The Commerce of War

Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic

Neil Coffee

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226111902
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Latin epics such as Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, and Statius's Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In The Commerce of War, Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society.

Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

PART I

Reciprocity in Crisis: Vergil’s Aeneid

CHAPTER ONE

Roman Heroic Reciprocity

As Aeneas and the Trojan exiles first catch sight of their promised Italian homeland, they see four white horses grazing on the plain. Aeneas’s father, Anchises, interprets this scene as an omen, and the Trojans pray for divine favor:

et pater Anchises “bellum, o terra hospita, portas:

bello armantur equi, bellum haec armenta minantur.

sed tamen idem olim curru succedere sueti

quadripedes et frena iugo concordia ferre:

spes et pacis” ait. tum numina sancta precamur

Palladis armisonae, quae prima accepit ouantis,

et capita ante aras Phrygio uelamur amictu,

praeceptisque Heleni, dederat quae maxima, rite

Iunoni Argiuae iussos adolemus honores.

—(3.539–47)

Then father Anchises: “’Tis war you bring, welcoming land; for war are horses armed, war these steeds portend. But yet,” he cries, “those same steeds at times are wont to come under the chariot and beneath the yoke to bear the bit in concord; there is also hope of peace!” Then we pray to the holy power of Pallas, queen of clashing arms, who first welcomed our cheers, before the altar veil our heads in Phrygian robe, and, following the urgent charge which Helenus had given, duly offer to Argive Juno the prescribed sacrifice.

Anchises’ prophecy anticipates the potential for both war and peace in Italy, which he seems to predict in that order: first the battles of Aeneas and his descendants, then Rome’s ultimately tranquil dominion, just as foretold by Jupiter (1.254–96). Yet when the Trojans reach Italy, events occur in the opposite order: they enjoy a brief moment of concord with the Latins before plunging into war. Even during the war there are moments of calm, including the idyll of Aeneas’s friendship with Evander in Book 8 and the truce in Book 11 between Trojans and Latins for the burial of bodies. In hindsight, we see that Anchises’ prediction offers less a sequential view of future events than a synchronic overview of the alternating periods of war and peace to come.

A second tension in the prophecy looks forward to the mixed success that Aeneas will have in creating reciprocal bonds to secure peace. Anchises refers to a “welcoming” (hospita) land of Italy that will nevertheless try to repel the Trojans. The word hospita is properly the female equivalent of hospes, and as such refers to a female “host” or “guest,” often one with whom one has ties of guest-friendship. Yet, as Anchises’ prophecy anticipates, this new land will be quite inhospitable to the Trojans, although Aeneas does form ties of hospitium with Latinus and Evander. As long as such ties hold, the Trojans can maintain these peaceful relations: thus from their initial meeting with Latinus the Trojans are said to “carry back peace” (pacem reportant) in the form of gifts:

talibus Aeneadae donis dictisque Latini

sublimes in equis redeunt pacemque reportant.

—(7.284–85)

With such words and gifts from Latinus, the sons of Aeneas, mounted on their horses, return carrying back peace.

Conversely, war results from the violation of reciprocal ties. Thus Aeneas accuses Latinus of breaking their ties of hospitium and turning to war:

rex nostra reliquit

hospitia et Turni potius se credidit armis.

—(11.113–14)

It is your king who forsook our guest-friend allegiance and preferred to trust himself to Turnus’ sword.

Taken as a whole, then, the competing suggestions of reciprocal ties (terra hospita) and warfare in Anchises’ prophecy suggest that Aeneas’s success will depend upon his ability to create and maintain reciprocal relations.¹

As the prophecy suggests, socioeconomic relations in the Aeneid present a mixed picture, which I survey globally in this chapter. I will argue that Vergil represents reciprocal practices as choiceworthy and, at times, effective in bringing social solidarity. Yet he also allows that reciprocal mechanisms are easily disrupted and can be exploited for divisive or self-interested ends. With few exceptions, Vergil reserves commodity language for the actors who participate in this sort of undermining of reciprocal relations. In sum, Vergil provides his epic world with a socioeconomic dimension that is aligned with the dominant aristocratic view offered by Cicero. The hope for social solidarity lies in fostering strong reciprocal ties, even if these ties are subject to failure and manipulation.

Successful Reciprocity

Unlike Lucan and Statius, Vergil presents a wide range of reciprocal behavior that is both admirable and successful. In the end, gestures such as the gift exchange between Aeneas and Latinus come to naught when overtaken by a metastasizing drive for war. But such efforts nevertheless illuminate the character of Aeneas, Evander, and others. They also establish a standard against which we measure the descent into conflict and the culpability of those who disrupt reciprocal bonds. In the following two sections I consider the range of successful reciprocity that defines this standard, first among mortals and then between mortals and divinities.

Reciprocity among Mortals

As we might expect given Homeric and Roman norms, of the four types of economic actors discussed in the introduction, the model of the generous man predominates in the Aeneid. Gifts are exchanged to initiate or strengthen relationships between Aeneas and Dido, Helenus, Andromache, Latinus (through Ilioneus), and Evander.² Evander shows that services can be offered as a gift when he goes to rouse Aeneas “mindful of his promised service (muneris)” (8.464). Attempts to give gifts may be abortive, as when Latinus proposes an offer of gifts to Aeneas that is then made impossible by a new eruption of fighting (11.755). Such offers can also fail or need to be redirected, as when Diomedes refuses the gifts offered him by the Latins in exchange for his allegiance in their war against the Trojans, telling them to give the gifts to Aeneas instead (11.281–82).³

Gift giving is often part of hospitium, a reciprocal exchange of hospitality that creates a social bond between host and guest. Aeneas makes or refreshes numerous ties of hospitium throughout his journey—with King Anios on Delos (3.83), with Acestes on Sicily (5.63, 5.630), with Latinus (7.202, 7.264, 11.165), and with Evander (8.123, 188, 364, 532, 11.165).⁴ Evander lives up to his name (“Good Man”) in economic terms as in other respects, not only through his cultivation of ties of hospitium with Hercules and Aeneas, but also through his endorsement of modest living (8.364–65). As the founder of a city at the future site of Rome, Evander is in a sense the first Roman, so it is fitting that he practices and encourages frugality, a virtue associated with Rome’s earliest generations. Evander engages virtuously in reciprocal and moderate commodity behaviors so long as he stays in his proto-Roman idyll, but, as we will see in the next chapter, his bond with Aeneas will force him to change. Apart from gifts and hospitium, the characters of the Aeneid do also exchange honor, despite the attenuation of the Homeric honor economy. Aeneas promises to give Dido honor in his future travels (1.609); Venus asks Jupiter why he is not giving honos to her and Aeneas (1.253); and the narrator promises Aeneas’s nurse, Caieta, the continued honor of an Italian shore named after her (7.3).

The concept of gratia, which combines notions of gratitude and repayment, was fundamental to Roman reciprocity.⁵ We find few explicit mentions of it in the poem,⁶ but gratia underpins Vergil’s most explicit and sweeping vision of social harmony. In his prophecy of a peaceful Roman society in Book 1, Jupiter mentions that Fides, Vesta, Romulus (as Quirinus), and Remus will establish laws (iura, 1.293) that will restrain Furor (1.292–96). These laws originate in part from a general trust represented by Fides, as well as family ties represented by both Vesta and the reconciled Romulus and Remus. Thus relationships of trust (fides) both within and outside the family obviate discord. Fides “manifested itself . . . in the scrupulous upholding of obligations derived from gratia”:⁷

Gratia and fides were inextricably linked. A favour or gift was never supposed to be reciprocated immediately because this would extinguish the reciprocity “debt” that bound the amici together. Therefore, gratia implied a time lag, but even when a return gift had been made gratefulness was not supposed to end. Thus ideally gratia was a durable disposition that required mutual trust and feelings of solidarity—in other words fides. On the one hand, fides could be regarded as the trust put by one partner in another’s benignitas and gratia. On the other hand, fides implied solidarity and had to be shown by officia that would inevitably generate gratia. Thus gratification was both the cause and effect of fides.⁸

Through their own actions and support of the law, fides and gratia serve to check destructive Furor. Jupiter’s vision makes explicit the need for reciprocity to establish social harmony that we find implicit in the other successful reciprocal gestures among mortals.

Divine-Mortal Reciprocity

Jupiter and other divinities do not just comment on exchange relations with mortals, of course, but also participate in them.⁹ Mortals engage most fully in these relationships by performing sacrifices, often described as “gifts” or “honors,”¹⁰ and offering vows in return for help with unseen forces. The gods may reject these relationships by ignoring mortal overtures or participate by responding with favor.¹¹ Gods also give gifts to mortals, but these are usually expressions of the god’s basic function, as when Apollo grants the healing arts to Iapyx.¹²

Interactions with the divine are typically put into a commodity form, the so-called do ut des contract,¹³ which lacks the stigma of commodity exchange between mortals. Thus in the Aeneid, when Iarbas calls upon Jupiter to disrupt the relationship of Aeneas and Dido, he invokes his past sacrifices:¹⁴

et nunc ille Paris cum semiuiro comitatu,

Maeonia mentum mitra crinemque madentem

subnexus, rapto potitur: nos munera templis

quippe tuis ferimus famamque fouemus inanem.

—(4.215–18)

And now that Paris with his eunuch train, his chin and perfumed locks bound with a Lydian turban, grasps the spoil; while we bring offerings to your temples, yours forsooth, and cherish an idle story.

Turnus, in the middle of his final duel with Aeneas, similarly prays to Faunus and the Earth to hold fast Aeneas’s spear in return for his past offerings:

“Faune, precor, miserere” inquit “tuque optima ferrum

Terra tene, colui uestros si semper honores,

quos contra Aeneadae bello fecere profanos.”

—(12.777–79)

“Faunus, have pity, I pray, and you, most gracious Earth, hold fast the steel, if ever I have honoured your rites, which the sons of Aeneas, to the contrary, have defiled by war.”

In both of these cases, the mortal character implicitly calls upon the gods to make some return for past services.

This demand for a return implies a contractual, commodity relationship that is inconsistent with the ideology of reciprocity among mortals but fully compatible with divine-mortal interactions. Contracts were used at all levels of Roman society in transactions where reliance on trust alone was deemed insufficient,¹⁵ and the well-known ficklenes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Reciprocity in Crisis: Vergil’s Aeneid
• Part Two: The Triumph of Venality: Lucan’s Civil War
• Part Three: Conspicuous Consumption: Statius’s Thebaid
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Index of Cited Passages