I’d really like Coarelli 2013 to be right and to have Lar mean forebearer, and it might, just about.  But CIL I(2) 2843 isn’t going to be any help alas.

The new reading is by La Regina 2014.

Reading Coarelli 2003 again I wonder if his argument might be strengthened if he considered “Colle delle Picche” to possible derive from picus not pica.  Both derive from pingo, it is thought.  And the picus is of course the bird of Mars.

On the whole his landscape speculations and optimistic readings of Festus and Strabo are a bit much for me, but I did start thinking about woodpeckers again.

Thorvaldsen I940

One Baby.  No Twins.  Likely no wolf.  That canine looks far more like the loyal dog of the shepherd.

I received a very happy email from the Münster coin cabinet!    There publicly stated policy is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License. This unlike Yale’s public domain images, or York and Dublin’s CC BY-SA 4.0 would exclude scholarly publications or at least some scholarly publications.  However, upon inquiry they offer blanket permission for scholarly publications!  There are 119 republican coins online now.

The ANS policy is very permissive as well and is probably the best choice for images for journal articles.  However, they begin charging for books with print runs that exceed 500.  And I at least believe one should be allowed to dream of larger print runs and even paperback editions.

That’s no wolf, it’s a goat!

Cf. Strabo:

“for the Curetes, like these, are called genii or ministers of gods by those who have handed down to us the Cretan and Phrygian traditions, which are interwoven with certain sacred rites, some mystical, the others connected in part with the rearing of the child Zeus in Crete and in part with the orgies in honour of the mother of the gods which are celebrated in Phrygia and in the region of the Trojan Ida.”

Dated by the BM to 300-200BC.  1849,0620.4.  Just another piece of contextualization for earlier posts on Elephants.

Where the Roman people offended at being compared to dogs by Scipio?  Was the suggestion of the need of collar offensive?  The collar is a real thing:

Varro says this:

To protect them from being wounded by wild beasts, collars are placed on them — the so‑called melium, that is, a belt around the neck made of stout leather with nails having heads; under the nail heads there is sewed a piece of soft leather, to prevent the hard iron from injuring the neck. The reason for this is that if a wolf or other beast has been wounded by these nails, this makes the other dogs also, which do not have the collar, safe.

Wolf Collars are still a thing.  And someone even advocated their introduction by American ranchers back in 2011.

I’m usually a Derow-vian on all matters Polybius.  So, true to my roots, I don’t talk about a mixed constitution, but a balanced one.    I read his anacyclosis as an unstoppable force with the Roman constitution only being a modified democracy of sorts that has fended off ochlocracy (mob-rule) and demagogury thus far.  I believe the final chapters of Book 6 are written to an eye to the tribunician  politics of the post 146 BC period.

The key passage is as follows:

6.57.7-9: and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office.  For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule.

What specific tribunician acts? We need not mean the Gracchi:

145BC – C. Licinius Crassus, tr pl, proposes the popular election of members of the priestly colleges. Laelius, pr, Scipio’s buddy, defeats this through a speech that was to become a famous source on Roman religion.

140BC – Claudius Asellus, tr pl, prosecutes Scipio for the infelicitas of his censoral lustrum, revenge for Scipio’s attempt to demote him in the census.

139BC – Aulus Gabinius, tr pl, establishes secret ballot for election of magistrates

138BC – C. Curiatius, tr pl, tries to get the consuls to take action on the soaring price of grain and when that fails imprisons them for a time.

137BC – L. Cassius Longinus Ravilla, tr pl, extends secret ballot to all popular trials excepting  perduellio (according to Cicero, Brut. 97 supported by Scipio).

Nothing new here.  This perspective shares something with Scullard’s 1960 reconstruction of the political thought of Scipio himself.  I would just rather see it as Polybius’ rather that Scipio’s.  The other direction this conversation usually goes is the the degree of accuracy in Polybius’ assessment (See Sommer for summary; Millar‘s many statement is here.).

So where does Dionysius come into this?  Well, I think that the Coriolanus episode in book 7 is written as a rhetorical answer to Polybius book 6 with Coriolanus cast in a Scipionic like role and contemporary history alluded to in the misguided foretelling of the future undertaken by Manius Valerius.  I think Dionysius is, to an extent like Millar, out to prove that Polybius was right and that the republican constitution had no remedy for healing itself, something new was needed.

Dionysius ‘summarizes’ the early themes of his speech, and then begins in earnest with his constitutional argument, an argument based completely on the anacyclosis and that the Senate must introduce a democratic guard against their own power if they wish to retain it, just as they have guarded against tyranny via the nature of the consulship.  Valerius’ speech becomes Dionysius vehicle for rehearsing a Polybian constitutional view.

He then goes on to say that there is no need to fear demagoguery, because the dictatorship will act as the right and proper check against that possibility:

Of course, what Dionysius knows is just how wrong the dictatorship will go through the person of Sulla.  He’s in fact already meditated on its failure in book 4.  The expanding influence of the tribunate will lead to the use of the dictatorship and that in turn will lead to the end of republic.   Dionysius’ uses a few words spoken by Coriolanus to underscore the counterfactual nature of preceding speech:

since the opinion of Valerius prevails, may these measures prove of advantage to you and may I prove a poor judge of future events.

Dionysius the continues his constitutional lesson and firmly aligns his perspective and that of his readers with the Senatorial majority:

the greater part of the senators too were well pleased that he was to be tried upon this charge, for two reasons — first, that to speak one’s mind freely in the senate was not going to render one liable to an accounting, and second, that Marcius, who had led a modest and irreproachable life, would easily clear himself of that accusation.

Senatorial free speech was a key contentious issue in the late republic (I would state the case far more strongly that Raaflaub 2004).  Think of Antony being barred from reading of Caesar’s letters in 49BC to start…

And, we also have hear another false prediction of future, reminding reader to read the whole optimism of the elites towards the masses as counterfactual idealized fantasy.

The constitutional nature of the episode continues with Dionysius playing anthropological participant-observer for his readership, explaining about market days, and trials, and the whole character, structure, and procedures of the comitia centuriata, procedures that are left unfollowed in the narrative itself.

Dionysius then stops the narrative to speak directly to the audience about the tribunate in his own day and the historical importance of the moment he’s just described as a constitutional turning point.

I would speculate that if the whole of Polybius’ Book 6 survived we would see many more concrete intertexts between it and Dionysius’ account of Coriolanus.