Identity

Before decoding these portenta, it is fundamental first to consider how portenta might allow us insight into issues of identity. In their landmark studies, both MacBain and Rasmussen highlighted the importance of identity construction in the reporting and expiation of republican prodigia.Footnote ¹⁰ Both recognized that the Roman senate primarily began to identify prodigia in the Italian peninsula from the time of the Second Punic War, principally during Hannibal's invasion of Italy. They reason that the act of the senate recognizing divine signs from across Italy sent a strong message that Italian religious concerns were of importance to Rome, thereby developing and reinforcing a collective Romano-Italian pax deorum. By acknowledging that the sphere of their religious outlook was not limited to Rome (or even the ager Romanus [‘Roman land’]) but also incorporated key parts of the Italian peninsula, the Roman senate symbolically demonstrated to some Italians that there was a burgeoning synthesis between Roman and Italian identity.Footnote ¹¹ In so doing, the senate was able to strengthen the symbolic unification of the peninsula. For MacBain, this was a process of communication, a ‘signalling system’ whereby the senate ‘could acknowledge the anxieties and identify with the religious sensibilities of Italians’.Footnote ¹² Whilst he revised MacBain's conclusions,Footnote ¹³ Rosenberger similarly conceived of prodigia as a ‘Kommunikationsmedium’,Footnote ¹⁴ emphasizing that, amongst other communicative forms, prodigia were used for religious communication with Italians, and that this could form the basis of stronger commonality between Rome and other areas.Footnote ¹⁵

For Rasmussen, this was more specifically a process of Romanization and identity (re)creation or (re)construction. Highlighting not only the acceptance of Italian prodigia, but also those instances where the senate found that certain divine signs were not of concern to the collective Romano-Italian pax deorum, Rasmussen argues that ritual expiations of Italian prodigia became ‘an expression of transformation as well as incorporation: it turned a foreign matter into a matter of Roman concern…this process was both a manifestation and extension of Roman identity’.Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, in recognizing or rejecting divine signs as prodigia, the senate set limits on Roman identity and carved divisions between those Italian communities that were recognized as within the Roman pax deorum and those that did not have a share in Roman identity.Footnote ¹⁷ By Roman identity, Rasmussen specifically invokes the concept of a society's Selbstbild – its self-image – the ‘collective, official picture a society paints of itself, and which is used to identify that society, its distinctive characteristics, and its members in relation to other cultures’.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, Rasmussen conceives of the acceptance of prodigia as a prominent and evocative sign that the Roman Selbstbild had come to include communities of the Italian peninsula.Footnote ¹⁹

The intersection between divine signs and identity did not, I believe, end with the republic, but rather continued (at the very least) into the early principate. Whilst these treatments of prodigia and identity place the overwhelming importance on ‘Roman’ identity as viewed from, and controlled by, the Roman centre, these studies can, I think, be built upon to conceptualize a relationship between divine signs and identity-communication on a variety of different levels. Not only can we conceptualize the importance of divine signs for Rome and its principes in the construction of a Roman Selbstbild (from the lens of the centre, especially the princeps), but I suggest that reports of various portenta could also function (and be seen to function) as part as the constant (re)negotiation of local, trans-local, and global identities for provinces, communities, and individuals.Footnote ²⁰ Whilst we can see these functions playing out in a variety of portenta reports, I intend to focus here on just two case studies: a portent reported in the early Augustan period of the statue of Athena on the Athenian Acropolis turning and spitting blood, and the various portenta reported during Boudicca's rebellion at Camulodunum in 60 ce. By decoding the similarities between these otherwise distant reports of portenta, at a distance that is both temporal – Augustan as opposed to Neronian – and geographical – Athens as opposed to Camulodunum – we can both see the widespread possibilities of examining how portenta intersected with identity and can glimpse the continuity of these concepts over time. I turn now to the first of these case studies: that of the statue of Athena spitting blood on the Acropolis.

Athena on the Acropolis

Cassius Dio, whilst recounting Octavian's tour of the East after the battle of Actium, recounts a unique interaction between the Athenians and Octavian:Footnote ²¹

Various historiographical objections have been made to discredit the accuracy of Dio's account,Footnote ²⁴ not least of which is the existence of a passage in Plutarch, commonly believed to refer to the same events:

Bowersock and Hoff, believing that Dio and Plutarch describe the same episode, posit that it must have occurred in the winter of 22/21 bce as it was the only winter when Augustus could have stayed on Aegina.Footnote ²⁶ Both Dio and Plutarch agree that a fault had been committed – responsibility for which was ascribed to the Athenians – which prompted Octavian's ire. Dio provides two potential reasons for Octavian's anger, but makes no explicit authorial judgement on which of the two was more likely. Such ambivalence is likely the result of Dio's overall intention here to contrast Octavian's negative attitude towards the Athenians with his positive disposition towards the Lacedaemonians.Footnote ²⁷ Plutarch, meanwhile, does not furnish us with details of the fault and simply records that one had been committed (ἐξαμαρτάνω). There is, however, an obvious inconsistency between the sources. While Dio recounts a series of punitive economic sanctions taken against Athens, Plutarch claims that Octavian merely wintered in Aegina but otherwise neither said nor did anything else to Athens or the Athenians. Even if we must read these two accounts as relating to the same events, I see no reason to assume historicity for Plutarch rather than for Dio.Footnote ²⁸ In compiling his compendium of apophthegmata (‘sayings’) – anecdotes destined for inclusion in his (now lost) Life of Augustus – Plutarch deliberately sought to depict Augustus as a calm, moderate ruler, capable of controlling his anger and demonstrating his moderatio (‘moderation’) – or at least found these themes already evident in his source material.Footnote ²⁹ Dio, too, may have had reasons to invent, or at the very least creatively interpolate, the incident with the statue of Athena. However, I find the possibility of complete fabrication unlikely, especially given Dio's well-known fascination with the occurrence of portenta in his source material.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, I take Dio at face value and assume that there was a contemporary report of the extraordinary behaviour of the statue of Athena.Footnote ³¹

It is well accepted that Dio recounts a remarkable event that was likely to have been interpreted as a portentum, that is, a sign of divine displeasure indicating a breach in the pax deorum. Here, however, is where agreement between most modern treatments of the incident ends. There is, perhaps most importantly, no consensus on how this portentum might have been interpreted. To fully understand this report of a divine sign and to decode it as a moment of contested identity, we must deconstruct the various elements of the portentum and analyse comparable instances of statue portenta and the various interpretations given to those reports. Whilst Santangelo rightly urges us to remember the potential for competing views in our interpretation of portents, our sources imply – at least for statue portenta – that there were standard (or at least relatively common) ways that these incidents were interpreted.Footnote ³²

Based on comparable evidence, we can delineate and characterize two main types of statue portent. The first type are incidents where statues were externally afflicted; most commonly where they had toppled or been blown over, or had been struck by lightning.Footnote ³³ The second type are statues said to have behaved in some way like animate humans. Common manifestations of this are reports of statues sweating, crying, or independently moving. The interpretations given to occurrences belonging to either category seem to depend entirely on whether the affected statue depicted a human or a divinity. Where statues of humans were afflicted, the most common interpretation appears to be that the gods were angry at the persons depicted by the statues. Incidents concerning statues of Cleopatra and M. Antonius are useful illustrations of this. As Dio recounts, during the civil war with Antonius, ‘the statues of [Antonius and Cleopatra] which the Athenians set up on the Acropolis bearing the form of gods, were struck by thunderbolts into the theatre [below]’ (τάς τε εἰκόνας αὐτῶν, ἃς οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι ἐν τῇ ἀκροπόλει τὸ τῶν θεῶν σχῆμα ἐχούσας ἔστησαν, κεραυνοὶ ἐς τὸ θέατρον κατήραξαν, 50.15.2–3).Footnote ³⁴ Dio implies that this external affliction to their statues (amongst other omens) was interpreted by Cleopatra as a sign that they would be defeated at Actium, prompting her hasty retreat from the battle.Footnote ³⁵ Plutarch also recounts a statue of Antonius behaving in sentient fashion, which, he implies, foretold the result of the battle of Actium before it had even begun: ‘one of the stone statues of Antonius near the Alban hills was oozing sweat for many days, and though it was wiped away it did not abate’ (τῶν δὲ περὶ Ἄλβαν Ἀντωνίου λιθίνων ἀνδριάντων ἑνὸς ἱδρὼς ἀνεπίδυεν ἡμέρας πολλάς, ἀποματτόντων τινῶν οὐ παυόμενος, Vit. Ant. 60.2).Footnote ³⁶

In contrast, human reactions and agency expressed in statues of divinities seem to have been interpreted as pathetic responses from divinities themselves.Footnote ³⁷ Such a belief, that statues of the gods might be vehicles for divine agency, seems to align with what we understand about Graeco-Roman conceptions of the relationship between statue and divinity.Footnote ³⁸ Whilst divine representations generally seem to have been understood as not being divine in themselves, Rüpke has suggested that acts of binding or flogging of statues evinces an understanding that statues could represent a divinity's agency.Footnote ³⁹ Further, Chaniotis has recently argued that a statue of a god represented a ‘privileged medium of epiphany’, a nexus of easy visitation for the gods to access the mortal realm (and vice versa).Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, although these kinds of statue portents are rare,Footnote ⁴¹ it is reasonable to assume that when a statue is seen to have expressed a physical, pathetic response, it could be seen as the expression of the divinity's own emotions.

Indeed, statues that were believed to have turned themselves around seem to have frequently been interpreted as having expressed the opinions of the represented divinity. When recounting the portents that were said to indicate the victory of Caesar over Pompey at Pharsalus, Dio mentions that ‘in Tralles a palm tree grew up in the temple of Nike and the goddess herself turned around to the likeness of Caesar placed beside her’ (ἐν Τράλλεσι φοίνικά τε ἐν τῷ τῆς Νίκης ναῷ ἀναφῦναι καὶ τὴν θεὸν αὐτὴν πρὸς εἰκόνα τοῦ Καίσαρος ἐν πλαγίῳ που κειμένην μεταστραφῆναι, 41.61.4).Footnote ⁴² The interpretation is unambiguous: Nike turned towards Caesar to indicate that he had her favour, and thus that he would claim victory. Interpretations of similar portents seem to place more importance on the act of turning away, as if the god was abandoning particular individuals. Dio reports a portent from Germania concerning P. Quinctilius Varus: ‘and a statue of Nike which was in Germany and looked towards the land of the enemy turned around towards Italy’ (καὶ Νίκης τι ἂγαλμα ἒν τε τῇ Γερμανίᾳ ὂν καὶ πρὸς τὴν πολεμίαν βλέπον πρὸς τὴν Ἰταλίαν μετεστράφη, 56.24.4). In turning away from Germany, Victoria had abandoned Varus. In this context, where Victoria turns to indicate her favour for one side rather than another, it is important to remember Ripat's caution: ‘[o]ne person's dire prodigy could be another person's good omen’.Footnote ⁴³ The turning of Victoria towards Caesar was necessarily Victoria's abandonment of Pompey.

It is not only statues of Victoria that were reported to have turned to demonstrate their disapproval. Dio tells of ‘a statue of Tyche…Sejanus himself saw the statue turn around [turn its back on him] whilst he was sacrificing’ (Τύχης τέ τι ἄγαλμα […ὁ Σεϊανὸς] αὐτός τε θύων εἶδεν ἀποστρεφόμενον, 58.7.2–3).Footnote ⁴⁴ Tyche turned her back upon Sejanus just as his ‘fortunes’ were reversing.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, we see in Dio a cluster of references whereby divine qualities turned to indicate their favour or lack thereof. Given the nature of divine qualities, such interpretations must have been readily apparent.Footnote ⁴⁶ As divine qualities given physical form, the unusual movements of these statues could easily and immediately indicate that these qualities were abandoning or favouring certain individuals.

The turning of divine statues takes on a new dimension when considering the movements of statues of the divine Iulius. One such moment, from 69 ce, is recounted in Tacitus, Suetonius, and Plutarch:

The implication shared in all versions is that the statue of the divine Iulius turned away from Italy and towards the East to indicate that the divine Iulius was turning away from Otho, and towards Vespasian, stationed in Jerusalem. Although there is no small degree of ex post facto interpretation of this portent of Vespasian's fate,Footnote ⁴⁷ the logic of these portent reports is instructive. The movement of a statue of the deified Iulius Caesar, the progenitor of imperial power, could easily be seen as commenting on the fortunes of current and future emperors. The divine Iulius Caesar himself was seen as dictating (or at the very least suggesting) the appropriate home for imperial power.

Although Dio's account of the Athena portent on the Acropolis is frustratingly brief, on the weight of these exempla I contend that the movement of Athena's statue would most obviously have been seen to indicate the feelings of Athena herself. Athena, the patron deity of Athens, had a message for the mortal realm. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the act of turning could be variously interpreted. Given this ambiguity, some have suggested that, because Athena turned away from Antonius in the East, she turned towards Octavian in the West to indicate her favour for him, thus portending Octavian's victory at Actium.Footnote ⁴⁸ This interpretation fits those instances reported above, where divine statues apparently turned in the direction of their favour, and thus turned away from disfavoured parties.Footnote ⁴⁹ Whilst such an interpretation is possible on the basis of the turning of the statue alone, we cannot ignore the spitting of blood in our overall interpretation of the portent.Footnote ⁵⁰

Examples of statues spitting or otherwise emitting blood are, however, relatively rare. More common are instances of statues exuding sweat or crying.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, we can draw on a handful of comparable instances. As preserved in Zonaras (8.22), Dio records that blood issued from statues of divinities upon Hannibal's crossing into Italy (13.56).Footnote ⁵² Livy too recounts that, when Hannibal had invaded Italy, in the temple of Iuno Sospita at Lanuvium, the signa (‘statues’) of the gods dripped with blood (23.31.15).Footnote ⁵³ From a later period, Dio relates that, during the battle at Mutina, a statue of Athena that was worshipped nearby sent forth blood and milk (46.33.4),Footnote ⁵⁴ that a statue of Jupiter on the Alban Mount sent forth blood from its right shoulder and right hand to foretell the downfall of democracy in the defeat at Philippi (47.40.4–5),Footnote ⁵⁵ and that a marble statue of Antonius on the Alban Mount sent forth blood to portend his own death after the battle of Actium (50.8.6).Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, statues emitting blood generally portended disaster for Rome and the shedding of blood in war. This mirrors the predominant interpretation of blood portents generally (not necessarily involving statues), where the emission or appearance of blood is generally ‘regarded as the forerunner of the shedding of blood’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Athena's emission of blood could therefore be intended to portend Antonius’ defeat at the battle of Actium. Yet, as in the other examples we have already seen, where the statue represented a deity, the agency of that deity is crucial to the interpretation of the portentum. Blood had not simply appeared to portent disaster and the loss of life. Rather, Athena herself actively turned towards the West and then spat blood. The implication must be that Athena was spitting blood at the West, and thus, at Octavian himself, presumably in disgust and loathing. This interpretation is strengthened when we consider Dio's verb, ἀποπτύω (‘spew forth’), and compare it with the neutral terminology used to describe the emission of blood in the statue portents previously considered.Footnote ⁵⁸ It follows that the portent must have occurred after the battle of Actium.Footnote ⁵⁹ This interpretation also fits with Octavian's reported reaction to the statue portent moving and spitting. Whilst Dio reports that there were two potential reasons perceived for Octavian's anger, the Athenians’ support of Antonius and the portent report, the latter of these seems far more likely to have aroused Octavian's ire. In his previous visit to Athens, Octavian had already had the opportunity, if he had wanted it, to rebuke the city for supporting Antonius.Footnote ⁶⁰ More likely is that Octavian was incensed by the report of this portent, and indeed viewed the portent as a personal attack against him, and his authority, in Athens.

On this reading, Octavian's reaction to the occurrence of the portent seems anomalous. Why should Octavian have been angry with the Athenians for an act that, ostensibly, was that of a goddess? As we know from Suetonius, Octavian was particularly sensitive to the occurrence of divine signs.Footnote ⁶¹ I suggest that Octavian's reaction to this incident reveals that he did not interpret it as a sign of displeasure from the gods. Rather, his reaction shows that Augustus viewed this incident as a personal attack and rebuke. Indeed, Octavian's reaction lends support to modern, cynical views of religious interventionsFootnote ⁶² – that this incident was orchestrated by the Athenians to personally slight Octavian.Footnote ⁶³ Hoff, for instance, recreates the portent pragmatically as an Athenian intervention:

Rather than follow standard ‘republican’ methods for reporting and expiating prodigia, Octavian's anger at the report of the portent gives scholars the latitude to consider the potentially manipulative ways in which divine signs might have been used. Yet, even if Octavian believed that this portent was choreographed, he was not necessarily denying the sign's religious potency. Indeed, within Octavian's reaction is embedded an important exchange of power between Athens and Octavian, expressed on the level of the divine.

In reacting as if the Athenians had personally slighted him, Octavian unilaterally declared that the occurrence was not a prodigium publicum, and thus was not worthy of Roman intervention and expiation. In so doing, Octavian sidelined and subsumed the powers of the senate, which was traditionally responsible for confirming prodigia publica and appointing the best priesthood to recommend an expiation. Octavian was therefore making an explicit statement (both to Athens and to the Roman senate) of his own supremacy as the interpreter of divine will. If correct, this allows us to glimpse the extent of Octavian's auctoritas (‘social persuasiveness’). Even at this early stage, Octavian believed he had the auctoritas to sideline and commandeer the senate's authorityFootnote ⁶⁵ – an auctoritas that may have been strengthened by (but did not wholly rely on) a specific priestly authority, regardless of Octavian's gradual (and unprecedented) accumulation of priestly offices.Footnote ⁶⁶ Another layer to this interaction is that Octavian did not simply reject a portentum that had occurred in Athenian territory. Rather, given the identity of the statue, Octavian was rejecting Athena herself, the Athenian goddess par excellence. In denying Athena, Octavian deprived Athens of divine autonomy. In a similar vein to the senate accepting or rejecting Italian portenta as being of concern to the Roman pax deorum 200 years earlier, Octavian here authoritatively rejected an Athenian portentum, and the authority of Athena herself, from the Roman worldview. Thus, within this apparently simple action we can decode a powerful and poignant statement: whilst Athens was being incorporated into the Roman empire, they were not joining on equal terms. Rather, Octavian's message was that the new Selbstbild of the Roman empire would (at least for the moment) explicitly exclude the Athenian gods.

Octavian's refusal to accept Athens’ divine autonomy, and his refusal to incorporate it within the Roman Selbstbild, is striking considering that Athens’ symbolic and religious ‘capital’ was the most potent tool in its arsenal for its negotiations with Rome. As Alcock has stressed, ‘Athens, more than any other Greek city, possessed a stock of symbolic capital with which to negotiate its position with Rome’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, alongside Octavian's rejection of Athena and her active input, it has been argued that the Athenian agora during the Roman period became – with the help of Augustus and Agrippa – a kind of cultural and religious museum where temples, altars, and statues were brought and reassembled.Footnote ⁶⁸ In redefining this public space, Augustus and Agrippa contributed to the reconfiguration of Athens’ cultural and religious heritage.Footnote ⁶⁹ At least from the perspective of Augustus and the imperial administration, the divine world of ‘Roman Athens’ should no longer be active, but rather passive, under the remit of the princeps.

I am not the first to consider this portent within a framework of Athenian identity. It plays a starring role in Hoff's influential picture of ‘Roman Athens’, where Athens is transformed from passionately pro-Antonian during the civil wars to passively submissive to Augustus by 14 ce.Footnote ⁷⁰ The Athena portent is perceived as a major milestone along this continuum. Hoff views the incident with the statue as a symptom of greater civic unrest in Athens, an outpouring of anti-Roman sentiment orchestrated by an anti-Roman faction within the city.Footnote ⁷¹ The construction of the monopteros to Roma and Augustus on the Acropolis is perceived as the next turning point; it represented an apology and an attempt at reconciliation with Augustus.Footnote ⁷² For Hoff in particular, the temple represents how the Athenians were ‘quickly brought to heel’.Footnote ⁷³ Impassioned and evocative, the linearity of this narrative is enticingly simple yet brushes over negotiations and interactions throughout this period that must have been messy and complicated. Approaches to various manifestations of emperor worship have demonstrated that there was always a range of voices, pressures, and motivations in the invocation of the divine authority of Rome and/or Augustus, and to focus only on one side of the coin is misleading.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such insights should be extended to consider the entire period of ‘Augustan’ Athens. Even if we adopt the wholly pragmatic approach – that the portent was orchestrated and engineered by Athenians – we should not imagine that such an expression of hatred was wholeheartedly supported by the entirety of the Athenian élite.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rather, this incident might simply have been a potent utilization of divine symbols and signs by a group of dissatisfied Athenian citizens who sought to frame themselves by their religious identity, the most powerful tool at their disposal. Whilst Athena might naturally be perceived to represent the feelings of Athens as a whole, the invocation of Athens’ patron goddess obscures the realities of what must have been complex, contested, and evolving discussions around the nature of their identity – both of individuals and the collective – in this period.

Arx aeternae dominationis (‘the citadel of eternal domination’)

The capacity for portent reports to provide insights into issues of identity is not, I contend, simply limited to ‘Augustan’ Athens nor to Dio's historiographical methods. This can most evocatively be seen in the portent reports – contained in both Tacitus and Dio – that surrounded the uprising of Boudicca in Camulodunum in 60/61 ce. Tacitus provides us with an emotive series of portenta:Footnote ⁷⁶

The first of these portents is strikingly similar to the portent in Athens: a statue representing the divine quality of Victory was said to have turned and fallen. Tacitus himself suggests the interpretation of the portent: that Victory fell in the process of running from Boudicca and the province of Britannia.Footnote ⁷⁷ Fishwick intimated that this statue of Victoria had been set up in the context of the temple of Claudius,Footnote ⁷⁸ the very temple that was (according to Tacitus) seen to have been the ‘citadel of eternal domination’ (arx aeternae dominationis, Ann. 14.31) by the population of Britannia.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, the portenta as Tacitus recounts them cluster around ostensible elements of the Roman colonia of Camulodunum – namely the senate-house and theatre – an image that is reinforced by the entire colony appearing ruined in the Thames. Whilst the statue portent is not given by Dio (or at least not in Xiphilinus’ version), his list of portenta similarly coalesces around the very identity of the colony itself (62.1.1–2).Footnote ⁸⁰ Except for the statue portent, the portents recorded are so similar that they must have come from common source.Footnote ⁸¹ Only a handful of chapters later, Dio depicts Boudicca as a diviner summoning an omen to stir her army into revolt, before thanking Andraste for the sign (62.6.1–2).Footnote ⁸² Several lines later, Dio evokes Boudicca in the grove of Andate – who Dio recognizes was the Britons’ name for Nike – and claims she was given exceptional reverence (62.7.3).Footnote ⁸³ It has persuasively been suggested that, despite the different names (Andate/Andraste), Dio is referring to a single goddess, a divinity who (at least for Dio) resembled Nike/Victoria.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, whilst Dio eschews the statue portent, he constructs a narrative whereby Boudicca emerges as a devotee of British Victoria, and that the divine quality was so enraptured by her devotee that she even summoned divine signs at Boudicca's command.Footnote ⁸⁵ In both accounts of the conflict, therefore, the divine quality of Victory emerges as being – at least in the Roman imagination – emblematic of the contest between Britons and Rome. Such sentiments can even be glimpsed in other media. Given that the epithet Victricensis came to be added to the official titulature of the colony of Camulodunum after Boudicca's defeat (previously only colonia Claudia),Footnote ⁸⁶ it is possible that Victoria was used as a rallying cry for the Roman forces in the conflict, or that she became the patron deity for the recaptured colony.Footnote ⁸⁷ Thus Victoria seems to have been a central locus around which the uprising revolved, both before and after the conflict. Much of this attention manifested itself in the reporting of divine signs – portenta that gravitated around Roman and British claims to victory, and indeed, the visible signs of the Roman colonia itself.Footnote ⁸⁸