlement of 27 BCE, the celebration of the secular games in 17 BCE) has given way to recognition that Roman politics, culture and society continued to evolve throughout his years in power – and beyond.³² Even accounts centred on the individual who became Augustus now tend to accentuate continual change, at least at the level of nomenclature.³³ The aura of inevitability, stability and timelessness that earlier treatments frequently accorded to the Augustan regime has dissipated in more recent accounts: ‘Richardson’s detailed narrative invites the reader always to ponder the interrelatedness of events and to entertain a philosophy of history that values both the logic of structural forces and the role of the contingent, including natural disasters, human illness, the deaths of individual men and women, and their unpredictable decisions.’³⁴

Similarly, if earlier scholarship on Augustan literature and culture often focused with an obsessive single-mindedness on Augustus and (shades of) pro- and anti-Augustanism – as well as the (im-)possibility thereof – in various forms of cultural expression, recent studies have brought other actors and audiences more forcefully into view (without losing sight of the centre). Dialogue and negotiation among various stakeholders and constituencies have been recognised as key hallmarks of the Augustan set-up, not least in the creative diffusion of stimuli emanating from the princeps.³⁵ In his survey of the manifold agents that were involved in shaping the cityscape at the time, Hölscher, for instance, includes not only the princeps and members of his family and inner circle, but also the senate and the people of Rome (as collective bodies) as well as individual members of the senatorial and equestrian elite: ‘Augustus’ omnipresence in the cityscape of Rome through buildings and monuments was not presented as a top-down demonstration of imperial power but as a bottom-up manifestation of the consensus universorum, which was the only realistic way of establishing a monarchy against the background of the deeply rooted Roman Republic.’³⁶

The present volume tries to build on this body of work by further exploring the politics of the past in late-republican and early-imperial Rome.³⁷ We do so from different angles. The two papers in Part A revisit the years of chaos after the assassination of Caesar, as a period in which key concepts and coordinates for our understanding of the principate first took shape; those in Part B investigate the ways in which Augustus situated himself and his regime in time; Part C offers studies of ‘alternative histories’ promoted by empowered subalterns beside the central and centripetal figure of Augustus; and the chapters in Part D explore ways in which the cityscape of Rome and modes of literary discourse participated in Augustus’ plots (and destruction of history), but also kept the (legendary, republican) past present. Part E consists of an ‘epilogue’ that traces conceptions of history revolving around Rome’s Trojan ancestry (and the destruction of Troy) from the late republic (Catullus) via the principate of Augustus (Virgil) to one of its most pernicious retrospective invalidations (Tacitus). In the remainder of this introduction, we shall consider how the Romans configured history, memory and time during the republican centuries – both in general terms and with reference to the distinctive visions of specific individuals, which will form the necessary backdrop for assessing the historical plots that gained currency under Augustus (2), before offering a more detailed account of the overarching argument of our volume and the specific contribution of each of the case studies it comprises (3).

2 Cultural Memory and Historiography in Republican Rome

Recent years have seen a significant amount of scholarly attention dedicated to such questions as to whether it is possible to identify a distinctively Roman way of engaging with the past, why the Roman elite did not foster an indigenous tradition of historiographical writing, how the Romans commemorated significant facts and figures before the advent of historiography à la Grecque, in what ways the ‘cultural logic’ of these traditional modes differed from that of narrative texts, and how Roman writing about the past across a range of genres in poetry and prose evolved in the last 150 years of the republic.³⁸ Certain aspects of the wider phenomenon of how Roman culture and society imposed meaning on time and on how the civic community and specific individuals therein situated themselves within, or wrote themselves into, history nevertheless deserve brief (and necessarily sweeping and partial) coverage here, as background for our concern with how the nexus of power, memory and meaning played itself out under Augustus.

2.1 The Greek Background, or: Why Rome was not just like Greece

The communities of the ancient Greek world evolved a wide range of more or less local ‘chronotopes’, i.e. ways and means of configuring space and time, and not just in literary discourse – the sphere of cultural expression, that is, with respect to which Bakhtin coined his neologism.³⁹ Different timeframes – often all but incompatible from a strictly logical point of view – co-existed in cultural practice, from accounts of the mythic past to sequences of royal dynasties, priests or magistrates, from the religious calendar, often polis-specific, that gave order to the year, to the various temporal frameworks of literary discourse, including the imaginative synchronicities and other rhetorical devices employed to bridge the gap between the local and the Panhellenic (or universal).⁴⁰ Narrative texts – that is those cultural artefacts that have acquired the greatest resonance in the context of the classical tradition – were only one (and not necessarily the most important) medium in which Greek culture configured time and processed the past. As Purcell (2003) 16 put it, ‘the genre of literary historiography known to the Greeks as historiê (technically systematic enquiry) is only a rather small and stylized part of the whole universe of historical thinking.’ And yet, the large corpus of narrative texts that circulated in ancient Greece from the archaic period onwards is striking and distinctive, especially when compared to the situation in mid-republican Rome.⁴¹ What sets ancient Greece apart is not least the investment in (narrative) poetry and song that at an early stage received written codification and thereby provided the stimulus for similar ventures also in prose. By Hellenistic times, extensive traditions of mythographic and historiographic writing had come into being, sustained by a wider literary culture with a distinct set of practices and institutions and interacting in various ways with other modes and media of commemoration.

For the period of c. 800–300 BCE, Hellenists interested in conceptions of history and historiographical discourse can thus occupy themselves with a rich set of data that raises all kinds of fascinating issues. To list a few: the implications of the existence of large-scale verse narratives reliant on long-standing oral traditions as a medium of (Panhellenic) truth, memory and knowledge and its eventual codification in writing; the ‘invention’ of prose composition in the course of fifth-century Greece (or rather its adoption for purposes previously covered by poetry);⁴² the simultaneous emergence of other discursive modes that cultivated novel criteria of truth (proof, evidence, sources, arguments), such as rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and various other forms of (proto-) scientific enquiry interested in natural causes and empirical consequences; the ambiguous status of historiography as a mode of critical world-making that had significant affinities with other forms of intellectual enquiry (science, philosophy) coming into their own at the same time and yet also featured strong lines of continuity with earlier endeavours in verse (in particular epic poetry) in such areas as narrative technique;⁴³ shifts in authorial self-fashioning from an appeal to the Muses as a source of divine knowledge, truth and beauty to other strategies of authorisation such as autopsy, personal experience and the critical vetting of information, as basis for the transformation of data gleaned from a variety of sources into internally coherent and aesthetically appealing narratives; the intellectual profile of historiographical endeavours, from the ethnographic interests of a Herodotus to the universalising analytic categories of a Thucydides; the sheer variety of prose writing that engaged with the (more or less mythic past) from mythography to local chronicles (often organized around the terms in office of (high) magistrates, such as the archons in Athens), from aetiology to chronography, from genealogy to universal history;⁴⁴ the existence of socio-political resources and institutions that sustained a vibrant and multifaceted literary culture, of which prose historiography formed one aspect – and the interaction of these literary endeavours with uses of the past in politics, such as the appeal to common ancestry (sungeneia).⁴⁵

For the same half millennium (800–300 BCE), such research interests are difficult, if not impossible to pursue with reference to Rome – though scholars have tried hard to sketch out the cultural life (surely vibrant) of the city during this period despite the comparatively meagre evidence:⁴⁶ the Romans of the regal period and the early and middle republic across all social strata (from elite families to the plebs) surely sang songs, attended diverse types of dramatic performances, told all sorts of stories, used writing for a variety of (commemorative) purposes and stood in contact with the cultures of (Middle) Italy and the wider Mediterranean world.⁴⁷ But none of these activities resulted in the kind of literary traditions that took shape in Greece. Some of the scholarship on Archaic Rome has been trying hard to make Rome look (a bit more, even just) like Greece; yet while it has succeeded in doing so to some extent, it has also heightened awareness of difference. Moreover, it has rendered the question of why the Romans did not develop a literary culture comparable to Greece, including the practice of historiography, even more puzzling and acute. In the old paradigm of the Romans as clod-rooted farmer-soldiers, technologically inclined but uninspired in the liberal arts, the absence of the kind of (literary) culture we see in contemporary Greece was easy to explain: it did not even register much as a problem. Yet the more we reconstruct, posit (or invent) about the cultural life at Rome during the archaic period, the more glaring the differences to Greece become. Despite the fact that the required technology (the alphabet) was available from the seventh century BCE onwards, despite the fact that Rome engaged in intercultural dialogue as part of the Mediterranean oikumene, despite the fact that sub-literary genres of story-telling (oral traditions, dramatic performances) re-imagined history for SPQR, there is no evidence of a literary culture revolving around narrative texts at Rome until it began to evolve with reference to Greek precedents from about the second half of the third century BCE onwards, when the dynamics of cultural exchange with Greece, building on centuries of prior contact, intensified significantly in the context of Rome’s imperial expansion.⁴⁸

2.2 The memorial culture of the Roman republic

Nowadays most scholars have stopped positing Greece as the norm or benchmark that the Romans initially fell short of. The absence of a literary culture à la Grecque is no longer considered the sign of a primitive civilization: Rome was different rather than deficient – not (as goes without saying) because of any innate lack of inspiration but because of its distinctive socio-political evolution that for various reasons initially did not include investment in the literary practices (and the wider cultural settings and institutions that sustained them) familiar from Greece.⁴⁹ Not that the Romans of the early and middle republic were uninterested in their past. Quite the contrary. But they developed a set of memorial practices in tune with their overall political culture, in which narrative historiography had no place – indeed would arguably have been dysfunctional. As Egon Flaig and Harriet Flower, Tonio Hölscher and Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp among others have worked out, the memorial culture that evolved alongside the formation of the so-called Roman ‘nobility’, with its highly selective core of key facts and exemplary figures, opted primarily for non-literary genres of commemoration, such as statues and commemorative spaces in the city, the stemmata and tituli on display in noble houses, together with the shrines that contained the wax-mask of former office holders and the spectacle of the pompa funebris in which actors donned the wax-masks and the garb of the deceased officials and paraded through the city to the forum for the funeral oration (laudatio funebris), delivered by a relative of the deceased.⁵⁰

Not least with reference to Augustus and his investment in Trojan ancestry, it is important to recognise that alternative sources of symbolic prestige existed, which were perhaps not as valuable as former office-holders, but proved nevertheless useful in the context of aristocratic self-promotion. True, asking, rhetorically, ‘with a god in the family tree, who needed consuls?’ does not quite capture the relative importance of gods and consuls as ancestors in the political culture of republican Rome and seems to betray a Hellenocentric way of thinking.⁵¹ As Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp has shown, the inverse emphasis is apposite.⁵² In Rome, legendary origins were a relatively soft source of symbolic capital with comparatively little persuasive force in the competition for honores, imperial commands, and gloria. But a god could nevertheless be helpful. Those families that had the real (historical) goods may not have needed to rely on supplementary sources of prestige, though they often saw no harm in using them as well as the hard currency of historical facts and figures, whereas those that did not at all, or not to the same extent, could feel particularly tempted to play up claims to divine and legendary lineage. The best example of an individual, who (initially) occupied a subaltern position in the Roman field of power and utilised myth to make up for a perceived dearth of hard historical capital (at least of recent vintage), is none other than the young Julius Caesar who, in the laudatio funebris he delivered for his aunt Julia, the widow of Marius (itself an innovation), in 68 BCE boasted of descent from gods and kings.⁵³ What at the time was a rhetorical ploy born of lack of better alternatives (if of considerable ingenuity) eventually became the new orthodoxy, helped along, not least, by Virgil’s Aeneid.⁵⁴

All of this is by now well known and does not require more extensive rehearsal.⁵⁵ But for the purposes of this volume, certain distinctive and related features of this memorial culture are worth stressing. First, storage of the historical data was notably decentralised: each gens, each family, celebrated its historical superstars, if within the wider context of the res publica. Second, while the families kept records of their successful members and their achievements and had them on permanent display in their atria, the enactment of this memory in the public spaces of the city during funeral celebrations, consisting as it did of a ritual procession and the delivery of a speech, was ephemeral and polycentric: in each individual instance, the time in the public spotlight was brief and passed from family to family. And third, the displays or enactments featured what we might call a ‘selectively annalistic’ outlook: each individual gens could only hope to commemorate a subsection of the former magistrates and their deeds that made up the story of the Roman commonwealth. No family, not even the most powerful one, could lay claim to an uninterrupted sequence of annual office-holders. All acted under a common aegis with a shared set of norms, values and their illustration via concrete historical exempla, but, importantly, no individual figure or family could claim to represent that aegis fully.⁵⁶ Within the memorial culture of the nobility, each gens cultivated the memory of its own ancestors, but the totality of which each gens was a part, while forming an important point of reference and generative matrix, remained ultimately unavailable for the purposes of aristocratic self-promotion.

All of these features interlocked supremely well with the political culture of the Roman republic more generally. The polycentric storage, the partial and ephemeral enactment of past achievement in the public spaces of the city and the fact that no individual or family (however outstanding) could represent the whole left plenty of space for (heated) aristocratic competition over (past) distinction within and on behalf of the res publica, yet chimed with the principle of oligarchic equality and the distribution and fragmentation of political power and prestige in other cultural spheres, such as politics and (civic) religion. Moreover, while the gentes took care of commemorating facts and figures, other groupings and institutions within the commonwealth played an essential role in ‘manufacturing’ these core contents of each family’s memoria in the first place. The populus Romanus voted members of the ruling elite into magistracies (and only former office-holders were awarded a wax-mask and a public funeral), and it was up to the senate to decide upon the ne plus ultra of glory at Rome, i.e. the celebration of a military triumph. Civic institutions and procedures thus determined and regulated the production and circulation of symbolic capital derived from historical achievement, yet the display and enactment of this capital remained de-centralised, insofar as the agents that used the ‘centrally’ generated facts were individual aristocratic families.⁵⁷ Scholars might argue over the extent to which a common commitment to the res publica as a whole informed the identity of the ruling elite; and a good case can be made that certain forms of conduct that were considered ‘exemplary’ – and hence commemorated – by the family to which the individual who performed the deeds worthy of imitation belonged were also meant to be of inspirational relevance to all the others.⁵⁸ But this shared set of values centred in the commonwealth did by no means require a strong central agency – on the contrary. Within the memorial culture of the Roman nobility, senatus populusque Romanus only register as weak or notional agents: the ‘protagonists’ were the outstanding individuals and their clans.

Within this memorial system, certain ways of thinking about history and historical developments that look natural (indeed, even quintessentially ‘Roman’) to us remained literally inconceivable. As Wolfgang Blösel puts it, ‘in this mode of memory [sc. the memoria practiced by the Roman gentes] there was no place for profound breaks and transformations.’⁵⁹ Each gens would put on display those of its members who had been successful within aristocratic competition; and while the number of individuals that marched in any given pompa would manifest the relative contribution of this particular family to the story of the res publica, that story was by definition one of overall continuity and success. Even for the family of the deceased, the funeral celebration was designed to put a recently successful member of the family on display for public admiration, and thus to boost the chances that younger members of the clan could achieve similar distinction. Genuine failures, i.e. those members of the gens without any honores to their credit, did not register; in this sense, the memorial system of the republican gentes manifested a ‘triumphalist’ approach to the past.⁶⁰ The conception of history, then, which we find embedded within and informing the memorial culture of republican Rome before the advent of written historical narratives, is one in which the civic community and an annually rotating set of outstanding representatives marches forward into an open future, which was (to factor in Rome’s civic religion) contingent upon maintaining good relations with the gods.⁶¹ The discourse of decadence, the notions of ‘decline and fall’, of Sittenverfall and crisis, of a pre-determined development towards a final catastrophe may have circulated orally, but had no place in the stories that the gentes told about themselves (and hence, collectively, about their res publica): the rise to codified prominence of these figures of thought – and their abiding presence within the classical tradition – had to wait until the arrival of Greek historiography (as well as other literary genres).⁶²

2.3 The Rise of Historiography at Rome

The rise of historiography at Rome from the late third century BCE onwards on the basis of Greek models (indeed, at least initially, in Greek) surely happened in interaction with existing modes of story-telling within a wide variety of settings, from conuiuia to dramatic performances; but, importantly, it also occurred within and against the established memorial culture of the Roman nobility.⁶³ Why the Greek turn? Answers range widely. Earlier generations placed the emphasis on the inherent appeal of Greek culture that cast its spell over the Roman ‘barbarians’.⁶⁴ More recent scholarship seeks the reason in the strategic value that the cooption of Greek cultural resources had in Rome, especially in the context of imperial expansion, where the composition of historical narratives arguably helped assert a sense of national identity by carving out a space in the Greek oikumene.⁶⁵ In addition, we ought to reckon with the dynamics of inner-aristocratic competition as an important factor – which functioned generally as a key catalyst of cultural innovation in republican Rome – in contrast to approaches that turn collective agents (‘the Romans’, ‘the senate’, ‘Rome’s officialdom’) in search of a national identity into the motor of acculturation.⁶⁶ To state the obvious, historiographical works in particular were not composed by a senatorial collective or the Roman people or commissioned by (or from) a public body such as a priesthood – rather, authors were specific individuals, each with a distinct position in the Roman field of power, and they used the medium to promote their own views on communal affairs, ‘of course’ in a civic spirit.⁶⁷

Memory had always been a contested battleground, even before the advent of historiography.⁶⁸ And the genre offered novel ways of conceptualising the past that enabled reflection on and intervention in contemporary struggles for prestige and distinction – ways that the traditional memorial culture of the nobility not coincidentally obviated. To name a few: historiography delivered the wherewithal to construct a totalising view of Roman history that brought the hitherto fragmented facts and figures into a coherent narrative order; it thus afforded a single individual the opportunity to put his personal stamp on the entirety of the past, incorporating materials from across all gentes and generations into his story – he had only (as it were) to authorise himself and speak on behalf of the collective; it enabled experimentation with collective protagonists (the senate, the people) as driving the plot;⁶⁹ it permitted the assertion of decisive historical caesuras or even ruptures that facilitated self-serving claims about qualitative differences (whether positive or negative) between the present and some period in the past; it thus opened up a new discursive space for moralising reflections; and, as a literary craft, it operated according to a set of discursive protocols and criteria of distinctions not necessarily linked to the sociopolitical status of the practitioner and thereby gave purchase on the contents of memoria even to individuals with a marginal position in the Roman field of power. The composition of historical narratives in prose or verse was in principle open to anyone with the requisite level of expertise in verbal craftsmanship – including poets such as Ennius. The criteria for the success or failure of such discursive interventions notably differed from those that determined entry into the traditional memorial culture of the nobility. The sociopolitical standing of the author remained an important factor (not least for authorial self-fashioning), but other qualities such as literary appeal and conceptual creativity also counted.⁷⁰

While the precise motivations behind the introduction of historiography (and related genres, such as historical epic or autobiography) will doubtless remain controversial, once the practice of composing narrative accounts of the past had arrived in Rome, it proved a winner.⁷¹ It quickly became – if it was not from the start – an arena for aristocratic competition, as creative authors tried to put their stamp on this prestigious discourse through innovative approaches, including the choice of novel and distinctive titles.⁷² Not coincidentally, the majority of authors who chose to write history hailed from the ruling elite. The temptation to resort to this import from Greece might have been particularly strong among those of its members who possessed comparatively limited symbolic capital or found themselves for other reasons under pressure or at the margins. (And as the case of the young Caesar and his insistence on legendary ancestry shows, ‘marginality’ is a relative concept: even established nobiles might feel the need to employ nontraditional means of aristocratic self-promotion.) In the course of a few decades, the genre thus became part of the ‘cultural revolution’ that saw the Romans coopt and domesticate Greek cultural resources with increased intensity, triggering a wide range of intended and unintended consequences.⁷³

Processes of acculturation involving the domestication of foreign ideas that open up novel ways of thought and practice often have unpredictable repercussions, which may prove functional in some ways and dysfunctional in others, within the wider context of the recipient culture’s societal evolution. The Roman co-option of Greek historiography is a case in point, not least since literary narratives about the past were ideologically diffuse, insofar as they could be mustered for all sorts of (conflicting) purposes, dependent on the agenda of the author:⁷⁴ they could be employed to celebrate or condemn the present; to elevate (or indict) a specific individual (and his family) or to attack (the memorial culture of) the established ruling elite altogether; to aggravate the tension between an outstanding individual and the rest of the senatorial oligarchy or to reassert the desirability of elite consensus. Even the very posture of telling a ‘national’ tale in the service of the commonwealth could be profoundly problematic in a context shaped by aristocratic competition: it is hard to imagine a better (or more controversial) way of self-promotion than to authorise a necessarily partial point of view by claiming for it a larger civic remit and relevance.

Indeed, among much else, literary genres made in Greece (historical narratives in poetry or prose, but also drama and other modes of discourse) offered an ideal – and permanent – medium for endowing a partisan perspective with seemingly universal appeal. When Fulvius Nobilior pushed for a triumph over the Greek city of Ambracia in the teeth of senatorial opposition, for instance (aided, it seems, by Ennius’ fabula praetexta on the sack and his memoralisation of the victory in his Annals), part of his pitch will have been the desire ‘to make Rome look great (yet again)’. In republican Rome (as elsewhere…), the promotion of personal stakes usually came embedded within a rhetoric that represented the individual (politician or poet) as acting or speaking in the interest (or even on behalf) of the entire civic community.⁷⁵

2.4 Roman Annals

When Roman memoria went literary it did so in multiple forms, in both verse and prose, and authors shaped the past to their particular set of prejudices and preferences. This variety has not always been recognised by scholarship. Until some decades ago, the view was widespread that early Roman historiography manifested an ‘annalistic backbone’ of information, based on the notion that even before Fabius Pictor the pontifices maintained a chronicle-like record of yearly magistrates and events from the earliest years of the republic onwards that provided Romans with their history. But as Jörg Rüpke has convincingly argued, annalistic historiography is one mode of writing about the past that emerged along with others in the course of the second century BCE: the first literary work entitled Annals (Annales) was Ennius’ epic – a literary undertaking that stood in dialogue with the temple complex his patron Fulvius Nobilior built to celebrate his victory over Ambracia and the displays that seemed to have formed part of its wall decorations, including a calendar and lists of magistrates.⁷⁶ Subsuming most of republican historiographers under the label ‘annalistic’ is therefore misguided. As Rich observes, ‘the use of the term annalist, with its accompanying assumptions, has imputed a wholly unfounded homogeneity to the numerous early histories of Rome whose character we can only dimly discern through their fragments. It would be best to avoid altogether the term annalist in writing about Roman historical writing, and to use annalistic merely as a designation for organization by magistrate years, without any further assumption about the character of the works in which it was deployed.’⁷⁷

Yet while it is important to recognise that (a) annals belong among the forms of historiography that emerged in the wake of Fabius Pictor’s introduction of the genre to Rome, that (b) narratives with an annalistic outlook were by no means the only form of historiography that the Romans began to practise and (c) that also ‘within the annalistic tradition’ there was a ‘wide range of models … available’, annalistic approaches to the Roman past – in poetry or prose, in literary texts or in inscriptions – still constitute a very distinctive mode of engagement with history because of the powerful affinities with the memoria of the gentes and the conception of history that traditionally informed Rome’s political culture and civic religion: the programmatic focus on annual office-holders and their deeds turned ‘republican annalistic writing’ into ‘the written version of Rome’s social order’;⁷⁸ and the sequence of magistrates elected each year gives annals an open-endedness that chimes well with the (sequential) temporal empowerment of (changing) members of Rome’s ruling elite – even though the lack of a definitive end-point might register as a problem from an aesthetic point of view. The annalistic paradigm struggles to accommodate significant ruptures and defies closure – as the first bona fide literary articulation of the format illustrates. Ennius seems initially to have conceived of his Annals as an epic in 15 books from the beginning of Roman history down to his own times, ending with the triumph of his noble friend Fulvius Nobilior in 187 BCE; but after a couple of years this ending had become out-dated by the inexorable progression of years, and he saw himself compelled to issue an updated and expanded second edition that traced the story of Rome to the year 184 BCE in a further three books of epic verse.⁷⁹ As Hardie (1997) 140 points out, this need for continuation is an inherent feature of the annalistic genre:

While this extension beyond an ending is analogous to, and perhaps licensed by, the continuability of the oral epic, it is determined specifically by the nature of the subject matter of an annalistic epic that takes the story down to the poet’s own day: the constant flow of time renders the previous narrative incomplete and demands a new ending, which in turn is doomed to obsolescence. The Ennian epic is deprived of the satisfying sense of explanatory completion available to the aetiological or ktistic epic that narrates events in the remote past as a kind of ‘charter myth’ for the institutions of the present day.

From a sociopolitical point of view, of course, the sense of an open future was entirely functional: it constituted a vital component of the political culture of the Roman republic.

At the same time, written annals dispense with three key hallmarks of the traditional memorial culture of the nobility that we singled out above: fragmented storage, ephemeral enactment and inbuilt selectivity. The format enabled something more – a permanent, unified and in principle non-selective overview of the history of the Roman res publica that incorporated the contribution of the entire ruling elite (and people), the personnel of all the gentes that ever acted on behalf of the commonwealth.⁸⁰ And a permanent annalistic record generates evident winners and losers. Some families are prominently present; others are not. homines noui, for instance, were entirely absent, and it is therefore hardly coincidental that some of the most creative and unconventional non-annalistic conceptualisations of the past in republican Rome were authored by new men: Cato the Elder conceived of his Origines as an ethno-history of the Roman people, refusing to identify any of the aristocratic office-holders from the traditional ruling elite by name; against the annalistic honouring of distinct individuals who belong to a specific gens, his coverage of the republican past turns this period into a prosopographical graveyard populated by anonymous protagonists.⁸¹ The ‘institutional history’ of Rome that Cicero offers in de Republica 2, which features the pre-republican kings as the defining protagonists of Roman constitutional developments (not least the distinguished Servius Tullius, a learned innovator steeped in Greek culture, with whom Cicero conveniently shared the nomen gentile), is arguably animated by the same polemic desire to sidestep the agents of (annalistic) history, who overwhelmingly hailed from the established nobility.⁸² And Sallust disenfranchised the aristocratic lineup of individual agents by identifying abstract factors such as unpredictable fortuna or metus hostilis as the principal forces that had shaped recent Roman history.⁸³

2.5 History and Memory at the End of the Republic

By the late republic, the memorial culture of the nobility co-existed and interacted with a vibrant literary tradition across a broad range of genres in poetry and prose, practised both by members of the ruling elite and talented litterateurs who used their literary gifts as entry tickets into Roman high society. In addition, Rome’s cultural imaginary also harboured other, alternative ways of configuring the past and positioning the civic community in time that complemented (at times also conflicted) with the conception of history built into aristocratic memoria. For our purposes, three deserve special mention: the idea, presumably of Etruscan origin but also resonating with the Greek doctrine of the magnus annus, that time unfolded in a sequence of saecula;⁸⁴ the apocalyptic visions propagated by prophet-figures (so-called uates), who represented counter-hegemonic views on religion and time and in times of crisis challenged the authority of