Writing After Livy: Historical Epitomes in the Livian Tradition [electronic resource].

9781088315026

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (240 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Writing after Livy: Historical Epitomes in the Livian Tradition is a study of how the ancient historian Livy's 142-book history of Rome impacted historiographical norms in Latin literature. Rather than focusing on the ancient authors who typically dominate scholarship on the reception of Livy, this dissertation considers a body of historical epitomes that, in various ways, rewrite Livy's Ab Urbe Condita by summarizing it: Florus, Eutropius, Festus, the Livian Periochae, and the Oxyrhynchus Epitome.Chapter 1 begins by investigating how the authors of the epitomes established themselves as authoritative voices within the tradition of Roman historiography. Epitomes—along with other types of writing such as commentarii, letters, and breviaries—are constantly hovering in the background of antiquity's major historical compositions. Taking account of how these shorter 'sub-literary' texts cooperate with larger historical texts to preserve and re-present particular versions of Rome's history, the first chapter argues that the epitomators understand their projects primarily and seriously as works of history. This position is at odds with traditional views of historical epitomes that have sought to exclude the texts from the category of historiography on the grounds that they lacked the genre's requisite discourse of innovation. Examples from technical, commentarial, and religious literature, however, demonstrate the existence in antiquity of a mode of textual authority that relied on the pretense of non-innovation to lend the weight of traditional authority to a particular narrative or body of information. Hence, the epitomes' studied avoidance of discourses of innovation is not a sign that the works are not 'proper history'; rather it signals their alignment with the Livian historiographical tradition that they are themselves in the process of (re)inventing.Chapter 2 acknowledges that despite how the epitomes present themselves, these texts offer innovative and unique re-writings of the Livian version of Roman history. Much like commentators, who often profess fidelity to a source text to authorize their novel interpretations of it, the epitomators are readers and interpreters of Livy whose texts are informed by their creative contexts. The chapter examines the ways in which the epitomes present novel readings of Roman history through dialogue with the Ab Urbe Condita, focusing predominately on five generic markers of historiography: narrativity, focalization, chronological scope, chronological arrangement, and subject matter. This chapter details how the various epitomes adapt the Ab Urbe Condita for new and different communities of readers, paying attention to how each text selects for itself the elements of Livy that are indispensible (i.e. the story of Romulus, narratives of imperial expansion, and estimates of troop numbers) and those that are superfluous (i.e. Rome's urban topography, political narratives, and the variant accounts of different sources).Chapter 3 explores some of the reasons why short format texts became the favored tool for Imperial historians writing about Rome's Republican past. Beginning with Florus—the earliest datable epitomator—this chapter examines him in the context of contemporary Latin literature of the second century and argues that the text responds to the same discourse of cultural trauma that can be detected in the works of Tacitus, Pliny, and Juvenal. Florus leverages the unique formal aspects of epitome to mediate the perceived breakdown in public discourse that permeates his contemporaries' writings; his text relies on the process of re-writing that is inherent to epitomization to reframe, and so revitalize the distinctly Republican practice of writing history that begins with Roman origins. In doing so, he demonstrates the adaptive resiliency of epitomical writing and establishes a model for later authors such as Eutropius and Festus.Chapter 4 examines the later receptions of historical epitome. Despite evidence of historical epitomes' favored reception from late antiquity to the early modern period, authors like Florus and Eutropius have come to be regarded for the most part as 'bad' historians by modern scholars. The final chapter looks more closely at the reception of Florus, whose fall from grace is both the most dramatic and also well documented among the Livian epitomes. Formerly one of the most popular books in western Europe, the prefaces from the editions and translations produced in Early Modern England (ca. 1650-1800) provided a vignette of decline that is in lockstep with emerging ideas about historiographical method, authorial genius, and literary creative ownership: the arrival of "scientific" history from the continent paired with the advent of copyright protections that posited an adversarial relationship between "original" works and their summaries proved a disastrous combination for Florus, and indeed many other derivative forms of historiography, with lasting implications for their study.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

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English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Classics.