The objective of the book under review is straightforward: to analyze the conflict between patricians and plebeians as the “backbone of the narrative” (p. 19, p. 187) of the first ten books of Livy’s Ab urbe condita.[1] The skeletal metaphor functions as a leitmotif: the tropes and motifs of the conflict of the orders serve Livy as a resource to elaborate his history. Meunier’s central claim is that there are four primary variations on the conflict of the orders (he prefers the term “patrician-plebeian conflict”). The first is the “traditional” form, where the plebeians quarrel against the patricians. In the traditional form, the plebeians are riotous and marked by resentment. They seek to arrogate the privileges of their more prestigious rivals. In the “inverted” form, the immoderate and arrogant patricians strive to dominate the plebeians. The other two types occur within the ranks of patricians and plebeians, producing “plebeian-plebeian conflict” and “patrician-patrician conflict.”
As this summary suggests, the author adopts a typological approach. The book consists of four chapters, with a short introduction and conclusion. Meunier’s doctoral supervisors Lambert Isebaert and Bernard Mineo contribute a preface. In Chapter 1 Meunier builds his dossier, analyzing repeated episodes of discordia and concordia in the first ten books of Livy’s history (“alternance” is Meunier’s term of choice). Meunier identifies three repeated “factors of discord:” the proposal of laws alleviating plebeian debt, laws redistributing land, and laws concerning consular imperium. Each factor is understood in a capacious sense: whether the law is enacted or merely threatened and indeed regardless of whether it is a law (lex) at all. (In this respect, Meunier advisedly [p. 34n.12] follows Livy’s disinclination to distinguish between leges, rogationes, and plebiscites).
Three tables (p. 35, pp. 46-7, pp. 60-1) chart the distribution of episodes involving these factors across the narrative. The charts also note whether Dionysius of Halicarnassus also describes the event, including two debt laws and three agrarian laws that appear in Dionysius and not Livy.[2] In addition, Meunier tabulates the instigators of such measures. A surprising conclusion is that, of the three chosen axes of patrician-plebeian conflict, the tribunes only push a majority of laws on consular imperium—laws that would open the curule magistracies to the plebeians. Other features of the Livian conflict of the orders—such as the tribune Canuleius’ efforts to end the ban on patrician-plebeian intermarriage in Book 4, or debates over plebeian access to élite priesthoods (6.34-42 ~ 10.6-9)—do not feature in the analysis.[3]
The second and third chapters effectively function as a commentary upon the first. Episodes from the conflict of the orders, cited by their abbreviation from the tables in Chapter 1, analyze how Livy uses character-types to add musculature and flesh over the skeleton (“ossature,” p. 67) of the three themes of discord. Chapter 2 examines the representation of characters, focusing on how—as is often recognized—Livy tends to type-cast his historical actors according to gens, social position, and, especially, their office.[4] Tribunes are fractious and disorderly, or defenders of freedom against patrician overreach; consuls may promote societal concordia or represent the interests of the senatorial few; fathers are like sons.
From the panoply of types and subtypes, Meunier defines his four “fundamental motifs” in Chapter 3. A chart explains the difference between the “vertical” (“traditional” and “inverted”) patricio-plebeian conflicts and their “horizontal” (class-internal) forms.[5] The remainder of the chapter covers much ground, and quickly. Six subsections, none longer than eight pages, explore the influence of drama on history, gentilician traditions, anachronism and Roman historical analogy, Greek models, and Livy’s Augustan context. In particular, the Augustan section shows the dialogue between Meunier’s focus on the “alternance” of concordia and discordia and Mineo’s thesis that a cyclical understanding of history underpins Livy’s writing.
In Chapter 4, the stakes of the label “traditional” and “inverted” become clearer as the argument turns to the “crumbs of ancient memory” (p. 156) preserved in Livy’s history. Meunier uses his four motifs as a sieve, through which he sifts Livy’s history to trace the gradual consolidation and constitution of the Roman historical tradition. This quadripartite model aims to explain incongruities in Livy’s narrative. For instance, after fiercely demanding a new form of magistracy, the “military tribunate with consular power,” the plebeians proceed to elect only patricians to the office.[6] Fabii appear sometimes as proponents of agrarian reform, sometimes as staunch opponents. In such cases, Meunier asserts, Livy has intervened to transpose different models of the conflict of the orders upon his source material. In the conclusion, Meunier gestures more comprehensively, turning to the stages of Roman historical memory and the elaboration of the Roman historical tradition, from clan and family histories through the different phases of Republican historical consciousness.
The ultimate result of the schema is that three of the four “motifs” of conflict of the orders become variations upon an original and primary theme: the natural intransigence of the plebeians as the essential disruption to social harmony. Thus, the patricio-patrician conflict is first defined as a situation where the patricians are made to play the “‘natural’ role” of the plebeians (p. 117). This vision of Livy may surprise U.S.-trained readers, accustomed to readings that stress how provisional and vulnerable are Livy’s claims upon Roman identity and authority.[7] In addition, Meunier’s analysis of social conflict in the Ab urbe condita prioritizes internal conflict. The reader is informed that “the narrator insists, even with particular care, on the absence of any link between internal and external conflicts, underlining the fact that the former ceases when the second threatens, and vice versa” (p. 44). More engagement with the theme of metus hostilis might have brought out the significance of this other major alternance in the narrative of Livy’s history.[8]
Readers of Livy’s first decade will benefit from engagement with Meunier’s detailed analyses and comprehensive view of the patrician-plebeian conflict. In a way, however, this book is not purely a study of Livy. There is much examination of how Livy shapes the narrative he received and transforms the narratives of the Roman past; at the heart of Meunier’s project is the elaboration of the Roman historical tradition, and Livy’s central place in transmitting and transforming the history of archaic Rome.
Works Cited
Bernard, J.-E. 2000. Le portrait chez Tite-Live: essai sur une écriture de l’histoire romaine. Brussels: Latomus.
Haimson Lushkov, A. 2015. Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic: Politics in Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meunier, N. 2023. “The Decemvirate and the Second Secession of the Plebs (451–449 BCE): A Historiographical fabula.” In T. Cornell, N. Meunier, and D. Miano, eds. Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Rome. Historiography of Rome and its Empire, 17. Leiden. 155-184.
Schips, C. 2019. Typen, Gruppen und Individuen bei Livius. Untersuchungen zur Darstellung und Funktion historischer Akteure in ›Ab Urbe Condita‹. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, 377. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Vasaly, A. 2015. Livy’s Political Philosophy: Power and Personality in Early Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vassiliades, G. 2020. La res publica et sa decadence: de Salluste à Tite-Live. Bordeaux: Ausonius Éditions.
Notes
[1] In general, Meunier focuses on the first pentad, as the index fontium (p. 224) indicates; the Licinio-Sextian Rogations of Book 6, which cap or “conclude” Books 2-5, which “narrated the crises [evocatively, péripéties] of the proto-republican régime” (p. 33), serve as a capstone beyond which the argument only occasionally passes.
[2] Meunier’s comparisons between Dionysius and Livy are suggestive more than elaborated; these charts, then, will offer a springboard for future studies.
[3] For Canuleius, see p. 128n.20
[4] Here Meunier is in conversation with Bernard 2000. Other recent approaches to the typology of officeholders and groups that merit comparison with Meunier’s and may be added to his bibliography include Schips 2019 and Haimson Lushkov 2015.
[5] Meunier 2023 applies the schema to the analysis of the decemvirate, which he analyzes briefly in Chapter 5 of this book. The chart also appears there.
[6] For a different analysis, see Vasaly 2015: pp. 119-20 (Meunier cites the book, e.g., p. 88 n.50, but it does not appear in the bibliography).
[7] Influentially, Miles 1995, Feldherr 1998.
[8] For example, see Vassiliades 2020, p. 343-394.