comment often made about George W. Bush during his campaign. In some ways this habit helps us understand the past better, as Hamilton surely does, but it can also make us believe the past was just like the present when it may have been dramatically different. No historian today believes that Romulus might have been assassinated by senators. Once we see that the historian is shaped by their own experiences, we can ask more productive questions rather than simply discarding a text as inaccurate or biased. In the end, that is our task as historians when we confront a source: to find out what the source may be telling us rather than discarding it because it does not meet our expectations.
Using Livy as an example has opened a window onto how historians deal with sources. Livy does not provide an eyewitness account, but eyewitnesses have disadvantages as well as the advantage of being present at a particular event. Eyewitnesses see only a portion of the action, and so may not be able to gain as complete an understanding of an event as others. The ability to gather a wide variety of evidence and to consider what each piece might be telling us is critical to good historical thinking. In the case of the Roman society and culture, we are both blessed and cursed in this regard. The blessing is that we have a wide variety of source material on which to draw, as the Roman Republic, and especially its last 200 years, is one of the best attested periods in the ancient Mediterranean world. We have multiple texts from both Roman and Greek authors on which to draw. We also have what scholars call material culture: physical remains of both monumental public buildings and private dwellings uncovered in archaeological excavations, as well as inscriptions left on stone and coins minted by the Roman state and others. All of these sources assist us in reconstructing a picture of Roman life. The curse is that this material is widely scattered like pieces of a puzzle, since most of it was created for purposes other than helping us tell a history of Roman social and cultural life. Our task then is first, to find the information that is relevant to our story and second, to understand the original purpose of the evidence so that we can put it in the proper place in our puzzle. The discussion that follows examines the major sources of information and then discusses how we might use these sources throughout this book to understand Roman society at any given point in time.
Literary Sources
One of the primary issues we must confront in approaching the literary sources from Roman history is to recognize that fundamentally Rome was an oral society. Although the alphabet had been invented as early as the eighth century BCE, Rome did not develop a written literary tradition until the middle of the third century BCE. For comparison’s sake, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey seem to have been committed to writing in the eighth century, and the great Athenian tragedies were composed over the course of the fifth century. Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon and it remains unclear how many Romans could read and write.
Exploring Culture: Could the Average Roman Read?
“Stronius knows nothing!” “Vote for Popidius Ampliatus and Vedius Nummianus!” “Rufus loves Cornelia.” The walls of Pompeii are covered with graffiti written by residents and visitors to the town, but how many people could read them?
Some scholars have suggested that the percentage of inhabitants of the Roman empire who were literate was as low as 10%. If we are interested in those who had formal training and could read and especially write Roman history or poetry, that number might not be far off. Our written texts clearly come from this segment of the population.
There is reason to believe that literacy was more widespread from an early period in Roman history. Rome possessed a written law code from the middle of the fifth century BCE and it seems to have been a point of importance to the lower classes to have important public documents made available publicly in writing. It is possible that relatively limited numbers of the lower classes could read these documents for themselves, but clearly some outside of the elite circles possessed this ability and could either share it with others or read when need be. At the same time, the language of the early law codes suggests that many agreements were verbal and that witnesses might be crucial to establishing them. Written contracts for transactions were not the norm.
The graffiti from Pompeii falls further out on the literacy spectrum. For one thing, this evidence dates to 79 CE, two hundred or more years after Rome had established itself as the dominant city in the Mediterranean, and it is likely that literacy rates had improved as more money flowed into Rome from her conquests. However, it also suggests a more widespread picture of literacy: it would make little sense to go to the trouble and expense of expressing oneself on the walls of the city if only a small percentage of the city’s population could read them. Some of the graffiti even engage in conversation with other messages, indicating that the author of the second graffiti, or perhaps a friend, had read the first post. The graffiti at Pompeii might be seen as the social media of its day, which certainly implies a higher level of literacy than 10% if one is willing to count composing tweets on subjects ranging from politics to sports to sex.
Further down the literacy spectrum, it seems likely that the majority of Romans could at least recognize the letters of the alphabet. Individual letters have been found on building blocks and roof tiles, suggesting that manual laborers could recognize these for use in construction projects. The letters SPQR (the abbreviation, still used, for “the Senate and People of Rome”) appear frequently, apparently familiar enough that recognizing these four letters would be enough to indicate the involvement of the Roman state.
Like other non-literate societies, most communication in Rome, including stories about the past, was handed on orally from one person to another. Adding to the challenge, whatever written texts might have existed prior to 390 BCE were probably destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome in that year. This situation means that Roman historians face particular challenges: we lack contemporary texts for the first 600 years of Rome’s history and we have only scattered contemporary texts for the next hundred. The vast majority of surviving Latin texts date from after 80 BCE, and our copies of them come from many centuries after that (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Fol. 1r from ms Plutei 63.19, a tenth century CE manuscript of Livy, originally copied in Verona and now in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence.
On the one hand, the absence of texts from the earliest years of Rome’s history might appear to be a serious problem: the distance between Livy and the death of Romulus is greater than that from us to Christopher Columbus, but as we have discussed, later texts do not mean that they have no valuable information about early Rome. It means that we have to ask different questions about someone like Livy, who drew on earlier written material that we no longer have, than we would about other authors. Knowing when authors were writing is important because we can use that knowledge to ask questions more appropriate to that historian and therefore more useful to us in attempting to understand Roman society.
The abundance of sources dating after 80 BCE means that a Roman historian does have plentiful eyewitnesses for the Late Republic (133–31 BCE; see Chapter 2 for an outline history of the Roman Republic). Chief among these are the texts of the Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE). Cicero provides us with three different types of texts: speeches written and delivered primarily in the law courts, philosophical treatises, and personal letters to family and friends. Because Cicero apparently did not intend for his letters to be made public, they are often the most revealing source. His correspondents ranged from leading politicians of his day to his wife and daughter and his best friend Atticus, and the letters range over a wide set of topics, from politics to personal matters such as the death of his daughter in childbirth. Not only do they allow us to see his unpolished opinions about affairs of state or others in the Roman elite, but we get glimpses into his actual day-to-day activities and his family life. No other source can compare to Cicero, which sometimes has the consequence of giving too much weight to the evidence we get from him.
Indeed,