The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ earlier, inscribed in an archaic form of Latin around 230: ‘hone oino ploirume consentiont R[omane] duonoro optumo fuise viro’ – ‘this one man most Romans agree to have been the best of the good.’ The effects of this ideology on the writing of history are graphically described by Cicero:

      And speeches in praise of the dead of past ages are indeed extant; for the families concerned kept them as a sort of mark of honour and a record, both in order to be able to use them if anyone else of the same family died and in order to preserve the memory of the achievements of the family and document its nobility. Of course, the history of Rome has been falsified by these speeches; for there is much in them which never happened – invented triumphs, additional consulates, false claims to patrician status, with lesser men smuggled into another family with the same nomen, as if, for instance, I claimed to be descended from Marcus Tullius, who was a patrician and consul with Servius Sulpicius ten years after the expulsion of the kings (Brutus 62).

      The funerals at which such speeches were delivered are characterized by Polybius from his own experience:

      Whenever any famous man dies at Rome, he is carried to his funeral into the forum with every kind of honour to the so-called Rostra, sometimes conspicuous in an upright posture and more rarely in a reclining position. Here with all the people standing round, a grown-up son, if he has left one who happens to be present, or if not some other relative mounts the Rostra and discourses on the virtues and successful achievements of the dead man … Next, after the burial and the performance of the usual ceremonies they put an image (imago) of the dead man in the most public part of the house, placing it in a little wooden shrine. The image is a mask, remarkably lifelike, both in its modelling and in its complexion (Pl.8). When any famous member of the family dies, his relatives take the masks to his funeral, putting them on men who seem most like the original in general appearance or bearing … (and) he who delivers the oration over the man about to be buried, when he has finished speaking of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the rest whose images are present, beginning from the most ancient (VI, 53–54, 1).

      Even for a relatively recent period, Livy remarks that the recording of the death of M. Marcellus in 208 was complicated by the version in the funeral speech pronounced by his son; similarly, one of Livy’s sources omitted the consuls for 307 and 306, either by mistake or, as Livy suggests, supposing them to have been invented; and Livy comments in total despair on the impossibility of discovering the truth about a dictator of 322 as a result of the vitiation of the record by funeral speeches.

      When one reflects that the historians contemporary with or close to the events they were describing and on whom Dionysius and Livy ultimately depended for much of their material were not above allowing family pride to influence their history, it is clear that any attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of the only more or less continuous sources surviving, the history even of the middle Republic from the fourth to the second centuries BC is a hazardous proceeding.

      Despite this caution, the no doubt largely oral traditions of family history are not wholly to be decried. In a modern, literate society, oral traditions beyond the living generation have been found to reflect what has been read in books; but in early Rome, anchored to the imagines of the ancestors, traditions may have had a firmer basis. Funeral speeches may have been written down at a relatively early date and Cato (see here) is represented by Cicero (de senectute 21 and 61) as explicitly claiming that the sight of the tombs of men long dead served to keep fresh the memory of their deeds and as quoting the epitaph of a man who was consul in 258 and 254. And there is another point; the vision of the early Republic in Livy is no doubt fanciful, but it was a vision in its main outlines shared by his contemporaries and predecessors, a fact of the highest importance for the understanding of a society as prone as the Roman to identify itself by reference to the past.

      A problem of a different kind arises in connection with the account in Livy of the Second Punic War and the early second century BC. For this period Livy used Polybius for affairs in the Greek world and for other matters earlier Roman historians, who themselves depended ultimately on official records and on contemporary authors. The result is a detailed chronological narrative of a particularly measured kind, which does not exist for any later period; the narrative breathes a confidence and a degree of normality which is necessarily lacking from the sources for the late Republic and it is desirable at least to ask how far the obvious contrast which exists between the middle and the late Republic results from the different nature of the source material.

      Four lesser figures pose problems similar to those posed by Dionysius and Livy and require brief mention. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the late first century BC, is the author of a universal history from the earliest times down to his own day. His work survives only in excerpts for the period in which we are interested, but possesses one great merit: he was disinclined to do more than copy or paraphrase one source at a time and therefore preserves much good material. The other three historians who concern us all belong to the period of the renaissance of Greek literature in the second and early third centuries AD. Appian, a native of Alexandria in Egypt, wrote a series of monographs (for the most part surviving) on the wars which Rome fought during the Republic; like Diodorus, Appian faithfully reflects his source of the moment; his own comments are of a degree of naivety which sheds an interesting light on the nature of the Roman imperial administration, of which he was a member. By deciding, however, to write not only on Rome’s foreign wars, but also on her civil wars, Appian came in effect to write a continuous history of the last century of the Roman Republic, from 133 to 35; moreover the first book of the Civil Wars contains the only serious surviving account of the agrarian history of Italy.

      Plutarch of Chaeronea in Boeotia was a member of the upper class of his community, a wide reader and a prolific writer; among his writings is a series of paired biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, covering with equal verve half-legendary figures like Romulus and historical figures like Julius Caesar; they are as reliable as their sources and Plutarch’s memory permit. Finally, there is Dio of Nicaea in Asia Minor, an easterner in the Roman senate at the turn of the second and third centuries AD ; an acute and original historian of his own times, his account of the middle Republic survives only in the version of a Byzantine abbreviator and in excerpts; it represents, however, in some cases a tradition not otherwise preserved. Dio’s account of the last generation of the Roman Republic, from 69 onwards, survives nearly intact and is of enormous value.

      Fortunately there is other evidence outside the main historical tradition. In the first place, there is a great deal of evidence from contemporary sources of one kind or another which is in a sense free from contamination or distortion, the evidence of public and private inscriptions, of non-historical literature and of archaeology and coins. Outside early Roman history, archaeological evidence is particularly important in allowing us to know far more of non-Roman Italy than the literary sources reveal. At the same time, the development of Roman art under the patronage of the Roman aristocracy is one of the threads of Republican history. The production of the coinage of the Republic was entrusted to young men at the start of their political careers and the types which they chose often reflected the pretensions of their families and their own ambitions. Moreover, as time passed, the coinage of Rome circulated ever more widely, becoming eventually the coinage of a world state. That too is one of the threads of Republican history.

      We also possess, for instance, twenty plays of Plautus, produced at the turn of the third and second centuries BC, which provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of Roman society and institutions. The poems of Lucilius, even in the fragmentary form in which they survive, present us with a succession of often savagely satirical vignettes of the aristocracy of the late second century BC.

Finally, Rome’s involvement with the Greek world on a massive scale from 200 onwards resulted in the promulgation there of numerous decrees of the Senate and letters of Roman officials, meticulously inscribed on stone by the communities to which they were addressed; laws of the people and decrees of officials along with treaties are preserved on stone or bronze in increasing quantities СКАЧАТЬ