The Fragments of the Roman Historians, or in the editor's preferred abbreviation, FRHist, ‘partly to match Jacoby's FGrHist, and partly to differentiate it from Die fruhen romischen Historiker by H. Beck and U. Walter (abbr. FRH)’ (1.viii), sets out with no less a goal than replacing outright the collection of H. Peter, now nearly a century old (there is a generous discussion of Peter's success, as well as his eclipse by Jacoby, on pp. 4–7), adding in the process the first systematic English translation and commentary on this important corpus. Lest some of the following sound too critical, let me be clear at the outset: the editors have accomplished their task magnificently, and the product is in many ways a scholar's dream: a difficult and complex corpus presented both lavishly and clearly, with accessible translations, introductions and notes, all of which will enhance access and facilitate research.
There are three volumes, the first for extensive introductory materials, the second for testimonia, fragments and translation, and the third for commentary. The production values are high: the volumes are attractive and spaciously printed; the font sizes are not overly taxing; and the organisation of sections lucid and easy to follow. The paper is of good quality, and the spines are tough – both crucial for making sure the volumes do not themselves fragment with use, for each volume is substantial, with volume 2, the heaviest, at just over 1,150 pages, and volume 1, the runt of the pack, at just over 660. They contain 1,203 fragments and 1,368 citations, mined from 99 sources which run the gamut from Polybius to the Byzantine period. These fragments in turn represent 110 authors, as well as the Annales Maximi, whose authorship, and indeed existence, is contested and ultimately unknown (J. Rich provides an elegant discussion on pp. 142–59). FRHist's haul has nine fewer authors than Peter (the also-rans are relegated to an appendix at the end of the first volume). It nevertheless tops Beck and Walter, as well as Chassignet's Budé edition, both of whose collections contain only republican authors, by almost a full hundred. Indeed, like Peter FRHist covers the full chronological range, from the Annales Maximi (1) to the Severan author Asinius Quadratus (102), the last author for whom the editors provide a secure date. The numbers 103–8 are brought up with authors of unknown date, with two anonymous authors to round up the queue. Each author and citing authority receive careful treatment in an individual introduction, a useful and distinctive feature of this collection; the same editor has also prepared the text, translation and commentary for the same author, as indicated by initials in the table of contents and each introduction. These initials can be deciphered using the list of contributors, but otherwise FRHist has striven for a consistency of voice and appearance, which is by and large successful, though personal interests and stylistic quirks naturally emerge in places.
Perhaps the best addition the editors of FRHist make is to devote sustained attention not only to the fragmentary authors themselves, but also to the citing authorities, the ‘cover-texts’ which provide much of the direct transmission. This is evident in the main in the ‘Citing Authorities’ section of the general introduction. Over the course of 99 pages, the editors introduce each of 99 extant sources in alphabetical order, giving a brief summary of the sources’ life and works, and focusing on the author's use of the fragmentary historians. The section further contains a number of highly useful charts, which allow us to parse the mass of evidence and begin to tease out trends. Thus, for instance, from fig. 2 we learn that Cato the Elder leads the league table of most cited historians, cited 207 times by 42 authors. The author with the most verbatim citations, meanwhile, is Sisenna, unsurprisingly since his colourful vocabulary drew the attention of grammarians. Propping up the chart are the emperor Augustus and Fabius Pictor, a rather tantalising combination which could usefully invite speculation on the shelf life of history at Rome, and its dependence on the author and his network of friends, connections and readers. Other charts present the distribution of citations across the citing authorities (fig. 3), while fig. 4 does the same for verbatim quotations alone. Statistics can be misleading, however, and indeed they are when viewed in isolation. The editors note, for instance, that Cato the Elder is the most cited author of the ones included in FRHist – but also that he is easily surpassed by Sallust's Histories (1.44), which are excluded on grounds of length, thus surely skewing any cursory reader's perception of the historiographical record. Nevertheless, the charts, together with the introductory materials, allow us to see broader patterns at work: that even in the ‘direct transmission’, as the editors call it, we are heavily reliant on paraphrase; that some historians are cited for their language while others are cited for their historical content; and above all, that the majority of the surviving citations come from a small charmed circle of authors who wrote in the republican period, about republican history and the prehistory of Rome.
Following Peter's model, FRHist contains testimonia as well as fragments, numbered in sequence as T1, T2 and so on, listed before the fragments (F) for each author. The distinction is commonsensical: fragments are texts that purport to quote or paraphrase another author, while a testimonium is one that provides information about a text or author. The editors have aimed for completeness in providing the testimonia, except in the cases of famous men, like Sulla or Augustus, where the testimonia are sensibly restricted to those referring to their literary output; they thus range from the whole of Catullus 1 (T1 for Cornelius Nepos) and Horace's Odes 2.1 (T1 for Asinius Pollio), to the more laconic T1 C. Galba, which merely notes that Pliny mentions a ‘Galba’ as a source for his 36th book. They do not, however, have their own commentary, and the reader is referred to the relevant citing author for further information. This is a missed opportunity, since many of the testimonia deserve commentary in their own right, but the welcome attention not only to the fragments but also to the citing author provide almost as rich a context as one could hope for.
‘Almost’, because collections of this sort invite comparison with the collections that might have been, an infinite galaxy of permutations of which any single collection is bound to fall short. Given FRHist's scope and success, it may seem churlish to point out any perceived omissions, but in this case lacunae and exclusions invite reflection on what constituted ‘history’ and ‘historian’ in ancient Rome. The most basic division the authors make is between poetry and prose, with the former entirely omitted from the volumes (1.8 ‘our definition of ‘historian’ covers every Roman described in a reliable source as a historicus … or as having written … in prose’). Now on one level, this is delicious poetic justice, since all too often it is the prose genres which are crowded out from scholarly view, but an increasing sense of the multi-media nature of Roman historical transmission and cultural memory means that leaving history as a pure realm of prose flattens out what was a much more vibrant cultural exchange occurring in a wide variety of idioms and discourses. Some exclusions would always have been necessary: size, at least for Ennius, must have been a consideration, and similarly obviates the need to ask whether Lucan should be regarded as a fragmentary historian, but the Carmen De Bello Actiaco, or Cicero on his own consulship are indisputably fragmentary and in a broad sense historiographical, and they have demonstrable connections to the prose historians.
The exclusion of poetry, moreover, sets aside the fact that Roman history, albeit of a particular sort, started not in prose but in verse and that, like Herodotus’ debt to Homer, so too the historians owe much to Naevius and Ennius, who have perhaps the greatest claim for inclusion here yet miss out on the grounds that – length notwithstanding – they ‘obviously call for and have always received separate treatment’ (1.8). Mos maiorum aside, the case for closing the gap between the genres is now an exciting strand of scholarship, with I. Gildenhard and J. Elliot making compelling cases for Ennius as a writer of history, if not an outright historian, and his inclusion would have placed authors like Fabius Pictor in a broader and more vivid intellectual milieu. Other poetic genres, like lyric poetry, are not even mentioned in the introduction, though they are discussed as appropriate in the commentaries (e.g. 3.20–1 on Fabius Pictor F4 a–e), or mentioned as testimonia. Nevertheless, one cannot help feeling that this tessellated treatment, however pragmatic, closes the door on a better integrated discussion of historical transmission at Rome.
Even discounting the problem of poetic histories, a work of this sort and scope requires some tough decisions from the editors. In addition to Roman historians writing in Latin, who form the backbone of the collection, the editors make an explicit distinction, for instance, between native Roman citizens writing in Greek (like Fabius Pictor), who are included, and naturalised citizens (like Juba II of Mauritania), who are left out, presumably because they can be for the most part consulted in Jacoby. Freedmen, on the other hand, generally make the cut. The antiquarians are left out ‘not only following the example of previous editors, but … applying a distinction that would have been understood and approved by the ancients themselves’ (1.8). Still, they find room for fragments from Varro's Trojan Families and Hyginus’ On Italian Cities, ‘even though they would probably not have been regarded by the Romans as history’ (1.8), but not for the fragments of Livy or of Sallust's Histories, left out due both to their scope and to their easy accessibility elsewhere. Like the exclusion of the poets, the exclusion of those larger histories makes a certain amount of pragmatic sense and natural justice – Livy and Sallust both get plenty of attention elsewhere – but it once again leaves the fragments somewhat isolated from the cultural and literary context in which they were produced, or at least presents a very partial picture of both context and tradition.
All this is of a piece with the general conservatism of the volume, which is careful to keep to the front the limits of the knowable. This is stated clearly and early on, and by and large the editors fulfil their ambition to ‘make clear the distance that separates the lost originals from the surviving remnants, and to emphasize the uncomfortable fact that, all too often, the latter are inadequate to reconstruct the former, even in the most basic outline’ (1.6). In service of this cautious approach, the editors have introduced an excellent typographical method to distinguish between verbatim quotations, paraphrase and attributions, which makes it very easy to see even at a glance the type of fragment one is dealing with (1.15). Bold font represents attributions, italic font verbatim quotations and regular Roman indicates reported paraphrase. Further, for fragments for which both author and work are secure, the fragment number is printed in bold; where the author is secure, but the work in doubt, in regular type; where the author is in doubt, in regular type and in parenthesis. This is all reassuring and convenient, but the volumes’ general reluctance to speculate also means that the best parts of scholarly energy are devoted to matters of textual criticism, historical questions and Quellenkritik, rather than the place of the historians in their cultural milieu, and above all the status of the fragments as works of literature, whether in their own right or as components of a now-lost objet d'art. This focus is partially, I assume, a result of scope, as with the poetry above, but must in part also be a matter of the editors’ personal interests and the still ongoing divide in the field about how best to make use of the ancient historians. Readers will differ on the question, but ignoring such issues closes off avenues of approach that some might wish to explore further, or at least be alerted to.
This is especially true when editorial decisions seem to simplify complex issues. Thus, for instance, for the fraught account of the Trial of the Scipios, FRHist prints as belonging to Antias (F 49) only Livy's opening sentence: duo, Q. Petilii diem dixerunt, and even that as paraphrase rather than verbatim quotation. Beck and Walter, by contrast (F 46 = Peter F 45), print nearly all of Livy 38.50.5–60. There is little doubt that FRHist's is the more responsible approach; Livy was unlikely to copy or paraphrase such large swathes of Antias with total accuracy. Conservative editing is rightly called for here, since Antias’ presence is especially problematic, and since the Trials episode – so goes the old reconstruction, at least, though now much out of favour – is where Livy allegedly despaired of his most exasperating source and turned to the more reliable Quadrigarius instead. FRHist, thankfully and unsurprisingly, does not subscribe to this old-fashioned view, and gives both Antias and Livy at least some credit for sense and sensibility: ‘Having decided that, for all the uncertainties, Antias’ account would provide the best foundation for his narrative, Livy alerted his reader to its problematic character at the outset with reference to Antias’ (3.356 ad loc.). Still, such minimalist formulation leaves some ground to cover: why assume that Antias was a problematic source, if it is also the best foundation for the story? And why alert the reader to its problematic nature quite so subtly? While many of the questions pertain more to Livy than they do to Antias, some speculation on the depth and breadth of Livy's reliance on Antias in this episode would have been welcome, as well as some cross-referencing with the other sources Livy cites, not least because, as FRHist itself maintains so consistently, attention to the cover texts speaks volumes about the nature of the fragmentary remains, and the limits of what is knowable about them.
Whatever else it is, FRHist will be very much a reference work, and one that will be at many elbows over the coming years. A specialist's view, however, is very different from a teacher's and still more a student's. The physical aspect of the books is perhaps the first thing to tackle here; and ‘physical’ is used advisedly, since no online version is currently available or, so far as I know, planned. This is a problem that has been well discussed already (e.g. by Pitcher in Histos, Working Papers [2014]), but it is worth repeating here that online editions, while not without their own set of considerable problems, offer the distinct advantage not only of increasing access – laptops and tablets being more portable and increasingly more easily available in remote parts than the three volumes of FRHist are likely to be – but also of being thoroughly searchable. FRHist as it stands compensates ably with a series of good appendices and indexes, but a generation reared on Google will miss the ease of a search function, and we will all miss its consequences: making thematic and intertextual connections readily and efficiently visible. The last point is not negligible, especially since the editors of FRHist themselves offer little by way of literary interpretation, much less connectivity, and the three-volume arrangement will encourage most readers to leaf horizontally rather than delve vertically – there is only so much prestidigitation one can do.
The organisation of the work, allocating one volume each to introductory material, text and commentary, is one of the most striking – and most commented on – features of FRHist, especially since working with the set will almost always require use of all three volumes at once. Indeed, they are only sold as a set. This is a shame, because despite the best intentions of the Press and the occasional conference or holiday sale, the hefty price tag will put FRHist outside the hands of anyone reluctant to make a lifelong commitment to the fragmentary historians. This is especially challenging, as J. Marincola points out (Histos, Working Papers [2014]), for the casual user (if any user of FRHist can be called casual), and more so in the case of graduate seminars, which concentrate demand. FRHist's use by non-experts is also hindered, in places, by its own high standards. Indeed, some of the notes assume a great deal on the part of the reader, nowhere perhaps more so than the laconic commentary on Sisenna F 18–19: ‘Lindsay's Law applies’. An expert will know that this refers to Nonius’ tendency to maintain the order of the text when citing authorities, and a conscientious reader will take this as an opportunity to learn (and will find the answer in the relevant introduction on 1.93); but a less conscientious or more time-strapped reader will be either confused, put off or simply dismissive, and there were surely more forgiving ways to tender the same information. It is therefore welcome and reassuring to hear from OUP that the editors plan to produce a one-volume print version for student use, with the hope that it would be simplified in some places and expanded in others to facilitate a less experienced reader's engagement with the material. If the projected volume is priced affordably, it stands to make a significant advance in the teaching of this material, and thereby in exposing it to an ever-wider readership, which is, after all, one of the editors’ explicit aims in replacing (and English-ing) Peter's edition.
A minor example might be illustrative of the thrills and difficulties of using the three volumes of FRHist, and it is offered here to showcase both the kind of serendipitous finds for which such volumes are so conducive, and of the practical obstacles a reader might encounter in pursuit of them. Leafing through the Fabius Pictor entry, a reader might be pulled up short to notice that in Fragment 4d, from Quintilian, Inst. 1.6.12 Varro, in eo libro quo initia Romanae Urbis enarrat, lupum feminam dicit, Ennium Pictoremque Fabium secutus, the editors have classified ‘lupum feminam’ as a verbatim quotation, despite the fact that Fabius Pictor wrote in Greek. Since Quintilian's attribution is to both Ennius and Pictor, and that Ennius certainly wrote in Latin, questions might well multiply. The heading offers some help in untangling this, listing Pictor F 4d as Peter's ‘Pictor (Lat.) F2’, but this may well make less than perfect sense to someone encountering the fragments for the first time with FRHist. Going to the commentaries is the natural recourse, but little help is offered here. Early on, we hear that ‘Varro (d) and Nonius (e) quote isolated phrases used by Fabius in the course of his narrative. The latter two fragments purport to be verbatim quotations (evidently therefore from the Latin edition of the work), but amounting to only a few words in each case’ (3.16). Otherwise, the note, at nearly six pages, is extensive and informative, with many a discussion that might distract the mind from the lupus femina problem, since its main interest is in Quellenkritik and sorting out the various strands of evidence on the Romulus story. Now I hope I will not win any prizes at David Lodge's infamous Humiliation if I admit that the Latin edition of Pictor was news to me, and it most certainly will be to many a graduate student and other newcomers to the world of early Roman mythography. In any case, the commentary offers no elucidation of this Latin edition, nor refers the reader to any further discussion of it, despite (and perhaps because of) it having been discussed in the introductory note, though there is not a cross-reference to direct one there. A determined reader in possession of the full set of FRHist volumes may well, for the sake of completion, at this point make room on an already groaning desk for volume 1, and there would be rewarded for his or her efforts with a concise and fascinating discussion of the publication history of Pictor's Latin edition. The problem is far from straightforward, and the editors duly go through the various possibilities of authorship of this Latin edition before deciding, like Octavian and his Caesars, that there ought to be only one Fabius: ‘the conclusion that only one Fabius Pictor wrote history, and that it circulated in two versions, is provisionally accepted here as a working hypothesis’ (1.165).
As a collection of answers to questions, this is well and good, but the voyage is circuitous, and exposes at least three assumptions about the reader: that he or she has possession of all the volumes; that he or she will consult the volumes in order; and that he or she is more interested in the content of the source-material than in questions of style or literary form. These are all three problematic in their own way. Some readers will have difficulties getting all volumes together at once. Many will naturally work first with the texts and then turn to the commentary, much though the editors might like them to start at the beginning and work their way through the volumes. And, above all, the evocative phrase lupus femina itself goes uncommented, though there is much that might interest the reader, whether the archaic gender marker or the broader tradition of foxy ladies saving orphaned babies (‘ein uraltes Motiv’ as Beck and Walter [F 7–8, p. 91] call it; there are passing mentions to Acca Larentia in FRHist's note, but no synthetic discussion of her). Indeed, the alternative aetion for the she-wolf story in Livy's account of Romulus and Remus has an intriguing parallel in Herodotus’ account of the youth of Cyrus, a figure known to fascinate the Romans, and bringing with it questions on Livy's familiarity with the Greek historians. The reader is thus left to his or her own devices to piece together a grammatical feature of archaic Latin, an allusive connection to the father of history and the possibility that the phrase lupus femina itself might use the archaism as marked and allusive language.
This state of affairs has advantages and disadvantages. It is, of course, an editor's prerogative to determine what to comment on, and nobody can please everyone. And however frustrating a historiographically-inclined researcher might occasionally find FRHist, there is no denying that the editors have provided a wonderful platform for doing exactly the work they themselves leave off. As the lupus femina example shows, there is much that can be built on FRHist's rock, precisely because the editors omit to include it. One can, now, assign and set students to work on a variety of problems, aided by clear-eyed reviews of the relevant issues, generally reliable translations (there are occasional infelicities and mistakes, however, as there inevitably always are) and invaluable introductions not only to the fragmentary historians but also to the cover texts. Digitising FRHist will aid considerably in addressing thematic and linguistic problems, but even the ability to read the historians quickly will make scholarly work faster and graduate teaching more adventurous. But these are all quibbles and soon-to-be-fulfilled hopes. FRHist is a genuine achievement, and will doubtlessly prove an invaluable asset as the fragmentary Roman historians move further into the mainstream of scholarly debate.
