Sally Mubarak (University of St Andrews)
Livy’s narratives of the siege and sack of the two cities in close succession at the turn of the fourth century BCE, Veii by the Romans (5.1-5.23) and Rome by the Gauls (5.32-50), provide insight into how Romans may have conceptualised space, ‘the city’, and trauma in a military context. The sack of Veii is depicted as a traumatic defeat for the Veientines, after an epic 10 year siege, from which the city never fully recovered. Conversely, the sack of Rome by the Gauls is far more indefinite. The Romans seemingly evade the more traumatic aspects of siege; the pomerium is breeched but the Capitol holds out (5.43.1-43.6), non-combatants escape with the Flamen Quirinalis, the Vestals, and the sacra publica (5.40.5-10), the besieging Gauls – not the Romans – are stricken by plague (5.48.1-3), and the city famously returns to power soon after. While one could certainly read this as the Romans sanitizing their history, the contrast with the clearly recorded defeat at the River Allia is also marked. The Romans were not afraid to remember defeats in general, but the sack of the city itself was, perhaps, something different.
The breach of an ancient city was a fundamentally traumatic and transgressive event, especially given the fact that the city was often – often quite consciously – separated from military activity. In a Roman Republican context, the city saw soldiers leaving on seasonal campaigns to fight wars for their commanders, often (although not always) returning victorious with stories and spoils from the fighting. Those who remained at home continued with ‘business as usual’ until the need to celebrate the return or grieve the deaths of their kin. However, this spatial distance disappeared when a siege brought the battlefield to the city, and the horrors of war penetrated the city space.
Though the sieges of Veii and the sack of Rome progress differently, they both carry allusions to the paradigmatic urbs capta (Kraus, 1994). They also fit the mould of other siege narratives, reflecting the role of siege narrative as a ‘stock’ traumatic event (e.g. Polyb. II.58.4-10; Caes. B.G. 7.77) embedded with a distinctive level of horror and chaos (App. Hisp. 97; Joseph. BJ. 6.204-207) and, significantly, collective suffering (Hom. Il., 22.406-22.515). The narrative trope of the urbs capta has been discussed at length by Paul (1982) and others, however, the way in which sieges and sacks vary from this well-established trope is instructive. Indeed, the diversity in the narration of sieges and space suggests a difference in Roman and Greek thought in how the city relates to warfare in the period (Armstrong and Trundle 2019).
This paper explores how these two specific sieges from early Roman history exemplify this connection between city boundaries, transgressions, and military trauma. It will discuss how these sieges fit within and differ from the narrative trope of the besieged city. It will then investigate how differences between the sieges of Veii/Rome are connected to the city-space, and finally, it will explore the connection between transgressive events and military trauma.