Public spectacles among the Romans
Lesser magistrates also had opportunities for public display. From an early date, the great religious festivals of the Roman state had included games or ludi. At first, these comprised a procession, followed by chariot racing in one of the open spaces, the Circus Maximus or the Circus Flaminius, just outside the pomerium. In the mid-fourth century, occasions for dramatic performances (ludi scaenici) were added to these circus games. During the third, second, and first centuries, such festivals would become more and more spectacular, as an increasing number of contests and plays in the Greek style were added to the traditional events. By the second century, if not earlier, the senate budgeted funds to finance the spec¬tacle, but the presiding official was expected to add more of his own, to increase the display and his own fame. Indeed, the opportunities for self advertisement were so attractive that more festivals and more festival days were steadily added to the public calendar. In addition, prominent Romans could stage games of their own on days not designated for any in the city’s official religious calendar. Dedicators of temples, for example, did this to mark their dedications, and from the end of the third century generals also began to do so in order to thank the gods for bringing them victory.
A public figure was particularly concerned to preserve the memory of his accom-plishments. By their very nature, victories were ephemeral: Memories of rites would fade, too, and new victors and new victories would always be occurring to obscure the old. Hence, from the last decades of the fourth century, leading Romans sought to enshrine the memory of their accomplishments in prominent monuments; the Latin word monumenta (singular, monumentum) is actually related to the verb meaning “to remind” or “to instruct”. Often, initiatives of this type involved the official religion of the city, which in turn was so closely connected to its political life and to its leading families. When beginning a campaign or preparing for battle, for example, Roman commanders made vows in which they promised new temples, adornments for existing shrines, and elaborate rites to favored deities should they prove successful. As a result, generals would come to build dozens of temples in prominent places both inside the city and immediately outside its walls. In addition to statues of the gods and altars for their worship, temples often housed statues of the victor and prominent inscriptions recording his name and the names of the peoples he had defeated. Perhaps to highlight their prowess further, some commanders even introduced new gods especially associated with victory: Bellona Victrix in 296, Jupiter Victor in 295, and Victoria in 294. These novel deities reflect not only Roman preoccupations, but also the similar cult of Victory developing in the Greek world at the same period, around Hellenistic kings especially. By the end of the third century, monuments to past leaders surrounded the places where magistrates performed their tasks, where the senate held its meetings, and where assemblies of citizens gathered to hear debates and to vote.
Advancement of a family’s claims to status came to involve remembering and celebrating the specific offices held by its members in earlier generations and their notable achievements in those capacities. Certain types of display were designed simply to encourage family members to imitate or outclass their ancestors. Other types were more public, because the deeds of famous ancestors helped advance the claims to office made by their descendants, who supposedly had inherited their virtues. This desire to proclaim the glory of one’s ancestors led some aristocrats to stress an additional name, the cognomen, which, when added to their praenomen and nomen, announced their descent from a particular member of their gens; thus, the Cornelii Scipiones used the cognomen Scipio to identify themselves as lineal descendants of a common ancestor within the larger gens Cornelia. It seems that some families were not entirely honest in their claims: the historian Livy would later complain that families claimed magistracies and victories for themselves falsely, and, in the process, compounded the difficulties of determining the history of the late fourth and early third centuries. Portrait masks of wax, or imagines (singular, imago), offered another means of proclaiming the greatness of a family’s ancestors. Prominent Romans kept masks of those ancestors who had held high offices or performed famous deeds in the atria or reception halls of their houses, where they would be visible to visitors and passersby.
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