Jacques-Louis David, ‘Le Serment des Horaces’ (1785)

'The Oath of the Horatii', as we say in English

Three brothers swear an oath before their father: they will go out and fight for Rome, will sacrifice themselves if need be. Are they reaching for the swords their father is holding, or saluting? David’s painting, completed a few years before the French Revolution, became one of its defining images: a political as well as a moral picture, urging citizens to put personal concerns aside and to dedicate themselves to the state, to fight for it, perhaps to die for it. The three Horatii and their father, all masculine vigour and energetic diagonals of composition, are dressed in the red and white and blue of the French tricolore. Three Horatii; three swords; three arches in the background. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. There are three women, too: a mother and two of the Horatii’s sisters, but they are draped in umber and brown instead of martial red, they are weeping, and their composition is complicated by the addition of two much younger children, sheltering under the mother’s cloak (boys? girls? hard to say). The sister in the bottom right is betrothed to one of the warriors her brothers are going to fight: she knows that either she will lose her brother or her lover. Hence her tears.

Here’s Livy’s account of this famous episode. We’re in the middle of the 7th-century BC, Rome is a small city-state, her glory-days still to come. Rome and Alba Longa, geographically proximate, are in dispute: Romans are stealing cattle from Alban territory, and Albans are doing the same to Rome. The Roman king at this time was Tullus Hostilius, a belligerent ruler: ‘thinking that the nation was growing decrepit from inaction,’ Livy tells us, ‘he everywhere sought excuses for stirring up war.’ He sends messengers to Alba, demanding immediate redress or promising war ‘within thirty days’. And so the two cities go to war:

The Albans were first in the field, and with a great army invaded the Roman territory. Their camp they pitched not more than five miles from the City, and surrounded it with a trench. Meantime Tullus, asserting that Heaven's great powers would take vengeance upon all of the Alban name, beginning with their king himself, for their unscrupulous war, made a night march past the enemy's camp and led his army into the country of the Albans. [Livy 1:23. Translation by Benjamin Oliver Foster]

At this point the Alban dictator Mettius Fufetius — such a great name! — makes a proposal. ‘The instant you give the signal for battle,’ he warns Tullus, ‘the Tuscans will be watching our two armies, so that, when we have become tired and exhausted, they may attack at once the victor and the vanquished’. Instead of destroying their respective military strength, why not pick three soldiers from each side and have them fight, as proxies for the two nations?

It chanced that there were in each of these armies triplet brothers, not ill-matched either in age or in physical prowess. That they were Horatii and Curiatii is generally allowed, and scarcely any other ancient tradition is better known; yet, in spite of the celebrity of the affair, an uncertainty persists in regard to the names —to which people, that is, the Horatii belonged, and to which the Curiatii. The writers of history are divided. Still, the majority, I find, call the Roman brothers Horatii, and theirs is the opinion I incline to adopt. To these young men the kings proposed a combat in which each should fight for his own city, the dominion to belong with that side where the victory should rest.

The two sides sign a treaty agreeing that ‘the nation whose citizens should triumph in this contest should hold undisputed sway over the other nation.’ The six men get straight to it, with the rest of the armies watching.

The signal was given, and with drawn steel, like advancing battle-lines, the six young men rushed to the charge, breathing the courage of great armies. Neither side thought of its own danger, but of the nation's sovereignty or servitude, and how from that day forward their country must experience the fortune they should themselves create. The instant they encountered, there was a clash of shields and a flash of glittering blades, while a deep shudder ran through the onlookers, who, as long as neither side had the advantage, remained powerless to speak or breathe. Then, in the hand-to-hand fight which followed, wherein were soon exhibited to men's eyes not only struggling bodies and the play of the sword and shield, but also bloody wounds, two of the Romans fell, fatally wounded, one upon the other, while all three of the Albans were wounded. At the fall of the Romans a shout of joy burst from the Alban army, while the Roman levies now bade farewell to all their hopes; but not to their anxiety, for they were horror-stricken at the plight of the single warrior whom the three Curiatii had surrounded.

Things are looking bad for Rome! But the last of the Horatii has a plan. He runs away, hoping thereby to split up the three Curiatii:

He had already run some little distance from the spot where they had fought, when, looking back, he saw that they were following at wide intervals and that one of them had nearly overtaken him. Facing about, he ran swiftly up to his man, and while the Alban host were calling out to the Curiatii to help their brother, Horatius had already slain him, and was hastening, flushed with victory, to meet his second antagonist …—Horatius dispatched the second. The Roman cried exultantly, “Two victims I have given to the shades of my brothers: the third I will offer up to the cause of this war, that Roman may rule Alban.” His adversary could barely hold up his shield. With a downward thrust Horatius buried his sword in the Alban's throat, and despoiled him where he lay. The Romans welcomed their hero with jubilations and thanksgivings, and their joy was all the greater that they had come near despairing. The burial of their dead then claimed the attention of the two armies.

There’s a postscript to the story:

The armies then marched home. In the van of the Romans came Horatius, displaying his triple spoils. As he drew near the Porta Capena he was met by his unwedded sister, who had been promised in marriage to one of the Curiatii. When she recognized on her brother's shoulders the military cloak of her betrothed, which she herself had woven, she loosed her hair and, weeping, called on her dead lover's name. It enraged the fiery youth to hear his sister's lamentations in the hour of his own victory and the nation's great rejoicing. And so, drawing his sword and at the same time angrily upbraiding her, he ran her through the body. “Begone” he cried, “to your betrothed, with your ill-timed love, since you have forgot your brothers, both the dead and the living, and forgot your country! So perish every Roman woman who mourns a foe!” [Livy 1:26]

That’s the fate awaiting the woman in the bottom-right corner of David’s canvas. Not jolly!

Horatius is tried by the Roman state for murdering his sister and set to be tied to a tree and flogged to death, until his father intervenes and begs for mercy: do not punish a hero of Rome, he pleads, who has brought Alba under our dominion; and do not deprive me of my only remaining son. So Horatius is spared, his execution commuted to a symbolic sentence: ‘a piacular sacrifice, which was thenceforward handed down in the Horatian family’ Erecting a beam across the street, to typify a yoke, the father ‘made his son pass under it, with covered head. It remains to this day, being restored from time to time at the state’s expense, and is known as “the Sister’s Beam.” Horatia’s tomb, of hewn stone, was built on the place where she had been struck down.’

Do all these details alter the way we read David’s painting? That stagey background set looks, doesn’t it, rather like a triple halter? — as if the image is anticipating the Sister’s Beam and Horatius’s shame. The girl herself is mourning not just the coming death of her beloved, and two of her brothers, but her own death. Horatius’s victory is achieved only by an act of seeming-cowardice: running away, having failed in the more heroic full-frontal assault. Is this cowardly, or clever? Corneille’s play Horace (1640), one of the inspirations for David’s painting, styles this as a deliberate and cunning ruse rather than a panicky retreat luckily turned to victory. But we might see it as something less heroic, something undermining the triumphalism of this artwork.

===

The three swords, held as a bunch by the father, resemble a fasces — clearly a deliberate gesture on David’s part. The point of the fasces, the symbolism of the bundle, is strength in collectivity: one rod is easily broken, but the bundle, tied together, is not. It’s is from this that we get the word, and ideology, of fascism: and though it’s anachronistic to fold Mussolini into a painting made a century before he was even born, this is a fascist picture: the militarism; the masculinity; the subsumation of individuality into the volk. Strength and honour, to quote another quasi-fascistic text.

As for the core story, Livy’s mythologised quasi-history: I wonder what it means. The fact that Livy isn’t even sure whether the Horatii were Roman and the Curiatii Alban or vice versa is intriguing. Livy tells us that the city of Alba Longa — from whose royal dynasty Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, derived — was destroyed by Rome and its aristocracy forced to move to the victor city: pretty much all the Roman patrician families, the Julii, Servilii, Quinctii, Geganii, Cloelii, originated in Alba Longa, or so Livy says. Alba is Rome’s shadow, a fictional extrapolation of Rome itself. So there is a level of interchangeability about the two triads of brothers, the two families.

No-one is entirely sure what the name ‘Horatius’ means (‘possibly a Latinized Etruscan name’ it seems) but a connection with hortus is surely likely: which is to say, the Horatii were in effect the gardeners, the cultivators, the husbands of the soil. Likewise the curia is the court, both the law-court and the senate or public meeting house — a curialis is a courtier. Does this speak to a symbolic ‘battle’, a kind of civil-war at the origin of Rome as such? Romans liked to think of themselves as honest farmers, close to the soil, hard-working and hardy, not urbanised, or ‘civilised’ sophisticates. It’s ironic, since Rome is, as we look at it now, the Eternal City, the archetypal city. But, for its earliest phase, before (as they saw it) Hellenization and luxury and decadence corrupted romanitas, this was what it meant to be Roman. In the De Officiis (44 BC) Cicero approvingly quotes the Elder Cato’s words:

Ex quo genere comparationis illud est Catonis senis: a quo cum quaereretur, quid maxime in re familiari expediret, respondit: “Bene pascere”; quid secundum: “Satis bene pascere”; quid tertium: “Male pascere”; quid quartum: “Arare”; et cum ille, qui quaesierat, dixisset: “Quid faenerari?”, tum Cato: “Quid hominem,” inquit, “occidere?” [2:89]

To this class of comparisons belongs that famous saying of old Cato’s: when he was asked what was the most profitable feature of a state, he replied: “Raising cattle successfully.” What next to that? “Raising cattle with fair success.” And next? “Raising cattle with but slight success.” And fourth? “Raising crops.” And when his questioner said, “How about money-lending?” Cato replied: “How about murdering people?”

Archaeologists are sure that there never was a city of Alba Longa, as described by Livy; certainly not a city of equal size and military force to Rome. There was, it seems, only a spread of small villages. The absence of any city in that portion of Italy is explained by Livy as a consequence of its total dismantlement by Rome after its victory; but by the time he was writing, that whole area, ‘the territory of Alba (the Ager Albanus)’ had been settled once ‘with many residential villas, which are mentioned in ancient literature and of which remains are extant.’ In other words, Rome was the city, and Alba the affluent suburbs where the wealthy aristocrats lived. There is Rome as Old Cato imagined it, and there is the wealthy, courtly city — Alba — and both are Rome. This originary battle is the symbolic iteration of the two.