Roman historians rarely have more fun than when representing the emperor. Emperors are not like the rest of Rome's population. Primus inter pares or “first among equals” they may be, but they are still first in authority or princeps. They are also candidates for deification. For their primacy to be recognized, they must appear exceptional (eximius), different from the senators, in tune with them, but “super-human.” This is a delicate balance at the best of times. In public, there were stock devices to separate them from the masses: dress, props, entourage and so on, not to mention the circulation of their names and portraits on coins, in marble and other media, the frequency of which turned them from private citizen to public commodity. But an emperor had to look like an emperor “on the page” as well as in public - had to act, think, and sleep like an emperor. The need for him to be extraordinary in any given narrative afforded authors like Tacitus and Suetonius numerous opportunities for exaggeration. His public displays of office could be turned on their head so that what was destined to spell distinction could - in the writing of a reign - make an emperor sub-human.

Both pivotal and celebrated, Polybius of Megalopolis looms large on the isthmus that divides and connects Greek and Latin historiography. Firmly embedded in the genealogy of Greek historians, the methodological heir of Thucydides, a continuator of the great third-century Sicilian historian Timaeus, his impact on later writers of all kinds, both Greek and Roman, is unusually demonstrable; few historians cite so often or so extensively the work of their predecessors, fewer of those are themselves so often cited. Polybius compared the ideal historian with itinerant Odysseus (12.27.10-28.1), and, like his hero, he did indeed wander around the Mediterranean from Spain to Alexandria, seeing for himself. But at times he seems more like Cercyon blocking the Isthmian road, ever ready to wrestle with his predecessors, and intimidating those who wrote after him, the intersection of a “two-way shadow” thrown by the light of posterity: casting a shadow, cast in shadow. Even so learned and assured a writer as Strabo is circumspect when rising to correct him: “Someone could say, 'My dear Polybius. . .'” More than a mere historian he is himself “un fait culturel,” positioned between Greece and Rome by his biography and his Bildung as much as by his subject matter, a Romanizer in his vocabulary and, strikingly, his syntax, he was also a paradigmatic captive Greek who captivated his Roman conquerors.

This chapter discusses the influence of Roman historians on the development of early modern political theory. It will explore how and why readings of the Roman historians, in whose works few explicit treatments of the nature and forms of government are to be found, nevertheless contributed largely to the articulation and development of political theory as a discourse. More specifically, the chapter will address the ways in which the interpretation of Roman historiography by the political theorists of early modern Europe contributed to the formation of modern political thought. Thus, the paper will look at the reception of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus in the thought of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Montesquieu. Political theory is constituted by three basic elements or forms of inquiry. The first deals with the inquiry into the best forms or types of governments (or constitutions, as in Plato and Aristotle). The second talks about the analysis of political power and of its sources, origins, and foundations (and, consequently, of the state and its legitimacy, and its justification in terms of political obligation). And the third delves into the nature and character of “politics,” or of the “political.”

It would be hard to over-estimate the role that characterization of individuals played in Roman historiography. The reasons for this are many and complex; only some of them can be touched on here. Of seminal importance was the prevailing moral didacticism of ancient history, which inclined Roman historians to portray events as dependent on the actions of individuals and these actions, in turn, as “indexes of goodness or badness of character.” The influence of the heroic characters of epic and drama, with their central roles in a narrative of events, would have been pervasive, especially in light of the fact that from the time of Naevius and Ennius the subject-matter treated by poets and writers of Roman history had often overlapped, with historians retailing myth and legend, on one hand, and playwrights and epic poets writing of recent Roman historical events on the other. A focus on individuals played an obvious role in the purely affective appeal of earlier historical texts in both Greek and Latin, and Roman historians could look especially to their Hellenistic Greek predecessors for models of gripping narratives that revolved around the virtues or, more often, vices of a major actor.

The perception that historiography is rhetorical could not be more contemporary. In recent years the traditional view that “the research of truth is the main task of the historian” has come under fire. Social scientists, linguists, and theorists of narrative have shown how much historical and fictional accounts have in common, playing down whatever realities might lie behind them. Their concern is with how historical narratives use rhetoric, or persuasive language, to construct meaning instead of innocently conveying it. On that basis, historical narrative is not regarded as veridical and it cannot be subject to refutation. Instead, it has been argued, truth in history is determined by the readers of historical texts - the expectations and principles of a given reader in a particular time and place can be seen as far more crucial than any universal standards of veracity. Hayden White, who promoted a markedly rhetorical conception of modern historiography in the 1970s, went so far as to affirm that historical truth is determined merely by “concomitance with the scholarly practices and standards prevailing among the community of professional historians” - presumably the standards and practices prevailing in today's universities. An affirmation like that should not go unchallenged.

If I say that I am writing these words (or as a Roman would have said, anticipating your reading of them, “I was writing”) on 8 June 2006, anyone reading these words will be able instantly to correlate that location in time with their own present, or with any other location in time back to Caesar's introduction of his reformed calendar on 1 January 45 BCE. Our calendrical system operates on a grid of time extending backwards into a precisely charted past and forwards into a future which can itself be plotted out numerically and which will require no calendrical adjustments until our descendants reach the year 4000 CE and have to decide whether it is going to be a leap year or not. This grid of time encompasses our globalized planet and provides a frame of reference which it is all too easy to be lulled into regarding as simply written into history, almost into nature. Very few readers of this volume will ever find themselves in a position where they have to correlate a date such as “8 June 2006” with a date from another system. A touch of the keyboard brings up Fourmilab's splendid “Calendar Converter”; it will tell you that 8 June 2006 Gregorian equates to a date in the Islamic calendar of 11 Jumada 'l-'Ula 1427 (counting from the era of the Hijira, or “departure,” of the Prophet from Mecca on 16 July 622 CE Julian), or to a date in the Hebrew calendar of 12 Sivan 5766 (counting from the creation of the world).

“Classics is the study of the culture, in the widest sense, of any population using Greek and Latin, from the beginning to (say) the Islamic invasions of the seventh century A.D . . . [W]hy have we allowed our “canon” of what is worth reading in Greek and Latin to be narrowed to whatever counts as “literature”? . . . But above all, why do we exclude from the standard conception of what a classical education is about Jewish and Christian texts in Greek, and Christian texts in Latin? . . . If we allowed ourselves this angle of vision on the classical world, we could also accept the centrality of the works of Josephus, written in Greek in Rome in the later first century A.D., but representing to the pagan world a tradition and local history going back to the Creation.” / The field of classics has become broader and more welcoming of scholarly work on Judean and Christian texts since Fergus Millar originally offered these remarks in 1993. His own scholarship and that of other classicists and ancient historians has made it more inviting for those in the field who choose to concentrate on the historiography of Josephus. The study of Josephus' texts can lead to a far richer understanding of the interplay of various cultures in the ancient Mediterranean world in the first century CE. This short introduction will provide an overview of the author and his works, the reception of his texts in conjunction with the problem of defining the modern fields of classics and ancient history, and protreptic examples for readers who might find inspiration for new investigations in the pages of Josephus.

The Annals of Tacitus begin at the death of Augustus, whose funeral is narrated in chapters 8-10 of the first book. The ninth and tenth chapters, beginning “then there was much talk about Augustus himself,” record various interpretations of the emperor's life current at the time of his death; as has been “recognized” for nearly a century, these chapters contain precise and pointed allusions to Augustus' self-representation in the text entitled Res Gestae Divi Augusti (henceforth RGDA). Chapter 10 of the Annals, in particular, tellingly re-phrases Augustus' account of his activities in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's death: “At the age of nineteen I raised an army on my own initiative and at my own expense, with which I recovered the freedom of the Republic, which had been suppressed by the domination of a faction. On account of this the Senate, in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, decreed in my honor that I be enrolled as a senator, giving me the right to speak in the consular position, and bestowed on me imperium. The Senate also commanded me as propraetor, together with the consuls, to see to it that no harm should come to the state. But the people, in the same year, when both consuls had fallen in battle, made me consul and triumvir for the maintenance of the Republic. (RGDA 1.1-4)”

This volume is about historical writing at Rome from the first emergence of historiography to its full flowering in the high imperial period and its later influence in European culture. As such this book serves as a companion to a series of prose authors who chose to write formal “written history” in terms both of genre and of content. Every ancient text has something to tell us about the past, particularly about the society in which it was written. By contrast Roman historians consciously set out to give an account of the past, mostly in relation to their own times and to its political culture. Our picture of Roman history is heavily dependent on the historiographical texts that have survived, aswell as on other prose histories, now lost, that served as the sources and models of the works we can still read. For the Romans themselves, however, the past was recalled and represented by many different types of texts, monuments, and rituals, both before and after historiography became a formal written genre of prose literature at Rome. Moreover, the vast majority of Romans could not read and only had very limited access to literary texts. Historiography as a literary genre is, therefore, by definition the alternative that emerged around 200 BCE to a wide variety of more or less traditional forms of memory making in Roman culture.

““Alexander - God knows, and you know, - in his rages, and his furies, and his wraths, and his cholers, and his moods, and his displeasures and his indignations, and also being a little intoxicates in his prains, did, in his ales and his angers, look you, kill his pest friend, Cleitus.”” Fluellen in Henry V, Act IV, Scene VII / The cover picture of the first edition (2002) of Diana Spencer's monograph The Roman Alexander is a variant on a 1982 print of Andy Warhol's Alexander the Great, stamped on a red background, in the same poly photograph format as the artist's graphic studies of twentieth-century iconic figures like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Onassis. One implication of such imagery is that celebrity is packaged and duplicated for mass consumption. The choice of representing Alexander in this way is simultaneously evocative and ironic; evocative, because as Spencer herself notes, given that all of our extant literature on the Macedonian conqueror derives from a time when Rome was the dominant power in the ancient world, Alexander's story has been transmitted through a “Roman” filter, and is thus (to some degree) a reflection of Roman popular cultural reception. The irony is this: Warhol's 1982 original designs of Alexander, which he created for the famous Search For Alexander exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, were based on a bronze head from the Roman imperial period - a time when Alexander's portrait - in itself a carefully created and idealized image - was as well known and established as famous corporate logos are today.

Since the mid 1970s, when “theory” became a powerful new force in the humanities, “history,” as a discipline, has been particularly resistant to the questions and challenges, the debates and aporias of “theory.” Only a few years ago in the journal History and Theory Keith Jenkins composed, in response to Peter Zagorin's attack on postmodernism, a call for “postmodernism sans histoire.” Zagorin, in his rejoinder, concluded that “postmodernist philosophy has little insight into historiography and nothing to contribute that clarifies or illuminates its character as an inquiry or a body of knowledge.” In this chapter, I would like to introduce some of the concerns of postmodern historiography and consider how they may affect the way we use and understand the Roman historians. Postmodernism is not a single theoretical perspective, nor is it easily defined and limited. It can be thought of as a response to the failure of the emancipatory project of modernity. As such, it is primarily a present condition and a prospective project, concerned with how we understand our own world in the context of late capital, American hegemony, mass reproduction of simulacra, modern heteroethnic communities, and a loss of faith in grand metanarratives.

Any large-scale history of the Romans is inevitably a history of conquest. Livy, for example, defines his subject as the “men and arts, through which, at home and abroad, power/empire was born and increased” (praef. 9). So too Sallust can distinguish between Rome's moral flourishing and decline on the basis of military success against foreign enemies (cf. Cat. 2.4-6; 51.42). The importance of military victory as an affirmation of political and moral well-being gives a special importance to the portrayal of non-Romans in Roman historiography. This function appears most transparently in one of the monumental records of the Roman past, the Fasti triumphales, an inscription recording all triumphs from the time of Romulus, which formed the military counterpart to the “domestic” list of consuls within the triumphal arch erected by Augustus in 19 BCE in the Roman forum. In this compendium of Roman imperium, culminating in the return of the standards captured by the Parthians at the notorious defeat of Carrhae, the data recorded are simply the date of the ceremony, the name and office of the commander, and the people over whom he triumphed. The function of non-Romans in such a record is to be defeated, and by their defeat they affirm the identity of the Romans in both a negative and a positive sense.