In republican society, viewers of the movements and appearance of male bodies were trained to discern clues to the moral and political consciousness that lay beneath physique. My overview of the two principal ways in which the Roman elite wished for these bodies to be represented begins with a pair of passages from ancient authors that bracket the period under consideration. The first occurs in the historian Livy’s version of events that were alleged to have occurred in 494 BC. In reaction to the practice at Rome of debt slavery (nexum), by which a wealthy creditor gained mastery over a debtor’s physical well-being, the plebeian members of the army literally withdraw their bodies from participation in society, settling upon a hill outside the city to protest the conditions of the poor. The Senate sends to speak on its behalf a member of plebeian descent, the former consul, Menenius Agrippa, who offers the crowd a parable that Shakespeare was to use to open Coriolanus.1 The human body, he relates, was once in a state of internal revolution, since the limbs perceived that the stomach alone enjoyed the fruits of their constant labor. As a result, the extremities withdrew their usual services - hands no longer providing food, mouth refusing to accept what was offered, teeth disdaining their own work - until eventually the body as a whole began to waste away. The political moral of Agrippa’s fable is clear: the senatorial stomach may seem at rest (quietum), but its unnoticed workings are essential to the survival of the community. Within the dramatic context of Livy’s own narrative, subsequent events soon prove the validity of the parable. Like the restful stomach, it is Menenius at the center of the angry masses that allows the opposing factions of the early Republic to cohere.2 At the same time, however, Menenius’ analogy calls attention to the very political tension that it is designed to alleviate. Despite the tale’s emphasis on the mutual benefits that cooperation can offer to society, the dichotomy of Senate versus non-elite ultimately obtrudes, reasserting the paradox that union is in fact possible only through the imposition and enforcement of hierarchies. The Senate’s privileged role, like the stomach’s, is a function of the natural order. It is perhaps, then, not so ironic that the terms reached by the opposing parties - the creation of the office of tribune of the plebs and,
Eventually, of its independent Tribal Assembly - underscores the potentially fragmentary condition of the Roman citizen body. Furthermore, as we shall see, these newly created tribunes will themselves be included in the subsequent centuries of the Republic among those parts of the state that function analogously to the rebel limbs of Menenius’ parable. In the dichotomy of bodily representation that I intend to trace in this chapter, the active bodies of both these tribunes and other members of the non-elite will continue to contrast in the political arena with the calm physical appearance of the elite.
A comparison employed in the mid-second century AD provides my second starting point: a rare and vivid snapshot of a scene that must have taken place daily throughout Rome’s empire and during the late Republic. The orator Apuleius has been relating to his audience at Carthage the dilemma of the public speaker - the greater respect he demands from his audience, the more exposed he becomes to the possibility for public embarrassment. ‘‘Being low class provides plenty of excuses, having status {dignitas) plenty of difficulties’’ (Apul. Flor. 9.8). Apuleius then compares his own predicament with the particular behaviors of the elite and non-elite as each performs, side by side, their respective public duties. The proconsul, he notes, speaks infrequently and with moderation from a seated position, since his words can quite literally become law, while his personal attendant (praeco), unrestrained by the same considerations for status (dignitas), can either be stationary or wander about as he shouts contentedly at those in attendance. Contrasting public functions produce contrasting physical behavior.
These anecdotes - one a parable, the other an analogy - are two of only a handful of textual descriptions that allow us to perceive how the non-elite, the majority of Roman citizens, were meant to view their leaders as they performed affairs of state. What is particularly intriguing about these passages is the awareness that the elite participants betray concerning the potential for their calm facades to fail at persuading. The calm stomach in Menenius’ parable hardly matches the anxious Senate back in Rome’s Curia, and the composure of Apuleius’ magistrate hides a continual fear of misprision. Nevertheless, despite these glimpses behind the calm, both passages succeed in reaffirming the dichotomy promoted in elite-authored texts between the willfulness of unchecked physical activity - inevitably performed by either the nonelite or a malfunctioning member of the elite - and the authority conveyed by the stable body.
In the following pages, I wish to summarize the many manifestations that this dichotomy has taken in recent scholarship on the role of gesture and the body in ancient Rome. The two contrasting forms of elite or non-elite representation appear as readable in the physique of every Roman citizen and allow the educated - or prompted - viewer to read properly their meanings. I do not wish, however, to try to re-create what political activity at Rome may literally have looked like, a scholarly pursuit that in the end must prove elusive,3 but rather to analyze why our elite-based texts place so much emphasis on specific types of physical action. My discussion throughout is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, by which a given culture’s political activity becomes ‘‘em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable way of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking.’’4 As in the traditional society of the Kabyle of North Africa that Bourdieu studies, our ancient textual evidence depicts Romans of the Republic as displaying two habitus around which other aspects of society organize themselves. The elements that inform the division at Rome are, however, never strictly defined since each habitus engages in a constant process of revising itself in contradistinction with its counterpart. I will be showing some of the various opposing categories that lie on each side of this ideological divide and conclude by offering suggestions for further research on the ways in which, and the reasons why, these oppositions continued (and, indeed, still continue) to survive.
World History
