Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects Spring 5-2016 Searching for Blood in the Streets: Mapping Political Violence onto Urban Topography in the Late Roman Republic, 80-50 BCE Theodore Samuel Rube Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Rube, Theodore Samuel, "Searching for Blood in the Streets: Mapping Political Violence onto Urban Topography in the Late Roman Republic, 80-50 BCE" (2016). Honors Theses. 186. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/186 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Searching for Blood in the Streets: Mapping Political Violence onto Urban Topography in the Late Roman Republic, 80-50 BCE An Honors Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Classical and Medieval Studies Bates College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Theodore Samuel Rube Lewiston, Maine March 28th, 2016 2 Acknowledgements I want to take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to everybody who during this process has helped me out, cheered me up, cheered me on, distracted me, bothered me, and has made the writing of this thesis eminently more enjoyable for their presence. I am extremely grateful for the guidance, mentoring, and humor of Professor Margaret Imber, who has helped me through every step of this adventure. I’d also like to give a very special thanks to the Bates Student Research Fund, which provided me the opportunity to study Rome’s topography in person. I’d also like to thank Professor Jeffrey Paller, who first got me interested in urban politics. My deepest gratitude goes out to my friends for all of their support, comradeship, and their good- natured willingness to weather my frustrations and share in my successes. Most of all, I want to thank my parents, for everything. They have always been supportive of all my endeavors, regardless of how many books in a dead language I bring home. Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to Dr. James Hunt, the man who started me off on this whole Classics thing in the first place, and to Harry, the guy who makes me glad I’m still doing it. Teddy Rube 3 Table of Contents Introduction: A Spatial Approach to Political Violence in the Late Roman Republic .......... 6 Mapping Violence onto Urban Topography ............................................................................................9 Space, Exclusion, and Politics in the Late Republic .............................................................................15 Chapter I: Topography and Violence in Transition ................................................................ 19 Exiting the 70s ........................................................................................................................................19 Setting the Topographical Stage ............................................................................................................24 Chapter II: Controlling Topography in the Western Forum ................................................. 43 Boxing in the Senate—Violence around the Curia(e) ..........................................................................45 The Rostra: A Double-Edged Weapon ..................................................................................................58 Brawls in the Saepta: Controlling Space during Legislative Assemblies .............................................75 Conclusion: Targeted Violence Yielded Results ....................................................................................86 Chapter III: Expanding the Battlefield .................................................................................... 88 Claiming the Forum—Cicero’s Catilinarian “Triumph” ....................................................................89 “They drove him out of the Forum”: Widening the Space to be Controlled .......................................96 Towards an Expanding Field of Battle ................................................................................................101 Chapter IV: Personalizing Space in the Eastern Forum ....................................................... 103 Courtroom Permeability and Judicial Violence ..................................................................................104 Patterns of Organized Judicial Violence, 66-61 ...............................................................................106 Attempts and Failures to Fortify the Court .......................................................................................115 Soldiers in the Forum: The Trial of Milo in 52 .................................................................................121 Clodius Personalizes the Temple of Castor and the Eastern Forum .................................................129 Popular Politics at the Temple of Castor ..........................................................................................130 Clodius Claims the Eastern Forum ...................................................................................................136 Controlling Topography: Clodius’ Activities in the Eastern Forum ................................................141 Assessing Clodius’ “Control” ...........................................................................................................146 Chapter V: Violence at the Aristocratic Domus .................................................................... 149 Defensive Bastions and Offensive Headquarters ................................................................................151 Clodius and the Elision of Political and Domestic Space .................................................................161 Conclusion: Towards the Politicization of Private Space and the Privitization of Political Space ..181 Chapter VI: Class and Conflict in Rome’s Theaters ............................................................. 183 Locating Rome’s Theaters ....................................................................................................................183 Class Distinctions in the Theater: Riot at the Ludi Apollinares .........................................................187 Food, Class, and Clodius ......................................................................................................................195 The Plebs’ Conditioned Behavior: The Attack at the Ludi Megalenses in 56 ...................................201 Chapter VII: Violence on the Campus Martius ..................................................................... 207 Clodian Demonstration at the Villa Publica .......................................................................................208 Electoral Violence in the Saepta ..........................................................................................................210 Conclusions ................................................................................................................................ 217 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 220 4 Table of Figures Figure 1:Modern Rome, ArcMap Satellite Image ........................................................................ 10 Figure 2:Modern Rome, ArcMap Satellite with Coarelli's Reconstruction of the Western Forum overlaid ................................................................................................................................. 12 Figure 3:Ancient Buildings in the Forum reconstructed over modern topography ...................... 13 Figure 4: Political Violence Data Points overlaid on Ancient Buildings ..................................... 14 Figure 5: The Mid-Republican Comitium-Curia complex, viewed from the East. In Christopher Johanson, Spectacle in the Forum, p. 91. Note that as a result of Sulla’s reconstruction of the Curia, in the period 80 to 50 the building would have actually been larger and extended forward into the circular Comitium space, decreasing the distance between it and the Rostra. From left: Temple of Concord, Carcer, Basilica Porcia, Curia, and Comitium. .................. 48 Figure 6: The Rostra (restored view after Gjerstad) from Amy Russell, The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome, 63. ............................................................................................ 61 Figure 7: Looking west, the Western Forum at maximum viewing capacity, highlighting the Rostra and Comitium space. Visible behind the Rostra from right to left are the Curia, the Basilica Porica, the Carcer, and the Temple of Concord. In Christopher Johanson, Spectacle in the Forum, p. 136. ............................................................................................................. 64 Figure 8: The Area Capitolina, From Russell, 2016, 107. ............................................................ 84 Figure 9: The Eastern Forum ...................................................................................................... 104 Figure 10:The Temple of Castor and Pollux, UCLA Virtual Reality Lab Digital Roman Forum Project. Although the Temple pictured is an Imperial restoration, the structure and the Rostra are the same as the Republican one. .......................................................................