Tribal Rome

Shadi Bartsch ( Mirror of the Self ) notes that the Romans sometimes regarded the wax death masks of their ancestor ( imagines ) to be their judges: “In his oration Pro Murena , for example, Cicero, as he tried to move the jurors to acquit a newly minted Roman consul, did not ask how the man could go home to face his living family if convicted, but what he would say to the grieving mask of his distinguished father that awaited him as he entered . . . . Elsewhere, Cicero introduces the dead Appius Claudius Caecus into his oration to ask his disreputable descendant, the libidinous Claudia, how she could ignore the imagines of her ancestors – including his.” In short, “the imagines were there to be answered to or lived up to,” and so to “motivate as well as reprove.”