procedures also have symbolic, ceremonial and ritual dimensions and that, on the other hand, pageantry, ceremonies and rituals are more important and play a kind of special role sui generis in the language of legitimation which makes up the complex dramaturgy of politics and power. Both are also true in modern societies and political cultures, in an illimitable variety of complementary as well as mixed forms.

In different ways and on different levels, procedures, ceremonies and civic rituals all serve the regular reproduction and affirmation of the ‘indigenous civic identity and ideology’, as Edward Muir calls it, an identity based on a broad consensus about social norms and values. Such rituals make these abstract values and the civic identity as such visible and, in a way, tangible by staging and putting them on public display (in the full sense of the term), thereby confirming and renewing their validity and the universal consensus. At the same time, according to Muir, the repertoire of rituals and ceremonies provides a ‘medium of discourse’ – or, to put it in another way, an important part of the vocabulary of any language of symbolic communication – between the participating social groups.¹⁹

Civic rituals illustrate the valid and legitimate arrangement of human relationships – and, in the case of the Roman Republic, these relationships are by definition and indeed by nature hierarchic, defined by a steep asymmetry of authority and power.²⁰ Hierarchy permeates not only all formal and informal relationships between the political elite and the ordinary people of the populus Romanus overall, as constituent classes of the political community as well as between an individual senator as patron and priest, consul and commander, and the man in the Roman street as ordinary citizen, client and soldier (see Chapter 18; Chapter 20; Chapter 17; Chapter 22). Hierarchy is also the omnipresent ruling principle that defines the complex network of relationships within the senatorial elite itself, based on the hierarchical ordering of offices in the cursus honorum, the consolidation of which was a prolonged, conflict-ridden and complex process – a process practically identical with the consolidation of the patricio-plebeian oligarchy as such.²¹

In a nutshell – and to use the precise concepts coined by Edward Muir, in order to characterise Renaissance Venice, its ‘serene society’ and inheritance of myth and ritual – ‘government by ritual’ in the Roman ‘republic of processions’ was based on a repertoire (or ensemble) of civic rituals (themselves ensembles) that was intricately interconnected by a rich texture of symbols, images, meanings and messages, revolving around the omnipresence of, and complex correlation between, concepts of power and hierarchy.²² In a culture of spectacular visibility, the language or poetics of power are necessarily visual. This is especially true of a political culture such as that in Rome, that has been appropriately named a ‘civilisation of spectacles’. In the specific sense of the concepts ‘spectacle’, ‘ritual’ and ‘ceremony’ underlying this reconstruction of a political culture, the whole repertoire of ritualised interaction in the shape of social gestures, postures and manners, the range of forums and modes of communication between high and low, senators and citizens, patrons and clients, magistrates and assemblies, commanders and soldiers, tribunes and plebs is part of the same field of social action.²³

That means that it is simply not enough to exercise power by pulling strings behind the scenes – in the Republic, as in other societies, power only becomes real when and if it is seen to be exercised, it needs publicity and performance, that is in theatrical terms, actors, who are present (in the full sense of the word), a text (in both senses of the concept), a stage and a co-present audience.²⁴ The same is true for hierarchies: they are not just in place, defining and reproducing themselves – they need to be acted out in public to reproduce and affirm themselves. This is particularly true in a city-state system in which rule and the most important acts of ruling are carried out publicly, in the presence and literally under the eyes of those who are being ruled, and who are thus explicitly or implicitly the addressees of these acts. Moreover, this co-presence and, even more so, the different supporting roles of a co-acting citizenry in many civic rituals generates a specific Roman kind of consensus and even complicity, which the exercise of government and authority in this political culture depended on, and which was therefore part and parcel of a typical city-state government as a process shared between rulers and ruled.²⁵ It is exactly this variant of rule in, and through, face-to-face communication which necessarily has a particular need for special forms and media of symbolic interaction in the shape of civic rituals: they structure and channel the interaction between rulers or ruling classes – or rather their representatives physically present in a given situation – and the ruled as co-present audience and addressees; and, last but not least, these rituals, in which power is (seen to be) exercised in the shape of performative acts of ruling, render this situation calculable and its results foreseeable, thus providing the kind of dependability which is the prerequisite of stability, continuity and legitimacy.

In this system, commensurate with its culture of personal presence, visibility and physical performance, it was a particularly sophisticated ensemble of civic rituals that took centre stage. Every single ritual is a peculiar hybrid of dramatic and ceremonial elements, derived from different sources, with a specific syntax, taxonomy or text of its own. As a systemic ensemble, civic rituals constitute a symbolic language and serve as a medium for a continuous discourse among the constituent groups of the political community – in this case between the political class and the populus Romanus, but also among the political class itself. This particular subgenre of rituals is particularly designed not only to stage and thus reveal, but to constitute and continuously reproduce an exclusively Roman civic ideology and a sense of collective indigenous identity based upon a broad consensus about political and social values – such as the pompa funebris. This demonstratively public funeral ritual of the great gentes was designed to enhance their respective accumulated social capital by symbolically staging the return of the ancestors into the Forum Romanum as the central civic space and onto the rostra as the most prominent stage of public appearance (see Chapter 8; Chapter 32). This ritual must be read as an implicit appeal to a universal consensus between members of the gens, dead or alive, as actors on the one hand and their social peers and the people as co-present audience on the other. It is an ideological consensus about individual and familial contributions to Rome’s greatness, in the shape of outstanding accomplishments in politics and war, as the only legitimate origin and foundation of honours and honores, reputation, rank and membership in the political elite.²⁶ The ideology of commitment and reciprocity and its regular ritual representation, which is particularly impressive and effective through the constant repetition of key concepts and principles in the laudationes, the use of the same symbols and the implementation of the same basic syntax, is an important symbolic source of a shared sense of unity and coherence, which in turn is a prerequisite for the legitimate exercise of authority.

Moreover, civic rituals are commentaries on the city, not only on its internal order, but also on its relationship with the outside world – such as one of the most complex and interesting civic rituals, the pompa triumphalis. This particularly splendid spectacle was designed to stage not only the ceremonial return of the victorious commander-in-chief into the city, but also the ritual completion of the subjugation of yet another foreign nation under Roman rule and the symbolic appropriation of yet another distant part of the world by the populus Romanus, partly co-present as awe-inspired civil, as well as civic, audience and partly co-acting in the procession of the ordinary soldiers following the triumphal chariot (see Chapter 17; Chapter 35). It was a discourse about power in the shape of conquest of, and control over, the world – and thus yet another aspect of the ideological consensus between the populus Romanus and its ruling class, and again a