u/Potential-Road-5322

In Breisach’s Historiography he comments that “Alexander’s grand deeds and short lived empire, involving so many barbarian areas and peoples, could not be located in the Greek view of the past which remained stubbornly centered in the polis” page 30.

Earlier in chapter he mentions that “their accounts lacked vision, depth, and creativity… Alexander’s campaign and its achievements and aftermath, proved difficult to treat in the context of Greek history.” Page 27.

My questions are:

In what ways did it mean for Greek history writing to be “centered in the polis?”

How did Alexander’s campaign defy the traditional methods of Greek history writing, why did Alexander’s historians write about him like a classical hero or “lapsed into gossip?”

As this chapter is called “the limits of Greek historiography” what really were the limits of Greek history writing? What could it accomplish that has found lasting praise, and what did it fail to accomplish that gained criticism (criticism from other ancient authors)

Having recently finished chapter 1, entitled Sources and approaches I'd like to share my notes from the following sections:

Early historians (Greek and Roman)

Surviving literary sources

Archaeological evidence

The value of our evidence for early Rome and the Roman construction of the past

Early Historians (Greek and Roman)

The Roman memory world was larger than just written history. page 16.

Greek writers were writing about Rome as early as the early sixth century BC. The beginnings of the city were discussed by Greeks in the fifth century BC and the Gallic sack of the fourth century (traditionally dated to 390 BC) was also mentioned by Greek writers, Aristotle being one of them. page 16.

Greeks were aware of the third Samnite war with Duris of Samos (an island in the Aegean) writing about the battle of Sentinum. page 16.

After the Pyrrhic war (281 - 275 BC) Greek writers in the west began to write more about Rome.

Timaeus, a Sicilian Greek writer from Tauromenium wrote quite a bit about Rome and worked off a theory developed by the aforementioned Duris that linked Rome's founding to Carthage and which placed Alexander the Great 1000 years after the Trojan war. page 16, note 54.

Greek writers wrote on Roman foundation myths and their own day. Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch wrote about different versions of the foundation story. Because the story of Romulus and Remus were local stories, Greek writers may have consulted Romans firsthand or heard about them second hand. page 17.

Fabius Pictor, writing in the late third century BC probably wrote to present a Roman version of events of the second Punic war. Because Hannibal had the support of some Greek historians, Pictor may have written to counteract perspectives provided by those sources. page 17, note 56 about Habinek's Politics of Latin literature for the purpose of latin lit under senatorial control.

Epic poetry also played a role in early Roman history writing as Ennius work "The Annales" survives, albeit in only 600 lines. page 18.

Livy relied upon earlier annalists, some of the sources he used regularly included: Valerius Antias who Livy criticized for exaggerating combatant numbers among other things, Licinius Macer (who made use of the linen books of magisterial lists), Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Aelius Tubero. page 18.

Surviving literary sources

Cato the elder write the first history of Rome in Latin. Table 1.1 page. 19.

Livy expressed a good deal of skepticism when recounting mythical events by prefacing such statements with "it is said" or something similar. page 20.

The first few books of Livy's history cover a much greater amount of time compared with the later ones, likely indicating that there more accounts to pull from in writing about later periods. pages 21, 22.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a scholar and rhetorician who came to Rome in 30 BC and published a history of Rome down to 264 BC. His goals in writing were to correct the views some Greeks may have had and to emphasize the Greek nature of the city. page 22.

Antiquarian writing was a related field to that of History. Antiquarians investigated things from the past such as traditions, institutions, language, monuments, and documents. page 23.

On noting the uniqueness of Livy, Robert Ogilvie says how he brought a very personal and moral look at history as well as making use of a very engaging style of Latin prose. He commends Livy on this despite his lack of deep antiquarian research or attempt at accuracy through comparing different historians or arguing and defending a position. "Livy's approach to history." Robert Ogilvie, Britannica.

Cicero dedicated Academica to M. Terrentius Varro saying "Your books led us home when we were wandering like strangers in our own city... you have revealed to us the names, types, duties, and origins of all things divine as well as human." page 23, Academica 1.9

Archaeological evidence

excavations in Rome go back to the Renaissance when areas like the Forum were explored by the papacy to recover ancient statues. Protection for the monuments waited until the late 19th century. Giacomo Boni performed a lot of excavations such as the sepulcretum burial ground of the 9th and 8th centuries BC and the comitium around the early 1900's. page 25.

Einar Gjerstad studied part of the Forum Boarium under the church of Sant' Omobono from the 1950's to 70's and collected a great deal of information about burials, although after collecting the evidence of the Forum's layers he advanced a chronology that was quite controversial. page 25.

Larger excavations accelerated in the 1980's under the Italian ministry of culture through their Soprintendenza offices. page 25.

Constant habitation, devastation of older burial sites from redevelopment, and the change to austere burials during the Orientalizing period c. 580 BC make excavations difficult. page 26.

Archaeological studies of the temple of Jupiter and the temple of Castor match the literary record and the discovery of the pyrgi tablets in the 60's provided evidence or at least strong support for Polybius' dating of the Roman-Carthage treaty of 509 BC. Epigraphy offers some credence to stories of migration to Eturia and Rome like that of Demaratus of Corinth, even if specific tales like the Tarquinian connection to Corinth were legendary. Inscriptions also supports the existence of a certain "Aulus Vibenna" with an inscription found in Veii, dated to 580 BC. page. 27, also see subsequent note

We must be careful not to assign too much significance to the connections between archaeology and literature, as if their existence means something is very important. Sometimes random insignificant things just survive. When examining both literary and archaeological evidence we also need to be wary of thinking that some archaeological finding definitely confirms something found in the literary sources and vice versa. To draw these conclusions would be committing the "Positivist fallacy." page 27, positivist fallacy article on Livius, and paragraph 6 of this review from BMCR.

Bradley write that the more significant action or study is the independent story the archaeology tells us about the nature of Rome's economy, society, and culture instead of trying to find correlations between literature and archaeology. page 27. c.f. "An interim report of the origins of Rome" by Arnaldo Momigliano.

The value of our evidence for early Rome and the Roman construction of the past

Bradley highlights that his goal is the clarify our current state of knowledge; what we know, what we don't know, and our approaches instead of providing a definitive judgement. page 27.

Table 1.2 provides a schematic for the character of the historical record. page 28.

Bradley pivots away from judging the reliability of sources and points out how recent research has drawn more attention to how the agenda of primary source authors affect the era they discuss. In short- more emphasis is given to the Roman construction of their own past rather than trying to figure our exactly what happened. page 29.

The teleological perspective, or imagining the Rome's conquests were working toward the goal of dominating the Mediterranean played a part in Livy's history with him having a Samnite leader say "let us then... determine whether Samnite or Romans shall dominate Italy." This exchange, fabricated as it might be is suggesting that either party was aiming for the complete domination of Italy, a seeming inevitability in Livy's day when looking at the size and power of Rome by the late first century BC. page 29.

Anachronism, or the misplacing in time of persons, customs, events, and other things features in later writers. The great power Rome wielded in the first century BC/AD made for a different system than how it operated in the fourth century BC. Later writers who never experienced early Rome would not have been able to re-imagine the changes the state underwent. Its greatness was not predestined. page 29.

Struggles in the late republic may have influenced a nostalgic and moralizing view of the past and what was going wrong in the late republic and so the Roman construction of the past should be seen a both a reflection of contemporary anxieties contrasted with an idealized past for the purpose of moral education along with being an account of past events, but the former guided writing more than annals of the past. page 30.

Some of the contemporary vs. idealized past views included: rural agricultural past vs. urbanized present, austere past vs. luxurious present, military strength of the past vs. a military of uncertain ability of the present, conservative patriarchy of the past vs. increasingly influential elite women of the present, pious devotion to gods in the past vs. increased secularization of thought and manipulation of religion for political purposes in the present, and believing that patrician families had some ancient origins when in fact social mobility was more prevalent in the archaic period. page 30.

Bradley's goals restated are asking "how does this information contribute to our understanding of Rome? How does Rome compare to its Italian neighbors and other Mediterranean societies and how did it participate in the wider Mediterranean world. pages 33,34.

I included a few notes as well:

Note 51 on page 16 mentions how Pliny the elder wrote about how Theopomus mentions the Gallic sack and after him another writer, Cleitarchus wrote of an embassy the Romans sent to Alexander. Look this up to learn about any contact between the Romans and Alexander. Pliny's Natural history 3.57.
When asking about the differences between antiquarians and historians I thank u/ifly6 and u/HaggisareReal for clarifying that they were similar pursuits. Antiquarians collected information about the past and historians often wrote about their own day, formed causal explanations for how things happened, and wrote on geography and the history of certain areas. However, the ancient historians did not examine their own primary sources as thoroughly as historians do today, often time just repeating what an earlier writer may have written or shared anecdotes and stories of their own and other cultures.

I also had a few questions:

Bradley writes "written history, a late and contingent development, was perhaps never central to the Roman collective memory;"

Contingent on what? What did the beginning of history writing in Rome depend on to start?

When was the Esquiline cemetery devastated in redevelopment as page 26 says? Was that during the archaic period, later in Rome's history, or did it happen after the empire fell?

An excellent introduction to examining Roman history which helps set the stage for getting into what we do and don't know, but also for understanding how each piece of evidence at least tells us something about Rome even if it isn't profound.

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In what way did ancient Greek historiography remain “stubbornly centered in the polis?”

In what way did ancient Greek historiography remain “stubbornly centered in the polis?”

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More notes from chapter 1 of "Early Rome to 290 BC" by Guy Bradley

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