Literary Texts and the Roman Historian

David Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134962327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Literary Texts and the Roman Historian looks at literary texts from the Roman Empire which depict actual events. It examines the ways in which these texts were created, disseminated and read.
Beside covering the major Roman historical authors such as Livy and Tacitus, he also considers the contributions of authors in other genres like:
* Cicero
* Lucian
* Aulus Gellius.
Literary Texts and the Roman Historian provides an accessible and concise introduction to the complexities of Roman historiography.

Notes

Introduction

1 D.S.Potter, Prophets and Emperors: Human and Divine Authority from Augustus to Theodosius (Cambridge, MA, 1994).

I
Definitions

1 C.L.Becker, “Everyman his own historian,” AHR 37 (1932), 223; 226 for both definitions, and discussion of the problems with both.

2 OED s.v. “history”; another definition offered in the same dictionary is “the study of past events, especially of human affairs.”

3 The formulation here is similar to that in L.Stone, “History and postmodernism III,” Past and Present 135 (1992), 189–90. The key study upon which Stone bases his remarks is G.M Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990), 59–87. repr. in K.Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), 180–203. A slightly earlier discussion of these problems, with a similar perspective is offered by E.Hobsbawm, “Escaped slaves of the forest,” New York Review of Books 6 (December, 1990), 46–8, repr. as “Postmodernism in the forest,” in E.Hobsbawm, On History (New York, 1997), 192–200. For a broad perspective on these issues, see A.D.Momigliano, “Considerations on history in an age of ideologies,” The American Scholar 51 (1982), 495–507, repr. in A.D.Momigliano, Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1984), 253–69.

4 P.Joyce, “History and post-modernism I,” and C.Kelley, “History and post-modernism II,” Past and Present 133 (1991), 204–13. Joyce seeks support from a then unpublished essay by G.Eley, that has now appeared as “Is all the world a text? From social history to the history of society two decades later,” in T.McDonald (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 193–244. In the relevant section of what is a valuable survey (pp. 207–16), Eley recommends “intermediate course” between text and reality, a position rather similar to that of Stone. For a more radical critique, that places the historian in control of the reality that the historian has decided to narrate, see R.Barthes, “The discourse of history,” in R.Howard (ed.) The Rustle of Language (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 127–40; N.Dirks, “Is vice versa? Historical anthropologies and anthropological histories,” in T.McDonald (ed.) The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 17–41; for a general survey, see R.T.Vann, “Turning linguistic: history and theory and History and Theory, 1960–1975” in F.Ankersmit and H.Kellner, A New Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1995), 40–69.

5 C.Geertz, “Blurred genres: the refiguration of social thought,” in C.Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 30, for the influence of linguistic theory. On various forms of social and cultural history, see the lucid discussion in J.Appleby, L.Hunt and M.Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), 225–31 though see also the critique of the ideological tendency therein provided by M.Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York, 1997), 47–8.

6 For this problem see, for instance, F.Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, 1991), xiii: “for the name itself—postmodernism—has crystallized a host of hitherto independent developments which, thus named, prove to have contained the thing itself in embryo and now step forward richly to document its multiple genealogies.” M.Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd edn, (Athens, GA., 1993), 1–4 points out that postmodernism may be described as a series of critiques of “the human subject,” “historicism,” “meaning” and “philosophy.” For another lucid discussion of the evolution of postmodern approaches see L.Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford, 1996), 13–19.

7 Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 201. For earlier debates in the context of the North American historical profession, see below.

8 Joyce, “History and post-modernism I,” 208; Kelley, “History and postmodernism II,” 210. See also Stone, “History and post-modernism III,” 135; G.Spiegel, “History and post-modernism IV,” Past and Present 135 (1992), 197–8. See also J.Passmore, “Narratives and events,” History and Theory 26 (1987), 71, drawing the distinction between “narrative” as a linguistic mode and “event” as an “ontological” mode. K.Jenkins, On “What is History? From Can and Elton to Rorty and White (London, 1995), 29–36, likewise admits that no postmodernist construction denies the existence of reality, but fails to see the importance of the admission to his own discussion. Pace Jenkins, it is unreasonable to assert that the concern is primarily to do with the future of peer review (p. 30), his evident unfamiliarity with studies of the past using material culture alone leads him to suggest that the past has only ever been accessed through textuality. The counter-argument to this point is, of course, that the material culture passes through the filter of textuality in the discourse of the past, but that is to confuse the vehicle of contextualization with the object being contextualized. Jenkins’s fourth point (p. 31–3), that textualism calls attention to the “textual conditions” under which all historical work is done and all historical knowledge is produced” (his italics), would call forth few objections, and is stated by Stone with the qualification that “all historical knowledge” is not produced in this way. The issue is rather the way that the historian approaches “historical knowledge.”

9 See for instance the responses to D.Harlan, “Intellectual history and the return of literature,” AHR 94 (1989), 581–609 by D.A.Hollinger, “The return of the prodigal: the persistence of historical knowing,” AHR 94 (1989), 610–21 (implying that Harlan’s critique is a threat to all forms of monographic history, which it plainly is not, note particularly D.Harlan, “Reply to David Hollinger,” AHR 94 (1989), 625 specifically pointing out that he is talking about intellectual history). The same issue informs J. Appleby, “One good turn deserves another: moving beyond the linguistic; a response to David Harlan,” AHR 94 (1989), 1326–32, who treats Harlan as if his discussion ranged well beyond the one branch of historiography. For a very useful discussion of the relationship between text and “history” in the New Historicism, see K.Ryan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London, 1996), ix–xviii, especially p. xiii.

10 See Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity especially pp. 14–37. For a less nuanced view, see K.Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (New York, 1997), passim. Most recently, see C.B.McCullagh, The Truth of History (London, 1998), 13–61.

11 J.-F.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN, 1984); see also J.F.Lyotard, “Futility in Revolution” in R.Harvey and M.S.Roberts (eds) Toward the Postmodern, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993), 91.

12 See also J.Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge, 1997), 258–66. Marincola’s volume appeared after the present text was largely complete. I have taken account of his excellent and well-informed discussions as far as is possible under the circumstances.

13 C.Geertz, “Commonsense as a cultural system,” in C.Geertz, Local Knowledge, 73–93. For the importance of Geertz’s work to the New Historicism, see Ryan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, 1–4.

14 Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism 2nd edn, 59 for a lucid summary.

15 Chantraine, Dictionaire etymologique sv. . E.Floyd, “The sources of Greek “istor,” “judge,” “witness”,” Glotta 68 (1990), 157–66, suggests a different etymology, from, “to sit.” This view has not gained assent.

16 W.R.Connor, “The histor in history,” Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), 4. See also the stress on the investigative role of the historian in P.S.Derow, “Historical explanation; Polybius and his predecessors,” in S.Hornblower (ed.) Greek Historiograph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Definitions
• Texts
• Scholarship
• Presentation
• Epilogue: the discourse of dominance?
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index