The sixth chapter covers the origins of Roman historiography. As usual, they are in Greece, and as usual the Romans do something rather different with their model. From its origins in Cato down to what many considered its perfect form in Livy, the Romans were deeply interested in their own pasts. But history-writing was not as it is in the modern world: the ancient historian did little of what we would consider research. Here again, therefore, literary elements were to the fore: choosing the right kind of story to tell and telling it in the right way were the important things. Discussions of Ennius, Cato, Caesar, Sallust, Asinius Pollio, and Livy.

Scipio’s downfall is superficially surprising: the charges were obviously invented, although he was not helped by his own arrogance. The disgrace and death in humiliating retirement of a successful, patriotic general seems a display of petty ingratitude. But in the Roman Republic, no individual, however gifted and successful, must be allowed to become too wealthy from booty or too politically powerful. The main agent of his disgrace (two phases, 187, 184), was Cato. Livy’s narrative is gripping but confused. Polybius treated the troubles of the Scipio brothers only as part of an anecdotal obituary. In 187, Cato put up two tribunes to demand an account of the money which Lucius received from Antiochus as part-payment of war indemnity. Publius, the real target, angrily tore up the account book which could have cleared him. He himself was prosecuted (184). It never came to trial. He died at his Campanian villa (183).

Chapter 3 explores how the models of the healer and head of state converged around the figure of the princeps. Although each proved useful in validating the Principate, their distinctive Republican histories invested them with divergent imperial trajectories. Because Cicero had already integrated the figure of the healer into Republican discourse, Augustan writers could soon locate the princeps in this role as well. The regal resonance of the caput, in contrast, made it unavailable as a descriptor of the “first citizen.” It is therefore absent in the works of Vergil, Horace, and Propertius. Yet for a society steeped in organic comparisons and confronted with constitutional change, the utility of the metaphor was obvious. Livy responded to this quandary in his first pentad, which depicts three stages in the life cycle of the Roman body politic: a regal polity topped by a caput, a Republic structured around the Fable of the Belly, and a fusion of these two forms under Camillus. Livy’s narrative thereby helped make the head of state metaphor available for contemporary usage. As Augustus’ rule came to an end, Ovid finally began identifying him as the caput orbis.

Livy, following a tradition established in Latin historiography at least by the early 1st century, frequently employed archaisms in his narrative. In addition, on a number of occasions he quotes what purport to be texts dating from the period of the events narrated, most of them containing language recognisable as early Latin. This chapter will consider three of these in detail: (i) 22. 10. 2-6. The terms of the vow of a uer sacrum approved by the people in 217 BC, part of the expiations following the disastrous defeat by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. (ii) 25. 12. 5-6, 9-10. The carmina Marciana, predictions said to have been made by the seer Marcius, which came to light in 212 BC (for the second passage Macrobius 1.17.28 constitutes an indirect tradition for the text). (iii) 40. 52. 5-6. The tabula triumphalis of M. Aemilius Regillus, affixed to the temple of the Lares permarini dedicated in 179 BC but commemorating his victory over the Seleucid fleet at Myonnesus in 190. The authenticity of these texts, Livy’s sources, and the linguistic phenomena they contain are discussed. The chapter also tabulates a number of other passages with a claim to derive from the time of the events narrated.

In the Ab Urbe Condita, Livy reports that in 363 BC a dictator was appointed to revive the ancient ritual of the Capitoline nail in the midst of a plague (Livy 7.3.1–9). While recounting this historic episode, Livy provides a detailed description of an inscribed law marking this ritual that was located in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline.

Chapter 4 charts the Decameron’s rewritings of exemplary anecdotes by Roman historical authors. The young Boccaccio has been associated with Trecento vernacularizations of Livy, Ovid, and Valerius Maximus, and his early engagement with translation and his commitment to Italian literary culture are indisputable. This chapter investigates how novella 2.9’s revision of the episode of Lucretia’s suicide in Livy participates in larger debates about the nature of women and the usefulness of generalizations. It also examines Decameron 4.1 – which takes its details from the suicide of Sophonisba – to argue that in killing herself like her classical forerunners, Ghismunda attributes a closer analogy between her situation and theirs than is warranted. The end of the chapter concentrates on Day 10, dedicated to the virtue of magnanimity, especially tales 10.3, 10.6, and 10.8, which echo exempla from Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Doings and Sayings. Although all of this day’s stories seem straightforward narratives of magnificent deeds worthy of imitation, the tales slide inadvertently into ambiguity and parody, belying their ethical pretensions.

This chapter analyzes Livy’s narrative of the events of 207 BCE, when Roman officials addressed a pressing religious and military crisis by commissioning an innovative musical event – a Greek-style maiden procession with a hymn composed by Rome’s first known poet, Livius Andronicus. Livy’s account asks us to confront the question of how Roman musical and ritual traditions were created and remembered, by inviting the reader to witness a tradition in the very process of being invented. On the one hand, great emphasis is placed on how the hymn’s ritual actors created a collective memory of its success and incorporated it into the religious traditions of Rome. On the other, Livy refuses to record the hymn himself on the basis of its primitive aesthetics, with the paradoxical result that a significant document in the history of Roman music is simultaneously remembered and forgotten. Self-consciously aware of ritual song and narrative history as differently constituted repositories of collective memory, I propose, Livy draws attention to the processes by which his account of Rome’s early song culture shapes his reader’s musical memory.

Livy’s History is very interested in the way that societies are maintained by belief in a host of shared fictions. The Roman citizenship is Livy’s prime example of this process, as Rome keeps recreating the model of citizenship as more and more new people come into the Roman sphere. The fictive power of the citizenship allows it to be redescribed from generation to generation. The citizenship is not a matter of shared blood or of a shared place of birth; it is a corporate fiction that can in theory accommodate anyone as a member.

The chapter argues against recent attempts to analyse religious aspects of Latin literature without paying attention to the question of genre. History, antiquarianism, epic are all very different ways of representing the divine, and the specificity of each genre is crucial for understanding how the texts function.

This chapter examines the discursive role of plaustrum, first plotting out its reliable representation in Latin literary texts as the sturdy uehiculum par excellence, repeatedly defined as a functional tool for agricultural (and other) hauling. It then moves on to unpack the different versions of two crucial episodes in which the conveyance is represented delivering much more, for the Roman republic – even saving it from disaster: first, before the Gallic occupation of Rome after the battle of the Allia in 390 BCE, Albinius’ legendary lending of his plaustrum for the delivery of the very religious life of the city; and second, in 311 BCE, the dramatic walk-out of the tibicines, and their drugged recovery by means of plaustra. In particular, Ovid’s version of the tale in the Fasti serves as an entrée to the final section of the chapter, which investigates the deep-seated metapoetics of this clunkiest and lowest of Roman vehicles.

This chapter investigates the portrayal of carpentum and its prestigious relative, the pilentum, two special carriages sanctioned for use by Roman matrons but frequently portrayed as problematic or dangerous. Through an examination of several stories involving carpentum – most importantly that of Tullia, who famously drove over the corpse of her father, King Servius, in the carriage – it shows how this conveyance served to focalize Roman patriarchal anxieties surrounding women’s conflicting loyalties as daughters and wives. It moves on to analyze accounts of the prohibition of women’s privilege of using carpenta, the attempts of moralizing senators such as Cato the Elder to oppose the repeal of this ban, and the dramatic protest of the women themselves. A concluding section examines how its occasional, but conspicuous use by men is represented as effeminizing, and traces the recurring theme of hybridity in its depictions.

A counterpoint to Rome’s most powerful (and most proudly Roman) vehicle, essedum, is the subject this chapter. A brief introduction discusses another non-Roman battle car, the scythe-chariot, and the ways in which its portrayals can externalize onto Eastern enemies Roman currus’ dangers and violence. Essedum represents an alternate strategy of domestication. This war-chariot of the Britons, first encountered and described by Caesar during his British expedition, was subsequently appropriated as an exotic and fashionable means of getting around Rome and its environs. As the vehicle’s original associations fade through time, the conveyance becomes increasingly normalized for quick trips and even seems to have become a kind of light stagecoach for long-distance journeys. Still, as the chapter argues, essedum’s lingering identity as mobile spoils of war available for leisure use by elites allowed the vehicle to function as a safe, subordinate alternative to the pinnacle achievement represented by the triumph.

This paper explores the various roles Ennius plays as source and programmatic model in Livy’s Ab urbe condita, as a way of situating epic more fully within the range of models available to Roman historians. I address this complex issue here through the lens of citation practices. In the first section I discuss the uncharacteristically explicit quotation of Ennius in the eulogy of Fabius Cunctator and the consequent questions about the invisible intertextual networks that the quotation activates. In the second section I consider impersonal citations of the form fama est (vel sim.), focusing on the story of the Capitoline wolf, where Livy naturalizes Ennius within the dossier of sources with which he is working rather than pulling him out from the crowd. I conclude that Epic had a memorable and distinctive voice, and provided a language for speaking of Rome around and against which other genres could, and by necessity did, array themselves.

In this paper I use speeches taken over or adapted from speeches in Ennius’ Annals as a window onto the treatment of Ennius as a historical source and the attitudes of Roman prose writers to the representation and transmission of historical speech acts. I argue first that allusions to the content of speeches and the specific language of speakers in the Annals draw productively on Ennius’ cultural authority with or without the presumption of parallel episodes. Next, I consider the question of accuracy in relation to the citation of Ennius. Finally, I attempt to draw these two strands together through the Ennian speech in which Hannibal addresses his troops before one of the major battles of the second Punic War, as adapted by Cicero, Livy, and Silius Italicus, arguing that these allusions do not presume that the Ennian version offers a through line to what was really said, but rather incorporate the authoritative Ennian tradition in a self-conscious nod to the “culturally truest” account of the Roman past.