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On Historical Fragments and Epitomes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

P. A. Brunt
P. A. Brunt
Affiliation:
Brasenose College, Oxford
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Extract

The modern historian of Greece and Rome often depends for his information on writings whose reliability is no greater, though often much less, than that of the histories, now lost in whole or part, which their authors followed. The quality of these histories can sometimes be detected from the internal evidence of the extant derivative accounts, even when we cannot name the historians with any certainty.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , December 1980 , pp. 477 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1980

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References

2 RE 5.669 f.; 679.

3 Bibiotheke, cod. 70. See the Budé edition by R. Henry.

4 Jane Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia (shortly to appear). Schwartz had discerned the influence of the original writers on Diodorus' style, though not his diction, RE 5.669.

5 Peter, HRR 2. LXXXVII; LXXXXIIII for the phrase and rare verb .

6 Hardy, E. G., Studies in Roman History, First Series 1910, pp. 317 ff. conveniently collected the verbal parallels. Tacitus transposed the second epigram, cf. Plut., Galba 4.4.Google Scholar

7 Walsh, P. G., Livy, 1961, Chs. VII f., esp. pp. 186–90; 193 f.; 205–7; 209–12.Google Scholar

8 Thus in his Aristides he cites thirteen authors, chiefly philosophers; it should be obvious that most of these were not his ‘sources’, and that he did not turn up papyru: rolls to verify his references.

9 For many examples see Plut., de malign. Herodoti, passim. Cf. Them. 25.2 f. with Thuc. 1.137; Mor. 1107A with Hdt. 7.46.

10 On his probably similar treatment of Chrysippus see Cherniss, H., Loeb edn. of Moralia 13.2, 401–6.Google Scholar

11 e.g. 856E; 860CD; 863C. In Plutarch's view an author is malicious if he merely repeats a ‘calumnious’ story (856C) or even tempers praise with blame (856D); a historian must either set down the truth as he sees it, or in uncertainty record only the most credible version (855EF). Similarly Polybius reproaches Theopompus for describing the failings of Philip II and his hetairoi, when he himself had said that Europe had never before produced so great a man (8. 10–13). Modern detraction of Tacitus follows the same line, and often indulges in misrepresentation of the author as malignant as Plutarch's distortions of Herodotus.

12 869 f. Contrast Herodotus 8.56–63; 74–6.

13 I would go rather further than Walbank, F. H., JRS 1962, 1 ff. Cf. remarks in my forthcoming article, Cicero and Historiography, in Miscellanea Manni, and on Callisthenes my Loeb edn. of Arrian, Anabasis 1., Appendix III.Google Scholar

14 Compare Athen. 231d; 436; 146ab with Herodotus 2.151; 6.84 (cf. 75), and 7.118–20 respectively.

15 Jacoby comments on 115 T 225 that ‘the fragment is important for the assessment of Athenaeus’ accuracy in excerpting, since the concluding part [not in Polybius] shows how Theopompus goes off into protests of moral indignation and finally disregards all measure.' But we should not infer that Athenaeus is reliable because he preserves what we suppose to be a characteristic of Theopompus: it is the general reliability of Athenaeus determined by other criteria (and not by his accord with Polybius, whose own exactitude in transcription is not testable elsewhere) that should make us confident that Theopompus wrote in this manner.

16 See the apparatus in Roos's edn. Aelianus: RE 1.482. For full discussion of Arrian and his sources see the second volume of my forthcoming Loeb edition of the Anabasis and Indica.

17 Anab. 6.28.6, cf. 1.12 for his literary pretensions.

18 Anab. 7.20.9 f. = Ind. 32.9–12.

19 Ind. 37.3, cf. Strabo 15.3.5–7.

29 Thus Strabo 15.1.12 and Arrian, Anab. 5.5.5 Bite various authorities on the size of India in identical order, evidently from Eratosthenes. Cf. RE 4A.98 ff. (W. My).

21 The apparatus in Hude's edition also shows how frequently Thucydides was quoted elsewhere.

22 Excerpta bistoriae iussu imperatoris Constantini Porphyrogeniti confecta, ed. Boissevain, de Boor, and Büttner-Wobst; 1903–6; the apparatus shows how faithful the excerpts are to extant texts, though it is also necessary to refer to the context of the excerpts, to see how far they may be misleading without it. Preface: vol. 1, 1 f. Embassies of foreign peoples include some not sent to Rome (e.g. Polyb. 4.30, 34 and 36). See also Moore, J. M., The Manuscript Tradition of Polybius, pp. 129 ff. and generally Krumbacher, Gesch. der byzant. Lit., p. 258.Google Scholar

23 See the Prolegomena, p. XL in the edition of Arrian's Anabasis by Roos and Wirth and the apparatus.

24 Photius, Cod. 238, 241, 244, 245. Henry's apparatus notes divergencies from our texts. Cf. also the Loeb edn. of Diodorus vol. xi, ed. F. R. Walton, pp. 320–2; 336; 370–2; 444–6; vol. xii, 56–70; 14852.

25 Numerous ‘fragments’ come from scholia on poets.

26 Cf. my article cited in n. 14. Whatever his predilection for marvels (Jacoby 76 T 7 f.) and desire to please his readers with vivid effects (F 1), he was for Cicero ‘in historia diligens’, and his Hellenic history, at least 23 books long (F 15; the book number is congruent with 13 f.), cannot have been filled simply or chiefly with the trivia of most of the ‘fragments’.

27 The Lost Histories of Alexander the Great, pp. 50 ff.

28 I hope that any doubts will be removed by my edition of Arrian (n. 16).

29 Jacoby, RE 11, 630 f. See most recently J. R. Hamilton in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. K. H. Kinzl (1977), pp. 126 ff.

30 Schwartz, RE 5.690 f. For Posidonius' history see esp. Strasburger, H., JRS 1965, 40 ff.Google Scholar

31 The fragments hardly illustrate, however, what I see no reason to doubt, Theopompus' attempt to unveil the secrets of political actions (Dion. Hal. ad Pomp. 6.7), i.e. they are not at all representative.

32 Edition of Cassius Dio I, pp. LIV ff.

33 Cod. 60; 90 f. Photius' summary of Josephus, BJ, in Cod. 47 is just as defective. Note that his summary of Memnon (Jacoby 434) has some two pages in Jacoby's text for Books 9–10, three for 11–12, seven for 14, ten for 15, and eight for 16. In my judgement its reliability will be roughly proportionate to length.

34 The errors are perhaps more explicable if the author never read Livy, but a somewhat fuller epitome, like that represented by the Oxyrhynchus fragments.

35 So too Justin's summary of Trogus preserves the book division, but can vary in fullness from 675 lines in Seel's edition for Book 5 to 31 for Book 40.

36 I cite the text, reprinted in Boissevain's edition of Dio, 3.480 ff., in the pagination of Dindorf (D.) or Robertus Stephanus (R.St.), given in the margin by Boissevain together with references to the relevant passages of Dio.

37 Even here his excerpts or summaries do not do justice to Dio; cf. for instance 5.1–20 D. with Dio 36.44–9.

38 It may then be due to Xiphilinus, not Dio, that the destruction of Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus in 66, and of an unnamed person, evidently Salvidienus Orfitus (171, 23 R.St. cf. Suet. Nero 37), whose death lies beyond the period covered in the extant part of Tacitus, and probably in 67, is sandwiched into the account of Piso's conspiracy in 65 (170, 4 ff. R.St. = Dio 62.24–7).

39 He explains that his work will be useful for busy men: ‘longum est enim singula et sparsa per immensum corpus historiarum persequi; et hi, qui notabilia excerpserunt, ipso velut acervo rerum confuderunt legentem’; he does not seek to be exhaustive: ‘quis enim ad percensenda omnia monuments, quae utraque lingua tradita stint, sufficiat?’ (praef); his collection was clearly not the first of its kind and may be largely derivative from an earlier compilation.

40 But see Loeb edn. of Plut. vol. xv (ed. F. H. Sandbach), pp. 324 ff. 172 D. F. C. Babbitt (Loeb edn., vol. iii.3 ff.) regards the work as authentic.

41 Random instances: 1.28.9–16; 38.1821; 46.10 f.

42 e.g. 2.29 (Pompey, cf. 30.3; 33.3; 53); 35 (Cato, cf. 45.4 f., 49.3); 41–3 (Caesar); 45.1 (Clodius); 46.2 (Crassus); 66 (Cicero); 68.1 (Caelius); 72 (Brutus and Cassius); 73 (Sextus Pompey).

43 e.g. 2.4.5; 7.2; 14.1; 22; 30.1; 53.2; 64.1; 70.2–5.

44 Like modern historians of the ancient world Livy evidently wrote at more length where he had more material. Of the years 99–92, covered in one book, there was little to say.

45 Schwartz RE 7.15 noted some similar cases.

46 Jacoby 137 F 6; Book 12 related to the Indian campaigns. Other book-references, notably in F 4 and 5, give reciprocal confirmation for the scale of the work.

47 Thus Appian's very detailed account of events from Caesar's death in BC, Books 3–5, though not free of mistakes, is con-finned over and over again by Cicero's letters and speeches.

48 For instance the details Appian gives of Drusus' judiciary bill (BC 1.35) should not be taken as invention but as confirmation that his account is correct (cf. de vir. ill. 66); the truth is incompletely given in the brief allusions of Vell. 2.13 and is garbled in Per. Livy 71 (compare the similar errors in Per. 60 and 97; in each case the epitomator misrepresented the complexity of the measure he purported to describe). Of course Appian's own account of Drusus is excessively brief, and therefore obscure and not entirely reliable.