A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic. Группа авторов

on the surface, and ensure its acceptance by assuring its meaning and sense.¹² It also confirms affiliations, generates compliance, grounds and maintains a collective identity and of a group – and this is a fundamental function of political culture understood as a ‘language of legitimation’. This language comprises, on the one hand, ‘a vocabulary of images, metaphors, rituals, assumptions and performances’, through which ‘political negotiations are conducted’, as well as, on the other hand, ‘a grammar, a set of conventions, governing the appropriate use of this vocabulary’ – a definition which seems to tie in quite nicely with Christian Meier’s concept of the ‘political grammar’ of late Republican Rome (Chapter 7).¹³ In this sense, political culture ‘constitutes the discursive environment in which power is legitimated’ (Braddick 2005: 69) – and more than that, this language serves the discursive construction of order, hierarchy and subordination and is therefore instrumental not only in representing power, but also in stabilising and even generating it: ‘Political symbols and rituals were not metaphors of power; they were the means and ends of power itself’ (Hunt 2004: 54).

Therefore, I suggest that we take the concept, firstly, to include the ‘symbolic dimensions of social action’ (Geertz 1973: 30) in the public sphere of politics and the concomitant communicative system of symbols, images and their semantics, shared (or at least understood) by the political community at large. Above all, secondly, a holistic model of a political culture in general (that is, premodern or modern, historical or contemporary) must highlight the specific interfaces and interconnections of these formal and social, ideological and symbolic layers, as well as their complex cross-referencing. A modern cultural history of politics could certainly profit from other modern models of middle-range explanatory reach which focus on these interdependencies, such as a systems-theoretical model of ‘institutionality’ which conceives of institutions both in terms of diachronic processes of acting out functions and their change, as well as in terms of habitualisation and structuration, ritualisation, formalisation and, ultimately, institutionalisation.¹⁴ Such a model should be able not only to describe functions and offices of any polity, but also explain the negotiation, emergence (or demise) and implementation of rules and norms, written and unwritten, and also of procedures and practices, formalised or informal.

By its very nature, I think, such a holistic model cannot do without comparative approaches, which focus on a whole variety of equivalent global and particular sociopolitical structures in different cultures in different (especially premodern) epochs. I again suggest that we must cross traditional disciplinary boundaries by drawing on comparative approaches as advanced in a volume of extreme importance which systematically put city-states in classical antiquity and medieval Italy in perspective (Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen 1991). This approach was inspired by innovative work on politics, its symbolic languages and ritual dimensions in late medieval and Renaissance city-state cultures, especially by the famous historians of early modern Europe, Edward Muir and Richard Trexler, and their analyses of civic rituals and public life in Venice and Florence.¹⁵

Further inspiration in the wake of the communicative and performative turns may be drawn from closely related recent German research on early modern political cultures of personal presence, immediate communication and ritual interaction.¹⁶ Last but not least, I suggest that we draw on the innovative and indeed radically new constructions of symbolic and ritual representations in the specific political culture during the French Revolution, focused on rhetoric, symbolic forms and images in general, and the revolutionary repertoire of festivals in particular (see Chapter 4).¹⁷

      1.2 Application(s) I – ‘Civic Rituals’ (Or: A Political Culture as an ‘Ensemble of Ensembles’)

Moving from a carefully developed theoretical underpinning of such a comprehensive concept of political culture, to its systematic empirical testing and practical application in an interdisciplinary research environment would certainly have a beneficial integrative and regulative effect on the field of (‘new’ political) history in general and ancient history in particular. As always, however, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.¹⁸

If we are to put these new approaches to good practical, that is histori(ographi)cal, use in the future, we need to integrate the detailed deciphering of the collective moral code into a more comprehensive description of the political culture of the Roman Republic as a complex multidimensional system. One might even formulate the ambitious ultimate aim of this project once again in the classic Geertzian terms: we have to learn how to read this ‘culture’ of the populus Romanus and (not only) its ruling class as ‘an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles’, which are inseparably interconnected by referring to, and affirming, each other. These ensembles and texts are inescapably ‘suspended in webs of significance’, and they consist of ‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life’ (Geertz 1973: 452, 5, 89). Obviously, therefore, our attention is no longer focused on actual politics, such as the decisions and actions of magistrates, commanders and the Senate, or speculations on alleged policies, trends and tendencies within the political class; nor can we just look at the social framework and/or the subsystem of the political institutions and formal procedures of decision-making in an isolated way. The first aspect which has become the centre of our interest now is not easy to characterise: what was not (and could not be) politically addressed, explicitly debated and put on the agenda of decision-making? Is there anything – and if yes, what – that remains implicit in the discourse of politics, but must nevertheless be considered a fundamental part of the system (and its basis of legitimacy)? Does this apply, for example, to the collective mental horizon of Romans and their lost world of concepts, meanings and ingrained views?

      Secondly, the concept of ‘civic rituals’ serves to denote an ‘ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles’ – that is, in concrete terms, the whole range of rituals, ceremonies and other spectacles which, as ensembles, make up the specific repertoire of ways, means and media which serve to affirm, reproduce, modify, criticise or otherwise negotiate the system of values, norms and conceptual codes of a given culture (see Chapter 28; Chapter 34; Chapter 35). It is this repertoire or ensemble which in turn complements, as well as overlaps and intersects with, yet another ensemble, which has its own text – namely the institutions and formal procedures of politics as a decision-making process (see Chapter 15; Chapter 16).

      That is why a broad range of symbolic forms of communication has always to be part of it too, regardless of culture, period and society: performances, games and other variants of theatrical spectacles, festivals, ceremonies such as processions, and other civic rituals of all kinds – which in this context also include genuinely political forms and formal procedures of decision-making, such as the contio or electoral assemblies (see Chapter 33; Chapter 34; Chapter 35; Chapter 16). It has long been acknowledged that symbolic and ceremonial (or expressive) functions and forms of rituals on the one hand, and the technical (or instrumental) functions of open-ended procedures on the other, which are geared to decision-making and/or the formal enactment of decisions, cannot be compartmentalised in specific types of (rational) procedures (versus ceremony, ritual, or even performance). Nor can these alleged ‘types’ be neatly assigned to particular stages of historical development, let alone in a unilinear process of rationalisation: it is by no means only and alone in premodern cultures that,