Livy's Alexander Digression (9.17–19): Counterfactuals and Apologetics

Abstract

Orthodox historians have tended to dislike attempts to think counterfactually about the past, on the grounds that ‘virtual history’ offers little more than entertainment and degenerates too easily into banal trivialities. In addition, it provokes fears about the offending historian's commitment to the truth and the consequent effect on his readers’ historical memories; a recent essay in the New Statesman, deploring the increasing presence of counterfactual history in the syllabus for national exams in British schools, condemned it as an agent of ‘collective amnesia’. E. P. Thompson was more trenchant: ‘unhistorical shit’. Yet popular and professional interest in counterfactual history continues to grow, spawning a recent radio series and a number of books on the ‘what if?’ theme. It seems, then, an opportune time to reconsider the famous passage of counterfactual history in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the Alexander digression at 9.17–19, a passage which, it so happens, one popular website lists as the first example of the genre. This paper offers, after a brief survey of previous scholarship (Section II), an account of Livy's allusions both to his sources and predecessors and to his own text (Section III), followed by an integrated reading (Section IV) which will argue more fully that the passage embodies central Livian ideas about the utility of historical writing, that it is thematically tightly woven into its place in Book 9, and, finally, that it offers a powerful critique of one-man rule which has important consequences for our understanding of the historian's view of Augustus.