‘It seems reasonable that Nicolaus would have known of the autobiography of Augustus and he may well have used it in composing his own work on Augustus, but that is about all we can say of any significance.’ Thus M. Toher (p. 138) in an acute analysis of the relationship between Nicolaus of Damascus' Bios of Augustus and Augustus' Autobiography. Toher's minimalist position goes against a common view that Nicolaus is more or less a free paraphrase of Augustus' Autobiography, and he sounds a good methodological warning. A reading that argues that a portion of an extant text derives from a lost source makes assumptions about the content and narrative strategy of the lost source which may not be testable, and it can often be assumed that the extant writer merely ‘hands down’ the material untouched. If Nicolaus does not mention Augustus' Autobiography as a source, it is pure speculation how much of his Bios ‘derived’ from it.
Similar difficulties apply to using texts that are explicitly cited by a surviving writer but are otherwise lost. Some authors cite Augustus' Autobiography, but how much of what they narrate in the context of the citation can actually be traced to the Autobiography? Is the citing author using it directly or through an intermediate source which he does not name, and how does he handle the source material? What, then, can safely be said of the content and narrative strategies of the Autobiography? Augustus' Autobiography is treated rather differently by the extant sources (cf. e.g. F8 [Smith] and F10), and that influences considerably our access to the ‘original’. Understanding autobiographical writing at Rome more generally is problematic precisely because those texts that do survive are fragmentary.
Such methodological considerations recur in the nine contributions to the 2005 conference that set out to ask what we know about Augustus' Autobiography and the wider autobiographical tradition at Rome.
The fragments and testimonia of Augustus' Autobiography throw a faint light on the content and approach of the original. If it is unclear how much attention Augustus gave to his origins and youth, it is certain that the work was composed in thirteen books and did not proceed further than the Cantabrian war of 26/25 b.c. (Suet. Aug. 85.1). J. Rich discusses the war within the context of Augustus' external policy and suggests that Augustus chose it for his climax because it was the last war that he commanded in person. Subjugation of a foreign enemy was a fitting climax to a narrative that seems to have been dominated by war and politics. Four fragments taken together suggest that within that narrative Augustus used supernatural phenomena such as dreams and omens as a means of legitimation. For Wiseman, Augustus structured around evidence of divine support an autobiography that was as much aretalogia as political propaganda, and Thein considers the supernatural as evidence of Augustus' felicitas. Pelling discusses what was at stake for Augustus in writing an autobiography in the first place. He was presumably sensitive to fears that Cicero connects with writing autobiography: the inuidia, the difficulty of achieving credibility (Fam. 5.12.8). Where Cicero saw danger, Augustus, for Pelling, saw an opportunity. By offering a viewpoint that does not self-aggrandise, for example in his withdrawal before the battle of Philippi, Augustus could score points with his ‘rhetoric of honesty’ (p. 57) among readers who would have expected personal bias. This strategy could help him when he was being tendentious. Pelling's engagement with the Autobiography through Plutarch's use of it demonstrates nicely how fragments can be read to shed light on the lost text and on the narrative strategies of the extant author that uses it.
Cicero's letter suggests that readers would have approached autobiographical writing with some expectations. If M. Aemilius Scaurus (cos. 115 b.c.) was perhaps the first to write autobiography at Rome in the late second and early first century b.c. (p. 72), the tradition of writing autobiographically at Rome can be traced back as early as the elder Cato, as Cornell demonstrates in the opening chapter on autobiographical elements in Roman republican historiography. The most significant figure before Augustus, more so than Caesar, was Sulla, the subject of S.'s fine, wide-ranging chapter. Sulla's 22-book Autobiography, the longest in Latin, was written within a republican culture concerned with emphasising in various media the contribution of the individual to the growth of Roman imperium. Sulla's narrative was dominated by warfare, crowned by triumph and seemingly pervaded by supportive supernatural phenomena. These foci, the concern with the display of virtue, place Augustus in Sulla's tradition. If Pelling remarks that it was ‘clearly not a nice thing to do’ to suggest a comparison with Sulla (p. 45), S. shows that ‘of all the models before him, perhaps appropriately, Augustus did not flinch from choosing that of Sulla’ (p. 79). Thein too argues that the felicitas of Sulla and Augustus offered points of contact (especially in the tradition of charismatic leadership) but their very different careers allowed Augustus also to define himself against his literary model. Welch helps broaden the contemporary perspective: what would it mean to write autobiography as a ‘reconciled’ opponent of Augustus? Welch discusses how Messala Corvinus might have used his writings to position himself in the new state, and his acknowledgement that the civil wars had ended benefited Augustus' political legitimacy in the process. Messala's resignation of the prefectureship of the city indicates on the other hand that Augustus would not have it all his own way.
These papers combine to offer a nuanced and wide-ranging consideration of Augustus' Autobiography and the tradition of autobiography at Rome that will become essential reading for the Republic and the transition to Empire (unfortunately later imperial autobiography is only glanced at). The volume has been made even more useful by the inclusion of S.'s text and translation of nineteen fragments and five testimonia of Augustus' Autobiography that will appear in the forthcoming Fragments of the Roman Historians. Close examination of these texts brings us back to the methodological considerations set out at the start of this review. S. has performed well the unenviable task of establishing what counts as a fragment. He presumably discusses his rationale in the forthcoming volume, but it is a shame that he did not offer some guidance in the present book. It is not clear, for example, how F2 and F3 should be interpreted. The use of etiam by Servius and in the Digest in the citation of the Autobiography suggests only that it treated the same material, not that it was necessarily the source of the passages that S. highlights in bold type. Are these passages, then, really fragments? Why is F1 a fragment and not, say, F11? Similarly, Pelling takes issue with S.'s handling of F5 and F13, and P. places the Autobiography behind passages in Appian that are not normally regarded as fragments. S. himself demonstrates that similar problems beset constructing and interpreting Sulla's fragments (pp. 67–8, 71).
There is in fact no agreed ‘line’ among the contributors about some fundamental issues. Pelling warns against regarding autobiography as a genre, but others seem to regard the genre as a given. Some argue against regarding the Autobiography simply as political propaganda, but it is central to Rich's argument that Augustus strove to justify his political actions as strongly as he could, and P. reads apologia throughout the fragments (and also in Virgil). These differences, far from being signs of weakness or lack of collaboration, illustrate the interpretative flexibility that such an elusive text provides. They are also an important reminder of how little we know about the tradition of autobiography, how little we know about Augustus' Autobiography and how much that Autobiography is a modern construction, mediated through secondary ancient authors. It is a credit to the contributors that they provide such an insightful, measured guide to this fragmentary subject.
