In contrast, the contiones did have an advisory function and were dedicated to the presentation of candidates and the explanation of planned laws. The final decision was still open, and speakers were concerned to determine or produce specific preferences. The audience’s reaction to such alternatives was signaled orally. In addition, as Jean-Michel David has shown for the law courts, we must not neglect aspects of argumentation beyond the verbal.19 In court, demonstration of support by wearing mourning clothes, invocation of the status of one’s friends and the size of one’s clientele, the readiness with which social distance could be overcome through gestures of personal intimacy, self-abasement through a gesture of supplication:20 these were all decisive factors in a competition in which the coherence of the arguments was only one level of evaluation.21 Alas, even if such maneuvers were passed down as tips, they receive only minimal systematic treatment in textbooks on rhetoric. The rationalization of values—which type of behavior should be regarded as acceptable by all participating parties in court22—remained fragmentary, limited by the interest in individual victims.
Rituals
Political assemblies were neither the most frequent nor the most attractive occasions for convening large numbers of people in Rome. Holidays and large rituals provided such opportunities far more often. It is precisely in this connection that we can observe the most significant changes in the period under consideration here. This applies first to the frequency of holidays. Commencing with the final years of the fourth century, a rash of temple building continues down through the third. These building projects were the occasion for some intense conflicts between the Senate and their sponsors, most of whom had gained wealth as generals. These building projects are also associated with huge dedicatory festivities and permanently institutionalized holidays on the anniversaries of their foundation. Specific cults gained in value through connection to games (ludi), a process that began especially in the second half of the third century. As we have seen, traditionally the games consisted of races and athletic competitions. Dances were also an ancient element of games, which were probably professionalized under Etruscan influence and augmented by background scenes and slapstick dialogue. Games including dramatic plays on a Greek model (ludi scaenici) were, according to later Roman self-image, a resumption of these earlier forms.23 For the years 240 and 235 we have evidence of performances of plays by the first two dramatists whose names are known to us, namely the “half-Greek” Livius Andronicus, possibly from Tarentum, and Cn. Naevius, from Campania.24
Within a few decades, there was an explosion of opportunities for dramatic performance, of both tragedies and comedies. By the end of the third century eleven,25 and by the end of the second century around thirty, days for games had grown up out of the ritual framework of the ludi Romani.26 The two canonical genres were, after a few initial attempts in 173, augmented by the establishment of the mime at the annual ludi Florales, which then marginalized the other dramatic genres in the imperial period.27 The dramatic aspect increasingly overtook the circus-like aspect of the games.28
Nor was this the extent of large-scale ritual. Triumphal processions and ad hoc games on the occasion of military victories were also celebrated in most years, not to mention holidays without games, such as the Saturnalia, which increased to three and then finally to five days, as well as events for expressing supplication or gratitude, the supplicationes, when people took part in banquets in old Roman temples.
When changes in “public” communication can be detected, they are found in connection with these rituals. Sacrifices and feasts celebrated in families or with neighbors were at the center of traditional popular holidays, in contrast to the “weekly” holidays of the Nundines or Calends, Nones, and Ides, which were often celebrated in alternating locations or outside the city center. This also applies to the Neptunalia, a sort of Feast of the Tabernacle, the Parentalia celebrated at graves, the Matronalia and Poplifugia in the Field of Mars, and the drinking contest in the cult of Anna Perenna on the banks of the Tiber, and similarly to the Parilia, the purificatory fire in April, while the Saturnalia in December were more of a domestic holiday. It is not possible to determine the degree of popularity of the old horse races of the Equirria or the Consualia or the Equus October.29
The supplications initially followed this pattern.30 As supplicatory or thanksgiving holidays they were initially crisis rituals that were intended to mobilize the entire population to visit the temple and celebrate in the streets. Such a ritualized state of emergency was a regular feature of warfare in the early second century. It offered an occasion to strengthen solidarity with ever more distant theaters (and actors) of war. By the middle of the first century the emphasis of the same ritual had changed. We do not know to what degree the twenty- and fifty-day thanksgiving holidays that were declared on the occasion of Caesar’s victory in Gaul could be differentiated from everyday life. The resolution declaring the holiday was certainly more easily enacted than the actual holiday, for which no public funding at all was made available. In any case, everyday life was synchronized with significant military victories in this manner, and the person in whose name the gods were being thanked was a topic of conversation throughout the city. Thus, I presume, the period produced and extended focusing of communication on one subject, namely a person, instead of intensive face-to-face interaction between participants.
The other type of ritual that gained in importance from the middle Republic onward is characterized by just the opposite of the popular festivals reviewed so far, namely precise spatial centralization of symbolic action. The core elements of these rituals were processions (pompae) and the actual games. Typically, the procession began at a temple and ended at a circus. Even dramatic performances took place on improvised stages in the large circuses, including the Circus Maximus and, from the end of the third century, also the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius.31 While the actual ritual space—the path of the procession and the circus—could be used in various ways and thus remained architecturally underdetermined, it was framed by several means.32 A large number of temple buildings were concentrated in the area around the circuses, and the most important paths for processions to and from the Capitol and the Forum Romanum were lined by statues, columns, and victory arches. Thus a specific “public” space was created from the rather bland architecture of the areas of political assembly—comitium, rostra, curia—which was increasingly monumental and whose monumentalization worked to relate the success of the overall community to the achievement and glory of specific individuals. Statues built in honor of individual victors, and especially sacred buildings, served as primary media, so that the characteristics of the ludi and the supplicationes meet in their architectural expression.
How was communication carried out within this framework? The default stance is one of passivity. The Roman citizen found himself in the role of a spectator. This is true first of all for processions: taking part in the triumphal parade of Aemilius Paullus meant standing on the side of the street for three days and admiring the display of booty. The victorious soldiers could march in the procession, the senators could hail the parade and join it, but the center of attention belonged to the victor and his display of booty, both living and dead. Agents without citizenship dominated the pompa circensis. While the magistrate sponsoring the games and hierarchically organized Roman youth led the parade, chariot drivers, dancers, musicians, and clowns followed. Even the gods were mere Roman citizens. On the one hand they were taken along at the end of the procession. The sacrifice, when the procession had arrived at its goal, was dedicated to them. Primarily, however, they were spectators of the games and competitions following the procession. They had a front-row seat, so to speak, even if the games were not carried out in front of a temple.
The gods were therefore the target audience of the ritual, and the Roman spectators were only second-class spectators. The latter point is clearly indicated by the fact that, unlike in Greek festivities, general participation in sacrificial feasts was not the norm at Rome. Only in very rare exceptions did the public as a whole get anything to eat. The variously integrated epula were, like the lectisternia, meals for the gods, in which specific groups of priests and the senators could participate.
Such multifaceted communication is typical