Crossing the Pomerium

The Boundaries of Political, Religious, and Military Institutions from Caesar to Constantine

Michael Koortbojian

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691197494
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

A multifaceted exploration of the interplay between civic and military life in ancient Rome The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city's foundation. In this book, Michael Koortbojian explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used social practices and public monuments to assert their capital's distinction from its growing empire, to delimit the proper realms of religion and law from those of war and conquest, and to establish and disseminate so many fundamental Roman institutions across three centuries of imperial rule. Crossing the Pomerium probes such topics as the appearance in the city of Romans in armor, whether in representation or in life, the role of religious rites on the battlefield, and the military image of Constantine on the arch built in his name. Throughout, the book reveals how, in these instances and others, the ancient ideology of crossing the pomerium reflects the efforts of Romans not only to live up to the ideals they had inherited, but also to reconceive their past and to validate contemporary practices during a time when Rome enjoyed growing dominance in the Mediterranean world.A masterly reassessment of the evolution of ancient Rome and its customs, Crossing the Pomerium explores a problem faced by generations of Romans—how to leave and return to hallowed city ground in the course of building an empire.

1

Crossing the Pomerium: The Armed Ruler at Rome

The distinction that the Romans made between urbs and agri, between the city and what lay beyond, is well known to all. A staple of both Roman public and augural law, it depended on the Romans’ sense of the two spheres in which legitimate authority and the public auspices were held to obtain—“at home” and “in the field,” domi and militiae, the proper realms of laws and war.¹

The pomerium constituted the divison. It was a limit—but a conceptual, not a physical one. It was constituted not by the city’s walls, but by the act of inaugurating the place where those defensive structures were to be built. The Etruscan rite of plowing the primordial furrow (the sulcus primigenius), the establishment of the ditch known as the fossa, and then the actual building of the city walls all depended on the site’s formal inauguration, a matter of augural law. In a sense, we might say that the walls not only divided the urbs from the agri, but monumentalized what the pomerium stood for as a legal and religious idea.²

Thus, we comprehend that the distinction between the urbs Romae and the outside world was juridical and religious rather than merely geographical.³ When leaving the city and crossing the pomerium, the exercise of imperium took on its most fundamental aspect as the urban auspices ceased to be valid.⁴ Commanders now assumed the military auspices so as to exercise that power granted by the people in the military sphere (imperium militiae); the inverse situation held when entering the city, where the military facet of imperium was surrendered and a properly civil aspect of power prevailed. It was a fundamental tenet of the Republican constitution that, as magistrates moved between the spheres domi and militiae, it was required that the power to command be renewed. One took the auspices to acknowledge the passing of this fundamental boundary in either direction in order to inquire of Jupiter if the imperium about to be exercised in action—in either sphere of that authority—was unobstructed and might legitimately proceed. The import of these rituals is clear: without religious sanction, the power to command (imperium), whether exercised “at home” or “in the field,” lost its legal foundation. So one readily understands how, for Roman magistrates and commanders, to “cross the pomerium” was a highly significant act.⁵

Yet legal distinctions did not always correspond to lived realities. Two examples must suffice. First, by the later Republic, the pomerium no longer marked the actual boundary of the city and the inhabitants of “Rome” did not reside solely within its limits, nor even inside the first milestone, to which this boundary was extended; thus, the pomerium ceased, in any real sense, to be the division between domi and militiae.⁶ Second, and perhaps more significant, violence—and, at times, war—encroached on the city, which became, as a consequence, the center of the military sphere. The literary evidence for this is abundant: one need only think of Livy’s account of 211 BC, with Hannibal’s troops at the city walls.⁷ Indeed, the rise of the dictatorship as an institution (which, as shall become clear, plays a fundamental role in our problem) is traced in the sources to precisely such conditions, and these would have a profound effect on other institutions as well. Thus, despite the traditional distinction between domi and militiae, not only arms but those quintessential symbols of the exercise of imperium in the military sphere—the fasces bound with axes—were allowed to be carried within the pomerium; on some occasions, imperium militiae was to find its role “at home.”⁸

So we recognize that the assumption, repeatedly voiced, that a corollary of the distinction between domi and militiae was that arms were not to be carried within the pomerium is mistaken: armed troops did cross the pomerium and appeared in Rome—in art as well as in life—during the Republic as well as under the Empire.⁹ While the Republican sources are, admittedly, ambiguous, those of the imperial period make plain that this ancient legal distinction had lost both its relevance and its reality: for instance, the stationing of troops in the capital was a staple of early imperial organization, and already by the reign of Tiberius the accompaniment of the emperor by an armed guard at Rome was an established practice.¹⁰ Moreover, we have the striking evidence of the monuments: for example, on the Chatsworth relief we find armed men burning tax records, and on the Arch of Constantine the emperor appears paludatus in the forum. Despite the evidence of such images, discussions of some monuments—such as the Cancelleria reliefs—still founder on the mistaken view that a ban on all things military remained a fundamental aspect of Rome’s civic life throughout the Roman era; the corollary, explicit or merely implied, is that this should be determinate for representations as well as reality. As we shall see, this was hardly the case. Although Republican Rome distinguished the urbs both legally and religiously from what lay beyond the pomerium, its fundamental boundary, the disintegration of this essential division was merely one of the many Republican traditions whose demise would gradually define the advent of empire.¹¹

All Roman imagery demands to be set in the context of those legal, political, and religious institutions that not merely shaped but defined it. Three examples that have long been regarded as representations of the imperator are examined in the pages that follow; the meaning of these images is—as we shall see—hardly self-evident, despite convention. What ensues is an attempt to sketch the broader institutional background that allows us to establish what it meant to be represented in this fashion at Rome and, in so doing, to demonstrate what was, for the Romans of the dawning imperial age, the very real significance of “crossing the pomerium” and entering the city under arms.

The Dictator’s Prerogative and Caesar’s Statue

A statue of Julius Caesar is attested by the elder Pliny, who tells us that “Caesar the dictator allowed a cuirassed statue to be dedicated to himself in his forum (loricatus in foro suo).”¹² The work was in all likelihood of bronze, and may well be reflected (it is demonstrably not replicated) by a clearly later statue, now in the Senator’s Palace on the Capitoline (figure I.1). That statue, according to a reference in a letter of the younger Pliny, seems to have still been standing in his day.¹³ So, as Caesar’s statue attests, in the late Republic and throughout the first century, men could clearly be represented in armor within the pomerium. But what did this represent? And what did such representations mean? These are our questions.

The statue’s fame in the younger Pliny’s day was sufficient that mention of it needed no further topographical reference—something might simply be ad statuam loricatam divi Iulii.¹⁴ Was this because it was unusual? Images of cuirassed warriors are to be found among the surviving monuments of the late Republican period—for example, the Vatican relief (figure I.2) long (and mistakenly) associated with the taking of vows (the nuncupatio votorum).¹⁵ There is an important difference, however, both in genre and in cultural significance, between these reliefs and what constituted an honorific statue. In fact, while the statua loricata was to become a central element of the imperial statuary repertory, no other Republican examples of such a cuirassed statue survive from the city of Rome, physically or epigraphically, although several are known from elsewhere in Italy. For instance, a statue (figure I.3), now in Munich, was found at Frascati; others are known from the south, at Lecce and Brindisi; and there ar...