[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
This is the seventeenth volume of Brill’s prestigious Historiography of Rome and Its Empire series, and it contains ten essays (plus a substantial introductory chapter) that explore the fuzzy line between myth and history in Roman historiography. The papers were originally delivered in a panel in the 2016 Celtic Conference in Classics and in a 2017 workshop at the University of Sheffield, and they provide many very fine examinations of the ways in which ancient authors engaged with myth when composing histories about early Rome. The problems with the historiography of early Rome are well known: the Romans did not start writing about their own history until the end of the third century BC, and very little can be said with certainty about the nature, quality, and quantity of information about earlier periods that was available to those first historians. This has left scholars to debate the reliability of our information about the regal era and early Republic, and to question what—if anything—we can accept from the literary tradition about those periods. Are the stories of early Rome memories that were preserved more-or-less accurately down to the third century BC, or were they myths or even literary fictions that writers in the later Republic and early Empire created to fill in the emptiness of early Roman history?
The contributors to this volume take a new approach, which is set out clearly in the introductory chapter (Chapter One) by Daniele Miano. They begin from the position that the ancient conception of myth was different from its modern corollary, and that ancient definitions and usages were not fixed, but shifted according to the ways myths were represented and performed in different ancient narratives. Rather than assuming a dichotomous relationship between myth and history, they suggest a framework in which the relative positions of myth and history depend upon several other concepts and performative tools, treating myth as a grey zone between the knowable and the unknowable.
In Chapter Two, Amber Gartrell argues that ancient authors—especially Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Livy—employed stories of the epiphanies of the Dioscuri in different ways, using them to blend history and myth in different ways depending upon different factors. Dionysius presents the appearance of the Dioscuri at the Battle of Lake Regillus as credible (albeit supernatural) historical events, whereas Livy—either through skepticism or through a desire to emphasize human agency—could neglect the stories of the epiphanies, relegating them to myth. Chronology could also influence their presentations of epiphanies, since the oldest examples are more prominent and vivid, and so appear more historical, while later epiphanies are deemphasized with more passive descriptions. In Chapter Three, Daniele Miano argues that Dionysius of Halicarnassus shaped and used myths in his narratives as instruments of his political, moral, and philosophical message, and that he used myths that create wonder (thauma) as a pedagogical tool to help his readers understand the order of things. The greater the marvel created by a myth, the greater its value as a pedagogical device. He believes that Dionysius used Theopompus as a model for methodology and style, and that a close examination of how Dionysius incorporated or rejected parts of Theopompus’ use of myth reveals the flexibility and permeability of the line between history and myth.
In Chapter Four, Edoardo Bianchi looks at the stories of aborigines that Greek and Roman authors included in their narratives of Rome’s prehistory. He notes that these stories developed as early as the fourth century BC and were used as propaganda supporting Roman expansion, but he focuses on their use in the Augustan era when authors influenced by Greek genealogical writing reinterpreted these stories to identify Rome as a kind of Greek city. Whereas authors such as Livy, who wrote from a Romanocentric historical perspective, had less interest in this topic, writers such as Trogus and Timagenes gave significant time and attention to discussing aborigines and their (Greek) origins to show that Rome was a Greek city and thereby claim an important place for Greeks in the Roman Empire.
Tim Cornell asks two historiographical questions in Chapter Five. First, he provides an analysis of Dionysius’ use of sources in his Roman Antiquities and asks why they are cited far more often in the first chapter than in any other chapter. He acknowledges that Dionysius wanted to prove the superiority of his work to other (less researched) histories, but argues that this shows Dionysius’ effort to counter widespread anti-Roman sentiment, which depicted early Rome as a city of primitive and unsophisticated outlaws, so he used his sources to present Rome as a Greek city. Second, Cornell asks how we can reconcile the excellence of Dionysius’ research in that first book with the weakness of his results, since there is no serious chance that his sources were transmitting accurate information of Rome’s earliest origins. He answers this by explaining how ancient writers lacked modern historical methods, which caused the line between history and myth to become blurred or even undetectable because ancient historiography relied heavily on the believability of a source rather than on modern tools of historical analysis.
The next three chapters look at the use of myth in political narratives, exploring how history and myth could be intertwined for political purposes. In Chapter Six, Roman Frolov explores the myths of L. Junius Brutus. He notes that stories familiar to Cicero imagined him as a private citizen (privatus) when he led the uprising against Rome’s last king that expelled the monarchy, while later myths said Brutus held an official military position as tribunus celerum. Cicero suggests that it was Brutus’ oratory as a private citizen that initiated the uprising against the king, but Livy and Dionysius describe the overthrow as a comitial procedure, which necessitated that Brutus held an official position to preside over a comitia. Frolov examines these variations and argues that they had less to do with Augustus’ need to legitimize his early actions as a privatus, but were instead an example of how the Romans used myth to work out complicated political problems: the capacities of a privatus were unclear even at the end of the Republic, so authors used the myths of Brutus to study, explain, and legitimize the question.
In Chapter Seven, Chantal Gabrielli explores how Roman authors used myths of early Rome to make the case that the murder of the Gracchi brothers had been justified. The political assassination of the two brothers created a problem for the anti-Gracchan aristocracy, so several optimate writers reinterpreted and updated old myths to claim that the summary execution of potential tyrants by private citizens was legitimate under Roman custom. Gabrielli suggests that Cicero was foremost among these, and may have been the first to rework the myths of Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus into a triptych of quasi-historical examples to justify the murder of would-be tyrants. Thus, myth was the malleable tool that could be reworked to validate current political questions and behavior. In Chapter Eight Nicolas Meunier explores Roman myths about the Decemvirate and the Second Secession of the Plebs. He first argues that the narrative framework of these stories not only follows the ancient definition of myth closely, but in particular it is very similar to the Roman fabula, a popular form of Roman story-telling that freely mixed heroic fiction and recent history. He then argues that the underlying stories of the Decemvirate and the Second Secession of the Plebs originally reflected events within the Latin League that were later “Romanized” as Rome expanded its control over central Italy, showing the extent to which reality and fiction could be intertwined in the historiography of the early Republic.
The next three chapters study how myth and history intersected in physical monuments or space in Rome. In Chapter Nine, Marine Miquel examines descriptions of space in the historical narratives of Dionysius and Livy, and she argues that each author shaped their descriptions and use of spaces to suit their particular literary aims. Livy’s writings were guided by his moral perspective, and so tend to treat myths of Rome’s landscape briefly as heroic symbols of the city’s future greatness, whereas Dionysius was interested in countering anti-Roman propaganda, and so give considerable attention to etiological stories that “cosmeticized” Roman spaces to give them a Hellenic shape. Thus spaces were part of the flexible grey area between history and myth, since they could be repeatedly reinterpreted and reimagined to suit the purposes of the author. In Chapter Ten, Stephen Oakley examines the tendency of Roman authors to date events in the regal period with suspicious precision. He examines fragments of the Fasti Triumphales and excerpts from Gellius and Macer to show that they all believed that triumphs and other specific events could be precisely dated within the reigns of the seven canonical kings. He argues that these sources provided Dionysius with the chronology he needed for his expansive narrative, although he observes that many dates were left out to focus on the grander literary form of his work.
In the final chapter of the book, Jaclyn Neel carefully compares the visual representation of Tarpeia on the frieze from the Basilica Aemilia with literary descriptions provided by Dionysius and other later authors. Whereas the first-century BC literary accounts present Tarpeia as a negative exemplum of how a Roman woman should not behave, Neel argues that the visual image is more malleable. She argues that the frieze depicts Tarpeia with an unusual hairstyle that identifies her as a foreign woman (perhaps a Gaul), and in doing so it inverts the meaning of the myth from a negative exemplum of a bad Roman woman to a positive exemplum of virtuous Roman soldiers killing the Gallic enemy. This emphasizes how the line between myth and history was easily crossed depending upon the purpose(s) of the author or the story being told.
The chapters of this book are a fascinating read for anyone interested in early Rome and its historiography. The collection is well balanced and includes a wide range of perspectives on the blurred line between history and myth in Roman historiography or—perhaps better—the grey zone in which history and myth often intermingle in different ways depending upon the purposes of the ancient writer. While each chapter makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of historiography, collectively they succeed in proving the contention in the Introduction that the ancient conception of myth is not the same as the modern definition. Myth and history were spheres that partially overlapped, and this invites researchers to be more circumspect with Roman historiography and to develop new approaches for examining that overlapping area where myth and history were easily manipulated and recast to suit the needs of an author.
The publication of this edition seems to have been somewhat delayed, so in a few places some recent scholarship is missing, but this does not detract from the strength of chapters’ arguments or the great value of the collection. There are very few errors in the text, each chapter is well written and usefully accompanied by its own bibliography, and the collection is attractively produced. Each chapter may be usefully read on its own, but taken together they provide a very strong argument for seeing myth as a flexible and active tool in Roman historiography. This book is a must-read for anyone working on the historiography of early Rome, but individual chapters will also be useful for undergraduates studying specific topics or authors.
Authors and titles
- Introduction: The Historiography of Myth in Historiography (Daniele Miano).
- The Epiphanies of the Dioscuri: Myth of History? (Amber Gartrell).
- Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Theopompus, and the Historical Marvel: The Rhetoric of Myth and the Myth of Rhetoric (Daniele Miano).
- Augustan Historiography on the Mythical Aborigines: Ideology and Erudition in Dionysius, Trogus, and Timagenes (Edoardo Bianchi).
- The Methodology of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Book 1 of the Roman Antiquities (Tom Cornell).
- Privatus or tribunus celerum? The Myth of Lucius Brutus and the Political Role of Private Individuals (Roman M. Frolov).
- Political Violence between Myth and History: The Examples of Accius and Cicero (Chantal Gabrielli).
- The Decemvirate and the Second secession of the Plebs (451-449 BCE): A Historiographical fabula (Nicolas L. J. Meunier).
- Men, Gods and Places in Early Rome: Myths in History in the First Century BCE (Marine Miquel).
- The Precise Dating of Events in Dionysius’ Narrative of Rome’s Kings (S. P. Oakley).
- Sculpting History into Myth: Tarpeia and Foreign Conquest (Jaclyn Neel).