Exemplarity In Roman Literature

The concept of exemplarity was used extensively throughout Roman literature as a tool to give guidance and enforce authority. By providing an ethical framework of societal precedents, exempla served to govern all facets of Roman public life. The system of exemplarity had an inherent power in Roman society, allowing it to be exploited for personal gain by rulers such as Augustus. Through his monumental literary biography, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Augustus manipulated exemplarity in order to translate his coercive power into benevolent authority over the people of Rome. Exemplarity, in the broadest sense, is system of precedents in Roman history that are passed down through generations to serve as guidance in the decisions of everyday life.

The first stage in the formation of exempla according to Roller is the performance of an action in the presence of others, yet Augustus’ good deeds in the Res Gestae blatantly fall outside of this criterion. Rather than allow the public to directly view his actions, Augustus decided for himself which sections of his history he would reveal to Romans. Augustus’ selective whitewashing of the accomplishments that he chose to display in the Res Gestae represents the first step in his exploitation of exemplarity to exercise his concealed authority. In order to translate these deeds into exempla, Roller sets forth that the public must judge an action either good or bad in terms of a shared set of values (Roller, 216). Again, Augustus’ writing of the Res Gestae breaks from the application of this framework. By preselecting which events were to be released to the public, Augustus incorporated judgements of his own actions into the work. This directly prevented the people of Rome from effectively vetting the collection of exempla. It was impossible for Romans to judge negatively, for example, Augustus’ mercy in sparing the lives of foreign captives; yet if a Roman were witness to all the facts of the situation instead of the manipulated accounts of the Res Gestae, it is likely that Augustus’ exempla would have been less

In her chapter on the historiography of Roman exemplarity, Christina Shuttleworth Kraus examines this loss of power through the transition of exempla as the res gestae populi Romani to the res gestae divi Augusti (Kraus, 2). In early Roman history, exemplarity rested in the hands of popular consciousness; the citizens of Rome had the sole power of deciding which events or people to raise up to the status of exempla. This system of exemplarity that is explained in detail by Matthew Roller’s four stage model of the creation of exempla by public discourse (Roller, 216-217). However, Roller’s framework begins to collapse when Augustus intentionally influences exemplary power through his coercive Res Gestae. Rather than looking to the past for the great deeds of common people like the Sabine women or Lucretia, Roman citizens of the Augustan period had their attention directed towards the persona of one man, an exemplar in the form of an emperor. Augutus’ Res Gestae served as a means to focus the eye of exemplarity solely on himself. This self-centered approach to exemplarity can be seen explicitly in the language used by the Res Gestae. Throughout the description of his achievements, the only Roman names Augustus mentions specifically are those of consuls to mark the times of events and those of his possible