Livy's Women

Crisis, Resolution, and the Female in Rome's Foundation History

Peter Keegan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351373357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Livy's Women explores the profound questions arising from the presence of women of influence and power in the socio-political canvas of one of the most important histories of Rome and the Roman people, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City).

This theoretically informed study of Livy's monumental narrative charts the fascinating links between episodes containing references to women in prominent roles and the historian's treatment of Rome's evolutionary foundation story. Explicitly gendered in relation to the socio-cultural contexts informing the narrative, the author's background, the literary landscape of Livy's Rome, and the subsequent historiographical commentary, this volume offers a comprehensive, coherent and contextualised overview of all episodes in Ab Urbe Condita relating to women as agents of historical change.

As well as proving invaluable insights into socio-cultural history for Classicists, Livy's Women will also be of interest to instructors, researchers, and students of female representation in history in general.

1

AUC HISTORY

Women and the art of exemplary storytelling

1.1 Res novae and mores maiorum: exempli documenta, haec tempora, and the resonances of change

The prominence of individual or collective female activity in certain episodes of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita (AUC) presents the critical reader of Graeco-Roman historiography with a difficulty and a duty. The problem is a matter of emphasis; the obligation, one of explanation.

The latter first. Any treatment of Livy's interposition of women in the dense, composite superstructure of his annalistic narrative must elucidate the connection which exists between the stated aim of the ancient writer's historiographical project and the practical application of that argument. In other words, to appreciate the consistency and vigour of Livy's gendered textual exposition of Roman history (res Romana), the modem interpreter requires some familiarity with the subtle propositions which the annalist outlines in his introduction to Book 1.

This task requires a sympathetic imagination. In this respect, it is hard to accept R.M. Ogilvie's assessment that Livy's praefatio is “the preface of a small man … who writes … to enshrine in literature persons and events that have given him a thrill of excitement as he studied them”; nor is P.G. Walsh's assertion that, “if the Preface is any guide … moral and patriotic considerations are united for didactic purposes” completely satisfying.¹ Rather, in line with the increasing respect accorded to Livy's literary and historiographical intelligence, I would argue that Livy sought to redefine the writing and interpretation of AUC history – that is, the representation of Rome's historical past – albeit within the formal structural limitations of conventional annalistic practice.

Without avoiding the complexity of discussion which naturally attends such a reading of Livy's famous Preface,² the following observations are cited for consideration. First, the opening words of the historian's long, intensively personalised introductory period establish the desired relationship between writer and reader.

Whether the task I have undertaken of writing a complete history of the Roman people from the very commencement of its existence will reward me for the labour spent on it, I neither know for certain, nor if I did know would I venture to say. For I see that this is an old-established and a common practice, each fresh writer being invariably persuaded that he will either attain greater certainty in the materials of his narrative or surpass the rudeness of antiquity in the excellence of his style.³

By virtue of the fact that the opening words of his Preface possess a very particular metrical pattern, Livy draws attention to the relationship between poetry and history.⁴ Recognition of this association immediately compels the historian's readership to engage thoughtfully with the writing of a history intended to teach moral and ethical lessons. The unsettling effect created by Livy's inclusion of a poetic metre is at first glance solely a stylistic issue. Notably in this regard, Quintilian, who recognised the quality of Sallust as a historian, contrasts his austere and epigrammatic brevitas with Livy's lactea ubertas (“milky richness”), a style that, while lush and vivid, avoiding all harshness and in which the periods run along smoothly, still provides a richly fertile historical narrative suitable for nourishing the reader.⁵ Associated with the question of style, however, is the existence and continuity of an ancient argument best exemplified by the diverging historiographical approaches of the 5th century BCE Greek writers, Thucydides and Herodotus, a difference regarding respectively the distinctiveness and assimilation of poetry and history.⁶ In the simplest terms, while the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides both drew inspiration from oral history, the poetry of the Greek epic cycle and the Iliad and Odyssey in particular, Thucydides broke from Homer's grip and took a different approach to observing the landscape of historical memory and conveying the world's reality. Of course, when the Homeric epics were composed, usually dated to the 8th century BCE, poets were the only historians. Although it does not follow that poets would always scrupulously adhere to truth, veracity in historical narration relied significantly on a poet's reputation in public opinion. Naturally, the common use of written records and the rise of prose histories drew into contention unquestioning acceptance of truth-telling in relation to the genre of poetry, regardless of the merit in which the composer was held. When this tension between the writing of poetry and history is admitted, the rhetorical ploy underpinning Livy's provocative beginning guarantees the participation of his readers.

Second, this reciprocal involvement in the writing of AUC history is explicitly articulated in Section 10 of the Preface:

There is this exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from the study of the past that you see, set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being mischievous in its inception and disastrous in its issues, you are to avoid.⁷

In the light of Ogilvie's interpretation of these words, the force adhering to Livy's claim – that history offers examples (“set in the clear record of a nation”) of every sort of conduct (exempli documenta) – is novel and original.⁸ As C.S. Kraus notes, there is “a direct, personal relationship between the ego of the text and this tu: history is understood – even made – in the space between them.”⁹ This kind of view resonates in certain ways with recent reassessments of how we read the past. More and more, modern historiography has moved beyond the preoccupation with factually accurate data drawn from approved historical sources, passive reception of canonical prose history, and valorisation of static written records and literary accounts.¹⁰ In line with Livy's explicit acknowledgement of the permeable nature of history and the agency of the consumer of the historical tradition, there is merit in studying the past wherever it may be illuminated. For scholarly historical inquiry in the 21st century, this approach draws on a constantly evolving corpus of non-prosaic, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence: literary, documentary, and material sources of knowledge outside the medium of historical writing that preserve the memory of the past as cultural knowledge.¹¹ In much the same way, a majority of the men and women living in late republican Rome accessed their culture in a wide variety of forms: for those who were wealthy persons educated in the elite curriculum (mythology, Greek and Latin language, literature, and rhetoric), traditional historiography afforded a very particular opportunity to engage with narratives of the past; for those with functional, little, or no literacy, the formal memorials of the past, displayed in the architectural, aesthetic, and inscribed topography of city and suburbium, and the performative historiographical traditions of theatre, recitation, and procession.¹² With this in mind, the ancient reader of Livy's Preface could not help but register the implied interdependence of narrative and artefact – that is, the discursive monument of annalistic history and the narrative episodes of historiographical storytelling – and the mediating role ascribed to the complicity between creator and observer.¹³

Third, setting this in the milieu of the saeculum Augustum – the period of socio-historical change marking Rome's conceptual transition from oligarchic to dynastic rule, linked intrinsically to the lifetime of Augustus – Livy's historical monumentum can be viewed as an attempt to reconstruct Rome in a representational and referential sense.¹⁴ As the historian observes mid-way through his prefatory manifesto,

The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these: the life (vita) and morals (mores) of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these times (haec tempora), in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.¹⁵

While it cannot be verified – either by historical research or the sequential comparison of symbolic discourses (that is, literary texts and visual images) – if Livy or his late republican contemporaries were aware of the qualitative leap embodied in the transition from Republic to Empire, the possibility of an ancient historian coming to grips with intellectual, moral, and emotional conceptions similar to those of Augustus should be entertained.¹⁶ Despite this uncertainty, it is reasonable to propose that Livy meant his version of the existing tradition to extend and outstrip the pessimistic and moralistic imperatives of his Roman historiographical predecessors, and to interrogate the tensions be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 AUC history: Women and the art of exemplary storytelling
• 2 Gendered collectives in livy: The agmen mulierum and independent female demonstrations in AUC history
• 3 The rhetoric of the unfamiliar other: Non-Roman women in AUC history
• 4 Topoi, tropes, and the female: The rhetorical memory of the annalist tradition
• Afterword: Final observations
• Bibliography
• Index