I. Östenberg, Power walks. Aristocratic escorted movements in ancient Rome, in I. Östenberg, S. Malmberg and J. Bjørnebye, The moving city. Processions, passages and promenades in ancient Rome, Bloomsbury, London 2015, 13–22, 239–243.
The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, ... more The Roman nobility very seldom walked alone. Aristocratic city walks were no private promenades, but nor were they formal processions. They did, however, often share several traits with the ceremonial pompae; many included a larger number of participants, had an ordered sequence and strived at specific ends, they moved through the city centre, took use of symbols and insignia, and they were certainly watched, noted and discussed. This paper analyses aristocratic escorted movements, here labelled ‘power walks’, as movements set between processions and promenades, the formal and the informal, ceremony and everyday life, social distance and physical presence. Besides the central person of the aristocrat himself, the paper looks at his escort and the spectators, and also at the interplay between the various participants and the Roman cityscape.
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Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
The quote from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, illustrates the limitations in the human sense of sight. Only by adding sound to our visual perception of a person — or a place, an event, or indeed a city — can a full portrait be obtained. The laugh of M. de Charlus also has social implications; it is a mark of his aristocratic lineage, a culturally embedded sound adding to his social standing, to be admired or scorned by listeners and readers alike.
The question of how “to paint a complete portrait” is central to the study of the senses in antiquity, a topic which has recently and quite rapidly become en vogue in the classical fields:
• How do we, in the words of Proust, “add a phonetic imitation to our verbal descriptions” of life in the Roman city?
• How do we move beyond depictions of maps, plans and 3D-models fully to grasp how the city of the empire was perceived, not only through sight but also through sound and by way of smell and touch?
• How did the Romans themselves express their urban sensory experiences in their written testimonies?
• What can a deepened understanding of the sensual perceptions of the city in Roman times — the visual, audial, olfactory, tactile and synaesthetic — tell not only about a single individual’s experience, but of Roman culture as such?
• Was there a specific Roman way of perceiving the urban environment, and in what ways were such sensory experiences dependent on the subject and in what ways on the object — the cityscape itself, with its buildings, streets and open areas?
• What rôle did the social and historical context play? and
• How do we approach these questions in a scientific mode that takes our research beyond intuition?
civil war. It is argued that the Senate and the victorious generals turned to the traditional triumph as a means to embrace civil war victories within an accepted frame of external conquest. It is further argued that the triumphal procession, in its capacity as a well-established spectacle performed as a role-playing between Roman victors and foreign losers, proved an inadequate means to give voice to Romans conquering other Romans. Novel forms of expressions were hence exploited: the memorial and the calendar. The memorial was alien to the Roman culture and did not succeed in winning acclaim. The calendar proved a more effective means. Both Caesar and Octavian were able to use the fasti anni as a medium to articulate their success in civil war, commemorating even their victories at Pharsalus and Philippi.
interest among Roman scholars. In recent years, attention has
also turned to martial rituals, war memorials and the sense of
oneness as shaped by joint experiences of war. These current
discussions focus almost without exception on Roman victories.
In contrast, this paper aims at exploring aspects of defeat, asking how battlefield failures were received, remembered and
how they contributed to the creation of identities in ancient
Rome. The basic questions are these. How did Rome handle her
own defeats? Which losses were forgotten and which were remembered? How were defeats committed to memory (or consigned to oblivion)—what rituals, monuments and narratives
were employed? This paper will argue that, while contemporary
battle losses must have triggered enormous sorrow and fear,
there are very few traces of former defeats visible in Roman
ceremony and cityscape. Only a very limited set of failures
from the distant past were embraced as specific events by the
communal Roman memory. Most defeats were instead taken up by the writers of the Early Empire as preludes to later victories and were thus absorbed into the larger picture of constant Roman success.
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah
The quote from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, illustrates the limitations in the human sense of sight. Only by adding sound to our visual perception of a person — or a place, an event, or indeed a city — can a full portrait be obtained. The laugh of M. de Charlus also has social implications; it is a mark of his aristocratic lineage, a culturally embedded sound adding to his social standing, to be admired or scorned by listeners and readers alike.
The question of how “to paint a complete portrait” is central to the study of the senses in antiquity, a topic which has recently and quite rapidly become en vogue in the classical fields:
• How do we, in the words of Proust, “add a phonetic imitation to our verbal descriptions” of life in the Roman city?
• How do we move beyond depictions of maps, plans and 3D-models fully to grasp how the city of the empire was perceived, not only through sight but also through sound and by way of smell and touch?
• How did the Romans themselves express their urban sensory experiences in their written testimonies?
• What can a deepened understanding of the sensual perceptions of the city in Roman times — the visual, audial, olfactory, tactile and synaesthetic — tell not only about a single individual’s experience, but of Roman culture as such?
• Was there a specific Roman way of perceiving the urban environment, and in what ways were such sensory experiences dependent on the subject and in what ways on the object — the cityscape itself, with its buildings, streets and open areas?
• What rôle did the social and historical context play? and
• How do we approach these questions in a scientific mode that takes our research beyond intuition?
civil war. It is argued that the Senate and the victorious generals turned to the traditional triumph as a means to embrace civil war victories within an accepted frame of external conquest. It is further argued that the triumphal procession, in its capacity as a well-established spectacle performed as a role-playing between Roman victors and foreign losers, proved an inadequate means to give voice to Romans conquering other Romans. Novel forms of expressions were hence exploited: the memorial and the calendar. The memorial was alien to the Roman culture and did not succeed in winning acclaim. The calendar proved a more effective means. Both Caesar and Octavian were able to use the fasti anni as a medium to articulate their success in civil war, commemorating even their victories at Pharsalus and Philippi.
interest among Roman scholars. In recent years, attention has
also turned to martial rituals, war memorials and the sense of
oneness as shaped by joint experiences of war. These current
discussions focus almost without exception on Roman victories.
In contrast, this paper aims at exploring aspects of defeat, asking how battlefield failures were received, remembered and
how they contributed to the creation of identities in ancient
Rome. The basic questions are these. How did Rome handle her
own defeats? Which losses were forgotten and which were remembered? How were defeats committed to memory (or consigned to oblivion)—what rituals, monuments and narratives
were employed? This paper will argue that, while contemporary
battle losses must have triggered enormous sorrow and fear,
there are very few traces of former defeats visible in Roman
ceremony and cityscape. Only a very limited set of failures
from the distant past were embraced as specific events by the
communal Roman memory. Most defeats were instead taken up by the writers of the Early Empire as preludes to later victories and were thus absorbed into the larger picture of constant Roman success.
Many traditional historical studies are more concerned with the causes and effects of the murder than the funeral display. Gelzer’s account (1968) ends with Caesar’s death. Syme (2002, 98) notes Antony’s oration almost in passing, calls the speech ‘brief and moderate’ and adds that ‘the audience was inflammable’. Lintott (2009) makes no mention of the funeral, and Woolf (2007, 39–40) writes briefly that Antony took the opportunity to read out Caesar’s will. In the wake of the ‘performative turn’, scholars are more willing to acknowledge the funeral as a significant event (Wiseman 2009, 227–34; Strauss 2015, 171–7). Most importantly, Sumi (2005, 97–122) presents a detailed survey of the funeral’s components, as part of his study on spectacle and power. Still, to this date, most accounts of the funeral are rather descriptive and present the evidence from the sources with little in-depth analysis of the contents and effects of the performance.
My paper has two aims. One is to emphasize the persuasive effects of Antony’s performance by placing it in a context of Roman spectacles, the other to argue that the funeral set the murder itself on stage and contributed to shaping views of what had occurred at the Senate’s meeting.
I intend to analyze the funeral as a Roman performance set in a long tradition of visual spectacles (funerals, triumphs, fabulae pretextae). I aim to show that the funeral intentionally played on people’s emotions by incorporating them as active partakers in the ritual itself (Bell, Ahmed). Through speeches, hymns, voices, gestures, tears and props (Appian BCiv 2.101), Antony’s performance created a strong communal sense of empathy for Caesar that turned Rome against the assassins. In particular, I will stress the importance of the inclusion of Caesar’s dead body in the spectacle, and argue that by way of his physical corpse, the large image of his stabbed body and through his re-enacted voice, Caesar himself had a central role in the play.
I aim further to show that the funeral staged not only the dead dictator, but also the very way in which he had been killed. Various rumours of what had really happened at the Senate’s meeting were circulating after Caesar’s death, and the funeral provided a first fully constructed version, which highly influenced how people were to imagine the event. Again, Caesar’s body played a central role. By pointing out the blood and the scars, Antony was able to transmit a version of the murder that exposed it as an cowardly ambush aimed at an innocent victim who was likewise the saviour and father of the assassins. At the funeral, the people of Rome saw the murder as it had happened before their own eyes (enargeia). Antony’s performance established a story in which the conspirators were morally guilty rather than liberators of the res publica.
WORKS CITED
Ahmed, S. (2004, 2014) The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh.
Bell, C. (1992) Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford.
Gelzer, M. (1968). Caesar. Politician and statesman. Cambridge, Mass.
Lintott, A.W. (2009) “The assassination.” In Griffin, M., ed., A companion to Julius Caesar, 72–82. Malden, MA.
Strauss, B. (2015) The death of Caesar. New York.
Sumi, G. (2005) Ceremony and power. Performing politics in Rome between Republic and Empire. Ann Arbor.
Syme, R. (1939, 2002) The Roman revolution. Oxford.
Wiseman, T.P. (2009) Remembering the Roman people: Essays on late Republican politics and literature. Oxford.
Wolf, G. (2007) Et tu, Brute? A short history of political murder. Cambridge, Mass.
Roman history as it is presented in our sources suggests very little resistance to communal views. But military defeats are traumatic and emotional events that might have triggered and shaped alternative interpretations. One such example occurred in the aftermath of Cannae, when the Senate rejected the Roman war prisoners offered by Hannibal. Sources describe the event as very emotional, with the prisoners and their families begging for mercy and offering to pay the ransom. The event thus displays a conflict of interest between the people, who wanted their relatives back home, and the Senate, who firmly refused. We might suspect that people's experience of the event did create popular, or subjugated, memories, which were not taken up by the communal Roman version of the event, which boasted firmness and heroic resistance.
Later examples might be found in Tacitus' story of how Germanicus took a detour to bury the fallen in the Teutoburger forest in defiance to Tiberius, and his similar depiction of how Cn Domitius Corbulo, in the reign of Nero, had part of his army to march to the location of Lucius Caesennius Paetus' earlier defeat to bury the place. Both these instances paint the act of burying the defeated as critique of empire. They provide small signs of an alternative view, a resistance against the traditional Roman condemnation of the defeated. As in the example of Cannae, these stories underline the emotional force and political conflict that defeat might trigger. But whereas the memory of Cannae turned into a commemoration of strong communal consensus, Tacitus' narratives chose to remember the individual heroes who acted against the will of the men in power. In this paper, these different examples of commemoration will be discussed as a reflection of the change in political systems, from Republic to Empire.
Ancient Rome was crowded with monuments that celebrated victory in war. Memories of defeat, on the other hand, were almost non-existent. Anyone who walked through the city would have made innumerable encounters with success but met with few notions of failure. At the same time, ancient literature abounds in lengthy stories of Roman defeats. The pugna Cannensis takes up as much space in Livy as the victory at Zama.
In this paper, I will reflect on why Roman defeats were acknowledged in literature but suppressed in the monumental landscape. Above all, I will focus on how the ancient authors described and explained the Roman Republican military setbacks. Nathan Rosenstein has argued that defeated generals (imperatores victi) were given only very limited blame for the failures, but that Rome instead held her gods and soldiers responsible. The sources do not support such an interpretation. Generals were often criticized; their greed for glory and lack of patience are regular components in the literary accounts. Other standard explanations were also employed. Authors often characterize the enemy as treacherous, and ambush and deceit were frequently given as reasons of defeat. In many accounts, Nature itself plays a role. The wild and foreign landscape supported the adversaries by luring the Roman army into an unknown and difficult terrain.
I shall discuss the nature and function of the recurrent explanations of defeat in ancient literature – the overambitious general, the deceitful enemy, the untamed nature. Why were these particular excuses so frequently emphasized? What do they tell of the Roman way of handling reverses? What role did they play in shaping Roman identity and history?
Ida Östenberg
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
"
However, it will be argued in this paper that damnatio memoriae not only erased but also memorised the targeted individual. Roman inscriptions kept their erased names. At times, the deleted name was still legible, at others, the very cutting, often conspicuously visible, preserved the memory of the erased, and also of the very act of removal. For example, everybody who gazed at the arch of Septimius Severus would have noticed first and foremost the erased name of Geta. The material of the arch did not allow for oblivion, but preserved both the name and the process of erasure. Damnatio memoriae was inscribed into the stone.
In this paper, I intend to look further into the materiality of damnatio memoriae by examining how erased inscriptions both removed and perpetuated Roman names. I will also discuss the issue of intent. Was oblivion the aim of the erased texts? I will focus principally on inscriptions, but to be able to discuss the cultural significance of damnatio memoriae, I will also include the parallel phenomenon of re-cutting and destruction of portraits in the analysis."
Ida Östenberg, University of Gothenburg
This paper aims to discuss Rome's civil wars in the light of her long bellic history and martial traditions. As is well known, war permeated all aspects of Roman culture and constituted the core of Roman civilisation. Tradition and rituals set war in a continuous process and understandable form that explained conflict and placed confrontation and violence in a larger frame. Hence, for example, success was always announced by way of certain ritual proceedings, the victor entered the city by a specific route in a time-honoured triumph, and victorious wars were represented in text and image according to well-establish and easily comprehended patterns. Defeats too, according to my present work, were noted and remembered along recurrent standard lines.
Roman representation of victory and defeat in war was based on a traditional historic and dramaturgic notion of external wars, in which Rome fought against outer enemies. Us and them were the basic entities that structured the stories from the battlefields. Whether Rome won or lost, the idea of us, as represented in text and image, created a strong sense of participation, identity and notion of common values. All this changed with the civil wars of the late Republic.
Battles in civil war resulted in Roman victory alongside Roman defeat. How did Rome handle this novel and very different construction of us and them? How did she choose to represent and remember the single battles of these domestic conflicts? How was victory and defeat in civil war described and depicted? In this paper, I will compare Roman traditional ways of expressing victories and explaining defeat to parallel descriptions of civil war. Special attention will be given terminology in the literary texts and inscriptions. The main aim is to be able to discuss Roman textual and visual strategies at a time of change, and the central question is this: Did Rome take refuge in her customary schemes of representing war at this time of confusion and turmoil, or did civil war rather force Rome to develop novel kinds of verbal and visual expressions in order to better articulate and understand this very different reality?"
In this paper, I aim to discuss aristocratic escorted movements, here entitled ‘power walks’, as movements between processions and promenades, the formal and the informal, ceremony and everyday life, social distance and physical presence. Besides the central person of the aristocrat himself, my paper looks at his followers and the participating spectators, as also at the interplay between these people and groups. Terms in focus are: performance, movement, space, monuments, power, character and communication. Aristocratic power walks will be discussed as both reflecting and shaping communal ideas about Rome and as forming part of the continuous struggle for political powers and cultural capital between her leaders.
Cicero received the title in 63 BC after his handling of the Catilina affair. As might be expected, he was vey proud of the honour and frequently boasted both fatherly mildness and firmness towards the Roman people. Caesar was named Parens Patriae in 45 BC, also by decree of the Senate. His title became a central issue especially after his murder. The plebs erected a monument with the inscription “To the Father of the Fatherland”, and the Senate decided to call the Ides of March “the day of the Parricidium”. Caesar’s followers also issued a number of coins picturing Caesar with the legend Parens Patriae.
Cicero and Caesar were the two men of the Republic given the official title “Father” by the Senate, and both were killed by political motives. In this paper, I aim to discuss the deaths of Cicero and Caesar in terms of Roman fatherhood and patricide. The use and function, legal and symbolic, of family terminology in Roman politics will receive attention. In particular, the paper will discuss relations, rights and responsibility between fathers and children. The central question dwells around the deaths of Cicero and Caesar: How did Rome deal with having killed their own Fathers?