Rhetoric and historiography have a fruitful but unstable union. In the present chapter the fruit - in the form of finely crafted historical narratives - is neglected; our focus is the pair’s problems. The central issue is how reliable the ancient narratives are qua historical source, if historiography is rhetorical. Woodman’s Rhetoric in Classical Historiography threw down the gauntlet in 1988: ‘‘Classical historiography... is primarily a rhetorical genre and is to be classified (in modern terms) as literature rather than as history’’ (1988: 197). Wiseman had laid out some of the argument that underlies this view in his 1979 Clio’s Cosmetics, showing the spread of rhetorical elements into historical narrative and the consequent ‘‘expansion of the past’’ (the phrase is from Badian 1966: 11; quoted with approval by Wiseman 1994: 138; for further developments of the argument see Wiseman 1979a, 1979b, 1981, 1993; for critiques see Cornell 1982, 1986). Focusing as he does on the history of the republic, Wiseman provokes less dissent than does Woodman working on authors of contemporary or near-contemporary history. For the early republic the survival of information in the amounts needed to fill the large-scale ‘‘from the beginning’’ histories of, for example, Gnaeus Gellius, writing in the late second century bce (thirty-three books for the period from Aeneas to the second Punic War; Badian 1966: 12 calls him ‘‘the voluminous Gellius’’), or Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the late first century BCE (twenty books for the period from Aeneas to the first Punic War), is generally agreed to be unlikely (see, e. g., Badian 1966; Rawson 1976; Wiseman 1979a: 9-26; Oakley 1997: 72-99). One has to suppose that some of the ‘‘history’’ was invented, and the fact that members of Rome’s leading gentes do the same sort of thing generation after generation shows that fleshing out the character of a gens by means ofindividual exploits was one fruitful form ofinvention (Vasaly 1987, 1999; Wiseman 1979a: 57-139; Oakley 1997: 98-9; other methods for ‘‘creating history out of next to nothing’’ are discussed briefly by Wiseman 1979a: 23-5, and at greater length by Oakley 1997: 72-98). The notion gains in plausibility when we find men with no experience of public affairs writing on Rome’s public affairs: ‘‘the whole
Point of the new historiography was that it took a rhetorician to write it’’ (Wiseman 1981: 380). Examples include, in addition to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antias (on whom see Badian 1966: 18-22; Oakley 1997: 89-93), and the elder Seneca (on whom see below). When Woodman argues for comparable inventiveness in the senatorial historian Tacitus writing on events close to and during his own lifetime, however, protests ensue (e. g., M. Gwyn Morgan 1992-3: 36: ‘‘Yet the question which appears not to have occurred to Woodman is why a writer of contemporary history would either need or want to engage in inventio, especially on a topic for which there was no shortage of material’’).
The question of the evidentiary value of ancient historiography has a different salience for different (modern) types of history. It is exceedingly troubling for a historian developing a narrative of events - histoire evenementielle - if inventio (on which see below) extends to events. But it is not a grave problem for historians of culture or society if, say, the description of one event has been applied to another. For such historians the stipulation that the narrative be plausible provides comfort (on plausibility see further below); indeed for someone pursuing the history of mentalitis, plausible is almost better than true, insofar as it provides evidence about the worldview of the author and his contemporaries.
The part of rhetoric that is particularly problematic in historiography, at least in connection with its reliability as a historical source, is inventio, the first and, according to Cicero, most important part of rhetoric, which he defines as ‘‘the thinking-up of material, true or truth-like, to make one’s case plausible’’ (inventio est excogitatio rerum verarum aut veri similium, quae causam probabilem reddant, Inv. Rhet. 1.9; cf. Rhet. Her. 1.2.3; see Lausberg 1998: secs 260-442 for ancient definitions and discussion). ‘‘True or truth-like,’’ there’s the rub. More precisely, the ‘‘rub’’ lies in the role of inventio in the construction of narrative; the invented speeches that enliven ancient histories are relatively unproblematic, although it is naturally of interest, where possible - as it is for one speech in Tacitus (see Griffin 1990) - to see how closely the historian’s composition matches the original speech. The basic questions are: How far from the truth does truth-like take us? And will we know when we have been taken? My plan therefore is to look first in general terms at the constraints on narrative inventio in oratory and especially historiography. Then I will turn to some examples of inventio in the historical narrative of Livy (writing ab urbe condita history) and Tacitus (writing the history of the recent past), both of them heavily dependent on the (now lost) narratives of earlier historians. To conclude, I will look at the use of inventio by an author writing up his own achievements, namely, Caesar. (Hereafter I distinguish between inventio, which involves the discovery of true as well as truth-like material, and fiction or invention, which lacks evidentiary warrant.)
World History
