| dc.description.abstract | The importance of rhetoric in Roman historiography cannot be over-emphasised, and a great amount of scholarship has been devoted to mapping out the relationship between the two. To be able to learn something from the past – one of the main purposes of history – the facts had to be adequately registered and ordered. In Antiquity, this order was given mainly by rhetoric. History benefits from rhetoric in its search for evidence or its alertness to detect bias, because rhetoric offers arguments from probability and imposes a structure on different types of historical materials. History needs rhetoric because it looks for clarity: ‘facts have to be interpreted, material organised, details selected, events reconstructed, words matched with deeds’.1 Besides, the historian, like the good orator, had to win his audience by telling good stories of the past which would make the reader engage in active learning lessons from the past. And that is why Cicero could say that history was a ‘kind of writing particularly suited to an orator [opus oratorium maxime]’.2
This history-reader engagement was attained not only by the way things were told – that is, having recourse to rhetorical models and techniques – but also through the specific content of their narratives which helped to build up a common identity. Thus, Roman historical writing was useful for self-definition, and to write about the history of Rome worked somehow as a tool for domestic policy: public life and the development of the res publica, the wars for the expansion of the Empire, the relations between the ruling elite and the plebs, the leaders and the institutions – everything was there to emphasise their specific role and function in society and to support continuity even in changing circumstances.3 The topics which history was concerned with also helped to promote the same kind of behaviour as that which had been followed in the past, encouraging fidelity to the mores maiorum through exempla. History fulfilled a specific and practical part in the community, as Livy said: ‘There is this exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from the study of the past, that you see set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being
1 Comber, ‘Re-reading the Roman Historians’, 54.
2 Cic. De Leg, 1.5, Zetzel’s translation, On the Commonwealth and on the Laws, 107.
3 For the topic of identity and role models, see Bell and Hansen, Role Models in the Roman World: identity and assimilation.
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mischievous in its conception and disastrous in its results, you are to avoid’.4 The Roman historian, then, provided good models to imitate and bad ones to avoid. In one way or another, history was regarded as a beneficial guide of behaviour or as Cicero would say, as magistra vitae5. | |
