CHAPTER 25
JOHN RICH
“THROUGH piety and religion … we overcame all peoples and nations,” so Cicero wrote (Har. Resp. 19), and it was indeed a Roman commonplace to claim that their devotion to the gods was exceptional and their empire its reward (Cic. ND 2.8; Hor. Odes 3.6.5; Livy 6.41.8, 44.1.11; Tert. Apol. 25; early stress on Roman piety: Sherk 1969, nos. 34.11–17, 38.23–25; cf. Polyb. 6.56.). Roman religion centered on ritual observance, and, in view of the prominence of warfare in Roman life, it was natural that rituals related to warfare should play an important part in their religious activity. However, although it had conservative elements, Roman religious practice also showed great adaptability, and Roman war rituals evolved radically in response to changed circumstances.1
This inquiry extends from the earliest times to the Principate of Augustus. The study of Roman religious practice over this long period is hampered by source problems. Our fullest information comes from Roman historical and antiquarian writing, but this, like other forms of Roman literature, did not begin until the late third century, and most of the surviving works date from the time of Augustus or later. For the first century we have plentiful contemporary evidence, above all from Cicero. For the period 218–167 we have a detailed historical account in Livy, Books 21–45: much of the information on religion in this part of Livy’s history may derive ultimately from archives, although even this was subject to distortion by his annalistic predecessors. Thus we know a good deal about Roman religious life from the later third century on. For the earlier period we are on much shakier ground, despite the detailed narratives of Livy and Dionysius. This has not deterred either ancient or modern scholars eager to speculate on primitive religious practice or ritual origins.
These issues—continuity and change and problematic sources—are well illustrated by the rituals considered in the next section, which were—or have been thought to be—related to the incidence of war and peace. The three following sections consider rituals related to command in war, from the commander’s departure from the city to his return in triumph. We then turn to the role of the fetiales, priests with special responsibilities in respect to war and peace.
WAR AND PEACE
Imperial expansion from the later fourth century on involved the Republic in almost continuous war: it has been estimated that in the period 327 to 100 there were at most thirteen years of peace (Harris 1979: 10). The presence of so many competing peoples in the Tiber plain and its hinterland meant that in the earlier centuries too the Romans will have been very frequently at war (but cf. Rich 2007: 8–16 for a more tranquil fifth century).
The annual regularity of war in early times has been commonly thought to be reflected in various rituals, which were held in March and October: the March ceremonies are interpreted as ritual preparations for war at the start of the campaigning season, while those in October are taken to mark the end of the season and the putting aside of arms for the winter. On March 1, 9 and 19 the Salii, priests of Mars who were found not only at Rome but in other Latin communities and whose distinctive costume included archaic weaponry, performed ritual dances with their sacred figure-of-eight shields (ancilia) and sang their ancient hymn. On February 27 and March 14 horse races (the Equirria) were held in honor of Mars on the Campus Martius. On March 23 and May 23 another festival of Mars, the Tubilustrium, involved the purification of trumpets. On October 15 the ceremony of the October Horse took place, another horse race on the Campus, at which one of the victorious horses was sacrificed to Mars. Finally, on October 19 the Armilustrium was performed at a site of the same name on the Aventine; the name suggests that this festival was a purification of weapons, though the Byzantine writer John the Lydian (De mens. 4.141) is the only source to give this explanation. How far these various ceremonies were interrelated is not clear; there is, for example, only weak evidence for associating the Salii with the Tubilustrium and the Armilustrium (sources for these rituals in Degrassi 1963: 416–18, 421–2, 426–30, 460–1, 521–4).
Mars was a god of agriculture as well as war, and there has been much scholarly dispute as to whether most of these rituals were agricultural or military in origin. There is, nonetheless, wide agreement that, as Beard, North, and Price put it (1998: 1.43), “whatever these ceremonies originally meant … at least by the fifth century B.C., they represented a celebration of the annual rhythm of war-making.”2 This consensus is merely conjectural, unsupported by the ancient evidence (cf. Rüpke 1990: 23–6). Ancient writers who discussed the rituals could themselves only speculate as to their meaning. Some of their references to the individual rituals describe them as honoring Mars as a war god, but that may be merely because this was his predominant role in the author’s own day. No ancient writer treats the various rituals as a group or links them with the campaigning season.
Two rituals could only be performed in time of peace, namely the augurium salutis and the closing of the shrine of Janus. In the augurium salutis the safety (salus) of the Roman people was prayed for, after the augurs had first sought divine permission; the ceremony was annual, but could only be carried out on a day when Roman forces were nowhere at war. It may once have been regularly performed, but the only occasions under the Republic when we know it to have been enacted were in 160 and in 63. It was revived after a long intermission in 29 in celebration of Augustus’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra; he continued to have the ritual performed from time to time: an inscription shows that it was celebrated in A.D. 3 and 17, and Claudius revived it in A.D. 49 after a twenty-five-year lapse (160: Plut. Aem. 39.3–4; 63: Cic. Div. 1.105; Dio 37.24; Augustus: Suet. Aug. 31.4; Dio 51.20.5; ILS 9337; Claudius: Tac. Ann. 12.23.1; see Liegle 1942; Linderski 1986: 2178–80, 2255–6; Rüpke 1990: 141–3).
The Janus ritual was a greater rarity and, under Augustus, a correspondingly powerful symbol. He himself noted in his record of his achievements that the doors had been closed only twice altogether since the foundation of the city, “but the senate decreed that it should be closed on three occasions while I was leading citizen” (Res Gestae 13).
The shrine of Janus Geminus (also known as Janus Quirinus) was a small rectangular building with double doors in the Forum. The first of the pre-Augustan closures is certainly legendary: it was attributed to Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, whose reign was held to have been a time of peace and religious innovation. The other closure, which lasted only a few months, is well attested and must be historical. Sources associate it with the end of the First Punic War; this was Rome’s longest war, and so its ending might well have prompted special commemoration, but the war ended in 241 and, puzzlingly, the closure did not take place until 235, following a campaign in Sardinia (Varro, Ling. Lat. 5.165, Livy 1.19.3; other sources at Broughton 1951–1952: 1.223). It is uncertain whether the 235 celebration marked the revival or the invention of a tradition. Scholars who suppose that the practice was of ancient origin have offered various explanations, for example that the shrine marked an early boundary of the city or had bridged a stream, but these hypotheses are mere conjecture.3
Augustus’s first closure of Janus was carried out in 29 in celebration of his ending of the civil wars (Livy 1.19.3; Dio 51.20.4; Degrassi 1963: 395). The fact that various campaigns against external enemies were still in progress was conveniently disregarded. The occurrence of the same phrase in several sources’ reference to this closing suggests that the Senate’s decree expressly linked it with the establishment of peace “on land and sea,” adapting a formula first used by Hellenistic rulers (Momigliano 1942; Schuler 2007).
Having established his claim to be bringer of universal peace, Augustus in 27 declared a continuing program of pacification against Rome’s external enemies, thereby conveniently justifying the division of the provinces which enabled him to retain most of the legions under his command (Rich 2003). Janus was at first employed as a symbol of this pacification program: the shrine was closed for the second time in 25, following Augustus’s war in northern Spain (Dio 53.26.5). It may not have been reopened until his next departure for a war theater, to Gaul in 16. Thereafter he may never have closed it again: Dio (54.36.2) records an abortive senatorial decree for its closure in 11, and in the Res Gestae Augustus says merely that the Senate decreed its closure three times, not that all these decrees were implemented (see further Syme 1984: 1179–97, 1991: 441–50; Rich 2003: 349, 355–6). Another symbol of his achievements in pacification had now been created, namely the still-surviving Altar of Augustan Peace (Pax Augusta), which was decreed on his return from Gaul in 13 and dedicated in 9, and provided Peace with its first cult site at Rome (RG 12.2; Galinsky 1996: 141–55).
Only three subsequent emperors resorted to the Janus ritual (Syme 1984: 1192–7). Nero closed the shrine in celebration of his Parthian policy, and Vespasian did so after his victorious conclusion of the Jewish War (an event also commemorated through the establishment of the Temple of Peace). Much later, in 242, Gordian III staged an opening of the temple when he set out for war against the Persians.
THE DEPARTING COMMANDER
Livy’s surviving narrative of the years 218–167 gives us a clear picture of the structure of the magistrates’ year in the middle Republic. At the start of their year of office the consuls performed various state duties at Rome, many of them religious in character. They then departed for their provinces. One of the consuls normally returned before the end of the year to hold the elections, but the other might remain in his province, with his command prorogued as proconsul. One or two of the praetors remained at Rome throughout the year, but the others went out to provinces and might be prorogued. Various changes to this pattern occurred in the first century: from early in the century consuls and praetors customarily left for their provinces only near or after the end of their year of office (Giovannini 1983); in 52 Pompey imposed a five-year interval between magistracy and provincial command.
Under the Republic departing commanders often held a levy. On enrollment legionaries had to swear an oath of loyalty, the sacramentum, to their commander, under the Empire to the emperor (Campbell 1984: 19–32; Rüpke 1990: 76–91).
Polybius (6.14.10) states that the Roman people decided on war and peace, and other sources assert that the people’s consent was required for war. In practice, however, there was only limited observance of this principle (Rich 1976: 13–17; Harris 1979: 263; Zack 2001: 75–166). When the people did vote on war, it was generally just to ratify a decision of the Senate. Before major wars began with the formality of a war vote, special religious observances might be held to assure success. Livy gives lavish details of those held before the great wars with kings Philip, Antiochus, and Perseus in respectively 200, 191, and 171. Before the Senate voted for war, a consul held sacrifices and prayers, following which the haruspices (Etruscan priests whose divining included the interpretation of sacrificial entrails) announced that the entrails portended victory, triumph, and the extension of the boundaries. (The last is a surprising detail, possibly an invention by Livy’s source, since these wars in fact resulted in an extension of the Romans’ power, but not of their territory.) Later, a supplicatio was held (a rite in which offerings and prayers were made by the whole people to the gods displayed on couches, pulvinaria, outside their temples), and games and gifts were vowed to the gods in the event of a successful outcome (Livy’s notices: 31.5–9, 36.1–2, 42.28–30; cf. 4.27.1, 7.11.4 [games vowed before some early wars]; 21.17.4—supplicatio before the Second Punic War).
The last known occasion when the formalities of a war vote were enacted was in 32, against Cleopatra (Plut. Ant. 60.1; Dio 50.4.4–5). To avoid the odium of starting civil war, Octavian (the future Augustus) represented the conflict as an attack on the Republic by a foreign queen; Antony and his followers were thus portrayed as starting civil war by remaining at the side of Rome’s enemy. With the establishment of the Principate, no more is heard of war votes: war and peace were now the prerogative of the Emperor (Str. 840).
Other rituals associated with the start of wars will be discussed below. Here we must notice one further ceremony which all departing consuls and praetors were expected to perform during the middle and late Republic. Having taken the auspices (see next section), the magistrate with his lictors ascended the Capitol to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (and also of Juno and Minerva) and there proclaimed a vow, as Cicero (Verr. 2.5.34) tells us, “for his command and for the public welfare.” He and his lictors then donned the paludamentum, the purple military cloak, and, accompanied by friends and well-wishers, crossed the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city, so passing from the civil sphere (domi, “home”) to the military (militiae). Numerous texts attest the observance of this ceremony (e.g., Varro Ling. Lat. 7.37; Festus 176L; Livy 31.14.1, 42.49.1–8, 45.39.11; Dio 39.39.6 [Crassus in 55, with hostile tribunes]; Caes. B Civ. 1.6.6 (praetors in 49); cf. Mommsen 1887–8: 1.63–4, 431–3; Rüpke 1990: 131–6; 1995: 38–40; Sumi 2005: 35–8). Strong disapproval was expressed of a commander who dispensed with it through haste, as when C. Flaminius left for his province even before his entry into office, one of the instances of religious neglect which was perceived as contributing tohis defeat and death at Lake Trasimene in 217 (Livy 21.63.7–9, 22.1.6–7; cf. Livy 41.10.5–13; Cic. Phil. 3.11, 5.24).
Occasionally doubts subsequently arose about the validity of the auspices taken at departure, and the magistrate then had to return to the city “to seek the auspices again” (Livy 8.30.2, 10.3.6, 23.19.3; Val. Max. 3.2.9; Degrassi 1937, no. 62; Rüpke 1990: 45–6; Linderski 1993: 62–3).
Commanders redeemed the undertaking made in their vow to the Capitoline gods when they triumphed, in the concluding act on the Capitol, when they performed sacrifices and deposited laurel from their fasces in the lap of Jupiter’s statue in his temple. (That these acts fulfilled departure vows is shown by Livy 45.39.10–12 Res Gestae 4.1). Thus, somewhat surprisingly, only those commanders who triumphed redeemed their vow. It is striking too that commanders continued to make a vow which could only be redeemed through success in war down to the late Republic, although by then the duties of many provincial governors were primarily civil. The new arrangements for provincial commands introduced by Augustus put an end to the departure ritual, and thenceforth the emperor alone wore the paludamentum, which now became one of the symbols of the imperial role.
ON CAMPAIGN
Commanders in all periods occasionally performed a “lustration” of their army. Common occasions for carrying out this ceremony were when a commander first took over his army or at the start of a new campaign: thus Cn. Manlius Vulso lustrated his army in Asia Minor in 189 and again in spring 188 (Livy 38.12.2, 37.8), as did Scipio in 209 (App. Iber. 19) and Cicero in 51 (Att. 5.20.2). Besides frequent references in literary sources, the ceremony is also depicted on sculptured reliefs, notably Trajan’s Column (scenes 8, 53, 103; Lepper and Frere 1988: 58–9, 100, 157–9). Its purpose would have been partly practical, as an army review, but it was also a religious ritual, which, as with the related ceremony performed by the censors at the end of the census, centered on asuovetaurilia, a sacrifice of a boar, a ram, and a bull. The term “lustration” implies purification, and is so translated by Greek writers, but scholars dispute the further significance of the rite (e.g., Rüpke 1990: 144–6). Roman fleets also underwent lustration, as in 191 (Livy 36.46.2) and by Octavian in 36 (App. B Civ. 5.96).
Magistrates were able to communicate with the gods and ascertain that conditions were favorable for action by two means, the auspices (divination from birds) and by offering sacrifice, with haruspices interpreting the entrails (divination: Scheid 2003: 111–26; augural practice: Linderski 1986). They employed both procedures before important actions, both civil and military, including battles (auspices and sacrifice before battles: Livy 6.12.7, 9.14.4, 35.48.13, 38.26.1; auspices: Cato, ORF fr. 36; see Rosenstein 1990: 60 ff.). The methods used usually ensured a satisfactory response. Thus the auspices were normally taken from the feeding of chickens in the charge of a chicken keeper (pullarius): when food dropped from a chicken’s mouth, this was a tripudium and constituted a favorable auspice. A favorable response did not guarantee a successful outcome. However, on several occasions a commander’s neglect of unfavorable auspices or entrails was held to have led to disaster, as for example at Lake Trasimene (Cic. Div. 1.77, from Coelius Antipater (fr. 20 Peter); cf. Cic. N.D. 2.8; Livy 22.3.9–14). The most celebrated instance concerned the naval defeat at Drepana in 249. It was said that before the battle the chickens had refused to eat and the commander, C. Claudius Pulcher, had ordered them to be thrown overboard, saying, “If they won’t eat, let them drink.” The story has sometimes been regarded as a historian’s fabrication, but it is more likely that it was current at the time and formed part of the case against Claudius at his subsequent trial (Broughton 1951–1952: 1.214; Rosenstein 1990: 79, 90, 157–60; other instances of neglected auspices or sacrifice: Livy 5.38.1, 25.16.1–4, 27.26.13–14, 41.18.7–14; Obsequens 55).
No doubt there were some occasions when unfavorable auspices or entrails led commanders to delay, but the reported cases of neglect suggest that commanders were sometimes prepared to disregard such signs when military imperatives appeared to require it, despite the risk of recriminations in the event of defeat.
Taking the auspices was the prerogative of magistrates, and it appears that promagistrates did not have this right. As we saw above, from the middle Republic Roman commanders were often promagistrates, usually magistrates whose command had been prorogued once their year of office had expired, and from the early first century military command was almost exclusively held by promagistrates. Some sources do speak of campaigns being conducted under the auspicium of a promagistrate, but here the term appears to be used loosely to mean no more than independent command. Practical administrative needs thus resulted in the consultation of the auspices becoming obsolete on campaign and confined to the civil sphere. Since they could not take the auspices, promagistrates had to rely exclusively on the interpretation of the sacrificial entrails to ascertain the gods’ favor. The view just stated is controversial, but I think it is the best interpretation of Cicero’s claim that divination by birds was no longer employed in war since “for many years, our wars have been conducted by proconsuls and propraetors, who do not have auspices” (Div. 2.76; Nat.D. 2.9; Rich 1996a: 101–5).
Certain days are reported as not propitious for initiating fighting. Antiquarian writers inform us that, while other days were proeliares (“fit for battle”), combat was not to be initiated on days which were religiosi or atri, “black” (Michels 1967: 62–7; Rüpke 1995: 563–75; Oakley 1997–2005: 1. 395–9). The dies religiosi comprised certain days of special ritual significance and the dies Alliensis (July 18), the anniversary of the Gauls’ victory at the River Allia in 387/386 before their sack of Rome. This day is said to have been declared religiosus after the Gauls’ withdrawal, following the discovery that several earlier defeats had occurred on the same day. The dies atri were the days following the Kalends, Nones, and Ides in each month, and some writers connect these too with the Allia disaster. Thus these rules precluded Roman commanders from initiating hostilities on about fifty days each year. However, in practice these constraints seem to have had little effect (Holladay and Goodman 1986: 160–2; Rüpke 1990: 179–80; Rosenstein 1990: 67–85). The decisive victory against King Antiochus in 190 is said to have been fought on a day offering tactical advantage although it was religiosus (Frontin. Str. 4.7.30). The disastrous defeat at Cannae in 216 is said to have taken place on August 2, the day after the Kalends, but the commander Varro appears not to have been criticized for offering battle on a dies ater (Claudius Quadrigarius F53 Peter, cited by Gell. 4.9.5; Macr. Sat. 1.16.26; cf. Rosenstein 1990: 84–5). Lucullus defeated the Armenian king Tigranes on October 6, 69, having insisted on engaging despite the day’s being the anniversary of the great defeat at Arausio in 105 (Plut. Luc. 27.8–9). Despite Octavian/Augustus’s scrupulous concern for religious propriety, his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (September 2, 31) is one of several first-century battles fought on a dies ater.
Special methods were sometimes employed to win divine support in combat. In battles, commanders quite often made a vow (votum) to a named god, to be paid in the event of victory. Usually the god was promised a temple, but vows for games are also reported, and in 293 a mere libation of mulsum (sweetened wine) was found sufficient. Such vows happened most often in the third and early second centuries; by the first century the practice seems to have effectively lapsed.4
When the permanent destruction of a besieged city was planned (a relatively rare occurrence), the Roman commander sometimes pronounced an evocatio (“calling away”) before its capture. This was a form of vow in which the tutelary god was asked to desert the city and come to Rome, with the promise of a temple and cult. Evocatio was certainly enacted against some of Rome’s near neighbors in Italy: Livy describes Camillus’s transfer of Juno Regina and its cult statue to Rome when he destroyed Veii in 396; Vortumnus was brought from Volsinii in 264, and probably Minerva Capta from Falerii in 241 (Veii: Livy 5.21.3, 2.3–8, 23.7, 52.10. Volsinii: Prop. 4.2.1–4. Falerii: Ovid, Fasti 3.843–4). The later writer Macrobius (Sat. 3.9.1–8) preserves a prayer formula forevocatio in a version purporting to have been used at the sack of Carthage in 146. However, our main sources for the fall of Carthage make no reference to evocatio, and a cult for Juno Caelestis (the name by which the Romans referred to Carthage’s principal deity) is not attested at Rome before the third century A.D. Many scholars therefore formerly held that evocatio was not practiced outside Italy; however, an inscription from Isaura Vetus, in southern Asia Minor (Hall 1973; AE 1977: 816), shows that a form of the ritual was in use overseas as late as 75. Erected by P. Servilius Vatia, it records his sacking of the town and fulfillment of a vow made to “whether it is a god or goddess in whose protection was the town of Isaura Vetus” (the traditional formula to cover uncertainty over the identity of the tutelary god). What Servilius vowed is left unclear: he can hardly have transferred the cult to Rome, but may perhaps have provided for a new temple and continued cult at the site of the destroyed town. (On evocatio see also Pliny, NH 28.18; Plut.QR 61; Festus 268L; Serv. Aen. 2.351; evocatio for Carthage is explicitly attested only by Serv. Aen. 12.841; see now Ando 2008: 113–86.)
In the same passage Macrobius (Sat. 3.9.9–13) goes on to provide a formula for the devotio of enemies: once their gods have been “evoked,” the Roman commander “devotes” the enemy city and army to the nether gods in return for his own army’s safety, and promises three black sheep to these gods. The formula again purports to be for use against Carthage, but Macrobius states that it was employed widely: Veii, Fidenae, and Fregellae in Italy, Carthage and Corinth overseas. If this is correct, it may, as Versnel (1976) has argued, have been the original form of devotio and the better-attested “self-devotion” of commanders then a derivative. However, since the devotio of enemies is attested only in this single, late source, its authenticity should be regarded as questionable.
The devotio of commanders is attested solely for members of a single family, the Decii, celebrated as exemplary instances of Roman virtus. Numerous sources report that a father and son, both with the name P. Decius Mus, performed a devotio when commanding with their fellow consul in a crucial battle, subsequently won by the Romans. The elder Decius is said to have sacrificed himself, prompted by a dream, at the battle of the Veseris in 340 against the Latins and Campanians, and the younger to have imitated his father’s example at the battle of Sentinum in 295 against the Samnites and Gauls. Each is said to have uttered a prayer formula, dictated by a priest, calling on the gods to destroy the enemy army and devoting himself on behalf of the Roman people and their army to the nether gods Di Manes and Mother Earth, and then to have ridden into the midst of the enemy to their death. In 279 yet another P. Decius Mus, probably son of the consul of 295, was one of the consuls commanding at the battle of Ausculum at which the Romans were defeated by Pyrrhus; some sources credit him too with a devotio, but the claim is not supported by the rest of the tradition and is surely a fabrication. However, despite some scholarly skepticism, the probability is that at least the Sentinumdevotio is historical, and the earlier episode may be so as well (Livy 8.6.9–13, 9.1–13, 10.10–14; 10.28.6–18 provides our fullest accounts; other sources in Broughton 1951/1952: 1.135, 177; see also Oakley 1997–2005: 2.477–86; Feldherr 1998: 85–92).
One further Roman combat ritual which deserves notice is the burning of enemy arms after a victory as a dedication to one or more gods (Livy 1.37.5, 8.1.6, 8.30.8–9, 10.29.18, 23.46.5, 30.6–9, 38.23.10, 41.12.6, 45.33.1–2; App. Ib. 59, Lib. 48, 133, Syr. 42,Mithr. 45; Plut. Mar. 22; discussions: Oakley 1997–2005: 2.397–8; Östenberg 2003: 24–6). Reported recipients include Vulcan, Mars, Minerva, and the obscure Lua Mater. The practice is attested quite often down to the early first century, but Sulla at Chaeronea in 86 is the last commander reported as observing it. Different practices are reported in the early Imperial period: the dedicating of mounds of weapons as monuments and even, on one occasion, the throwing of broken weapons into rivers (Tac. Ann. 2.22.1; Florus 2.24.9, 30.23). It has been thought that burning of enemy weapons was originally intended to dispose of objects felt to be taboo, but there is no reason to think that there was ever a requirement that all captured arms should be disposed of in this way. Selected items were brought back to Rome to be carried in triumphs and displayed permanently in temples or on private houses (Rawson 1990).
THE RETURNING VICTOR
On returning to Rome, and if authorized to do so, victorious commanders entered the city in a triumph, a ceremony in which, as Polybius perceptively remarked (6.15.8), “a vivid impression of their achievements is put before the citizens’ eyes by the generals.” Said to have been celebrated over three hundred times over the course of Roman history, the triumph is by far the most important and the best documented of Roman war rituals. From the later fourth century to the end of the Republic, it was the supreme expression of the competitive ethos of the elite and of the Roman people’s delight in their success in war.5 The evidence comprises plentiful literary accounts of individual triumphs, artistic representations, and the remains of inscribed lists of triumphs (the Fasti Triumphales) from the later first century, of which the fullest forms part of the so-called Capitoline Fasti, probably set up on the Arch of Augustus in the Forum.6 While the triumphs reported for the kings and some of those for the early Republic are not historical, the record is reliable and nearly complete from at least the early third century. A good deal can be reconstructed about triumphal custom as it operated in the last two centuries of the Republic, and some of the main points will be outlined below. Much, however, remains obscure, and it is clear that individual triumphs varied considerably and practice evolved greatly over time.
The origins of the triumph were in dispute in antiquity. Different etymologies were proposed for the name and different explanations for the use of laurel, while the first triumph was credited by some to Romulus and by others to the elder Tarquin (etymology: Varro, LL 6.68; Pliny, NH 7.191; Isidore, Orig. 18.2.3; laurel: Plin. HN 15.133–5; Festus 104L; Romulus or Tarquin: Dion. Hal. 2.34; Plut. Rom. 16; Livy 1.38.3; Degrassi 1947: 534–5). Florus (1.1.5) alleges that Tarquin introduced the triumph from Etruria, identified by several writers as the source of the triumphing commander’s dress. An Etruscan origin for the triumph has been widely accepted in modern times, and may be correct, but the evidence is thin, and the related belief that Rome was under Etruscan rule during the reigns of the last kings has been refuted. There has been much modern discussion about the triumph’s supposed origin in religious ritual: one theory interprets it as a purification rite, while another holds that both the triumph and the circus games derive from an Etruscan New Year festival. All these suggestions are mere speculation, and they have nothing to tell us about what the triumph meant to participants and spectators in the mid- and late Republic, for whom the religious element in the celebration consisted simply of the closing observances on the Capitol (triumphal origins: Bonfante Warren 1970; Versnel 1970; Coarelli 1988: 414–37; Rüpke 2006; cf. Beard 2007: 305–18 [salutary skepticism]; Etruscan rule refuted: Cornell 1995: 151–72).
The process of claiming a triumph began in the field. A commander who won a significant victory was hailed “Imperator” by his troops. He then had his fasces decorated with laurel and continued to use the laurel and the title Imperator until his return. Following such an acclamation, the commander would send a “laurelled letter,” a tablet wreathed in laurel (litterae laureatae), to the Senate announcing the victory and requesting the voting of a supplicatio. This ritual was used not only (as above p. 546) to seek the gods’ support, but also in thanksgiving. The voting of a supplicatio created the presumption that a triumph would follow. Cicero’s correspondence of 51–50 vividly illustrates the lengths to which commanders and their friends might go to secure a favorable vote (Beard 2007: 190–9).7
Claims to a triumph normally required the approval of the senate, which allocated funding from the treasury for the costs of approved triumphs. On their return to Rome commanders who aspired to a triumph were received at a Senate meeting convened to consider their claim in a temple outside the pomerium, usually one of the adjacent temples of Apollo and Bellona near the Circus Flaminius, northwest of the city. Promagistrates, whose imperium would otherwise lapse when they crossed the pomerium, also required a law to be passed by the assembly granting them imperium for the day of the triumph. (There is no reason to suppose that such a law was also required for magistrates still in office.) Triumphs celebrated without senatorial approval were very rare: in 223 C. Flaminius (in another of his disputes with the Senate) and his fellow consul secured approval from the popular assembly instead; two consuls, L. Postumius Megellus in 294 (or 291) and Ap. Claudius Pulcher in 143, triumphed without approval and despite tribunes’ opposition (223: Zonaras 8.20.7; Postumius: Livy 10.37.6–12; Dion. Hal. 17/18.5.3; Claudius: McDougall 1992).
On four occasions between 231 and 172 commanders whose applications had been rejected by the Senate organized triumphs outside Rome on the Alban Mount, with its temple of Jupiter Latiaris (Brennan 1996). Some of those denied a full triumph by the Senate were accorded the lesser honor of an ovation, in which the commander processed on foot (or occasionally horseback) rather than in a chariot, wearing the toga praetexta (the purple-bordered toga which was magistrates’ normal garb) rather than the triumphal dress, and garlanded with myrtle rather than laurel (see Rohde 1942; Richardson 1975: 54–7).
We are particularly well informed about senatorial debates on triumphs in the late third and early second century, thanks to the survival of this part of Livy’s history. One factor which made these issues particularly pressing in the early second century was the exceptional opportunities for triumph-seeking provided by the frequent warfare in Spain, northern Italy, and the Greek East, not only for consuls, but also for praetors, who seldom triumphed at other periods (Rich 1993: 49–52).
Livy’s accounts make it clear that, while various criteria were taken into account, they were not applied with full consistency and political influence played a part (see Richardson 1975; Develin 1978; Beard 2007: 199–214; Pittenger 2008). Only those commanding in their own right and in or following a magistracy were deemed eligible. Private citizens holding special commands in Spain in 210–197 were thus denied a full triumph, though some obtained ovations. Pompey was finally to force the abandonment of this principle, with all three of his triumphs (in 81, 71, and 61) following such special commands. A new factor which became an issue in some of the debates reported by Livy was whether the commander had brought his army back. In earlier times victorious commanders had always brought their armies home, but Rome now needed to garrison some provinces permanently. Not having brought his army home was the pretext used for decreeing Marcellus an ovation rather than a full triumph following his capture of Syracuse. From 200 some commanders who had passed their armies to their successors were allowed to triumph if they had left their provinces pacified, but, when L. Manlius Acidinus returned from Spain in 185, he was held not to have met this requirement and so accorded only an ovation (Livy 39.29.4–5; Develin 1978: 432–5).
Most often, however, the outcome turned on whether the commander’s achievements merited a triumph. Usually a significant victory, with substantial enemy losses, was required, and heavy Roman losses sometimes led to refusal. However, in some early second-century cases, triumphs were approved without significant enemy losses, and in 180 the previous year’s consuls secured triumphs just for deporting Ligurian tribesmen, although no blood had been shed (Livy 40.38). It may have been in reaction to this episode that the reported law requiring five thousand enemy casualties was passed, if it is historical (Val. Max. 2.8.1; Oros. 5.4.7; cf. Beard 2007: 209–10). Disputes about whether commanders’ achievements truly merited a triumph continued in the first century: in 95 the triumph decreed for L. Licinius Crassus just for repressing raiders in northern Italy was vetoed by his fellow consul Scaevola, who claimed that it had only been voted because of Crassus’s status and influence (Cic. Pis. 62; Asconius 14–15), and in 62 Cato and another tribune passed a law imposing penalties for false casualty declarations (Val. Max. 2.8.1).
Two further criteria came into play in the late Republic. Full triumphs required a “legitimate enemy” (iustus hostis: Gell. 5.6.21), and so the slave wars fought in Sicily and Italy earned only ovations. Only external wars could be celebrated, and so the triumphs which Pompey, Caesar, and Octavian won in what were in reality civil wars were presented as over external enemies or regions. In 36 Octavian took an ovation for his defeat of Sex. Pompeius, representing it as a victory over slaves and pirates.
Once the triumph had been approved and his preparations were ready, the commander formed up his procession outside the city in the Circus Flaminius and Campus Martius. In front of the commander’s chariot were paraded spoils and captives, as well as musicians, the animals to be sacrificed, and sometimes gold crowns donated by allied communities. The spoils could include enemy weapons, chariots, and standards; bullion; art works and other precious objects; and even captured animals such as war elephants (first displayed in 275 and 250). Pride of place among the captives would go to any captured enemy leaders, especially royalty. Also often paraded before the chariot were placards proclaiming the commander’s achievements and sculpted or painted representations of his conquests, which might show conquered cities, rivers, and nations, or absent leaders, such as Cleopatra. The commander’s young children could ride with him, either in the chariot, or, if they were youths, alongside. After the chariot came the officers and troops who had served under him, and sometimes Roman citizens whom he had freed (on triumphal display; see especially Beard 2007: 107–86; Östenberg 2009).
The commander’s chariot, drawn by four horses led by a slave, had a high, tower-like shape, and was elaborately decorated. The commander himself wore the tunica palmata and, over it, the toga picta, both purple and embroidered, and he carried in his right hand a laurel branch and in his left an ivory scepter, topped by an eagle. He wore a laurel crown, and a slave riding with him held a heavy gold crown over his head. Some sources report a custom that the commander’s face, or even his body, was painted red, but the best authority, Pliny (HN 33.11), implies that the practice was long obsolete. We should not infer from this evidence, as many scholars have done, that the triumphing commander represented a king or a god or both, a claim made by no ancient source. The distinctive tunic and toga, the scepter and the gold crown were all also used by the presiding magistrate at the procession for the circus games, and were presented along with other magisterial insignia to foreign kings recognized as friends of the Roman people. Roman tradition held, perhaps rightly, that these items had been the insignia of their kings, but this did not mean that magistrates using them appeared as kings for the day. The triumphal insignia were kept in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and brought out when required (SHA 18.40.8, 20.4.4), and this fact and the god’s role in the triumph and the games adequately explains why Livy describes the triumphing commander as “decorated with the costume of Jupiter” (10.7.10: Iovis … ornatu decoratus) and Juvenal (10.38), writing of the circus procession, speaks of the “tunic of Jupiter.” Some late sources associate the red paint on the commander’s face with the periodic touching up with such paint of the terracotta cult statues of Jupiter and other gods, but this is merely an antiquarian attempt to explain the archaic practice.
The slave accompanying the commander was required repeatedly to tell him to “Look behind” (Respice). Like the ribald songs sung by the troops, some at the commander’s expense, this served as a warning against arrogance and perhaps to ward off evil. The addition “Remember that you are a man” appears only in Christian sources (Tertullian, Apol. 33; Jerome, Epist. 39.2.8).8
Once it was drawn up, the procession advanced from the Circus Flaminius and crossed the pomerium at the Triumphal Gate (Porta Triumphalis), of uncertain location. The route followed within the city is disputed, and may not have been fixed, but all triumphs culminated in the approach, by the Sacred Way, to the Forum.9 Once at the Forum, commanders could, if they chose, have elite prisoners executed in the carcer, the state prison (Beard 2007: 128–32).
From the Forum, the commander ascended to the Capitol, and there sacrificed the victims to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and his fellow gods and deposited laurel from his fasces in the lap of Jupiter’s statue. As we saw above, these acts constituted the fulfillment of the vow he had made on his departure from the city (above, pp. 546–7; the laurel: Plin. NH 15.134; Obsequens 61a). Thus the Senate’s decisions on triumphs were in effect religious as well as political judgments, assessing not only the commander’s achievements, but also whether Jupiter had fulfilled the request made in the departure vow.
The festivities were concluded by a banquet for the senators on the Capitol. Some triumphing commanders feasted the whole populace, but this appears to be a late development: Lucullus (in 63) and Caesar are the first certainly attested instances (see Beard 2007: 257–63, correcting misconceptions).
The distinction conferred by the triumph continued to be enjoyed by the commander during the rest of his life and by his family after his death: those who had triumphed were entitled to wear a laurel crown at the games, and after their death the actors representing them in the funeral processions of their descendants wore a toga picta (Mommsen 1887–8: 1.437–41; funerals: Polyb. 6.53.7). From the later second century, triumphal temple building became less common, but other public buildings, such as porticoes, were built from commanders’ spoils. Pompey and Caesar demonstrated their preeminence with monuments on a wholly new scale: Pompey constructed Rome’s first theater, with an accompanying portico, on the Campus Martius, and Caesar’s buildings included a whole new forum (triumphal building: Ziolkowski 1992; Orlin 1997; Bastien 2007: 331–42).
The fall of the Republic led to a transformation in the role of the triumph (Hickson 1991; Beard 2007: 68–71, 295–305; Krasser et al. 2008). At first triumphs were numerous: the triumvirs were happy for their supporters holding provincial commands to claim triumphs, and twenty such commanders celebrated triumphs in the period 43–26. Triumphal building revived too: many of these commanders restored temples, erected secular buildings, or repaired roads. After the constitutional settlement of 27, however, by which the provinces were divided between Augustus and the Roman people, the governors of the emperor’s provinces (legati if senators, praefecti if equestrian) commanded under his auspices and held imperium not in their own right, but by delegation from him. They were thus not eligible to be saluted imperator or hold a triumph. In the course of Augustus’s reign, a consolation prize was devised: legati who achieved success in war might be awarded the ornamenta triumphalia, in effect the right to wear the laurel crown at the games, usually accompanied by the erection of an honorific statue in Augustus’s new Forum.
Warfare in Africa early in Augustus’s reign enabled two of its proconsuls to win triumphs: L. Sempronius Atratinus and L. Cornelius Balbus triumphed in 22 and 19 respectively, and Balbus dedicated a theater in 13. However, Balbus proved to be the last commander to triumph outside the imperial family. There is no reason to postulate a deliberate policy to permit no more such triumphs in the aftermath of Balbus’s celebration.10 From circa 11, Africa was the only one of the people’s provinces to retain an army, and, after Balbus, there was no further warfare there until A.D. 3. By then the practice of granting triumphal ornaments to legati was well established, and it will have seemed natural that victorious proconsuls should be content with the same. However, the effect was to secure a monopoly not only of the triumph itself, but also of triumphal imagery and ideology for the emperor and his family.
Augustus held no further triumphs after his three-day triumph on August 13–15, 29, declining those decreed by the Senate. He only held command in person once more, in Spain in 26/25, and to hold a triumph for this war or for successes won by others commanding on his behalf would merely have dimmed the luster of the triple triumph. However, having won eight acclamations as imperator in person, he continued to accept further acclamations for successes won by members of his family, bringing his total to twenty-one by the end of the reign, and, when returning from war zones after such an acclamation, he dedicated his laurels on the Capitol (Res Gestae 4.1; Dio 54.25.4, 55.5.1). Augustus planned to enhance the prestige of family members by granting them commands with independent imperium and then allowing them to triumph. However, in the event only his stepson (and later adopted son) Tiberius triumphed, in 7 and A.D. 12. Similarly, under Tiberius, Germanicus was accorded a triumph in A.D. 17. Thereafter triumphs were celebrated only by emperors in person, and were rarities: from Claudius’s in 47 to Severus Alexander’s in 233 just ten triumphs were held (see Campbell 1984: 133–42).
Although triumphs under Augustus and his successors became infrequent, triumphal themes played a central part in the imagery and ideology of the Imperial regime. Two of the most vivid expressions of this under Augustus were the new Forum Augustum with its temple of Mars Ultor, dedicated in 2, and his funeral in A.D. 14. The colonnades of the Forum held statues of great Romans, most of them men who had triumphed; inscriptions commemorated the peoples Augustus had conquered, and in the center of the Forum stood a triumphal chariot, originally voted in his honor in 19; it was decreed that the temple should henceforth play an important part in triumphal ritual (Suet. Aug. 29.2; Dio 55.10.3). The funeral procession included a triumphal chariot carrying his image and images of the nations he had conquered (Dio 56.34.3).
Another, much rarer, ritual of military return also came into renewed prominence under Augustus, namely the dedication of spolia opima, that is, arms and armor taken from the body of an enemy commander killed in battle (Rich 1996a; Kehne 1998; Flower 2000; Tarpin 2003; McDonnell 2005; Sailor 2006). According to tradition, such spoils should be dedicated by the man who had killed the commander in the tiny, ancient temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, but only three such dedications had been made. The first, certainly legendary, dedication was ascribed to Romulus, who was said to have killed Acron, king of Caenina, and founded the temple to receive such spoils. The other two dedicators were A. Cornelius Cossus, who killed Lars Tolumnius, king of Veii (ca. 437 or 426), and the great Marcellus, who killed the Gallic king Viridomarus as consul in 222 and made the dedication as part of his triumph.
Marcellus’s dedication, which was celebrated in a play by the contemporary poet Naevius, will have made a great impression, and probably helped to shape the tradition about the ritual, as Flower (2000) observes, but he cannot have invented it, as she suggests, and the feat ascribed to the otherwise obscure Cossus must be historical. The spolia opima tradition may, as some scholars have suggested, derive from a primitive ritual, perhaps an early form of triumph or linked to dueling by champions (archaic triumph: Bonfante Warren 1970: 51–7; single combat: Oakley 1985: 398). An alternative possibility is that it began just with the celebration of Cossus’s feat, with the legendary Romulean precedent forming a later accretion.
A key aspect of the ritual became the subject of ancient scholarly dispute: some held that the spolia opima could be won only by the general under whose command the war was fought, but the great antiquarian Varro maintained that even a common soldier could win them. A further complication was provided by an obscure regulation, anachronistically ascribed to Numa, which distinguished three categories of spoils for dedication to three different gods (Festus 202–4 L; Plut. Marc. 8.9–10; Serv. Aen. 6.859). Support for Varro’s view was afforded by the Roman historians’ accounts of Cossus, which all reported him as achieving his feat under the command of the dictator Mam. Aemilius, in some versions as a military tribune, in others as magister equitum (Livy 4.17–20; Dion. Hal. 12.5; Val. Max. 3.2.4; Serv. Aen. 6.841; vir. ill. 25).
Augustus himself contributed to this debate, as we learn from Livy. In his narrative of the episode Livy follows the version in which Cossus was military tribune, which he says he found in all his authorities. However, he then inserts a perplexed excursus (4.20.5–11, perhaps a later addition) in which he acknowledges that the account he has given is incompatible both with the principle that spolia opima must be those “which a commander has taken from a commander” (quae dux duci detraxit), and with the evidence of the spoils themselves. He had, he says, heard that Augustus, who had restored the dilapidated temple of Jupiter Feretrius, had seen there a linen corselet with an inscription declaring that Cossus had won it as a consul (an office he held in 428). Augustus, however, can at best have seen only a later restoration, so his evidence cannot decide the question of Cossus’s status. In view of the unanimity of the historical tradition, it seems likely that Cossus was only a subordinate when he dedicated his spoils, and that the claim that only a commander could dedicate them is a later development.
By an extraordinary chance, M. Licinius Crassus, proconsul of Macedonia, achieved the feat of killing an enemy commander, Deldo, king of the Bastarnae, in battle, the very year of Octavian’s triple triumph (29). Crassus, however, did not go on to dedicatespolia opima. The extensive modern discussion of this episode, for which Dio (51.24.4) is our only source, starts from the influential article of Dessau (1906). Dessau rightly observed that for a proconsul at this time to achieve the rare distinction of dedicating spolia opima would have been most unwelcome to Octavian/Augustus, particularly in view of the ritual’s connection with Romulus, with whom he had long sought to associate himself. Dessau accordingly argues that Augustus had Crassus’s request to dedicate spolia opima rejected by the Senate on the grounds that he was not qualified to make the dedication, and that he exploited the discovery that he claimed to have made about Cossus to justify the rebuff to Crassus.
This conclusion has been generally accepted, but suffers from a grave difficulty: Augustus would have been hard put to find a plausible ground to challenge Crassus’s right to make the dedication. Crassus, contrary to Dio’s misconception (51.24.4, 25.2), was in independent command, and accordingly was hailed Imperator and triumphed on his return. No source states that Crassus was refused permission to dedicate spolia opima, and it is more likely that, recognizing that it would be impolitic, he chose not to exercise his right, either of his own accord or as the result of informal pressure. Crassus’s entitlement to dedicate spolia opima will thus not have come into dispute, and Augustus therefore cannot have had a political motivation for his claim that Cossus was consul when he dedicated his spoils. Augustus’s interest in the problem of Cossus’s status is better explained as arising from his keen interest in Roman antiquities. The issue was probably drawn to his attention by the great scholar Atticus, at whose urging he had undertaken the restoration of Jupiter Feretrius’s temple (Nep. Att. 20.3; the [controversial] view presented here is argued in full at Rich 1996a; see also Flower 2000: 49–53).
The spolia opima tradition was subsequently exploited to serve the purposes of the Augustan regime. When in 20 news arrived that Augustus had secured the return of the captured Roman standards and prisoners from the Parthians, the honors which the Senate decreed in celebration included the erection of a temple to Mars Ultor on the Capitol to receive the standards “in imitation of that of Jupiter Feretrius” (Dio 54.8.2). Like Romulus, therefore, Augustus was to be the founder of a temple for the receipt of a special category of spoils. In the event, the temple decreed for the Capitol was probably not built, and its role as a repository for the standards recovered from Parthia and future recovered standards was transferred to the great temple of Mars Ultor which Augustus dedicated in his new Forum. Pride of place in the Forum’s statue gallery was assigned, along with Aeneas, to Romulus, who was depicted carrying his spolia opima (Rich 1998: 79–97; Spannagel 1999: 15–25).
Suetonius (Claud. 1.4) tells us that Augustus’s stepson, Drusus, sought to win the spolia opima. Drusus commanded the invasion of Germany from 12 to 9; in his final campaign he reached the Elbe, but died on the way back. When Augustus next reentered the city, he dedicated his laurels not, as was customary, in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but in the neighboring temple of Jupiter Feretrius (Dio 55.5.1). This action was most likely a tribute to Drusus’s aspiration to win the spolia opima, probably also commemorated on the arch erected in his honor, on which, as coins of his son Claudius show, he was depicted as a charging horseman. Drusus, who was consul in 9, may have made a vow to Jupiter Feretrius on his departure from Rome, seeking his help in winning the spolia opima. While Augustus will not have wished a senator like Crassus to dedicate spolia opima, he will have been delighted for so signal an honor to befall a member of his family, whose military prestige he was eager to enhance (see Kehne 1998: 206–11; Rich 1999).
THE FETIALS
In the preceding sections our focus has been on the ritual activities of Roman commanders. We turn finally to the fetials, the college of priests with ritual responsibilities in respect to war and peace.11 The fetials’ rituals concerned the preliminaries of war, the solemnization of treaties, and the surrender of Roman offenders. The priesthood was clearly very ancient, and in early times the Latin and some neighboring communities probably had their own fetials. Some of what we are told about the fetials’ rituals is evidently archaic; for example, their use of sagmina, grass clumps taken from the Arx (the northern summit of the Capitoline Hill), and the designation of an individual fetial as pater patratus, empowered to act on behalf of the Roman people. However, much of our evidence about the priesthood derives from antiquarian constructions and has been influenced by the idealizing deployment of the institution in support of Roman claims to have fought “just and pious wars.” One instance is the claim of some writers that the fetials had once had an adjudicatory role, deciding, for example, on whether wars were just. Their expertise was surely confined to ritual and procedure, and the two reported consultations of the college by the Senate, in 200 and 191, concern matters of that kind (consultations: Livy 31.8.3, 36.3.7–12; alleged adjudication: Varro ap. Nonius 850L; Cic. Leg. 2.21; Dion. Hal. 2.72.4–5; Plut. Num. 12.13, Cam. 18.1–3).
According to Livy, who gives the fullest account (1.24.3–9), the fetial treaty ceremony concluded, on the Roman side, with the pater patratus striking a pig dead with a flintstone and swearing an oath calling on Jupiter to strike the Roman people similarly if it were the first to break the treaty.12 This procedure was used to solemnize the peace treaty with Carthage in 201, as is shown by Livy’s report (30.43.9) of a Senate decree authorizing fetials to leave Italy with flintstones and grasses.13 It appears that fetials still enacted treaties in the later first century: Varro (LL 5.86) states that they did so in his day, and two recently discovered inscriptions relating to treaties of 46 and 39 may mention fetial celebrants (Reynolds 1982: 89–90; Mitchell 2005: 240–1). However, other Roman treaty ceremonies are known: there is evidence for the pig-slaughter ceremony being performed by commanders instead of fetials (Cic. Inv. 2.91: the Caudine Forks treaty), and Polybius (3.25.6–9) reports different rituals for the swearing of Rome’s early treaties with Carthage. Some scholars have concluded that fetial involvement with treaties was a late development (Rawson 1973: 167; Rüpke 1990: 111–5), but it is more likely that the various procedures are all of early origin (cf. Zack 2001: 55–9; Richardson 2008).
We hear of five occasions when fetials, on the instruction of the Roman government, surrendered Roman offenders to the nation they had injured. In each case the surrenders are reported to have been rejected, but it was nonetheless held that they had served to avert responsibility for the offenses from the Roman people in the eyes of the gods. In three of the cases those surrendered were commanders (and sometimes perhaps also others) who had sworn to treaties subsequently repudiated: the occasions were an obscure incident in Corsica in 236 and two famous episodes in which treaties had been made to extricate armies, in 321 with the Samnites at the Caudine Forks, and in 137 with the Numantines in Spain (Caudine Forks: esp. Cic. Off. 3.109; Livy 9.1–12; Oakley 1997–2005: 3.3–38, 648–51; Corsica: Val. Max. 6.3.3; Dio fr. 45, Zon. 8.18.7–8; Amm. Marc. 14.11.32; Numantia: Rosenstein 1986). The other two cases concerned injuries to ambassadors, from Apollonia in 266 (Livy Per. 15; Val. Max. 6.6.5; Dio fr. 42, Zon. 8.7.3) and Carthage in 188 (Livy 38.42.7; Val. Max. 6.6.3; Dio fr. 61). The four later cases are certainly historical. The tradition on the Caudine Forks disaster has clearly been influenced by the later episode at Numantia, and many scholars hold that the reported repudiation of the Samnite treaty in 320 is a fiction. However, it may be historical (cf. Cornell 1989: 370–1), and the expedient of a voluntary Roman surrender of offenders to avert blame may indeed have been an innovation pioneered at that point. Its extension in 266 to those who injured ambassadors may have been prompted by the fact that the Romans had used the insulting of their ambassadors in 282 as a ground for war against Tarentum (see Barnes 2005). The highly controversial surrender of Mancinus to the Numantines in 136 was the last time the practice was observed (Saturninus underwent a capital trial in 102/101 for insulting ambassadors [Diod. 36.15], surely before a jury empaneled from the Senate rather than the fetial college as argued by Broughton 1987).
While the fetials were involved in swearing treaties and surrendering offenders in the later Republic, the traditions about their enactment of war preliminaries relate to earlier times. The fullest version is again given by Livy (1.32.5–14), who ascribes the introduction of the ritual to King Ancus Marcius (other sources credit it to Numa or Tullus Hostilius). Livy’s account opens with a mission to present Roman demands for satisfaction (res repetere); if the offending state does not comply, a war vote follows; finally, a fetial declares war by throwing a spear across the enemy border. However, this narrative betrays signs of having been patched together, and Livy appears to have combined two distinct fetial rituals, which are elsewhere mostly recounted separately.
We hear of two forms of the spear rite, one performed at the enemy border, the other at Rome, with the spear being thrown over a column in front of the temple of Bellona. In either version the rite merely initiated war; it did not convey notification to the enemy, whose presence was not required. The rite was performed at Rome in person by Octavian in 32 against Cleopatra, and again by Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 178 (Dio 50.4.5, 71.33.3). A late source (Servius Danielis, Aen. 9.52) states that it was transferred to Rome at the time of the war with Rome’s first overseas enemy, Pyrrhus, but this account is flawed (not least in that no declaration was required against Pyrrhus, who joined Tarentum as its ally in a war already under way). Octavian’s use of the spear rite served to support his portrayal of his war as against a foreign aggressor and of Antony as a traitor, and some scholars have suggested that he invented the entire rite for the occasion (Wiedemann 1986: 481–3; Rüpke 1990: 105–8). However, such an imposture would have been too readily exposed, and the spear rite at the enemy border predates Octavian’s enactment [Diod. 8.26, cited by Tzetzes]. Octavian, then, enacted a rite for which there was established tradition. However, by Octavian’s time it will have been at best long obsolete, and it may well be that at least one and perhaps both forms of the rite were antiquarian inventions.
Livy and Dionysius (2.72.6–8) give closely similar accounts of the fetial res repetere procedure, which evidently derive from a common source (other somewhat divergent sources include Cic. Rep. 2.31; Varro ap. Nonius 850L; Plin. HN 22.5; Serv. Aen. 9.52). The fetial goes to the offending nation and, cursing himself if the claim is unjust, proclaims the Roman demand for the surrender of property and persons at the border to the first man encountered at the city gate and in the forum. If the demand is not met, the fetial returns after an interval and calls the gods to witness that the Romans have not been given justice. Livy specifies the interval as 33 days, Dionysius as 30 (with the fetial returning every ten days). Much of this account is likely to be antiquarian invention. However, the tradition that the fetials were involved in presenting demands for satisfaction in early times must be sound, and it is probably also an authentic feature that the demands are specified, as for the return of stolen property and the persons responsible. Such a claim figures not only in reports of the fetial procedure, but also in our earliest account of a Roman demand for satisfaction, Plautus’s parody in the Amphitryo (203–10): before battle Amphitryo sends an embassy to demand the return of “the plundered and plunderers” (rapta et raptores). Recent studies have emphasized the likely frequency of raiding and private wars among the early communities of Latium and between them and their neighbors. It is thus plausible to suppose that the practice of demanding restitution through fetials originated as a means by which the communities could control such private warfare, giving the raiders’ community the choice between disowning them or accepting responsibility.13
Our information on the preliminaries of subsequent Roman wars is bedeviled by our sources’ preconception that Roman wars were generally fought in response to injuries to the Roman people or its allies and following the presentation of grievances and a declaration of war. Such principles are enunciated in Cicero’s philosophical works, and the late annalists who were Livy’s main sources took pains to construct their narratives to demonstrate Roman conformity with them (Cicero: Rep. 2.31, 34–5, Leg. 2.21, 34,Off. 1.34–8; see Ferrary 1995: 411–16; Roman conceptions of the just war: Kostial 1995). Nonetheless, some overall conclusions can be reached about Roman practice.
Before several of the wars of the early centuries of the Republic, Livy and Dionysius report the dispatch of fetials to present demands for satisfaction (ad res repetendas), either on their own or in association with senatorial ambassadors (legati), followed by a war vote and declaration, the last such notice being for war against the Falisci in 293 (see Oakley 1997–2005: 2.312–4; Santangelo 2008: 66–72; Rich 2011: 216–22). For what it is worth, this evidence certainly does not suggest that observance of the fetial ritual was standard before Rome’s wars in this period: such preliminaries are mentioned for only a few of the very numerous wars reported in the tradition. In fact most, perhaps all, of these notices are probably annalists’ inventions. It is likely that fetials continued to be dispatched to present demands for satisfaction before some of Rome’s wars during the early Republic and the conquest of Italy, especially when these demands could be couched in the form of claims for restitution and the surrender of offenders. However, all the fetial priests could do was proclaim demands, and from early times diplomacy was probably also conducted through ambassadors. We should not suppose that there was any period in which all wars were preceded by the dispatch of fetials.
From 264, the Romans were embroiled in numerous overseas wars, most notably against Carthage and, later, the kings of the Greek East, and, as we saw above (p. 546), the most important wars were usually begun with formalities including a war vote in the assembly. Fetials were no longer deployed on missions to other powers, which were now conducted solely through legati. However, the procedures for initiating war were still felt to form part of their expertise, and so, before the wars against Philip and Antiochus, the Senate consulted them as to whether the war needed to be declared to the king in person or whether an announcement at one of his guard posts would suffice, and the college responded that either method would be correct.
F. W. Walbank (McDonald and Walbank 1937: 192–7; Walbank 1941, 1949) argues that the Romans, before major wars in the second and third centuries, observed as standard a modified version of the fetial procedure in which the war vote in the Senate and assembly was followed by the dispatch of an embassy to present an ultimatum (res repetere) and, if it was rejected, declare war (bellum indicere). However, this view is not in accord with the evidence, and no standard procedure can in fact be discerned in the preliminaries of the major wars, which varied widely according to the circumstances. Diplomatic exchanges and Roman presentations of grievances took place before most of these wars over the period before the Senate reached its consensus for war (itself often months before the formal vote in the assembly). After that consensus had been reached, diplomatic contacts usually took place only at the initiative of the other party, although the Senate did, at least for a time, recognize an obligation to have a formal announcement of war conveyed to the enemy. Only for the Second Punic War was a war decision followed by an ultimatum: in 218, following the fall of Saguntum, a Roman embassy presented Carthage with the alternative of surrendering its commander Hannibal, or war. This appears to be the product of disagreements in the Senate and doubts about whether Hannibal had the backing of his home government. Resort was thus made to the old fetial device of offering the other party the alternative of surrendering the offender or accepting responsibility for their actions.14
Thus the ritual activities of the fetials all centered on the issue of communal responsibility. When fetials solemnized treaties, they bound the Roman people. When they presented demands for satisfaction to another community, they offered it the alternative of making restitution and surrendering offenders or accepting responsibility, and, when by a voluntary Roman decision they surrendered Roman offenders, they absolved the Roman people of responsibility for their acts.
It has commonly been supposed that the fetial law provided a comprehensive procedure to be observed before all wars. Some scholars have supposed that this imposed a moral constraint which the Romans scrupulously observed, others that it was a matter merely of ritual observance, devoid of moral content. As we have seen, in reality procedures were probably a good deal less clearly defined. The Romans did, however, for the most part recognize moral obligations both about how wars should be started and about the need for a just cause. They did not, however, usually find it difficult to convince themselves of the justice of their cause.
CONCLUSION
The material we have surveyed attests to the centrality of both war and religion in the life of the Roman Republic. Roman institutions were and remained in many ways strongly militarist, as is strikingly illustrated both by the supreme importance attached to triumphs and by the fact that, even when many of them ceased to have a realistic prospect of achieving this goal, all imperium holders, on departure from Rome, undertook vows which they could only fulfill by holding a triumph. Roman religious scrupulousness, however, was tempered both by readiness to innovate and by sober practicality: thus military requirements were not hampered by the incidence of dies atri or religiosi, and the administrative utility of the promagistracy led to its being increasingly widely used, although promagistrates could not take the auspices.
Change and innovation occurred throughout in response to particular needs and alterations in political and social circumstances. The period between the first two Punic Wars provides a good illustration: this brief interval saw such notable ritual episodes as the surrender of a commander to the Corsicans (236), the first historical closure of Janus (235), the first Alban Mount triumph (231), Marcellus’s dedication of spolia opima (222), and the demand for the surrender of Hannibal, modeled on the old fetial practice (218). However, the most radical change came with the replacement of the Republic by the rule of emperors. As with other Republican institutions, Augustus subtly deployed war rituals, some little known except to antiquarians, in the construction of his regime (e.g., the fetial spear rite and the closure of Janus). The new power dynamic was, however, expressed above all in the monopolization of the triumph, and its rarer counterpart, the spolia opima, by the emperor and his family.
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