In this book Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp explains the political culture of the Roman Republic under the rubric of ‘theatre of power’. Intended for a wide readership, part of the remit of this series, this book spans the Roman Republic, beginning with the creation of the patricio-plebeian aristocracy in the fourth and third centuries b.c.e. along with its value system and the concomitant ritual forms of elite self-representation (assemblies and grand processions, above all). He continues his explication through the expansion of the imperial Republic, concluding with Augustus’ harnessing of these traditional forms in his invention and justification of the Principate.

H. argues for the fundamental importance of ritual and ceremony in the political culture of the Republic. No mere formalisms, such performances, following Geertz’s conceptual framework of ‘thick description’, constitute an ensemble of texts in a ‘language of legitimation’ (27) with their own vocabulary and syntax (34–5). Political culture, moreover, refers to the entire ‘discursive environment’, not only general power but principles and beliefs, whose meaning is found in normative rules and everyday practices of exercising power. Politics as communicative action suggests a dialectic between rulers and ruled. This interaction, however, was not ‘equal’ but determined by specific cultural and political factors (29). H. further explains republican offices and commands, whose bestowal was largely in the hands of the people, as the ‘symbolic capital’, accruing across generations, that partly gave the elite their prestige and authority (333–5). Ritual forms from later eras, such as court ceremony under Louis XIV (ch. 2), are analysed as points of contrast with those of republican Rome.

Building on this theoretical foundation, H. argues in Roman rituals the actors and audience closely interacted — a phenomenon he describes as ‘co-presence’, further deploying the term ‘specta(c)tors’ (179) to elucidate what he views as this uniquely Roman performative interaction. This phenomenon is especially evident in the various citizen assemblies (electoral, legislative and the less formal contio) (ch. 3). These assemblies fit most closely H.’s model of authoritative actors (i.e. magistrates) and ‘co-present’ audience (populus Romanus) engaged in an interdependent interaction. They were indeed ‘consensus rituals’ in the sense that citizens exercised a right to vote, but they did so, H. emphasises, only within a rigidly hierarchical structure based on wealth and social rank. The supreme authority of Roman magistrates, exercised in assemblies through their control of the agenda (the Athenian ekklesia is cited as a vivid contrast), is shown further in the symbolism of lictors and fasces and the annual investiture of consular authority (ch. 4). The senate, however, despite its growing collective authority (ch. 4), especially in the middle Republic, as it decreed and prorogued provincial commands, still needed the populus Romanus as a third party to adjudicate disputes. Elections still mattered since they determined rank within the senate (from praetorians to consulars to princeps senatus). These are further examples of the co-presence of the Roman people in the political drama.

Central to H.’s ‘theatre of power’ are the grand processions of the Roman Republic — triumph, funeral, circus — each with its own ritual syntax and vocabulary. The triumph, for instance, had its timing and occasion, the dress of triumphator, quadriga, processional participants and their marching order, as well as spoils and prisoners of war. Over time the triumph’s ritual syntax only escalated, as did that of the pompa funebris, as a result of imperial expansion and the influx of wealth, the agonistic nature of the Roman elite and its increasing self-promotion. This escalation culminated in the late Republic in the triumphs of Pompey and the funerals held by Caesar, each of whom tested the boundaries of tradition (ch. 6).

The stage for H.’s ‘theatre of power’ was the political and sacred memory landscape of Rome (chs. 5 and 7), with monuments and statuary recalling myths and legends of early Rome as well as those individuals and families through whose accomplishments Rome grew as an imperial power. Manubial buildings were permanent reminders of the ephemeral triumphs, strategically located along the triumphal route. The grand processions thus inscribed this memory landscape. A funerary procession paraded imagines past monuments erected by the deceased or his ancestors. Statues erected in the Forum, beginning in the fourth century b.c.e., when the Forum became the city’s political centre, connected honorees with the earlier Roman expansionists. Such monuments, and the military accomplishments they commemorated, further helped fill the gaps in the family lines of the new plebeian families (gaps visible in their parade of imagines), which lacked the consular ancestors of the older patrician families.

This system of self-representation and indeed self-aggrandisement, from the symbolic action of the rituals themselves to the memory landscape of imperial Rome, was inherited by Augustus, who refashioned it into the basis for his Principate (ch. 8). The triumph soon vanished to be replaced by a spirit of triumphalism (ch. 6), wherein Augustus’ victory and its resultant peace were continually and ubiquitously celebrated in monuments (e.g. the Ara Pacis). Even new or revived ceremonies, such as the Ludi Saeculares, were draped in the veil of longstanding tradition. This ideology is visually expressed in the Forum Augustum, with statuary hearkening back to the founding myths of Rome (Aeneas and Romulus) as well as the individuals (summi viri) most responsible for the creation of empire, at the monumental centre of which stood Augustus’ statue in a quadriga, conqueror and victor supreme and the culmination of his version of Roman history.

H. combines his impressive mastery of the ancient evidence — the literary record, to be sure, but also coinage, statuary, monuments and reliefs — as well as of the vast scholarship of this period to create a compelling model for understanding the workings of politics in the Roman Republic.