But if Roman historiography in the first century bce shows a great deal of continuity, it also contains one of the most radical departures in the genre. A further feature that Sallust and Livy share, a feature that is so obvious that it is hardly ever thought necessary to comment on, is that they are ‘‘Roman historians’’ in not only nationality but also subject matter. They are historians of Rome, only touching on other nations in as much as those nations are involved with the events of the Roman empire. And this is indeed the general rule at Rome among both historians who survive and those who are lost. From Fabius Pictor to Caesar, from Tacitus to Ammianus, Roman historians wrote about their own country: the varied topics of Greek historians, where other nations were often no less the object of attention than their own, are alien to the genre as it developed at Rome.
There are, however, occasional but important exceptions. Pompeius Trogus was a contemporary of Livy, and like Livy wrote a large-scale multi-volume history. But Trogus’ history centered not on Rome but on Greece and the East. It was a ‘‘universal history’’ in the tradition going back to Ephorus and exemplified in the work of Trogus’ contemporaries Diodorus Siculus and Nicolaus of Damascus, but to a certain extent that term does not do justice to the balance of the work. The geographic range is much less than in Diodorus: notably, the Assyrians and Babylonians are only there briefly at the start, and likewise there is no independent Egyptian history - the Egyptian past is given merely as background at the point of the Persian conquest (Prologue 1). Overwhelmingly the focus is on two nations: Persia and the area of the Persian empire (including the subsequent rise of Parthia), but above all Greece and the Greek states (including Macedon). The chronological range is likewise narrow. Of the forty-four books, the bulk - Books 11-40 - deal with Alexander and the fate of the Hellenistic kingdoms after his death (though there is a substantial digression to give the background to Sicilian history in Books 18-23). Other nations’ histories are introduced only in digressions according to when they came into contact with these Greek kingdoms.
The omission is obvious: Rome appears to be marginalized. The Romans are of course frequently present in the narrative, not least because they came increasingly into contact with and ultimately conquered the Macedonian successor kingdoms. But their story is not told in its own right for virtually the whole work. To judge by Justin’s summary, they are first mentioned in 2.3.5 to point out that their empire had never encompassed Scythia, then at 6.6.5 to provide a synchronism for the ‘‘King’s Peace’’ between Greece and Persia, and then at 12.2.12 where they are merely one of a list of nations that made a treaty with Alexander of Epirus. They appear in a more sustained way in 17-18 with the war against Pyrrhus, but are largely lost sight of again during the long back-history of Sicily that occupies 18-23 (above). From Book 28 they are a more dominant presence, but even so it is not until the penultimate book of the work that Trogus finally provided an independent narrative of Roman history. His explanation, according to Justin, is that (43.1.1-2):
He considered it the work of an ungrateful citizen if, after glorifying the deeds of all nations, he was silent about his country alone. Therefore he briefly touched on the beginnings of the Roman empire, such as neither to go beyond the limits of his planned work nor pass over in silence at any rate the origin of the city that is the capital of the world.
But in fact even here he hardly fulfills expectations: all he does is give a brief account of the Roman kings before passing on to a history of southern Gaul, the origins of his own family.
It is not surprising that, in the light of this, people have sometimes wished to interpret Trogus as anti-Roman, arguing that this narrative was deliberately designed to challenge the Roman claim to universal hegemony that is the underlying assumption in writers like Livy. And there are other aspects of the work that could appear to support this reading. One example is the focus on Parthia as the implicit equal of Rome at 41.1.1-7 (if this is indeed Trogus’ and not Justin’s slant on the matter). Book 38 includes a lengthy anti-Roman harangue by Mithridates of Pontus (38.4-7), including some telling points about Roman imperial ambitions; anti-Roman speeches are also reported at 28.2 and 29.2. Trogus’ account of the Roman-Macedonian wars implies that they were partly generated by Roman fears and manipulations (30.3.2, cf. 29.3.7) and exacerbated by Roman attacks on Greece that drove the Greeks to seek help from the Macedonians (29.4.7); the description of Mummius’ destruction of Corinth suggests at least as much sympathy with the defeated as with the victors (34.2). The Roman alliance with the Jews against the Seleucids prompts the cynical comment that ‘‘it was then easy for the Romans to be generous with other people’s property’’ (36.3.9), and the conquest of Asia is said to introduce vices to Rome along with wealth (34.4.12).
But this last should instantly alert us to the problems of suggesting that Trogus adopted a distinctly anti-Roman slant, for it simply replicates Livy’s image of Roman decline under the influence of eastern wealth (cf. above). Mithridates’ speech against Rome has its forerunner in the letter which Sallust wrote for the same Mithridates in the Histories (F 4.69), which even uses some of the same arguments. And criticisms of Roman leaders and sympathy with their victims are commonplace in Sallust and Livy as well. None of these is enough to make Trogus into an anti-Roman historian, especially when they are set side by side with the positive image of Rome at various other points in his work (e. g., 18.2.10; 30.3.7; 31.6.4, 8.9). It is true that the focus on other states and the relative marginalization of Rome within the work means that these standard images may gain a particular force from their different context: for example, bringing to the fore the ancient theme of the ‘‘succession of empires,’’ with the possible implication that Rome may fall as Assyria, Persia, and Macedon had before her. But this is certainly not explicit in anything that survives from the work. What Trogus did was provide the Romans with a new perception of their empire, from the standpoint of the histories of the empires that they overcame and swallowed up into their own. But the basic ideological building-blocks of that perception remained unchanged: patriotic praise of one’s own country combined with an awareness of the problems in particular aspects of its behavior, and a sense that the present represented a potentially disastrous moral turn away from the glories of the past. In this most un-Roman of Roman histories, the essential continuity in Roman historical conceptions and writing in the late republic receives its clearest demonstration.
FURTHER READING
Everything written about the lost Roman historians, including this chapter, will in due course need to be rethought after the publication of the multi-authored Fragmentary Roman Historians project (by Tim Cornell and others). In the meantime the most accessible survey is still Badian 1966, though it is unsatisfactory in various ways, as set out in the chapter; my arguments here have been strongly influenced by Verbrugghe 1989 and Marincola 1999. There are also significant studies of individual historians, including Sisenna (Rawson 1979), Licinius Macer (Ogilvie 1958; Walt 1997), and Pollio (Morgan 2000; Woodman 2003).
Sallust still needs a good general book in English: Syme 1964 (revised edition 2002) remains the only candidate, although it has significant weaknesses. He has been better served in monographs and articles, important examples including Earl 1961 and Scanlon 1987 on the whole corpus, Batstone 1988 and 1990 on the Catiline, and Scanlon 1989 and Kraus 1999a on the Jugurtha. But the best book on Sallust by some margin is still La Penna 1968, although it unfortunately has suffered from serious neglect as a result of being in Italian, poorly distributed, never translated, and long out of print.
Livy has done better in recent years, with a sequence of important monographs stemming mainly from America in the 1990s, notably Miles 1995, Jaeger 1997, Feldherr 1999, and Chaplin 2000, complemented by the major commentaries of Kraus 1994a and Oakley, CL; the splendid book of Luce 1977 should also be acknowledged, as the springboard from which much of this new work has leapt. to these scholars, and others like them, the ‘‘revisionist’’ account of Livy’s work in this chapter in fact looks increasingly and comfortably mainstream. However, parts of the wider scholarly community remain wedded to older models, such as that found in Walsh 1961, still the only substantial general study of Livy’s entire work in English.
As for Pompeius Trogus, the best study is Seel 1972, though it is in German and somewhat disjointed in its approach. For a brief and relatively uncontentious English summary of the most significant features of Trogus’ work, one may consult Alonso-Ndnez 1987.
to Gary Boydell, Mary Jaeger, Christina Kraus, Eric Levene, and Tony Woodman for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter.
World History
