CULHAM, Documents and Domus in Republican Rome

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Documents and Domus in Republican RomeAuthor(s): Phyllis CulhamReviewed work(s):Source: Libraries & Culture, Vol. 26, No. 1, Reading & Libraries I (Winter, 1991), pp. 119-134Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25542326 .

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Documents and Domus in Republican Rome

Phyllis Culham

The Romans beganto

specify locations at which documents were to be kept

and to retrieve and refer to earlier epigraphic documents as a result of en

tanglement with the Greek-speakingstates of the eastern Mediterranean.

The three surviving diplomatic documents that provide specific citations to

earlier records offer insight into how the Romans categorized and stored

information. They demonstrate that the Romans of the Republic did not

attempt word-for-word duplication of master copies,nor did they make public

records easy to consult. Instead, they attempted what Foucault called "simi

litude" rather than "resemblance," since they shared apremodern mindset

unconcerned with careful representation of originalsor master

copies.

... a dislocated voice (that of the

paintingor the blackboard, possibly)

speaks of both the pipe in the paintingand

the one above it: "None of these is apipe,

but rather a text that simulates apipe;

a

drawingof a

pipethat simulates a draw

ing of apipe;

apipe (drawn other than as

adrawing) that is the simulacrum of a

pipe (drawn after apipe that itself would

be other than adrawing)."

. . . more

than enoughto demolish the fortress

where similitude was held prisoner to the

assertion of resemblance.

?Michel Foucault,1 commentingon

Magritte's Les deux mysteres, apainting of

a

pipeabove an easel on which there is a

painting of apipe;

at the bottom of the

painting within the painting is written,''Ceci n 'estpas

unepipe''

Phyllis Culham is professor of history, U.S. Naval Academy.

Libraries ndCulture,Vol. 26, No. 1,Winter 1991?1991 by theUniversity ofTexas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713



120 L&C/Documents and Domus

Modern readers of ancientpublic

documents are often confoundedby

contradictions greater than those that confront viewers ofMagritte's

Ceci

n'est pas unepipe (1926) or the later Les deux mysteres (1966). At least the verbal element on

Magritte'stwo-dimensional canvas is

negativelyworded:

apainting is not a pipe. A viewer not given to lengthy contemplation can

take that statement as an assertion of self-evident truth: apainted pipe

is

not apipe.

The modern reader ofinscriptions does not have such an

easy

option.The

largebronze or marble

object confronting the modern scholar

is clearly not the diplomatic letter sent from one party in negotiations to

another, as its text may claim it to be. Nor did the witnesses to the draftingcited in decrees of the Roman senate attest to the

accuracyof the stone

Greek text inwhich they are listed. What are we tomake of anepigraphically

preserved official letter from a Roman magistrate that reports a decree of

the senate but supplies a text that departs from the format inwhich such a

decree would have beenpassed?2

In most of the cases considered here, the

situation is further complicated by the fact that we have onlya Greek ver

sion of a communication that must have been framed in Latin. In each of

these cases, the document makes apositive

statement: "This is," "The

witnesses to this draft are," "I enclose." Nevertheless, it isn't;they

aren't; he doesn't.

I believe that we should ask why those who engraved these documents

included these statements. I intend to examine some of these published

texts in order to see what they can tell us about how Romans in the period

of the Republic categorized, stored, and described some sorts of informa

tion. Modern historians relyon

carefullyverified resemblance in order to

claimauthority

for their ownattempts

to report historical fact recovered

from authenticated, carefully described documentation. I use "resemblance"

in Foucault's sense: "Resemblance has a 'model,' an original element that

orders and hierarchizes the increasingly less faithful copies that can be

struck from it. Resemblance presupposesa

primaryreference [another key

term] thatprescribes

and classes." Foucaultrecognized

that Magritte's

work constituted an assault on our faith in resemblance and an insistence

on the primacy of similitude:

The similar develops in series that have neither beginningnor end,

that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obeyno

hierarchy.. . .Resemblance serves

representation [yetanother

key term], which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which

rangesacross it. Resemblance predicates

itself upon a model itmust

return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an in

definite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar.3

Modern scholars have tended to read their own reliance on resemblance



121

into Greco-Roman texts, which not only tolerate but thrive and propagateon similitude. An examination of the relevant features of Greek and Roman

diplomatic documents will demonstrate that these ancient societies did notthink in terms of resemblance but did develop other means of categorizingtexts and ascribing authority to them, means that developed from simili

tude. The three diplomatic documents examined at length supply the

reader with precise citations to another document in a different location.

They are the only documents I could find in which such information is

offered. They are also among the few documents in which there are instruc

tions for locating epigraphic copies of the texts.4 It is no accident that

Romans firstbegan

toprovide

for and record locations of texts in this

diplomatic context, although itmay initially seem odd that the instances

that survive are Greek versions kept by the recipients. A brief account of

the historical milieu in which these diplomatic documents were drafted

followed by an examination of the reasons for their survival only inGreek

will serve two purposes. It will establish how and why the Romans initially

adopted and then perpetuated a standard of similitude instead of resem

blance and will provide a number of glimpses into basic problems of how

the Romanscategorized, labeled, and stored texts.

Roman interest in the city states and kingdoms of the Greek-speakingeastern Mediterranean intensified dramatically at the beginning of the

second century B.C., largely as a result ofMacedonian and Seleucid Syrian

complicity with the Carthaginians, against whom the Romans had just

fought the Second Punic War. Correspondence from Rome to the Greek

speaking East consisted mainlyof letters from Roman

magistrates, decrees

of the Roman senate, and documents or dossierscombining

the two. The

Greek East generated letters from the Hellenistic kings and honorific

decrees to Romans or others who had acted in the interest of the state pass

ing the decree. Both sides, of course, arerepresented in the treaties that

survive. We know of the vast majority of the documents from Rome onlybecause Greek speakers engraved Greek versions of the texts. The basic

Roman Documents from theGreek East provides editions of thirty-two decrees

of the senate and thirty-five documents labeled epistulae (letters) by the

editor.5 More Romanpublic documents from the second and first centuries

B.C. survive in the Greek East in Greek than survive in Italy in Latin.6

There are anumber

ofpossible explanations for the survival of these

Roman documents primarily inGreek copies. One explanation lies in the

Hellenistic kingdoms' development of chanceries, archives, and form letters

long before the second century B.C.7 Consequendy, city states that had to

deal with the Hellenistic kingdoms (almost all of them) also had to be able to

document transactions. The Romans had not been accustomed to such diplomatic procedures until they were

entangled with these Greek-speakingstates, and

they therefore had no state mechanisms dedicated to such tasks.8




As a result, the earliest Romanparticipation

in suchdiplomatic exchange

tends to look much like itsHellenistic predecessors: witness the letter from

Flamininus to Chyretiae dated somewhere between 197 and 194 B.C. Itfollows the essential pattern for letters to cities from Hellenistic kings:

(a) name of king (or Roman magistrate), (b)name of addressees, normally

the people and the magistrates/council of a city, (c) greeting, (d) back

ground/description of basic policy, (e) disposition of current question, and

(f) procedure for the future. In announcing a policy and disposing of a

matter of business, it intrinsically shares with royal letters the quality of

speaking from a position of superiority. That is especially striking in this

case, since previously articulated policy with which the letter claims to beconsistent guarantees the "freedom" and (implied) equality of the Greek

cities.9

The document derives its authority from similitude to hundreds of years'

worth of kingly letters. The Greeks of Chyretiae actually blurred its re

semblance to its Roman original by following the standard practice in

Greece during these years and listing Flamininus as consul rather than

proconsul. Flamininus was known for his subtlety in dealing with Greeks in

Greek,

so he could not have made such a mistakehimself;

nor could he

havepromulgated any translation that made so basic and serious an error.

The terms could not have been easily confused: hupatos and anthupatos do

not resemble each other that closely, especiallyin Greek letters. No Ameri

can ambassador or evenextraordinary governor general

could approvea

document that called him the president. Apparently,as far as the Greek

cities were concerned, once aking, always

aking;

once a consul, always

a consul. Similitude preserved authorityand order; resemblance would

have threatened it in this case.

Flamininus himself faced a more complicated dilemma. Nothing in the

Roman Republican past gave him a model or authorized him to deal with

foreignstates as a Hellenistic potentate. Nonetheless, he could only

succeed

at representing the Roman interests with which he had been charged if he

participated in their ongoing diplomatic discourse, issuing documents that

would be accorded authority. He met with the standard Roman advisory

council of ten of his peers from the senate, but issued their decisions in a

form that used similitude to kingly authority.10 If this document had been

circulated or engraved within Italy for some reason, it might well haveevoked resentment rather than respect for Flamininus, since it did not refer

to traditionally Roman sources of legitimacy.

The two great fires on the Capitoline hill in 83 B.C. and 69 A.D. may

supplya second reason

whyRoman

diplomaticdocuments tend to be pre

served only in Greece. In the few cases in which a location is specified for

installing or findingan epigraphic text, the Latin text engraved in bronze

should have been placedat one of the numerous sacral sites on the Capitoline



123

hill. Suetonius tells us that three thousand documents engraved in bronze

were lost in the fire of 69 A.D. alone (Vespasian 8.5). Suetonius was himself

a professional handler of documents for the Empire, and we must trust hisaccount, which claims that it took an extraordinary effort directed by the

emperor himself to recover some of these documents and to have them re

engraved. That alone demonstrates that the Romans had not carefully filed

mastercopies

ororiginals

at aspot from which

they could have been rou

tinely retrieved. The reengraving shows that the Romans did not especially

value reference to anoriginal document; what they wanted was a bronze

object dedicated at its original sacral site. Similitude (a similitude of loca

tion orspace, in Foucault's

terms)

achieved that; resemblance was not an

issue.11

Third, the Greeks had the stronger motive for preserving Roman diplomatic records. The Greek cities that began petitioning the Romans for

diplomatic exchanges and friendship at the beginning of the second centuryB.C. were

encounteringthe Romans as victors over

Macedon, theking

dom that had overshadowed the Greek peninsula and was still keeping a

hand in intrigues reaching to Syria and Egypt. The Romans were an un

known force and therefore worrisome. Greek cities as well as smaller

monarchies in Asia Minor wanted to be assured of amicable relations with

the new power looming on their western horizon. Many of them hoped to

manipulate the Romans ascounterweights against older threats closer to

home. In short, the Greek parties in this correspondence were petitioners

currying favor with a stronger party. It is the petitioners who have the

incentive to document the guarantees made to them. With theexception

of treaties, which were accorded aparticularly religious treatment,12 the

Romans had little reason to engrave the Latin versions of these items of

correspondence or to treat them with great respect. The Romans were

concerned primarily with achieving similitude, which would lend imme

diateauthority

to their pronouncements. Resemblance, allowingverifica

tion back to acarefully preserved original,

was not among their interests.

One final reason for the documentation of Greek and Roman diplomaticcontacts primarily inGreek is that the Greek speakers had developed their

documentary and epigraphic habits within a Hellenistic tradition of royal

correspondence, whichencouraged

suchdevelopments

more than thepublic

processesof the

Republiccould

foster such practices among the Romans.I mentioned above the habits of documentation in royal chanceries and

among cities that had to deal with the kings. Royal pronouncements readilylent themselves to

recordingand preservation, since

theycould be com

municated assimple,

evenshort, letters from a

recognized authority.In

the RomanRepublic, however, leges, laws, and decrees of the senate de

rived their authority not from the voice that pronounced them but from

the process that generated them. The Republic, as shown below, did




developa formula meant to assure the reader that a decree of the senate

wasgenuinely that and

validly produced, but the situation was much more

complicated for laws. It is much harder to document a process than to

preservea

pronouncement.

Even Hellenistic monarchs were more concerned with promulgatingtheir rulings and securing compliance than with insisting on a standard of

resemblance to a storedoriginal.

In fact, they often intended to generate

asmany separate texts to consult as

possible?a clear reliance on similitude.13

Thephysical and economic restraints on

recordingtexts on bronze, wax,

or papyrus meant that the Romans could not have planned onpreserving

the entireprocess by

which a text became a law or decree.14 Ifthey

had

somehow, it would have made the substance of the decision harder to con

sult, not easier.Consequently, Romans

beganthe

practiceof

frequent

promulgation later than did Greek speakers and within the diplomaticdiscourse in which such practices were

already frequent. In that context,

the substantive decision was moreimportant than devices that demon

strated the authenticity of the document qua Roman document. Such

devices remained rare, but it is not surprising that they occurred (or at

least survived) only within diplomatic documents preserved in Greek and

onlyas

signposts enhancingthe documents' authority,

not asgenuine

guides to locating and referring back to anoriginal?that is, claims to

resemblance.15

That brings us to the three known texts inwhich there areprecise citations

to sources of information. The first is from c. 129 B.C., a decree of the

senatepreserved

in twocopies

atAdramyttium

andSmyrna,

two cities of

Pergamum,the

kingdomfor which the decree was issued.16 The decree of

the senate is followedby

a rubric, "judgment concerningthe land," a

citation, "deltos B wax [illegible]," and the date and location of a meeting

of amagistrate

with histypical advisory council of senators to announce a

decision on the tax liability of the land in question. The judgment itself was

reported in the illegible section at the end. Deltas is presumably Greek for

codex, a collection of wax-facedpieces of wood, tabulae, bound as a set with

leather strips.The "wax" was

presumably the tabula, numbered as it was

tied into the codex. From the context, this second (beta) deltos from an un

named set appears to have been the record of the decisions of this magis

trate with this advisory group. Both copies of the decree are severely

damaged,and we cannot now recover how the dossier was transmitted

(i.e., whether the formal senatorial decree was appended heading and all to

a letter or whether it was reported informally within a letter). A later,

better-preserved example is morerevealing.

The example from 73 B.C. might conceivably be called a dossier, or it

mightbe termed a letter reporting

on a number of items. It consists of a

letter from the consuls of 73 B.C. to themagistrates, council, and

peopleof



125

Oropos.17It announces that the consuls and their standard

advisorycom

mittee of senators have reached a decision, as they were asked to do by a

decree of the senate dating to the previous consulship (not explicidy cited),about a dispute over tax liability between the shrine of the god Amphiariosand the tax farmers. The decision itself is prefaced by a

listing of the dayand location of the meeting

at which the announcement was made and of

those council members present. The decision in favor of the Greek

speaking complainantsrefers to a law

governing the award ofpublic

con

tracts but does not cite it. The consuls specify that they issue the decision in

accordance with the opinion of their advisors, that they will bring that deci

sion before the senate

(presumably

to have it ratified in a

decree),and that

they will record it in the deltos of their minutes. (That is presumably the

kind of deltos cited after the decree of 129 B.C.) The decision purports to

quote previous findings reached by the dictator Sulla with his advisoryboard of senators and notes that a list of those who were on that advisory

board can be found in "deltos one of Things Considered, wax fourteen,"

obviously the fourteenth tabulabound into the codex in question. Finally, the

inscription (from Oropos of course) ends with the senatorial decree in ques

tion, cited with full formal heading: date, location, witnesses to the draft

ing,whereas clause, and concurrence of the senate in whatever the consuls

decided.

Previous correspondence lays no groundwork for this unique effort to

incorporate precedents in the decision and to enhance the authority of the

text with specific citations to earlier texts and to a Latin record. Hellenistic

royal documents do not cite precedent with that detail. If I seem to be mak

ingmuch of oneexample, my excuse is that it is the only direct evidence we

have of Romans of the Republic simultaneously describing and consulting

identifiable earlier texts. This letter, the Pergamene decree, and the Aphro

disias dossier discussed below are theonly documentary references to the

technology of information storage in the Republic. Even in the Oropos

case, however, the recipientsare

clearly expectedto retain, cite, and refer

to the letter from the consuls, not the"original" Latin version recorded in

a codex used as acommentarius, which would be retained

byone of the con

suls. The text still derived its local authority from similitude within the

series of Hellenistic letters from potentates, as well as from its similitude to

thePergamene

decree andperhaps other examples that

nolonger survive

but that helped to enhance, domesticate, and Romanize this similitude to

kingly pronouncements.

The citation and the detail of date and place of decision lent the Oroposdocument

authority among the Romans at whom it was directed: the tax

collectors who just would not leave that poor shrine alone. It placed the text

within a series of findings of boards that had examined the dispute, within a

Romanlegal

context(the otherwise unknown law on

lettingstate

contracts),




within a tradition Rome had come to share with Greek democratic cities of

recording alegitimating, deliberative process in a short form (date and

place),and within the

weighty genre of consular commentarii, formal diaries

in which every consul recorded his own actions and those of the senate

when hepresided. These are all instances of similitude rather than resem

blance, albeit a complex similitude of analogy or even sympathy, in Fou

cault's terms, since thecovering letter as

engraved evoked theatmosphere

of consular deliberations without actually citing a "wax" on which the

reader could find the original in Rome. There was no literal original or

even master in Rome, of course, since the consuls promisedto record the

decision, not this letter we actually have, in a commentarius.

The citation to an earlier codexwould be unique for the Republic even

without the purported quotation from Sulla's decision reached with his

advisory council. Even scholars who believe that the Roman Republic

thoughtin terms of

originals,verified

copies, retrieval, and so on have

recognized that this description cannot have been meant to aid the reader

in locating the cited document in any publicly accessible set of holdings.

The Roman Republic cannot have been still in a first codex of Things Con

sideredin 73

B.C.The

citationmust refer to

the first codex of ThingsConsidered by Sulla and his council.18 In that case, itwas a commentarius

and was retained by Sulla. Hence, those who quoted it borrowed it from

his heirs at home. We will return to the significance of that later. Now we

can simply note that this citation of a finding, the only one known from the

Republic,did not constitute resemblance to an

"original"and could not

have been meant to. It does grant this letter from two potentatesa sort of

similitude to an authoritative Roman commentarius.

The third example comes from the final days of the Republic; it is from a

triumvir just before the dawn of the Empire. Reynolds has sorted out this

dossier, one she thinks was assembled and sent out to Aphrodisias by

Octavian (called Augustusas

emperor).The documents in the set were

apparently inscribed out of order by the recipients. The reconstructed

portfolio consists of a covering letter from Octavian (inscribedas no.

6),a

decree ofAntony

and Octavian as triumvirs(no. 7),

a decree of the senate

ratifying the substance of the triumviral decree (no. 8), another senatorial

decree or a law (no. 8a), and a fragmentary text that is probablya related

law (no. 9). Nos. 10-13 are other documents brought back to Aphrodisias

byits ambassador Solon at the same time as the ones that concern us.19 The

letter from Octavian notes that he was asked to send Aphrodisias copies of

Roman documents relevant to their interests, and one istempted

to assume

that the attached dossier was assembled and sent by Octavian in response

to that request.

Theeighth document, the senatorial decree, is the only surviving

docu

ment that claims to cite the senatorial decreesdeposited

at the aerarium,



127

ortreasury. Reynolds translates, "from the record of decrees referred to

the senate, file [one, pages four], five, six, seven, eight, nine, and in the

quaestorian deltoi of the year in which M. Martif- and . . . ]were urban

quaestors, file one.'' (Her files and pages are deltoi and waxes.) As Reynolds's

commentary notes, this initially looks like a reference both to the copies of

senatorial decrees that were taken from the senate anddeposited

at the

aerarium afterthey

werepassed and to the set of codices kept by

the quaes

tors at the aerarium into whichthey copied senatorial decrees in chrono

logicalorder. In this case, the modern reader

naturally tends to assume

that the integrity and stature of this document are beyond doubt, since this

explicit cataloginginformation would allow the reader to confirm its au

thenticity orauthority. In fact, Reynolds and Miller both cite this document

as an example of Roman scruples in acting "officially through the 'properchannels'

"and insist that it illustrates "the formal observance of institu

tional niceties" even by the junta of the triumvirs.20

Reynolds's epigraphicacumen casts doubt on her reconstruction of a

dictatorial triumvirate carefully preservinga wax-trail, to coin a

phrase.

In spite of her insistence that Romans carefully cataloged the stored official

texts of senatorial decrees, at least, for routine retrieval, as well assupply

ing officially approved translations, shescrupulously

notes in her commen

tary that this text of this decree is rife with "incoherence of arrangement

. . .repetition of theme . . . variation in the form of the recommendations/

decisions . . .[and] idiosyncrasies of translation," even in the basic termi

nologyused when

enrollinga state

among the allies. Some of the other

documents in the dossier, she notes, display "textualcorruption"

and

reverse the normal order of the names of the consuls.21 It would have saved

Reynolds much trouble if one of Octavian's scribae hadself-consciously and

playfully written at the bottom of the text sent Aphrodisias: "This is nota decree of the senate."

If this document isactually

an authenticated representation, in official

translation, of anoriginal

filed in the mostorganized record series we know

of in the Republic (the senatorial decrees in the aerarium), it does not

inspire faith in Romanrecording

and transmission of information. An

alternativeexplanation may lie in the phrase "deltos of decrees referred to

the senate," not"passed by

the senate," aphrase that bothered

Reynolds.22

The simplest explanation is that Octavian's household slapped togetherthe whole set of documents from their own

holdings. We know that senators

hadbegun

to draft itemsthey

meant to refer to the senate and to present

them from written copy at least a generation earlier.23 The codices (deltoi)

involved, in that case, were those in which Octavian's slave and freedman

clerks kept track of decrees drafted in his household and referred to the

senate for ratification. These codices, in other words, were the commentarius

of amagistrate with

imperium, the most authoritative source the Romans



128 L&C I ocuments and Domus

couldimagine,

the same definitive source cited in our twoprevious

ex

amples.

Octavian's staff undoubtedly retained a copy of what he wanted ratified

before sending it to the senate. A copy read by Octavian or by a consul in

the senatemight

ormight

not have been the copy taken to the aerarium

forregistry by the quaestors. Whoever took a

copy to the aerarium must

havecopied

down theregistry date (i.e., the numbers

assignedthe tabulae

as they were bound into codices and the location of the version copied into

the quaestorian codices) in order to be able to offer the data as proof that it

had been properly registered. It is simply inconceivable that Octavian or a

consul or staff from the households of either copied this text we have fromthe quaestorian files in the aerarium. Under any reasonable reconstruction,

whoever presented the draft to the senate already had a copy. The proposer

must have taken a draft of the decree to the senate with him. If the decree

passed in that exact form, he may simply have listed the witnesses on his

own tabulae and have taken those very tabulae to the aerarium.Surely

he

already would have seen to it that he or his scriba had entered it on tabulae

in his own commentarius.Why

would any magistratehave carried a

single

copyto the

awkwardly arranged, badlylit

record-keeping spaceand then

proceeded to copy his own copy after registering it? If the senate had in

sisted onchanging

thewording,

the problemwas even

simpler.The com

mittee of witnesses would have attested that a new version perhapsrecorded

on the spot reflected the will of the senate. The proposer would then have

made the requested changes on the copy he had brought with him and

would have taken the newcopy generated by

the senate over to the aerarium.

In our case, either someone made notes for Octavian, addingon his draft

both the names of witnesses appendedto the copy to be taken to the aera

rium and theregistry

data from the aerarium; or someonesimply

made

note of the names of witnesses and the registry data, and Octavian's staff

added that information to the retained codex of "decrees referred to the

senate." The text of the senatorial decree sentAphrodisias

was not re

covered from a records set, nor were the other documents in that group,

including the law (if it is alaw).

In short, even in the one case in which aspecific

citation to a records set

at a known location is given, it cannot have been intended to allow the

reader to retrieve an original. The wax text in the aerarium, taken from

another wax text, was not anoriginal,

and the senatorial decree as we see

it in Aphrodisias does not claim to resemble an original. None of these

copies in my reconstruction (which is simpler than that implied by Rey

nolds and others ) is an original. They share similitude. The citation of

another text in another location confirms that the requisite processwas

followed: ratification then deposition. This descriptive device ismeant to

establish authorityrather than location.



129

These three instances of citations in diplomatic documents?the decree

on Pergamum, the letter to Oropus, and the decree on Aphrodisias?

demonstrate the importance of commentarii, the records kept by magistratesin their own households. There is no

signof deference to an

original,

descriptively cataloged at aspecified location. There are reasons why the

only known citation to a set of deposited records, that in the Aphrodisias

decree, occurred during the legal chaos of the junta.24 Documents produced

anywhere during those yearswere

suspect, but those sent to reassure the

frightened population of the Greek East were themost suspect. Cicero may

have beenexaggerating

or evenlying when he claimed that the consuls

brought proposalsbefore the senate for ratification that had

alreadybeen

sent to the East and already had lists of witnesses appended (e.g., Pro Sestio

66), but Cicero's repeated charges to that effect must have fed skepticism.One need not take Cicero at his word that Antony's household staff was

manufacturing decrees for any frightened Greeks who would pay his pricein order to accept the implication that his staff was

big enough and expert

enough that the charge might have been thought plausible (Philippics 5.4.

11-12, et al. onoperations

inAntony's domus).

A decree in which the city of Abdera honored its envoys in 166 B.C.

demonstrates that the Greeks understood well how to manipulate the

Roman systemas

earlyas their second

generationof intensive

negotiations.

Abdera hailed its clever envoys who besieged the Roman "leading men"

by waiting upon them in their homesdaily and won them over as

patrons.25

Greek envoys soughtintroduction to the senate

by attendance at Roman

salutationes (levees) in the domus of the consular families. Documents first

drafted by the consular families were sought and supplied from those fami

lies. It may seemstrange that Roman

diplomacy could be handled on such

an entrepreneurial basis, but we should be less surprised when we remem

ber that the preference fororiginal

and archivalcopies

is ours and that

Romans always thought only in terms of similitude. The chaos of the civil

warspermitted

some of the lessscrupulous among them to

dispense with

the process that should have conferredauthority.

In fact, texts that located other texts in order to establish their own

authorityare a

unique feature of thediplomatic correspondence,

un

matched by anything in the Italian documentation. It is surely significantthat formal treaties alone merited the

specification of location of epigraphiccopies inRome and in the Greek cities. The Roman texts were bronze and

were placed on or around the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.26 Nor did the

rarer Latin texts have many headings or labels that could allow a reader to

scan a wall or monument looking for the subject heading of immediate

interest. A few of the Greek versions have headings that wereprobably

added by the recipients when they had the texts engraved. Surely Teos,rather than Rome, added the separate line "Of the Romans" at the top




of a letter from M. Valerius aspraetor,27 just

as the Magnesiansmust have

added the rubric "from the Roman senate" at the top of a letter from M.

Aemilius.28 In the second half of the second century B.C. Greek-speakingcommunities frequently added a full heading toRoman documents, giving

the names of those who were in local office when the Roman document

was obtained. Greeks as well as Romansnormally

dated by eponymous

magistrates,and the Greeks were, in essence, assigning the document a

date within their local system.29 Clearly, the Greek recipients had greater

incentive to ensure that they could identify these documents when they

needed them, but even Latin documents on Italian issues preserved in Italy

were notuser-friendly

and did notaim

at easeof consultation, let

alone

scanning.30These tacked-on Greek headings,

of course, weakened resem

blance rather than fostering it. They certainly do not indicate deference

to the form of a Roman original.

One may reasonablyask at this point whether Romans actually cataloged

or even classified information onpublic

affairs at all. The fewexamples

we have of Roman citation of documents admittedlydemonstrate that the

Republic did not have sophisticated ideas of subject headings?witness the

multivolume codex

Things

Considered.

Only

modern historians,spoiled

bymodern

catalogingand storage processes, could ever have

envisaged

retrieval of documents, even decrees of the senate, from the aerarium,

where the copiessent from the senate would have been registered

in chrono

logicalorder. One can

imagine how hard it would have been to find a sena

torial decree of the first century B.C. for which one had only a year and

not a month, at least, especially given the absence of any comfortable or

even convenient provisionsfor

usingthese codices.31 Nonetheless, the

standard preamble to a public document did offer important identifying

information that would have told a researcher or interested party where

the text and even, perhaps, details of the meeting at which it had been

passedcould be

sought. Williamson, in animportant dissertation, has

collected instances in which Romans cited laws, some of them from other

laws. As she notes, laws are cited by the names of the proposers and are,

in essence, named after them.32 After the Empire moved the legislative

process from the assemblies of citizens to the senate, senatorial decrees

took the place of laws, andthey

alsobegan

to be, significantly,named

(e.g.,

the senatus consultum Velleianum).33 That was the information the researcher

needed?telling which of the great families to petition for help. This whole

picture of information stored and mentally categorized in accordance with

status and patronage proceduresis incompatible

with modern conceptions

of publiclyverifiable archival documents, derived from our own insistence

on resemblance.

As late as the Lex de XX Quaestoribus,one of those rare survivals in Latin

of a Republican law, dating to 81 B.C., we have a valuable glimpse of



131

Roman efforts to create mechanismsenabling

the state to cope with escalat

ingdemands.34 It is

significantthat the increase from

eightto twenty quaes

torswas

part ofa

package of constitutional "reforms" proposed by Sulla

during his illegal dictatorship. Since the quaestors were charged with keep

ing track of financial records, and one of them wasassigned

to manage the

aerarium, the temple where copies of senatorial decrees andperhaps

en

acted legislationwere deposited, this additional administrative support was

at least a century overdue. That is typical of the Republic's reluctance to

institutionalize and bureaucratize. The section of the law that survives

provides forincreasing

thequaestors' staff

by adding criers and couriers?

useful for financial business but of no

help

in

classifyingand

retrievingrecords. There is no mention of the managers of tabulae, the tabularii, who

were toemerge in the

Empire.35 After more than acentury of intensive

diplomatic exchange with the Greek East, there is no trace of the sort of

chancery withspecialists

in records management that every petty Hel

lenistic monarch had to have.

After Octavian became Augustus and the Republic became the Empire,tabularii began to appear, but still in the context of finance and accounting.

Theywere slaves and freedmen detached from the

emperor'sown house

hold. The great imperial chanceries,a bureau for Greek correspondence

and another for Latin, werepart of the emperor's

own domus, not of the

old aerarium.36 That does notrepresent imperial usurpation

of functions

from older mechanisms of the Roman state; there wasnothing

to usurp.

Augustus continued to issue letters (which survive in epigraphic copies)

saying,"Here is the decree of the senate on this matter." Over the next

century, his successors withincreasing frequency simply

issued what came

to be called edicts. Some of these survive in truncated form in the Digest

of Roman law, others in odd epigraphic copies. Nonetheless, resemblance

to an archivedoriginal

was never the issue. The Roman emperors spoke

in the voice of the Hellenistic kings to whom theMediterranean had longbeen accustomed. That similitude was more

comfortingto them than the

Republic's infrequent attempts to have a document represent the authen

ticating process that produced it. An ancientMagritte, working

as a stone

carver on the Aphrodisias or the later Cyrene dossier, might have thought"This is not a decree of the senate" or "This is not a letter," but he never

mentioned it.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, This Is Not A Pipe (Berkeleyr: University of California Press,

1982), p. 49. I could not havecompleted this study

or have begun the next stage of a

related long-term project without theprofessional assistance of Barbara Breeden, a

reference librarian at the NavalAcademy, who has remained astonishingly cheerful




in the face of my repeated demands that she supplyme with obscure foreign pub

lications of mutilated epigraphic documents.

2.

Examples

are Robert K. Sherk, Roman Documents

from

the Greek East

(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969),

nos. 11 and 38. This basic collection

is normally cited as RDGE.

3. Foucault, Pipe, p. 44.

4.Except for military diplomas certifying honorable discharge, which ordinarily

cite a bronze copy placed somewhere on the Capitoline. See the collections of M.

Roxan, Roman Military Diplomas 1954-1977 (London: Institute of Archaeology,

1978), and RomanMilitary Diplomas 1978-1984 (London: Institute of Archaeology,

1985).5. The two categories of RDGE are not

really distinct, since decrees were often

reportedwithin or

appendedto a letter. Since the

headings

or

topsof stones are

often the mostseverely damaged part, it is quite likely that decrees not now known

to have been engraved with a letter originallywere

(e.g., RDGE no. 13, categorized

there as a senatusconsultum).

6. I am notcounting milestones and other brief texts in Latin that give credit

for public works inItaly. They

are much shorter than legaltexts and were presuma

bly placed by the builder to honor himself; they do not speakto the intentions of the

Roman state.

7. Examplesare

conveniently collected in C. Bradford Welles, Royal Correspon

dence in theHellenistic Period (Chicago: Ares, 1974). RDGE (pp. 188-189, 197) notes

the Roman adoption of Hellenistic models. The Latin records contemporary withthe Greek correspondence in the second century open with a very short formula that

identifies the document as a senatorial decree and names the presiding magistrate.

There is noequivalent for the Hellenistic diplomatic protocol of formulaic greetings,

and so forth. See, for example, the senatorial resolution on the Bacchanalia and

the one addressed toneighboring Tibur, in H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae, 3

vols. (Chicago: Ares, 1979), vol. 1, nos. 18 and 19, respectively.

8. Phyllis Culham, "Archives and Alternatives in Republican Rome," Classical

Philology 84 (1989): 100-115. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 166, positsa

heightenedawareness of

literacy and records beginningto

change Roman practices about130 B.C.

9. The literature on the Roman proclamation of support for "The Freedom of

the Greeks" is immense; see now Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming

of Rome, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984),vol. 1, pp. 132-157.

10. On the magistrate's concilium, seeJ. A. Crook, Concilium Principis (Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 4-5. Given the attested finesse and

linguisticskills of Flamininus, we must suppose that he intended to achieve the

tonerepresented

in the letter. On his skill in dealing with the Greeks, see Plutarch's

Flamininus 2.2-4 and 5.5.

11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (NewYork: Vintage, 1970), pp. 18-19.

12. C. Williamson, "Monuments of Bronze: Roman Legal Documentson

Bronze Tablets," Classical Antiquity 6 (1987): 172; Culham, "Archives," pp. 110-111.

13. For example, Welles, Royal Correspondence,no. 18.

14. On the costliness of papyrus for the Romans, see Harris, Literacy, p. 195; on

the awkwardness of the codex, see C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the

Codex (London:British Academy, 1983), pp. 11-12; on the illegibility of most

bronze documents in situ, see Williamson, "Monuments."

15. Pace RDGE (pp. 7-10),whose reconstruction of Roman chancery and record

handling practices is accepted by recent scholars except for Culham, "Archives."



133

16. RDGE, no. 12, with references to the voluminous literature. The copy from

Adramyttium only recorded the section naming the members of the consilium and

giving

their decision

(losthere,

too).

But the

illegible beginning

never included the

citation to the minutes accordingto Sherk, who saw the squeeze in Berlin. The

Adramyttium copy also omits one witness, lists others out of order, and misspells

one's name, although its letter forms indicate that it wasengraved shortly after

receipt of the document. Since the Smyrna copy engraved almost acentury later is

more accurate, this speaks well for Hellenistic archives, but ill for theories that

require epigraphic documents to share in resemblance. There may have been a

tendency toward careful reproduction in stone of received documents, but the dis

parities between the twocopies of this document deserve fuller discussion elsewhere.

17. RDGE, no. 23.

18. SeeSherk,

who mentions the concurrence of

Badian,

Rome and the Greek East

to theDeath of Augustus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 71. On

the stature of commentarii, see Cicero Atticus 14.13.6 and Pro Sestio 66. Cicero claimed

in de Lege Agraria 14.37 that only the consuls for any given year could serve as re

liable sources for decrees of the senate passed during their year in office; that directly

holds commentarii to be more reliable than anything that could be recovered from the

aerarium.

19. Joyce Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome(London: Society for Roman Studies,

1982), pp. 33-70.

20. Ibid., pp. 45, 46, where Reynolds cites Fergus Miller in agreement. See

Miller,"Triumvirate and

Principate," yownia/ ofRoman Studies 63

(1973):50ff.

21. Reynolds, Aphrodisias, pp. 64-69. Arelatively

new find presents significant

comparative evidence: K. Bringmann, "Edikt der Triumvirn oder Senatsbe

schluss?" Epigraphica Anatolica 2 (1985): 47-76. This document apparently derives

from a similar Octavianic portfolio, but its difficulties are such that Bringmann positsa

local translator who understood neither Latin governmental terminologynor sena

torial procedure. While pronouncing that judgment, Bringmann still believes that

Rome had aprofessional chancery and that the triumvirs were anxious to follow

normal procedures. Whether this and other documents werelocally translated or

not, the explanation offered above is at least supplementary: the Romans had no

chancery

or trueprofessionals

atcorrespondence yet.

22. Reynolds, Aphrodisias, p. 64.

23. Cicero Caec. 16.52 even accuses an opponent ofintending

to present a stock

rhetorical reply from a collection available in a liber, apapyrus roll sold in the book

stalls.

24. Other possible instances occur in Josephus A ntiquities of theJews 14.10, where

a number of documents from the final civil wars are cited. Josephus claims he saw

all of them posted in bronze on the Capitolinein Rome. Nonetheless, his version

of their texts presents a number of anomalies, and we do not know whether these

textsexemplify,

as does Aphrodisias no. 8, the too-rapid manufacture of decrees

for the Greek East and thepublication

of these texts inbronze after insufficient

vetting,or whether Josephus, who was a native speaker of Aramaic, did not exer

cise precision in translating from Latin texts read in Rome into hishistory

inGreek.

25. Inscriptions Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinendas (Paris: Leroux, 1927), vol. 4,no. 1558.

26. For example, RDGE, nos. 25 and 44.

27. Ibid., no. 34.

28. Ibid., no. 7.

29. For example, ibid., nos. 9 and 43.




30. Williamson, "Monuments."

31. Culham, "Archives," pp. 101-102.

32. C.

Williamson,

"Law

Making

in the Comitia of

RepublicanRome"

(Ph.D.diss., University of London, 1984), pp. 235-236.

33. The senatus consultum Velleianum getsa titled section in the Digest: 16.1.1.1.

34. C. G. Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani Antiqui, 7th ed.(Tubingen: Mohrii, 1909),

no. 89.

35. The law does not survive in its entirety, but what we have does seem to in

clude the whole personnel section.

36. G. W. Houston, "Administrative Records in the Roman Empire," pre

sented 1September 1984, at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archi

vists.

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