Was There a Roman Homer? Niebuhr's Thesis and Its Critics

Abstract

In 1811-1812 a remarkable book by the Danish-born bureaucrat Barthold Georg Niebuhr made a modern attempt to recreate the first five centuries of Roman history. Titled simply Rdnmische Geschichte, it contained a daring blend of source criticism and reconstructive narrative. Among the several imaginative hypotheses in it, perhaps the most startling claimed that Roman historiography had its Homer, an indigenous poetic oral tradition, some of whose features could still be traced in the extant works of later Roman historians. The idea was an inspiration for someone like Thomas Macaulay, whose Lays of Ancient Rome of 1842 made Horatio at the bridge every schoolboy's hero; but in the scholarly world it rekindled a smoldering controversy which has continued to the present day, and which it will be the purpose of this paper to analyze. On the one hand, trained philologists, familiar with humanist criticism and tending toward historical pyrrhonism for the period in question, found Niebuhr far too credulous about the existence of a primitive historical tradition and the shreds of information it might have conveyed. On the other hand, educated Germans who were not classical scholars were horrified to see whole sections in Livy dismissed as fables. The great Goethe, for all his admiration of Niebuhr's meticulous analysis, cried out in pain: What do we want with such impoverished truth? If the Romans were great enough to fabricate it, we should at least be great enough to believe it.' In fact, Niebuhr, self-taught in philology and exhibiting the dauntlessness of an autodidact, was steering the precarious straits between the Scylla of credulity and the Charybdis of doubt. In suggesting that Roman historiography had roots in poetry which conveyed at least symbolic historical truth, he tried to save early Roman history from the great void into which many of the philologists were relegating it.2 The hypothesis was a natural outgrowth of his method, which assumed an unbroken continuity reaching back beyond the known an-