preferred to the good ones. And this, too, besides, which I had almost forgotten: while the performance is going on, do you, lackeys, make an attack on the cookshops; now, while there’s an opportunity, now, while the tarts are smoking hot, hasten there. These injunctions, which have been given as the manager’s command, it will be well, by Hercules, that every man remembers them for himself.30
The Circus Maximus offered seats, but, by virtue of their smaller size, theaters—which for most of the Republic were temporary structures, sometimes set up within a circus—enabled more intensive communication among the audience as a whole. The enormous growth of the ludi scaenici during the second century cannot be separated from this fact. Even if modern theorizing about the political functions of dramatic performance at Rome rests mostly on Ciceronian observations, any unbiased description must acknowledge that the intensity of political communication exploded in this kind of ritual.
Rituals in smaller circles not identical with primary groups like families offered even more intensive forms of communication.31 Banqueting had been an aristocratic practice, offering opportunities for the display of luxury in the aristocracies of early Latin cities. Now it was either revived or intensified as a social practice. The proliferation of villas in the areas surrounding Rome offered a growing space for elaborate dining. Professional poets like Ennius offered attractive and envied forms of entertainment. This was no purely secular form of festival. Literary dialogues usually imagined religious dates as the opportunities for banquets. According to the Fasti Praenestini, the newly introduced cult of the Great Mother of the Gods gave birth to mutitationes, mutual invitations for dinner among the nobility. The sweeping changes taking place in banqueting as a site of social display and differentiation are obliquely attested in the prominence of sumptuary legislation in this period, which sought to limit expenditure and force banqueting groups into open, that is, controllable, space.32 This development started long before the 190s. The reforms of the priestly colleges enacted by the lex Ogulnia in 300 transformed the colleges into “banquetable” circles of nine persons (three to each triclinium); the longest extant fragment of the protocols of the pontifex maximus gives details of a pontifical dinner.33 When a new priesthood was created in 196, the only such innovation to achieve the prestige of the augurs, pontiffs and (quin-)decimviri, it was the tresviri epulonum, whose duties basically consisted in supervising the senatorial banquets connected with the great Iuppiter festivals in September and November.
Donation and Appropriation
The dinner attested in the records of the pontifex maximus just mentioned was organized to celebrate the inauguration of a Flamen Martialis in about 70. We need not doubt the existence of other luxurious banquets. However, if a Roman of the first century wished to stress the lavishness, he would speak of cenae sacerdotalis (priestly meals). Of course, an event that is marked out as religious can also offer an occasion for intensified social interaction, however much communicative practice on such occasions was constrained by formal and informal rules specific to the event. This is not to contrast “secular” and “religious.” And yet the drawing of lots in order to determine the first voting unit, a randomized procedure that left the decision in the hands of the gods, did not transform electoral or legislative assemblies into religious meetings; contiones without such religious elements existed, too. The organization of splendid games, however, was considered to leave a greater impression on the voters than a grandiloquent speech. The rise of the games and public processional rites is as intensively connected to the euergetic habit as seemingly private dinners. What is the mechanism at work?
Religious occasions mean actions substantively involving the gods. Despite the neglect of the religious factor by many ancient historians, the gods were not superfluous or merely traditional paraphernalia. As shown above, the gods were the primary addressees of competitions and dramatic performances and were unmistakably present in place, time, or images—usually all three. Even the gladiatorial spectacles, which were classified neither as games nor as public during the Republic and long thereafter, were nonetheless organized with a view toward future elections; and yet they were labeled munera, duties owed to a dead ancestor. The great men of the late Republic took pains to identify such forebears and did not refrain from constructing long temporal bridges connecting particular munera to a death that had occurred years before. The audience that was thereby created—and an introductory pompa, of course, helped to create such an audience34—did not constitute a private meeting, but rather a semipublic party offering cult to a divine being, that is, the dead person. The performance of munera for the dead was understood to sacralize, however unofficially, the site of their performance. The site became a locus religiosus (though perhaps not sacer).35
The religious character was even clearer for the technically public rituals that were addressed to deities venerated by the res publica, that is, those venerated at its expense. In public religious ritual the axis of interaction between an energetic benefactor (the leading magistrate) and the consumer (the citizens present) was transformed into a complex field of interaction among four parties at least. By cofinancing the spectacles, the polity left no doubt about its role. The presence of the gods was the guarantee that those present would not simply consume the magistrate’s donation. In the ritual the gods were not honored by the leading magistrate, but by the citizenry as a whole. The explicit consumers were the gods, and the citizens became a part of the donating party. Thus the res publica appropriated the ritual action.
Distinction and Control
It has been my argument thus far that the possibility for the refinement, modification, and invention of forms of social differentiation was an important driving force behind the multiplication and enlargement of certain types of expensive audience-oriented rituals. As far as we can see, as regards the history of the rituals, this process was not primarily characterized by the modification of traditional competitions, sacrifices, and the like, but by the creation of new rituals, which opened up opportunities for new agents, usually magistrates, to distinguish themselves. The formation of the new nobility, the integration of patricians and office-holding plebeians from the end of the fourth century, demanded an intensified communication among its members, as between nobles and the populace. The development of a “literary culture” of drama and epic (and the financing of the first) is a consequence of this need for communication and the ritual contexts for their performance, namely banquets and ludi scaenici.36 The populace needed space for communication among itself for other purposes, too. The need was not in the first instance simply to corroborate dominant understandings of citizenship or political association—there were enough blood-soaked possibilities for that. Other problems, however, needed alternative modes of constituting an audience and hence a populace: as the Plautine prologue quoted above demonstrates, such audiences included females and slaves, too.
Distinction was not the only end served by these developments. Control was enhanced too. Probably the same year that witnessed the introduction of drama into the Megalesia (191) saw the introduction of reserved seats for senators.37 Opportunities were at the same time “channels.” As the establishment of a normative framework for political careers channeled the possibilities for martial success or, to put it more broadly, the exercise of aristocratic excellence, so, too, the spectrum of rituals channeled public communication. Social control was produced by forcing the members of the nobility to employ the framework of public rituals and by restricting access to them: the organization of games is restricted to specified magistrates or returning generals, the triumph has to be individually approved by the Senate after discussion of the achievements of the preceding campaign. Control was likewise exerted by the long delay in the construction of permanent theaters, which imposed upon would-be celebrants the high cost of building new, temporary infrastructure for a single ritual, and by new debates about and licenses for places for temples.38 In order to prevent individuals from engaging in wholesale dissent from these new frameworks, the ritual has to be allotted high prestige (e.g., the opening of the most prestigious temple of Iuppiter Optimus Maximus for the triumph, the use of the Circus Maximus, and longer periods for games). But dissent was possible,
