108 Mass Oratory and Political Power

the past and their services to the Republic was produced. Mass oratory,
in the main forms of ubiquitous political contiones and the less frequent,
but more spectacular funeral eulogies of the nobility, was able to exploit a
huge array of mnemonic cues embodied in the monuments among which
all public life, and much life in public, took place – simultaneously, of
course, reviving, and perhaps reshaping, the commemorative meaning of
those same monuments. Set in the context of Rome’s peculiar dedication to
memoria, rather than judged in accordance with a priori assumptions about
the ignorance of an urban proletariat, the challenging historical allusions
with which this chapter began start to take on real significance as evidence
of the civic awareness of contional audiences.
Although the discussion of comparative material from the coinage or
monumental landscape has ranged more widely in order to elucidate vari-
ous points about the commemorative dynamics of Republican Rome, thus
far the allusions in contional speech that have been examined belong to rel-
atively distant history, certainly beyond the direct and personal knowledge
of their audiences. I have argued for a fairly high degree of participation
by contional audiences in Roman cultural tradition, which would be, if
accepted, a significant finding; but of course the kind of knowledge and
awareness most directly relevant to the audience’s role as political agents
will be that of recent history, issues, and practices, references to which will
be the subject of the remaining part of this chapter.
A dividing line is certainly discernible in Cicero’s contiones between the
age of “our ancestors” (maiores nostri) and that in the direct experience
of “you and your fathers”; it falls roughly fifty to sixty years before the
present.177 For example, Cicero’s references to the Gracchi, on or just be-
yond that threshold of popular memory, are perceptibly stereotyped and
lacking in precise detail,178 and it is noteworthy in this context that in 63
177 See Leg. Man. 60 (for a secular shift between 133 and 107), Red. pop. 6–11 (where the exiles of
Metellus Numidicus in 100 – c. 98 and of Marius in 88–87, but not that of P. Popilius in 123–121,
are placed in the time of vos patresque vestri or vestra patrumque memoria), and Rab. perd. 2 (where
the so-called “final decree of the Senate,” first used in 121, is an inheritance from the maiores; below,
n. 179). The break is considerably more recent than is the division between “cultural memory”
and “communicative memory” (80–100 years back) adopted by the leading contemporary theorists
of memory, Aleida and Jan Assmann (1988: 29–30); but that is explicitly a maximum, and we
should perhaps keep in mind the relative scarcity of living grandfathers in Rome (Saller 1994: 229).
Roloff 1938: 128–31 (= 1967: 318–22), implausibly sees the terminus of the age of the maiores as a
fixed rather than a sliding one, and rather arbitrarily sets it just before the “Gracchan Revolution.”
(Cf. Stemmler 2000: 185, n. 164.) The honorific aura of maiores, of course, produces a natural bias
toward antiquity in the use of the word. Pace Horsfall 1996: 47, the suppression of Saturninus in
100 was hardly beyond living memory in 63.
178 Leg. agr. 2.10, 31; Rab. perd. 14–15. However, pace Mack 1937: 30–31 with n. 74, comparison of the
references to P. Popilius Laenas and Q. Metellus Numidicus at Red. pop. 10–11 and at Red. sen. 38