Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping, or toppling into the void*

Abstract

Abstract Getting a sense of perspective on Rome, whether temporal or spatial, is a recurrent concern of this collection. Modelling the chronological filters and processes of layering of the spaces from which, and into which, one gazes, is central to understanding how and why Rome’s multiple pasts continue to obsess us. It also allows us to tease out correspondences and conflicts between ongoing urges to recuperate ‘Classical’ Rome, and a succession of simultaneous penchants—from antiquity onwards—for rewriting it in our own image. Chronological perspective (or, in Bakhtin’s terms, the chronotope) Wgures as one underlying concern in this essay—the versions of us and them, then and now, that Rome and Livy invoke are never culturally neutral. Equally signiWcant, however, is the perhaps more straightforward trick of creating a textual ‘reality eVect’ by deploying a whole range of vertical and horizontal perspectives, both spatial and temporal. My essay is interested in particular in how one deWnes place, moves through space, and comprehends up and down in Livy’s early Rome; in the consequences of this for Augustan Rome; and Wnally, in the * David Larmour, Indra McEwen, and Gideon Nisbet signifycantly improved various drafts of this essay, for which many thanks are due.

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