In his 1864 book La Cité antique, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges warned against glorifying ancient narratives of civil government in the fashion of revolutionaries like Robespierre and Desmoulins, who had vainly hoped to re-make modern France in the image of the regime memorialized in Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus: virtuous republics where, Fustel de Coulanges complained, the citizen was the virtual property of a state governed by an austere militaristic code. Latin historical writers no longer command the influence they did in the age of revolutions, but the political questions they pose remain the subject of critically important debate today: the nature of civic virtue, the collective values of the community and the extent of its legitimate claim on the citizen, the role of conflict in domestic and foreign politics, the significance of public speech, and the corrupting power of tyranny. In what would doubtless strike Fustel de Coulanges as an ominous return to the past, some political theorists argue that the republican tradition opens up the possibility of a third way between communitarianism and liberalism, “hope for revitalizing our public life and restoring a sense of community.”

Religion in ancient Rome concerned itself with (amongst other things) issues of control, prediction, and explanation, largely through the use of ritual, which was mostly designed to consult the gods or (if they proved adverse) to win their favor. Historiography, on the other hand, dealt with (amongst other things) issues of influence, warning, and explanation, largely through the representation of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Clearly there is some potential for overlap: who had the last word in explaining how and why something had happened - especially when Rome had suffered a defeat and the stakes were high? It is not impossible to envisage a Rome where there was tremendous rivalry over whose account should predominate, and this hypothetical tension reaches its height when we consider that Tacitus was not just a historian but also a priest concerned with the interpretation of the Sibylline Books - which meant that he was one of those responsible for reviewing the past century or so of Roman affairs to discern the workings of Fate.

In the third book of his compendium of historical exempla, Memorable Words and Deeds, the first-century author Valerius Maximus offers the story of Sempronia, sister to the Gracchi and daughter of the famous Cornelia, who appeared before a public meeting in the Forum around 100 BCE. Sempronia was brought forward to identify a certain Lucius Equitius, who, by claiming to be the illegitimate son of the great Roman demagogue Tiberius Gracchus, was seeking to establish himself and his allies as heirs to the Gracchan legacy of political power and popular influence. By refusing to give Equitius the symbolic kiss which would have recognized him as a member of her family, however, Sempronia effectively disabled the faction which was using him as its figurehead and quelled the threat of renewed civil strife.

Let me begin by introducing a distinction between “space” and “place.” The two terms are often opposed (if only because of the rhyme), but the precise differences in meaning involved vary across disciplines (geography, architecture, sociology) and individual scholars. Two of the parameters often invoked are degrees of constructedness and of extension. On the first measure “space” tends to be used of whatever is (relatively) natural or given, while “place” takes some such space and filters it through experience, interpretation, or construction. So for Harrison and Dourish (1996: 67) “spaces” define properties like proximity, relational orientation, presence/absence, and partitioning: “place” is “invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectation, and so forth.” Hence “space” stands in a relationship to “place” not unlike that of “action” to “praxis” or “sex” to “gender.” On the other measure, “space” is often taken as a universalizing term, while “place” is more local or particularizing. Hence (Harrison and Dourish again), space is the “structure of the world; it is the three-dimensional environment,” while place is in space. Hence, generic expressions like “a place” or “some places” are far more common than “a space” or “some spaces.” There is a connection between the two parameters. If places are in some sense simpler than spaces, they can often be focalized through particular individuals or by groups with a lot of shared history, ideology, or the like. Hence, their constructedness is prominent.

The Roman historians can seem deceptively familiar. Three authors especially from the late Republic and early Empire left works that survived in substantial enough form to shape our understanding of the periods they wrote about. From the pen of Sallust, writing just after the civil war between Caesar and Pompey ended and as the new civil war between Antony and the future Augustus was coming into view, we have two monographs. One relates a recent domestic crisis, the coup attempt of Catiline (63 BCE); the other the war against the North African king Jugurtha from two generations before. A decade after Sallust, as that period of extreme internal violence was giving way to the nervous stabilities of the Empire, Livy began a history of Rome from its foundation, concluding eventually with the death of the emperor's stepson Drusus in 9 BCE. This enormous project would take its author many decades and fill 142 book rolls; from it, we possess the first ten books on the early history of Rome up to the beginning of the third century BCE and another twenty-five taking the story from the struggle against Hannibal (218-201 BCE) through the conquests of the early second century BCE. Finally Tacitus, writing a century after Livy's death, produced two extended works that together tell the story of the Empire, from the moment it became clear it was an empire (that is, when Augustus died and was succeeded by Tiberius) up to the revolution that gave power to the dynasty under which he wrote.

The modern reader of any Roman text that concerns itself with the Roman past - principally, but not only, narrative historiography - is inevitably struck by the prominence accorded “great deeds” and the actors who perform them. It is a familiar feature of Roman historical consciousness that, at any given time, the past could be regarded as a storehouse of practices, orientations, and values - sometimes referred to as the mos maiorum, “the custom of the forebears” - that were embodied in celebrated actors and deeds, and through them were made manifest and accessible to later ages. These actors and deeds could be adduced as cognitive or ethical models to provide guidance and standards to later Romans as they contemplated actions of their own, or evaluated the actions of others. These paradigmatic actors and deeds from the past are my subject here, and I aim to examine the consequences, for historiography and other commemorative forms, of regarding the past as “exemplary” in this way. I begin by distinguishing the “exemplary” mode of confronting the past from the “historicist” modes that have characterized the academic discipline of history since the early nineteenth century. I then explore the ways exemplarity manifests itself in Roman culture generally (the broader context in which the specifically historiographical manifestations occur) by examining the case of Gaius Duilius, consul in 260 BCE, who was renowned for a naval victory over the Carthaginians. I conclude by considering to what extent, in Duilius' case and more generally, “historicist” elements can be identified alongside the “exemplary” ones in Roman historical consciousness.

Despite a now substantial and ever-growing body of scholarly work on the imperial Greek historians, they remain the poor second cousins of their extant Latin counterparts. The simple fact is that Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus strike most as a better read than, for example, Appian or Cassius Dio, at least for those interested in history qua literature. In this regard Plutarch is perhaps the one worthy rival of the Latin historians, but he is not really a “historian” in the sense I employ for the purposes of this chapter. This is not merely a matter of taste; there is something intrinsically “different” about the way the three historians I discuss in this chapter - Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Appian, and Cassius Dio - think about Roman history, something that sets them apart from their Latin-writing counterparts. One distinction is obvious: they write in Greek. To be clear, when I use the term “Greek historian” I mean “a historian who writes in Greek”; these characters are inarguably Roman historians in terms of subject-matter. But apart from language, the distinctions one might draw between them and, say, Livy and Tacitus are not so clear-cut. Tacitus was an imperial senator from the provinces; so was Cassius Dio. Dionysius of Halicarnassus lived in Rome and wrote history in the Augustan period; so did Livy, who like Dionysius had no part in Roman politics. Appian was an imperial bureaucrat from Alexandria who had spent the better part of his career living in Rome.

“In history, as in life critically considered, truth rests not on possibility nor on plausibility but on probability.” Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (3rd edn, 1977: 133) / This essay weeps at the intellectual motion this volume exemplifies: the triumph of what now masquerades as “Roman historiography,” the academic study of the ancient Roman historians as a discipline sundered from Roman history, the study of what happened in ancient Rome and why. Its narrower target is the species of scholarship about the Latin historians arising in T. P. Wiseman's Clio's Cosmetics of 1979 and A. J.Woodman's Rhetoric in Classical Historiography of 1988. This writing, grown considerable in the late 1990s and the current decade as the founders' stars attracted satellites, studies the Latin historians as literature. In the hunt for the historian's artistry or ideas, his concern with historical material - that body of “what happened in the past” that the historian was trying to convey - is either argued away or passed over. The Latin historian is constrained to become - depending on modern whimsy - a rhetorician, a dramatist, a novelist, or, in the late-summer bloom of academic narcissism, a postmodern literary critic. What the Latin historian is not allowed to be is what he thought he chiefly was: a teller of true tales about the past.

“Why do scholars not contemplate the possibility that we perceive historical truth differently from the ancients?” (Woodman 1988: 202) / In his Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, A. J. Woodman challenged notions of the nature of the “historical” texts of classical antiquity, and specifically their relationship with “historical truth” as understood by “modern historians.” His focus on rhetoric evokes Hayden White's highly influential (and, in more traditional quarters, controversial) treatments of historical writing as kinds of discourse, its pretensions to truth and objectivity no more and no less than the “rhetorical strategies” of the genre. Indeed, Woodman has issues even with White: the latter persists in imagining “stable events” to be told by his “alternative rhetorical strategies,” implying that there is ultimately some historical “truth” and fixity after all (1988: 197-9; White 1973, 1985, 1987). Woodman's “modern historians” are potentially a large and broad group that includes historians of modern societies, but his detailed arguments are with named modern historians of antiquity and the claims they have made about the status of ancient “historical” writing. His polemic is directed against two Professors of Ancient History, Peter Brunt and Kenneth Dover, for their claims that Cicero and Thucydides respectively propound methodologies remarkably similar to those of modern scientific history, and Ronald Syme for his preference for the critical gaze of Tacitus as a marker of truth-telling (1988: 197-205).

Although some Greek historians comment on the audience for their own history or for history in general, the Roman historians are usually silent on the subject, and we must use passing remarks or inferences from their histories and from other writers to determine the audience for history at Rome. That Rome was a society much devoted to the past cannot be denied. Romans of all eras prided themselves on their fidelity to mos maiorum, the ways of their ancestors, and the past provided both example and inspiration; Rome itself abounded with concrete reminders of past events; in early times the pontifex maximus recorded publicly the year's notable or unusual events; and the funerals of great men rehearsed the deeds of noble Romans and their ancestors. An interest in history is evident, moreover, at the very beginnings of Latin literature in C. Naevius' poem, the Bellum Punicum, which treated both earlier Roman history and the First Punic War (264-241 BCE) in which Naevius himself had fought. The writing of prose narrative history, however, began late in comparison with other genres. Its first practitioner was Quintus Fabius Pictor, a participant in the Second Punic War (218-201) who wrote when Roman history was already nearly five centuries old. Fabius wrote in Greek, a choice that suggests primarily a Greek audience: he was placing Rome and the Roman case before the wider Mediterranean world, in which Rome now played a leading role.

A few months before Cato's death a scandal caused a considerable stir in Roman politics: in 150 BCE, the propraetor of Hispania Ulterior (Further Spain), Ser. Sulpicius Galba, after his victory over the Lusitanians, butchered a great number of the enemy and sold off the rest into slavery, even though they had surrendered and he had guaranteed them clemency. The provincial governor's rashness created such outrage in the capital (not otherwise known for its excessive sensitivity) that the plebeian tribune L. Scribonius Libo proposed a law to free the surviving Lusitanians and court-martial Galba. The proposal polarized politics at Rome with prominent men on both sides. Even Cato, now over eighty years old, stepped once more into the ring with all the vehemence at his disposal. He began his fiery tirade against Galba in the style of the elder Appius Claudius Caecus crusading against peace negotiations with Pyrrhus: “Many things have dissuaded me from appearing here, my years, my time of life, my voice, my strength, my old age; but nevertheless, when I reflected that so important a matter was being discussed . . .” Cato did not succeed: Libo's proposal was finally defeated by a dramatic vote of the popular assembly.

Nowhere has the Nachleben of Roman historiography been more visible and productive than in early modern theater. From the Renaissance to Romanticism, legions of tragedies and operas took their subjects from ancient history and drew heavily, and often literally, on Latin and Greek sources, many of which were familiar to dramatists and audiences alike. This intertextual dependence was especially strong in theatrical cultures which - unlike those of Elizabethan England or Golden Age Spain - came to be governed by a neo-classical poetics of imitatio that virtually excluded not only purely fictional subjects (which were restricted to comedy) but also the staging of recent, national history: in this framework, the role of serious drama was to re-enact illustrious and distant events attested by a textual tradition, be it mythology or secular and sacred history. At the same time, Aristotle's famous distinction, in chapter 9 of his Poetics, between history, which recounts “the particular” (what actually happened), and poetry, which tends to express “the general” (what could happen), freed writers from the yoke of factual truth and authorized a creative handling of the historical matter.

The extant books of Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae cover the deeds of emperors and high officials in the quarter-century between 353 and 378 CE. The work is adorned with all the apparatus of classical historiography: prefaces, digressions, set speeches, battles and sieges, treason trials, and natural disasters. Yet for the historian of Latin historiography, or the compiler of a companion to it, Ammianus is an awkward fit. Many general works on the Roman historians stop over two and a half centuries earlier with Tacitus: a fine climax, and an inept ending. One of the more notable twentieth-century contributions to Ammianus scholarship, Edward Thompson's The Historical Work of Ammianus Marcellinus (1947), opens with the thought that “for every reader of his work nowadays there are a thousand readers of Sallust, Livy or Tacitus.” This was probably never true, and the vast expansion of interest in the late Roman world ensures that scholarship on Ammianus is now quite as hard to keep up with as on the other three great Roman historians. But what was and remains true is that Ammianus is terra incognita for most classicists, including many historiographical specialists.

Almost all our earliest documentary evidence demonstrating with certainty an awareness of the myths for the foundation of Rome, and easily our most informative, comes from the Greek world. Despite Momigliano's famous claim that the Greeks did not really pay attention to what non-Greeks said, the Romans were producing stories about the foundation of their city, and these stories were reaching Greek ears, at least by the early second century BCE. This fact should not surprise us. Several scholars have demonstrated recently that there was never a “pure” or “pristine” Rome, detached from the larger culture of the Mediterranean; in particular, earliest Roman culture developed “within the orbit of Greek culture.” When we turn to the production of literature at Rome, several puzzles present themselves. If Rome participated from its inception in Greek culture, and, further, was literate early on, why did it take so long for it to produce a literature?