1. How could communities,

2. Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

3. Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

4. The primogenitive and due of birth,

5. Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

6. But by degree, stand in authentic place?

7. Take but degree away, untune that string,

8. And, hark, what discord follows!

9. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, i, 3, 105–12

Roman culture was always a culture of spectacles – in the concrete as well as abstract or metaphorical sense of the concept. To begin with, the religious calendar was packed with regular rituals and ceremonies, processions, games, festivals and other truly ‘spectacular’ occasions of all kinds – such as the run by the Luperci around the Palatine in mid-February and the carnival fight between Subura and Sacra via over the tail of the equus October (October Horse). The spectacular splendour of the ludi – in the late republic, the six most important of them, the ludi Romani, Apollinares, Megalenses, Plebei, Ceriales and Florales alone lasted for no less than 57 days every year – gave Livy reason to observe that by his own day this splendour had turned into utter craziness that would be hard to bear even for rich royalty. This culture revolved around, or was defined by, ‘spectacles’ as ‘ritualized performances that communicated, restored, consolidated, and sometimes helped change the communal order’ of the populus Romanus and their res publica.