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OATHS and GREED in TACITUS' HISTORIES by NICHOLAS MICHAEL DEE DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement

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OATHS and GREED in TACITUS' HISTORIES by NICHOLAS MICHAEL DEE DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement OATHS AND GREED IN TACITUS’ HISTORIES BY NICHOLAS MICHAEL DEE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Philology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Antony Augoustakis, Chair Associate Professor Eleni Manolaraki, University of South Florida Associate Professor Angeliki Tzanetou Assistant Professor Brian Walters Professor Craig Williams Abstract In Tacitus’ treatment of the various military conflicts of 69-70 CE, the military oath of allegiance (sacramentum) assumes tremendous significance throughout. The historian pointedly begins his narrative with Galba’s failure to properly compensate his soldiers for their loyalty. This expectation of financial reward for swearing allegiance, a phenomenon which I call the “sacramentum-donativum contract”, arose earlier in the Julio-Claudian period and is still, in Tacitus’ view, the bedrock of the soldier-emperor relationship in 69. Vespasian and his close supporter Mucianus appreciate this contract and understand the vital role the sacramentum ought to play, as the rise of the Flavian challenge in the east demonstrates. Yet, notably, it is instead the brutal and greedy campaign of Antonius Primus that allows for Flavian rule. In Histories 4, after the civil wars have officially ended, Julius Civilis and his fellow rebel Batavians prove adept at administering oaths in order to garner support and subvert loyalties, thereby forcing Roman (and reader) to reckon with the source of Flavian power. The extant text ends with no guarantees that the new regime will ever strike the correct balance between a soldier’s greed and an emperor’s demand for loyalty. In fact, there is every indication that no full reconciliation is on the horizon. ii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: sacramentum: Definition, Evolution, and Rupture…………………………………..7 Chapter 2: The Success of the Flavian sacramenta………………………….…………………60 Chapter 3: The Calculations of Civil War………………………………………………………93 Chapter 4: The Chaotic Oaths of a bellum permixtum: Histories 4 and the Batavian Revolt…146 Final Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………...197 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………..….201 iii Introduction Usually in Latin literature, the fact that fealty is or has been pledged lurks somewhere in the assumed cultural context. If an oath is mentioned, its inclusion is usually incidental, part of the textual scenery. This makes perfect sense: oaths were a fact of life in the Roman world. So there is really no particular reason to dwell on them.1 Tacitus chooses to dwell. By doing so, he transforms an element of interpersonal interaction, usually relegated to the background of historiographical narratives, into a prominent motif, imbued with meaning beyond the merely documentary.2 Those who have discussed the oaths in Tacitus’ works in past scholarship have been almost exclusively concerned with their evidentiary value in the reconstruction of Roman institutional history.3 While not without merit, this approach does not do justice to Tacitus’ literary craft. As we shall see, the diverse and subtle ways in which the various strata of military society in the Histories employ, respond to, embrace, and resist oaths all shed much-needed light on the civil war landscape of 69-70 CE.4 1 You might say that to do so would, in some instances, be like sports broadcasters offering commentary during the singing of the national anthem. 2 I do not mean to suggest that Tacitus alone is capable of treating oaths in this way. Studies on other historians’ uses of oaths are without doubt also needed. 3 Scholarly interest in parsing and codifying the precise functions of oaths, their administrators, their recipients, and how all three changed over time, dates back at least as far as Mommsen (1871) 792-93. The following is a (certainly incomplete) list of attempts to elucidate several aspects of the historical oath, some of which have proved more influential than others in the present study, including a brief description of their argument or contribution: Premerstein (1914) 36-74 saw a relationship between oaths and imperial clientela. Brunt (1962) 77 emphasizes the apparent weakness of oaths to ensure loyalty in the late Republic. Millar (1963), esp. 238, questions the continuity in form between the Tiberian accession oaths and what preceded them. Beare (1979) address whether pre-Christian emperors received imperial oaths to their Genius. Herrmann (1968) has authored the most recent monograph on the subject of imperial oaths, in which he argues, contra Premerstein, that the loyalty oaths of the principate are an outgrowth of the conflicts of the late Republic. Though he is too trusting of the objective truth of our evidence, his reconstruction of the loyalty oath’s diachronic development is convincing in broad strokes. Watson (1969), esp. 44- 49, argues that the “marked conservatism of Roman religious ritual” (49) explains an alleged continuity of sacramentum ritual from the Republic through the late Empire. Lendon (1997) 253 views the sacramentum as a transaction of real social utility in the “highly sacralized community” that was the Roman army. Chrissanthos (1999) 1-12 points out the connection between sacramenta and seditiones in the Republic. Stäcker (2003) 294-306 focuses on the oath’s personal and religious dimensions in the bond between miles and princeps. 4 My attention to Tacitus’ inordinate aversion to treating armies and soldiers as a monolith is owed to Ash (1999), one of the first monographs to focus specifically on the Histories, and still one of the most useful. 1 Tacitean oaths do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they recur repeatedly within a network of other components of soldier-elite interactions—genuinely felt loyalty, mutiny, silence, ignorance, perception, among others—the sum of which constitutes a large range of the historian’s expression. This study proposes to focus in particular on one less-obvious and hitherto-unrecognized connection within this interactive network, namely the connection between oaths of loyalty and the remuneration of rank-and-file soldiers. Specifically, I argue that the Roman soldiers of the Histories pledge their loyalties with the expectation of receiving a range of special monetary rewards in exchange. This expectation was born out of the Julio- Claudian years, and was one of the dominant forces in the post-Neronian fallout (i.e., Histories 1-4). For Tacitus, Vespasian’s successes and ultimate victory (and the delays thereof) depend upon how Galbans, Othonians, Vitellians, and Flavians all handle both the oath itself and the rewards expected for it. The nature of these monetary rewards becomes increasingly violent and intense as the narrative progresses; what starts as a desire to be justly compensated, as the soldiers saw it, turns into flat-out greed. Yet at the most fundamental level, the simple fact that the act of swearing loyalty has been so thoroughly “commoditized” is a powerful symbol for the potential transience of military loyalty and the social instability of Tacitus’ civil war landscape. The present study, like so many others of the past generation, stands on the shoulders of classicists who, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, began elucidating the ways in which Roman historiography participated in the larger project of Roman literary culture.5 Nearly forty years ago, T. P. Wiseman showed how the historians employed many of the same techniques of persuasion the orators did: rhetorical colorings (colores) allowed the historian not only to make 5 Wiseman (1979) distinguishes between the rhetor’s need to be persuasive and convincing, and the historian’s need only to be convincing. 2 the narrative more entertaining, but also more didactic as he saw fit. Using the rhetorical technique of inventio, historians were expected to fill in the gaps of what was “known” with what was likely, and thus convincing, to their intended audience. A few years later, A. J. Woodman applied Wiseman’s and similar observations to Tacitus in particular, demonstrating that several elements of the preface of the Histories bear remarkable similarity to Cicero’s recipe for “pleasurable history.”6 The implications here are wide ranging: Rome’s writers of history might draw from anywhere—not only from what “really happened,” or even only from (flawed) unliterary annals and (flawed) previous histories, but also from speeches, poems, cultural currents, and their own imaginations—in order to fashion historical meaning and narrative.7 This discovery, unsurprisingly, threw the interpretive doors wide open. Tacitean scholars now regularly elucidate the historian’s employment of, and debt to his prosaic (primarily historiographical) and poetic (primarily epic) predecessors.8 Such intertextual approaches expose, guide, and solve points of interpretation on a micro- and macro-level. Indeed, my interpretations of the words, phrases, and motifs of the Histories will often be informed by contributions made in this arena. Yet the present study (with the notable exception of one section in the third chapter)9 is not primarily intertextual in orientation. Rather, I seek to discover how Tacitus constructs meaning via lexical and thematic relationship within the Histories and (sometimes) within his 6 Woodman (1988), esp. 79-80, 165-66. Cf. Woodman (1979) 154: “It think the reasons for Tacitus’ ‘substantive self-imitation’ in Annals 1.61-2 and 64-5 lie…in entertainment. However foreign it may be to us today, historians in the ancient world were expected to provide their readers with entertainment, delectatio lectoris, a responsibility of which Tacitus expresses himself only too well aware (cf. Annals 4.32.1, 33.2-3).” 7 Cf. the influential framework proposed by White (1973/2014) 5: “the historical work represents an attempt to mediate among what I will can the historical field, the unprocessed historical record, other historical accounts, and an audience” (emphasis in original). 8 For historiographical predecessors, Sallust and Livy in particular, see esp. Woodman (1998) and Ash (1999).
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