Ordering the res gestae: observations on the relationship between texts and images in Roman ‘historical’ representations

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between images and texts in the Roman ‘historical’ narrative. A letter that Lucius Verus addressed to Fronto about his Parthian war and the shipping of paintings and epistulae from the battlefield to Rome by Septimius Severus and Maximinus Thrax suggest a fruitful dialogue between the texts written by commanders on the field and the picturae commissioned by them to immediately celebrate their victories. Cicero’s epistulae to the Senate (Fam. 15.1–2) and a letter (Fam. 15.4) to Cato that the orator wrote when he was leading his only military campaign in Cilicia are the only surviving texts that really allow us to compare this type of swift and rhetorically less elaborate form of communication from the battlefield with the ‘historical’ friezes of the imperial age. They show remarkable commonalities with figurative representations of wars such as the reference to suovetaurilia at the beginning of the campaign and the emphasis on challenging the ‘barbarian’ landscape. Indeed, the brevitas of these texts (litterae laureatae and the less sophisticated commentarii) also left much space for a strong figurative redevelopment of the storytelling, especially in the case of a carefully planned monument such as Trajan’s column. Moreover, in front of a monument like this, the observer was also free to follow different reading strategies in reconstructing his own ordo of the res gestae, as suggested by the importance of the vertical axis on the column itself or by Josephus’ description or, more correctly, by his perception of the ‘historical’ pegmata during the Jewish triumph