Mark Antony and the young Octavian. In the summer of 44 BCE a comet appeared in the skies over Rome, and Caesar’s supporters argued that this comet represented the ascension of Caesar to the heavens, and that Caesar should thus be worshipped as a god, much as Romulus was worshipped as a god. After the conclusion of the Roman civil wars, Octavian, now known as Augustus, issued a series of coins referencing this star with the legend DIVUS IULIUS, or “the deified Julius.” These coins thus made the claim for Caesar’s divinity and, by association, Augustus’ own descent from a god. In a world of limited communication, these coins served as perhaps the best way to share a message.
Conclusion
The sources for Roman social and cultural history are thus numerous and impressively varied, but not without challenges. One issue that will crop up repeatedly throughout this book is the balance between synchronic history and diachronic history.
Synchronic history means taking pieces from different times (chronos) and putting them together (syn) to form a single picture. Roman historians are often to forced to write synchronic accounts because of the nature of our evidence. For example, we may learn about Roman fathers from a document in one period and about Roman mothers from a slightly different period, and historians combine the two to provide a picture of “the Roman family.” The problem, which sharp-eyed readers might have noticed, is that there may never have been a single time when the Roman family looked exactly like our picture. Synchronic history offers a composite image that can help us understand a subject broadly but sometimes the image remains fuzzy as the details do not match up fully.
Diachronic history goes through (dia) time (chronos) and so focuses more attention on documenting change. Tracing the rise and fall of an empire is a good example of diachronic history. Our evidence for military affairs often allows us to know the specific battles and the dates that allowed an empire such as Rome to grow, and so we can describe the steps by which Rome grew into an imperial power.
As we embark on our exploration of Roman social and cultural history, we thus face two challenges. One is to combine the literary and material culture sources into a single picture, and the second is to employ both synchronic and diachronic history to understand Roman society. Each historian will find a different balance for these two challenges, which explains why each historian’s picture of Roman society looks slightly different.
Let us close this chapter by taking the Roman family as an example of how we might proceed. We could start with the stories about Romulus and note that some literary sources suggest that the Roman family may have been dysfunctional by our standards. At the same time, we have to note that this story concerns the elite – the founder of Rome! – and we might wonder whether all families felt this way. Plautus and Terence left us comedies from the second century that feature fictional families with stereotyped relationships: a doddering father, a shrewish wife, and a young man mooning over the girl next door, and we might wonder how much truth lies in these stereotypes. Funerary inscriptions written by a husband for his wife or vice versa offer a different kind of evidence and suggest a type of devotion that looks different from the comedic picture. Cicero’s letters offer another type of evidence from the first century BCE and show us his personal devastation when his daughter died as a result of childbirth. The houses from Pompeii and elsewhere show that Roman houses, both rich and poor, had few spaces that family members might consider their own private space, and so raise questions about what family life looked like on a day-to-day basis. Each isolated piece of evidence by itself can give us only a partial or even misleading picture. Taken together, however, as we will do in the pages that follow, these sources will allow us to develop a rich picture of Roman life, a life that was both like and quite unlike modern Western experiences.
Discussion Questions
1 If the most important element of historical thinking is understanding the author’s purpose in writing, what do you think is the purpose of the author of this textbook? of your professor?
2 Given the absence of female voices from antiquity, how can a historian learn anything about that half of the population of the ancient world?
3 What challenges can you foresee in trying to mingle both archaeological and textual evidence?
4 What subjects do you think will be the most difficult to handle for a cultural historian of Rome? What subjects might be the easiest? Why?
5 What value might there be in developing comparisons between the Romans and modern Western peoples, or peoples living in other times or places?
Further Reading
1 Ancient Authors (Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, et al.)Often the best place to find the texts of ancient authors is within the Loeb Classical Library series, with each author listed by name; translations in the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics are also usually reliable. While translations do exist on the Internet, many of these are very old-fashioned, occasionally misleading (as early twentieth-century translators often shied away from taboo topics), and sometimes even incorrect.
2 Chaplin, Jane(2000). Livy’s Exemplary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Chaplin’s book is one of a number of recent books that offer new ways of thinking about Livy, whose text provides the foundation for the history of Rome down to the early second century CE. She focuses on how Livy’s use of examples was intended to make history relevant for his Roman audience, even as the meaning of those examples might shift over time.
3 Feldherr, Andrew(Ed.) (2009). The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Contains essays on a variety of topics, with attention paid both to texts that survive only in fragments as well as sources for history that remained unwritten. Good focus on themes (religion, space, the setting of examples) rather than merely a historian-by-historian description.
4 Keppie, Lawrence(2001). Understanding Roman Inscriptions. London: Routledge.A book designed for the non-specialist, Keppie’s book covers a range of issues, from how the stone-cutter did his work to how to read and date inscriptions. No knowledge of Latin is necessary; Keppie provides all terms needed. Later chapters in the book cover thematic topics such as government, the army, and religion.
5 Laurence, Ray(2012). Roman Archaeology for Historians. London: Routledge.A recent introduction specifically aimed an integrating the study of archaeology and Roman history. The complexity of archaeological data sometimes makes the book’s language difficult, and examples tend to be drawn from Roman Britain (the author’s home country), but the range of topics covered is especially valuable.
6 Lintott, Andrew(2008). Cicero as Evidence: A Historian’s Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.A recent concise work focused precisely on using Cicero as a source for Roman history, rather than on the politician or his views. Superbly organized into four sections, on Reading Cicero, Reading Oratory, History in Speeches and Letters, and History and Ideas. A must-read for this topic.
7 Yarrow, Liv M.(2021). The Roman Republic to 49 BCE: Using Coins as Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Yarrow’s book introduces students of ancient history to the ways in which coins provide information about the history of the Roman republic. She uses coins to offer insights on early Roman-Italian relations, Roman imperialism, urban politics, and constitutional history, among other topics. This book helps take the mystery out of numismatics, with over 200 illustrations and a guide to research for non-specialists.
2 How Do We Tell the Story?
In 509 BCE according to the Roman historians, Sextus Tarquinius developed a lust for Lucretia, the noble wife of one of his friends (Livy 1.58–60). Sextus’s family was originally Etruscan, from the territory just north of Rome, and his father Tarquin the Proud was then king of Rome and leading an army against a neighboring town. One evening while the Roman men were still away on this campaign, Sextus snuck into her house late at night and forced her to have sex with him. After he left, Lucretia sent for her husband