Edward Bispham

All written texts can be seen as forming a single class; to exclude, for example, inscriptions or papyri, is problematic. In this chapter I shall, nevertheless, focus on texts which belong to one of the literary genres, texts which were published, copied, lodged in libraries, and put on sale during antiquity. Some, still circulating at the end of the Roman Empire, were preserved and copied in medieval monasteries, to emerge finally from the gloomy scriptoria (copying rooms) into the daylight of the Renaissance. Many more had perished during the Middle Ages, if not before; and others remained only as shadows of their former selves: of Livy’s 142-book history, 35 books survive.

A standard sourcebook (Greenidge and Clay 1986) collects, over 292 pages, most of the sources for the period 133-70. Such a volume of material for a short period obscures, however, the nugatory survival rate of ancient literature from, and on, the Republic. Complete survivals, like Caesar’s accounts of the Gallic and Civil Wars, are exceptional. Of Sallust’s major work, the Histories, some 530 short snippets survive, mainly quoted by later grammarians interested in his archaizing language. Of Varro’s approximately seventy-five works, On Agriculture (De re rustica) and five books from On the Latin Language (De lingua Latina) survive as continuous text. The histories of Diodorus, Dionysius, and Dio Cassius, although preserved fully at some points, are at their most abbreviated (by late-antique excerptors) where they cover the Republic; Polybius’ history is complete for Books 1-5, a continuous series of extracts for Books 6-16, and more randomly excerpted thereafter, with a few books wholly missing. Much of what survives of the later books is what interested Byzantine readers, hence the preponderance of embassies. This is to say nothing of the dozens of authors now represented by a few fragments, or a bare name, and whom we can only know in the most indirect and capricious way, reading them as we must at the mercy of the later writers who cited them for any number of purposes which are not our own.

Literary texts are studied by, on the one hand, those who attempt to reconstruct past societies across time; and, on the other, those who examine style, diction,

Techniques of composition, and issues of genre. These two approaches cannot exist in isolation. A literary source is not useless to the historian just because it does not tell stories about the past: plays and poems (and history too) tell us about the times in which they were written.

My main theme, however, will be prose texts about events or individuals, past or present: that is, historiography. This term has three, related, meanings, in which the concerns of historians and literary experts come together: (1) the study of how history is written; (2) the study of the written sources available to us as works of literature in cognate genres (prose history, biography, antiquarian writing), and their interrelationships; and (3) the study of how modern scholars have shaped their areas of study: why the history of the late Roman Republic, say, has been written as one of ‘‘decline.’’