The Struggle for Rome: The Place of History in the Roman Republic

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

One fact differentiates Roman Republican history from the history of fifth century Greece, for example, and that is the fact that there is an absence of contemporary sources. Whilst Thucydides and Xenophon wrote about wars in which they fought themselves, the first Roman historian wrote his work three hundred years after the foundation of the Roman Republic. It has sometimes been assumed that a good deal of the history of this early period therefore was invented or at least embellished through the retrojection of contemporary issues and events into an earlier period. Thus it is argued that civil dissension in the early Republic must be understood not as a description of reality, but as a reflection of the concerns of contemporary late Republican Rome. This research will interrogate the evidence for such retrojection, and will argue that to regard this either as rendering early Roman history wholly unreliable, or as merely a superficial gloss which can be stripped off to reveal the factual truth fails to acknowledge the complex ways in which Romans thought about their past, and the way that the kinds of historical Rome they constructed affected contemporary behaviour.Some of the earliest evidence for the Roman ability to set past and present alongside each other in a fruitful dialogue may be found in the construction of a religious calendar, at least by the early 5th 1 century, where festivals which celebrated an even earlier Rome were juxtaposed with festivals that may have represented the foundation of the Republic. Throughout the Republic, exemplary individuals were identified and celebrated through a variety of media and in several genres; towards the end of the Republic for instance, the imagery on coins would become an important way of glorifying oneself with reference to one's past. Family histories, rituals and celebrations such as funerals, which were often highly public affairs, also reinforced private identities and linked in interesting ways with civic identity. In all these ways and more, Romans returned to their past, and in a constant process of revisiting and reinventing produced a complex and rich account of their origins, foundation and struggle to stability and eventual power.Two examples show how the past informed the present. In the second century, two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, held the office of tribune of the plebs, an ancient office whose establishment was the one of the first victories in the attempt by the plebeians to break down the power of the aristocratic patricians. Their tenure of office led to the death of both, and near revolution. Scholars have often argued that the way that our sources describe the Struggle of the orders owes much to their observation of the Gracchi, and there are elements of truth in that, but it is also true that the whole episode of the Gracchan tribunates also owes much to historical memory of older conflicts.As another example, in Roman warfare, the steady accumulation of victories cannot mask moments of disaster and the accelerating impact of victory. Roman accounts of war, and the ways in which success or failure are permanently etched in the fabric of the city through inscriptions and buildings and the calendar itself, reinforce the centrality of external conflict and conquest. In the later Republic, we see the development of military autobiographies which combine the authority of the historian with the propaganda of the victor.Using the full range of available evidence, this account will both provide an account of how we know about early Rome and the Republic, and will compare the evidence for historical memory and identity in Italy. Ultimately it will illustrate the struggle to create a lasting image of Rome in times of profound instability and doubt, and show the tenacity and success of the Roman historical memory.