Bibliography
| Title: Latin Imperial Historiography between Livy and Tacitus Type: Thesis Year: 1993 Abstract: "From Livy to Tacitus, nearly a century of Latin historical writing has almost completely vanished. The only work to survive is the erratic and loyal summary-cum-panegyric of Velleius Paterculus. Such enormous losses hinder and often preclude the study of Latin imperial historiography from this period. In the absence of direct evidence, recourse must be made to indirect methods. Prosopographical and literary considerations together with source criticism permit some answers to the two key questions with which this thesis is concerned: Who were the practitioners of the art of historiography in the first century of our era? And what may reasonably be said about the scope and nature of their works? Chapters 1-3 address prosopographical and literary questions. Chapter 1 demonstrates that the common assumption that military men of the early empire wrote self-promoting memoirs after the model of Julius Caesar's Commentarii will not stand. Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between biography and political propaganda in the early empire, with a particular focus on the circle of Thrasea Paetus. Chapter 3 reviews the evidence for the other authors who are generally thought to have written history in this period. A number of these are dismissed, or at least put aside due to lack of evidence. Consideration of those who remain shows that the scholarly historian was often more prominent than the "senatorial" historian. Chapters 4-6 re-examine three classic problems of source criticism: (i) the question of the source(s) of Josephus Antiquities 19.1-277; (ii) the "common source" used by Plutarch in his Galba and Otho and by Tacitus in his Histories; and (iii) the source(s) behind the tradition concerning Tiberius. The thesis ends with a discussion or historical "truth". Special attention is given to recent objections that the ancient historians saw truth in fundamentally different terms from modern historians and to the rof inventio in historical writing. Tacitus' observation that, in the century preceding him, "truth had been broken in many ways" is nowhere better demonstrated than in the one work which has survived from that period". Keywords: Greek and Roman historiography |