Having looked at how ancient historians set about writing accounts of the Republic, it is worth examining how we attempt the same task. Our view of what the Romans did affects what we think we are doing, whatever sort of exercise we see them as engaged in.
Ancient accounts need to be compared, and collated, combined to produce a coherent account, or sorted into a hierarchy in order to provide the basis for a narrative. Discrepancies need to be ironed out, errors detected and corrected, bias identified and accounted for, and obscurity illuminated. Examination of a writer’s agenda, and those of his sources, and his use of them, allow for the detection and neutralization of bias: distortions can be recognized and eliminated, rather like remastering a 1920s jazz session from a badly scratched wax-cylinder recording. This is a day in the office for most ancient historians today.
Underlying this approach, however, is the assumption that there is a truth to be exposed by following rules, ones shared by ancient writers: Cicero asks Lucceius to concede more to their friendship than the laws of history allow (Fam. 5.12). Truth is assumed to be empirically or logically demonstrable. A related idea is that history is ‘‘mimetic’’; that is, it reproduces faithfully the course of events. Not all is absolute: the search for truth often depends on probabilistic assumptions of, for example, a hierarchy of sources: ‘‘Livy is preferable to Appian,’’ and therefore generally likely to be correct when the two are compared. Another common metaphor is that of reconstruction. Where our evidence is either late or consists of heterogeneous passing references, if ‘‘the truth is out there,’’ it is out there in lots of very small bits; some of these can be made to fit together, and the historian’s craft is the glue. This approach is a positivist one; it is related to foundationalism, the belief that there are immutable metaphysical and moral truths on which our value-system is founded. Positivism is seen as related to straightforward Anglo-Saxon common sense. The problem with common sense is that it is very hard to measure, not terribly rigorous, and thus a weak basis for historical methodology.
I think there is a lot to be said for positivism (now under heavy challenge from postmodern historians); it has after all produced a consensus about what happened which forms the backbone of our discipline. Nevertheless, it is also an approach which can discourage reflection. It is worth examining briefly its claims to truth.
‘‘The truth should be the whole truth.’’ Yet on any definition, Roman writers reproduce the perspectives and the prejudices of a tiny literate elite within Roman society. Roman comedy aimed at a broad audience; political speeches were made to the people, and those of Cicero give us a taste of the oratorical complexity to which the plebs was routinely exposed (see also Chapters 20 and 25). Nevertheless, literary sources tell us very little about the ordinary man - and less about women, ordinary or otherwise, except as they fitted into the traditional worldview of the male elite (see also Chapter 15). The world of the sources is one where the urban plebs is greedy, sordid and fickle; women lack rationality, and are prone to superstition; and slaves, at best, are cunning tricksters; at worst, the proverb applies: quot serui tot hostes - ‘‘all slaves are our enemies.’’ The peoples of Italy have hardly any voice in literature, although in the case of inscriptions from our period, Etruscan texts outnumber Latin by a ratio of more than 2:1. The inhabitants of the provinces are virtually ignored. Our literary sources thus offer a partial truth for a privileged few.
Writers inevitably reflect the preoccupations of their age; or, in the words of the Italian historian Benedetto Croce, ‘‘all history is contemporary history.’’ Thus, Sir Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution (1939) reflects the contemporary rise of fascism in Europe (note the chapter titles ‘‘Dux’’ and the ‘‘March on Rome,’’ applicable to Mussolini as much as to Octavian; see also Chapter 1). Are historians’ truths true forever, or only true (or truer) for the time of writing? If we agree in large measure about what happened in the Roman Republic, each generation keeps reinterpreting why, and what sort of society it was.
The question of viewpoint is important, because much historical writing today defends one viewpoint against others (e. g., why Caesar actually crossed the Rubicon), yet also denies having any viewpoint as a matter of principle: it is objective. A belief in historical objectivity presupposes that facts can be empirically determined, and uncomplicatedly accessed, and entails that any personal involvement by the historian will ‘‘contaminate’’ the history being written. Some works use the image of history as scientific. Yet history cannot be the subject of repeatable identical experiments under laboratory conditions, with controls; it cannot be scientific. A more common metaphor (cf. Cic. De or. 2.36, history as the ‘‘witness of ages’’) is that of a courtroom, where rival advocates use evidence to convince a jury. We allow the evidence to ‘‘speak for itself’’; we let readers judge our arguments against the ‘‘facts’’ presented. Objectivity and impartiality belong in court, but do these metaphors apply to history?
They are often spoken of as if they were timeless, but they are ideologically charged constructs. The idea of impartiality is not new (cf. Sall. Cat. 4.2). On the other hand, the analysis of the sources, weighing them against each other, and using ancient evidence to support arguments, these trends we owe to the rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the new professional historians of the modern period. The German historian Leopold von Ranke (born 1795) has been seen as influential in the development of the idea of a dispassionate facts-only, stripped-down history.37 In such scenarios the past is ‘‘dead,’’ neutral; a defused bomb, which can, indeed, should, be studied for its own sake, without the risk of political explosions. We ‘‘do’’ history in a particular way not necessarily because that is the ‘‘right’’ way, but because that is the way in which our dominant cultural traditions have shaped the discipline, the same traditions which boxed it off and made it an autonomous area of study.
More recent studies on historiography, especially those of Hayden White, have stressed narrativity. Texts are just that, texts, narratives; they are not the same as past events, and should not be treated as if they were. Instead of a straightforward and dispassionate history, White has argued for invention as an important component of all historical writing, and for the historian’s need to ‘‘write’’ historical contexts for individual elements of data.3 This view is echoed in approaches to ancient literary sources.
Those who prize objectivity as the keynote of their own working practices have also assumed that ancient historians, and antiquarians, grammarians, and jurists, operated as they do: impartially, within a ‘‘research culture’’ which allows all available evidence to be brought forward and rigorously assessed.39 That ancient historians (e. g., Polyb. 12.3-28a) do criticize predecessors (for missing items of evidence, for exaggeration and invention, or for writing in a sensationalist fashion) might encourage such a belief. Yet our objective, empirical historiography is an Enlightenment/Modern mode; it would be wrong to assume that our values applied in antiquity. In fact, scholars have noted how ancient practices of history writing are very different from our own. Importantly, ancient historical writing shared ground with poetry, rhetoric, and drama. Scholars have also pointed to the development of what has been called ‘‘unhistorical’’ thinking, a way of seeing the past fundamentally different from our own.40 These scholars characterize ancient history as creative and inventive. Woodman, among others, has argued that when ancient writers and theorists talk about ‘‘truth,’’ they really refer to an ideal that history should be written without bias, not that it should not be made up; on this view, like orators, historians could be about the business of invention.41
Yet it will not do to efface entirely the difference between rhetoric and historiography. The position that the ancients effectively did not have an idea of truth, or that if they did, ancient historians had quite one quite distinct from our own, is unconvincing. As for inventio, stressed by Woodman, it is not so much invention in our sense, as the search for materials; Cicero’s On Invention is about finding material for court speeches, not about making up alibis or other material; this is not disproved by the fact that orators lie. Nevertheless we need to be alert to the many differences between ancient history writing and our own, including the fact that the political cannot be written out of any aspect of the text, as we saw at the start of this chapter: ‘‘style reflects ideology.’’42
World History
