Quite apart from the various filters of cultural desire through which interpreters view the primary and comparative evidence, there are issues of historical interpretation that do not always receive full consideration.
Here I begin with the protos heuretes approach. Supporters of this theory tend to exaggerate the poverty of Roman cultural life before the mid-third century. In fact, the dossier of Roman accomplishments in the early period, familiar as it is, remains impressive. By the end of the sixth century, Rome boasted, among other important structures, the largest temple in Italy, that of Jupiter on the Capitoline. Perhaps also in the sixth century but at all events by the early fourth, when the Republican city walls were completed, Rome was by far the largest fortified urban area in Italy. By the end of fourth century, construction had begun on a system of roads that became the most extensive and most technically advanced in the world, and on a system of aqueducts that went well beyond the need to provide the city with water, being clearly intended to accomplish this task in the most conspicuous and impressive way possible. On this evidence, Rome was obviously not backward in terms of material culture. Of course, it is a cliche to say that the Romans were engineers and soldiers, not artists and poets, but none of the monuments just listed was without an important aesthetic dimension. Finally, even if the city had been a backwater, it would be difficult to imagine that the Romans had no literature of any kind; and, as a matter of fact, we can say with certainty that they did in the archaic period have a religious, legal, and annalistic literature. So the conditions necessary to support an imaginative literature of some importance would seem to have been in place.
Beyond this, there is nothing intrisically unlikely about Cato’s testimony concerning the carmina convivalia, which would fit very easily into such a milieu. Therefore, the idea that Rome was completely uncultivated and unlettered prior to the time when Livius wrote his Odusia is a tendentious caricature.
However, if we conceive of our task as combing through the surviving literature for native Roman characteristics inherited from the archaic period, we may be on the wrong track. If the archaic Romans were not uncultivated philistines, neither were they completely un-Hellenized. Almost everything we know about the sociopolitical structure of archaic Rome suggests the influence of Greek institutions, particularly that of the polis itself. The transition from a regal period to one of Republican government parallels the Greek phenomenon that produced first tyrannies and then different forms of oligarchic, democratic, or mixed governments in Greek cities. More generally, Hellenization begins throughout most of the Italian peninsula during the period of Greek colonization, that is, as early as the eighth century (Malkin 1998). New analyses of settlement patterns, foundation narratives of individual cities, mythographic evidence, and archaeological finds and the social practices associated with them all suggest that characteristic elements of Hellenism were part of a common culture familiar to the elite of practically all Italian cities. Among those Greek cultural institutions of literary character that were widely dispersed in archaic Italy we find, specifically, the theater, the symposium, and Homer.
These points are stressed by critics of the protos heuretes approach, who have developed updated theories of the relationship between pre - and post-Livian culture. Some continue to argue, in the manner of Niebuhr, for a continuous performance tradition concerned with the heroic deeds of earlier times; they focus either on theatrical performance (Gentili 1977; Zorzetti 1980; Wiseman 1994, 1995, 1998) or on symposiastic settings (Zorzetti 1990; Rupke 2001b). A full discussion of the origins of the Roman theater is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is a topic that is obviously related to the history of Roman epic. Rome’s first epic poets, as I have mentioned, were primarily dramatists who turned out tragedies and comedies year after year, but produced just one epic each. It is therefore necessary to see third - and second-century epic as having taken shape within a literary context dominated by drama. But in a very important sense, the history of theater is bedeviled by the very same questions and paucity of evidence that complicates the study of epic. And, while there have been learned and imaginative efforts to establish the existence and estimate the character of a theatrical culture at Rome from the earliest times, Nicholas Horsfall’s objection to these efforts has never, so far as I can see, been answered convincingly:
Scholars have realized for over a century now that the suviving accounts of the origins of drama in central Italy are substantially of Varronian origin and that behind Varro there stands above all the account of Eratosthenes of the origins of Greek comedy... Our standard texts on the origin of the Roman theatre repeat, then, what remains a first-century BC reconstruction, heavily influenced by the research undertaken a couple of centuries previously on the origins of Attic drama. (Horsfall 1994: 66-8)
At any rate, the history of theater does not provide an independent point of comparison from which one might draw inferences about the history of epic. Rather the two phenomena are subject to exactly the same methodological and evidentiary problems.
Besides the theater, the symposium has recently been suggested as a setting for Roman literary performance in connection with ambitiously revisionist arguments about Roman literary culture. On this view, a ‘‘musical culture’’ of recitation and performance flourished at Rome at least to the time of the first epic poets and perhaps to the end of the first century bce, when writing and reading began to supplant singing, reciting, and listening as the principal ways of experiencing poetry (Zorzetti 1990; Dupont 1999). Of course the carmina convivalia have been adduced in support of this line of argument. But the chronology and perhaps the existence of this tradition are uncertain. As I have mentioned, very few scholars are willing to deny its existence, but just when and for how long did it flourish? This question turns on a point of elementary interpretation of the Latin text that says that these performances took place, according to Cicero’s paraphrase of Cato, ‘‘multis saeculis ante suam aetatem’’ (Brut. 75). The normal translation of this phrase would be ‘‘many generations before his [Cato’s] own time,’’ and would mean that
Cato had never witnessed such a performance, but was reporting on the tradition as a matter of hearsay, if not indeed making the whole thing up. However, Niebuhr took the phrase as evidence that these performances took place ‘‘for many generations down to Cato’s own time’’ - a most unlikely interpretation, in my view, but others have followed his lead.
There is another point, however, that is crucial for our interests. Even the most ambitious of recent efforts to build on Cato’s testimony regarding the carmina convivalia agree about one thing: these poems were not epics. Both Cato and modern proponents emphasize the Greek-style symposia as the relevant settings for these carmina. If the comparison is exact, then it is more likely that the carmina convivalia were not epic, but rather lyric or other melic poetry, not unlike the skolia that are familiar as Greek banquet songs (Zorzetti 1991). If this is true, then Cato’s report concerning the carmina con-vivalia, even if it could be taken as evidence of a tradition that flourished right down to Cato's own day, would be only indirectly relevant to our interest in specifically epic poetry.
The case of Homer presents a different aspect. Here we can say with certainty that Homer was known in Italy from a very early period (Malkin 1998), and one expert has written about the adoption of a ‘‘Homeric life-style’’ in central Italy by the eighth century BCE (Ridgway 1988). Even without taking into consideration the individual scenes that may be viewed as part of a Homeric or a theatrical tradition (if this distinction is indeed to be observed in such cases), cycles of wall paintings that allude to the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey, and that in some cases even draw comparisons between epic literature and events from archaic history, point unmistakably to the central place of Homer in elite Italian culture (Farrell 2004). Indeed, the institutions of Homeric poetry and the symposium seem to converge in some places. We know that Etruscan aristocratic tombs were venues for ritual banqueting, and that some of them were decorated with scenes from Homer and the Epic Cycle (Brilliant 1984). It happens of course that we are much better informed about funeral customs than we are about how people actually lived in the archaic period, and it is an open question how far we can go in drawing inferences from the one sphere about the other. But in the Latin city of Ficana the same implements that characterize the symposium, and that have been found in burials, have also turned up in habitation sites (Rathje 1983, 1990). We can then imagine residents of archaic Latium taking part in Greek-style symposia, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that these occasions would have involved songs of some sort. We do not know whether these occasions took place in rooms decorated with the same sort of Homeric scenes that we find in some of the tombs, but the pattern of inference between burial and habitation sites makes this seem at least possible. It is difficult to imagine that banquets held in the presence of such paintings would not have featured some comment on the scenes represented. But even if existing evidence does not permit us confidently to reconstruct actual performances of the Homeric epics in Roman symposia, Homer is plentifully represented in the material culture of central Italy in the archaic period. For these reasons, the idea that Livius Andronicus introduced Roman readers to Homer and so introduced Hellenic literary culture to Rome has come to seem hopelessly simplistic and badly in need of correction.
World History
