Michael Crawford - The Roman Republic

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 of the Scipio Barbatus mentioned 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.