BMCR 2009.07.04: Clark on Pittenger, Contested Triumphs: Politics, Pageantry, and Performance in Livy's Republican Rome

Miriam R. Pelikan Pittenger, Contested Triumphs: Politics, Pageantry,
and Performance in Livy's Republican Rome.  Berkeley:  University of
California Press, 2008.  Pp. xiii, 365.  ISBN 9780520241398.  $60.00.


Reviewed by Jessica H. Clark, California State University, Chico
([email protected])
Word count:  1926 words
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Table of Contents (http://books.google.com/books?id=fs53Wa6fKRMC)

The Roman triumph -- its pageantry, ritual, and role in the
commemoration of the past -- looms large in the literary and material
record of the Roman Republic. In recent years, the triumph has begun to
receive the critical analysis that it certainly merits. Between 2005
and 2009, four monographs and one edited volume have explored the
historical and material records for the triumph in the Republican and
Imperial periods.[[1]] Miriam R. Pelikan Pittenger's Contested Triumphs
approaches the topic from a different, specifically historiographic,
angle, and analyzes the process of debate that surrounds the award of
the triumph in Livy's narrative. These debates emerge as a venue for
the recognition of a commander by his senatorial peers, in which the
process can be as important as the result.

In the two main sections of her beautifully crafted book, Pittenger
examines the mechanics of triumphal decision-making and examples of
triumphal debates in Livy. She argues persuasively that these debates
were about much more than who might triumph, or why; rather, they
provided an essential arena for the enacting of Roman, elite,
collective identity, and both the acclamation of success and the
resolution (or, at least, recognition) of conflicts. Ancient sources
are translated, and two appendices and a supplemental index give the
reader immediate access to triumphs as listed in Livy and the Fasti.
Although the ideal audience is surely classics scholars and graduate
students, the clarity of her prose and this level of accessibility
should encourage researchers in related fields to engage with
Pittenger's work.

Pittenger approaches the triumph through its presentation in the text
of Livy, an author who experienced his own scholarly renaissance in the
1990s. This makes for a fruitful intersection, as Pittenger is able to
take advantage of this recent reconsideration of Livy's methods --
which has tended to focus upon the first ten books -- while adapting
and modifying that reconsideration in the light of Livy's later
decades. Her chronological focus (on the triumphal debates of the late
third and early second centuries B.C.E.) and careful exegesis of the
debates' literary context combine to produce a welcome contribution to
the political and social history of the Middle Republic and to Livian
studies. In addition, the use of separated "Summary" sections at the
close of most chapters, and the occasional chapter "Epilogue," will
help the reader less familiar with the material obtain a clear sense of
what is at stake.

Although Pittenger notes in the preface that her topic might strike
many classicists as "frightfully arcane" (xi), her Introduction
establishes the wider context and broader interests of a study on
triumphal debates in Livy. Her point of origin is the important
assertion that the most successful public figures in the Republic were
those who possessed superior talent in both the "art of war" and the
"art of self-promotion" (1); the triumph and its attendant monumental
and textual commemoration is the venue where these abilities combined
to generate political capital for the triumphator and exempla for
historians such as Livy (1-2). Pittenger frames the body of her
introduction around one such example, the disputed triumph of M.
Fulvius Nobilior (187 B.C.E.). In this extreme case, Nobilior faced
consular opposition but eventual senatorial approval. Before the
celebration, the objecting consul attempted to return to Rome from his
province -- whereupon Nobilior advanced the date of his triumph, aiming
to avoid having "more of a struggle over his triumph than he had in the
war" (3; Livy 39.5.12). War may be Politik by other means, but had
Clausewitz seen Pittenger's Rome, he might have reversed his nouns.

Part I, "Setting Standards: Imperio Auspicio Ductu Felicitate,"
addresses the mechanics of triumphal decision-making in six chapters,
preceded by an introduction of the question "who deserved to triumph?"
The answer, it seems, is the general whose independent and successful
military activities in the field might be most articulately linked to
the mos maiorum, and its understanding of "independent" and
"successful," in senatorial debates -- that is to say, it varied, but
within certain limits. Thereafter, Pittenger devotes a chapter apiece
to six of the factors that might complicate or challenge the idea of
triumphal regulations in the Middle Republic.

Chapter 1, "Triumphal Decision Making and the SPQR," addresses the
question of which groups within Rome had the authority to grant a
triumph, concluding that while the commander might technically be able
to triumph without senatorial approval, the collective approbation of
the commander's peers was necessary to give the triumphal award its
full symbolic force. Pittenger's focus here, though, is on instances
where a commander invoked the people's authority, or his own, in making
his bid. The "Summary" makes clear Pittenger's intent: to highlight the
vexed nature of these exceptional events, and thus explain the
senatorial focus in what is to come.

Chapter 2, "Consular Tribunes and Privati cum Imperio: Magistracy and
Triumph," argues that no triumphs were celebrated by either military
tribunes with consular power or private citizens invested with
imperium. The consistent denial of (or decision not to seek) triumphs
suggests a firm requirement of the possession or prorogation of a
higher magistracy, although Pittenger does not dismiss other
explanations.

Chapter 3, "Crossing Provincial Boundaries: Joint Campaigns and
Overlapping Jurisdictions," tackles a similarly focused problem.
Pittenger concludes that triumphal awards in cases of a commander's
unclear authority were decided on individual bases. Here too commanders
might respond to senatorial decisions, strategically yielding honors to
a colleague or modifying the formal traditions of the triumphal
procession. Problems of succession -- when a commander's imperium might
technically have passed to another before a subsequent victory -- could
cause the Senate to deny a triumph, grant an ovatio, or in fact award a
triumph, without a clear system emerging for imposing consistency in
the future.

Chapter 4, "The Importance of Closure," outlines another area of
inconsistent senatorial decision-making. Determining when a commander
had brought his war to an end, and whether or not that determination
ought to rest with the Senate, generated a variety of solutions but no
firm criteria or reliable pattern. In consequence, political and
personal influences may have exerted both greater and more subtle
effects. At this point in her narrative, Pittenger's frequent
anticipation of the case studies of Part II creates a certain amount of
repetition -- a disadvantage for the reader proceeding from
introduction to conclusion, but a decision that allows each chapter to
stand on its own.

Chapter 5, "Body Counts; or, Who Killed Whom," addresses another
potential source of triumphal criteria, the number of Roman and enemy
casualties sustained. After acknowledging the textual and practical
unreliability of casualty figures, Pittenger suggests -- interestingly,
for the historian seeking a means of using these details -- that these
numbers can be read as "a political and cultural artifact rather than
as a guide for reconstructing" battles (105), although her subsequent
analysis relies more upon adjectives of scale and the inclusion of
quantitative details than the numeric figures themselves.

Chapter 6, "Patterns of Success," concludes Part I. Pittenger proposes
that the Senate's reluctance to impose impersonal standards for
triumphal decision-making arose from a belief that debate was essential
to the process. It was not in the interests of the republic to have
honors easily awarded or denied. Rather, mechanisms of elite
competition relied upon this formal venue for the voicing of political
and personal concerns: "triumphs were by no means the only thing at
stake in triumph debates" (124). While triumphs were not the only
recognition of success, and commanders who were denied or who did not
seek triumphs had a range of less formal commemorative options, it was
the triumphal debate that allowed a commander and his peers to define
and perform their political identities.

In the introduction to Part II, "The Performance of Politics and the
Politics of Performance," Pittenger conceptualizes her approach to
Livy's triumphal debates. Essentially, the process begins with the
historical victory itself: victorious commanders immediately began the
promotion of their accomplishments, employing various traditional means
in the hopes of determining the reception of their triumphal request
well before it came to be made. Other public figures might offer
supporting or contradictory views, and whatever images emerged would
form the Roman public's "collective memory" of the events and the
genesis of later historical accounts (in this, Pittenger compares
Livian debates to Homeric heroes' self-fashioning (143-45)). In
commemorative terms, the public reception of the event was inseparable
from the event itself. This near-codependence of the past upon its
present, literary, representation may give some ancient historians
pause, but those contemplating graduate seminars on the Roman Republic
will welcome Pittenger's meticulously referenced assessment of the
performance of elite competition.

The following eight chapters present the case studies upon which the
preceding analysis is based. After a short chapter on the triumphal
debates of the Second Punic War (Chapter 7), Pittenger devotes one
chapter apiece to L. Furius Purpureo in 200 (Chapter 8), L. Cornelius
Merula in 193 (Chapter 9), P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica in 191 (Chapter
10), M. Fulvius Nobilior in 187 (Chapter 11), Cn. Manlius Vulso in 187
(Chapter 12), M. Popillius Laenas in 173 (Chapter 13), and L. Aemilius
Paullus in 167 (Chapter 14). The range of these examples is extensive:
the selection includes the well-known and obscure, the successful and
the rebuffed, and encompasses a host of political, military, familial,
religious and purely rhetorical factors that determined the outcome of
these commanders' triumphal hopes. In each chapter, Pittenger considers
Livy's battle narratives in the light of the tone and substance of the
triumphal debates, and discusses the ways in which Livy's
representations ofultimately political performances in Rome inform his
accounts of the events themselves. Chronologically and structurally,
the battles come first -- but in commemorative and historiographic
terms here, the debates predate their subjects.

Here, then, is a key for navigating the complex interrelation of
Augustan Livy, his sources, and the Roman past (itself having the twin
forms of its transmission and the equally shadowy wie es eigentlich
gewesen). When paired with the excellent exposition of this complexity
presented in the Introduction (7-20), the great benefit of Pittenger's
critical approach here is undeniable. That said, each case-study may
spark disagreement on specific points -- but the inclusion of her
reading of each episode, much like presenting one's own translations,
allows the reader to follow the process of interpretation, and thus
increases the utility of these episodes as a basis for the generalized
arguments of Part I.

Pittenger's Conclusion ("Triumphs and Roman Values") begins with a
series of approaches to the ritual of the triumph itself, in terms of
its power as spectacle, its origins, and its relation to time and
space. Pittenger highlights certain details: the Fasti's ascription of
the first triumph to Romulus, for example, literally inscribes the
triumph as coterminous with Roman identity (277); the slew of
variations among triumphal processions not only defies classification
but served a historical purpose, leading Roman viewers to question and
explore the notion of tradition and evolution, past and future (279).
It is this notion, then, that joins with the specific arguments of
preceding chapters to support Pittenger's ultimate conclusion, that the
triumphal debates (in Livy's post-civil war context) represent an
attempt to reconstruct the Republic's most effective mechanisms of
self-governance, wherein the conflicts of commanders and statesmen
received a formal venue for their resolution and the performance of
Roman values. Livy thus allows the very "real" characters of the Roman
historical memory to enact a Roman collective identity, at once
inseparable from its present but unimaginable without its past.

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Notes:


1.   In chronological order: T. Itgenshorst, Tota illa pompa: Der
Triumph in der roemischen Republik (Goettingen, 2005); M. Beard, The
Roman Triumph (Harvard, 2007); J.-L. Bastien, Triomphe romain et son
utilisation politique a\ Rome aux trois sie\cles de la re/publique
(Rome, 2007); H. Krasser, D. Pausch and I. Petrovic, eds. Triplici
invectus triumpho: Der roemische Triumph in augusteischer Zeit
(Stuttgart, 2008); and I. Oestenberg, Staging the World. Spoils,
Captives, and Representations in the Roman Triumphal Procession
(Oxford, 2009).