Tacitean Usage and the Temple of 'divus Claudius'Author(s): Duncan FishwickSource: Britannia, Vol. 4 (1973), pp. 264-265Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/525872 .

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Notes Tacitean usage and the temple of divus Claudius. Professor Duncan Fishwick

writes: In Britannia iii (1972), 164-81 I elaborated the view that, contrary to the standard interpretation, the great temple at Camulodunum was to the deified Claudius ab initio and at no stage served the cult of the living emperor. My argument hinged ultimately on the word 'constitutum' in Tacitus's phrase 'templum divo Claudio constitutum' (Ann. xiv, 31), which, to judge from the few parallels available in respect to altars, appears to imply a senatorial decision to consecrate, marked in all probability by inaugural-foundation ?-rites. In that case divus also must be used in the strict sense of a temple 'constituted' to the divinized emperor and Tacitus is not applying the epithet conventionally to Olaudius as, for example, in Agric. xiii, 5: divus Claudius auctor iterati operis.

Final proof of this thesis may possibly be provided by closer analysis of the way Tacitus uses the term divus throughout his extant works. Charlesworth pointed out long ago that the historian finds occasion to use the word much less frequently than he might:' for example, divus is applied to Claudius only in the two instances cited above, yet the emperor frequently figures in the Annals in the period after his consecration.2 But there seems to be no hard and fast rule on the point, and one must conclude that the only criterion is the whim of the historian, who no doubt had reasons of his own for determining when or when not to label a deified emperor divus. What is important is to observe the usage wherever it does occur. Here an important principle can be established. While Tacitus certainly uses divus more or less as a conventional epithet on numerous occasions, it seems that whenever the word appears in a religious context the meaning is invariably the strict one of a statue, altar, temple, or rites to an emperor as divus: that is, raised to the ranks of the gods by decree of the senate. Paradoxically the clearest example is probably Ann. xv, 74: ut templum divo Neroni quam maturrime publica pecunia poneretur. As Nero was never officially deified, the meaning can only be that a temple should be built to Nero as divus during his lifetime-an unheard-of proposal, which apparently Nero himself (the text is corrupt) forbade for superstitious reasons. In the following examples, which include all instances of the word in a strictly religious context, divus is used throughout in the technical sense. Remaining examples listed in Gerber and Greef, Lexicon Taciteum s.v., show a looser usage with the exception of passages relating to oaths (see below): ante aedem divi Julii iacuit (Hist. i, 42); statuam divi lulii in insula Tiberini amnis (Hist. i, 86); tua, dive Auguste, caelo recepta mens (Ann. i, 43); sacrarium genti Iuliae effigiesque divo Augusto apud Bovillas dicantur (Ann. ii, 41); petere et Cretenses simulacro divi Augusti (Ann. iii, 63); cum haud procul theatro Marcelli effigiem divo Augusto lulia dicaret (Ann. iii, 64); obiecta publice Cyzicenis incuria caerimoniarum divi Augusti (Ann. iv, 36); mactare divo Augusto victimas (Ann. iv, 52); effigiem divi Augusti amplecti (Ann. iv, 67). As examples of the more conventional usage may be quoted: cum divus Augustus sibi atque urbi Romae templum apud Pergamum sisti non prohibuisset (Ann. iv, 37); caelestesque honores Claudio decernuntur et funeris sollemne perinde ac divo Augusto celebratur (Ann. xii, 69). In the former example the temple at Pergamum was to the living Augustus and Roma; in the latter Augustus was not yet divus at the time of his funeral.3 Lastly, there are two passages concerning oaths. As one swore by the deified Augustus-later by other deified emperors as well (cf. ILS 6o88 f.)-it seems very probable that in a legal context also divus is

'JRSxxvii (1937), 59. 2 P. Fabia, Onomasticon Taciteum, 199-205. 3 S. Weinstock, Divus Julius (1971), 388.

264

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NOTES 265 used in the full, technical sense: quod in acta divi Augusti non iuraverat (Ann. iv, 42); cuius in acta divi Augusti et divi Iuli non iurare (Ann. xvi, 22).

The conclusion to be drawn is self-evident. If Tacitean usage is such that divus appears consistently in a technical sense whenever the immediate context is religious (or legal), it follows that this must hold also for templum divo Claudio constitutum in Ann. xiv, 3 1; that is, quite apart from the implications of constitutum, divus of itself must mean that the temple was to the divinized Claudius and the possibility that the temple was to the living emperor, to whom Tacitus is conventionally applying divus, should be excluded. Nor would I have thought there was the slightest possibility that the senate might have decreed a temple-even in far-off Britain-to Claudius as divus before his death, along the lines of Cerialis Anicius's proposal in respect to Nero (Tacitus, Ann. xv, 74: A.D. 65). For that would not only have contradicted Claudius's expressed wishes on such matters4 but have gone clean contrary to the principle recorded by Tacitus: nam deum honor principi non ante habetur quam agere inter homines desierit (ibid.). As a supple- mentary line of reasoning, this surely clinches the argument based on the obscure process of 'constitution'. The theory that Claudius was paid cult at the temple during his lifetime must be discarded.

4 Cf. Britannia iii (1972), 167, 178 f.

An Unusual Pottery Bowl from Kelvedon, Essex. Mr. Warwick Rodwell writes: Excavations on the extensive Iron Age and Romano-British settlement of Canonium (Kelvedon), 9 miles south-west of Colchester on the main Roman road to London, have examined c. 0-5 acre (o0*2 ha) of the first-century B.c. to first-century A.D.

occupation area which was abandoned at or soon after the Roman conquest, when it was overlaid by a military base.s

A great quantity of pre-conquest pottery has been recovered, including such fine wares as Arretine, terra rubra and terra nigra, as well as the four unusual sherds described here. The freshest sherd (FIG. Ia, PL. XXIX A) was found at the bottom of a well of the mid first century A.D.; two others were found higher up in its filling and the fourth came from a nearby ditch. The sherds belong to a thin-walled, roughly hemispherical bowl, 23 cm in diameter, with a very finely-moulded rim and footring. The fabric is a hard, well-fired, fine grey ware with smooth black surfaces. The vessel has been care- fully burnished all over but the tooling lines are visible on the inside below the rim. In general, the fabric has the appearance of a very competent copy of terra nigra, and the form is clearly an imitation of a metal prototype: for example, it closely resembles the bowl of a bronze patera in the Nijmegen collection.6 Immediately below the rim is a horizontal band of relief-stamped figures, each impressed from an individual die. The matrix of the only complete one measures 28 mm by 22 mm. Each outline abuts or slightly overlaps the next. The depth of the relief averages I mm and was produced by pressing an engraved die on to the surface of the pot whilst it was still in a semi-plastic state. Considerable care must have been exercised in the placing of each impression as no finger marks are visible on the inner face of the vessel, where they are usually to be seen marring the surface of pottery decorated by this technique.

Assuming that the shoulder was decorated by a contiguous single row of stamps, as seems likely, there would have been 32 or 33 impressions in all. Fragments of eight impressions, from six different dies, survive; only one is complete. The total number of different dies and the order of their impressions is unknown, but there is an instance of like impressions occurring adjacent to one another.

s Rescue excavations in advance of housing development have been directed since 1970 by K. A. Rodwell for the Department of the Environment and the Essex Archaeological Society; see Britannia ii, 273; iii, 333-

6 M. H. P. Den Boesterd, The Bronze Vessels in the Ryksmuseum (1956), pl. Iv, No. 68.

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