Jessica Clark (Florida State University)
A JStor search for “officer + masculinity + gaze” yields 1,781 hits. The majority occur in “History” (529) and “Literature” (502), nine within “Classical Studies” journals. The ratios are equivalent with comparable terms, and most hits are recent: conversations are ongoing in adjacent disciplines that are not noticeably widespread in ours.
This paper applies models from those conversations to the army of the Roman Republic. Roman officers in the Republic derived authority through task-based delegation by a commander holding imperium. Key tasks included the public levy and evaluations of rewards or punishments. These officers functioned as the “eyes” of the commander, and exercised authority through formalized acts of watching, while soldiers experienced that authority through their consciousness of formal contexts of observation. The evidence for this process varies in its implications, however. Polybius makes frequent reference to visual evaluation and appearance in describing the Roman army (e.g. 6.20.2-7, 22.3, 23.13, 27.1), essential to displaying Roman military masculinity (e.g. Reeder 2015: 67-69). The near-contemporary ‘Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus’ illustrates how headdresses and ocular orientation can convey hierarchical power, as the figure of Mars as an ideal type invites comparison with the other soldiers in the scene (cf. the parody at Plaut. Mil. 11-12). There, as elsewhere in both art and text, “more visible” correlates to “more masculine” on the spectrum of what officers seek with their eyes, and soldiers are the objects of culturally-determined observational criteria without explanation or appeal (Lendon 1999: 310; Tohm 2011: 127-37; contested by civilian displays of virtus, Rhet. Herr. 4.52; variable emphasis on musculature vs. equipment as status markers, e.g. RRC 335/3, 401/1, 469/1, 470/1, 514/1). They are believed to perform more admirably when watched (Caes. BCiv. 1.67.4), to watch officers in turn (Livy 21.43.17; Veg. 2.12.3; cf. Phang 2008: 95-97), and to act with an awareness of the impact of their performance (Cato FRHist F76; Livy 7.33.10-12). This appears acutely on a second-century relief from Praeneste, where marines on a bireme variously gaze at an errant crocodile and comrades prominently staged as if to confront it.
Thus in practice and the representation of practice, military bodies become objects for visual evaluation. In practice, their forms and performance were the subjects that constituted officers’ authority, as observation was a core aspect of campaign life. In the literary representation of this practice, however, officers are mere mirrors: soldiers’ awareness of being watched reciprocally inspires them to perform. Therein lies a crucial distinction between “the gaze” as means of control and “the gaze” as a projected ideal of internalized cultural dominance (two different current uses), with implications for how we interpret operational hierarchies, the performance of military subordination in a culture of competitive masculinity, and the representation of martial excellence by and for civilians. The contention of this paper is thus that the terms in which other academic disciplines discuss these phenomena have much to offer the military history of the Republic, and may be particularly useful in distinguishing among imagined audiences for representations of service and command.