just those controversies.29 This atmosphere is reflected in another fragment from the Astyanax, in which the seer Calchas is instructed to stop being obstructive (171f. R = 281f. D):
Nunc, Calcas, finem religionum fac: desiste exercitummorari meque ab domuitione arcere tuo obsceno omine.
Now, Calcas, make an end to religious scruples: stop delaying the army and hindering me from returning home by means of your unpropitious sign.
Likewise in the Melanippus, the question of the limits of religious scruple is raised in the remark reicis abs te religionem (430 R = 531 D: “You cast away religious scruple!”), as well as in the question about stains (433 R = 529 D): Crediti’ me amici morte inbuturum manus? (“Do you think I am going to maculate my hands with the death of a friend?”)
The Dream of Tarquinius Superbus
The longest surviving fragment by Accius is the Dream of Tarquinius Superbus, consisting of twenty-two verses in the preface to Brutus (651–72 D). Probably first performed c. 136 after the return of D. Iunius Brutus, the consul of 138, from Spain,30 this fragment demonstrates Accius’s rational engagement with literary and religious topics and the fruitfulness of viewing that engagement in light of a broader understanding of contemporaneous changes in religious practice and discourse.31
The religious-historical motifs of the extract have long spurred interest in the dream.32
What is interesting for an investigation of the history of argumentation is neither the dream motif nor the content of its interpretation but that the interpretation offered by a professional interpreter is introduced by an explicit theory of dreams:
Rex, quae in uita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, uident,quaeque agunt uigilantes agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,minus mirum est; sed in re tanta haud temere improuiso offerunt. (663–65 D)33
King, if the things that occupy people in life, what they think about, worry about, and look upon, and what they do and busy themselves about when awake, happen to somebody when asleep, it is no wonder; but in a matter of this gravity they do not arise unexpectedly or without cause.
The “theory of dreams” offered here had not been expressed in Latin before.34 In Plautus, for example, detailed dream scenes derive their thematic significance from the similarity of the dream and reality, but the topic of the dream is by contrast the reality immediately following upon the dream.35 Plautus’s “dream theory,” which appears in the demon prologue to the third act of the Rudens as well as in the Mercator, differs in glaring ways from that of Accius:
Miris modis di ludos faciunt hominibus,mirisque exemplis somnia in somnis danunt:ne dormientis quidem sinunt quiescere.36
In wondrous ways the gods play games with humans,
in wondrous fashions they give dreams in sleep:
not even the sleeping do they permit to have their rest.
The gods play their games with humans, and this is “wondrous”: the label serves to bracket the entire phenomenon from rational explanation.
By contrast, when Accius refers to this language, he does so polemically: mirum, the wondrous, is exactly what is negated. Even the avowedly extranormal, which is explicitly the subject of the dream interpreter’s reflections,37 is described by the dream interpreter as following a certain (admittedly vague) necessity: it is “not without cause.” The effort at rational explanation within the framework of a worldview that unquestioningly assumes the existence of the gods is clear enough. Again, a comparable theoretical treatment of the interpretation of dreams is not to be found in earlier Latin literature.38
Also of note in the words of the interpreter of dreams is the connection between the dream and other forms of divination. The content of the dream itself is basically two divinatory events: an animal sacrifice gone wrong and an unusual astronomical event, a change in the course of the sun. These clues serve to disambiguate.39 The private application of the first event, an attack by the sacrificial animal, is to our knowledge unclassified in Roman divinatory practice but is definitely negative. It is connected to the precise classification of a bad public omen (ostentum) (668–72 D):
. . . nam id quod de sole ostentum est tibi,populo commutationem rerum portendit fore perpropinquam. haec bene uerruncent populo! nam quod [ad] dexterumcepit cursum ab laeua signum praepotens, pulcherrume auguratum est rem Romanam publicam summam fore.
. . . for that which was shown to you concerning the sun portends that an upheaval soon awaits the people. May it turn out well for the people! For the fact that the mighty sign shifted its course from left to right is a most splendid omen that the Roman state will rise to greatness.
The astronomical abnormality is, according to its reference and direction, the object of the teaching on augury.40 Here we see once again Accius’s concern for insuring the success of divinatory practice by applying several techniques simultaneously to the interpretation of signs.
Conclusion: Strengthening Probability
We should not expect to be able to extract a coherent or universalizing position from scattered passages deriving from diverse dramatic contexts and characters. The material is not sufficient to identify Accius’s own views, let alone to reconstruct anything like an Accian “theology.” Taken as a whole, however, the findings do allow us to recognize across the totality of the fragments specific modes of critique and interpretive presuppositions. These I interpret as primarily determined by the context of their production, rather than viewing them as evidence of some narrow process of reception of a philosophia perennis or as the mere report of a foreign view. (That said, this last category might well serve to characterize the religious-philosophical statements of Ennius.41)
Understood in this way, Accius appears closer to the type of rationality on display in works of the first century normally termed philosophical than to the form of rationality in play in antiquarian literature. Accius distances himself alike from criticism for the sake of criticism and also from pleasing the audience.42 He takes up the position of one integrated into the Roman upper class, to whom the “probable” of Greek philosophical argumentation has become not verisimile, but probabile. The theoretical judgment that something is “close to absolute truth” is replaced by the concept of positive social sanction, the socially acceptable that “could be given assent.”43 Accius’s near contemporary, Pacuvius, while not sharing Accius’s social position, did share his attitude.44
Accius, it should be remembered, was primarily a playwright. His reflections are part of dramatic discourse, which is to say, a distinctive form of public discourse. It did not have to be accepted, but it had to be witnessed by the audience. Public ritual thus offered space for explicit rationalization in a theoretical mode. Indeed, as the next chapter will show, ritualization itself could come to the service of rationalization.
Chapter 5
Ritualization and Control
Symbolic Communication
The findings of the previous chapters invite us to apply a historicizing analysis to a ritual that took on many different usages in the late Republic but is said to be a remnant of a very early layer of Roman religion, surely predating the period analyzed here: the triumph.1 From the formation of the
