The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch

5. Conservative (continued)

5 j CONSERVATIVE (continued) Transition to a republic with elected magistrates was handled by the Romans through their clans. These were prominent and established from the earliest times, as evidence makes clear.1 All the rest of the Romans ’ history is to be explained by the role of gentes down to the moment when the monarchy was restored in the person of Augustus Caesar, ‹ve hundred years later. To cling so long to any institution surely shows not only the conservatism of this people but still more, the strength of the trait in their collective character. Details, too, in their transition to a republic show the same trait at work. As Livy tells it, the last of the kings was condemned to exile by an aristocratic coup, led by the two highest of his own of‹cials, one of whom, Junius Brutus, Junius “the Bonehead”, then became one of the new consuls and promptly ‹lled up the senate with members of the elite whose commander he had been, tribunus celerum. Dionysius of Halicarnassus for his part stressed the importance of class, the old nobility, patricians, as distinct from and set above the general populace. Junii, Valerii, Lucretii, Horatii , were the leaders bearing names of clans also prominent in the early years of the new republic; and in the overthrow of monarchy the tradition emphasized the need not to disturb an institution of the ‹rst importance through the exiling of all kings absolutely: a rex sacrorum was to be created, that is, retained, by a piece of simple humbug that might pass for truth. Let it only fool the gods! Holders of this of‹ce were still around ‹ve centuries later.2 57 If this outline of what happened is easily accepted, it is almost by accident , so elaborately is the whole traditional account dressed up in much posturing, a glorious suicide, galloping about, rhetoric, high morals, appeals to ancestral values and customs, sel›ess love of country, and at last treachery avenged by rightful assassination. All these dramatic elements simply sustain the style that gave us the Roman monarchy: it is to history as Vivaldi’s Seasons is to the weather report, that is, more art than reality. Yet Livy has readers today who will protest, whatever he recounts we should accept so long as we can’t actually prove it wrong.3 It is Livy of course on whom we most depend. How he went about his work has often been described. I quote T. J. Luce: Livy’s dependence on his sources is nearly total; he trusts himself to follow only one at a time (rather than produce a con›ation), and when he is forced to alternate among several over long stretches, an appalling pastiche could sometimes result: skewed chronology, contradictions , the same story repeated twice, cross-references to stories told not at all . . . [and] no evidence that he was ever a senator or involved in public life; hence his treatment of the workings and traditions of government betrays ignorance and naiveté. . . . Indeed, the general feeling is that he was a romantic novelist who wandered into history by default.4 This characterization is offered by someone who very much admires his subject, taking him at least as an artist, and who is himself rightly seen as Livy’s champion “against the hypercritical emphasis on the historian’s perceived shortcomings”.5 Let me, however, call attention to the charge latent in a term occurring here: “hypercritical”. It waves away any reader of the ancient historians who might seem too ready to doubt them, as for instance Ettore Pais a full century ago.6 He extended debate by defending his views after their ‹rst expression. The term was then taken up for frequent use along with less polite expressions, “bizarre”, “absurd”, “fantastic”, “astonishing”, and more, by which antagonists subsequently and to this day seek to dispose of each other’s interpretations. Strong feelings are engaged very naturally; for, if the surviving written accounts should be totally discounted, a great library of exegesis must lose all meaning, on the instant, and half of the debaters retire from their business. Instead, like Pais, they defend themselves, provoking a reminder from a veteran of the scene: “The most dif‹cult virtue required by the historian of early Rome is that of being able to re58 • the earliest romans nounce the greater part of the information the ancients have handed down...