The speech in ancient historiography mediates between past and present (as does narrative history itself), and this mediation manifests itself in at least three ways. First, speeches in later writers allude to or are modeled on those of predecessors; second, many historians have their speakers use historical exempla; and third, many speeches display anachronisms and what we might call ‘‘modernizings,’’ updatings that are more about the historian’s own time than the putative era he is recreating. Let us take each of these in turn.
On the first topic, it should be no surprise that a historian’s speech would be modeled on that of a distinguished predecessor. Historiography was, after all, a literary genre, and as such it partook of all the elements of competition and display that were inherent in other genres. Polybius himself makes reference to such expectations when he refuses to ‘‘enter the contest’’ (enagonismati, 36.1.1) by including the speeches made before the Third Punic War, and his hesitance stands in strong contrast to that of Diodorus, who claims it would be false modesty for a historian not to engage in such contests (20.2.1). The ‘‘contest’’ involved not only the creation of an appropriate speech for the character but also the display of an acquaintance with the tradition and an ability to build on, refine, and allude to one’s predecessors. As always, slavish imitation was to be avoided; the writer was expected to recreate imaginatively in a new context what his predecessors had done (Russell 1979). Thucydides’ Sicilian debate (6.9-18) reenacts and reanalyzes the arguments about empire and imperialism rehearsed by Mardonius and Artabanus in the Persian decision to invade Greece (Hdt. 7.8-10; Raaflaub 2002b). Sallust’s debate between Caesar and Cato (Jug. 51-52) owes much to Thucydides’ Mytilenean Debate (3.37-48); the Campanians’ request for Roman assistance at Livy 7.30-31 is modeled on Thucydides’ Corcyrean debate (1.24-45; Oakley, CL II.293-294); and Tacitus’ account of the debate on governors’ wives accompanying husbands to their provinces imaginatively recasts some of the same issues that Livy explored in his debate on the repeal of the Oppian Law (Ginsburg 1993: 89-96; Santoro L’Hoir 1994/5). And such an approach may not have been exclusively ‘‘literary’’: Claudius’ speech to the Senate recorded in the Lyon inscription mentioned above is clearly indebted to the speech Livy attributes to the tribune Canuleius (4.3.2-5.6; Last and Ogilvie 1958).
As to historical exempla, they were sparsely used by Herodotus and Thucydides, but seem to have come into their own in the Hellenistic world. In Polybius’ account of the congress at Sparta in 211 bce (9.28-39), Chlaeneas rehearses the deeds of the
Macedonians from Philip II to Antigonus Gonatas so as to encourage the assembly to resist Philip V, while Lyciscus refutes Chlaeneas by going through the same events offering different historical interpretations and adding other events not treated by Chlaeneas. Sallust has Licinius Macer remind the plebs of their own history, recalling their earlier victories against the patricians (Hist. 3.48), and Mithridates uses historical exempla to bolster his argument against trusting the Romans (Hist. 4.69). Livy’s work abounds in historical exempla (Chaplin 2000), and the conflict in Tacitus between past and present strongly suffuses all of his work (Ginsburg 1993).
Two points should be made about exempla. First, there is no doubt that orators in the real world employed historical exempla regularly as ways of swaying their audiences and buttressing their cases. Plutarch, in his Political Precepts, advises a speaker addressing the people to use ‘‘histories and tales’’ (historias kai muthous, 803A), and Quintilian explains more fully (3.8.66, tr. Russell):
Almost everyone rightly agrees that this use of examples [i. e., historical] is particularly appropriate to this kind of speech [deliberative] because the future often seems to reflect the past, and experience can be regarded as evidence supporting theoretical reasoning.
Such actual use, however, was not by itself a guarantee that exempla would be reproduced in historiographical orations, since (as we noted above) histories were literary compositions that interpreted rather than simply mirroring the ‘‘real world.’’
What made the use of exempla in historiography valuable was the belief of historians themselves that the past was a teacher for the present and future. But not in a simplistic or nostalgic sort of way. Rather, the historian exploits the situation of the reader of history, who, unlike the deliberative orator, already knows the outcome of events, and by so doing the historian provides an additional analytical level: in light of his later knowledge, the reader can watch the debate unfold and analyze the deployment of exempla made by the speakers, and reflect upon which were accurate, which significant, which appropriate (for this dynamic see Chaplin 2000: passim). The reader must simultaneously evaluate to what extent the past can be a guide since innovations are always possible and later ages (including the reader’s own time) also have much to offer (see, from very different viewpoints, Pol. 9.2.5 and Tac. Ann. 3.55.5). Recreating the drama of debate, then, the historian through speeches also examines the purpose and value of history itself.
We come, finally, to anachronisms and ‘‘modernizings.’’ It has been noted that many speeches in the historians reveal more about the historian than the era of which he was writing. To some extent, this was the result of their use of probability and appropriateness, concepts that are, by and large, culturally determined (one need only consider what ancients thought it probable or appropriate for a woman to do): relying on such notions, the historian’s ability to recreate the past imaginatively was limited, and this led to a type of ‘‘unhistorical thinking’’ (Wiseman 1979: 41-53). This is an enormous topic which cannot be treated here (for some starts see Marincola 2007), but it was not just rhetoric that led the ancients to view the world in this way. The ancient habit of seeing the past in the present and the present in the past - this sense of continuity with the past, characteristic of traditional societies - fostered an approach that did not postulate a wide gulf between it and the historian’s present (cf. Tac. Ann. 4.33.4; Griffin 1985: 188-191). Much of the process of‘‘modernization’’ will have been unconscious, the result of each generation’s examining those things of interest to it (this, after all, is still true of history). So it is no surprise that Livy chooses exempla with particular resonance for his Augustan audience (Chaplin 2000: 74-77, 80-82), or that the speech of Galba to Piso (Tac. Hist. 1.15-16) should be written in the light of Nerva’s later adoption of Trajan (Heubner 1963: 47-49), or that Amyntas’ defense before Alexander in Curtius (7.1.26-30) should have been influenced by the contemporary trial of M. Terentius (Tac. Ann. 6.8; Heckel 1994: 69-70) or that Dio’s ‘‘debate’’ between Maecenas and Agrippa (52.1-40) represents not the Augustan age but the uncertain conditions of the third century when Dio was writing (Millar 1964: 102-118). If we want to call this a failure of historical imagination, we can, but it seems to me that this is putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Modern historians tend to look for the difference in the past, the essential uniqueness of an event at a particular time and place. The ancients were more concerned with what they thought of as timeless truths, and so they usually sought what connected them to the past. In their speeches, they made the past and its historical actors come alive with an immediacy that could not always be managed in the narrative itself. If their speakers echoed those of earlier times and earlier historians (precisely the things that we point to in arguing their essential falsehood), this was for them and their readers the guarantee that they had executed their task responsibly and faithfully - that they had told things not so much as they really were but as they really are.
FURTHER READING
For overviews of speeches in ancient historians see Scheller 1911: 50-56; Avenarius 1956: 149-157; Walbank 1965; Fornara 1983: 142-168; and Brock 1995. For generals’ speeches see Albertus 1908; Keitel 1987; and (for their historicity) Hansen 1993, 1998 and Pritchett 1994, 2002.
Most treatments of speeches naturally focus on individual historians.
For Herodotus see (for starters) Deffner 1933; Hohti 1976; Lang 1984; and Pelling 2006. For Thucydides the scholarly bibliography is enormous: see Stadter 1973: 124-165 for the bibliography to 1972; Marincola 2001: 77 n. 77 adds more recent bibliography; see also below, Ch. 28. For his generals’ speeches see Luschnat 1942 andLeimbach 1985. On Timaeus see Pearson 1986. On Polybius, see Pedech 1964: 254-302; Walbank 1965; Wooten 1974; and Nicolai 1999. For Dionysius see Flierle 1890; Usher 1982: 832-837; Schultze 1986: 127-132; Gabba 1991: 68-73,83-84; and Fox 1993. For Arrian see Bosworth 1988:94-134 and Hammond 1999; for Dio see Millar 1964: 49-55, 78-83, and McKechnie 1981.
On the Latin side there is much of value in the analyses of Ullmann 1927, even if the divisions of speeches are sometimes too arbitrary. Differently oriented but also worthwhile is Leeman 1963. See also Miller 1975 and, on the Latin use of indirect discourse (a topic I have not touched on here), see Utard 2004. For Sallust see Schnorr von Karlsfeld 1888 and Nicolai 2002. On Livy see Gries 1949b; Walsh 1964: 219-244; Luce 1993; Forsythe 1999: 74-86; and Chaplin 2000. For Tacitus see Miller 1964; Martin 1967; Ginsburg 1989; and Keitel 1991,1993. Curtius’ speeches are treated in Helmreich 1927 and Ammianus’ in Pighi 1936.
World History
