The Consuls Hirtius and Pansa and the End of the Republic

Robert Chenault (University of Michigan)

As is well known, the Romans traditionally specified their years by the consuls who served in that year.  One pair of consuls, however, enjoyed an afterlife unrivaled by any other.  Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa, consuls in 43 BC, continue to appear as a named pair even in authors as late as Eutropius and Orosius.  This paper examines the memory of the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa and offers some possible explanations for its singular longevity.

The study of historical memory in Roman culture has made great strides in recent years.  Uwe Walter’s Memoria und res publica (2004) explored the mechanisms by which Romans of the Republican period learned about their own history, while Alain Gowing’s Empire and Memory (2005) examined the memory of the Republic in the early Principate.  Although Walter and Gowing do not discuss the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, their approaches can help to explain the persistent memory of this consular pair.

The memory of Hirtius and Pansa is inextricably bound up with the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire.  One strand of citations (Velleius 2.61, Ovid Tristia 4.10.6) derives from the prominence of Hirtius and Pansa in the very first chapter of Augustus’ Res Gestae.  Tacitus’ whispered criticisms at the funeral of Augustus directly respond to the claims in the Res Gestae:  Hirtius and Pansa did not simply fall in battle, but were cut down (caesis), with Octavian the main beneficiary (Annals 1.10).  A second strand of citations stems from an event passed over by Augustus:  the proscription and murder of Cicero, which also occurred in 43 BC.  Velleius (2.66) expatiated on this crime, and Tacitus (Dialogus 17) dated the death of Cicero by the phrase, Hirtio nempe et Pansa consulibus, nempe clearly signaling that this consulship was well-known to everyone.  Suetonius (De Rhetoribus 1), following the elder Seneca and Quintilian, provides an even closer connection between Cicero and Hirtius and Pansa:  a misunderstanding of passages from Cicero’s letters to Atticus gave rise to a mistaken tradition that Cicero instructed Hirtius and Pansa in declamation.  Yet another carrier for the memory of their consulship was their burial at public expense in the Campus Martius; their tombs, in fact, were side-by-side, thus providing a physical cue for the memory of Hirtius and Pansa, joined even in death.

The persistent recurrence of Hirtius and Pansa in later sources indicates that their names signified far more than an ordinary dating formula.  Their consulship evoked conflicting and contested memories; their names came to be used as shorthand for both the end of the Republic and the dawn of the imperial age.