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Roman Republic, Year One

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

T. P. Wiseman
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Extract

The Romans knew that they had once been ruled by kings, and they believed, perhaps rightly, that the fall of the monarchy had taken place at what we would call the end of the sixth century B.C. The texts that tell us this – Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch, etc. – all depend on a historical tradition that can be traced back as far as the second half of the third century B.C., when the Roman literary genres of historical drama, historical epic, and prose historiography began. Before that, we do not know how the Romans conceived or recorded the memory of their own past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , April 1998 , pp. 19 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1998

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References

Notes

1. A fragment of a bucchero bowl from the Regia, , illustrated in Cambridge Ancient History VII.2 (ed. 2, Cambridge, 1989), 76, fig. 25Google Scholar; and the ‘Lapis Niger’ stele at the Volcanal (CIL I2 1 = ILLRP 3).

2. L. Cincius, quoted in Livy 7.3.5–7.

3. See Ovid, , Fasti 2.685, 851Google Scholar; Festus (Paulus) 347L; Plutarch, , Quaestiones Romanae 63Google Scholar (= Moralia 279D); Ausonius 7.24.13; Silvius, Polemius in CIL I2 p. 259Google Scholar = Inscr. Ital. XIII. 2 p. 265.

4. The main narrative sources for the first year of the Republic are Livy 2.1.7–8.9, Dionysius of Halicarnassus 5.1.2–19.5, and Plutarch, , Publicola 1.4–14.5Google Scholar. Up-to-date modern discussion in Cornell, T. J., The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 B.C.) (London, 1995), ch. 9 ‘The Beginnings of the Roman Republic'Google Scholar; cf. also Drummond, A. in CAH VII.2 (n. 1 above), 172–90Google Scholar. For a fascinating exploration of all the aspects of the Brutus legend, assuming (wrongly, in my view) its essential historicity, see Mastrocinque, A., Lucio Giunio Bruto: ricerche di storia, religione e diritto sulle origini della repubblica romana (Trento, 1988)Google Scholar.

5. ILLRP 309; Wachter, R., Altlateinischer Inschriften: sprachliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Documenten bis etwa 150 v. Chr. (Bern, 1987), 301–42Google Scholar.

6. Augustine, , City of God 3.16 (Penguin translation)Google Scholar.

7. Illustrated in CAH VII.2 (n. 1 above), 97, fig. 33; see Stibbe, C. M. et al. , Lapis Satricanus: Archaeological, Epigraphical, Linguistic and Historical Aspects of the New Inscription from Satricum (The Hague, 1980)Google Scholar.

8. Op. cit. (n. 4 above), 217.

9. Ibid. 217–18, 439.

10. Ibid. 13 (my emphasis).

11. See Journal of Roman Archaeology 9 (1996), 313–15 for arguments againstGoogle Scholar. Stephen Oakley, in the introduction to his magnificent new commentary on Livy 6–10 (Oxford, 1997), defends a position close to Cornell's: ‘it is very hard to see whence Pictor and later annalists drew the basic framework of their narrative, if there were no state records which were in some sense official’ (24); the Romans' belief that the annales maximi went back to the beginning of the Republic ‘does not amount to proof that the chronicle was already in existence in the fifth century or before, but it would be surprising in a partly hellenized and partly literate society if the state did not keep records of some kind’ (25). I think that begs a big question about the nature of ‘the state’; and Oakley's general treatment of archival evidence seems to me more relevant to the fourth century (the period covered by Books 6–10) than the fifth or late sixth.

12. Op. cit. (n. 4 above), 11.

13. Cf. Oakley, , op. cit., 102Google Scholar: ‘accepting annalistic information unless it is proved to be wrong [is] an absurd procedure given the inadequacies of our sources’.