by David Grant
A plate titled ‘View of Hissarlik from the North. Frontispiece. After the Excavations. From the publication Troy and Its Remains. A Narrative of Researches and discoveries made on the site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain. By Dr. Henry Schliemann. Translated with the author’s sanction. Edited by Philip Smith, B.A., Author of History of the Ancient World and of the Student’s Ancient History of the East. With map, plans, views, and cuts, representing 500 objects of antiquity discovered on the site.’ Printed 1875.
THE NON-PRESERVING ASPIC OF ROME
The early accounts of Alexander’s contemporaries, and those sponsored by their courts, had to straddle the chaos of a Hellenistic world that saw the kingdoms of the Diadokhoi and their epigonoi absorbed by the expanding Roman super-state. The bloody process swallowed much of the literary output of the age so that the century before Polybius remains a ‘twilight zone’;10 for almost seventy years after the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE there is no surviving continuous coherent account, Justin’s severe epitome aside. Polybius himself stoically reflected in the opening of his book that the ‘… writings of the… “numerous historians”… whom the kings had engaged to recount their exploits have fallen into oblivion.’11
Diodorus, whose Bibliotheke unfortunately survives in tattered fragments for the post-Ipsus period and without the useful chapter proektheses (synopses or lists of the detail covered), also mourned the poorly documented years with a proem that underlined his own ‘universal’ efforts:
And of those who have undertaken this account of all peoples, not one has continued his history beyond the Macedonian period. For while some have closed their accounts with the deeds of Philip, others with those of Alexander, and some with the Diadokhoi or the Epigonoi, yet, despite the number and importance of the events subsequent to these and extending even to our own lifetime which have been left neglected, no historian has essayed to treat of them within the compass of a single narrative, because of the magnitude of the undertaking.12
The literary wasteland gives the superficial impression that in Rome’s sphere of influence, too, there was lack of interest in overseas history through this era, which, as McGing puts it, was neither ‘proper Greek history, which lost its appeal after Alexander, nor yet the vital part of proper Roman history…’13 But Rome had been establishing herself over the twelve-city confederation of the intensely pious Etruscans and other neighbouring tribes, which was clearly the early priority, and the war against Carthage (Qart-hadasht, ‘New City’ in Punic, Karthago to the Greeks) occupied its attention for the latter part of the period. Any trade delegations, government embassies, treaties and skirmishes that did take place between Rome and the Macedonian-dynasty-dominated Hellenic East in the post-Ipsus years were simply lost with intervening literature.
The narratives that did once knit the two worlds together once came from the now-lost works of Phylarchus (ca. 280-215 BCE), Aratus (ca. 271-213 BCE), Philochorus (ca. 340-261 BCE), Diyllus (ca. 340-280 BCE), and Demochares the nephew of Demosthenes, among a clutch of other names that have come to us through fragments. They included Hieronymus’ lost account which ended sometime soon after 272 BCE, and the non-extant history of Timaeus written in fifty years of exile in Athens (care of Agathocles the Sicilian tyrant) which closed at 264 BCE, the year Rome invaded his homeland, Sicily (he was from Tauromenium, modern Taormina). Diodorus’ fragmentary Bibliotheke had hardly made any mention of Rome until this point, which, significantly, marked the beginning of its control of his place of birth in Sicily too.
But it was Polybius, whose own account commenced in 264 BCE with the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage, who saw first-hand the final fall of the former Macedonian-governed empire to the Roman legions, though he failed (in what text survives at least) to acknowledge Hieronymus as a source of the post-Alexander years, which, as one scholar notes, is remarkable given their parallel themes: the rapid expansion of superpowers that had risen from obscurity, and with the one subsuming the other.14 Possibly influenced by his ‘tour of duty’ with Scipio, Polybius, who defined his work as pragmatike historia,15 believed the recording of history meant subordinating ‘the topics of genealogies and myths… the planting of colonies, foundations of cities and their ties of kinship’ to the greater significance of the ‘nations, cities and rulers’.16 So imperial 5th century BCE Athens, for example, was, in Momigliano’s view, ‘a distant unattractively democratic world’ to him, only salvaged, for a while, by enlightened leaders like Themistocles.17
Clearly familiar with (and influenced by) Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, and highly opinionated on what ‘history’ should be, Polybius contended that monographs were inferior to his ‘universal’ approach. This was supposed to highlight that the earlier Greek accounts, especially those of the 4th century BCE, leaned to ‘the great leader theory of history’, focusing on single individuals and so revealing just dissected parts when the ‘whole body’ needed a post-mortem.18 The Greek historians had placed war, with its victors, the vanquished, and the proponents of war, centre-stage in their perception of epochal change. His criticism of Theopompus’ Philippika, now ‘double abbreviated’ through first Trogus and then his epitomiser Justin, brought the point home: ‘It would have been much more dignified and more just to include Philip’s achievements in the history of Greece, than to include the history of Greece in that of Philip.’19
Polybius began his main ‘holistic’ narrative of affairs in the Mediterranean Basin, in which he recorded Rome’s contact with the Diadokhoi kingdoms to the East, in the 140th Olympiad, so 221/220 BCE,20 the year Philip V ascended the throne of Macedonia and Hannibal Barca was appointed commander of Carthaginian forces in Spain. Unsurprisingly, he never actually named the Alexander-era historians at all, save Callisthenes and in a somewhat disparaging manner;21 his fourteen digressions on Alexander’s behaviour (besides five passing references), which offered little unique material, provided him little more than a somewhat stoical mixed review.22 Nevertheless, these monographs, and Theopompus’ unique character focus, provided Polybius with the anonymous essences he slotted into his ‘entire network’ with its many ‘interdependences’.23
True to his polemical literary ancestral roots, Polybius didn’t shy away from attacking ‘competing’ historians, Phylarchus, Philinus and Fabius Pictor, for example, who covered the wars with Carthage.24 He was also highly critical of his forerunner, the long-lived Timaeus (Lucian claimed he lived to age 96), whose Olympiad reckoning system Polybius nevertheless adopted to calibrate his own chapters which commenced at the point at which Timaeus had closed his (the 129th Olympiad).25 His loud invective against Timaeus, ironically, preserved much of the detail he had set out to destroy, and yet Polybius’ charity ‘was conspicuously lacking’, for he also proposed: ‘We should not find fault with writers for their omissions and mistakes, and should praise and admire them, considering the times they lived in, for having ascertained something on the subject and advanced our knowledge.’26
Timaeus’ account, rich in detail of colonies, city foundations and genealogies (and highlighted coincidences – all the detail Polybius ‘subordinated’), was probably worthy of a place on the shelves,27 but the exiled Sicilian had himself famously criticised everyone and gained the title epitimaeus, ‘slanderer’, along the way; he must have invited additional criticism when he spuriously dated Rome’s founding to 814/813 BCE (the thirty-eighth year before the first Olympiad) to synchronise it to Carthage’s in order to imply the cities enjoyed twinned fates.28 Possibly despising Timaeus for his self-declared lack of military experience, Polybius’ summing up did elucidate the principal problem of the day: Timaeus ‘… was like a man in a school of rhetoric, attempting to speak on a given subject, and show off his rhetorical power, but gives no report of what was actually spoken.’29
But Polybius didn’t remain faithful to his own critiques; he is branded a prejudiced eyewitness to the calamitous events of his day, and the frequent reconstituted speeches we read in Polybius were the produc
t of his ‘subjective operations’. His directionless last ten books read like personal memoirs ‘focused on himself’ in order to ‘write himself into Roman history’.30 In the opinion of one Greek scholar, Polybius could be ‘… as unreliable as the worst sensationalist scandalmonger historians of antiquity, provided that he is out of sympathy with his subject matter.’31 If pragmatic his history was, at times holistic it was not in unravelling events. Yet within Polybius’ focus on contemporary affairs, his assessment of constitutions articulated the notion of anakyklosis; this presented the theory, and even the prediction, of the evolution of governance through time.
Building on the discourses of Plato and Aristotle, as well as the sequence of empires described by Herodotus, his system of cyclical inevitability saw the rise and fall of city-states and their empires from ‘primitive’ monarchy through to (developed) monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, ochlocracy (mob rule), and finally back to the beginning of the cycle with some form of monarchy.32 Ironically, Polybius considered Athens at her prime as verging on ochlocracy (Plato might have agreed, for its demokratia had overseen the death of his friend and mentor, Socrates). He further believed that Rome’s republican system of government, a ‘mixed constitution’ (a hybrid that contained elements of a monarchy, aristocracy and democracy), had broken the chain, and though he was not suggesting that this would prevent its natural decline, signs of which he pointed to even in his day, Rome was, in fact, to become a fine example of the politeion anakyklosis.33
As part of his perception of change, Polybius expressed an appreciation of what we might term ‘globalism’:
Now in earlier times the world’s history had consisted so to speak of a series of unrelated episodes, the origins and results of which being as widely separated as their localities, but from this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end.34
Whilst he credited Alexander’s Asian empire with opening up the East, for him, this ‘organic whole’ now meant ‘Rome’ in her stellar fifty-three-year rise to rule the then-known world, ‘Fortune’s showpiece’ as he described it.35 Whether he was truly in awe of Rome and her conquests, or simply disdainful of her sway over Greece, we may never know, but (indirect) vexatious references we see in his books suggest the Romans were considered barbaroi, amongst the barbarian tribes.36
The pre-Polybian ‘twilight zone’ had its sequel, however, when ‘an even more vexatious twilight descends’ on Hellenistic history after Polybius passed.37 Although homebred Roman historians were spurred into action after the Second Punic War (or ‘Hannibalic War’, 218-201 BCE), they focused on the progress of the mother city through the Annales Maximi and not on gathering in the detail of the broader Hellenistic story.38 But Rome’s early history commenced on shaky ground. The invasion by Gauls in 390 BCE and the fire that followed it left much of the city and its records in ruins. The vacuum let in falsehoods which made their way sometimes innocently, sometimes deliberately, into its founding story. Good examples of the latter are the formative speeches in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita Libri, literally Chapters from the Founding of the City, better known today as The Early History of Rome.39
In his Lectures on The Philosophy of History, first published in 1837, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) termed this a ‘reflective history’ (as opposed to ‘original’ or ‘philosophic’ history), noting Livy ‘… puts into the mouths of the old Roman kings, consuls and generals, such orations as would be delivered by an accomplished advocate of the Livian era, and which strikingly contrast with the genuine traditions of Roman antiquity.’40 It reminds us that narrative history is a personal philosophy of the past and will always be a ‘child of its time’.41 In an attempt to justify his dialogue with the past and even a republic he did not know, Livy, who ‘praised and plundered’ Polybius’ books along the way, explained that: ‘By intermingling human actions with divine they may confer a more august dignity on the origins of states.’42 He nevertheless admitted the challenge he faced:
The traditions of what happened prior to the foundation of the City or whilst it was being built, are more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian… The subject matter is enveloped in obscurity; partly from its great antiquity, like remote objects which are hardly discernible through the vastness of the distance; partly owing to the fact that written records, which form the only trustworthy memorials of events, were in those times few and scanty, and even what did exist in the pontifical commentaries and public and private archives nearly all perished in the conflagration of the City.43
Macaulay agreed that the chronicles to which Livy, amongst others, had access were filled with ‘… battles that were never fought, and Consuls that were never inaugurated… such, or nearly such, appears to have been the process by which the lost ballad-poetry of Rome was transformed into history. There was an earlier Latin literature, a literature truly Latin, which has wholly perished, which had indeed almost wholly perished long before those whom we are in the habit of regarding as the greatest Latin writers were born.’44
The earlier historians of Rome had more often than not appeared on the fasti, the list of city magistrates. These were the wealthy elite, a point that supports the contention by Malthus’ 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population that ‘… the histories of mankind that we possess are – in general – histories only of the higher classes’, though the unfortunate woes of those below are inevitably exposed in passing.45 If the accounts of the past do indeed revolve around the higher social strata, then historians have a dilemma, for: ‘the upper current of society presents no criterion by which we can judge the direction in which the undercurrent flows.’ So the perfect historian, according to Macaulay, is one who ‘… shows us the court, the camp, and the senate. But he shows us also the nation…’ so that ‘… many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner.’46 But they were few and far between. As far as Ammianus Marcellinus’ retrospective view was concerned, the deeds of the Roman plebeian were in any case ‘… nothing except riots and taverns and other similar vulgarities… it prevents anything memorable or serious from being done in Rome.’47 Perhaps Marcellinus, himself a soldier in imperial service, should have questioned why there were riots in the first place, for he might have revealed a cause of the empire’s steady decline.48
These early republican historians, nevertheless, had advantages the later annalists did not: before imperial edicts closed them to public eyes, public records provided a first-hand account of events, for the Annales Maximi of the Pontifex Maximus, the Commentarii of the censors, and the Libri Augurales too had all been available to consult.49 One of the outcomes was the avowed later use of the so-called Libri Lintei, Linen Rolls supposedly kept in the Temple of Juno Moneta, a doubtful documentary source supposedly consulted by the historian Licinius Macer (died 66 BCE) when nothing else was at hand.50
But Rome needed a heroic start in ink, and lacking the pedigree of the great cities of Greece, Augustus finally commissioned a founding epic from Virgil in the style of Ennius (who wrote in the hexameters of Homer) and Naevius (ca. 270-201 BCE). The result was the Aeneid which firmly root-grafted a Roman legendary past to Homer’s heroes of Troy, a heritage reinforced in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, also written in Augustus’ reign.51 According to Timaeus, the sacrifice of the October Horse at the Campus Martius in Rome was a commemoration of the Trojan Horse itself.52
The Mykonos Vase: a decorated storage container, pithos, and the earliest object known to depict the Trojan Horse from Homer’s Iliad though the warriors wear the panoply of the later hoplite age. Found on the island of Mykonos in 1961 it dates to ca. 670 BCE and it resides today in the island’s archaeological museum.
By the time the private Roman collectors who were interested in Greek and Macedonian affairs got their hands on the p
apyri containing the earlier accounts, much had already decrepitated. These antique seeds, rotting on a classical literary compost heap, did however fertilise new Roman rootstock, and in that grafted form the genes of some of them survived. Classicus scriptor, non proletarius, an expression first seen in Aulus Gellius’ 2nd century Attic Nights (social standing was being linked to the quality of writing in the phrase) came to represent the works of a distinguished group of authors (writing in Greek or Latin) who were considered meritorious in Rome, and it was those that were destined to be copied, distributed and preserved; or, in the case of the Alexander biographies, given a Roman overhaul.53
In Macaulay’s view, ‘new’ Roman output could not compare to Greek output of ‘old’ and he was scathing about what emerged after:
The Latin literature which has come down to us… consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin philosophy was borrowed, without alteration, from the Portico and the Academy; and the great Latin orators constantly proposed to themselves as patterns the speeches of Demosthenes and Lysias.54
Macaulay additionally reminded us that for ‘modern’ scholars ‘… the centuries which separated Plutarch from Thucydides seemed as nothing to men who lived in an age so remote.’55 Temporal gulfs aside, in the case of the Greeks and Romans it was their literary output, perhaps above anything else, that gave them the sense of self-identity that the barbarians pressing on their borders always lacked. So the wholesale loss of Greek and Hellenistic literature must have been incomprehensible to the scholars of the stalwart Roman Empire.