A Three-Layer Analysis (TLA) of Livy, History of Rome, Book 1
1. Question
Why did ritual become a device that converted state violence into order, rather than remaining a mere religious act?
2. Abstract
Ritual became a device that converted state violence into order, rather than remaining a mere religious act, because in an ancient state, violence by itself could not easily be justified within the community. Left as it was, violence could not be clearly separated from private desire, plunder, revenge, or usurpation. Military force was indispensable for the founding of a state, but by itself it remained only the fact that “the stronger side won.” To create an order that the community could accept, that violence had to be connected to the gods, to justice, and to the community, and had to be translated into a public act that had passed through a proper form rather than a private fight. Ritual was the device that carried out this translation.
What Livy Book 1 shows is that, in Rome’s founding history, the decision of rule, the establishment of law, the declaration of war, and the memorialization of victory were all connected to communal order through ritual form. Ritual was not decoration that hid violence. It was a political technique that separated violence from private conflict and converted it into a legitimate act of the state that the community could accept.
3. Method
This study follows the three-layer structure of TLA.
In Layer 1, it organizes as facts the events that appear in Livy Book 1, such as founding, kingship, augury, ritual acts, legal formation, war declaration ritual, and temple dedication. In Layer 2, it connects them to structures such as the Celestial Layer, treaty and declaration-of-war ritual, diplomatic priests, priestly groups, religious houses, recording systems, the founding stage, and the stage of integrated expansion.
It also refers to OS Organizational Design Theory R1.30.03 and rereads ritual not as simple religious practice, but as a mechanism in which users connected to the OS take certain roles and, through their scope, control variables, and access classification, carry out the legitimation, correction, and transmission of state violence. In particular, this study focuses on how ritual acts on IA, H, and the trust of the governed, and clarifies the structure by which violence is converted into order.
4. Layer 1: Fact
What can be confirmed in Layer 1 is that in Book 1, violence and order formation are not separated, but are connected through ritual form.
In Chapter 6, Romulus and Remus do not try to decide the ruler of the new city simply by strength or seniority. Instead, they try to decide it through augury. Here, the result of conflict over rule is presented to the community not merely as the outcome of force, but as a decision made under divine signs.
In Chapter 8, Romulus first performs sacred rites according to proper form, and only afterward establishes the legal framework. This order matters. Ritual comes before law because law cannot unify rough and mixed people into one community unless it is presented not as the ruler’s mere command, but as a norm connected to a higher order.
In Chapter 24, the herald declares, “Hear, Jupiter,” and “Hear, Justice,” and then performs the demand for compensation and the declaration of war in ritual form. Here, the start of war is not treated as a simple military decision. It becomes a communal act only after it passes through a formal procedure that places the gods and justice as witnesses. Violence becomes public war only through ritual procedure.
In addition, the wars of Chapter 10 and the dedication of the temple of Jupiter Stator in Chapter 12 show that victory and spoils are not treated simply as private plunder. Through dedication to the divine sphere, they are given communal meaning. Here too, ritual works by weaving the results of violence into the story of the community.
5. Layer 2: Order
The Celestial Layer in Layer 2 defines divine will, omens, and ritual order as a higher reference axis that legitimizes human acts of politics, war, and founding, and connects communal action to cosmic order.
Roman acts are transformed from “mere force” into “right order” through augury, oracle, oath, sacrifice, and deification. Therefore, ritual is not a belief located outside politics. It is a device that translates state violence into a form the community can accept.
The structure of treaties, declaration-of-war ritual, and diplomatic priests has the role of making war a formal act of the community rather than a private fight. Its logic is to embed violence into legal order through rituals such as demand for compensation, time limits, senatorial consultation, and spear-casting. Here, ritual does not prohibit violence. Rather, it incorporates violence into the institutional action of the community. Through ritual, violence is cut off from anger and plunder and redefined as the execution of the will of the state.
The structure of priestly groups, religious houses, and recording systems also shows that ritual must be preserved and transmitted as a reusable institution, not as a one-time performance. Priests preserve religious procedures, translate the king’s will into proper form, and allow later rulers to connect themselves to the same order through records and transmission. In other words, ritual is not a ceremony that beautifies violence only for the moment. It is an institutional device that embeds violence into lasting political order.
From the perspective of OS Organizational Design Theory R1.30.03, this becomes even clearer. In R1.30.03, the subjects connected to the OS are “users,” and their functions are defined by “roles.” Each role has a scope, control variables, and access classification. The actors involved in ritual are therefore not merely believers. They can be understood as users who take roles within the state OS and legitimize and order violence.
For example, priests and diplomatic priests can be read as being connected, at minimum, to IA, H, and T. In information architecture IA, they communicate to the community what counts as “right violence.” In H, they give meaning to achievement through honor, sacrifice, offering, and dedication. In T, they help people accept that this violence is a right exercise carried out for the community. Ritual, then, does not grant monopoly or shared ownership over state violence itself. It gives violence the forms of correction and legitimation.
It also does not determine V directly. Rather, it prepares the conditions under which V can be accepted by the community.
6. Layer 3: Insight
Therefore, ritual became a device that converted state violence into order because violence by itself could produce neither communal consent nor lasting rule. Only when it was connected to the gods, to justice, to memory, and to institutions could it settle as public order. Ritual was not decoration that hid violence. It was a political technique that separated violence from private conflict, translated it into a legitimate act of the state, and then transformed its meaning into transmissible institutions and memory.
Ritual also determined how violence would be preserved in communal memory. For example, when spoils of war were dedicated to the divine realm, the result of violence was transformed from private plunder into communal honor, and victory was reconnected to divine order. In that process, ritual changed the meaning of violence from “taking” to “offering,” and from “private gain” to “public glory.” Through this transformation, the state could reuse the results of force as continuing legitimacy of rule.
At the same time, however, ritual could never erase the scars produced by violence itself. Resentment, loss, and the desire for revenge remained among people even when ritual formally enclosed them. Indeed, the more violence accumulated, the more these scars accumulated as well, and they could eventually generate private conflict and turn order back into disorder.
From the perspective of OS Organizational Design Theory, this appears as a decline in the health of the governed, especially in civic maturity M. In other words, after violence is used, ritual may help build order, but the accumulation of violence still leaves deep scars inside the community. Those scars damage M and, in the long run, erode the sustainability of order itself.
Ritual, then, is not a religious performance that merely justifies violence. It is a device that translates violence into public order. But at the same time, it cannot erase the very sources of disorder created by violence, such as resentment, loss, and revenge. For that reason, ritual is also a corrective device that contains the limits of translation within itself. That is where its true nature as a state technology lies.
7. Implications for the Present
Modern society does not use ritual itself as a governing technology. Yet structurally, a similar problem still remains in modern organizations. Decisions with a potentially “violent” character, such as severe disciplinary action, restructuring, strategic shifts, withdrawal decisions, or cutting unprofitable businesses, are not accepted simply because their content is rational. If it is not clear through what procedure they were decided and on what legitimacy they stand, people are likely to see them not as acts for the community, but as private decisions of management.
In terms of OS Organizational Design Theory, what is tested here is IA, H, and T. If IA is weak, the meaning of the decision is not shared. If H is unfair, punishment and evaluation are seen as arbitrary. If T is low, even rational policies will not be accepted by the execution environment. Ritual in the ancient state was a powerful medium that corrected these problems. In the present, instead of divine will, that role must be played by transparent procedures, proper explanation, open standards, auditing, meeting structures, and institutional records.
Even today, coercive measures leave scars. A policy may look correct at the institutional level, but that does not mean the resentment or distrust left in people’s minds disappears by itself. Because modern organizations cannot rely on divine will as ancient states did, they must think carefully about how to recover and soften the scars left after coercive measures are taken. If they fail here, short-term results may still appear, but in the long run M and T will be damaged, and organizational order will be eroded from within.
8. Conclusion
Ritual became a device that converted state violence into order because violence by itself could produce neither communal consent nor lasting rule. Only when it was connected to the gods, to justice, to memory, and to institutions could it settle as public order. What Livy Book 1 shows is that augury, the priority of sacred rites, declaration-of-war ritual, priestly transmission, and memorialization through dedication all functioned as governing techniques that transformed violence from private conflict into an act of the state.
Ritual, therefore, is not a remnant of irrationality. It is not decoration that hides violence. It is a political technology through which the state translates violence into public order, embeds its meaning into institutions and memory, and integrates the community in a sustainable form. At the same time, however, ritual cannot erase the scars left by violence. In that sense, it always contains the double character of order formation and order erosion. The essence of ritual lies not in removing the inevitability of violence, but in continually trying to connect that violence to an order the community can endure.
9. Sources
Titus Livius, The History of Rome, Book 1, translated by Satoshi Iwaya, Kyoto University Press, 2008.
OS Organizational Design Theory R1.30.03.