Most of our information for the period from the foundation of the city through to the Gallic sack (the first five books of Livy) contains stories mediated by centuries of negotiation and, dare I add, fabrication. T. P. Wiseman in Clio’s Cosmetics emphasised eruditely 37 years ago that later political interests and family traditions heavily influenced the memory of early Roman history and those who wrote it.Footnote 2 Wiseman contended that later republican politics determined the stories told of Rome’s past. Most crudely, the tyrannicide M. Brutus’ ancestor freed Rome from an earlier tyranny in driving out Tarquin.Footnote 3 Even Livy admitted that the first five books of his History were barely historical.Footnote 4 Many, including Wiseman, have discussed the problem of forgery or fabrication.Footnote 5 More recently, James Richardson and Andreas Mehl have both considered in much detail the basis of many of the claims made by the late republican ‘descendants’ of early Roman heroes.Footnote 6 Thus, as Richardson has identified and elaborated, the history of Athens provided models for Roman history. The sack of Rome in 390 BC has parallels with the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480, which in turn linked Rome to the defeat at the Allia and the defeat at the Cremera with its parallels to Thermopylae.Footnote 7 Such parallels demonstrate that Romans were aware of Greek historical models. These models could well have made Romans equally historically conscious.
Greek historical traditions also played a crucial role in framing and writing early Rome’s past.Footnote 8 The idea of history, its meaning and definition, has Greek origins.Footnote 9 The discipline has its roots in Greek ideas of inquiring into the past and the use of evidence that is displayed to reconstruct rather than simply invent or reinvent the events of the past. The Greek word ἱστορία, associable with enquiry and with judgement through the noun history, suggests a process tied not to invention, but assessment.Footnote 10 The identification of evidence and the source for that evidence, and then the use made of it in its presentation all combine to underpin what is history – that is the idea of an exercise to determine what had happened – beyond simply what is historical, which suggests only the parochial expression of what might have happened in the past. Herodotus shows awareness of this throughout his work with his use of information that comes to him through oral traditions and sources obtained through his inquiries and occasional material objects used as sources to support his conclusions. Most importantly, he identifies his sources, at least in his more reliable moments concerning who told him what, and even tells us of different sources for contested accounts of the same event. He thus provides information as evidence and the source for it. From the start we have the origins of the Persian Wars laid out through the stories told by the Greeks and the Persians, each blaming the other for their origins.Footnote 11 Occasionally he uses a generic λέγεται or ‘it is said’ that something happened in the way that it did, though this should raise suspicion as it is not attributing a tale to any single source, but a more vague anonymous tradition.Footnote 12 Individuals or groups of individuals often lay behind stories, often contested stories. This, for example, is well illustrated by the causes of the madness of Cleomenes as outlined in Herodotus.Footnote 13
Cleomenes took the weapon and set about slashing himself from his shins upwards; from the shin to the thigh he cut his flesh lengthways, then from the thigh to the hip and the sides, until he reached the belly, and cut it into strips; thus he died, as most of the Greeks say, because he persuaded the Pythian priestess to tell the tale of Demaratus. The Athenians alone say it was because he invaded Eleusis and laid waste the precinct of the gods. The Argives say it was because when Argives had taken refuge after the battle in their temple of Argus he brought them out and cut them down, then paid no heed to the sacred grove and set it on fire.
Thus, here the Athenians say it was because he had invaded Attica and defiled Eleusis, the Argives say it was because he paid no heed to the sacred grove and set it on fire when he defeated the Argives in 494 BC, but most Greeks say it was because he had persuaded the Delphic Pythia to declare against Demaratus and so get him deposed as king. The facts surrounding Cleomenes’ death go undisputed, but the cause of the madness that made him commit suicide clearly was – and significantly both Athenians and Argives claimed specific injury to them lay at its root while, for the rest of the Greeks, his infringement at the Panhellenic shrine was the cause. All this of course points to the notion that it really is all about ‘us’, whether we are Athenians, Argives, or other Greeks claiming we are the aggrieved party, and we are the cause of Cleomenes’ demise. Of most significance, however, is that Herodotus sought to bring these traditions together through his inquiries into how and why things happened – and this was a central step in the Greeks becoming ‘historical’ themselves.Footnote 14
Let us begin by stating that this paper is meant not so much to ‘throw a cat among the pigeons’, or worse a Greek among Romans, but more to provide a set of heuristic devices or perhaps examples from which to explore early Roman historiography.Footnote 15 Peter Wiseman, John Dillery, Nicholas Purcell, Mary Beard, and Christopher Smith have all contributed to this discussion.Footnote 16 The topic then is the influence of Greek historical thought on early Roman historiography, but there is also a hint here of the influence of Roman historians on Greek historical ideas.
Dillery in The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography has recently stated:
…almost all our earliest documentary evidence demonstrating with certainty an awareness of the myths for the foundation of Rome, and easily our most informative, comes from the Greek world.Footnote 17
This interconnection between Greek and Roman early historical traditions has received a good deal of support in the past decade or so and much recent scholarship has drawn breath from Purcell’s thoughtprovoking discussion ‘Becoming Historical’ aptly published in the Festschrift to Wiseman. To quote Purcell,Footnote 18
Roman adaptations of Greek historical narratives, made in order to package major moments in Roman experiences, could have taken place through the reception and discussion of the materials of the Greek historiographical tradition in Rome of the fifth and fourth centuries, in much the same way in which mythological and religious precedents were received and adapted, without its being necessary to postulate the avid perusal of literary texts in Greek in houses on the Sacra Via – which is not, however, something that I should at all want to rule out.
He therefore rejects the traditional view suggested by Jacoby in 1949 that Roman historiography emerged out of Atthidography and therefore at a later time as well.Footnote 19 Purcell suggests that both Greek and Roman thinking came out of the same environment.Footnote 20
The shadow of Jacoby’s reconstruction of the Roman past went far to make us believe that pre-Hannibalic Rome, in the words of Purcell, ‘was a small, involuted, land-locked, poverty-stricken, unenterprising community of counter-suggestible xenophobic anti-intellectuals ruled by a smug holier-than-thou philistine militaristic elite.’
Building on Purcell, however, Smith stated,Footnote 21
The complexity of the source tradition, the absence of contemporary evidence which can be trusted, and the influence of Greek historiography on the nature of the Roman historical imagination makes it hard to be certain about early Roman history, and the subject naturally invited skepticism.
Now Smith affirmed Purcell’s optimistic view of early Roman traditions interconnected as they were by a series of media and within the Mediterranean context of historical narrative and understandings.
I want to build on Purcell’s, Smith’s, and Dillery’s work here and suggest that Romans were far more aware of Greek paradigms and far more connected to the wider Mediterranean than earlier scholars and the later Romans themselves liked to think. This mutual awareness between Greeks and Romans naturally meant Romans engaged with and recorded their past. So much was this the case that by the fourth century BC stone inscriptions and monuments abounded, and fourth century Romans lived in a well-documented world, as Livy’s second introduction to his work, that begins Book 6, illustrates well.Footnote 22 More significantly still the earliest Roman historians of whom we know, such as Fabius Pictor, wrote in Greek. This fact alone illustrates the significant influence of Greek cultural models on early Roman practice.
What all the foregoing scholarship identifies are two intertwined historical themes from which early Roman history drew breath. One was a structure of historical processes. This structure, as Purcell suggests, appears in terms of a record of events, a sequence of periods defined by such events, alongside an organised memory that laid the foundation for better ‘reliability’.Footnote 23 Purcell links these things together as outgrowths of each other. We might then make connections between genealogy, aetiology, myth, and epigraphy. All of these things provoke historical consciousness. But we might link this to another important ancient idea concerning historical process, that of historical cycles or the repetition of events. As Gentili and Cerri noted, the ancients would often hark back to an early model, a paradigm-like event (a modello archetipico) that they could use to explain recent or current events.Footnote 24 Early Greek events would, naturally, provide easy models for later Roman ‘historical’ traditions.
The second historical theme was synchronisation, whereby events in a people’s history become connected to events in the wider world.Footnote 25 Thus, in terms of both time and space, such synchronisation was an essential part of developing historical consciousness. The establishment of a relative chronology between peoples and their achievements is an essential aspect in developing an absolute chronology that underpins scientific historical thought. Herodotus demonstrates such synchronicity as a key feature of his work. Thus Cyrus overthrew Croesus at about the same time as the Spartans established themselves as the most powerful state in the Peloponnese.Footnote 26 Similarly, the battle of Artemisium took place at the same time as the battle of Thermopylae and supposedly the battle of Plataea occurred at the same time as that at Mycale in the following year.Footnote 27 Two crucially important events linked in time, if not at this stage linked in space (but that would follow), and Herodotus knew that the destiny of the two peoples lay in the future and as a result of these two events. Similarly, the fact that Herodotus linked the battles of Salamis and Himera, in which the forces of Persia and Carthage were overthrown in the eastern and the western Mediterranean, shows a global awareness of the significance of certain related, similar, but not absolutely obviously connected events.Footnote 28 It is of course possible that such ‘synchronisation’ is merely symbolic, rather than intellectual, creating harmony between events rather than a genuine environment of inquiry into the past. But, in order to construct the course of events it remains necessary to understand, reconcile and recognise relative chronologies that cross national or political (for want of better terms) boundaries.Footnote 29
The end of the Roman monarchy in 509 BC and its association with the overthrow of the Athenian tyranny represents a classic example of one kind of synchronisation. Smith sums this up well when he states,Footnote 30
The actions and experience of kingship in the later sixth century at Rome may have been precisely analogous with the experience of some Greek cities, where a period of tyranny is productive of a constitutional settlement which establishes boundaries between elite power and popular representation, though the boundaries remain contested.
The point that I would derive from this is that both temporal and structural mechanisms are at work in creating Roman historical thinking using a Greek framework and Greek paradigm in the Roman context.
Ogilvie, inter alia, identifies many parallel stories found in Livy that the Romans moulded on the basis of Greek originals.Footnote 31 A good example of one such historical connection between Greek and Roman events is that of the death of 306 members of the clan of the Fabii at the Cremera River, connected as they are to the 300 Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. So connected were the two stories that Ettore Pais considered that the entire story of the Cremera was a fantasy created in Roman myth on the back of the story of the Spartans at Thermopylae. He wrote ‘a une réalité historique (celle des luttes soutenues par une gens des confins) s’est mêlé le souvenir des trois cent Spartiates aux Thermopyles’.Footnote 32 By contrast, but in a similarly mythic vein, Holleman explored the Roman-Italian context for the 306 Fabii story, analysing its mythic roots in Italian folklore and legend rather than its Greek roots.Footnote 33 Holleman’s approach, however, despite his Italian focus, appears equally sceptical regarding the historical basis of the Cremera story.Footnote 34
Each of our main sources for early Roman history, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Diodorus, preserve the story.Footnote 35 Its essence is well known. The Fabii assembled 306 clan members and a further 4,000 men from amongst clientes and friends. They established a fort, raided Veiian territory, but in 477 BC were wiped out and the fort captured. A single surviving member of the Fabian clan, a boy, survived the battle.Footnote 36 Dillery notes that Dionysius of Halicarnassus found this version more plausible than the alternative, according to which the Fabii were attacked on their way to Rome to perform a ritual, but he notes that Dionysius described as ‘implausible the story of the single surviving boy (paidion) who lived to tell the tale.Footnote 37 Livy, however, states the survival of the boy was common knowledge.Footnote 38 This boy, whose name was Fabius, became the progenitor of the entire Fabian house. Most see Fabius Pictor as the original source, although each of our three principal extant sources presents different versions of the same event, which makes it a key test case for early Roman historiography.Footnote 39 In one the Fabii were killed en masse when returning to Rome for a sacred ritual, and in another they are picked off one by one in a series of ambushes.Footnote 40 The third story told by Diodorus contains a very different version, in terms of date and participants. Richard explains the differences between the Livian/Dionysian accounts and that of Diodorus by suggesting two different trends within the sources and their respective stories.Footnote 41
Dillery suggests that here we have an example of a Roman narrative dominated by the deeds of a single clan, the Fabii, and that ultimately Livy smoothed over the variations and inconsistencies to create a singular past from amongst all the histories told by various families.Footnote 42 Cato claimed in the Origines that at banquets it was the custom of ancestors to sing one after another to the accompaniment of the flute in praise of famous men.Footnote 43 Dillery (citing no evidence or cause), among others, says that this claim is probably not true but the idea behind it, that history provides exemplary models, must have traction even for very early Romans and he suggests the idea of ‘collective achievement’ rather than that of a man or a family framed history’s purpose.Footnote 44
Wiseman saw history in a Roman context as closer to poetry and oratory than reality or historicity for want of a better term.Footnote 45 This view made history less ‘historical’, a position challenged by Cornell’s important review of Wiseman’s Reference Wiseman1979 book.Footnote 46 Wiseman more recently and perhaps more optimistically has seen drama as a central tenet of Roman historicity.Footnote 47 Indeed, several scholars have argued that Roman historiography has its roots with Roman tragedy.Footnote 48 It provided an important medium of communication and means of representing past events to the community. Mary Beard notes also use of ‘mythhistory’ to promote issues in later times and the debates these fostered about the past and its uses.Footnote 49 From a Greek perspective historical consciousness also emerged from just this kind of context whereby poems, songs and plays represented, remembered, and so recorded the deeds of famous people, families, and even communities and thus remembered the past. Poetry was a key part of funerals in which songs remembered the deeds of the dead warrior, like the σῆμα to Tetichus from around 550 BC, which reads,Footnote 50
Whether some citizen or a foreigner
Coming from elsewhere
Pass by in pity of Tetichus a brave man
Destroying his fresh youth in battle.
Mourning this go on to a good deed.
Or even deeds of the group of fallen warriors on tombstones and memorial markers like those for the Chalcidians who fell at Mount Dirphys in 507/6 BC.Footnote 51
We were overwhelmed beneath a glen of Mount Dirphys,
and a grave mound has been heaped over us near the Euripus
by our community; quite rightly for we lost our lovely youth
in abiding the harsh storm cloud of war.
Or more famously for the Spartans at Thermopylae.Footnote 52
Go tell the Spartan thou that passest by,
that here obedient to their laws we lie.
Poems became key devices in the memorialisation of events like the battles of the Persian Wars in the period just before Herodotus produced his Histories, just as Homer’s poems remembered the supposedly historical events of the Trojan War.Footnote 53 Plays too, from at least the beginning of the fifth century BC, displayed historical events on stage to Athenian audiences as Herodotus’ description of Phrynichus’ production of The Capture of Miletus shows.Footnote 54
The Athenians, on the contrary, showed their profound distress at the capture of Miletus in a number of ways, and in particular, when Phrynichus produced his play, The Capture of Miletus, the audience in the theatre burst into tears.
The preservation of the past and of past deeds by Roman families at funerals, for example, as Cornell reflected in his review of Wiseman’s Clio’s Cosmetics, was thus important not just as a memory of people, deeds and events, but also as a part of developing historical consciousness. A good example of this is found in one of the earliest Roman inscriptions we possess, which details the career of Scipio Barbatus whose exploits included the suppression of the Lucanians (CIL 6 1284 and 1285). This inscription preserves the historical achievement of a Roman statesman and illustrates well the nexus between memorialisation in stone and historical events. Pessimists might suggest this environment diluted historical realities, while optimists surely would see this as a crucial step towards not only recording real things about real people, but also inquiring into how and why things happened and the way that they did. Homeric poetry, funeral orations, poems, and plays about real things and real people, like those of the Persian Wars, all created the conditions for Herodotus to produce history in prose that genuinely sought out the realities of the past through inquiry. This was surely the case for the Romans ‘becoming historical’ too. As Wiseman thought, we should not underestimate the important role of drama and of dramatising events in framing historical consciousness.Footnote 55 Thus, he stated,
I am not suggesting that Livy or Dionysius took such episodes directly from dramatic sources; but I do suggest that much of the traditional material on early Rome which they found in their second and first century BC predecessors had been processed for the stage long before it ever appeared in the pages of any historian.
Dillery thought it important that Romans linked themselves with the Spartans, but it is of some significance that the heart of the story of the battle of Cremera actually linked only one gens (the Fabii) with the Spartans, and not the whole Roman people. The fact, therefore, remains that in terms of time, the battles of Thermopylae and Cremera were not synchronic in reality; and in terms of number, there were 306 Fabii and canonically 300 Spartans; and in terms of their nature Thermopylae and the Cremera were distinct and unrelated events. And of course our third source for this event, the universal historian Diodorus, places the battle in 472 BC and states it was a battle between the people of Rome and the people of Veii in which 300 Fabii were killed ‘according to some historians’.Footnote 56 Once again Dillery notes here no synchronism and no parallelism. But I would go further with my Greek historical lens firmly in place and suggest that the story of the Fabii at the Cremera illustrates historical consciousness at work. Three contested versions of the same event in the works of Dionysius, Livy, and Diodorus suggests a debate about earlier history that must go far back into the past and the preservation of that event challenged by the inquisitiveness of those with no necessary vested interest in one version of the story.
This at its heart, then, is essential to the development of a critical historical mindset and one that does not simply invent tales in an environment of singular, monolithic, monarchic propaganda, mythology and fabrication. Inquiry must lie at the heart of history – as indeed the Greek term ἱστορία not only suggests, but demands – and the early Romans, as this study has suggested all along, developed this sense of the historical in the context of the wider Mediterranean world very early in their historical and political development. Like the Greeks this was also as a result of their political development, as various families within the Roman state strove to control the past for their own interest, but at the same time faced challenges to that control from rival gentes. Such competition naturally led to contested pasts in which it was equally important to verify, through inquiry, the truth, whatever that actually might be.
