The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Michael Crawford
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007385263
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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.

      The Romans were also in some respects a highly conservative people, often preserving as fossils, especially in a religious context, institutions which no longer fulfilled any useful function; much interest was shown in them in the first century BC and antiquarians such as Varro were responsible both for recording valuable evidence of this kind about early Roman history and for attempting to elucidate it. Antiquarian evidence of this kind plays a major part for instance in any attempt to reconstruct the development of the Roman assemblies. The evidence of language may also sometimes illuminate the earlier stages of Roman history.

      For the last hundred years of the Republic, the amount and the nature of the information available change radically. The voluminous writings of Cicero not only document many aspects of the period of his maturity—roughly from the 80s onwards—but also contain much information on the two generations which precede his own. Sallust, a budding politician of the late Republic, writing in retirement after the death of Caesar, composed two monographs, which survive, on a past which was to him relatively recent and for which good information was still available; they are on the Catilinarian Conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. He also wrote a history of the period from Sulla to 70, which survives only in fragments. Finally, the first book of Appian’s Civil Wars draws on a late Republican source, sometimes identified with Augustus’ acquaintance C. Asinius Pollio; this source in any case paid a degree of attention, remarkable for antiquity, to social and economic factors.

      A last word. The history of the middle Republic, as presented to us in the Roman tradition, is despite its diverse origins extraordinarily monolithic; the literary material only occasionally