“Avoir découvert le temps, c’est la caractéristique de l’homme moderne ! Non seulement par rapport à l’homme de l’Euphrate et du Nil, au Grec, mais même à l’homme médiéval ! Le Moyen Âge n’a pas de temps : quand les primitifs peignent une crucifixion, les personnages de calvaire sont habillés comme les contemporains du peintre ! Si vous voulez savoir ce que c’est que le temps du Moyen Âge, justement, représentez-vous une crucifixion avec saint Jean en chapeau melon et la Vierge sous un parapluie. Le Moyen Âge est un présent éternel”.

1Anyone who works on the literary evidence for early Rome soon realises that it contains a certain amount of material that is both anachronistic and readily identifiable as such. Even those scholars who are generally very optimistic about the historicity of the literary evidence have accepted that Roman authors frequently assumed the conditions and circumstances of their own day when relating the events of the past¹. But, for all that this problem has been long and widely recognised, the nature and implications of it have received considerably less attention than might be expected. Did the Romans simply live in a “présent éternel” or were other factors involved? Were their anachronisms predominantly unwitting or were they often intentional? Are the effects of this problem pervasive or only sporadic? And what are the implications of all this, beyond those which are immediately obvious? These questions are really very important and the answers to them are potentially of huge significance for the study of Roman history, historical thought, and historiography.

2The purpose of this chapter, given the constraints of space, is simply to try to discern one or two of the causes and consequences of Roman anachronistic thinking. A comprehensive analysis of the problem may be unfeasible in any case, on account of the nature of the evidence and the difficulties involved in attempting to distinguish anachronism from historical reality². Nonetheless, there is certainly sufficient evidence to suggest that the consequences of the anachronistic nature of Roman thinking about the past may be much more significant than has hitherto been generally recognised. And some of the consequences are immediately relevant to the two themes of this volume: sources and models.

31. Some comments made by Livy in his Book 6 are quite revealing. Having narrated numerous wars fought by the Romans with the Volsci, Livy wonders how it was possible for the Volsci and Aequi to continue to put army after army into the field. He offers a few conjectures but is clearly not interested in pursuing a matter about which his sources have nothing to say (Liv. 6.12.2-6)³. That, as it happens, makes his suggestions especially useful: they are evidence only for Livy’s thinking and assumptions. And Livy’s suggestions are concerned simply with the question of manpower. It clearly did not ever occur to him that, more than three hundred years earlier, the very nature of warfare might have been different.

4Persistent and quite obviously inconclusive campaigning could be evidence of raids and skirmishes, and a focus on plunder instead of conquest, but nothing of the kind occurred to Livy. Part of the problem no doubt was the nature of his source material. As Livy knew all too well, military exploits often got exaggerated. They could even be made up⁴. But Livy’s own assumptions are relevant too. Unaware of the extent to which the past can be different from the present, and because his historical imagination was under-developed as a result, Livy’s response was inevitably limited. The best he could manage was to suggest that more people may have once lived in those parts of Italy than did in his day, but that was an obvious enough solution, given the nature of the problem. It did not require any real understanding of historical change on his part. In these shortcomings, Livy is unlikely to have been unique; certainly his view that the morals, religious scruples, and general manner of life had been superior in the past was fairly orthodox⁵. If anything, Livy’s historical imagination was probably more developed than most⁶.

5With this in mind, it is useful to reconsider one particularly striking anachronism. The Roman tribal system was said to have been established by Servius Tullius in the vi century BC (Liv. 1.43.13; D.H., AR, 4.14.1-2; etc.). The system eventually consisted of thirty-five tribes, but that total was not reached until the mid-iii century BC. Livy records the creation of fourteen new tribes between 387 and 241 and that means that Servius cannot possibly have set up more than twenty-one⁷. He may have set up as few as four. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, however, Fabius Pictor claimed that Servius had established thirty tribes, while Vennonius supposed that he had in fact created all thirty-five of them⁸. In the effort to save Pictor from embarrassment, modern scholars have often tried to explain this evidence away, while Vennonius’ claims have been attributed to ignorance and error, but such approaches miss the point. Vennonius at least had simply projected the circumstances of his own day into the distant past⁹.

6Discussion of this evidence has generally focused on the number of tribes, but other issues are involved. One very important issue is citizenship. Tribal membership was (or better, came to be) a necessary part of Roman citizenship; as P. Fraccaro demonstrated long ago, all Roman citizens were members of a tribe¹⁰. The Romans, moreover, believed that citizenship had existed since Romulus’ day (another anachronism, but in this case one associated with ideas about what the founding of a city entailed)¹¹. Romulus’ Rome had had its own tribes (naturally enough); those tribes were, however, subsequently replaced by the Servian tribes¹², and the Servian tribes must have included all of Rome’s citizens, since all of Rome’s citizens necessarily belonged to a tribe. Servius is generally supposed to have set up the four urban tribes, but those tribes were confined to the city and not all of Rome’s citizens lived there (certainly in later times they did not). It follows, therefore, that Servius must have set up the rural tribes too.

7When all of this is taken into account, the problems in the sources concerning the number of tribes that Servius had supposedly established become easier to understand. It was not just a simple matter of numbers, but also the bigger issues of citizenship, Roman land, and above all of being able (or unable, as the case may be) to imagine circumstances perhaps profoundly different from those of the present. The depth and scale of the anachronism were undoubtedly much greater: Vennonius is unlikely to have been projecting only the number of tribes that existed in his day back to the earliest possible date; he was almost certainly retrojecting the entire tribal system and all that came with it. Others may not have handled things quite as he did, but they were probably still trying to address the same underlying issues, issues that were due to the same general anachronistic outlook.

8It is worth observing that these same problems can be found in modern scholarship. Modern scholars usually suppose that Servius Tullius had established only the four urban tribes. But modern scholars also assume that citizenship, and citizenship that required tribal membership, already existed, and that creates difficulties when it comes to those Romans who lived outside Rome. One common solution is to suppose that the four “urban” tribes must have originally extended beyond the city to include the whole ager Romanus and all its citizen inhabitants¹³. Later, when the rural tribes were created, the four “urban” tribes must have been subdivided and the extra-urban parts of them used to make the new tribes¹⁴. But this reconstruction is really only just a different way of solving the same problems that the Romans themselves encountered and arguably represents a comparable failure of the historical imagination. Ancient authors supposed that Servius created a large number of tribes; modern scholars cannot so readily do that, since there is good evidence for the creation of new tribes, and so suppose instead that the first tribes must have been vastly bigger. It is much preferable to conclude that citizenship had probably once been different in nature or that it just did not yet exist. The early history of the Roman tribal system should not be rewritten to accommodate assumptions about citizenship that are almost certainly anachronistic. The Servian system should instead be seen as something that led to the very creation of Roman citizenship or at least to this particular element of it (that is, membership of a tribe).

9When it comes to the Romans’ inability to imagine a past that was different from the present it is, of course, important not to overstate the case. The Romans certainly came to realise that circumstances had been different in the past and some were also capable of spotting things that were chronologically impossible¹⁵. It is, however, equally important to distinguish between knowledge and understanding (however superficial) on the one hand, and argument and the influence of accepted views on the other.

10The Romans knew, for instance, that their empire had once been smaller, their enemies closer and different too; they knew that their city had also been smaller and had had considerably fewer temples and other buildings; they knew that it had once been ruled by kings, before Brutus established liberty and the consulship. And yet, despite all this, there is no real sense in the ancient accounts that circumstances in the past might have been fundamentally different. Archaic Rome is in many ways often barely distinguishable from later. There is rarely if ever any genuine sense of historical development either; change generally tends to be abrupt and is usually complete.

11A good example is the transition from monarchy to Republic: Rome’s last king was expelled and the consulship was immediately created. Only in modern scholarship has there been any debate about whether the formation of the Republic was the result of revolution or the outcome of evolution¹⁶. Livy, as it happens, found good evidence that the chief magistrate of the state had originally been a praetor of some kind, and that no doubt also has implications for the praetorship that was said to have been newly created in 367 BC (Liv. 3.55.12; 7.3.5)¹⁷. This looks to be evidence for development; it is certainly evidence for something different from the traditional account. But Livy could do nothing with it. In his narrative, consuls are elected following the expulsion of the kings and the praetorship is invented in 367¹⁸. The account that Livy gives of the creation of the consulship clearly owes more to accepted views than it does to evidence and proper historical method and understanding. It also involves a certain amount of anachronistic retrojection¹⁹.

12It is likewise clear that the Romans were perfectly capable of imagining a past that was genuinely different. The depiction, for instance, of Romulus’ Rome as simple and rustic is good evidence of that²⁰. But again, such perceived differences probably had little or nothing to do with knowledge and trying to understand the past. They are more likely to be the result of arguments of a different kind and may have had far more to do with the concerns of the present. A rustic Rome was a Rome unaffected by luxury, wealth, or Greek culture²¹. And arguments of that kind could just as easily introduce anachronisms as they could create contrasts.

13A story related by Dionysius provides an unambiguous illustration of this. For some time – as far as the Romans were concerned, since Romulus’ and Remus’ day – there had been two teams of Luperci, the Luperci Quinctiales, who were connected with Romulus, and the Luperci Fabiani, who were connected with Remus. In 45 BC, a third team was added, the Luperci Iuliani²².

14In his first book, in his account of the foundation of Rome, Dionysius has three teams of Luperci. He does not name any of the teams, but the third can only be the Luperci Iuliani. Although Dionysius identifies his source – the i-century historian Aelius Tubero – he makes nothing of the additional Luperci. They simply appear in his work alongside the others (AR, 1.80.1-2 = FRH, 38 F3). Aelius Tubero clearly must have just inserted the Luperci Iuliani into his account of Rome’s foundation. Since those Luperci had been created during his lifetime, it is difficult to imagine that Tubero had unwittingly projected them into the past²³. It may seem more plausible to argue that he was attempting to establish their credentials by treating them as if they were as old as the rest²⁴. The anachronism may have had nothing to do with a failure to understand that the past is different from the present; instead it may have had everything to do with the circumstances of Tubero’s day. The traditions of the past always mattered, and that meant that they were always prone to manipulation and modification, to suit the needs of the present²⁵.

15What is also significant in this particular instance is Dionysius’ handling of things. There is nothing in his account to indicate that the third team of Luperci had only recently been added. Something which had been invented at a very late date thus ended up being incorporated into an account of the events of the distant past as though it were genuinely ancient. The cause is obviously to be found in Dionysius’ method (which was commonplace) of generally just relying on what his predecessors had said. But Dionysius should not be censured too quickly or too harshly for this. Were his work the only extant evidence for the organisation of the Luperci, scholars today would no doubt speak with little hesitation of the three teams, as they do of the two. And for this reason, those two should be reconsidered. It is generally assumed that the Luperci Quinctiales and the Luperci Fabiani were both somehow original, but modern scholars may be guilty of ultimately handling their evidence in the same way that Dionysius handled his²⁶.

162. Roman veneration of ancestral custom can be considered in this context. The Romans thought of themselves as a conservative people. They held that something was done correctly only if it was done in accordance with the custom of the ancestors (the mos maiorum). The alternative was to introduce “new things”, which were by definition bad (hence, no doubt, Tubero’s handling of the Luperci Iuliani). In reality, of course, the nature of the mos maiorum and the alleged views and practices of the maiores were fluid and contestable, and inevitably changed from one generation to the next and indeed potentially even from one context to the next. The upholding of ancestral custom imposed little on the Romans that was static or immutable. But Roman reverence for the mos maiorum must nonetheless have affected the way in which the past was perceived. If contemporary practices were in general accordance with ancestral custom, then the ancestors must, mutatis mutandis, have conducted themselves as contemporary Romans did. The past should, therefore, in many respects be similar to the present²⁷. Certainly anything good and proper must have been old.

17A related feature of Roman culture is also immediately relevant; it too appears to have resulted in the events of later times being projected into the past. The members of Rome’s nobility celebrated the achievements of their own ancestors. They were important political capital in the highly competitive environment of Republican Rome, in which nobles sought election to office and to outdo one another in the performance of great deeds for the state. But the nobles did not just compete with their contemporaries. They were also expected to live up to the achievements of their ancestors. And, in order to do that, they were evidently expected to behave like them²⁸.

18The effects of these circumstances are most easily discernible when the relevant pattern of behaviour is unique or specific and not standard, as such patterns no doubt were in most instances; after all, the range of ideals, values, and ambitions of Rome’s nobility was, comparatively speaking, quite limited and conforming with what the nobility at large deemed acceptable would have usually been necessary or at least prudent²⁹.

19The career of M. Iunius Brutus, the famous conspirator and murderer of Iulius Caesar provides an especially useful example, given what was expected of him and the nature of the debate surrounding his actions. Marcus claimed that he was descended from L. Iunius Brutus, the man who had, according to tradition, expelled King Tarquinius Superbus. Marcus also claimed that he was descended on his mother’s side from Servilius Ahala. When Sp. Maelius had tried to make himself king, Ahala had murdered him (RRC, 433/1-2; Cic., Att., 13.40.1; Plu., Brut.; 1.1-5, Caes., 62.1). It was evidently expected that Marcus would act as these ancestors – L. Brutus in particular whose name he shared – had done; hence, when Iulius Caesar had effectively become king at Rome, it was to Marcus that Caesar’s opponents turned. To try to goad him into action, they left messages for him, some of which consisted of denials of his ancestry (Plu., Brut., 9.5-10.7; Caes., 62.4; Suet., Iul., 80.3; App., BC, 2.112-113; C.D. 44.12). The implication was that a true descendant of L. Brutus would not have put up with Caesar’s rule; for Marcus to prove the legitimacy of his claims, he needed to act as Lucius had done and get rid of the king. The denial of his ancestry was a challenge. Marcus was expected to take up that challenge, oust Caesar and, by doing so, prove that he was indeed descended from Lucius.

20Following Caesar’s death some of Marcus’ opponents evidently sought to undermine the legitimacy of his deeds by denying that Marcus really was descended from Lucius. They pointed out that Lucius had put his sons to death because they had conspired to restore Superbus to power. No one could possibly be descended from him (Plu., Brut., 1.6). Cicero, on the other hand, readily defended Marcus’ claims. Each day, he said, Marcus saw the imagines, the wax masks of the faces of his ancestors L. Brutus and Servilius Ahala; thus each day he was reminded of their deeds and what was expected of him³⁰.

21The idea that the imagines symbolised the achievements of ancestors and thus reminded descendents of how they should act is stated explicitly in a story told by Valerius Maximus (5.8.3). T. Manlius Torquatus, Valerius says, disowned his son on account of the corrupt manner in which he had governed Macedonia. When his son subsequently committed suicide, Manlius did not go to his funeral. He stayed at home and worked. In the atrium of his house was the imago of his ancestor, T. Manlius Torquatus, who was notorious for having executed his own son for insubordination. According to Valerius, Manlius maintained that the imagines and the inscriptions which accompanied them were kept in the atrium not just so that descendants could read about their ancestors’ deeds, but so that they could imitate them too³¹.

22One of the consequences of these ideas has been seen already: behaviour could constitute proof of descent³². It is worth considering some further evidence, to see just how widespread and well-established this sort of thinking was.

23In Plautus’ Truculentus (504-507), the soldier Stratophanes is tricked into believing that the courtesan Phronesium has just given birth and that he is the father of the child. When Stratophanes asks if the baby takes after him, he is told that, as soon as it was born, it asked for a sword and a shield. That is enough to convince him.

24Several centuries later, Suetonius recorded a poem that had been composed at Nero’s expense. It went (Ner., 39.2):

quis negat Aeneae magna de stirpe Neronem?
sustulit hic matrem, sustulit ille patrem.

“Who can deny that Nero is descended from the great line of Aeneas?
One removed his mother, the other removed his father”.

25At first sight, this may not seem all that clever. Apart from the pun on sustulit, which can mean “removed” in the sense of “killed” (Nero killed his mother) and “removed” in the sense of “carried off” (Aeneas escaped from Troy carrying his father), there does not appear to be much else here.

26According to the argument of the poem, what proves that Nero was descended from Aeneas was his behaviour. Obviously they both did very different things, but the pun on sustulit overturns all that. In fact, it transforms their very different deeds into exactly the same deed. And it is this sameness that proves Nero’s ancestry. To follow the poem’s argument, therefore, it is necessary to believe that similar behaviour provides proof of descent. Nero did the same thing as Aeneas and, by doing so, he proved that he was descended from him. This could be put differently: Nero did the same thing as Aeneas because he was descended from him.

27One of the most distinctive features of Roman historiography is its tendency to depict members of the same gens in a fairly standardised way, although this tendency can hardly have been unique to history writing. The best example, and the one which has consequently received the most attention, is the patrician branch of the gens Claudia. Numerous patrician Claudii are presented in the literary evidence in sometimes almost identical terms: they are arrogant, they are hostile opponents of the plebs, and they are better suited to the Forum than the field. The result is that patrician Claudius after patrician Claudius tends to behave in a broadly consistent fashion³³.

28In order to explain this depiction, scholars have generally tended to focus on identifying individuals, usually historians, who can be held responsible for it, as if the whole presentation of the Claudii were a consciously-created thing³⁴. But such an approach is unlikely to be adequate when it comes to explaining a phenomenon which is actually quite widespread³⁵. Such an approach is also unlikely to account for the standardised presentation of an early, little known, and subsequently unimportant family like the Icilii. They apparently specialised in producing radical tribunes³⁶. But why should anyone have wanted to present them in this way? One possible cause is their connection with the so-called lex Icilia de Auentino publicando. The law is hardly historical (for all that Dionysius says that it was inscribed on bronze), but that does not matter. Legislation concerned with the distribution of land, as the lex Icilia supposedly was, came to be associated with the tribunate, thanks in particular to the career of Tib. Gracchus³⁷. The plebeian Icilii no doubt must have produced tribunes of a comparable outlook, and if there had been one such Icilius then there likely would have been more. The whole presentation may be a question of methodology instead of motive.

29In light of the aspirations and ideals of Rome’s nobility and Roman ideas about what could constitute proof of descent, the Roman tendency to depict members of the same gens in broadly similar ways is perfectly understandable. And, when it comes to the presence of anachronistic material in Roman accounts of the past, the relevance of this tendency is obvious. If it was believed that the individual members of any given gens would tend to behave in a particular way, and if it was believed that, by doing so, those individuals could in fact prove that they belonged to the gens in question, then, in theory, the behaviour of people even in the present could have been used as evidence for the behaviour of people in the past.

30In practice, that need not necessarily have happened. Famous individuals were probably more likely to be used as models on which to style other members of their gens, and material from elsewhere in the literary evidence – most obviously, the works of other historians – could easily have been borrowed³⁸. The results would, of course, be no less anachronistic and unhistorical than if the model had been someone from the present. On the other hand, given Roman views and ideals, the standardisation may have often been perfectly historical, as individuals consciously styled themselves on their ancestors. In many instances, however, that styling (whether historical or fabricated) may now be undetectable, especially if the pattern of behaviour was unremarkable.

313. There were clearly many reasons why Roman accounts of the past were frequently, if not even normally, anachronistic. No doubt most Romans did indeed live in a “présent éternel”, but the problem was not just the result of a failure to understand that the past is different from the present. Roman values and ideals, political arguments and ideas, and also the methods of ancient historians all contributed to ensure that the events and circumstances of later times affected what the Romans said and thought about those of earlier. As for the question of sources and models, the implications of all this should already be apparent.

32One of the most fundamental problems for the study of early Rome is the fact that no one wrote history at Rome until the late iii century BC. How did Rome’s first historians know anything at all about the events of two, three or more centuries earlier? Modern scholarship has long sought to answer that question and numerous potential sources have been identified, from family archives to records made by priests, from oral poetry to dramatic performances. To a certain extent, the nature of the discussion has arguably – ironically enough – long been limited by modern ideas and approaches, with the result that other potential sources and methods have not been considered, quite probably because no one today would ever seriously contemplate using them.

33If it is believed that individuals behave as their ancestors had done, then it follows that the behaviour of any given individual can be used as evidence for the behaviour of his or her ancestors. But, in any case, when the present is eternal, and when people do not do things differently, then the present ultimately becomes, in effect, evidence for the past, regardless of whether or not it is consciously used as such.