(with the first sentence and last two sentences here added from Mellor, Ronald.
The Roman Historians, p. 24, to complete the paragraph in a subsection titled, 'The Latin annalists.')*
rgprice wrote: ↑Fri Aug 18, 2023 2:08 pm
The century of annalistic history in Latin must be judged from fragments, since these works eventually perished after they were superseded by Livy’s great history of the entire Republic. [highlight=lightgreenThe annalists preserved what was still a living tradition of Rome’s past but they also expanded the past through invention, borrowings from the Greek, and introduction of later events into the history of early Rome[/highlight]. Family pride and unquestioning chauvinism distorted the material, as did their need to sacrifice all to the annalistic chronological framework. There were different interpretations of what was missing: Asellio believed, with Polybius, that the true historian must ask probing questions while Cicero lamented the absence of true literary art. Thus they set the agenda for Rome’s first historians worthy to stand beside the Greek antecedents.
Mellor, Ronald. The Roman Historians (p. 24). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
* The three subsections of the first chapter, Origins of Roman Historiography,' before the one this paragraph is from are titled, 'Greek antecedents,' 'Sources of the Roman past,' and 'Rome's first historians.'
From '
Greek antecedents':
Greeks had been writing history for three centuries before the first Roman, Fabius Pictor, turned his hand to historical prose. Homer had long before provided the earliest example of oral poetry which contained praise, or encomia, of famous men. In fifth-century Athens Herodotus and Thucydides followed Homer in providing a third-person narrative of great deeds. Their historical masterpieces gave written history some of its notable characteristics. Thus Herodotus wrote his history of the Persian Wars on an epic scale. The early books set forth the geographical and cultural background of the eastern Mediterranean peoples: Persians, Egyptians, Scythians, Lydians, and Ionian Greeks. In the Homeric tradition, he invented speeches for his characters—wholesale fabrications in which he was followed by virtually every subsequent Greek and Roman historian. Herodotus’ goal was to give pleasure to the reader and to recreate the past ... Herodotus knew his audience and their taste. In an age of limited literacy, many more Athenians heard Herodotus’ recited performances of his history than could yet read the text. He needed to ensure that his listeners, and his readers as well, be entertained, as they had been by epic poems.
Several decades later Thucydides introduced a more austere way of writing history in his treatment of the Peloponnesian War ... Although some see in Herodotus and Thucydides only the stark contrast between historians who seek to entertain by telling stories and those who wish to educate—a contrast said to persist after 2,500 years between purveyors of popular history and academic historians—there is in fact much that they have in common.
Both were primarily concerned with contemporary history or the history of the recent past. Most of their sources were oral, since there were few earlier historical writings and no archives available. They truly engaged in an “inquiry,” but few of their successors did much of what we would recognize as primary research; they tended to rewrite history that they found in earlier books. Both Herodotus and Thucydides felt free to invent speeches when it seemed appropriate, and both constructed historical scenes to resemble the tragedies then so popular in Athens.
When the Romans turned to Greek models for history, they drew less on Herodotus and Thucydides than on later Greek writers who wrote in the very theatrical world of the Hellenistic city-state. Cicero regarded Herodotus as no more truthful than epic poets like Ennius, and he thought Thucydides deficient as a rhetorical model ...
The greatest Greek historian of the Hellenistic age, Polybius (202–120 BCE), also harshly criticized the emotional approach to history, and he preferred a more analytical style of history. Since he deeply believed that history is cyclical and thus would “repeat itself,” he saw great utility for political leaders to study history carefully. Though Fabius and Cato had already written the earliest Roman histories before Polybius completed his own history of the growth of Roman power, Polybius’ historical achievement made him the dominant influence on later Roman historical writers. With Livy and Tacitus, Polybius became one of the three greatest historians of Rome ...
At a time when the Roman nobles were becoming interested in Greek culture, Polybius’ intelligence, education, and political shrewdness brought him into the intellectual circle of Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of the conqueror of Hannibal. Under Scipio’s patronage Polybius was able to travel throughout Italy, as well as gain access to family libraries and state archives in Rome. He abandoned an earlier plan to write a history of the Achaean League, deciding instead to demonstrate to his fellow Greeks how Rome became in little more than a century the greatest power in the Mediterranean world ...
Polybius’ initial goal was to write a universal history in Greek of the period from 220 to 168 BCE. Later events caused him to extend the history through the fall of Carthage and Corinth to 144 BCE ...
A final important Greek influence on Roman historical writing was the historian and philosopher, Poseidonius (135–50 BCE). He was educated in Athens by the leading Stoic philosopher, Panaetius, and was in due course himself a teacher of Cicero in Rhodes. Poseidonius saw the Roman Empire as the incarnation of the ideal Stoic world state—the cosmopolis ...
Despite all these Greek models, the Roman historiographical tradition developed differently. Greek historians demonstrated their competence and credibility by discussing their methods, showing their research, and often engaging in intellectual polemic with other writers. A Roman historian did few of these things; his claim to authority and credibility usually rested on family background, public career, or military achievements. Nevertheless, Roman writers took over such favorite Greek historical topoi as the commander’s speech on the eve of battle or the siege and capture of a city.
... Roman historians...focused on the Roman state and the political life of the community. Before the Romans ever wrote history, they read of Greek achievements both in poetry and history and developed a defensive posture toward their accomplished predecessors. Thus Rome’s desire to rival the heroic ancestry of the Greeks created a chauvinistic historiography whose ethnocentrism left little sympathy for Rome’s opponents ... The Romans’ polemical, partisan, moralizing strain, first used by historians against Rome’s enemies, was increasingly deployed against one faction or another in the domestic struggles in Roman political life.
.
From '
Sources of the Roman past':
While the Romans looked to the Greeks as models for the writings of history, important indigenous traditions also shaped the form and subject matter of Roman historiography for centuries. Though no Roman wrote historical prose before the end of the third century BCE, more than five centuries after the founding of the city, the Romans still preserved the real or imagined achievements of their ancestors and there was remarkable agreement on the earliest traditions. Funeral addresses, which linked the achievements of the recently deceased with the exploits of his ancestors across the centuries, were either kept in family archives or passed orally from generation to generation with embellishments and distortions. However untrustworthy, these encomia are an early expression of the Roman desire to illuminate and guide the present through the past
...
... Roman magistrates kept the accounts of their tenure in office, called
commentarii, among private documents in their homes, though in some cases they were also
deposited with the priests for incorporation into the official records. Epitaphs on placards might also be carried beside the masks at family funerals. These epitaphs, best known from the group found in the tomb of the Scipios, might contain details of careers in public life. From the late fourth century, families preserved particularly famous orations by their ancestors. A.Claudius Caecus, consul (312 BCE) and dictator, best known for constructing the first aqueduct (
Aqua Claudia) and the first highway to Naples (
Via Appia), was also known as the first Roman to have a speech published, and Cicero regarded him as the forerunner of Cato. The speech must have been preserved for a century or more in the archives of the proud Claudian family.
Besides these family records, the Romans preserved a variety of public documents. They had long displayed treaties; thus there is no reason to doubt Polybius’ report that he saw on a bronze tablet a treaty with Carthage from about 500 BCE. The Twelve Tables were
[supposedly
] set up in the Forum in 450 BCE where they remained as “the fountainhead of all public and private law” (Livy 3, 34, 6). Decrees of the Senate were kept in the public treasury in the temple of Saturn, and resolutions of the Plebeian Assembly were preserved in the temple of Ceres.
The most important of the early records were the pontifical tables kept by the pontifex maximus (chief priest). This information was initially written each year in black ink on whitened notice boards from which they were later erased with a wet sponge. At the end of the year the records were added to the inscriptions on the bronze tablets which stood at the Regia in the Forum, probably called
annales maximi from the Latin word for year (
annus) and the title of the priest. They recorded the consuls, military triumphs, religious prodigies, and any other important events that required religious rituals. Cicero describes them:
For history began as a mere compilation of annals, on which account, in order to preserve the general traditions, from the earliest period of the City down to the pontificate of Publius Mucius, each High Priest used to commit to writing all the events of his year of office, and record them on a white tablet (album), and post up the tablet (tabula) at his house, that all men might have the liberty to acquaint themselves therewith, and to this day those records are known as the pontifical annals (annales maximi) (De orat. 2, 52, tr. Sutton and Rackham (Loeb))
Cato the Elder derided the
annales:
It is disagreeable to write what stands on the tablet at the house of the Pontifex Maximus—how often grain was costly, how often darkness or something else blocked the light of the moon or of the sun. (Origines Frag. 77; Peter Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae)
From '
Romes first historians.' It starts:
As in Greece, the earliest Romans to write about the past were the epic poets, though only fragments of their works survive. Though Gnaeus Naevius (270–201 BCE) was born in Campania in southern Italy, he is identified as a Roman citizen and was the first citizen—as opposed to slaves—to write books in Latin. Heroic legends of Rome’s past were transmitted from oral traditions into written epic poems, and the same stories appeared later as prose history and biography ... epic poetry was a vibrant and attractive, though usually uncritical, presentation of the past. Naevius’ epic poem on the First Punic War, Bellum Poenicum, retains certain Homeric elements like gods on the battlefield, despite the fact that Naevius himself had served in the war. A long digression allowed Naevius [" better known in his lifetime as a playwright"] to include the national myth of Rome’s foundation by a Trojan prince, Aeneas, as well as the early history of Carthage. About sixty of 5,000 lines of the poem survive—enough to show that Naevius knew both Homer and Hellenistic poetry. Since he was writing while Hannibal was in Italy during the Second Punic War, Naevius’ epic was certainly intended to stir patriotic feelings ...
'
Romes first historians' includes:
Ennius’ great epic poem, Annales, earned him the title of Father of Latin Literature ...Though only some 600 lines now survive, the book was once much studied and imitated by all later Roman poets, especially Virgil. The poem, which took its name from the pontifical annals, focuses on Roman military exploits and uses every opportunity to praise the virtus of the ancestors of the aristocrats of Ennius’ own time ... Ennius certainly used the recent prose history of Fabius Pictor, but his other sources are not clear. His emphasis on the national pride and moral power of Rome had a lasting influence on prose historical writing as well as epic poetry ...
Ennius certainly used the recent prose history of Fabius Pictor, but his other sources are not clear. His emphasis on the national pride and moral power of Rome had a lasting influence on prose historical writing as well as epic poetry. The Babylonian priest Berossus and the Egyptian priest Manetho both wrote histories of their own people in Greek and, in third-century BCE Egypt, a Jewish scholar named Demetrius wrote a biblical history in Greek ...
Fabius’ task was a formidable and an audacious one: to create the first prose narrative of Roman history when so much existing information was oral. He used what was available: the pontifical annales, family records including speeches, earlier Greek historians like Hieronymus of Cardia and Timaeus, and most of all what he had seen and could learn from oral testimony. Fabius must also have drawn on the existing traditions for the foundations of Rome, which seem to have become relatively coherent by his day. Rome had developed a remarkable sense of its past ...
... Fabius, who was born about 250 BCE, would have heard from men whose fathers and grandfathers had served in battles from Caudine Forks (321 BCE) through the First Punic War. His personal observations underlay his account of the Second Punic War, and his description of the embassy to Delphi became the source for Livy in Book 22.
Fabius’ achievement was remarkable. He created a narrative of Roman history that permanently displaced that of Naevius, while at the same time being taken seriously by Greeks as a “Greek” historian. Fabius’ history was very far from the bare annales kept by Roman priests; he was the first to bring Hellenistic Greek historical methods into Roman historical writing ... Though few fragments survive, Polybius’ use of Fabius allows us to discern the Roman’s moralizing anecdotes and nationalistic attitudes: praise for Roman greatness and moral superiority, the wisdom of the Senate, and especially of the Fabian family, with criticism of the stupidity of the popular assembly. In his exaltation of his own family, Fabius was the first to see that the intense competition for glory among the Roman elite could now be transferred to the field of historical writing. Fabius thus introduced prose history to Rome and his moralistic nationalism established its character for centuries to come.
For another generation Roman historians followed Fabius by writing in Greek. We cannot be certain whether this was due to the desire to appeal to a wider readership, the undeveloped state of Latin prose, or cultural pretentiousness. The most prominent of these annales Graeci—as they were later called by Cicero—was L.Cincius Alimentus (praetor, 210 BCE), who fought in the Second Punic War and was taken prisoner by Hannibal. His work was praised both by Polybius and by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The use of Greek soon fell into decline, probably because it no longer served any purpose.
In the preface to his history, A.Postumius Albinus (consul, 151 BCE) apologizes for the errors in his Greek, and Cato scathingly asked who had required him to write in Greek. By that time history in Latin was certainly possible; it was being written by Cato himself!
Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BCE), later called Cato the Elder, was the first to write history in Latin...the first important work in Latin prose, Origines. He derided Roman annals written in Greek, and defended his literary efforts as a justified use of leisure (otium in Latin, as opposed to its opposite, negotium: “business”) to write Rome’s history “in large letters” for his son. The work only survives in fragments quoted by later authors interested in Cato’s archaic Latin. Origines traced Rome’s history in seven books from the beginning down to about 150 BCE, shortly before the historian’s death at the age of eighty-five ...
Cato was remembered for centuries for his scathing criticism of aristocratic families for their personal luxury, political corruption, and servile acceptance of Greek ideas. He fought to keep Greek philosophers from teaching at Rome, and championed the old virtues (mos maiorum) of frugality, work, discipline, and piety. He believed in public expenditure and private frugality ...
Cato not only rejected the ideology of the Scipios and other great aristocratic families, but he stubbornly avoids mentioning the names of magistrates in his history; he simply refer[ed] to “the consul” or “the sictator.” He view[[/color]ed] the Roman people as sovereign, and resent[[/color]ed] the glory that Fabius, Ennius, and even the annales maximi attached to individual Roman families.
There was more than a little posing in Cato’s disdain for all things Greek. His famous phrase rem tene, verba sequentur (“Grasp the point, the words will follow”) was intended to be a rejection of Greek-style rhetoric ...
His purpose in writing history was to instruct Rome’s future leaders in pragmatic politics, and for that both Cicero and Livy associated him with Thucydides. But Cato also believed the young should learn the moral standards of their ancestors, which needed to be retained to combat the increasing corruption that accompanied Hellenization. The Origines was not just didactic history, it was also the beginning of the polemical tradition of factional history at Rome ...
It was also Cato, in describing his political and military career, who first made the historian’s own personality the source of authority and credibility, in which he was followed by later Roman writers. He made history an extension of the battles of the Forum in his aggressive attacks on the aristocrats, so that Livy called him “a ferocious attack dog against the nobility.”
.
The subsection, '
The Latin annalists,' begins:
From the century between Cato and Sallust there survive only fragments of the annalistic historians derided both now and in antiquity. With the pontifical annals as their formal model, these historians provided a year-by-year account of major magistrates and important events, but such a structure obviously precluded treatment of long-term political, social, or economic tendencies. They expanded the history by inventing episodes where necessary, but did not raise historical writing much beyond bare chronicle. In the words of Cicero, “they did not embellish their material, but were mere chroniclers” (De orat. 2, 54). Cicero meant stylistic embellishment; no one could accuse a writer like Cn. Gellius of being unimaginative, since he wrote fifteen books on Roman history before 389 BCE, though little could have been known of that period.
During the social and political conflicts of the age of the Gracchi, Roman annalists projected the violent confrontations of their day into their histories. Gaius Gracchus himself may have begun this tendency when he wrote a propagandistic biography of his murdered brother Tiberius. L.Calpurnius Piso Frugi (consul, 133 BCE) was an opponent of the Gracchi. His annales in seven books reached his own time. While Cicero found his style dry and overly spare, Calpurnius was respected both by Sallust and Livy.
Some fragments survive because the second-century CE antiquarian Aulus Gellius found his style charming. A contemporary, C.Fannius (consul, 122 BCE), was the first Latin annalist to represent the pro-Gracchan popular tradition, though he later seems to have become strongly critical of their movement. He was steeped in the Polybian tradition and did try to rise above factional interests to engage the entire Roman people. Sallust strongly praised Fannius for his devotion to truth.
Two slightly younger contemporaries who also diverged politically were able to improve the standards of annalistic history. The plebeian L.Coelius Antipater should perhaps be regarded as the first professional Roman historian, in that he had no public career. He adopted many Greek ideas in his monograph in seven books on the Second Punic War, including an erotic interest in women that owes much to Hellenistic historical writing. He introduced the historical monograph to Rome and was sufficiently skilled in rhetoric to merit praise from Cicero ... He placed Hannibal at the center of his narrative, and used sources with an African viewpoint as well as checking documentary sources.
He became Livy’s chief source for books 21 and 22, including the Spanish campaigns and the disasters at Trasimene and Cannae. The pathos and fantasy in his narrative sometimes approach the sensational, as when he adds a storm to enliven a sea-crossing by the Roman army. But he also shows considerable accuracy in determining Hannibal’s route across the Alps and the length of his march. His vigorous style combined with historical accuracy makes Coelius perhaps the best of the annalistic historians ...
Another annalist of the Sullan era, Q.Claudius Quadrigarius, wrote twenty-three books on the period from 390 BCE until his own day. His work contained an-evident pro-Roman bias and a certain romantic credulity. More of Claudius survives than of any other annalist since his plain, unadorned style greatly appealed to Aulus Gellius two centuries later ...
