3 - Historians without history: Against Roman historiography

Summary

“In history, as in life critically considered, truth rests not on possibility nor on plausibility but on probability.” Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (3rd edn, 1977: 133) / This essay weeps at the intellectual motion this volume exemplifies: the triumph of what now masquerades as “Roman historiography,” the academic study of the ancient Roman historians as a discipline sundered from Roman history, the study of what happened in ancient Rome and why. Its narrower target is the species of scholarship about the Latin historians arising in T. P. Wiseman's Clio's Cosmetics of 1979 and A. J.Woodman's Rhetoric in Classical Historiography of 1988. This writing, grown considerable in the late 1990s and the current decade as the founders' stars attracted satellites, studies the Latin historians as literature. In the hunt for the historian's artistry or ideas, his concern with historical material - that body of “what happened in the past” that the historian was trying to convey - is either argued away or passed over. The Latin historian is constrained to become - depending on modern whimsy - a rhetorician, a dramatist, a novelist, or, in the late-summer bloom of academic narcissism, a postmodern literary critic. What the Latin historian is not allowed to be is what he thought he chiefly was: a teller of true tales about the past.