The Origins, Program, and Composition of Appian's Roman History

Wie Gabba...sagt, geht es der wissenschaftlichen Forschung um die genaue Bestimmung des Gewährsmanns oder der Quellenautoren, die Appian vermutlich für sein Werk verarbeitete.

I. Introduction

The words are Matthias Gelzer's, and they form a classic expression of the way Appian was viewed until only a few decades ago.¹ With some notable exceptions, Appian's Roman History has been discounted as a poorly written work pieced together by an inept, if enthusiastic, amateur since Johann Schweighäuser gave us the first scholarly edition in 1785.² The most damning appraisals were those of the positivistic historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who attempted to reconstruct an objective history of the late Republic based in part upon the text of Appian and eagerly sought the Gewährsmänner behind these facts to assure themselves of the paternity of Appian's data. One tacit assumption of these critics was that Appian tried to write political history in the tradition of a Thucydides or a Tacitus. In comparison with these great historians, Appian is deficient in historical analysis, and, where we can check it, Appian's text contains a perplexing mixture of good data and errors. An Appian who was a bumbling assembler of other authors' work into a political history seemed to explain the odd mix: good data came from other authors' pens, errors came from Appian's bungled attempts to cut and paste those authors' words together to form his own "history."³ Such a view eliminated the need to think carefully about any program arising from Appian or the motivations for it.

Interest in Appian has customarily been based upon the claim that, like him or not, he offers the best surviving connected narrative of the years covered by the Civil Wars (roughly 133-35 B.C.E.) and the sole connected narrative for the years covered in BC 1 (133-70).⁴ This is odd, because BC 1, the most important book under these criteria, manifests a very different character. Emilio Gabba, whose name is synonymous with study of the Civil Wars, saw BC 1 as composed of two poorly fused parts: 1) a framework due to Appian and 2) accounts of the various staseis taken without substantial alteration from sources (and thus animated by different interests), "a book that seems to be made up of separated pieces."⁵ Appian himself was of minor importance for Gabba, who held to the older view that Appian was a faithful copyist or excerptor and compiler.⁶ Gabba saw nothing but a few summaries, the occasional references to Appian's own time, and remarks clarifying Roman customs for a Greek audience as Appian's own contributions; the rest was raw material suitable to be mined for historical data.⁷ Cuff's sharply critical observation of "Appian's ability to extract a significant item, and... his inability to make proper use of it" highlights the gap between what Appian produced and the "properly" used material modern historians expect, or would like, to find.⁸

This mode of thought has rightly been challenged in recent years, but the habit of looking at Appian through an exclusively historical lens is firmly rooted and only slowly yielding. Part of the problem lies in the enormous prestige of Gabba's work, which has framed the debate over Appian for nearly half a century, just as Schwartz's 1896 RE article did for the half-century before that. It is instructive to consider how tentatively and deferentially Magnino makes an almost minimalist case that Appian was not a mindless copyist in his extremely important 1993 treatment of the Civil Wars, and to observe that his 1998 commentary on BC 4 is still animated by the same historical interests as Gabba's commentary on BC 1, despite a gap of thirty-nine years and Magnino's own fundamental contributions, which have altered the debate over Appian's source use and method of composition.⁹ This approach to the author stands out all the more because already in 1988 Goldmann had proved that there...