This impressive volume is concerned with the ‘data set’ applicable to the study of the Roman Republic by Romans, and with the study of those Romans who engaged with that data to produce historical writing, within and beyond formal prose historiography. The introduction and eighteen chapters, divided into five sections, describe a wealth of evidentiary concerns cohering around the question of what ancient Roman speakers and writers ‘had to work with’ — how they found it, used it, transformed it, and how we understand it as both product and process of history. The structure is thematic, highlighting particular points of connection among associated papers and around the larger interests of the collection, including the ‘discourse of uncertainty’ that fragmentary historical texts create (1) and the complicated idea of ‘history’ as a genre. Thus the volume encourages neither a straightforwardly linear nor an evolutionary approach to literary-historical chronologies. We encounter history as a near-contemporary reification of the past and as a locus of contested authority, as a virtual equivalent to myth and as a tool for the articulation of a shared reality.
Chronological gaps are the hermeneutic tools here, as distance between author and subject informs the methodologies brought to bear on the targets. A clear advantage to the structure is the lack of imposed hierarchy among individuals, subjects, genres — or even questions. Early authors, such as Ennius and Cato the Elder, figure most prominently in the first few chapters, in order to elucidate second-century concerns about, among other things, the Roman past itself. The next two sections show readers how fraught questions of genre could be for first-century Romans engaged in the production of knowledge about the fundamentals of Roman historical culture and its governing categories; several authors explore Cicero's engagement with and deployment of ‘history’, and the historical record in forensic and political rhetoric and treatises thereon.
The volume's second half engages predominantly with later second- and first-century b.c.e. evidence in reference to representations and reconstructions of archaic and early republican Rome. Here, contributors bring questions of cultural identity to bear alongside the volume's consistent interests in genre and authorial authority: if what Latin authors made of (what they could represent as) their own pasts is complicated, it is all the more so when the materials in use are themselves the product of Greek or Etruscan historical contexts and commemorative processes. Furthermore, Romans’ history was not only made by authors and texts, and a final section offers more than a passing nod to the importance of monumental material culture at Rome.
The chapters throughout vary between focused investigations and broad explorations, juxtaposing what modern historians can read with what ancient writers, and their real or imagined audiences, knew and saw, and how they made and remade connections across time and space. A salient point that emerges is the episodic, inherently fragmented nature of Romans’ historical narratives, a fascinating corollary to the fact that we so often also, already, only have fragments. This here acts as a spur to inquiry rather than a caveat. Throughout the volume, there is a ‘real past’ to be recovered — or rather, more than one past, not because of the multivalence of perception, but because contexts of production and objects produced are studied as separate but integral subjects.
The volume's contributors represent a range of affiliations and share a significant proportion of their bibliographies and methodological bases. This brings a further degree of coherence to the chapters: although there is little sign of editorially imposed consensus, many shared tools and assumptions nonetheless aid the reader in moving between chapters and in forming further connections. One interesting partial exception comes in the contributors’ citations of scholarly literature beyond the ancient world. Less than a third of the chapters cite non-classicists on memory, but all who do cite at least one work by Jan Assmann, among others. The chapters that engage directly with this body of work are predominantly to be found in the volume's final two sections, where the distances from act of historical interpretation to historical act are greater. The other chapters are not under-theorised, but a plurality of the contributors cite instead the work of ancient historians who themselves engaged in depth with anthropological and sociological work on memory. The resulting impression is of a working consensus on what ‘memory studies’ means for ancient history, one articulated primarily in the 2000s. On the whole, then, the contributors do not pursue the application of new models, but focus on intensive interrogation of the evidence, complicating the ‘history’ side of the various triangulations of history, memory and cultural production (without unduly simplifying the rest).
My only critique of the volume's contents comes in what this shared approach defines out of history. A focus upon institutional or (what are understood to be) authoritative processes for the transmission of knowledge about the past necessarily gives more space to some Romans than others, and elevates the self-referential (and self-replicating) definitions of authority that can sometimes elide the distinction between a community of literate statesmen and scholars, on the one hand, and a closed caste of influencers, on the other. The volume excels at acknowledging diverse influences that might be adapted for use by orators, legal writers, and others whose authority to delimit or engage the Roman past was collectively recognised by their peers — and by us. It does not detract from the uniform value of the contributors or the high quality of the volume as a whole, then, to note that this ultimately involves a very small percentage of Romans and, ultimately, a more than concomitantly focused articulation of their past.
Readers may regret the lack of a subject index, and it would have been useful to see what key words and themes the authors and editors themselves wished to highlight. In its place, we have a unitary Index locorum, which allows for a different sort of synoptic appraisal. One can see the number of chapters that engage with epigraphic texts, and see immediately the interests of several contributors in the use and reuse of texts within contexts of transmission. Thus Servius is cited more than four times as often as Sallust (31/7), in seven different chapters. Of the forty-two citations of Livy's Books 31–41, more than half occur in one chapter, and only four rise above the footnotes; while there are no references to Books 30 or 42–45, there are sixty-one to Livy's first book alone. Ennius and Cato receive engaged but limited attention, while across several sections we find ILLRP and Aeschylus, Silius and Lactantius, (much) Pliny and Plutarch (after cameos by Pindar and Plato); no Plautus or Caesar. This nicely illustrates the extent to which ‘historical writing’ in this volume (the title aside) is no static monument. These chapters come together like a set of challenges to traditional constellations, inviting us to draw new lines between or beyond the old stars, and to shift the patterns we see in the fragments and the whole. If some of the same material remains outside, that is not a criticism of this fine volume, but a hope that it will lead to more.
