More than any men known to us, the Romans love their city and strive to protect all their ancestral treasures so that nothing of Rome’s ancient glory will be obliterated.... [Even in the wake of the recent siege and occupation by the Goths] they preserved the city’s buildings and such adornments as could withstand a long lapse of time, and all such memorials of their race, among them the ship of Aeneas, the founder of the city, a quite incredible sight: for they built a ship-house in the middle of the city on the bank of the Tiber and deposited it there, and have preserved it from that time. I have seen it myself and can describe it. . . . None of its timbers has rotted or gives the least sign of being unsound; intact throughout, as if newly constructed by the hand of its builder - whoever he was - it has retained its strength in a marvellous way up to my own time. Such are the facts about Aeneas’ ship. (Procop. Goth. 8.22.3-17 [abbreviated])
Writing this passage in the mid-sixth century ce, Procopius is a striking witness to the depth of the Romans’ concern for their national past - and also to the wishfulness, or credulity, of an antique writer’s report of it: ancient chronographers placed Aeneas’s voyage to Italy around 1200 bce, which would make the pristine nautical relic Procopius saw - had it been genuine - over eighteen hundred years old. An ‘‘incredible sight,’’ indeed - but perhaps for Procopius and his Byzantine readers that was just the point: to acknowledge the continuity of Roma Aeterna as a uniquely powerful historical ideal, a marvel that overrode one’s normal experience of time (Cameron 1985: 191-2; cf. Matthews 1989: 280, 470). For us, anyway, ‘‘Aeneas’ ship,’’ so implausibly well-preserved and so willingly pronounced authentic, offers a neat emblem for the subject of this chapter. Our interest lies less with raw events of Roman history than with ancient representations of it, and ‘‘the construction of the past’’ - a title that begs to be deconstructed - signals that our discussion will emphasize the role of human artifice and imagination in this connection. We are not discussing some fortuitous product of random accumulation akin to a coral reef. To treat the past as ‘‘constructed,’’ rather than just ‘‘retrieved,’’ or ‘‘recorded,’’ suggests narration and ‘‘emplotment,’’ and individual or collective human agents shaping material purposefully in some degree - if not with the panoptic vision of a master architect, at least in the manner of a building gang that has some notion, however hazy, of what is being produced or added to, and of the end-product’s likely utility. And that purposive impulse suggests in turn a process in which historical ‘‘fact’’ may be distorted or concealed, or simply invented, to suit the end in mind.
World History
