Apart from the offering of the vota publica in the Capitoline temple, and the expiation of prodigies (procuratio prodigiorum) in the name of the community, the setting of the date for the celebration of the Feriae Latinae was among the unavoidable duties of the consuls in Rome at the beginning of their time in office. Unless they carried out this ritual properly, the consuls could never leave the Urbs to undertake any military campaign. In doing otherwise, they would expose themselves to failure in their endeavours, as was the case with C. Flaminius in 218 or the consuls of 43 bc, Aulus Hirtius and Vibius Pansa. However, while it is clear why the offering of public ex-votos and the expiation of prodigies were necessary conditions for maintaining or restoring the pax deorum, it is not so evident, at least at first sight, why the celebration of the Feriae Latinae was an unavoidable duty for the consuls in the context of the conquering republic. The following reflections are aimed at understanding the reasons why, after so much time, this consular intervention in the Latin festival is still perceived as one of the fundamenta rei publicae.

The Feriae Latinae were annual rituals which the Latin League celebrated in honour of Iuppiter Latiaris next to his sanctuary on the summit of the Mons Albanus – the present-day Monte Cavo, situated about 27 km to the southeast of Rome. This was a movable feast (feria conceptiva), whose exact date would be set by the consuls immediately after taking office. A series of literary sources underline the enormous political relevance of this ritual and its importance when setting the sacred calendar of Rome, as well as its exceptional longevity and the fact that it was celebrated up until the end of the fourth century ad. The decision to announce publicly the celebration of the feriae (specifically, on the third day, when the sacrificium Latinarum was celebrated) was taken in the senate after the consuls took office, and it was expressed via a senatus consultum.

“Why was it,” Plutarch asks in Roman Questions no. 80, “that when [the Romans] gave a public banquet for men who had celebrated a triumph, they formally invited the consuls and then sent word to them requesting that they not come to the dinner?” It was “because it was imperative that the place of honor at the table and an escort home after dinner should be assigned to the man who had triumphed. But these honors can be given to no one else when the consuls are present, but only to them.” Plutarch's Roman Questions are a hotchpotch of distinct cultural practices and traditional codes of behavior. Throughout long sections of the work, it appears to be a random collection of curiosities rather than a treatise that is geared toward a stringent analysis of typically Roman customs and socio-political institutions. But this does not undermine the work's value as a historical source. Beyond the actual information related (sparse as it may be, at times), the Roman Questions shed light on the silent assumptions of Roman political life. In his attempt to familiarize his readership with select political or social practices, Plutarch alludes to the very basic implications of those practices. Question no. 80 illustrates the case: the practice of inviting consuls to triumphal banquets and then telling them not to come appeared to be a peculiarity and hence was deemed worthy of relating. But it also discloses some of the most vital features of Roman political culture. It operates on the assumption that the consuls were the highest magistrates not only in the field (militiae) but also at home, within the sacred boundary of the city (domi). Whenever present, they were to be included in public events and preside over them. Moreover, while the consuls claimed the right of highest honor, the story makes it clear that there were other distinctions, such as a triumphator's rights and privileges, which under certain circumstances challenged the superior power of a consul, whether present or not. And third, Plutarch reveals that if such a conflict between authorities arose, the Romans were not shy about practical solutions that enabled them to navigate around the provisions of their constitution without actually abandoning it. The messenger sent to the consuls was a go-between that kept everyone's honor intact – at least as long as everybody played along.

Two separate but interrelated issues arise whenever one addresses the topic of the early Roman magistrates: first, the reliability of the lists of early magistrates, and second, the mechanisms through which the accounts of the magistracies’ origins may have been produced. For some scholars, the likelihood of widespread corruption or falsification is so great that the lists can be ignored as evidence for anything other than the fact of their spurious creation, but even this position requires a view of the mechanisms for such creation, and the rationale. Although a slightly less sceptical position has begun to win a degree of support, the case still needs to be made and tested.

In addressing this issue, I also try to make better sense of the contribution of what we sometimes call antiquarian thought to Roman historiography and knowledge of the past. Whilst the problem of the Fasti is often addressed from a historical perspective, the impact of the list, or, as is far more probable, lists, on the way that Roman history was constructed demands our attention, especially as it contributes to an understanding of the obscure methods of the now-lost antiquarian writers. In this account, I will return repeatedly to the problem of the praetor maximus as an example of the difficulty of rewriting annalistic history through the insights of antiquarian research. After establishing some of the basic approaches to the Fasti, and examining in some detail the charges, ancient and modern, against various named and unnamed individuals held to have falsified the Fasti, I will offer some thoughts on how antiquarians and annalists may have approached the complex issues surrounding the origins of Roman magistracies.

Livy 42.1 preserves an anecdote that says a great deal about the interaction between Roman consuls (and consulars) and local Italian aristocrats. In 173, the consul Lucius Postumius Albinus departed for Campania to resolve a dispute over the boundaries between public and private lands, and along the way he stayed over at Praeneste. Before arriving, he had sent word ahead demanding that the local magistrates come out to greet him. He stipulated that he should be housed and entertained at public expense, and he further ordered the Praenestines to prepare pack animals for his trip to Campania. Livy claims that Postumius made these high-handed demands because he was angry at the Praenestines for failing to show him appropriate respect when previously, as a private citizen, he had gone to sacrifice at the temple of Fortuna. Livy condemns Postumius for abusing his consular authority and he concludes that the locals, who appear to have accepted Postumius’ demands without incident, must have acquiesced out of modesty or fear; Livy's assessment is not implausible.

This episode highlights the tensions and the ambiguities inherent in the relationship between Rome and the allied communities in Italy during the republican period. On the one hand, the Italian allies were subject to Roman hegemony, and many had been forced into alliance with Rome as the result of military defeat. The occasional arrival of a Roman consul or any other high magistrate, especially one possessing imperium, demanding preferential treatment and public or private gestures of deference, must have reinforced this reality. Indeed, Postumius’ anger at his earlier treatment at Praeneste suggests that Roman aristocrats had grown to expect deferential treatment when they visited Italian communities even when not holding public office. On the other hand, Roman and local aristocratic families often shared close personal and familial bonds. In fact, in the same passage in which he describes the Postumius affair, Livy comments on how Roman senators and local aristocrats commonly enjoyed mutual hospitality (hospitium), with senators opening their homes to guests (members of the Italian elite) in whose houses they would in turn stay when outside of Rome. Moreover, this example demonstrates that it made good practical sense for local elites to forge strong personal bonds with members of the Roman elite and continue to reaffirm those bonds, since, as Postumius’ abusive behavior shows, failing to do so could have serious consequences.

The consulship of the Roman republic is notoriously under-researched. To be sure, the republican “constitution,” and with it the consulate, have been addressed to a certain extent. Examples in English include Andrew Lintott's The Constitution of the Roman Republic and T. Corey Brennan's and John North's more recent syntheses. In some sense, these studies provide a comprehensive summary of a long series of scholarly contributions on the republic's institutional apparatus, starting with Theodor Mommsen's contribution and explored further in the works of Ettore de Ruggiero, Francesco de Martino, Jochen Bleicken, Wolfgang Kunkel and Roland Wittmann. This scholarship deals with the Roman “constitution” in general terms, and all of these essays focus, more or less, on the supreme magistracy in the republic. Furthermore, the consulship has been studied in research on Roman chronology and on the Roman nobility. Republican prosopography is roughly based on the Fasti Consulares as a starting point. In fact, without Broughton's monumental work it would be practically impossible to tackle any study on the republican period. And, of course, the groundbreaking work of Adalberto Giovannini must be mentioned. Giovannini succeeded in proving the non-existence of the assumed lex Cornelia de provinciis ordinandis, prompted by Mommsen, and specified the characteristics of the consular imperium. However, there is no book-length treatment of the office and its competences, or of the tasks performed by the consuls and their role in the government of Rome during the republic. The situation is somewhat different in other areas of constitutional research. The senate, the popular assemblies, the aedileship, the tribunate of the plebs, the censorship, the dictatorship and most recently the praetorship have all received in-depth treatment and works of analysis that were at times truly magisterial. In other words, virtually all republican institutions have, at some point, been the subject of extensive, although not completely updated, research. To date, the consulship is the only institution that has not received this attention.

This statement is quoted from the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History and seems to be fully correct. Nevertheless there is an “argument” that has not attracted particular attention so far: at least one ancient source denies that “such a dual magistracy was established immediately after the overthrow of the monarchy.” This source is Cassius Dio's Roman History. Dio's reconstruction of the origin of the consulship is rather different from the traditional one and seems to be, at its core, more ancient as well. Before coming to the point, in order to better appreciate the value of this unconventional tale, it is worth dwelling briefly on the circle of Severan jurists whom Dio knew well, on Dio's attention to the pre-Livian tradition and on his interest in the history of Roman institutions.

Preliminary remarks

A distinguishing characteristic of Cassius Dio's Roman History is its strong interest in the history of Roman institutions and magistracies, already pointed out in the early twentieth century by Cary (“he excels the other historians of Rome in the attention paid to constitutional and administrative matters”) and Vrind. De Sanctis passed similar judgment, though adding a negative comment on Dio's reliability as a whole: “Superiore d'assai per intelligenza pratica delle cose politiche e per cognizione dell'organismo dello Stato romano a Livio e a Dionisio, i suoi tentativi però non approdarono che ad alterare ancora la tradizione già sì alterata che era pervenuta fino a lui.” Hinard has recently come back to the topic: “On n'a pas assez remarqué que Dion prêtait une attention particulière aux questions institutionnelles et que c'est probablement dans ce domaine qu'il est le plus utile;” sometimes “c'est Dion qui donne les indications les plus précises, les autres sources ne servant qu’à recouper ces informations.” At the same time the severe opinion that made Cassius Dio “le plus prodigue en renseignements, vulnérable aux critiques” has given way to more cautious judgments (“if the work is not a masterpiece, its author deserves attention and respect”) and even to real eulogies: “In using his Roman history…we tend to slight or pass by the solid contributions he often makes to our knowledge. Greater alertness to his virtues as an historian, to the valuable, sometimes unique interpretations and data he provides is needed to achieve a more balanced perception of Cassius Dio's work;” “Dion est bien un historien qui n’était pas dépourvu de talent et qu'on aurait tort de négliger parce qu'il avait une immense culture et qu'il a travaillé avec intelligence et une indiscutable compétence, du moins pour la période républicaine.”

It seems paradoxical to devote time to a study of consuls and the consulship under Augustus in a monograph dealing with the constitution of the Roman republic. Yet such a choice is perfectly justified when we remember that Augustus’ great skill was in situating the new regime and its modus operandi within a context of historical continuity. The significant consequence of this axiom is that the consulship under Augustus can be analyzed not only for its own sake and for its many evolving aspects, but also for what it teaches us about late-republican practices, many of which Augustus revived. The continuity between the Roman republic and the regime founded by Augustus appears to be more or less pronounced depending on whether we look at the consulship from a purely formal point of view or whether we look at the consuls and the position that the princeps allotted to them. The guiding line of the following demonstration will be to stress that if the office of the consulship was never the object of legal reforms aimed at weakening its powers, the holders of this magistracy would have had no other choice but to make do with the new political environment resulting from the seizure by a single man and his family of the res publica, from Actium onward. For Augustus and the consuls, the crux of the problem lay in finding a relationship that would prevent the latter from contesting the former's superiority without infringing on the very foundations of consular power and prestige.

Preliminary remarks and historiographical clarifications

The study of the consulship under Augustus has normally been dissociated from the study of the place occupied by those who held this magistracy, even though they are two complementary aspects of the same question. Purely institutional elements drew the attention of specialists at first, as of the nineteenth century. We must go back to Mommsen to find a method of analysis that can be applied to the central theme of the book and whose influence was felt throughout the twentieth century. In his Römisches Staatsrecht, he studied the consulship in volume ii, entirely devoted to the magistracies, in accordance with the spirit of a textbook viewing public law as a system and, to this end, endeavoring to provide a legal definition of the Roman res publica. The characteristic absence of any diachronic perspective distinguishes this original project from the multiple surveys dealing with the history of the institutions as they evolved, but this does not mean that Mommsen's Public Law is of no use in defining the place occupied by the consulship in the new regime. Indeed, references to the consulship under the empire are numerous in the chapter in question, reflecting the state of the sources, and several of these general remarks can be noted for their pertinence to the subject under study here.

In mid-March of 49, Cicero was in anguish over what to do now that Pompey had crossed to Greece and Caesar was pressing him for support or at least neutrality. His personal obligation to Pompey weighed heavily with him, he writes, but on the other hand he represents joining Pompey as committing himself to fight a civil war with Sullan vindictiveness and ferocity. From Formiae he writes to Atticus on March 18 that he was deterred from joining Pompey above all by “the kind of war intended, savage and vast beyond what men yet see.” It is interesting that for Cicero at this point it is Pompey, not Caesar, who is the Sullan counterpart: Sulla potuit, ego non potero? Cicero then runs through some historical precedents, which he ultimately rejects – those of Tarquin, Coriolanus and the Athenian Hippias – and one that he embraces: that of Themistocles, according to the tradition that made him commit suicide in order not to join the Great King's war against his country. He proceeds: “But you may object that Sulla, or Marius, or Cinna acted rightly. Yes, justifiably, perhaps (immo iure fortasse); but once victorious, they were unequalled in cruelty and slaughter.” Cicero goes on to reject this kind of war quite forcefully, especially since Pompey and his friends were preparing (he claims) to surpass even those bloody precedents in savagery.

Cicero's imaginary interlocutor's objection – that “Sulla, or Marius, or Cinna acted rightly” – and his response – “yes, justifiably, perhaps,” while drawing an implied distinction between their behavior before and in victory – should pique our interest. Evidently he did not put Sulla, Marius and Cinna in quite the same category as Coriolanus, Tarquin or Hippias. He concedes that they may be seen as having had justice on their side, although their actions were deeply tainted by the use they made of victory. But this nuanced point of view is a far cry from the nearly unanimous chorus of disapproval raised in modern scholarship against these men's decisions to take up arms against what is frequently, but tendentiously, referred to as “the state.” In this usage, however, “the state” is not a neutral description of a particular locus of governmental authority, but a normative one that presupposes legitimacy – and that is precisely what was contested by Sulla in 88 (and 83–82), by Marius and Cinna in 87 (as well as Caesar in 49).

Introduction

1. Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.

2. Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem.

3. Ergo postque magisque viri nunc gloria claret.

4. Ennius, Annales fr. 363–5 Skutsch

1. One person, by delaying, restored the commonwealth for us.

2. He did not set people's criticisms (sc. of him) before safety.

3. Therefore it is afterward, and more, that the hero's glory now shines out.

These three hexameter verses, composed probably in the 170s or early 160s bc, come from Ennius’ historical epic, the Annales. They constitute the earliest surviving reference to Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus “Cunctator,” one of the leading Roman politicians and generals of the Second Punic War. This description of Fabius was among the best-known passages of Ennius’ poem in antiquity, to judge from the frequency with which later authors quote or allude to it. Its earliest such appearance dates to 59 bc, when Cicero quotes the first verse in a way that shows it was already proverbial; Cicero also quotes all three verses in a pair of texts dating to 44 bc – our only sources for the entire set. In subsequent authors there are numerous further quotations, paraphrases, or echoes of the first or second verse. Scholars have observed that these verses are already in the business of mythmaking, of manufacturing Fabius and his strategy of “delay” as an exemplum for subsequent Roman aristocrats. For the speaker of these verses places Fabius’ “delaying” in the past, and compares its reception by Fabius’ contemporaries with its reception in later eras. The second verse, in particular, hints at a conflict of values and evaluation: Fabius pursued safety (salus) and disregarded criticism (rumores), presumably propagated by contemporaries who opposed his approach. The third verse, however, indicates that the later view of Fabius’ deeds was positive: it is “now” (nunc, in the speaker's present time), and “later” (post, after Fabius’ deeds), that the “glory of the hero” (viri…gloria, both words conferring praise) “shines forth the more” (magis…claret). These claims, in turn, explain and corroborate the approbative declaration of the first verse, that Fabius “restored the commonwealth for us,” where nobis indicates the importance of Fabius’ achievement for the speaker and his generation.