Historiography at the End of the Republic

Abstract

AbstractThis book starts at the end of Polybius' Histories, and investigates documentation of the Roman empire recorded by non-Romans. Intellectuals, being members of the social elite, controlled the wealth in a community and usually the political decision-making processes as well. After the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, Rome made the transition from military dominance to provincial administration and client states. This left local elites grasping for the remains of their political influence. The products of the intellectuals reflect the concerns of the day. Also the culture of intellectual exchange in place in the Mediterranean gave the local elite a means of communicating their anxieties and expectations. Historical texts offer the most explicit evidence of this trend. The texts of six contemporary historians of this period survive in enough detail to allow productive analysis: the author of 1 Maccabees, Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Memnon of Heraclea. The book starts with a detailed analysis of the relationship between intellectuals and political authority. However, methodological difficulties are encountered because of the fragmentary nature of most of the surviving historical texts composed by non-Romans. Thus, the discussion continues by laying out an approach to the reliability of different forms of reliquiae. The remainder of the study looks at the political dimensions of the themes present in the contemporary history-writing of non-Romans, how narrative structures help to further the compositional objectives of each historian, and mythological and ethnographical characterizations of the Romans, their domestic affairs, and their involvement with the wider Mediterranean. The study also explores the portrayal of potential rivals for political dominion of the Mediterranean. The book shows that the historians are working not with models of endorsement or resistance, but instead with an eye to the pragmatic issues of harmonious co-existence. Rome is treated as an ultimate authority, intrinsically neither good nor bad.