In many practical ways Symmachus’ Relationes, the collection of his official correspondence
with Valentinian II during his tenure as urban prefect of Rome in 384,1 is most comparable to
Pliny’s Letters 10: Symmachus is writing to the western emperor as an imperial magistrate
stationed away from the seat of power; the Relationes are usually treated as archival material,
as ‘dispatches’ or ‘state papers’ or ‘reports’ rather than as letters;2 indeed the whole collection
of Symmachus’ correspondence is modelled on Pliny’s,in structure if not in style and
content.3 But, like Cicero’s correspondence, we have only one side of the exchange. Like all
of our letter writers, Symmachus fashions an ideal self for sender and addressee, in ways both familiar from earlier chapters (e.g. paraphrase or quotation) and not yet seen. Like Cicero and Fronto, Symmachus attempts to enact political change in his letters to the emperor, and he depends in part upon his identity as orator (he was considered the Cicero of his time) to persuade.
What makes Symmachus’ collection unique among the others, aside from the
drastically different Empire in which he writes,4 is the absolutely public nature of his official
correspondence with the emperor. This creates a situation in which the sender has in mind a
wider reading audience in every letter.5 As urban prefect, Symmachus was expected to report
to the emperor on city and Senate business, and so at times he is writing on behalf of the inhabitants of Rome or of the Roman Senate. The combination of this factor and the public status of these letters affords him the opportunity of creating and perpetuating
ideological/political propaganda, citing the will of the people or of the Senate, in order to lend strength to his position with the emperor, but also to convince these groups that his stance is
1 All dates in this chapter are AD unless otherwise noted.
2 I have not come across one reference to the collection as ‘letters’; see, e.g. Barrow 1973: 15; Hedrick 2000:
41.
3 Cameron 1965 (against Merrill 1915 and Stout 1955) with 1967 addendum; followed by Matthews 1974: 66
and nn. 40-41; Reynolds 1983: 317; cf. Callu 1972(i): 19-22.
4 The first and second centuries were marked by a low level of centralized power and a high degree of local
autonomy. By the end of the third century this pattern was disrupted by the gradual establishment of a centrally organized and expanded imperial bureaucracy. The Empire had been divided between two emperors since the descendants of Constantine came to power. Rome was no longer the capital; the centres of
government were at Milan or Trier in the West, Constantinople in the East. See Kelly 2004: 1-7; Cameron 1993: 1-12; on the composition of the Senate and role of the senatorial aristocracy in this period see Heather 1998; Matthews 1975.
also theirs.6 At the same time, Symmachus uses his named addressee(s) as a stand-in for
others, and uses epistolary techniques to blend the identity of internal addressee with that of the indefinite external reader, thereby reaching out to the wider reading public in order to
persuade them of the validity of his ideal definitions of emperor and prefect. Therefore, the I-
You epistolary discourse is complicated in Symmachus by a multiplicity of parties involved in
the communication; at times, he seems to operate in what we might call a We-You (pl.)
discourse.
Symmachus’ ideals are closely tied to the past; his goal, I shall argue, is to create cultural and political continuity between the distant past and present, and the strategies by which he attempts to accomplish this goal are particularly epistolary. Symmachus is
primarily known as a pagan, and in general Symmachan scholarship has focussed on the role he may have played in the ‘pagan revival’ of the late fourth century. Until recently there was general consensus that this period saw a unified pagan resistance to Christianity (an idea
supported in part by reference to Symmachus’ religious conservatism),7 the final demise of
which was signalled by the defeat of the usurper Eugenius by Theodosius in 394 that resulted in the immediate and universal Christianization of the Roman senatorial class. Furthermore, Symmachus was thought to be the leader of a so-called ‘circle of Symmachus’, a group of elite western senators concerned with preserving classical Latin literature and the traditional
state religion.8 This account of the late fourth century has since been re-evaluated, and a
group of revisionist historians have created a picture at the opposite extreme: of a Roman
pagan elite ruled by apathy at the rise of Christianity;9 of a model for the Christianization of
Rome characterized by ‘a fluid and relatively amicable coexistence’ with paganism, arguing
that Symmachus was not typical of his class;10 and of no ‘circle of Symmachus’, since the
6 See Long 1996: 212-219; the propagandist requires a ‘myth’ to which the members of the group he aims to
convince subscribe. Symmachus and others in his period evoke the ‘myth of Rome’, whereby mention of the city and its history will strike a particular note with their audiences (1996: 218).
7 Salzman 2002: 136. 8 Bloch 1945; 1963.
9 Alan Cameron was the first to call for the re-evaluation; his argument is developed in Cameron 1977 and
1984.
10 Salzman 2002: 136. For a summary and bibliography of the two views, see Hedrick 2000: 37-88, chapter
three, ‘Unspeakable Paganism?’. For the important arguments against a sudden and complete Christianization of the Roman senatorial class see Brown 1961; Barnes 1989, 1994 and 1995. For a summary of the various theories of Christianization, see Salzman 1992: 452-455.
primary text on which the idea was based was proved to have been written a generation later
than originally thought.11
As noted by C. W. Hedrick, there has been a tendency to compartmentalize late fourth
century culture,12 and he rightly argues for a more holistic approach to the period, in which the
various aspects of late antique western senatorial culture are treated as part of a
comprehensive social system: ‘Religion and war and politics and literature should not be treated as quarantined areas; they always impinge on each other and on other spheres of
economic and social and political and intellectual behaviour’.13 ‘Compartmentalized’
accurately describes much of the scholarship on Symmachus himself. In 1883 Symmachus’ editor, O. Seeck, suggested that, though Symmachus would not attract readers for his own
sake, one might refer to him on particular points.14 As noted by J. F. Matthews, subsequent
scholars have taken this advice with the result that Symmachus has seldom been treated on his
own terms.15
This perhaps is true especially of the Relationes. The famous third Relatio, in which
Symmachus argues for the restoration of the Altar of Victory to its original position in the
Senate house at Rome, has received far more attention than any other single relatio in the
collection, and it is treated in isolation from the others.16 Furthermore, within the third Relatio
itself, historians are generally interested solely in its religious arguments, to the exclusion of
11 Cameron 1966 proved that Macrobius’ Saturnalia was written in the 430s rather than contemporaneously
with Symmachus.
12 Hedrick 2000: 50-51; Eugenius’ usurpation, orginally viewed as a religious conflict, was tranformed into a
purely political one. This in turn has affected the view of late antique paganism. In general, scholars have attempted to divide the ‘public’ practice from ‘private’ beliefs of the senatorial class, correlating the state cults practiced at Rome with the former and the oriental cults with the latter (see Matthews 1973; 1975: 362- 363). Thus whatever attempts were made to maintain the traditional Roman religion are thought by some to have been motivated by non-religious (e.g. financial) concerns. For bibliography on the arguments related to economic self-interest see Salzman 1989: 352 n. 23; Cameron 1993: 156-157.
13 Hedrick 2000: 50; Salzman 2002: 136 likewise calls for a moderate view between the two extreme accounts
of late fourth-century history in the West.
14 Seeck 1883: lxxiii: ‘scriptorem ingenii tam pauperis pauci certe lecturi sunt, sed multi hic illic inspicient, ut
singulas res exerpant’.
15 Matthews 1974: 63-64. For the traditional assessment of Symmachus’ works as useless to historian and
literary critic alike, see Glover 1901: 150-153 and 165-170; Matthews 1974. The personal letters have been derisively described as no more than ‘formal visiting cards’ in many cases, but as Matthews 1974 has argued, while Symmachus would probably agree with this description, he would also be surprised at the negative assessment of their signficance. Symmachus maintains through his personal letters a complex system of traditional aristocratic amicitia. Salzman 2004 has shown (without reference to epistolarity) that Symmachus uses his letters in part to maintain relationships by means of epistolary mediation – a letter can make a visit for him; cf. Brown 1992: 46-47.
16 Noted by Matthews 1973: 175, who attempts a fresh interpretation of Relatio 3 with reference to epigraphic
evidence, but nevertheless is concerned with Symmachus’ religious views. Salzman 1989 attempts a more comprehensive study of Symmachus’ attitude to ‘tradition’.
its broader political implications.17 Because Symmachus’ correspondence is one of the few
texts providing evidence for pagan sentiment in the late fourth century, its religious elements have dominated, and as a result there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive
interpretation of the Relationes as a whole.
Whether or not Symmachus’ letters should be taken as evidence for the religious
attitudes of his class (or even of himself)18 is questionable. The re-evaluation of the late
fourth century has led to a more nuanced understanding of religious identity; there was a
range of pagan and Christian sentiment and some overlap between the two.19 Therefore, the
label ‘pagan’ itself is problematic: paganism in this period is an implied reference and opposition to Christianity, and, paradoxically, Christian identity is dependent upon the exclusion and therefore existence of paganism; yet, ‘paganism’ also relates to a social reality
and is more than simply ‘not Christian’.20
Cultural historians have recently moved away from the idea that ‘cultural identity’21 is
innate or corresponds to a ‘fixed’ reality; rather, (cultural and individual) identity is
constructed within a set of relationships.22 In late antiquity, and perhaps especially so, an
important relationship for the construction of identity is that to the past,23 and texts from this
period display an openness in realigning and reappropriating older paradigms in the present, a
novel, self-consciously revisionist perspective to constructions of identity and culture.24 It is
widely recognized that Symmachus (along with his aristocratic contemporaries) identified
himself and his class with the past and with traditional Roman culture.25 In fact, Symmachus
was for a long time dismissed as irrelevant to his time because of what was perceived as an
17 Hedrick 2000: 41: ‘This text came to be regarded as the characteristic statement of devotion to paganism in its
declining years’. See, e.g. Bloch 1945: 219-220.
18 See Matthews 1973: 189, who argues (against Robinson 1915 and Bloch 1945), that one must consider the
third Relatio’s context, and given its public nature, one cannot assume that it provides evidence of the personal beliefs of its author.
19 Hedrick 2000: 50.
20 Hedrick 2000: 51-53; cf. Miles 1999: 10: ‘Important late antique definitions such as “Roman”, “Greek”,
“Barbarian”, “Christian” and “pagan” are all deeply problematic: each has a myriad of potentially different and often contradictory meanings’.
21 On defining the term see Goldhill 2001: 15-20.
22 Miles 1999: 4; Hedrick 2000: 52-53. The Miles volume is among a growing body of work dedicated to
cultural identity in antiquity; see, e.g. on athletics and Greek identity, König 2005; on Christian identity, Lieu 2004; on ancient views of Greek ethnicity, Malkin 2001; on Greek identity under the Roman Empire Goldhill, 2001 and Whitmarsh 2001; on elite Roman identity, Edwards 1993.
23 Hedrick 2000: 52-53 refers to paganism’s ‘memory of identity’, which is in conflict with and dependent upon
its relation to the present.
24 Miles 1999: 4-8.
obstinate refusal to live in the present. While recently there has been acknowledgement of
Symmachus’ attempt to change the present by reference to the past,26 in general the approach
to the Relationes has continued to be compartmentalized and ‘realist’.
It is misleading, I would argue, to treat the Relationes strictly as an ‘archive’ of the
official dispatches sent from Rome to Milan during Symmachus’ prefecture; if instead we adopt an approach to the text not concerned so much with ‘reality’ as with their epistolary form, it becomes clear that this is a text in which cultural identity is articulated. And each text in which cultural identity is articulated creates its own ‘world’ with its own parameters, which in turn is in competition with other, politically and ideologically charged, versions of the
‘world’.27 T. Whitmarsh sums it up this way:
I take ‘cultural identity’, then, to be not the expression through material culture of a performed and self-evident social unit (a ‘race’ or an ethnos, for example), but a locus of continually evolving and continually challenged patterns of thought and language. It is not a single entity which is refracted through a number of individuals, but an inherently multiple set of languages and discourses: it comprises the vast mass of stories which are told either to give meaning and stability to the exterior world, or to challenge and transform that world.28
The aim of this chapter is to show that in the Relationes Symmachus makes a contribution to
the competing cultural discourses in order to create stability and meaning, primarily by repairing continuity between the past and present. Roman identity, as defined by
Symmachus, is articulated through a reconfiguration of Plinian political discourse by means of the epistolary strategies of self-fashioning used by Cicero, Pliny and Fronto. Like Cicero and Fronto, Symmachus’ corrective agenda, in this case correction of the recent past, is obscured by something else. But rather than employing the disguise of a particular letter type, Symmachus hides his self-fashioning behind the requests and mundane business naturally contained in his letters to the emperor.
Just as cultural identity does not correspond to a ‘fixed’ reality, so epistolary image construction is inherently provisional. As noted in the preceeding chapters, epistolary
communication is a precarious activity; there is always the possibility that a letter may be lost or intercepted, and as the letter is a product of absence, the addressee is not present to confirm the images created by the sender as in conversation. We have seen that Cicero, Pliny and Fronto all acknowledge this provisionality in one way or another: Cicero and Fronto
26 Salzman 1989: 356-357; Markus 1974: 9. 27 Whitmarsh 1999: 18.
deliberately undermine their images, while Pliny builds tentativeness into his self-identity so as to allow Trajan to take the lead in shaping the ideal governor and emperor.
Symmachus likewise displays caution in addressing his emperor, but builds
tentativeness into his self-portrayal in an even more pronounced way than Pliny. As noted
above, Symmachus employs a We-You(pl.) epistolary discourse, claiming to speak on behalf
of Rome and its inhabitants. He fashions an ideal prefect who is wholly defined by Rome, or, by ‘old’ Rome in particular and its community, which respects and values traditional Roman culture and fashions Symmachus accordingly. Thus, Symmachus goes farther than Pliny in depending upon another for his identity; rather than inviting his addressee to define him, he claims that an entire community has already defined him, and what is more, that community is also cited as the source of the ideal images of Valentinian II.
While this tentativeness reflects a strategy of caution, it is also in keeping with the creation of a ‘world’. The aim of Symmachus’ image construction is on a larger scale than our other letter writers: Cicero attempts to fashion an ideal self as an individual in a position of influence with those in power; Pliny’s ideal governor works together with his ideal
emperor for the the good of the province; Fronto attempts to reclaim a position of authority in relation to the emperor, likewise as an individual. But Symmachus is not just interested in fashioning the ideal prefect and emperor; he fashions an ideal Rome, the citizens of which value its past and its traditions, and an influential position for that community in realtion to the ideal emperor, who will be influenced and accordingly share Rome’s values. As for himself, Symmachus fashions the prefect as the mouth-piece for Rome, and so he does not take a prominent role in his images as an individual.
When we approach the Relationes as letters and as a whole, we are able to see the
development of this ‘world’ and the ways in which Symmachus uses the epistolary form in order to create it. The construction of his ‘world’ and the ways in which it is then enacted will be the subject of the first half of this chapter. In the second half, we shall examine evidence that Symmachus’ images have come into conflict with another version of the ‘world’ and his attempts to reassert his ideals.
Brave New ‘World’
The Relationes are not arranged in chronological order (one way in which ‘reality’ is obscured), and it is thought that Symmachus left them in the untidy condition in which we
find them.29 It is difficult to ascertain what principle of arrangement – if any – may have been
used. Letters concerning the same topic may or may not be placed together;30 the letters
addressed to the Eastern emperors are interpersed with the rest.31 However, whether by
chance or by design, the parameters of Symmachus’ ‘world’ are set out at the beginning of the
collection. In Relationes 1 and 2 Symmachus expresses his gratitude to the emperors for his
appointment as urban prefect and establishes that they are responsible at least in part for the success of his tenure (having chosen him, they must support him).
It is in Relationes 3 and 4 that the ideal emperor and prefect are constructed. Both
letters involve a request made on behalf of the Romans by the prefect, and the circumstances
surrounding the request in the fourth Relatio parallel those surrounding the request in the
third. In each case, the immediate request(s) put forward serves as the disguise, which obscures Symmachus’ corrective agenda. In the first of these letters Symmachus introduces the historical paradigms to be taken up in the present, and, while explicitly remaining an obscure figure himself, he (indirectly) fashions the ideal self for Valentinian II. It is in the second letter that he turns to the construction of an ideal self-identity, though here too, Symmachus’ self-fashioning is effected indirectly. These letters will be examined in detail, followed by a briefer look at some of the occasions on which Symmachus claims that his ideal is the ‘reality’.
Rel. 3, July-September AD 38432
The subject of Relatio 3 is the Altar of Victory, originally installed in the Senate house by
Augustus after the battle of Actium,33 and the status of the priests and Vestal Virgins at Rome.