The Roman Historiographical Tradition and Early Rome

1
The Roman Historiographical Tradition and Early
Rome

• Fact or Fiction?

2
The Making of a Penguin, or Historical
Implications of Textual Transmission

• The Papyrus Roll and the Codex.
• Monasteries as Transmitters of Classical Texts.
• Scribes and Scribal Errors the Art of Textual
  Criticism and Manuscript Collation.
• The Codex and the Editio Princeps.

3
The Manuscript Transmission of Polybius
4
Paris, National Library, NS lat. 5730, fol.
77v The Third Decade of LivysHistory
5
The Monasteries of Europe
6
The Cumbersome Papyrus Roll

• The ancient papyrus roll was elegant to look at
  but cumbersome to use. Size was strictly
  limited.A thousand or so lines of text was all
  that a roll could hold, and that would already
  make a long sheet of papyrus, averaging twenty to
  thirty feet in length. To shuffle through such a
  roll looking for a passage was time-consuming and
  bothersome.
• James J. ODonnell, Avatars of the Word From
  Papyrus to Cyberspace (Harvard UP, 1998) pp. 50-1

7
Transition to the Codex

• If you were a very farsighted text of the second
  century CE and you wanted to be read a thousand
  or more years later, the thing you most wanted
  was to be copied into a codex format. Books that
  made that transition successfully had a
  reasonable chance of surviving and being read in
  the centuries to come, while books that did not
  were more likely to be orphaned.
• James J. ODonnell, Avatars of the Word From
  Papyrus to Cyberspace (Harvard UP, 1998) pg. 52

8
Editio Princeps Preservation of Text, and Error

• This was the process scribal error and bad
  emendation that reached its apogee just at the
  time when printing was invented and it was
  nearly always the mongrel texts produced by the
  activities of the humanist copyists, scholars and
  criticsthat served as printers copy for the
  editiones principes.
• The editiones principes were usuallyprinted
  from current humanist copies, the text of which
  represented a chance mixture of traditional
  readings with conjectural emendations.
• E.J. Kenney, The Classical Text Aspects of
  Editing in the Age of the Printed Book
  (California UP, 1974) pp. 3-4

9
Roman Historiography on Early Rome

• Fact or Fiction?

10
Extant Historical Works History as Literature

• Livy (64 or 59 BCE-CE 17), Ab Urbe Condita (From
  the Founding of the City) in 142 books, 35
  survive.
• Character Types (the stern father, the evil
  tyrant, the disobedient son, the pious maiden).
• Ab Urbe Condita, praef. 2-3 Every writer on
  history tends to look down his nose at his less
  cultivated predecessors, happily persuaded that
  he will better them in point of style, or bring
  new facts to light (my emphasis).
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities,
  after 7 BCE in 20 books, 10 survive.
• Rhetorical History--free invention, esp. with
  speeches.

11
Lost Literary Sources for Roman History

• Annales Maximi and Pontifical Records.
• Early Roman Annalists (ca. 200 BCE) Fabius
  Pictor, Cincius Alimentus, Cato the Elder.
• Middle Roman Annalists (mid-first century BCE)
  C. Licinius Macer (popularist) Valerius Antias
  (conservative). R.M. Ogilvie, intro. 12 They
  werestatesmen who turned to the writing of
  history as a leisure pastime they were not
  interested in historical research as such but
  were concerned to use history as a means of
  reflecting the issues and controversies of their
  own times.
• Greek Writers (5th century BCE) Hecataeus of
  Miletus Hellanicus of Mytilene (4th century
  BCE) Aristotle (3rd century BCE) Timaeus of
  Tauromenium. Greek tendency to see foreign
  peoples through a Greek prism with little or no
  ethnographical investigation important non-Greek
  places (e.g. Rome) given a Greek origin.

12
Roman Attitudes Towards History Writing

• So I repeat--elaborate my activities even
  against your better judgment, and in the process
  disregard the laws of history writing that
  prejudice, which you discussed so beautifully in
  one or other of your prefacesplease dont
  suppress it if it nudges you strongly in my
  favor, but simply let your affection for me take
  a degree of precedence over the truth.
• Cicero, Letters to Friends, 5.12 (to Lucceius
  urging a history of Ciceros own achievements)

13
Greek Models The Tyrant

• Herodotus 5.92.6 At the beginning Periander was
  gentler than his father had been. But afterwards,
  when he had dealt, by messengers, with
  Thrasybulus, tyrant of Miletus, he became yet
  bloodierFor he sent a herald to Thrasybulus
  inquiring about the safest political
  establishment for administering the city the
  best. Thrasybulus led out Perianders messenger,
  outside the city, and with him entered a sown
  field then he walked through the corn,
  questioning, and again questioning, the herald
  about his coming from Corinth. And ever and again
  as he saw one of the ears of corn growing above
  the rest he would strike it down, and what he
  struck down he threw away, until by this means he
  had destroyed all the fairest and strongest of
  the corn.Periander understood the act of
  Thrasybulus and grasped in his mind that what he
  was telling him was that he should murder the
  most eminent of the citizens.

14
Greek Models The Tyrant

• Livy, 1.54.6 He sent a confidential messenger
  to Rome, to ask his father what step he should
  next take, his power in Gabii beingby this time
  absolute. Tarquinwas not sure of the messengers
  good faith in any case, he said not a word in
  reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air
  went out into the garden. The man followed him,
  and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence,
  began knocking off poppy-heads with a stick. The
  messengerreturned to Gabii supposing his mission
  to have failed.Sextus realized that though his
  father had not spoken, he had, by his action,
  indirectly expressed his meaning clearly enough
  so he proceeded at once to act upon his murderous
  intentions.

15
Greek Models Treachery

• Herodotus, 3.156 He went off to the gates of
  the fortress, turning round constantly to look
  back, as though he really were a deserter. The
  sentries who were stationed on the towers saw him
  and ran down and, opening one of the gates at a
  crack, asked him who he was and what he wanted.
  He told them he was Zopyros and was deserting to
  their side. The gatekeepers brought him in when
  they heard that and took him to the assembly of
  the Babylonians. Zopyros stood before the
  assembly and pitied himself. He said that Dareios
  had done to him what he had done to himself and
  that this had been his punishment for advising
  the king to break off the siege. Now, he went
  on to say, I have come to you, men of Babylon,
  as the greatest of blessings for you and the
  greatest of ills to Dareios, his army, and the
  Persians. He shall not, I tell you, get off
  unpunished after doing such outrage on me. I know
  all the ins and outs of his plans. That was what
  he said.

16
Greek Models Treachery

• Livy, 1.53 He Tarquin arranged for Sextus,
  the youngest of his three sons, to go to Gabii in
  the assumed character of a fugitive from the
  intolerable cruelty of his father. On his arrival
  in the town Sextus began to pour out his
  complaints Tarquin, he declared, had ceased to
  persecute strangers and was now turning his lust
  for dominion against his own family I myself,
  he continued, escaped with my life through the
  bristling weapons of my fathers guard Who knows
  but I may find some spark of true manhood, some
  readiness to take up arms against the proudest of
  kings and the most insolent of peoples? The men
  of Gabii gave Sextus a friendly welcome

17
Fabius Pictor and Greek Historiography

• The influence of Greek authors on Pictor should
  not be underestimated, especially for the regal
  period. Greek writers provided a framework on
  which Pictor could hang his tale without turning
  to the resources of his own memory or his own
  powers of structuring.
• Bruce W. Frier, Libri Annales Pontificum
  Romanorum The Origins of the Annalistic
  Tradition, 2nd ed. (Michigan, 1999) pp. 264-5

18
Modern Views Frier on the Chronicle
(Priestly Record of Events)

• The later annalists were not the first to employ
  documentary verisimilitude, but it is fair to
  assert that they took it far beyond all previous
  limits (pg. 152).
• To put the proposition straightforwardly, I
  believe that the account of the chronicle in our
  sources was recreated by men essentially ignorant
  of the real chronicle and its history and I
  believe that they aimed thereby to explain, as
  best they could, the annalistic tradition as they
  knew it, on the assumption that this tradition
  was somehow derived from the chronicle (pg.
  178).
• From B.W. Frier, Libri Annales Pontificum
  Maximorum The Origins of the Annalistic
  Tradition, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor University of
  Michigan Press, 1999)

19
Modern Views Cornell on the Nature of Roman
Historiography

• Roman historians did not, as a general rule,
  carry out original research unlike the
  antiquarians, they did not try to discover new
  facts about the past, but rather to present
  received facts in a new way. Their aims were
  rhetorical, artistic, political and moral (pg.
  4).
• The problem is aggravated by the fact that the
  late republican annalists interpreted the events
  of the struggle Struggle of the Orders in terms
  of the political divisions of their own day. This
  procedure is perfectly understandable, and should
  not be dismissed as frivolous or dishonest
  nevertheless, the annalists unwittingly contrived
  to distort the facts, and the results, which are
  incorporated in the surviving accounts of Livy,
  Dionysius, and the rest, are often anachronistic
  and misleading (pg. 242).
• From T.J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome Italy
  and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars
  (London and New York Routledge, 1995)