Chapter 2

      Institutionalizing and Ordering Public Communication

      This chapter will substantiate the claim made earlier that religion is an important and growing field in public communication. The analysis undertaken here seeks to document the extent and boundaries of processes of rationalization. I concentrate on systematization as a historical process and form of rationalization. It is seen above all in the growing number of explicit norms regulating—and hence institutionalizing—occasions of public, and specifically religious, communication. At every stage of the planning for such occasions, notes were taken and protocols written by senators and pontiffs—crucially, not by the magistrates who organized the games but by the performing companies.¹ The ease of this cooperation between Roman magistrates and foreign professionals in the organization of ritual, already well developed by the middle of the third century, is one of the astonishing features of instrumental rationalization. In order to please the god, one might say, major shifts in the structure of public communication were accepted, whereas shifts in political participation were already a matter of much domestic conflict by the beginning of the century.

      When we regard developments in Rome from the end of the fourth century forward, we are already dealing with a complex society that must have had a multifaceted system of communicative spaces, to which upper-class banqueting belonged,² as well as professional or neighborhood clubs,³ Dionysian cultic clubs,⁴ patrician or plebeian special organizations, and family or client associations.⁵ With the gradual leveling of the patrician and plebeian classes, a process observed in the historical record primarily in connection with the Licinian-Sextian laws and the patrician-plebeian consulship, a unified aristocracy came into being in the second half of the fourth century. Its formulation of values and in particular its orientation to external affairs— aristocratic competition being now channeled into intensive and extensive imperialist action—led to increased dynamism in overall processes of historical change,⁶ which expressed itself in rapid expansion, increasing internal social differentiation, and rising affluence. With the First Punic War (264–241), Rome rose from a regional power to dominance of the Mediterranean. That role was challenged in the Second Punic War (218–202), but the challenge failed. This process constitutes the framework within which the specific changes analyzed below occurred.

      The next three chapters will examine in detail changes in the communicative spaces and functions filled by rituals. As we will see, we are confronted not only with rituals being gradually or suddenly modified. Additionally— and more importantly—we witness their proliferation, the creation of new rituals. Such processes of ritualization,⁷ which is to say, of forcing actions into stable form and public space, operated as a means of social control, and we will eventually have to take up the analysis of ritual in just those terms. Yet the involvement of gods complicated the functioning of ritual as a mechanism of control. Religion, in other words, could hide social power, but any such obfuscation could also result in softening and questioning it. At the end of that process—not at the beginning—it was important for some ancient observers and agents to identify religion as a distinct sphere or phenomenon. For now, however, the accent shall fall on the notion of the public and developments outside religious rituals.

      The Senate

      The center of political communication was the Senate, an assembly of the three hundred leading men—old men, if one believes the ancient derivation of the name from senes. Although the institution was old, it gained the stability that made it the focus of republican decision-making processes and the efficient counterpart of ever more powerful magistrates around the year 300. This stability was provided by rules of membership that granted lifelong place to former officeholders of particular rank, which in turn produced a social structure in which the principle of seniority completely dominated the regulation of the right to speak and the order in which votes were cast.⁸

      The centralization of the public life of the upper classes in this committee is connected in the textual tradition with the censorship of Ap. Claudius Caecus in 312, who consistently applied the rules for admission to the Senate that had developed previously. His resistance to the expansion of the priestly colleges according to proportional representation of patricians and plebeians gives rise to the suspicion that alternatively institutionalized “publics” were feared. The publication of a list of days suitable for court sessions (fasti; see Chapter 7), which was among the priestly duties of the pontifex, was probably intended to serve the same purpose.⁹ General availability of the information reduced the influence of wide-ranging institutions. Writing is the medium of publication.

      Another early innovative political use of writing is connected with the name of Appius Claudius. His speech opposing peace with Pyrrhos in 280 has long been accepted as the oldest surviving Roman speech.¹⁰ This is more than a bit of cultural history trivia. A quarter of a century after his consulship (307), Claudius must have been one of the longest-serving and highest-ranking senators. The written dissemination of his speech—calling it a “private publication” would give a false impression of the number of copies in question— emphasized his disagreement with the outcome of the Senate’s deliberations, namely the decision to accept an offer of peace from the victor, Pyrrhos. The publication produced a “public,” no matter how small and diffused, which existed outside the norms of how senatorial consensus is reached. Without knowing the publication’s contents, it was not possible to discern whether Appius intended to bolster his arguments or his own person: what we see here is a break with tradition, but not a trend.¹¹

      Probably in the following decades, the Roman pontifices maximi began not only to produce written minutes but also to publish excerpts of these on a whitewashed wooden board.¹² Documentary procedures in the Senate probably provided the precedent for such written minutes, but this remains speculation in view of our lack of knowledge of both types of text in this period. Again, “publication” is a term used advisedly, as we know neither the intended nor the actual readers. In fact, it may have been the gesture of publication—of assuming literacy and of addressing a public of undefined size—that was decisive: acting in public, in the form of addressing the public, ensured institutional independence and significance.

      These acts of publication must be evaluated in light of the contemporary use of writing: the central political usage was in the preservation of official resolutions on bronze copies and placed to allow general access. This had been the case in the codification of the Twelve Tables. To what extent the later canonical text accurately reflects traditions of the fifth century or is the result of a process of collection and commentary may remain here an open question.¹³ Over against this evidence for the currency of writing in public must be set the vastly greater evidence for viva voce communication. When a public audience was actually wanted, people were required to be present in high numbers. This is true of the “hundred man court,” which in historical times consisted of three people from each of the thirty-five Roman tribus,14 and also of the quorum of at least one hundred senators stipulated for the administrative processes outlined in the Senate’s resolution on the Bacchanalia.¹⁵

      Public Assemblies

      The comitia and contiones were both large public assemblies, even if participants formed only a minor percentage of the populace.¹⁶ Recent research in ancient history has made it clear that the complicated voting procedures of the comitia served to obscure the fact that the assembly did not play a significant role in legislative decision-making. (Elections were a separate issue.¹⁷) The magistrates leading the assembly put laws to the vote that already had the support of the Senate without further debate. The potential to reach a specific resolution was not being tested: the vote was a ritual that signaled basic consent. The main motive for participating in the assembly was probably the opportunity to play out one’s role as a part of the structured populus Romanus.¹⁸ The “arguments” supporting the law consisted of respect for the elected