Family history has come back into fashion. From M. Dondin-Payre's excellent Exercice du pouvoir et continuité gentilice: Les Acilii Glabriones (1993) to H. Etcheto's recent Les Scipions: Famille et pouvoir à Rome à l'époque républicaine (2012), we have started to see a more nuanced picture of the role of families and their own self-representation.
One distinctive feature of P.’s book is his methodological focus on rhetoric and the construction of character. In this, he is following J. Richardson's study of the Fabii (The Fabii and the Gauls. Studies in Historical Thought and Historiography in Republican Rome [2012]) and M. Lentano's work (La prova del sangue. Storie di identità e storie di legittimità nella cultura Latina [2007]), which he cites approvingly in a sharp introduction. The book hereafter follows a strictly chronological sequence from the middle of the second century b.c. to the disappearance of the family in the middle of the first century a.d.
The Sentii Saturnini came originally from Atina. They were therefore one of those families who were edging closer to Rome in the second century b.c. (the Petreii are another Atinate family, who did not rise as far), and two brothers, Gaius and Lucius Sentius Saturninus, make it to the praetorship in respectively 94 and probably 89 b.c. The family's fortunes dip and pick up with Sentia, who was (following J. Scheid rather than R. Syme) granddaughter of the Gaius Sentius just mentioned, sister of Gaius Sentius Vetulo, mother of one Scribonia who married Octavian, and of another who married Sex. Pompey, whom Vetulo followed. Vetulo returned to Rome and, although we hear little of him, his son (who had also been with Sex. Pompey but must have been very young) rose to be consul in 19 b.c. He had three sons, two of whom were consuls in the same year, a.d. 4, and one of them bore the consul of a.d. 41, who eventually came to grief at the end of Nero's reign.
The Sentii Saturnini are therefore part of what Syme called the ‘mixed lot’ of consuls promoted in the triumviral and Augustan periods (Roman Papers II [1979], pp. 605–16). They merit study as an example of what might happen to a family that one way or another got itself into a significant position, and this was a family that rather successfully hedged its bets, marrying two of the lead contenders for power in the triumviral period.
P.’s book is clear and thorough on all this. He gives context, careful argument and clearly knows the sources and the secondary literature extremely well. At the heart of the book, however, is a difficult argument about precisely what difference it made to historiographical accounts that the Sentii Saturnini came from the same family, and how this was reflected in the rhetoric of historiography.
It is obvious that Velleius Paterculus was impressed by the consul of 19 b.c. and lavishes praise on him at 2.105. Why? Fairly clearly, the family's closeness to Tiberius was critical to Velleius. It is still striking (though rather obscured by P.’s presentation) that Velleius does not make the point that, whilst C. Sentius was in Germany, two of his sons were serving as consuls in Rome – an extraordinarily rare occurrence. If Velleius wanted to make something of the family, surely he would have mentioned this? C. Sentius’ Italian origins may have been just as significant to the Italophile Velleius.
P.’s argument is, if I have it right, that the rhetoric of historiography insisted on the pre-eminence of the father and expected the sons to be like their father. Velleius' concentration on the first consul of the family is what P. calls the central account as opposed to Josephus and Dio's regional accounts. The extinction of the family, however, meant that historians did not continue to press these claims. What happened to the Sentii Saturnini?
The grandson of the consul of 19 b.c. was consul in a.d. 41 and is known from Josephus (AJ 19.167–84) to have made a grand speech after Caligula's assassination, suggesting the return of the Republic. (It was not a clever move; at the time he was making the speech, Claudius was being made emperor.) P. discusses this and its rhetoric very well indeed. We do not hear this from any other source, though crucially we lack the relevant section of Tacitus. P. has to stretch to catch a hint of the consul of 41's political friendships in Hist. 4.7.2 when the disputed text seems to bracket a Sentius with Thrasea and Soranus as condemned friends of Vespasian, and there is the condemnation ex senatus consulto of a Cnaeus Sentius in the Tabula Herculanensis.
This is all brilliantly done and presented, but it seems to me that the argument that the historians have been affected by claims of inherited family characteristics is a hard one to make. There is no evidence that Velleius, Josephus and Tacitus were paying the slightest attention to each others' texts, and P. admits this. The consul of 19 b.c. was probably the most significant of the family, and his sons are less well covered because the sources change and the emphasis is different.
It would actually have been very easy (as P. shows) to make all sorts of cross references. Josephus knows (AJ 16.369) that the consul of 19 b.c. was governor of Syria in 7–6 b.c. His sons were with him. One of them would be governor of Syria in a.d. 19 and was governor in Syria when Germanicus dies and he has to sort out the problem of Piso. Tacitus, in his jumpy awkward account, which is always hinting at things he could have said, makes no reference to the family connections and neither does Josephus.
So what P. has given us is an exhaustive, thoughtful and well-written account of a family that flashed into prominence and then faded away. The solid beginnings, the quiet shift from Marius to Sulla and the opportunistic marriages in the triumviral period gave the basis for one to become a successful consul and to attract the attention of another Italian, Velleius. P. is certainly right that the attention was never as sharp again, but Velleius and Tacitus had a different focus, and we do not know if Tacitus in the Annales gave Sentius Saturninus' speech prominence. Maybe he came late to the realisation that it was an important moment. It must have been in his sources for Josephus to have found it and worked it up. As to the claims of the significance of the familial relationships, they seem to me rather thin.
P. has given us everything we can know about the Sentii Saturnini, but his case study does not bear out any grander claim for familial history or the patterning of lesser families on greater, except in the sense that all family histories have various trajectories. There is a gap between familial memory and self-representation and the historiographic presentation, and we cannot cross it without evidence.
P. points us in some directions, but may underplay the family's place of origin, Atina, and local or Italian pride. Described by Virgil as potens (Aen. 7.630), Atina had a relationship to the god Saturn (whether this came before the success of the Saturnini or after we cannot say) and was in a highly strategic position; in the Middle Ages it was a critically important frontier town. Giustino L. Ferri wrote a proud local history called Atina Potens (published in Sora in 1914, shortly after his death), which began with the great Roman and medieval figures of Atina and contained a sequence of historical essays. Sandwiched between are essays on the family Visocchi, with the key figure being Alfonso Visocchi (1831–1909), senator for 45 years. Ferri's encomium on him reads just like Velleius' on Saturninus.
