Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ramsay MacMullen is Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE EARLIEST ROMANS

The University of Michigan Press

Contents

Preface.........................................vii1. Conservative.................................32. Tolerant.....................................173. Aggressive...................................294. Practical....................................43PART 2. FROM 509 TO.............................2645. Conservative (continued).....................576. Tolerant (continued).........................767. Aggressive (continued).......................878. Practical (continued)........................989. Wrap-up......................................114Notes...........................................123Bibliography....................................165Index...........................................187

Chapter One

The Romans were a people distrustful of novelties, slow to adopt a change, grudging in their surrender to it. They liked the old ways. This trait appears, for example, in the fact of their being only twenty miles from the sea and yet never for a half-millennium bothering with it: building no fishing fleet that's ever mentioned, no port, no navy, or even a watchtower. For their own countrified purposes they had a cattle and a produce market but no interest in market tolls. Their riverine location invited them to look beyond their immediate horizons, but there is no sign of their attempting this, themselves; at most they allowed others from elsewhere to conduct business among them in an assigned, convenient spot: notably the traders in salt from the flats at the mouth of the Tiber, coming upriver on the right bank, who found at Rome the first fording place and could so continue up the so-called Salt Road on the left bank to their inland markets. They passed through leaving no trace. To judge from the problems of interest to the Romans' earliest laws, down to the mid-fifth century, it was lands and family property that they were concerned with, not commerce or banking.

We have in view, here, not just two or three generations but several hundred years of opportunities neglected. Another people would have behaved differently, with different historical consequences. Surely there would have been some such effect as Plato imagined, had the Romans chosen to engage themselves in the scenes beyond their own home at the invitation of the nearby waterways. We would have, or it would have produced, a different people; for "the sea", as Plato said, "is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but has indeed also a bitter and brackish quality, filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and unfaithful ways" (Laws 705, trans. Jowett). The philosopher had in mind and detested the very Athenians whom Pericles described in his funeral oration, loving them: always ready for something new, always the active agents of it at the cost of everything fixed and trustworthy. Indeed the early Romans would have suited Plato much better than Pericles.

Something can thus be inferred about the earliest Romans from what they chose to do or not do on a grand scale. Nature unfolds in behavior; "actions are proof of character" (Aristotle, Rhet. 1367b). If inferences are indeed fair, then we should be able to identify and similarly learn from further illustrations drawing on our familiar sources. We don't lack for a good base of information. On the shelf, inviting our inquiry, the ancient writers seem ample enough. Their appearance, however, is itself a problem that I need to explain before I go any further.

Among those that tell us about early Rome, one of the best known was Marcus Terentius Varro (born in 116). Though his work survives only in bits and pieces, he counts as first in a long line of scholars called antiquarians. He served as a prime source for most historians who came after him. For this authority and for his successors, whatever was very old and very odd was of interest. He collected absolutely everything, generally in lists, in volume after volume, some devoted to religious rites, others to city monuments and their origins, and so forth across a variety of subjects. A gigantically learned if often ridiculous hobbyist, he and his writings earned immense respect. In proof, it is enough to quote Cicero: "You unlocked for us the secrets of our country's age, the divisions of time, sacral and priestly law, the learning of war and peace", etc.

Antiquarian method may be illustrated through the use made of etymologies: for example, in the tale of the Sabine chief Curtius. Though Rome's enemy, he was generously remembered and his gallantry confirmed in the so-called Curtian Lake, a swampy section of the city. Varro indicates no less than three explanations for the name. One is as good as the other, all involve the invention of history. Or, for a second illustration, we have a certain Olus inserted into the historical record, a little-known king of Rome, whose remains were dug up by chance atop the city's citadel with the inscription in Etruscan writing, "Head of Olus", Caput Oli, to be interpreted as one Aulus in Latin spelling. Thus he explained what Romans called the citadel itself: the Capitolium. Since our sources had no reason to place this figure in any particular period, half of them put him in the 740s, the other half, two hundred years later.

A second tradition or category of historical literature, and by far the more familiar, was the narrative of action. As its representative I name Livy (Titus Livius, born in 59, the year of Caesar's consulship). He was equally comprehensive with Varro but in quite other ways, and equally laborious in research. His account From the Founding gives us as rich a resource as we could ask. We exclaim, rightly, at how readable his work is; for here are dramatic episodes, passions at their most heated, outsized personalities, beauty and bravery. We exclaim at the work's prodigious bulk, too; for, were it all in our hands along with Anna Karenina, both in an English translation, the two would weigh in at about the same 350,000 words. True, we have a little less than a quarter of the whole in our hands today; yet this portion is not only a wonderfully generous gift of words, by the standards of surviving Classical literature, but it happens also to contain a long run of his opening chapters devoted to just the centuries in which to look for the origin and development of the Romans' adolescence—my subject.

With such a resource ready to hand, it might seem easy enough to learn about early Rome, and in some detail; but we are deceived, not in the richness or proportions of Livy's work but in its quality. Like other ancient authors, he no doubt deserves a special veneration for his very antiquity, at least from a philological viewpoint, as literature; but Livy as a historian ... His level of analytical sophistication—his sense of all that needs to be looked at and indeed that sense among other ancient historical authors earlier and later, with the rarest exceptions—could be matched today by any clever fifteen-year-old, surely. It can hardly satisfy readers older or further along in their education. No need to flinch from the fact: for, after all, we are glad to point to mankind's progress in other disciplines, let us say psychology or linguistics. The world has changed, as we think, for the better.

The casual reader might conclude after...