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Moving from a carefully developed theoretical underpinning of such a comprehensive concept of political culture, to its systematic empirical testing and practical application in an interdisciplinary research environment would certainly have a beneficial integrative and regulative effect on the field of (‘new’ political) history in general and ancient history in particular. As always, however, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.¹⁸

If we are to put these new approaches to good practical, that is histori(ographi)cal, use in the future, we need to integrate the detailed deciphering of the collective moral code into a more comprehensive description of the political culture of the Roman Republic as a complex multidimensional system. One might even formulate the ambitious ultimate aim of this project once again in the classic Geertzian terms: we have to learn how to read this ‘culture’ of the populus Romanus and (not only) its ruling class as ‘an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles’, which are inseparably interconnected by referring to, and affirming, each other. These ensembles and texts are inescapably ‘suspended in webs of significance’, and they consist of ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (Geertz 1973: 452, 5, 89). Obviously, therefore, our attention is no longer focused on actual politics, such as the decisions and actions of magistrates, commanders and the Senate, or speculations on alleged policies, trends and tendencies within the political class; nor can we just look at the social framework and/or the subsystem of the political institutions and formal procedures of decision-making in an isolated way. The first aspect which has become the centre of our interest now is not easy to characterise: what was not (and could not be) politically addressed, explicitly debated and put on the agenda of decision-making? Is there anything – and if yes, what – that remains implicit in the discourse of politics, but must nevertheless be considered a fundamental part of the system (and its basis of legitimacy)? Does this apply, for example, to the collective mental horizon of Romans and their lost world of concepts, meanings and ingrained views?

Secondly, the concept of ‘civic rituals’ serves to denote an ‘ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles’ – that is, in concrete terms, the whole range of rituals, ceremonies and other spectacles which, as ensembles, make up the specific repertoire of ways, means and media which serve to affirm, reproduce, modify, criticise or otherwise negotiate the system of values, norms and conceptual codes of a given culture (see Chapter 28; Chapter 34; Chapter 35). It is this repertoire or ensemble which in turn complements, as well as overlaps and intersects with, yet another ensemble, which has its own text – namely the institutions and formal procedures of politics as a decision-making process (see Chapter 15; Chapter 16).

That is why a broad range of symbolic forms of communication has always to be part of it too, regardless of culture, period and society: performances, games and other variants of theatrical spectacles, festivals, ceremonies such as processions, and other civic rituals of all kinds – which in this context also include genuinely political forms and formal procedures of decision-making, such as the contio or electoral assemblies (see Chapter 33; Chapter 34; Chapter 35; Chapter 16). It has long been acknowledged that symbolic and ceremonial (or expressive) functions and forms of rituals on the one hand, and the technical (or instrumental) functions of open-ended procedures on the other, which are geared to decision-making and/or the formal enactment of decisions, cannot be compartmentalised in specific types of (rational) procedures (versus ceremony, ritual, or even performance). Nor can these alleged ‘types’ be neatly assigned to particular stages of historical development, let alone in a unilinear process of rationalisation: it is by no means only and alone in premodern cultures that, on the one hand, genuine political processes and apparently rational procedures also have symbolic, ceremonial and ritual dimensions and that, on the other hand, pageantry, ceremonies and rituals are more important and play a kind of special role sui generis in the language of legitimation which makes up the complex dramaturgy of politics and power. Both are also true in modern societies and political cultures, in an illimitable variety of complementary as well as mixed forms.

In different ways and on different levels, procedures, ceremonies and civic rituals all serve the regular reproduction and affirmation of the ‘indigenous civic identity and ideology’, as Edward Muir calls it, an identity based on a broad consensus about social norms and values. Such rituals make these abstract values and the civic identity as such visible and, in a way, tangible by staging and putting them on public display (in the full sense of the term), thereby confirming and renewing their validity and the universal consensus. At the same time, according to Muir, the repertoire of rituals and ceremonies provides a ‘medium of discourse’ – or, to put it in another way, an important part of the vocabulary of any language of symbolic communication – between the participating social groups.¹⁹

Civic rituals illustrate the valid and legitimate arrangement of human relationships – and, in the case of the Roman Republic, these relationships are by definition and indeed by nature hierarchic, defined by a steep asymmetry of authority and power.²⁰ Hierarchy permeates not only all formal and informal relationships between the political elite and the ordinary people of the populus Romanus overall, as constituent classes of the political community as well as between an individual senator as patron and priest, consul and commander, and the man in the Roman street as ordinary citizen, client and soldier (see Chapter 18; Chapter 20; Chapter 17; Chapter 22). Hierarchy is also the omnipresent ruling principle that defines the complex network of relationships within the senatorial elite itself, based on the hierarchical ordering of offices in the cursus honorum, the consolidation of which was a prolonged, conflict-ridden and complex process – a process practically identical with the consolidation of the patricio-plebeian oligarchy as such.²¹

In a nutshell – and to use the precise concepts coined by Edward Muir, in order to characterise Renaissance Venice, its ‘serene society’ and inheritance of myth and ritual – ‘government by ritual’ in the Roman ‘republic of processions’ was based on a repertoire (or ensemble) of civic rituals (themselves ensembles) that was intricately interconnected by a rich texture of symbols, images, meanings and messages, revolving around the omnipresence of, and complex correlation between, concepts of power and hierarchy.²² In a culture of spectacular visibility, the language or poetics of power are necessarily visual. This is especially true of a political culture such as that in Rome, that has been appropriately named a ‘civilisation of spectacles’. In the specific sense of the concepts ‘spectacle’, ‘ritual’ and ‘ceremony’ underlying this reconstruction of a political culture, the whole repertoire of ritualised interaction in the shape of social gestures, postures and manners, the range of forums and modes of communication between high and low, senators and citizens, patrons and clients, magistrates and assemblies, commanders and soldiers, tribunes and plebs is part of the same field of social action.²³

That means that it is simply not enough to exercise power by pulling strings behind the scenes – in the Republic, as in other societies, power only becomes real when and if it is seen to be exercised, it needs publicity and performance, that is in theatrical terms, actors, who are present (in the full sense of the word), a text (in both senses of the concept), a stage and a co-present audience.²⁴ The same is true for hierarchies: they are not just in place, defining and reproducing themselves – they need to be acted out in public to reproduce and affirm themselves. This is particularly true in a city-state system in which rule and the most important acts of ruling are carried out publicly, in the presence and literally under the eyes of those who are being ruled, and who are thus explicitly or implicitly the addressees of these acts. Moreover, this co-presence and, even more so, the different supporting roles of a co-acting citizenry in many civic rituals generates a specific Roman kind of consensus and even complicity, which the exercise of government and authority in this political culture depended on, and which was therefore part and parcel of a typical city-state government as a process shared between rulers and ruled.²⁵ It is exactly this variant of rule in, and through, face-to-face communication which necessarily has a particular need for special forms and media of symbolic interaction in the shape of civic rituals: they structure and channel the interaction between rulers or ruling classes – or rather their representatives physically present in a given situation – and the ruled as co-present audience and addressees; and, last but not least, these rituals, in which power is (seen to be) exercised in the shape of performative acts of ruling, render this situation calculable and its results foreseeable, thus providing the kind of dependability which is the prerequisite of stability, continuity and legitimacy.

In this system, commensurate with its culture of personal presence, visibility and physical performance, it was a particularly sophisticated ensemble of civic rituals that took centre stage. Every single ritual is a peculiar hybrid of dramatic and ceremonial elements, derived from different sources, with a specific syntax, taxonomy or text of its own. As a systemic ensemble, civic rituals constitute a symbolic language and serve as a medium for a continuous discourse among the constituent groups of the political community – in this case between the political class and the populus Romanus, but also among the political class itself. This particular subgenre of rituals is particularly designed not only to stage and thus reveal, but to constitute and continuously reproduce an exclusively Roman civic ideology and a sense of collective indigenous identity based upon a broad consensus about political and social values – such as the pompa funebris. This demonstratively public funeral ritual of the great gentes was designed to enhance their respective accumulated social capital by symbolically staging the return of the ancestors into the Forum Romanum as the central civic space and onto the rostra as the most prominent stage of public appearance (see Chapter 8; Chapter 32). This ritual must be read as an implicit appeal to a universal consensus between members of the gens, dead or alive, as actors on the one hand and their social peers and the people as co-present audience on the other. It is an ideological consensus about individual and familial contributions to Rome’s greatness, in the shape of outstanding accomplishments in politics and war, as the only legitimate origin and foundation of honours and honores, reputation, rank and membership in the political elite.²⁶ The ideology of commitment and reciprocity and its regular ritual representation, which is particularly impressive and effective through the constant repetition of key concepts and principles in the laudationes, the use of the same symbols and the implementation of the same basic syntax, is an important symbolic source of a shared sense of unity and coherence, which in turn is a prerequisite for the legitimate exercise of authority.

Moreover, civic rituals are commentaries on the city, not only on its internal order, but also on its relationship with the outside world – such as one of the most complex and interesting civic rituals, the pompa triumphalis. This particularly splendid spectacle was designed to stage not only the ceremonial return of the victorious commander-in-chief into the city, but also the ritual completion of the subjugation of yet another foreign nation under Roman rule and the symbolic appropriation of yet another distant part of the world by the populus Romanus, partly co-present as awe-inspired civil, as well as civic, audience and partly co-acting in the procession of the ordinary soldiers following the triumphal chariot (see Chapter 17; Chapter 35). It was a discourse about power in the shape of conquest of, and control over, the world – and thus yet another aspect of the ideological consensus between the populus Romanus and its ruling class, and again a symbolic source of unity and coherence.²⁷

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.