sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 7/8

Virginia Fabrizi: Space, narrative, and historical imagination in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita

That Livy conceived of his historiographical project in distinctly spatial terms can be seen as early as the Preface, where he declares that his subject is one of immense labor (res est [...] immensi operis, "my subject is one of immense labor," Praef. 4) - opus, as many scholars have noted, refers to both the work required to build the Ab urbe condita and the Ab urbe condita itself. Taking as its point of departure the centrality of space to Livy's conception of history and historiography, Virginia Fabrizi's Space, Narrative, and Historical Imagination in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita explores how Livy uses space to depict historical change and imperial growth in both the city of Rome and the territories that the Romans conquered. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of space in Livy but serves as a welcome contribution to the body of Livian scholarship that arose from the "spatial turn" in literary studies, including especially Mary Jaeger's Livy's Written Rome on memory and monumentality in Livy's representation of Rome. [1]

This book consists of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction ("Introduction: Space, Narrative, and Livy's Ab Urbe Condita") situates the book within preexisting scholarship, outlines the narratological framework that Fabrizi employs throughout, and provides an overview of the chapters that follow. Fabrizi's argument that Livy tends to privilege narrative over description and that his descriptions tend to occur in narrative passages (for example, Livy's description of Mount Haemus [Livy 40.21-22] is set within his narrative of Philip V's ascent of it [21-22]) provides a firm foundation for her subsequent analysis of space as a constitutive element of Livy's narrative.

Chapter One, "Strife, Reconciliation, and Change in the Forum Romanum," focuses on Livy's representation of the Roman Forum, demonstrating how it symbolizes the civic tensions in Livy's narrative of the Conflict of the Orders in Books 1-2; in the later books, Livy lavishes considerably less attention upon the Forum, but continues to cast it as a locus for civic competition, reconciliation, and unification. In this chapter and in Chapter Two, Fabrizi relies heavily upon the notion of "cityscaping," that is, the idea that Livy's readers would have constructed an image of the city of Rome based upon both what Livy says about it and their own topographical knowledge. This approach raises the intriguing question of just how much topographical knowledge of Rome Livy's ancient readers, who were probably largely non-Roman, [2] would in fact have had [3] - a question that Fabrizi takes up in Chapter Two (149), but perhaps should have engaged with earlier and more extensively.

Chapter Two, "The Space of the City," discusses other important spatial elements in Livy's representation of Rome, including the hills of Rome, the Campus Martius, and what Fabrizi calls "boundaries" - Rome's walls and gates, the Tiber, and the Janiculum. Fabrizi also describes "synthetic views of city space" (142) and identifies some general aspects of Livy's portrayal of Rome, including its schematic topography, the more detailed descriptions that Livy accords certain sites and areas (e.g., the Palatine), and his references to topographical features in annalistic passages. In this chapter as in the preceding, Fabrizi adduces an impressive range of exempla spanning all extant Decades of the Ab urbe condita, thus extending the body of the Livian scholarship which has encouraged interest in Livy's later books, [4] though sometimes at the expense of cohesion (the discussion of the Viminal, Quirinal, Caelian, and Esquiline hills [119-20], for example, reads essentially as a catalog of passages in which Livy mentions those features).

Chapter Three, "The Space of Battle," focuses mainly on what Michel Rambaud calls "tactical space", [5] that is, the military space evoked by describing the manoeuvring of armies, the position of camps, and the placing of fortifications, as well as topography and geography. This chapter provides for Livy studies the sort of in-depth examination of space in battle narrative that Andrew Riggsby has provided for Caesar studies. [6] Particularly stimulating was Fabrizi's discussion of the locus/arma dichotomy, by which Livy frequently figures non-Romans as dependent on topography rather than their martial prowess in military contexts. An important implication of this observation, which emerges as one of the main claims of the chapter, is that "ultimately [...] in the Ab urbe condita, the narrative construction of military topography works as a way of making sense of an alien world in Roman terms" (171).

Chapter Four, "The Semantics of Space and Gender," argues that Livy encodes public and private spaces as gendered and that he presents political crisis as resulting from the transgression of those two spheres. Fabrizi focuses on two types of transgression in particular: men invading the private space of other men (e.g., the rape of Lucretia, [201-2; Livy 1.57-59]); and women invading public space traditionally defined as masculine (e.g., Tullia's breaching of the masculine space of the forum [222; Livy 1.48.5]). This chapter avoids reducing the topic of gender and space in Livy to simple binaries such as "feminine/private vs. masculine/public," however. Fabrizi argues that women can exercise agency in Roman society by occupying a "liminal space between private and public" (200), as when Tanaquil orchestrates Servius Tullius' ascension to the throne by delivering a speech from a window in the regia (224-25).

In her conclusion ("Conclusions: Livy's Vocabulary of Space"), Fabrizi submits that Livy's portrayal of space expresses both the Romans' increasing control over territory and the difficulties they faced in maintaining it. This aspect of Livy's approach serves his broader historiographical end of furnishing his readers with a text that could help them make the state work properly by providing exempla both to imitate and to avoid (Praef. 10). In this respect, Fabrizi's monograph complements Livian scholarship that has emphasized the Romanizing aim of Livy's history, [7] neatly encapsulated by the phrase tibi tuaeque rei publicae ("for you and your Republic") in the Preface (Praef. 10).

By her own admission, Fabrizi's treatment of space in the Ab urbe condita is selective: she does not discuss Livy's representation of the space through which armies journey, the narratological techniques that Livy uses to shift settings, nor the space of cities other than Rome (30-31). Selectivity is of course necessary in a study of a topic as capacious as "space in Livy"; we should therefore regard Fabrizi's monograph as paving the way for examination of those spatial elements of which she foregoes discussion. Limpidly written, clearly organized, and meticulously researched, Space, Narrative, and Historical Imagination in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita is a must-read for anyone with an interest in Livy and his representation of Roman imperial expansion.

Notes:

[1] Mary Jaeger: Livy's Written Rome, Ann Arbor 1997.

[2] Dennis Pausch: Livius und der Leser: Narrative Strukturen in Ab urbe condita, Munich 2011.

[3] For the argument that most of Livy's readers would have had very little topographical knowledge of Rome, see D.S. Levene: "Monumental Insignificance: The Rhetoric of Roman Topography from Livy's Rome", in: The Cultural History of Augustan Rome: Texts, Monuments, and Topography, ed. by Loar / Murray / Rebeggiani, Cambridge 2009, 10-26.

[4] An important work in this vein is T.J. Luce: Livy: The Composition of his History, Princeton 1997.

[5] Michel Rambaud: "L'espace dans le récit césarien", in: Litérrature gréco-romaine et géographie historique, Mélanges offerts à Roger Dion, ed. by R. Chevallier, Paris 1974, 111-29.

[6] Andrew Riggsby: Caesar in Gaul and Rome. War in Words, Austin 2006 (see especially 21-46).

[7] See, e.g., Andrew Feldherr: Spectacle and Society in Livy's History, Berkeley 1998; Dennis Pausch: Livius und der Leser (see n. 2 above); and Ayelet Haimson Lushkov: Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic. Politics in Prose, Cambridge 2015.