Kings and Consuls. James Richardson

the reliability of the literary evidence.⁸ Indeed, for some, it seems that it is simply inconceivable that ancient accounts of Rome’s early history are altogether unreliable, so much so in fact that it has even been asserted that the burden of proof lies with those who doubt the historicity of those accounts.⁹ The problem is, the proof exists, but those who believe in the reliability of the evidence simply dismiss it or otherwise seek to explain it away.

Since his work has been lost, no one today knows for sure where Fabius Pictor got his material or even what material he used. But for those who maintain that ancient accounts of Rome’s early history are broadly reliable, it simply follows that Pictor must have had access to good evidence. It is possible, moreover, to identify some of his potential sources: he could, it seems, have consulted family records, state documents and archives made ←4 | 5→by priestly colleges, the pontifical in particular.¹⁰ The very nature of the material sounds reassuring: official, serious and safe (but no doubt for that reason, anachronistic, although the early existence of such material is regularly taken for granted). And since Pictor was an historian, it apparently follows that he must have been consistently engaged in an activity that – while admittedly different in many respects – was fundamentally the same as that of a modern historian, at least one concerned primarily with the military and political history of Rome. That assumption is implicit in the very question of his sources.

One serious difficulty with this view is the fact that the Romans themselves were aware that extremely few documents – some laws and a few treaties only – had survived from early times. They explained these circumstances with the story that Rome had been sacked by the Gauls in the early fourth century bc.¹¹ For many years, this was a problem with which modern historians also had to contend. After all, if ancient accounts of Rome’s early history are reliable, then Rome must have been thoroughly burnt by the Gauls.¹² And if the city and the documents in it had been destroyed, how could anyone at Rome have known anything about Rome’s early history?

The Roman account of the destruction of Rome was long seen as necessitating a deeply sceptical reaction to the literary evidence for early Rome, although those who wanted to have faith in the evidence certainly sought ways to get around what was for them an inconvenient problem.¹³ It has, however, since been discovered that there is no archaeological evidence ←5 | 6→for widespread destruction and so the story of the sack of Rome has been happily dismissed, along with all the implications of it for the historical record.¹⁴ Documentary evidence could have survived after all and so Roman accounts of Rome’s early history can, it seems, be taken as broadly reliable. That position is already a stretch, and not only because it involves a non sequitur. It is also based on the assumption (one made by the Romans themselves but clearly anachronistically) that documents had been made in archaic times in the first place. It is likely that the story of the loss of records was invented to explain the absence of records; after all, if such documents had actually existed, their absence would not have required an explanation. But that general absence is probably just what should be expected in an essentially oral society, as archaic Rome was. As for the production of anything along the lines of ‘state’ or ‘public’ records, since that requires not only the existence of a state, but also of a state able and concerned to produce such material, the very absence of documents is potentially significant evidence in its own right. It should not be argued away, and especially not on the basis of some belief (whether ancient or modern) that such material simply must have existed.

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      There is a certain irony in the fact that the solution to what was undoubtedly the single biggest problem for the study of early Rome was the discovery that the Gauls had not destroyed the city after all. The historicity of what the Romans had to say about early Rome had been saved, apparently, because the archaeological evidence had disproved the historicity of one of the things the Romans had to say about early Rome. With the unwanted story safely out of the way, all the rest of what the Romans said suddenly had the potential to be useful evidence for what had actually happened. The objection is obvious: if one story – and one story long considered to be sound – should have been invented, then why not others or even, for that matter, the rest? (Part of the answer to that question, no doubt, is that the rest is not quite so inconvenient.)

The Roman historian Livy certainly drew attention to problems in his sources. Some of these problems are very serious indeed. Livy complained about inconsistencies in the lists of magistrates;¹⁵ he lamented that funeral speeches and the like contained mendacious material, material that had found its way into other accounts of the events of the past;¹⁶ he complained ←7 | 8→about the distortions, exaggerations and lies of the historian Valerius Antias (whose work he nonetheless used);¹⁷ and he also observed that the historian Licinius Macer was unreliable when he wrote about his own family.¹⁸

For those who believe that the literary evidence for early Rome is generally reliable, what Livy has to say is a problem that clearly needs to be got rid of. The names of magistrates that can be extracted from Livy’s work and from Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ are broadly consistent and so, it supposedly follows, must be historical;¹⁹ funeral speeches and other such family records can only have been a source of minor corruption, apparently;²⁰ Valerius Antias was, it seems, actually a serious historian who carried out extensive research in the archives of the Senate and, if there were problems in his work, that was the fault of his sources (the Senate’s archives excluded, of course);²¹ as for Licinius Macer, his work was not really all that unreliable either.²² Besides, no one at Rome could possibly have distorted or misrepresented the events of the past and hoped to get away with it. Everyone knew what had happened, so any lie would have been so quickly rooted out that no one would have even attempted to tell it in the first place.²³

The fact that Livy had actually read the works of Antias and Macer, which no one today can do, is often ignored. So too is the fact that no ←8 | 9→Roman funeral speech survives; moreover, the evidence for them that does exist is frequently played down or just passed over.²⁴ Also played down is the fact that the extant evidence for the names of magistrates comes mostly from works from the first century bc, and that the nature and content (and even the existence) of lists of such names in the second, third, fourth and fifth centuries bc are unknown. As if that were not enough, Livy’s assessment of Macer’s work has been rejected on the basis of what Livy himself had to say about it, as if Livy were incapable of assessing the work properly and also so incompetent as to reveal that fact.²⁵ As for Antias, if he had indeed done all that research, why should he have also used sources that were patently unreliable? Why does Livy criticise specifically him and not those sources or his use of them? And does it ultimately make any difference, whether Antias or his sources were to blame for the problems that Livy encountered? But there is simply no evidence to support the claim that Antias conducted research in the Senate’s archives anyway.