War and its Cultural Implications

Since Suetonius, Odes 4 has been the focus of much criticism and apology. Odes 4’s apparent disunity as well as its eclectic mixture of encomium and occasional pieces seems to call for some explanation. A microcosm of this phenomenon can be found in the various treatment of Horace's ode to Lollius (C.4.9). From what we know of Lollius, he seems a less than obvious choice to stand alongside the other addressees of Odes 4: Augustus, his relatives, Maecenas, and Vergil. Lollius’ political life was moderately prominent but less than smooth.

In Aeneid 2.469-568, an ancient laurel (veterrima laurus) overhangs Pyrrhus’ murder of Polites and Priam, ironically crowning his sacrilegious triumph over Troy. Metamorphoses 1.452-567 aetiologizes the tree as the product of Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne, (p)rewriting the laurel as a sign of violence and cooptation from its mythological moment of origin up to modern times. Ovid’s text thus retroactively politicizes Vergil’s to comment on the laurel’s use within Roman visual culture to elide the violence that underpinned Augustan power.

Ancient ravaging warfare was morally problematic in its organized violence against targeted enemy peoples—many males slaughtered, many young females raped and enslaved, and many resistant and older females killed, often by lethal gang rape (Gaca 2015). Yet the forces ordered to carry out this aggression were trained by their superiors to regard their ravaging “ferocity” (saevitia) as a “virtue” (virtus), as exemplified in the First Mithridatic War on both the Pontic and Roman sides (Flor. Epit. 1.40).

While technical aspects of ancient fire-signaling have received extensive study (Riepl 1913, Diels 1920, Darmstaedter 1924, Reinecke 1935, and Forbes 1966), this paper examines how historians use this symbolic form of communication to reflect upon both the possibilities and the challenges of the transmission of human knowledge. This approach allows us to view fire signals as meta-historical representatives for the historiographical principles of each author.

My paper explores how the vitis, the vine-stock that a Roman legionary centurion wielded as a cane with which to punish his soldiers, developed during the Principate from a punitive tool to a positive symbol of military status and imperial authority. As Augustus and his successors transformed the legions into a permanent, standing army, centurions acquired responsibilities beyond combat, including the management of outposts, logistics and supply, policing, and local administration, and they received greater pay and social benefits to match.

It is widely recognized that Iliadic armies are neither democratic nor crudely autocratic (Albracht 1886; Latacz 1977; Finley 1978; van Wees 1986, 1992), and that treatments of the source of and limits on authority recur throughout the poem (Finsler 1906; Stanford 1955; Finley 1957; Donlan 1979; McGlew 1989; Hitch 2009). The neikos of Iliad 1 raises (and does not answer) such questions as: what makes warriors fight? and what makes some do what others tell them to do?