This useful and well-presented collection of articles has its origin in colloquia held in 2016 and 2017. The variety of topics and approaches is wide and acts as a helpful statement that collective work tackling the entrenched difficulties characteristic of this field can probably provide a better prospect for the future than the more dogmatic research necessary for large-scale monographic studies. This point is left implicit, but the diversity of methodologies is a big asset. Individual readers will find different value in the approaches adopted in the separate contributions, but their quality is certainly enhanced by the variety, making this a valuable volume with much to consider.
Miano's introduction sketches lightly the methodological debates typical of most of the work that has attempted to make sense of where myth ends and where history begins in the surviving accounts of Rome's foundation period. Though slightly frustrating, this light touch is useful, since it would be impossible to provide a brief survey that was even remotely comprehensive, and Miano rightly focuses on new potentials. It is refreshing to see the work of Carlo Ginzburg referenced, although I found it disappointing that the adverb ‘merely’ appears more than once in connection with the word ‘rhetoric’. That points to a continuing lack of appreciation of the great resource that formalist work on rhetoric in historiography presents to those hoping to move past entrenched polarities between myth and history. Most of the chapters steer clear of these problems, though a couple of them double-down on them, somewhat unhelpfully, at least for readers hoping for a common-sense approach to how historical texts are likely to have been produced and received. That approach can rarely be said to be a prominent feature of research on early Rome, but it has an impact here, despite a predictable lack of methodological consistency.
What the chapters all share is the motivation that was central to Quellenkritik: how to make sense of the historical reality that antedates the surviving accounts of early Rome, and which, from that perspective, has left many types of implausibility or evident fictionalisation in what passes for a historical record. None of the contributions focus directly on the reconstruction of lost annalistic historical texts as an end in itself, although several come close to this, presenting hypotheses as to why the accounts found in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus take the form that they do. What is not much in evidence is an emphasis on the communicative value that motivated these authors. In this respect, the backward-looking, diachronic mindset of traditional Quellenkritik leaves a persistent residue.
A. Gartrell uses the stories of apparitions of Castor and Pollux as a test case in debates about scepticism and about the problems of looking for a consistent attitude to myth over a long period of time. It is problematic that one of the passages cited (Dion. Hal. A.R. 6.13.4–5) is used as proof of Dionysius’ belief in the apparitions, when it can be just as easily read as evidence of the piety (and/or credulity) of the Romans. Dionysius calls the event paradoxos and thaumastes: this is hard to square with Gartrell's ‘there does not appear to be any doubt about the veracity of the epiphanies’ (p. 23). The question of ‘whose doubt?’ is not addressed with sufficient persistence. As so often with this approach, not considering multiple perspectives is almost inevitable. However, Gartrell's conclusion, that the Dioscuri invite us to consider as wide as possible a range of contexts for the boundary between myth and history, gets the volume off to a good start.
That topic gains useful reinforcement in Miano's discussion in the following chapter of the fantastical as a purposeful variation in the historian's armoury; helpfully, he scrutinises instances where these same paired terms appear (paradoxos and thaumastes), examining what they indicate about Dionysius’ approach to the marvellous. It is not so much about verisimilitude, but rather the pedagogical focus with which he shapes the past. The chapter makes good use of the contrast between Dionysius and Theopompus over integrating mythical material into history. Miano's main aim is to move the debate about the inclusion of the fabulous beyond the inflexible polarity between rational and irrational, and he achieves this through careful reading of a wide range of apposite passages.
E. Bianchi examines the alternative ideas of the Italian ‘aborigines’ that provide background to Dionysius’ better-preserved account in A.R. 1, alternatives glimpsed in the remains of Timagenes and Trogus, neither of whom adopted a Rome-centric approach to the question of how Italy's prehistoric populations were ethnically constituted. Bianchi's examination of Trogus reveals that he shared with Dionysius the idea of successive waves of migration from Greece, while crucially differing over the question of the indigeneity of the Etruscans: for Trogus they were migrants from Lydia. He locates the ideological impulse behind these ideas in the imperial ambitions of Syracuse from the fourth century onwards, which played its allies or enemies off against each other by employing ethnic origin stories. Bianchi's discussion includes a valuable and up-to-date summary of the evidence for ‘anti-Roman historiography’ in the Augustan period.
Cornell, in ‘The Methodology of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Book 1 of the Roman Antiquities’, makes a strong argument for the uniqueness of this text and brings to bear the fruits of his editorship of The Fragments of the Roman Historian (2013) in order to emphasise the diligence of Dionysius’ work with his sources and the deliberate effect that this work produces. This is an authoritative chapter that lays out the evidence with great clarity.
R. Frolov's ‘Privatus or tribunus celerum?’ is one of the chapters that adopts a more traditional positivist methodology, aiming to reconstruct the political status of Brutus, and what the different options reveal about how different historians reworked the story to foreground their visions of how politics functioned in their own day. Frolov treads carefully to avoid over-simplification of the Augustan context, although he is probably too trusting in accepting at face value Cicero's remark about the original Brutus’ rhetorical capacities. A more reactionary methodology characterises C. Gabrielli's account of ‘Political Violence between Myth and History’, which lays out a mechanistic and deterministic vision of how historical writing and ideology intersect. Not for the only time in this volume the (to my mind highly questionable) idea of ‘intentional history’ is made to do a lot of work here, work that deprives readers, ancient and modern, of any recourse to nuance or self-determination. The progress in rhetorical and ideological analysis that has characterised recent work on historiography leaves no trace here. However, within the context of the volume, this contribution is worth engaging with, at the very least in order to lend perspective to the more nuanced methodologies on view elsewhere.
The following chapter is well placed to help with that process, because, although the schema proposed by Meunier to decode ‘The Decemvirate and the Second Secession of the Plebs (451–449 bce): a Historical fabula’ recalls the structuralist models of the 1960s–1970s, Meunier's handling both of texts and methodological questions is far from schematic. The resulting analysis is energetic, even if the conclusion ‘it is striking to see how deeply this regime could be reinterpreted’ (p. 179) is a little underwhelming. M. Miquel, in ‘Men, Gods and Places in Early Rome’, adopts an interesting and wide focus on location and aetiology, but is insufficiently rigorous in its discussion of methodology. I find it puzzling that Livy's notorious demarcation of material that belongs in poetry can be casually equated with ‘the stories which he narrates in his first book’ (p. 200), when Livy clearly suspends his judgement and, to me, appears to be referring specifically to the very earliest period of his narrative, the one that overlaps with the poetry of Virgil. That said, one recent account of Livy extends this foundation period where what is suitable for poets can infiltrate history into a much broader range of material (J. Zenk, Die Anfänge Roms erzählen [2022]). But there are other examples of how a casual misreading of a crucial text can distort the argument. Here the blatant scepticism of Cic. Leg. 1.1–5 appears to have no relevance to the general point that Miquel is making about sites of memory, when integrating that scepticism would advance the argument.
S.P. Oakley's discussion of ‘The Precise Dating of Events in Dionysius’ Narrative of Rome's Kings’ maps a neglected topic, though I would have appreciated a more copious conclusion to this succinct analysis, one that opened up his interesting idea that, at times, Dionysius achieved a more effective style by neglecting excessive chronological precision. J. Neel's re-evaluation of the reliefs of the Basilica Aemilia, in ‘Sculpting History into Myth: Tarpeia and Foreign Conquest’, supplements her other recent publications on the same subject (JRS 109 [2019]; M.A.A.R. 65 [2020]). Here, after helpfully giving a report on the possibilities for dating both the different renovations of the basilica and the origins of the decorative frieze, Neel proposes a new hypothesis, drawing both on iconography and on details of the historical record. She argues that Tarpeia's image would have resonated with ideas of foreign captive women, specifically related to the activities of Aemilius Lepidus in Illyria. Neel is cautious and permits a number of different interpretations to co-exist. The resulting account forms a stimulatingly eclectic end to this worthwhile collection, which, taken as a whole, does justice to the surviving historical accounts and opens up many different avenues for their interpretation.
