Consensus, Concordia, and the Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology Studies in Classics

Consensus, Concordia, and the Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology Studies in Classics Singular Dedications Nothing Ordinary Here Founders and Innovators of Private Statius as Creator of Distinction in Cults in Classical Greece the Silvae Andrea Purvis Noelle K. Zeiner Empedocles Sex and the Second-Best City An Interpretation Sex and Society in the Laws of Plato Simon Trépanier Kenneth Royce Moore Rhetoric in Cicero’s Pro Balbo Simonides on the Persian Wars Kimberly Anne Barber A Study of the Elegiac Verses of the “New Simonides” For Salvation’s Sake Lawrence M. Kowerski Provincial Loyalty, Personal Religion, and Epigraphic Production in the Philodemus On Rhetoric Books Roman and Late Antique Near East 1 and 2 Jason Moralee Translation and Exegetical Essays Clive Chandler Ambitiosa Mors Suicide and the Self in Roman Aphrodite and Eros Thought and Literature The Development of Erotic Mythology Timothy Hill in Early Greek Poetry and Culture Barbara Breitenberger A Linguistic Commentary on Livius Andronicus Empedocles Redivivus: Poetry Ivy Livingston and Analogy in Lucretius Myrto Garani Aristoxenus of Tarentum and the Birth of Musicology Consensus, Concordia, and the Sophie Gibson Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology Hyperboreans John Alexander Lobur Myth and History in Celtic-Hellenic Contacts Timothy P. Bridgman Augustan Egypt The Creation of a Roman Province Livia Capponi Consensus, Concordia, and the Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology John Alexander Lobur New York London First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lobur, John Alexander, 1973– Consensus, concordia, and the formation of Roman imperial ideology / by John Alexander Lobur. p. cm. — (Studies in classics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-415-97788-3 (hbk) ISBN-10: 0-415-97788-6 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-0-203-89423-1 (ebk) ISBN-10: 0-203-89423-5 (ebk) 1. Rome—Politics and government—30 B.C.–68 A.D. 2. Consensus (Social sciences) 3. Propaganda, Roman. I. Title. JC89.L63 2008 320.5—dc22 2008002119 Figures 1 and 2, RRC 458, printed courtesy of the American Numismatic Society Figure 3, RRC 494/3a, © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum. ISBN 0-203-89423-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-97788-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-89423-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-97788-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-89423-1 (ebk) For My Parents Contents Note on Translation and Bibliographical References ix List of Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Consensus and Voice in the Formation of the Principate 1 1 Roman Consensus and the Founding of the Principate 12 2 Order from Chaos: The Narrative of Discord as the Early Imperial Political-Cultural Template 37 3 Proscription, the Autonomous Creation of Imperial Ideology, and Auctoritas 59 4 Velleius Paterculus and the Unifi ed Political Culture of the Early Principate 94 5 Declamation, Ideology and Consensus 128 6 “Presenting” the Past: Valerius Maximus and Imperial Consensus 170 Conclusion 208 Notes 213 Bibliography 299 Index 313 Note on Translation and Bibliographical References Translations for all the Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian passages in the text are original unless otherwise indicated. The bibliography con- tains the entire set of works referred to in the text, with the exception of the articles cited from Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertum- swissenschaft, abbreviated in the text as P-W. List of Abbreviations All periodical abbreviations in the bibliography conform to the list des périodiques dépouillés in l’Année Philologique: Bibliographie Critique et Analytique de l’Antiquité Gréco-Latine. Abbreviations of ancient authors conform to the standard citations, as listed in Liddell, Scott and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., 1968, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1982. Other abbreviations include: CAH Cambridge Ancient History.2 CIL Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. EJ Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.2 HRR Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae. MRR Broughton, T. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic. ILS Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae. P-W Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der Altertumswissenschaft. RIC The Roman Imperial Coinage, C.H.V. Sutherland and R.A.G. Carson, eds RRC Roman Republican Coinage, Michael Crawford, ed. SB D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero’s Letters to Atticus (Cambridge Texts and Commentaries) 7 vols. 1965–70. Cicero: Epistulae ad Familiares (Cambridge Texts and Commentaries) 1977. Cicero: Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem et M. Brutum (Cambridge Texts and Commentaries), 1980. RS Roman Statutes, M.H. Crawford, ed., BICS Supplement 64, 1996. SCPP Senatus Consultum Pisonianum. Acknowledgments This book constitutes a revision of my 2004 dissertation completed at the University of Michigan, and thus from the outset I thank the directors of that project, Professors David Potter, Ludwig Koenen, Rudi Lindner and Arthur Verhoogt. I also thank Prof. Andrew Dyck for his thoughtful scholarly and editorial criticisms of the original draft, and for giving me the opportunity to publish with Routledge. This project has benefi ted greatly from conversations with Professors Sabine MacCormack, Clifford Ando and Molly Posco-Pranger. Robert Chenault provided careful assistance in proofi ng the fi nal manuscript. Moreover, I am grateful for two summer grants from the Offi ce of Research and Sponsored Programs at the Uni- versity of Mississippi, which I received to complete this book, and for the support of my colleagues in the Classics department here, especially my Chair, Prof. Aileen Ajootian. Introduction Consensus and Voice in the Formation of the Principate The Empire needed no elaborate or sophistical justifi cation to most classes and regions. Their feelings are known, or can be guessed. Imperial propaganda, as directed towards the inferior orders of society, might seem either superfl uous or obvious and predictable. The upper classes needed a more subtle approach—or rather, it should be said, they gradually formulated the reasons and excuses for accepting the new order of things. How do men console themselves for the sur- render of political freedom? With what arguments do they maintain that they have discovered the middle path, liberty without license, discipline but not enslavement? It would be an entertaining specula- tion, and not remote from the concern of the present age. Ronald Syme, A Roman Post Mortem, Todd Memorial Lectures, p. 17. Though master of the world, an emperor had to acknowledge limita- tions. He was not able to control opinion in the educated class, which may be roughly equated with the upper orders in Roman society: that is, senators and knights. Idem, The Augustan Aristocracy, pp. 440–41. This book fi xes the set of questions posed in the fi rst quotation as its object of inquiry, and both relies on and confi rms the assertion made in the second. On the whole, they deviate from Syme’s earlier approach, which tended to categorize the evidence for the opinions of the upper classes during the Roman revolution, and Augustan culture generally, under the famous rubric of “the organization of opinion.” Syme’s earlier vision is an inescapable product of its time. Until recently, terms such as “propaganda” and its counterpart “ideology” carried only negative connotations; again, only recently have different approaches to these concepts in scholarship on the Roman world begun to change the picture.1 Syme applied contemporary notions of modern propaganda in his depic- tion of the Roman Revolution; he was writing in the 1930s, when analysis 2 Consensus, Concordia, and the Formation of Roman Imperial Ideology of the concept was still in its infancy. At the time, the prevailing method was to assume and “observe” its function in history as if this would some- how reveal its nature. Such an approach has two major shortcomings. First, the Romans had no concept of either propaganda or ideology; thus there can be no uncritical comparison between modern experiences with such matters and fundamentally dissimilar Roman political and cultural pro- cesses.2 Second, on account of this widespread anachronism, Syme injected into his study skeptical, negative connotations of mass propaganda current in the West through most of the 20th century.3 These views were especially characteristic of the British, who had pioneered its use in World War I and were rather disconcerted by their own success. Indeed, the effectiveness of such measures was so great that it led to the rather unsophisticated “magic bullet” theory: the public was easily manipulated through the right meth- ods; propaganda was a sinister thing, eschewed by democratic nations at peace, and embraced by modern autocrats.4 The notion of ideology, too, suffered at both ends of the western intellec- tual tradition (both continental and Anglo-American): from the criticism of Marx, on the one hand, that it promoted the interests of the dominant class, and from scholars outside that tradition, who again identifi ed it with modern totalitarian apparatus.5 The Marxian scholars fi rst made advances in value- free studies that recognized its ubiquitous and necessary nature (and the prob- lems this created for the notion of scholarly objectivity).

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