The Image of Lucretia: On the Creation of Republican Charisma in Livy

Abstract

At the end of book 1 of Ab urbe condita, Livy presents a paradigmatic case of an individual's rise to power and his ability to focus a community's actions and goals around himself. Analyzing the media and semiotic processes employed in this process, charisma can be described as the product of a chain of operations in which one element is highlighted in a way that ascribes charisma to it. In the light of media theory, Max Weber's sociological approach can be put in perspective. Weber seems to ignore the “technical side” of charisma: the arrangements, stagings, and semiotic processes at play in its constitution. The sociologist's intuition that the charismatic personality may in fact be an impostor and trickster is soon dismissed in favor of an emphasis on the “sublimity” of charisma. The role of Brutus in the Lucretia episode, however, shows that charisma cannot be reduced to the individual's personal qualities. Brutus eventually acts as the political scenographer of the entire situation, rearranging the objects, personae, events, and signs involved in that situation so as to form a clear and powerful political message emanating from Lucretia's death. Thus Brutus demonstrates that Sextus Tarquinius's crime, the res atrox, can actually be transformed into a res publica, a matter of concern for everybody.