Conclusion

The conclusion uses the Second Punic War as a test case for the results reached throughout the book. Hannibal attempted to insert himself into Croton’s polis identity by associating himself with Hera Lacinia, even as Croton itself asserted its Greekness in opposition to the Bruttians. Multiple identities thus impacted the politics of the city and the region, just as they had for centuries. The remainder of the conclusion recapitulates the main arguments and suggests avenues for further research.

Roman History

After a focus on social and cultural history in the last issue, this issue's offerings return us to more traditional subjects – political institutions, and historiography. That spring review ended with religion, which is where we start here: an apposite reminder that religion pervades all aspects of the Roman world. It is precisely that principle which undergirds our first book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Divine Institutions. Padilla Peralta is interested, at root, in how the Roman state became such through the third and fourth centuries bce. That is a story usually told – in a tradition going back to the ancient historians themselves – via a swashbuckling tale of successive military campaigns. Padilla Peralta, however, sets that anachronistic narrativization aside, and instead builds a careful case that between the siege of Veii and the end of the Second Punic War ‘the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments’ (1). Specifically, he shows that the construction of temples and the public activities they facilitated were a key mechanism – one as important as warfare – by which the consensus necessary to state formation was generated: the Republic more or less stumbles into a bootstrapping formula that proves to be unusually felicitous: high visibility monumental enterprises are paired with new incentives for human mobility in ways that dramatically and enduringly reorganize the rhythms of civic and communal experience. (17–18) In particular, Padilla Peralta argues that output was greater than input; that the genius – whether accidental or deliberate – of this formula was that it facilitated a confidence game whereby the res publica appeared more capable – via the apparent support of the gods whom its visible piety secured – than was in fact the case.

Decline in the Roman Republic

The rhetoric of Roman decline appears in some of the earliest surviving Latin literary texts (like Plautus’s Trinummus). Cato the Elder built much of his political brand around the idea that greed, extravagance, and, later, Greek influence undermined Roman virtue. He defended the lex Oppia, a sumptuary law, and directed attacks against figures in the mode of Scipio Africanus. This sort of attack particularly resonated as economic changes and the rise of a new class of super-wealthy Romans emerged in the decades after the end of the Second Punic War. By the 130s, Tiberius Gracchus used similar attacks on the greed and extravagance of Roman and Italian elites to push for aggressive land reforms. Tiberius’s unwillingness to be bound by constitutional norms, however, represented a new sort of decline that ultimately prompted his murder by a mob led by Scipio Nasica.

Augustus and the Economics of Adultery

This chapter examines Augustus’ legislation criminalizing adultery in the light of first-century BCE social arrangements that allowed Roman noblewomen to manage property without interference from their husbands and sometimes with little input from natal kin. During and after the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), concentration of wealth in female hands had triggered major legal changes and produced a corresponding shift toward marriage sine manu (“free” marriage). By the end of the Republic, the phenomenon of legally independent (sui iuris) women controlling their finances, especially with purely nominal oversight from tutors, created apprehension among husbands without a say in their wives’ dealings and arguably contributed to widespread concern over female sexual license. Responding to such anxieties, Augustus’ adultery law imposed economic penalties upon convicted women that, in addition to serving as deterrents, probably facilitated the transfer of property out of irresponsible (female) hands into the hands of those more deserving.

The Reception of Petrarch’s Africa in Fascist Italy

In his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

Symbolic victories and strategic risk

This article studies the rational side of symbolic victories. It opens with the broad question, why are some battles more significant than others? Extending the literature on bargaining and war, it argues that a belligerent can deliberately increase strategic risk in order to communicate its strength. By increasing the information a battle conveys, the belligerent artificially creates the conditions for a symbolic victory. In short, strategic risk becomes a useful, costly signal. This claim is developed in a formal model in which players choose between more and less dangerous military options. Under most conditions, a symbolic equilibrium exists in which both strong- and weak-type players are able to signal their types after only one round. This equilibrium’s rapid information flow is unusual in the rationalist literature: typically, strong types must wait to signal effectively. The article goes on to establish that, when the prior probability a player is strong is sufficiently small, this symbolic equilibrium uniquely satisfies the intuitive criterion. It then applies the model to two famous episodes from military history, the Doolittle Raid of WWII and the battles of Cannae and Capua of the Second Punic War. For both, it highlights how actors deliberately manipulate strategic risk to communicate with adversaries, allies, and their own publics.

Capua

This chapter considers how the pride script functions when the quality is attributed to a place. It investigates Roman attitudes to the city of Capua, which remained the proud place par excellence in Roman discourse from its star turn as a defector in the Second Punic War to late antiquity. The chapter begins with the distillation of the stereotypical picture of Capua in a poem of the fourth-century author Ausonius. Reading Capuan pride in Cicero, Livy, Silius Italicus, and Ausonius, the author shows how Roman ideas about pride interact with stereotypes about climate and ethnic character, as well as imperialist ideology, to create a remarkably durable portrait of a proud city that far outlasts its immediate historical motivation.

Enter Rome, Exit Macedonia

The chapter traces Rome’s involvement in Greece and Philip’s growing military strength, including his alliance with Hannibal of Carthage in the Second Punic War against Rome. Rome’s first clash in Greece against Macedonia—the First Macedonian War—is recounted, and then events leading to the more fateful Second Macedonian War, which involved Athens on Rome’s side against Philip, culminating in Philip’s defeat in battle by Rome. Punitive measures against Macedonia are discussed, heralding the demise of Philip to Rome, and then the so-called Roman proclamation of Greek freedom by the general Flamininus and what it meant for the Greeks and more ominously, Rome. That Rome could do this demonstrates Rome’s power in the Greek world.

Hannibal’s Elephants and the Liburnians

The second Punic war is a relatively well-known episode from Roman history. Reliable, detailed ancient sources such as Livy and Polybius, however, don’t say much on the topic of Hannibal’s provisions from his native Carthage. One of the questions related to the provisions is where Hannibal’s elephants came from after the battle of Cannae, as after traversing the Etrurian swamp Hannibal only had one elephant left (Livy XXII 2). Immediately after the victory at Cannae Hannibal sends a delegation requesting logistics and the Carthaginian senate decides to send him military aid, among which were 4000 Numidians and 40 elephants (Livy XXIII 11-13). In the meantime, Hannibal penetrates Campania already accompanied by elephants at the Siege of Casilinum (Livy XXIII 18). The authors of this paper believe that Hannibal’s path to Cannae was part of a premeditated military plan, according to which the Carthaginian army needed to pick up supplies near Cannae, with the Liburnians playing an important role in opening channels of communication and supplies. Several facts support this theory, most importantly the following: – one of the few suitable ports that Hannibal could count upon to be less guarded by the Romans than more northern ports, such as Ariminum, is found near Cannae; – an enormous amount of money from Africa is in circulation in Liburnia right at the time of the war with Hannibal; It is known that political entities on the eastern coast of the Adriatic had an anti-Roman political agenda during the time of the second Punic war, coordinating themselves with Macedonia among others, which became an ally of Hannibal and with which Rome went to war in 214 B.C, with which the two Illyrian wars right before and right after the war with Hannibal are related. The authors believe that the sources point to a sort of coalition for transport, trade and communication between Hannibal, the Liburnians and Carthage, which should be viewed in the context of the operations of the anti-Roman coalition of political entities on the eastern shores of the Adriatic

„Die schönste griechische Stadt“. Syrakus bei Cicero und Silius Italicus

Both in the fourth book of Cicero’s De signis (Verr. 2,4) and in the fourteenth book of Silius Italicus’ Punica, there are descriptions of the city of Syracuse at important points of the texts. In this paper, both descriptions are combined and for the first time thoroughly related. I discuss form and content of the accounts, show their functions in their oratorical and epic contexts and consider their similarities. The most important facets, where the descriptions coincide in, seem to be their link to Marcellus’ conquest in the Second Punic War, the resulting precarious beauty of the city and the specifically Roman perspective on which these ekphraseis are based.