The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ in Latin an epic poem on the First Punic War which included a great deal of material on early Roman history; and the family of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, who died about 280 BC, inscribed on his sarcophagus an account of his career in nearly four lines instead of a simple line-and-a-bit giving his names and titles (See Pl.1).

From this point onwards there is a rich Roman historical tradition, albeit now very imperfectly preserved. Beside this tradition there is another, that of Greek historians observing Rome from the outside. The Roman tradition has certain unifying characteristics; Pictor removed history from the hands of the official priests who had been responsible for most of such records as had been kept, but since the official priests of Rome were drawn from its aristocracy and were more officials than priests he did not change its essential nature. History at Rome was almost always written at least unconsciously from an aristocratic viewpoint and was often consciously apologetic. It shows a strong tendency to simplify the dilemmas of the past; and particularly in the late Republic it tends to see the antecedents of the revolution in purely moral terms, with evil men subverting the efforts of the heroic defenders of the res publica.

      The Greek tradition is perhaps more complex. With Rome’s confrontation with and defeat of King Pyrrhus of Epirus (Map 3) in 275 and the consequent abandonment of his attempt to create an empire in the west, the Greek world began to take notice, even if Rome remained unconscious of the significance of what she had achieved. The first serious Greek historian of Rome was Timaeus. Born in Tauromenium (Taormina) and exiled as a young man by King Agathocles of Syracuse (Map 2), he spent his working life in Athens, some fifty years in all; but his interest in the west remained and led him to write a history of Sicily and a history of Pyrrhus. The contemporary defeat of a Hellenistic king by a republic may have been a congenial theme to a man exiled by a tyrant and attested as an opponent of divine honours for kings. At all events, Timaeus was led to a serious investigation of the new power in the west; and it is not surprising that Polybius in his wish to establish himself a century later as the historian of Rome should have devoted so much energy to attacking the credentials of Timaeus.

      We are told that Timaeus narrated the early history of Rome and the Pyrrhic War; but he went beyond merely accounting for the existence of the power which had defeated Pyrrhus. He questioned native informants about the Roman sacra at Lavinium (Map 1); he knew of the curious Roman customs relating to the sacrifice of the October horse; he wrote of the origins of the Roman monetary system and census classes; he synchronized the foundation of Rome with that of Carthage and thus knew, unlike all his fellow Greeks hitherto, that a long period intervened between the arrival of the Trojans in Italy and the foundation of Rome.

      Timaeus lived to record only the first serious encounter of Rome with a Greek state; a century later Polybius of Megalopolis (Map 3) was stimulated to record the defeat by Rome not only of Carthage in the First and Second Punic Wars, but also of one Greek state after another and the consequent emergence of Rome as the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Unlike Timaeus, Polybius was an active politician, involved as a young man in the affairs of a Greek community, the Achaean League, which was allied with Rome in the early second century BC and whose leading city, Corinth, was eventually sacked by Rome in 146. Polybius, interned by Rome as a man whose allegiance was doubtful in 167, on balance approved of the Roman victory of 146. He had in any case already established a number of close friendships with members of the Roman aristocracy and his picture of Rome is hardly that of a complete outsider (see here).

      The last great Greek historian of Rome is Posidonius; contemporary with and a friend of many of the great men of the late Republic, he wrote, apart from numerous works on philosophy, science and geography, a history of Rome carrying on from where Polybius ended, the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146. An admirer of traditional Roman values and contemptuous of Rome’s declared enemies in the Greek east, he nonetheless devoted much space to internal stress at Rome and commented on her often deplorable approach to provincial government.

      Of all the historians of Rome writing before the death of Caesar no work is now preserved complete. The histories of Polybius have fared best, but of the other Greek historians and of all the Roman historians only miserable fragments have survived in quotation by later authors, often grammarians interested primarily in rare word forms. Their works, however, lie behind and are often directly used in the histories of two men writing under the principate of Augustus, the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Bodrum) and the Roman T. Livius of Patavium (Padua). The ‘Early history of Rome’ by Dionysius covered the period down to the beginning of the First Punic War and is preserved complete down to 444–3, thereafter in excerpts; the ‘History of Rome from its foundation’ by Livy covered the period down to the defeat of Varus in Germany in AD 9 and is preserved complete down to 293 (Books 1–x) and from 218 to 167 (Books XXI–XLV), otherwise in resumes made for the semi-literate reading public of the later Roman empire, in the works of later historians and compilers of collections of exempla, moral tales, and in occasional quotations in extenso.

A third ingredient in the works of Dionysius and Livy, apart from the writings of earlier Greek and Roman historians, consists of official Roman records. Although the Romans displayed no interest in the writing of history before the end of the third century BC, they had nonetheless kept from the beginning of the Republic records which were capable of serving as the bare bones of history and had also preserved certain documents important to the life of the community.

      The records called the Annales Maximi appear to have been kept year by year by the Pontifex Maximus, the head of the most important of the Roman colleges of official priests, and displayed outside his house on a notice-board; there is little evidence for their content – no doubt the names of the annual officials and a jejune record of phenomena of religious import such as eclipses and of events such as major wars. The annual display of the Annales Maximi was abandoned by P. Mucius Scaevola, who became Pontifex Maximus in 130; the doubtless edited form in which they were kept after being displayed had clearly long been available for consultation at any rate by members of the aristocracy and at some point the whole corpus was worked up and published. But the annual display was presumably abandoned because by now there flourished at Rome a more literary type of history, and the publication of the Annales Maximi, whenever it occurred, fell on stony ground; the historians of the late Republic and after made almost no use of them.

      More important for our purposes is the preservation of major documents. Some were already exploited by Polybius, notably the early treaties between Rome and Carthage; a wider variety can be found in Livy, ranging from the decree of the Senate on the suppression of the worship of Bacchus in the early second century BC to the records of booty brought in to the treasury by victorious Roman generals or the treasury records of building activity. The decree of the Senate on the worship of Bacchus survives also in a contemporary inscribed copy from which the substantial accuracy of the version preserved by Livy may be seen. Related to the Roman respect for tradition in religious matters is the careful recording of the foundations of temples; the historical framework implied by these records, for instance the picture of a Rome rediscovering the Greek world around 300 and borrowing Greek conceptions of the celebration of victory, is often strikingly confirmed by the archaeological record.

      The historical tradition as preserved by Dionysius and Livy is marred, however, by serious deformations. This is the result of two main factors. In the first place, the early historians of Rome, whether Greek or Roman, were interested in and recorded only the relatively recent past and the very distant past; later historians, moved by a horror vacui, set out to fill this gap, building on the bare record of the Annales Maximi, in their unelaborated and unpublished form. What they offer may be anything from informed guesswork to patriotic fiction; it is not history.

      Secondly and more seriously, however, few Roman historians were able to resist the temptation to improve the image of their own family in the history of the Republic. As we shall see, Rome was ruled by the members of an aristocracy, one of whose prime concerns was to achieve distinction in competition with their peers. This competitive ideology comes out already in the epitaph of L. Cornelius Scipio, son СКАЧАТЬ