Private Lives, Imperial Virtues: The Frieze of the Forum Transitorium in Rome. - book reviews

The Forum Transitorium, also called the Forum of Nerva and a few other names, is an enigmatic complex, not merely because so little of it is available for us to study (most of it lies under the via dei Fori Imperiali today), but also because what remains is tantalizingly different from other monuments of its type in ancient Rome. Chronologically the fourth of five Imperial fora, it was begun by the emperor Domitian and dedicated by his successor Nerva in A.D. 97 or 98, about a year after Domitian's assassination and damnatio memoriae. It is little more than the enclosure and monumentalization of a stretch of the Argiletum, the street that led from the Quirinal Hill to the Forum Romanum: hence, one of its names. Except for the temple to Domitian's patron deity Minerva on its northeast end, the forum incorporated no rooms to house the business of Rome. In its form and in the kinetic fashion in which the visitor would experience it, the Forum Transitorium differs from the other fora, which it in fact binds together.

Most unusual about the forum, however, is its frieze, which meanders forward and back as the entablature creates a series of bays along the enclosure wall. Only about 6 percent of the whole is preserved, and it is unique in character among the sculptural programs of state monuments. The majority of the figures on the frieze are women; those whose activities are clearly recognizable are involved in worship or in working wool, spinning or weaving. Even though it is appropriate to Minerva as the patron goddess of handcrafts, the theme of the frieze appears derived from the private and domestic realm, and is thus surprising for the adornment of a public monument. In her provocative new book, Private Lives, Imperial Virtues, Eve D'Ambra shows how the frieze, through the juxtaposition of mythological and moralizing emblemata, forges a connection between the feminine virtues and imperial ideals. She agrees with what seems to be the majority opinion about the theme: that the central motif depicts Minerva's punishment of Arachne.

D'Ambra begins by setting the frieze in its historical and ideological contexts. The introductory chapter, loosely organized under the title "Domitian and Minerva," discusses Domitian's rule--much maligned in the ancient sources--his attempts at social reforms, which were modeled on those of Augustus, and his devotion to Minerva. In her discussion of the history, D'Ambra relies almost exclusively on the analysis of B. W. Jones, who refutes the ancient portrayal of Domitian and constructs a positive image for his rule.(1) Although this image reconstruction is perhaps the current trend in Domitianic scholarship, D'Ambra should acknowledge that the Arachne myth has very different overtones if one accepts, even minimally, the traditional view of Domitian as presented in the ancient sources.

The first chapter, "Architecture and Topography," discusses the ideological messages communicated by the architectural structure and placement of the Forum Transitorium. One of the most useful aspects of this well-researched section is its review of the ancient remains on the Quirinal Hill, which abuts the Forum Transitorium at its northern end and from which the forum serves as a passageway to the old center of the city. This hill was the site of the original Sabine settlement, and it always remained associated in the Roman mind with that element of the ancient population. The Flavian emperors, of whom Domitian was the last, traced their ancestry back to the Sabines, who were proverbial for their moral rectitude. Domitian styled himself renovator urbis, and his architectural renovations and new constructions furthered his general program of cultic revival and moral reform. D'Ambra discusses various Quirinal cults as they fit into this program and into the imagery of the Forum Transitorium frieze.

One crucial architectural element that actually sat within the Forum Transitorium itself requires more analysis, however: the Janus Quadrifrons. The cult of Janus, god of passages, was established by Numa Pompilius, a Sabine and the second king of Rome. Structures honoring Janus, jani, were enclosed passageways, originally built over water courses or the pomerium.(2) We know from the ancient sources that Domitian included a janus in the Forum Transitorium, and that it had four openings; there is no evidence that these were arched. Of this structure no substantial trace has ever been clearly identified.(3) D'Ambra judiciously weighs the various theories about its character and location, but her own conclusions remain rather vague. At one point she speaks of the forum's "two temples," i.e., of Minerva and Janus, but later she supports the idea of a Janus shrine as a quadrifrontal arch "in or near the entrance to the Forum Romanum," and then on the same page speaks of the shrine as if it were placed in the center of the space. It would have been helpful if she had given us her own plan of the forum; all of the four or so plans she includes place the janus in different locations and give it a different form.

Janus is crucial to our understanding of the character of the space: this is the Forum Transitorium, after all. If we knew how the janus was situated, we might know the angles of the routes across the forum, the positions of the entrances to the four fora that it abuts, and most important for D'Ambra's study, the locations of the "stop points" from which the frieze could have been viewed. It is one of the weaknesses of D'Ambra's argument that she analyzes the only fully extant bay of the forum from a static vantage point. Her suggestions for reconstructing the motifs on the rest of the frieze would have benefited from a coherent theory as to how visitors would have read it as they moved variously through the space.

In chapter 2, "The Frieze," D'Ambra describes and analyzes the organization of the motifs; she begins with the central image on the back wall of the only preserved bay and moves outward symmetrically to a discussion of the messages on the projecting arms. My criticism here, for brevity's sake, will focus exclusively on the three lengths that enclose the extant bay.

The central figure, which lies directly under a large image of Minerva on the attic above the frieze, is another Minerva, whose pose suggests that she is striking the woman kneeling in supplication before her. D'Ambra reads the duplication as creating a vertical axis, which fixes and defines the message of the frieze. She identifies the scene as the punishment of Arachne for the hubris of challenging the goddess to a weaving contest; the narrative, as she sees it, is reduced to an emblem, a negative moral exemplum, a warning. Figures on either side then act as glosses to the central scene. To the right, three women bystanders, arranged from very old to very young, stand for the natural order, which Arachne has subverted. To the left of center, four women inspect a cloth, which D'Ambra identifies as Minerva's contest entry. Farther out on the right side, two women working at a loom and three more grouped around a wool basket represent the ideals of feminine behavior, apparently industry, obedience, and seductiveness. Farther out on the left, a figure whom D'Ambra identifies as Minerva Ergane instructs a worshiper in spinning: they form another positive behavioral model.

Although the myth of Arachne appears to be generally accepted as the subject of the central grouping, this highly moralizing interpretation raises some problems. The only known version of the myth occurs in Ovid's Metamorphoses 6.1-69, nor is there any other securely identifiable representation in ancient art. The elements of the story that are minimally necessary for the myth to be universally recognizable are the contest and the transformation of Arachne into a spider: these are not shown on the frieze. To support her interpretation, D'Ambra relies heavily on Ovid's text. She does not mention, however, that Ovid was exiled by Augustus, Domitian's role model, for certain moral indiscretions, a carmen and an error.(4) Whatever the specific charges might have been, it is clear that Ovid subtly and consistently made sport of Augustus's attempts at moral reform; he so angered Augustus that neither he nor his successor Tiberius ever allowed Ovid to return. D'Ambra needs to explain how a moralizing message on a public monument could be addressed only to those who had read an author whose works had been banned from all public libraries. It is highly ironic that a story from Ovid could become a moralizing exemplum; one can almost hear him slapping his knees in his grave. Furthermore, the story as told in the Metamorphoses is less about mortal insolence than about the abuse of godly power. This myth would be a dangerous reference for Domitian if, as the ancient sources tell us,(5) he demanded to be addressed as dominus et deus, lord and god (not "lord and master" as D'Ambra translates it, p. 9).

D'Ambra sees the myth of Arachne thus reduced to a cautionary emblem, flanked on the projecting arms of the bay by emblems of imperial virtues, which, through their antithesis, further illuminate the central tale. The emblematization of narrative, which D'Ambra identifies here, is a phenomenon that occurs both in literature, particularly biography, and in art: in the strictly artistic genres, since the Republic, and in literature, at least as early as the Julio-Claudian period.(6) One might take issue with her identification of the specific types, however.

The left arm of the bay offers the image of a seated goddess lifting her veil and being approached by a matron worshiper. D'Ambra identifies the goddess with some confidence as Pudicitia, Chastity or Modesty, whose cult was practiced on the Quirinal near the Forum Transitorium. Although the figure clearly must bear the connotation of chastity, the earliest certain personification of Pudicitia appears on a coin type of the Trajanic period, A.D. 112-115, later than the frieze. To the right of these figures are three women in Greek garments and a river-god personification. One of the three women is in a pose that D'Ambra later, in connection with a different figure in another part of the frieze, compares to the standard pose of the Muse Polyhymnia; the three women she then identifies as nymphs, and illustrative of devotion to the gods.

Her theory does not associate the two groupings, however. One can find an interpretation that would connect them: the seated figure could be the nymph Egeria, the legendary wife and counselor to King Numa. She was worshiped together with the Camenae, water nymphs identified since the third century B.C. with the Muses; their worship took place outside the Porta Capena in Rome at a spring from which the Vestals drew water daily.(7) This interpretation brings in the Sabine element again, it evokes the image of women as wise, even prophetic, counselors (the role Domitian claimed Minerva served for him), and most significantly, it suggests an explicit topographical and cultic reference.

The meaning of topographical references on the Forum Transitorium frieze should not be overlooked. Within the eight preserved sections alone, there occur three personifications of rivers or springs, four references to hills, and one or two to a grove. For most of these D'Ambra does not suggest specific identifications, yet she would read the forum itself as defining the axes of Domitianic cultic restoration across the city of Rome. It seems that the frieze, in the disposition of its motifs, should also reflect these axes, or at least reflect the topographical as well as the symbolic relationships between its cultic references. In this respect, D'Ambra's decision to view the frieze as statically and symmetrically disposed around a central element limits her ability to treat the whole dynamically.(8)

D'Ambra's interpretation of the figures on the inner right arm of the extant bay raises another important issue relevant to Roman Imperial sculpture generally: the identification of prototypes. After another reclining river god and two other figures that have all been deliberately chiseled away come two standing women, the first of whom holds scales over a wool basket. On the basis of coin types, D'Ambra identifies this figure as Moneta, personification of the Roman mint. Moneta is an epithet of Juno, but D'Ambra equates her with Aequitas, who also is depicted on coin types as a female holding scales. She then, it seems, further equates Aequitas with justice, which, she argues, would be appropriate to the placement of this section of the frieze opposite the podium of the Temple of Minerva, where law courts were held. Aequitas, however, is a benevolent equanimity, in contrast to Justitia, the goddess of retributional justice, a personification that would be more appropriate for placement between Arachne and the law courts. Why does she not simply identify the figure as Justitia? Perhaps because she wants to tie it to a Domitianic coin type.

D'Ambra rejects M.-T. Picard-Schmitter's identification of these figures as the Fates,(9) since they "derive from the vocabulary of private funerary art rather than that of official iconography". She believes that the figure must represent an imperial virtue in order to match the figure of Pudicitia directly opposite on the left side of the bay. This is circular logic.

Her argument, though, puts at issue the validity of such distinctions as "private" versus "official" and "court" versus "plebeian" styles in Roman art.(10) How fixed are the boundaries between these categories? How do the influences of style and the transmission of prototypes run? Only downward from the sources of power, or in both directions? The very presence of scenes of women weaving on the frieze of an imperial forum indicates an intermeshing of these artistic realms. Ultimately D'Ambra concludes that "the sources of the frieze's imagery imply that the boundaries between official and vernacular modes were less rigid than once was believed", but on page 59 she still holds to them.

This view limits her search for prototypes and adherent meanings for the frieze's images. She looks first to imperial iconography, then to the "important" freestanding sculptures of Greco-Roman Hellenistic production. Yet it is the "vocabulary of private art" that formulates a more explicit sense to the scene.

As with her interpretation of Pudicitia, D'Ambra may well be correct in connecting the figure holding the scales with the policies of sound government. I find it odd, though, that she does not question the need for scales in the wool-working process. Balls of cleaned, combed wool were weighed out by the head of textile production, probably the matron of the household, and these weights were then apportioned to individual spinners as their daily task. This was the chief means of controlling the productivity of the spinners. Thus the connection with the virtue of sound government becomes explicit: the domestic becomes the imperial virtue without the aid of the Arachne myth as a gloss. Can we tie this figure, too, to a specific legend or cult? Tanaquil and Lucretia both come to mind: both are known for their devotion to their spinning and for their roles as the major impetus for changes in the government of Rome.

These differences in interpretation of the frieze that I present here are evidence of the wealth of carefully researched, thought-provoking information in this chapter. D'Ambra's underlying thesis, that the frieze connects domestic with imperial virtues, is not affected by these disputes. She opens herself to criticism, however, by overstating the centrality of the Arachne myth to the meaning of the whole forum. The extant portion is too small a percentage of the whole and is not located in a sufficiently important position to justify D'Ambra's dependence on it.

The subject of the extant portion of the frieze, however defined, offers D'Ambra an opportunity to apply methods of feminist criticism to a major imperial monument. In the third chapter, "Virgins and Adulterers," she goes on to explore the imagery associated with the female role and how it reflects the social and political structure of Rome. She begins by setting the frieze into the context of other works of public sculpture and literature (all of the Augustan period) that present mythological themes with didactic content. From the death of Tarpeia and the rape of the Sabine women on the Basilica Aemilia, she moves to the story of Lucretia as told in Livy, and then to the sculptural programs of the Forum of Augustus, the Ara Pacis, and the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. All of these represent legends from early Rome except the Temple of Apollo, which drafts two Greek myths, the Niobids and the Danaids, into the service of Augustan political propaganda.

Semihistorical women, allegorical personifications, and Greek mythological characters all contribute to the composite symbolism associated with women's roles, which becomes integrated into the language of the Augustan state. These female figures lived or were created at different times, many centuries apart, by diverse cultures that had evolved to different levels of complexity. It is this sense of layering, of images rooted in specific cultural contexts, that is missing in D'Ambra's analysis; all of the edges are blurred. It is not clear whether the meaning attached to a symbol is D'Ambra's, Augustus's, or the result of societal attitudes in the 8th century B.C.

As a result, some of D'Ambra's conclusions appear distorted by the model she is using. For example, in her narration of the rape of the Sabine women and the ensuing war waged between their new "husbands" and their fathers and brothers, D'Ambra states four times that the women "felt they were to blame for the crisis". She appears to have based this interpretation on an overly zealous reading of the Livy version (since neither of the Ovid versions says anything of the sort). "Nos causa belli" (Livy 1.13) need mean nothing more than "we are the reason that the war is being fought"; the expression "to be responsible for" in Latin is "in causa esse." She portrays the women as victims of violence who ultimately sacrifice their own identities as Sabines for a peace "under Roman rule"; their action unifies Romans and Sabines "under Roman sovereignty." Livy's text, however, goes on to depict a very different situation. The Romans decide to call themselves by a Sabine name, Quirites, when they are exercising their civic functions. Romulus divided the new population into thirty wards and named each of the wards after a Sabine woman (so much for their loss of identity). After his death and apotheosis, Romulus was worshiped under the identity of a preexisting Sabine deity, Quirinus;(11) and two of the first four kings of Rome were Sabine. D'Ambra's model of Roman violence, conquest, domination, and suppression is simplistic. There are many places in this chapter where D'Ambra presents fascinating and useful information but then forces it into an interpretation that is rigid and distorting.

At times, however, more rigidity is called for than she exercises. After a discussion of Augustus's moral legislation, chapter 3 goes on to examine references to weaving as a metaphor for power and, ultimately, state-craft. This is a delightful section to read; D'Ambra sounds like a feminist Sir James Frazer. Like Frazer, however, she juxtaposes descriptions of beliefs and cults and social practices without any regard for the cultures or periods of time when they obtained. Sabines, Latins, Etruscans, and Greeks were all distinct peoples; as we see in Domitian's self-promotion, these separate strains tended to maintain their discrete identities through the centuries.

This imprecision is evident in D'Ambra's discussion of weaving as a metaphor for statesmanship. She compares the grid pattern of the intersecting warp and weft threads to the ideal city plan as an emblem of civilization; yet neither Rome nor Athens was ever orthogonally gridded, no matter how civilized they considered themselves. When does this analogy apply, then? She claims that the equation of weaver with navigator is suggested by the fact that the Greek words for the upright beam of the loom and the mast of a ship were the same. This is not surprising, since the two upright objects are very similar in form and the word for them comes from the Greek verb meaning "to make to stand." But one does not navigate with a mast; one navigates with a rudder. And how does this analogy work in the Latin-speaking world?

The final chapter, "Women's Work," is a short recapitulation of D'Ambra's theories about the frieze. The book ends with two descriptive appendixes, one on the style and technique and the other on the individual sections of the frieze, both based on her close-range inspection of the remains.

Private Lives, Imperial Virtues opens up an important Roman public monument to fresh scrutiny and new methodologies. Its greatest strength lies not in the questions it answers but in the questions it raises. D'Ambra is a masterful researcher, and the wealth of detailed information that she offers creates a myriad of issues for further study. Her interpretation of the frieze, too, will not be the last word. Although one does not dispute her basic premise that a moralizing message is conveyed through the juxtaposition of emblemata, whether narrative or allegorical, one might argue with her specific attributions. The centrality of the Arachne theme would bear some reexamination as well. D'Ambra has spun a tenuous theory that hangs together largely by virtue of the details on which she chooses to suspend it. (I am ashamed to admit that the pun is intended.)

JANE K. WHITEHEAD Classics Department Cornell University Ithaca, N.Y. 14853

1. B. W. Jones, Domitian and the Senatorial Order: A Prosopographical Study of Domitian's Relationship with the Senate, A.D. 81-96, Philadelphia, 1979; and idem, "Domitian's Attitude to the Senate," American Journal of Philology, no. 94, 1973, 224-53.

2. L. A. Holland, Janus and the Bridge, Proceedings of the American Academy in Rome, no. 21, Rome, 1961.

3. H. Bauer ("Il Foro Transitorio e il tempio di Giano," Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia, no. 49, 1976-77, 117-49) claims to have excavated the foundations of the Temple of Janus at the southern end of the Forum Transitorium, but the remains do not support his reconstruction. They must be laterin date, and are "architecturally unlikely, historically unparalleled, and symbolically unsuitable," according to J. C. Anderson, Historical Topography of the Imperial Fora, Collection Latomus, CLXXXII, Brussels, 1984, 137, n. 58. D'Ambra reproduces Bauer's plan in her fig. 3.

4. Tristia 4.10.99.

5. Suetonius, Domitian 3.

6. For the parallelism of literature and art, see J. K. Whitehead, "The Cena Trimalchionis and Biographical Narration in Roman Middle-Class Funerary Art," in P. Holliday, ed., Narrative and Event in Ancient Art, Cambridge, 1993, 299-325. See N. B. Kampen, "Biographical Narration in Roman Funerary Art," American Journal of Archaeology, no. 85, 1985, 55, nn. 29-32, for earlier bibliography.

7. Incidentally, P. von Blanckenhagen (Flavische Architektur und ihre Dekoration, untersucht am Nervaforum, Berlin, 1940, 122) identifies the seated figure as Vesta.

8. It is a deliberate choice; she refutes von Blanckenhagen's (as in n. 7) attempts at specific topographic references.

9. M.-T. Picard-Schmitter, La Frise du Forum de Nerva a Rome, et l'iconographie latine des Parques, Collection Latomus, XLIV, Brussels, 1966, 607-16; and idem, "Quelques Observations au sujet de la frise du 'Forum de Nerva' a Rome," in Atti del settimo Congresso internazionale di archeologia classica, Rome, 1961, II, 435-40.

10. A recent anthology of papers that explores the interpenetration of the public and private is E. Gazda, ed., Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Decor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula, Ann Arbor, 1991. The "court" vs. "plebeian" issue is a very old one; for discussion and bibliography, see Whitehead (as in n. 6), 300 and nn. 3-6.

11. When she states in chap. 1 (p. 44) that Romulus commanded the Temple of Quirinus to be built, she seems to imply that this was a Roman-dominated cult that was refitted to the hero worship of Romulus after his death. The legend, which is preserved in Ovid's Fasti, claims, however, that the temple was ordered not by Romulus but by his ghost. This implies that Quirinus was a preexisting Sabine god and that the Latin Romulus was assimilated into a Sabine pantheon. A similar pattern of chronological reversal appears in D'Ambra's discussion of the birth of Romulus and Remus; she states that their great-uncle, who had them thrown into the Tiber, was king of Rome (p. 88). What did the twins found, then?

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