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Chapter 2

Institutionalizing and Ordering Public Communication

This chapter will substantiate the claim made earlier that religion is an important and growing field in public communication. The analysis undertaken here seeks to document the extent and boundaries of processes of rationalization. I concentrate on systematization as a historical process and form of rationalization. It is seen above all in the growing number of explicit norms regulating—and hence institutionalizing—occasions of public, and specifically religious, communication. At every stage of the planning for such occasions, notes were taken and protocols written by senators and pontiffs—crucially, not by the magistrates who organized the games but by the performing companies.¹ The ease of this cooperation between Roman magistrates and foreign professionals in the organization of ritual, already well developed by the middle of the third century, is one of the astonishing features of instrumental rationalization. In order to please the god, one might say, major shifts in the structure of public communication were accepted, whereas shifts in political participation were already a matter of much domestic conflict by the beginning of the century.

When we regard developments in Rome from the end of the fourth century forward, we are already dealing with a complex society that must have had a multifaceted system of communicative spaces, to which upper-class banqueting belonged,² as well as professional or neighborhood clubs,³ Dionysian cultic clubs,⁴ patrician or plebeian special organizations, and family or client associations.⁵ With the gradual leveling of the patrician and plebeian classes, a process observed in the historical record primarily in connection with the Licinian-Sextian laws and the patrician-plebeian consulship, a unified aristocracy came into being in the second half of the fourth century. Its formulation of values and in particular its orientation to external affairs— aristocratic competition being now channeled into intensive and extensive imperialist action—led to increased dynamism in overall processes of historical change,⁶ which expressed itself in rapid expansion, increasing internal social differentiation, and rising affluence. With the First Punic War (264–241), Rome rose from a regional power to dominance of the Mediterranean. That role was challenged in the Second Punic War (218–202), but the challenge failed. This process constitutes the framework within which the specific changes analyzed below occurred.

The next three chapters will examine in detail changes in the communicative spaces and functions filled by rituals. As we will see, we are confronted not only with rituals being gradually or suddenly modified. Additionally— and more importantly—we witness their proliferation, the creation of new rituals. Such processes of ritualization,⁷ which is to say, of forcing actions into stable form and public space, operated as a means of social control, and we will eventually have to take up the analysis of ritual in just those terms. Yet the involvement of gods complicated the functioning of ritual as a mechanism of control. Religion, in other words, could hide social power, but any such obfuscation could also result in softening and questioning it. At the end of that process—not at the beginning—it was important for some ancient observers and agents to identify religion as a distinct sphere or phenomenon. For now, however, the accent shall fall on the notion of the public and developments outside religious rituals.

The Senate

The center of political communication was the Senate, an assembly of the three hundred leading men—old men, if one believes the ancient derivation of the name from senes. Although the institution was old, it gained the stability that made it the focus of republican decision-making processes and the efficient counterpart of ever more powerful magistrates around the year 300. This stability was provided by rules of membership that granted lifelong place to former officeholders of particular rank, which in turn produced a social structure in which the principle of seniority completely dominated the regulation of the right to speak and the order in which votes were cast.⁸

The centralization of the public life of the upper classes in this committee is connected in the textual tradition with the censorship of Ap. Claudius Caecus in 312, who consistently applied the rules for admission to the Senate that had developed previously. His resistance to the expansion of the priestly colleges according to proportional representation of patricians and plebeians gives rise to the suspicion that alternatively institutionalized “publics” were feared. The publication of a list of days suitable for court sessions (fasti; see Chapter 7), which was among the priestly duties of the pontifex, was probably intended to serve the same purpose.⁹ General availability of the information reduced the influence of wide-ranging institutions. Writing is the medium of publication.

Another early innovative political use of writing is connected with the name of Appius Claudius. His speech opposing peace with Pyrrhos in 280 has long been accepted as the oldest surviving Roman speech.¹⁰ This is more than a bit of cultural history trivia. A quarter of a century after his consulship (307), Claudius must have been one of the longest-serving and highest-ranking senators. The written dissemination of his speech—calling it a “private publication” would give a false impression of the number of copies in question— emphasized his disagreement with the outcome of the Senate’s deliberations, namely the decision to accept an offer of peace from the victor, Pyrrhos. The publication produced a “public,” no matter how small and diffused, which existed outside the norms of how senatorial consensus is reached. Without knowing the publication’s contents, it was not possible to discern whether Appius intended to bolster his arguments or his own person: what we see here is a break with tradition, but not a trend.¹¹

Probably in the following decades, the Roman pontifices maximi began not only to produce written minutes but also to publish excerpts of these on a whitewashed wooden board.¹² Documentary procedures in the Senate probably provided the precedent for such written minutes, but this remains speculation in view of our lack of knowledge of both types of text in this period. Again, “publication” is a term used advisedly, as we know neither the intended nor the actual readers. In fact, it may have been the gesture of publication—of assuming literacy and of addressing a public of undefined size—that was decisive: acting in public, in the form of addressing the public, ensured institutional independence and significance.

These acts of publication must be evaluated in light of the contemporary use of writing: the central political usage was in the preservation of official resolutions on bronze copies and placed to allow general access. This had been the case in the codification of the Twelve Tables. To what extent the later canonical text accurately reflects traditions of the fifth century or is the result of a process of collection and commentary may remain here an open question.¹³ Over against this evidence for the currency of writing in public must be set the vastly greater evidence for viva voce communication. When a public audience was actually wanted, people were required to be present in high numbers. This is true of the “hundred man court,” which in historical times consisted of three people from each of the thirty-five Roman tribus,14 and also of the quorum of at least one hundred senators stipulated for the administrative processes outlined in the Senate’s resolution on the Bacchanalia.¹⁵

Public Assemblies

The comitia and contiones were both large public assemblies, even if participants formed only a minor percentage of the populace.¹⁶ Recent research in ancient history has made it clear that the complicated voting procedures of the comitia served to obscure the fact that the assembly did not play a significant role in legislative decision-making. (Elections were a separate issue.¹⁷) The magistrates leading the assembly put laws to the vote that already had the support of the Senate without further debate. The potential to reach a specific resolution was not being tested: the vote was a ritual that signaled basic consent. The main motive for participating in the assembly was probably the opportunity to play out one’s role as a part of the structured populus Romanus.¹⁸ The “arguments” supporting the law consisted of respect for the elected magistrate, the monitoring of the casting of votes by patrons, and the prior resolution of higher decision-making bodies.

In contrast, the contiones did have an advisory function and were dedicated to the presentation of candidates and the explanation of planned laws. The final decision was still open, and speakers were concerned to determine or produce specific preferences. The audience’s reaction to such alternatives was signaled orally. In addition, as Jean-Michel David has shown for the law courts, we must not neglect aspects of argumentation beyond the verbal.¹⁹ In court, demonstration of support by wearing mourning clothes, invocation of the status of one’s friends and the size of one’s clientele, the readiness with which social distance could be overcome through gestures of personal intimacy, self-abasement through a gesture of supplication:²⁰ these were all decisive factors in a competition in which the coherence of the arguments was only one level of evaluation.²¹ Alas, even if such maneuvers were passed down as tips, they receive only minimal systematic treatment in textbooks on rhetoric. The rationalization of values—which type of behavior should be regarded as acceptable by all participating parties in court²²—remained fragmentary, limited by the interest in individual victims.

Rituals

Political assemblies were neither the most frequent nor the most attractive occasions for convening large numbers of people in Rome. Holidays and large rituals provided such opportunities far more often. It is precisely in this connection that we can observe the most significant changes in the period under consideration here. This applies first to the frequency of holidays. Commencing with the final years of the fourth century, a rash of temple building continues down through the third. These building projects were the occasion for some intense conflicts between the Senate and their sponsors, most of whom had gained wealth as generals. These building projects are also associated with huge dedicatory festivities and permanently institutionalized holidays on the anniversaries of their foundation. Specific cults gained in value through connection to games (ludi), a process that began especially in the second half of the third century. As we have seen, traditionally the games consisted of races and athletic competitions. Dances were also an ancient element of games, which were probably professionalized under Etruscan influence and augmented by background scenes and slapstick dialogue. Games including dramatic plays on a Greek model (ludi scaenici) were, according to later Roman self-image, a resumption of these earlier forms.²³ For the years 240 and 235 we have evidence of performances of plays by the first two dramatists whose names are known to us, namely the “half-Greek” Livius Andronicus, possibly from Tarentum, and Cn. Naevius, from Campania.²⁴

Within a few decades, there was an explosion of opportunities for dramatic performance, of both tragedies and comedies. By the end of the third century eleven,²⁵ and by the end of the second century around thirty, days for games had grown up out of the ritual framework of the ludi Romani.26 The two canonical genres were, after a few initial attempts in 173, augmented by the establishment of the mime at the annual ludi Florales, which then marginalized the other dramatic genres in the imperial period.²⁷ The dramatic aspect increasingly overtook the circus-like aspect of the games.²⁸

Nor was this the extent of large-scale ritual. Triumphal processions and ad hoc games on the occasion of military victories were also celebrated in most years, not to mention holidays without games, such as the Saturnalia, which increased to three and then finally to five days, as well as events for expressing supplication or gratitude, the supplicationes, when people took part in banquets in old Roman temples.

When changes in “public” communication can be detected, they are found in connection with these rituals. Sacrifices and feasts celebrated in families or with neighbors were at the center of traditional popular holidays, in contrast to the “weekly” holidays of the Nundines or Calends, Nones, and Ides, which were often celebrated in alternating locations or outside the city center. This also applies to the Neptunalia, a sort of Feast of the Tabernacle, the Parentalia celebrated at graves, the Matronalia and Poplifugia in the Field of Mars, and the drinking contest in the cult of Anna Perenna on the banks of the Tiber, and similarly to the Parilia, the purificatory fire in April, while the Saturnalia in December were more of a domestic holiday. It is not possible to determine the degree of popularity of the old horse races of the Equirria or the Consualia or the Equus October.²⁹

The supplications initially followed this pattern.³⁰ As supplicatory or thanksgiving holidays they were initially crisis rituals that were intended to mobilize the entire population to visit the temple and celebrate in the streets. Such a ritualized state of emergency was a regular feature of warfare in the early second century. It offered an occasion to strengthen solidarity with ever more distant theaters (and actors) of war. By the middle of the first century the emphasis of the same ritual had changed. We do not know to what degree the twenty- and fifty-day thanksgiving holidays that were declared on the occasion of Caesar’s victory in Gaul could be differentiated from everyday life. The resolution declaring the holiday was certainly more easily enacted than the actual holiday, for which no public funding at all was made available. In any case, everyday life was synchronized with significant military victories in this manner, and the person in whose name the gods were being thanked was a topic of conversation throughout the city. Thus, I presume, the period produced and extended focusing of communication on one subject, namely a person, instead of intensive face-to-face interaction between participants.

The other type of ritual that gained in importance from the middle Republic onward is characterized by just the opposite of the popular festivals reviewed so far, namely precise spatial centralization of symbolic action. The core elements of these rituals were processions (pompae) and the actual games. Typically, the procession began at a temple and ended at a circus. Even dramatic performances took place on improvised stages in the large circuses, including the Circus Maximus and, from the end of the third century, also the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius.³¹ While the actual ritual space—the path of the procession and the circus—could be used in various ways and thus remained architecturally underdetermined, it was framed by several means.³² A large number of temple buildings were concentrated in the area around the circuses, and the most important paths for processions to and from the Capitol and the Forum Romanum were lined by statues, columns, and victory arches. Thus a specific “public” space was created from the rather bland architecture of the areas of political assembly—comitium, rostra, curia—which was increasingly monumental and whose monumentalization worked to relate the success of the overall community to the achievement and glory of specific individuals. Statues built in honor of individual victors, and especially sacred buildings, served as primary media, so that the characteristics of the ludi and the supplicationes meet in their architectural expression.

How was communication carried out within this framework? The default stance is one of passivity. The Roman citizen found himself in the role of a spectator. This is true first of all for processions: taking part in the triumphal parade of Aemilius Paullus meant standing on the side of the street for three days and admiring the display of booty. The victorious soldiers could march in the procession, the senators could hail the parade and join it, but the center of attention belonged to the victor and his display of booty, both living and dead. Agents without citizenship dominated the pompa circensis. While the magistrate sponsoring the games and hierarchically organized Roman youth led the parade, chariot drivers, dancers, musicians, and clowns followed. Even the gods were mere Roman citizens. On the one hand they were taken along at the end of the procession. The sacrifice, when the procession had arrived at its goal, was dedicated to them. Primarily, however, they were spectators of the games and competitions following the procession. They had a front-row seat, so to speak, even if the games were not carried out in front of a temple.

The gods were therefore the target audience of the ritual, and the Roman spectators were only second-class spectators. The latter point is clearly indicated by the fact that, unlike in Greek festivities, general participation in sacrificial feasts was not the norm at Rome. Only in very rare exceptions did the public as a whole get anything to eat. The variously integrated epula were, like the lectisternia, meals for the gods, in which specific groups of priests and the senators could participate.

Such multifaceted communication is typical of religious communication and should not be passed over too quickly. The games were sponsored as an effective means of alleviating tensions in relations with the gods and preventing further catastrophic military defeats or plagues. For this purpose the very best was just barely good enough. The developmental process that this ideological and social-material matrix impelled then demanded greater and greater extravagance overall, as well as the professionalization of the agents involved. Authors formed an official Roman club (collegium poetarum) in the second half of the third century, and even before that professional troupes of actors could be hired from the more intensely Hellenized areas of Italy. Similar processes of professionalization can be observed among the chariot drivers, even though evidence for a cult dedicated to the victors of chariot races can only be found in the imperial period. Scattered and mostly late sources for the late Republic reveal these professionals functioning as the groups to whom the spectators turned with their expressions of approval or disapproval.

I emphasize this point for a particular reason. In a recent study on gladiators,³³ Georges Ville has set in the foreground of historical inquiry interactions that took place within the audience, such as the observation of senators or the applauding or booing of individual senators within a space that was increasingly divided according to social status.³⁴ I would by no means deny the importance of these factors, but I find the assumption that secondary functions rather than primary intentions could explain the enormous proliferation of institutionalized “games” unsatisfactory. Beyond that, we must be mindful of the fact that the competitions, especially the chariot races, were the most successful element of the games in the long term. Chariot races completely dominated the games in the imperial period and into late antiquity. At a phenomenological level, we would have to say that their appeal probably arose not out of the unified opinion of the spectators but from differing preferences for specific drivers or parties. One could win points for supporting the favorite driver of one’s girlfriend, even if he was sure to lose. This is admittedly hypothetical, but one can imagine the satisfaction of proving one’s instinct and winning over against a patron’s bet.

The Content of Religious Communication

This leads us to the necessity of addressing the content of organized communication. The entire spectrum of Italic and Greek cultural production was received at Rome, but the meaning of every object, and every form, was radically changed by their relocation. If we consider the display of statues and paintings in triumphal processions, for example, we observe that Greek statues and other “works of art” there had entertainment value, torn as they were from any functional context. This goes for Greek libraries as well. However, Romans did not remain passive recipients only but had their own Greek material, as it were, created for themselves.³⁵ Roman aristocrats were enthusiastic about the technique of bronze casting already at the end of the fourth century.³⁶ Nor did their appetite extend only to objects of art. Dramatic performances of every kind were translated or adapted and staged at festivals, including the Oscan Atellana, New Comedy, tragedies with topics from Greek mythology as well as, soon enough, Roman history. The latter, the Praetexta, was a genre destined to play a subordinate role, which mostly disappeared with the Republic.³⁷ The gods were thus offered more than just exotic animals as entertainment.

Surviving titles and texts from the late third century allow for a more precise view of their contents. Specific contemporary relevance or a close connection to the respective holiday does not at first view play any significant role. This differentiates this type of drama clearly from that of fifth-century Athenian theater. The titles and the few remaining fragments from the two earliest dramatists already mentioned in Rome, Livius Andronicus and Naevius, reveal mostly mythological material drawn from traditional Greek mythological cycles. The series of known titles of tragedies by Livius Andronicus are Achilles, Aegistus, Aiax mastigophorus, Andromeda, Antiopa, Danae, Equos Troianus, Hermiona, Ino, Tereus; for Naevius: Aesiona, Danae, Equos Troianus, Hector proficiscens, Iphigenia, Lycurgos. Naevius also staged plays with clearly Roman topics, such as Clastidium sive Marcellus, about a recent victory over the Celts, and a Lupus and Romulus. Thirty-five titles are known from Naevius’s numerous comedies, beginning alphabetically with Acontizomenos, Agitatoria, Agrynuntes, Appella, Ariolus, Astiologa, Carbonaria, Clamidaria, and Colax.³⁸ The surviving pieces by Plautus or Terence from the following decades confirm the impression left by these titles: plots are set in a Greek world, even when the problems they treat are clearly marked by Rome.³⁹ This mixture could become more Roman in the second century with comedies classified as togatae by Varro, but these did not achieve a lasting dominance.⁴⁰

How can we interpret these findings? The forms and objects of entertainment are ethnically marked in a multitude of ways. It must have been clear to the majority of spectators that they were consuming Greek (in the broadest sense of the word) entertainment, products from a culture perceived as superior in this regard and therefore attractive. There is another side to this: Rome imported these products often enough against the will of their authors or makers. Art piracy and enslavement were central modes of cultural transfer, and the profits of war served to engage the best free theater troupes and artists.⁴¹ In most cases the entertainment was connected to the celebration or commemoration of a military victory.⁴² In all this, Rome presented itself as the center of the world.

And yet, Rome presented itself as the center of a world outside of Rome and older than Rome. That world was dominated by Greek narrative traditions, and it was above all Greek myth, with its gods moving about, its exiles founding cities, and its adventurous military expeditions, that gave the coastal cities of the Mediterranean a genealogy, a place in Greek history. Thus Rome was understood to have been founded, as Varro worked out on the basis of these traditions, four hundred and thirty years after the fall of Troy. That is where the dates 754/753 for the foundation of Rome came from; year 1 in the history of the city is a date from Greek history. At the same time, religion, and the gods, offered a framework to recenter Rome again. It is the gods with Roman names, not Zeus but Iuppiter, not Hera but Iuno, not Ares but Mars, who received a history, a genealogy, within the plays. Even the demanding and destructive god Dionysos of the Lycurgos was a god so native that his followers only a short time later, in 186, were suspected of being members of a mass movement to overthrow the state.⁴³

Here, in the genealogical ordering and in the working out of the dramatic character of the gods of Roman polytheism, a moment of theoretical rationalization can be detected. The systematization that commenced consolidation from this moment is more recognizable in other types of texts, such as Latin epic, which began with the same two authors. Its content was an “Odyssey” and a “Punic War,” which reach back to Troy and Aeneas. Another example is Roman historiography, which began in the same generation with the work of Fabius Pictor, written in Greek. Both genres were aimed at a mass audience. The epic was most probably recited at upper-class banquets.⁴⁴ Considering that the language of historiography was changed to Latin only in the second third of the second century, private reading is the most probable form for its reception. The exclusivity of the circulation and performance audience of these latter genres makes it clear that history lessons at Rome took place in the theater.⁴⁵

Comedy had a quite different goal and effect with its everyday plots. Here the problems of ordinary Roman people were played out, literally, in Greek costumes:⁴⁶ conflicts about love and money, the superior intelligence of dependent slaves, the laziness of rich heirs, the reckless abandon of soldiers enriched by booty. Thus it comes as no surprise that allusions to daily political life occurred in this context rather than in the tragedies,⁴⁷ and that these texts, rather than high tragedy, have survived. However, it was not local color but the universalization achieved here that was decisive. That may sound a bit much to attribute to performances that served primarily as light entertainment, but we must not forget that even as light entertainment, just as much as in the soothing of anger, the pieces had to fulfill the standards of graecified gods and were consciously artistic, written in the elevated language of the leading Roman families rather than in everyday Latin.⁴⁸

Within the period considered, religious rituals had gained a significant and growing share in public communication. The notion of publicus, as used to bring together the members of the nobility, was an expanding concept. This development changed the character of the religious field. When public and private interests clashed over the institutionalization of the cult of Liber Pater, it was not the establishment of private religious groups, but the public attention given to that cult and what it represented, in the form of the decree of the Senate on the Bacchanalia, that was the more important development. From the perspective of this inquiry, some forms of systematization in the organization of the rituals, as well as a systematization of the procedures in deciding about the establishment of rituals, are the most important finding. Whereas the latter will be analyzed more closely through specific examples in Chapter 5, the former is the subject of the next chapter.