Blame It on the Barbarians: Ethnic Categorisation and Jingoism in the Cultural Memory of the Sack of Rome C.390BCE

Blame it on the Barbarians: Ethnic Categorisation and Jingoism in the Cultural Memory of the Sack of Rome c.390BCE Ralph Moore Abstract As with much of the early history of the Roman Republic, the Sack of Rome c.390BCE is known more from legend than verifi- able historical fact and is subject to several varying retellings in later Latin and Greek literature. One of the key variations, however, lies in who, precisely, is responsible for the attack on the city. The majority of accounts place the blame on a largely undifferentiated mass of Gauls, recently arrived in the Italian peninsula from beyond the Alps. This conflict gives rise to a centuries-spanning cultural enmity between Rome and the Gallic race in total. How- ever, the unusually detailed first century BCE accounts of Livy and Diodorus both attribute the attack to the Senones, a single group of Gauls already resident in northern Italy for several generations. Since this latter version appears better supported by archaeologi- cal and linguistic evidence, it seems that cultural memories of the Sack gradually became warped, and the guilt of the Senones was transferred to the entire ethnic category in which they were placed. This paper aims to examine how and why this change occurred and its relationship with the rhetoric of jingoism, ethnic prejudice, and demonization in both the ancient and modern worlds. Keywords: Gauls, Senones, Rome, Jingoism, Ethnicity, Cultural Mem- ory, Prejudice. 1 Blame it on the Barbarians One of the odder pieces of Classical Latin literature to survive to the present intact is the Apocolocyntosis of Seneca the Younger. This satire on the death of the Emperor Claudius (41-54CE) whose title puns on the apotheosis traditionally ascribed to deceased emperors, has the soul of the dead monarch summoned to defend his right to divinity before a hostile jury of the gods. One of its many jokes at its subject’s expense relies on Roman stereotypes concerning the people of Gaul. Claudius’ birthplace is identified as the city of Lugdunum (modern Lyon), making him a “Gallus germanus” (‘a native Gaul’). And “as a good Gaul ought to do” he proceeded to capture the city of Rome.1. Claudius’ birth at Lugdunum is a fact independently supported by other primary sources.2 However, given both his Roman ancestry and that the city itself was a Roman colony in Gaul rather than a native set- tlement, its use as an argument for his Gallic ethnicity is little more than a comical exaggeration.3 The reference to the capture of Rome, refers, on the one hand, to the controversial circumstances in which Claudius attained power.4 On the other, it refers to the infamous Sack of Rome c.390BCE, in which Gallic warriors occupied, looted, and burned most of the city, only the besieged Capitoline Hill surviving their assault.5 Seneca the Younger is far from the only Latin author to mine cultural memories of this event as a means of invective against Gallic individu- als or groups. A century earlier, the orator Cicero evoked the image of the Sack of Rome in a legal case, defending the senator Fonteius against charges of malpractice while acting as a provincial governor in south- ern Gaul, denigrating the Gallic accusers in the eyes of his audience with reminders that they were of the same nations that besieged the holy Capitoline Hill and had returned to arrogantly menace the city again.6 In broader approaches to the history of Rome, both ancient and 1Seneca the Younger Apocolocyntosis VI 2Suetonius, Life of Claudius II.1. 3The poem itself alludes to Lugdunum’s status as a colonia in referring to its founder, the triumvir Marcus Antonius, as a “fellow-burgess” of the emperor, Seneca the Younger Apcolocyntosis VI. 4According to the biographer Suetonius, Claudius became emperor through a combination of accident, being supported as a candidate by a rogue army faction after fortuitously evading the conspiracy that assassinated his predecessor, and bribery, securing further military support against challenges from the Senate with offers of increased pay, Life of Claudius X.1-4. 5Livy, Ab Urbe Condita V.32-49. 6Cicero, Pro Fonteio XIV.30-2. 2 Trinity Postgraduate Review, Vol. XVIII Transnationalism modern, the Sack of c.390BCE is often viewed as the inception of a racial enmity between Gauls and Romans.7 It has even been credited with providing much of the impetus for Rome’s expansionistic imperialism, motivating them to avoid any recurrence of such a humiliating defeat by pre-emptively subjugating any potential rival. 8 A problem with views such as this, however, is that they poorly re- flect the historical truth of the matter. As with many episodes of the Ro- man Republic’s early history, the Sack of Rome is shrouded in layers of mythologisation, while its precise date, extent of destruction, and exact conclusion remain debateable.9 That which concerns us here, though, is the disparity between the most probable account of the origins of those who attacked Rome in the early fourth century BCE and the aspersions cast upon Claudius the scion of Lugdunum and the Gallic Allobroges who brought a case against Fonteius. While authors such as Livy and Plutarch describe the attackers only as an undifferentiated mass of Gauls described as having crossed the Alps from the temperate lands of north-western Europe to reach Rome, a view under which nations such as the Allobroges or denizens of Lug- dunum could be implicated, a substantial body of evidence challenges this view. Instead, it points to the Sack being the work of a single Gallic nation, the Senones, who had settled south of the Po Delta (in roughly the modern March of Ancona) before coming into conflict with the Ro- man Republic. 10 7Appian, Celtic Wars Ep.I; Cicero, De Provinciis Consularibus XIV.34-5; Eck- stein, 2006, 133-135. 8Jones and Eirera, 2006, 16-17; Matyszak, 2004, 115-116. 9The date of the attack is variously given as 390BCE and 387BCE by various primary sources, c.f. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita V.32, Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History XV.1.6. For the level of destruction compare and contrast Livy, Ab Urbe Condita V.55 with Cornell 2000, 43. For the varying accounts of how the conflict was ultimately resolved see Polybius, Histories II.18., 1-4; Plutarch, Life of Camillus XXIX., 2-5; Livy, Ab Urbe Condita V.49., 5-7; et al. 10It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve fully into debates concerning the full evidence concerning the arrival of the Gauls in the Italian peninsula and the early history of the Senones. Here it should suffice to note that the bulk of the argument in favour of seeing the early fourth century BCE Sack of Rome in the context of a local war with an opponent based in Italy lies in a combination of support by an array of literary sources pointing to them specifically (discussed further below), the combined evidence of Gallic-style warriors in mid-to-late fifth century BCE Etruscan art (Cunliffe, 1997, pp70-1, Holliday, 1994, pp26-32) and concurrent gradual spread of early La Tène style artefacts through the Po Valley (Haywood, 2004, pp19-21) suggesting the presence of Gauls south of the Alps for 3 Blame it on the Barbarians Clearly, the cultural memory of the Sack became subject to warping factors that obscured its original culprits in favour of a tradition that tarred all Gauls, regardless of ancestry, nationality, or political al- legiance, with the same brush. This allowed authors like Seneca and Cicero to frame those with only the most tenuous connections to the incident as somehow culpable for it. To understand how and why this occurred, it is necessary to examine how the Sack of Rome c.390BCE was commemorated in literary tradition and how stereotypes and political concerns influenced their perceptions of the Gauls as an ethnic category. Furthermore, what this warping of historical traditions and elastic approach to ethnic labels suggests is that, far from deriving an authentic albeit erroneous historical tradition of Gallic culpability, the anti-Gallic polemics of Seneca, Cicero et al. rely on revisionist approaches to the past in response to contemporaneous political concerns. Remembering the Sack of Rome Remembering the past, ‘memoria’ in Latin, was a way of life in An- cient Rome. The commemoration and re-enactment of historical episodes formed the mainstay of social spectacle and entertainment while the veneration and emulation of ancestors was central to moral and spiri- tual life.11 Allusions and references to historical figures and events thus suffuse the literature of Rome regardless of genre or medium all partici- pating in the preservation and revival of the Roman past.12 This preservation of past traditions was, however, less a matter of rigid orthodoxy than it was of often dynamic, highly personal engagement with both individual and collective recollections of history.13 Such an approach tended to engender reworkings of the past for rhetorical ends more than the scrupulous transmission of fact. Despite the many discrepancies that attend remembrances of the Sack of Rome in available literary sources, what remains largely con- sistent throughout is that the incident is seen as the worst tragedy ever endured by the city. The image of the city occupied and looted by for- several decades prior to the attack, and the relative implausibility of the majority of accounts arguing for a sudden mass influx of migratory warriors from the north. 11Wiseman, 2014, 51; Hölkeskamp, 2006, 491. 12Gowing, 2005, 9. 13Gowing, 2005, 96. 4 Trinity Postgraduate Review, Vol.

Load more