Download Andrew B. Gallia. Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture

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Reviews of Books
sence of such an analysis, the argument that festival revelry, oral storytelling, and collective punishment operated alongside, within, and sometimes even in
opposition to the formal institutions of the Greek citystate remains a wayward phrase, void of real content.
GABRIEL HERMAN
Hebrew University
JAMES H. RICHARDSON. The Fabii and the Gauls: Studies
in Historical Thought and Historiography in Republican
Rome. (Historia Einzelschriften, number 222.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. 2012. Pp. 186. €52.00.
The concept of exemplarity, through which past acts are
evaluated according to their usefulness as models for
present conduct, has become a major focus in the study
of Latin literature and, by extension, Roman history after the cultural turn. The centrality of this habit of
thought for the structuring of Roman social memory is
reflected most famously in Polybius’s analysis of the
aristocratic funeral, in which the commemoration of
deeds performed by the deceased and his ancestors is
said to act as an incitement for future generations to
strive to accomplish similar things. Its importance is
confirmed by texts like Livy’s history From the Founding
of the City, the preface to which emphasized the benefits
of contemplating the past to learn what to emulate and
what to avoid, and Valerius Maximus’s Memorable
Deeds and Sayings, a handbook of exempla excerpted
from Greek and Roman sources and grouped under
subject headings for easy consultation.
James H. Richardson makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on this topic by reframing this
process of imitation as one that could be projected
backward, rather than purely forward, in time. The basic thesis, which is recapitulated at several points
throughout this meticulously argued and engagingly
written book, is that the Romans did not merely look
for patterns of behavior in the past; they also tended to
invent them in the course of reconstructing their narratives of what happened. Whereas the repetition of
recognizable formulae strikes most modern readers as
proof of the unreliable nature of this tradition, Richardson also argues that this technique originally served
to enhance the plausibility of these accounts, insofar as
it confirmed ancient expectations about how history
and human nature were supposed to work.
Focusing on the historiographical tradition for the
early Roman Republic (a period for which there were
few if any reliable sources of information), Richardson
traces the impact of this proclivity for parallelism along
two main vectors. In chapters one and two, he concentrates on the traditions surrounding individual families
or gentes, the members of which, as Polybius suggested,
were expected to behave similarly. Chapter one lays out
the general argument for this kind of historical patterning, presenting already established cases, like that of
the patrician Claudii, who were consistently represented as proud and recalcitrant in their hostility to the
plebeian class. Chapter two is a more narrowly focused
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
and original case study of the Fabii, a gens that reached
its greatest prominence in the career of Quintus Fabius
Maximus Verrucosus “the Delayer,” who championed
the strategy that ultimately led to Rome’s success in the
war against Hannibal. Richardson catalogs a host of
similarities, some more compelling than others, between Verrucosus’s career and those of other Fabii,
which cumulatively suggest that the biography of the
more famous Fabius was used to flesh out the historiographical characterizations of his ancestors.
In chapter three, the discussion turns to a different
kind of imitation, whereby certain notable events of
Greek history provided the pattern for accounts of Roman accomplishments. Noting that historiography itself
was a Greek invention, Richardson explores the implications of this particular form of cultural borrowing for
the tradition regarding the sack of Rome by the Gauls
in the early fourth century B.C.E., which he demonstrates was modeled on Herodotus’s account of the Persian invasion of Athens a century before. The annihilation of 300 Fabii along the Cremera, which was
supposed to have coincided with the Spartan stand at
Thermopylae, also figures into this discussion.
Throughout the book, Richardson repeatedly resists
the temptation to ascribe responsibility for any of these
parallels to a particular annalist or historian, preferring
instead to treat them collectively as the results of a
more deeply seated tendency in the way the Romans
thought about the past. While this approach represents
a welcome corrective to the overzealous theories of earlier generations of source critics, who created fantastically elaborate reconstructions of lost histories on the
basis of slight evidence, framing the issue so broadly
risks papering over the necessarily contingent, and often tendentious, nature of exemplary discourse. Once
it is acknowledged that certain historical accounts were
modeled on others, the question becomes why those
models were chosen. Moreover, if similarity was the expectation, it stands to reason that even minor variations
could become rich with meaning. By refusing to delve
even tentatively into the mechanics of how these traditions took the particular forms they did, Richardson
limits the value of this otherwise provocative and useful
study.
ANDREW B. GALLIA
University of Minnesota
ANDREW B. GALLIA. Remembering the Roman Republic:
Culture, Politics, and History under the Principate. New
York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xiv, 319.
$95.00.
This monograph is a comprehensive analysis of the persistence of the memory of the Roman Republic in the
principate, focusing on the period between the end of
Nero’s reign and Trajan’s rule (68–117 A.D.). Andrew B.
Gallia has chosen this relatively narrow period for its
“central place in the institutionalization of the power of
the emperors,” as well as for the wealth and variety of
evidence available for analysis—archaeological, textual
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Europe: Ancient and Medieval
(both prose and poetry), and numismatic (p. 8). To call
this a study of the commemoration of the Roman Republic in the principate is to understate the author’s aim
and accomplishment. Gallia rather analyzes how various political figures and authors of this period challenged and engaged with the memory of the republic
and with Roman political and cultural identity more
generally in often complex ways. Because of a lack of
a centralized mass media, and therefore the emperor’s
inability to organize opinion in a systematic way, memory under the principate was much more “contentious”
and “decentralized” (pp. 7–8). Another factor that
complicated the memory of the republic under the principate was the clear chronological separation of the republic as a period of history from this phase of the principate (one hundred years had elapsed between Actium
and Nero’s suicide), while at the same time it boasted
a political culture that the elite of the principate idealized and to which they clung. Continuity with this idealized past was one of the contested issues around the
memory of the republic.
Each of the book’s six chapters (titled, “Freedom,”
“Rebuilding,” “Control,” “Persuasion,” “Inscription,”
and “Restoration”) focuses on a different form of engagement with the memory of the republic. The first
three and the last discuss the emperor’s efforts to use
this memory to reaffirm his political authority and advance his own ideology. “Freedom” analyzes the use of
libertas as a vibrant and polyvalent political symbol in
the revolt of Vindex against Nero and the subsequent
accession of Galba. “Rebuilding” examines how Vespasian used the burning and reconstruction of the Temple
of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to exploit the temple’s
memory as the center of Rome’s imperial power, thus
promoting the peace that his new dynasty established.
“Control” is a study of Domitian’s attempts to establish
himself as the moral arbiter of the empire by employing
the traditional means of execution of a vestal (burial
alive) who has broken her vow of chastity. In so doing,
as Gallia argues, Domitian attempted to revive a traditional republican severitas, but succeeded only in
alienating the senatorial aristocracy. “Restoration” examines the republican coin types that Trajan reissued
in his reign, pointing out how men depicted on these
coins tended to overlap with the summi viri in the Forum Augustum. Further, the achievements of men outside the imperial family were featured, which is consistent with the revival of the senate in this period.
The other two chapters, “Persuasion” and “Inscription,” examine the elite’s manner of engaging with the
memory of the republic that emerges out of the senate’s
role in the new political culture of the Principate. In the
former, Gallia discusses the fate of oratory in the principate, analyzing closely Tacitus’s Dialogus. In the latter, he discusses how Silius Italicus and Frontinus reframed the history of the republic, especially the Punic
Wars, by putting this historical period in a larger framework—Silius by interweaving other elements of the epic
tradition into his Punica, and Frontinus by discussing
generalship in broad terms, using exempla from the re-
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public alongside those from other periods of history.
The result is a blurring of the republic with the larger
panorama of history, thus making it a less distinctive
period.
Gallia’s argumentation is detailed, nuanced, and
complex but also at times lengthy and discursive, to the
point that one can lose sight of the main thread tying
together the themes of the book. Complicating matters
is Gallia’s refusal to allow himself to be pinned down,
as he himself admits in the conclusion of the book, relishing in the complexities, conundrums, and paradoxes
(p. 251). Overarching themes, such as the use and reuse
of libertas, take a quintessential republican ideal and
see how it is redefined in the Augustan principate and
later. This also reveals a second theme—the malleability of the period of the republic and its characteristics. Romans in the principate, Gallia argues, never settled on the issue of whether their own period
represented a continuation of the republic or was a period of history completely distinct.
Ultimately, a reader of this book cannot help but reflect on what actually comprised the memory of the republic. In Gallia’s hands, it was a selective memory that
seems to have involved as much forgetting as remembering. Thus, the memory of the republic was in the
mind of the beholder, whether elite author or emperor,
and Gallia’s real achievement, in my view, is what his
close analysis of the memory of the republic in the principate reveals about the culture and politics of the latter
period.
GEOFFREY S. SUMI
Mount Holyoke College
BRIAN CAMPBELL. Rivers and the Power of Ancient Rome.
(Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2012. Pp. xvi,
585. $70.00.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates famously describes the relationship of the Greeks and the Mediterranean Sea as
“frogs living around a pond” (109A). The same is even
truer of the Roman Empire, which eventually grew to
encompass the entire shoreline of the Mediterranean
Sea. In these coastal regions, the empire typically
thrived—culturally, economically, and politically—but
conversely, it often struggled when it left those familiar
shores and attempted to expand inland. Most of the inland areas into which the Romans did successfully extend their influence shared two commonalities: a Mediterranean climate and navigable rivers. Such rivers
constituted crucial pathways by which Roman “frogs”
were able to infiltrate, conquer, and Romanize regions
that were hundreds of miles away from the shores of
their home pond. Given the importance of rivers in the
Roman world, therefore, a comprehensive study of
their role within the empire is long overdue. This gap
in the scholarly literature is the one that Brian Campbell’s book attempts to fill and, while occasionally falling short of its potential, it is a welcome, useful, and
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