Religion in Republican Rome. Jorg Rupke

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СКАЧАТЬ omnium consensu triumphum decessere. additus triumpho honos, ut statuae equestres eis, rara illa aetate res, in foro ponerentur).⁴²

      Livy stresses that the statues were equestrian and thereby supposes a conceptual link between the award of a simple statue and the triumph. Does Livy’s Augustan-era construal of his information accurately reflect the situation at the end of the fourth century? Anthropomorphic divine images were frequent before and during that era,⁴³ but the same was not true of honorific statues of living people.⁴⁴ There is no evidence that the honoring of living individuals through the erection of statues became common in Greek states before the late fourth century. In regard to Rome, there are isolated stories of statues being put up before then. Whether these stories are trustworthy is controversial.⁴⁵ Tonio Hölscher and Markus Sehlmeyer are in agreement that, at Rome, the practice of displaying statues in public started in the latter part of the fourth century, and that this practice assumed a variety of forms that surpassed any Greek models.⁴⁶ There are other indications that this same era saw the emergence of new commemorative practices, such as the reorganization of the Forum initiated after 318 during the censorship of Maenius, who had previously been honored by a statue, and who put up the so-called maenianum, a building that featured a gallery for spectators.⁴⁷

      We should not assume, however, that this development in respect to public honor through statuary was directed by the Senate. It is more plausible to assume that private initiative was responsible for the pursuit of the possibility that statuary afforded to represent, multiply, and immortalize one’s own body in a form previously reserved for gods. The warrior of Capestrano might be seen as evidence of such experiments. The granting of triumphs by the end of the fourth century might have constituted a reaction—an attempt at systematization—to regulate and bring under senatorial control an exploding private practice, which had begun only slightly earlier. Attempts to control the awarding of powerful honors—such as were attached to statues displayed in public—would continue throughout the rest of Roman (and, indeed, European) history.⁴⁸ The public ritual and the (mostly) private erection of a statue thus interacted. The display of booty could have taken place both during the ritual and at the erection of the statue. Maenius built the famous tribunal for public speakers, the rostra, as the means to display booty, and some of the earliest attested statues represented donors at the side of the divine images that they had dedicated. The triumphator Spurius Carvilius, for example, had his statue on the Capitol, close to a colossal image of Iuppiter.⁴⁹ In the triumph various media interacted in the representation of both the triumphator and booty, and paying attention to this interaction is crucial for a proper understanding of this elevated ritual.

      How can we date this development? Some comparatively reliable notices in our literary sources about the display of triumphal statues suggest the late fourth century as the terminus ante quem for the emergence of the triumph in its classical form. Other developments that relate to the question include the rather dimly understood spread of honorific statues in the Mediterranean world of the fifth and fourth centuries and the largely simultaneous process of the formation of the “new” Roman nobility during the fourth century. Decisive steps seem to have occurred in the wake of the constitutional changes marked by the so-called Sextian-Licinian laws, which are traditionally dated to 367.

      Another line of argumentation exploits the similarities between the triumph and the pompa circensis. In conjunction with the admission of plebians to the consulship in 367 (or thereabouts), the magistracy of the aediles curules was created, whose task it was to oversee the public games.⁵⁰ As a result, the pompa celebrated during the ludi was no longer led by the supreme officer of the Republic but by lesser magistrates, who, for the time of the ritual only, assumed, by means of their clothing, the role of the “king’s successor,” a role previously performed by the consul. This change in ritual procedure freed up the paraphernalia (and their semantics), rendering them available for use in other rituals as well, as the immediate proliferation of games and the length of the games would seem to evince. It is this semantic development that I claim as a terminus post quem for the creation of the ritual of the triumph in its classical form.⁵¹

      If a late fourth-century dating of the triumph can be maintained, the choice of representing the victor by a (fictitious) terra-cotta image that was also in use in other ritual contexts must have been deliberate. It gave prominence to the ritual associations of the statue and thereby stressed the exercise of senatorial control, even as, in a second step, the setting up of, and the choice of material for, a permanent statue left room for differentiation or, perhaps, accommodation to further development in either technical standards or semantic distinctions. Bronze statues became a minimum standard for honorific statues; gilding would be an exceptional honor.⁵² A chryselephantine statue, on the other hand, indicated a definite transgression of the boundary between man and god. It was employed in the final honors for the dictator Caesar.⁵³ Whereas pedestrian statues became regular for magistrates who died during embassies,⁵⁴ a representation on horseback or even on a currus would be given to victorious magistrates or persons who had exceptionally distinguished themselves in service to the res publica. But again it has to be stressed that it was not the public statue that was central. Statues were erected by many individuals and groups. Their status derived from the prior, public ritual, thus blurring the difference between public and private.⁵⁵ Ritualization, forcing private actions into public form and space, must have been seen as a powerful strategy by Roman protagonists of the middle Republic.

      Changes in Ritual

      As Versnel was able to demonstrate, the honos of the triumph was never seen as an honor for the gods.⁵⁶ Honoring the gods was the function of supplicationes, festivals of thanksgiving that were decreed “in the name of the victor,” as the later formula ran,⁵⁷ once reports of the victory had been received. From a religious point of view, the strict separation of human and divine honors was necessary. While it was possible to deny a triumph to the general, the res publica could not dare to withhold what was due to the gods. Still, problems remain. After all, the triumphal ritual involved the deposition of the laurel wreath to Iuppiter and the sacrifice of oxen on the Capitoline, which would have been owed to the gods. How are these actions related to honoring the general? We have to look for precedents and influences on the “systematized” triumph, apart from the Hellenistic pompae on which it was so clearly modeled in its ostentatious display of booty.⁵⁸

      Before the consolidation of the new republican nobility, Rome’s aristocracy engaged in “gentilician warfare.” Gentilician warfare was an enterprise of individual families, perhaps for their personal enrichment, but, at the same time, a public problem.⁵⁹ These wars only gradually became a matter for the entire commonwealth. We may expect that earlier rites of return from military campaigns were understood as religious obligations on the part of the leaders. They had to fulfill their vows and dedicate part of the booty to specific deities. The deities to whom this dedication was made might have been chosen according to the individual inclination of the general, family tradition, or more general rules, a reflection of which we can perhaps still capture in the so-called leges regiae, the royal laws that defined the dedication of spolia opima, the spoils taken from the opposing leader.⁶⁰ It is crucial to note that the Romans understood these regulations to involve the victorious general moving on his feet as he himself carried the spoils during the act of dedication. Of equal importance is the fact that the return to the city and its boundary would have been a highly marked occasion. Rome was completely walled during the early Republic, and entering the city with an armed force must have been restricted or even banned.⁶¹

      Augustan historiography and antiquarian research assimilated one to another and all to the triumph: the varied ritual performances of the ovatio, the entering on foot; the triumphus in monte Albano, a triumph at the federal sanctuary, which was celebrated for the first time in 231 and did not require the Senate’s consent; and the special form of dedication associated with the spoils of the hostile general, the spolia opima.⁶² Nonetheless, СКАЧАТЬ