Livy and the Construction of the Past

The last few decades have witnessed a significant increase in scholarly attention to contiones, non-voting public meetings at which magistrates addressed the Roman populus. Much of this work has focused on the role of the contio in Roman politics, as a primary locus for interaction between senate and people (Millar 1998, Hölkeskamp 2000 and 2004, Mouritsen 2001, Morstein-Marx 2004). With few exceptions (e.g., Tan 2008), the corpora considered have (understandably) consisted of the extant contional speeches in Sallust and Cicero.

In discussing Livy’s use of his most important Greek source, Polybius, P.G. Walsh famously wrote that “a clear and somewhat damning picture emerges of a mind rapidly and mechanically transposing the Greek, and coming to full consciousness only when grappling with the more congenial problems of literary presentation,” (Walsh 144). This has, until recently, been the received wisdom regarding the merits of this writer whose methods and goals differ greatly from those of modern practitioners of historiography.

Although readers have long noted the influence of dramatic genres on historiography, most discussions of “tragic history” have been preoccupied with the emplotment of certain episodes (e.g., Thomas 1991), the use of tragic emotions in history (e.g., Marincola 2003), or else the connections between historiographic narrative and dramatic predecessors (e.g., Wiseman 1998 or Santoro L’Hoir 2006). All of these studies have in common the invaluable grounding of their historiographical subject in the educative and cultural milieux of the early principate.

The early books of Livy famously contain three episodes of would-be tyrants and the subsequent reaction of the Roman government. While the perpetrators, Spurius Cassius (2.41), Spurius Maelius (4.13-16), and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus (6.11-20), are all executed on the grounds of seeking regnum, the legitimacy of such violence to protect the state is challenged in all three cases.

A particularly enduring metaphor of political thought is that of the head-of-state, in which the authority of the individual over the many is naturalized by analogy to the head’s command over the body. This discourse can be traced to the Roman principate, where the princeps was conceptualized as the head of the body politic (Cancik; Béranger). Ovid celebrates Augustus as the caput orbis (Trist. 3.5.46), while Velleius calls Tiberius the rei publicae lumen et caput (2.99).