Introduction: We Are All Historians
Most of us do things that historians do every day.
Almost one hundred years ago, Carl Becker delivered a speech to the national gathering of professional historians titled “Everyman His Own Historian.” In it he told the story of a figure whom he called Mr. Everyman who had stumbled across a handwritten note at home reminding him to “Pay Smith for a coal delivery.” Even though Mr. Everyman did not recall actually seeing Smith deliver the coal, the helpful note, combined with the 20 tons of coal in his house, led him to believe that the coal actually had been delivered, and off he went to pay the bill. When he got to Smith’s office, however, Smith reminded him that his operation had been unexpectedly out of coal that day and so he had passed the delivery job to Brown. Mr. Everyman dutifully went to Brown’s office and paid his invoice for $1,017.20. After returning home from his country club that night, Mr. Everyman went through his records. Sure enough he found the invoice from Brown, and so went to bed secure in the knowledge of what happened.
Becker’s point was that Mr. Everyman models historical behavior: he uses his memory and consults written records to determine what happened, and when the records do not match up, he continues investigating until he has a clearer and more certain picture of the past.
This book is about the Roman Republic, but it is also about this process of historical thinking: each reader is invited to consider themselves a historian and ask: how do we know what we know (or think we know) about ancient Rome?
The process can be a challenge: the Romans often seem so familiar to us, especially since so many aspects of their society have been incorporated into modern societies, and especially American society. The United States Senate is explicitly modelled on the Roman Senate, and our system of checks and balances derives from ideas about the Roman government. Roman law is the basis for our legal system. Roman architecture is all around us in our public buildings, and Latin literature has been a touchstone for many authors. Yet we need to remember that the Romans are far distant from us in time and space.
In 2009, eighty years after Carl Becker delivered his lessons about Everyman to a gathering of historians, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich stood up before the same professional setting and reflected on the distance between Becker’s distant time and her own. People no longer heated their houses with coal, nor did most people physically show up in an office to pay a bill. More significantly, a twenty-first century audience may not immediately recognize just how much 20 tons of coal really is: it is 10 times larger than the equivalent amount of heating oil that until last week I used to heat my house. Nor do we recognize that the fictional Mr. Everyman