had developed that oriented the drive for distinction toward “publicly” useful activities and thus enabled, or perhaps furthered, the drive within Roman culture toward external military success.70
Social developments would have affected public ritual, too. Hypothetically, an important change in the Roman ludi (games) could thus be explained. If aristocratic competition was restricted to publicly useful fields such as warfare, athletic competition as a means for achieving social distinction might have been scorned. To begin with, the organization of games was monopolized by patrician priests, who staged chariot races in March (Equirria), August (Consualia), or October (Equus October, “October Horse”), but the outcome of the games did not bring prestige to the winners. From this generalization, the “Roman” and the “Plebeian” Games, in September and November respectively, should probably be exempted, as also games organized by returning victors. Second, participation in athletic contests shifted from aristocratic youth to professional or local amusement, as indicated by the ludi Capitolini in October. Finally, the organization of the games—now multiplied and connected with different stages of a magistrate’s career— became a field of rivalry and distinction in itself. From this time on, games were concentrated at Rome, offering financial opportunities for foreign professionals and drawing spectators from its large hinterland,71 but restricting the field of elite competition to the splendors of organization. This process will be analyzed more closely in the next chapter.
The situation should not be regarded as stable, but—for a long time—as an ever shifting equilibrium. If prestigious display and consumption in the form of grave goods had been widely eliminated by the fifth century, gentilician power had been publicly stressed by the building of monumental houses from the same time onward. By the end of the fourth century, temple building by victorious generals turned into a highly competitive field, even if many of them opted for prestigious consumption in the form of victory games (ludi votivi).72 Such activities—and probably likewise the return of a victor into a city and his attempts at the display of statues of himself73—were subjected to public control by ritualization and senatorial decisions. Fighting the ever-heightened social differentiation that resulted from military expansion and direct contact with the cultural and political sophistication of the Hellenistic world became an agenda for centuries. This fight continued to reshape and expand Roman religion, too, for centuries to come.74
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
