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Ethnography and Poutics in F1rst-Century Rome

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Ethnography and Poutics in F1rst-Century Rome CHAPTER SEVEN VERGIL'S ITALY: ETHNOGRAPHY AND POUTICS IN F1RST-CENTURY ROME Clifford Ando At the end of the Roman Republic, in the aftermath of the Social War, all Italians were Romans, but not all Romans were Italians. To anyone but a Classicist, this .assertion would seem paradoxical, because precisely the opposite situation obtains today, when national states subsume individual polities just as loyalty toward the national state takes precedence over loyalty to the city of one's birth. This assertion may also reveal a profound conceptual problem within Roman thought, though the nature of the problem was quite different for Romans than for us. Like many others in the ancient world, the Romans regarded the city as the pre-eminent paradigm of the polit­ ical collectivity; it was, therefore, not obvious what sort of entity a united Italy would be. 1 Certainly neither Greek nor Latin had a term to designate such a vast community. Nor was it obvious what could unite the population of Italy: certainly not language, nor cus­ tom, at least not in the conditions that obtained at the start of the first century, nor even Roman citizenship, at least as it was tradi­ tionally conceived. The challenge that Romans and Italians faced, then, was to develop a conceptual framework for a united Italy that could surmount these obstacles. 2 In the late Republic and early empire individuals put forward different solutions to this problem, and this essay explores those advanced by Cicero, Augustus, and Vergil. If Romans did not locate the crux of this paradox where we do now, wherein lay the problem for them? To answer this question, we must begin with the terms Roman and Italian. Strictly speaking, only citizens of Rome were Roman. What is more, Romans tended 1 Ando (1999) considers Greek attempts to understand ·the political collectivity of the empire. 2 Cf. Fe1dherr (1997) 138-41. 124 CLIFFORD ANDO to associate citizenship with ancestral origo: your patria was generally the city whence your family sprang, and there you held citizenship. 3 The self-declared identity of Aulus Postumius Albinus succinctly con­ cretizes this understanding: nam sum homo Romanus, natus in Latio. 4 Romans also found it very difficult to conceive of citizenship as an honor, apart from the privileges and obligations that it entailed: one could earn a lower sort of citizenship that came with obligations and no privileges, but not the other way around. Romans consequently had no equivalent for Hellenistic icro1toA.ttEia.; political rights in some far-off polity were, through sheer impracticality, regarded and explic­ itly labeled as equivalent, as though not intended to be exercised. Thus, for example, those who regard hospitium publicum as a status that brought 'all the private rights and privileges of Roman citizen­ ship' without 'its burdens and obligations' seem, to me at least, to have misunderstood its import. 5 Hospitium publicum was explicitly not a form of citizenship and was, on the contrary, ideologically distinct from it.6 Consider, for example, Cicero's defense of Lucius Cornelius Balbus: it does not matter for us today, as it did not matter for Cicero, whether Balbus might, as a matter of law, hold citizenship in Gades and Rome simultaneously. 7 Before the jury Cicero empha­ sized not that Balbus had conformed to any existing statute, but rather that he had formally renounced his status as a Gaditanus once he moved his domicile to Rome: Cicero insisted that Balbus now dealt with his former countrymen through pacts of hospitium, pre­ cisely because hospitium did not imply shared patriotic sentiment. If 'Roman' was, at some level, a legal term with very circum­ scribed application but with complex ideological associations whose implications we must still untangle, 'Italy' and 'Italian' were, until the first century B.C., as fluid as Roman was precise.8 Italy had purely geographic significance: it was a peninsula that housed pop­ ulations diverse in origin, language, and customs. 9 Roman legislation 3 Thomas (1996) passim, but esp. 61-8, 97-102. C( Syme (1979-91) vol. 6, 106, 165-66, distinguishing between Hadrian's origo and birthplace. 4 HRR fr. I = Aulus Gellius 11.8.3. s E.g. Cornell (1995) 321. 6 So, rightly, Brunt ( 198 7) 515-16. 7 See Balb. 28-30, 42-3, and Caec. 100, and c( Brunt (1982), Rawson (1985a) 44-6, Errington (1988) 153. Contra, Sherwin-White (1973) 302-4. 8 Klingner ( 1965) 11-33. 9 The diversity of Italy in the second and first centuries B.C.: Tarpin (1998), Torelli (1995) 1-15, Crawford (1996), David (1996), Torelli (1999). .
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