be carried away and the Gauls to move off.… Fortune now turned, divine aid and human skill were on the side of Rome. At the very first encounter the Gauls were routed as easily as they had conquered at the Allia (Livy, 5.49).
Diodorus Siculus, a Greek contemporary of Livy, tells a different story however:
[when] the Romans sent ambassadors to negotiate a peace, they [the Gauls] were persuaded to leave the city and to withdraw from Roman territory in exchange for one thousand pounds of gold (Diodorus, 14.116).
Diodorus knows nothing of the miraculous arrival of the Roman dictator, and neither does the very brief mention of Polybius, another Greek who is our earliest surviving source on this episode. And even Roman sources, including Livy, acknowledge the devastation to the city caused by the Gauls. The image that emerges from all of our sources is more consistent with the notion of the Gauls plundering the city and then moving off.
Even if the Greek accounts provide a useful corrective, Livy’s account is still valuable. It reveals an attempt to save face, to avoid having to admit that Rome had once paid bribes to secure its survival. More than that, Livy’s account helps us understand Roman imperialism. The story of Vae victis became an important part of the Roman mentality: if losers have no bargaining rights, the Romans resolved never to suffer this fate again and so developed a stronger military that they used to engage anyone who even remotely threatened their security.
That does not automatically make Greek sources more reliable. Plutarch had his own purposes in writing. In his commentary on the character of Romulus, Plutarch made clear that he saw Romulus as a tyrant, guilty “of unreasoning anger or hasty and senseless wrath,” but he also includes the unlikely account of Romulus’ assassination. His version seems less concerned with Caesar, perhaps because he was writing 200 years later. Instead his text serves to reinforce his moralizing critique: Romulus was deservedly killed because he was a tyrant. Moralizing aims can affect a historian’s account as much as contemporary politics or a desire to paint a founder in a positive light.
Material Culture
Now that we have begun to develop a list of questions that we might ask of our literary sources, it is time to turn to the other major source of information for the Roman Republic: the material evidence. For a number of topics (visual arts and architecture, the city of Rome, the economy) the main source of evidence is not literary but physical. First and foremost, there is information that has been gathered through the practice of archaeology, the systematic uncovering of ancient remains in the earth, including private houses, cemeteries, roads, and large public structures such as temples and grain warehouses. The Roman state and individual Romans also left writings on stone or bronze, from public decrees to private tombstones; epigraphy, which is the analysis of these inscriptions, provides another key source of information. Numismatics, or the study of ancient coins, provides a third key primary source, not just for the economic information that can be derived but from the messages that Romans sent through the design on their coins. Each will be discussed more fully in the section below, to understand the questions we should ask of each source.
Archaeology
When archaeology is mentioned, we might think first of the remains of major cities and monuments: the city of Pompeii, the Colosseum, and the Forum in Rome. These monuments offer the most visible clues to understanding the growth of cities such as Rome. The development of new architectural forms, often by adapting them from other societies, can also tell us about the relationship between Rome and foreign cultures. For instance, several early Roman temples clearly follow the design of earlier temples in Etruria, suggesting a high degree of Etruscan influence in early Rome. For monuments such as these, we can ask questions about broad cultural trends and the development of city life over a long span of time. However, for questions such as what people ate, what they wore, or what their daily lives were like, major monuments have no answers.
For those questions, it is the small and often fragmentary remains that offer the most information. Archaeology is, in fact, one of our primary sources of information for non-elites in the ancient world. If Cicero has very little to say about the non-elite, we must recover that information by other means, and archaeology is tops on that list. The humble garbage dump turns out to be a tremendous source of information, as specialists can recognize plant and animal remains, household goods, and other items that tell us what people ate or used on a daily basis. We can ask about how the diet of the lower classes compares to that of the wealthy, but we can also ask questions such as the origins of either natural or manufactured products, which can tell us about contact with other regions and trade practices. As historians have begun to pay proper attention to the non-elite, excavations have increasingly focused not on the grand houses of the elite, but on the homes of the less fortunate. For example, at Ostia, the port city of Rome, multi-story apartment buildings have been uncovered, offering a glimpse into the one or two room dwelling places in which an entire family might live (Figure 1.3). Excavation of cemeteries sheds light on family structure, demographic trends, and even the kinds of affectionate language used by family members to commemorate their deceased, offering insight into how Roman family members felt about each other. The deliberate disposal of items in garbage dumps and cemeteries not only does a better job preserving items than items left out in the open, but forces us to ask questions about why a particular item might have been discarded. The lives of individual Roman men, women, and children are illuminated more by archaeology than by any other source.
Figure 1.3 Insula of Diana, Ostia Antica, second century CE.
Archaeological evidence cannot answer every question we might have. One challenge is simply the availability of archaeological data for our time period, which is generally less abundant than for the Empire. Pompeii provides a good example (Figure 1.4). The city has a long history and was refounded as a colony by the Romans in 80 BCE, but the city owes its fame and its preservation to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, a full hundred years after the end of the Republic, and of course the years closest to the eruption are the best preserved. Sometimes we do have evidence for an earlier period; for example, many houses in Pompeii have rooms that can be dated to the Republican period. The vast majority of the material from Pompeii, however, dates to the period of the Empire. Historians must then decide how much the evidence from the later period can be used to understand practices of a century or more earlier. While Pompeii offers unparalleled evidence on issues such what Roman houses looked like, religious practices of the household, and town planning, it also vividly demonstrates some of the challenges of using archaeological evidence.
Figure 1.4 Aerial view of Pompeii. Mt. Vesuvius is in the background.
Pompeii also reminds us of the seemingly random nature of archaeology: archaeologists find what they happen to find. A volcano happened to erupt five miles from Pompeii that almost perfectly preserved the city, which happened to be discovered when the King of Naples wanted a new summer palace, but other cities elsewhere in Italy remain completely undiscovered by archaeologists. This phenomenon presents challenges for the historian; our questions have to be tailored to the information that has been randomly provided, and we always wonder what evidence we are missing that might either confirm or refute the answers we develop. Certain time periods may be over-represented (or under-represented), not because there actually was more (or less) material produced in a given period, but because archaeologists happened to find more or less of it. Historians constantly question how far the practices of any one city represent Roman culture as a whole: what happens in Seattle may be very different from what happens in Dallas or in smaller cities like Pueblo, Colorado. Nor should we automatically assume that the larger cities were more “civilized”: we know that by 60 BCE Pompeii was home to several theaters as