I. GREEK PLOTLINES IN THE HISTORIES OF ROME FROM THE FOUNDATION TO 477 BC. .................... »
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1. Romulus ................................................................................................................... »
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2. The Age of Tullus Hostilius ....................................................................................... »
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3. Tarquinius Priscus .................................................................................................... »
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4. Servius Tullius........................................................................................................... »
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INTRODUCTION
The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another.
(Ibn Khaldun, historian)
Historiographical calques
The historical corpus of events of first centuries of Rome is studded with a significant number of
later falsifications and excrescences, and the historian of antiquity must reckon with these as he attempts
to distil history from its sources, distinguishing, selecting and discarding: performing an operation not very
different to an archæological dig. The manipulative strategies applied by the Romans to their history, from
anachronistic fillers to reduplications of events and backdating, do not count. We could call them
interferences in the tradition, and they inevitably determine its evolution.1 The reasons for them vary
depending on circumstances, and often interact. First of all, it may be a question of literary preoccupations,
of narrative, or rather rhetorical, character. In other cases, falsification is produced by the desire to provide
erudite amplification,2 or else consists of high-minded manipulations on the part of historians aiming to
make the deeds of their own forefathers noble, for propaganda purposes. Or else ethnographic reasons,3
ideological factors and political preoccupations4 play a role. Out of the many strategies for adulterating
«Les facteurs responsables de l’evolution»: POUCET 2000, p. 50.
And the product will be a pseudo-history created on the basis of etymologies or interpretations of monuments,
MASTROCINQUE 1988, p. 7.
3
Cf. MUSTI 1970, who has highlighted Dionysius’ generally anti-Etruscan attitude, as well as the existence of the same
hostility in some strands of annal writing that systematically backdated the presence of the Etruscan element in Rome to
the age of Romulus, with the intention of diminishing and ignoring the real and lasting influence that the Tyrrhenian
people exercised on the city from the most ancient times until the first decades of the 5 th century.
4
MASTROCINQUE 1988, p. 10: the interests of the optimates and the populares worked on the tradition alternately,
resulting in two fundamental and alternate strands of interpretation of the ancient history of the city: one pro-patrician,
pro-senate, pro-aristocracy against another pro-plebian, pro-popular, pro-democracy.
1
2
history, I shall focus on one case of great interest, and characteristic of Roman historiography: calques of
Greek history. This is the voluntary deformation of certain episodes from Roman history with the goal of
making them similar to earlier events from Greek history. We shall see in particular how the Greek plotlines
that Roman historians loved to imitate were, in the majority of cases, drawn from Herodotus. A clear and
suggestive example: the tyrant Thrasybulus makes the gesture of severing the ears of corn in a wheat field
in the presence of the herald sent to him by his friend Periander, who was looking for the secret of how to
keep his tyranny stable. This alluded, metaphorically, to the necessity of eliminating his most prominent
political opponents.5 Many years later and more than one thousand kilometres away, Tarquinius
Superbus—according to the historians of Rome6—is supposed to have behaved in a very similar way: having
received the emissary who had been sent to him by his son, who wanted to learn of a strategy to help him
strengthen his power in the city of Gabii, Tarquinius lead him into the palace courtyard and began to break
the stems of the tallest poppies in the meadow with a stick. Of course, Tarquinius never did anything of the
kind; the episode is lifted from Herodotus’ anecdote, which also has all the appearance of being legendary.
Survey of earlier studies
Many of the Roman calques of Greek historiography, especially of Herodotus, have already been
highlighted by many modern scholars, from Pais to Bayet, as well as more recent criticism. There are also
some scholars who have attempted to diminish its importance,7 but, as we shall see, the brazen evidence of
calquing cannot be denied. Some calques, though, had already been noticed by the ancients: the similarity
between the poppies cut by Superbus and the ears of corn chopped by Thrasybulus, for example, had been
already noted by Dionysius.8 As far as I know, though, no one has ever tried to explain the phenomenon
systematically by identifying the person or persons responsible for it; instead studies have restricted
themselves to making hypotheses about the authors of individual falsifications. Some of Mastrocinque’s
ideas are an exception; he suggests that a good candidate for the intrusion of Herodotean themes into the
historical corpus would be Fabius Pictor,9 but that the taste for making Roman history similar to Greek may
already have been present in the Hellenistic historians who wrote about archaic Rome and from whom
Fabius and the annalists drew.10
5
HER., 5.91.
LIV., 1.54.6; DION. HAL., 4.56.1-2.
7
For example, PARETI 1955, p. 23: “it is absurd to think that the Roman annalists, even if in some specific cases they let
themselves be carried away by their reading to repeat some anecdotes from Greek history, would have systematically
drawn the most beautiful events of their own history from some obscure, minor episodes of Greek history that have
been laboriously dredged up by the modern iconoclasts”.
8
DION. HAL., 4.56.3.
9
On the same lines, FRIER 1979, p. 264. However, on the difficulties of investigating Fabius’ work cf. POUCET 1976, p.
201-216.
10
MASTROCINQUE 1988, p. 35.
6