Meggie Macdonald

I was recently contacted by an American student who is hoping to work on the Villa Della Vignacce site this summer in Rome with the American Institute for Roman Culture with questions about background reading that would help supplement the research that they would be undertaking in Italy.  I wish this student the best of luck in securing a position with AIRC and admit to being a little (but very happily) jealous of the opportunity.

Among the various questions I was asked, one stands out because it is a question that I never thought to ask when I was an undergraduate student myself and only recently became aware of.  There are important implications for historical study when the necessary primary sources are not only unavailable but, in all likelihood, no longer exist at all.

This student was looking for a primary source similar in scope and detail to Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars which ends with the death of the third Flavian emperor, Domitian in AD 98.  The most obvious extension of Suetonius’ work is of course the Historia Augusta that chronicles the reign of Hadrian beginning in AD 117 to Carinus in AD 284.  Written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine (Diocletian reigned from AD 284 until his abdication in AD 305; Constantine reigned from AD 306-337 and was sole emperor from AD 324 until his death), the authors of this document claim to be picking up precisely where Suetonius left off.  This of course suggests that the reigns of the Five Good Emperors and that of Trajan were once included in this compilation as well and have since disappeared.

More recently, scholars have disputed this claim, stating that there is nothing to suggest that the Historia Augusta ever contained the histories of emperors prior to Hadrian.  So where did we get the information on these emperors?  And what can be said about the information from the Historia Augusta on the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus?

At this stage, I will address the latter question.  The Historia Augusta is not a primary source for the second half of the second century AD.  It was written nearly one hundred years later by an author, or multiple authors (that debate still rages as well), who could not have seen the events they described unless they lived well into their hundreds (as unlikely 2,000 years ago as it is today).  Therefore it is a wonderful primary source for the fourth century AD but must be taken with grains of salt regarding the second.  It is also largely agreed that the information in the opening pages of the HA are much more reasonably objective than the grossly unsubstantiated details in the later chapters, where chronologies and events vary sometimes by decades.

In situations like this – and, in fact, it is good academic practice to take every primary source at less than face value – we can compare and contrast the primary sources that are available to paint a fuller picture of events at a given point in time.  What the HA cannot offer with reasonable accuracy, we can sometimes find in other sources, such as the letters of Simon bar Kochba written during the Second Jewish Rebellion in AD 132-136, the report on aqueducts written by Rome’s Water Commissioner, Sextus Julius Frontinus, in the first century AD, and even other historical treatises that may be Roman but do not represent eye-witness accounts or living testaments to the nature of the world in the second century AD.

One must look at historical evidence with the same discerning eye that a jury considers witness statements during a trial.  Are they trustworthy accounts?  Is there something about one account that makes more or less sense than another?  Are there details that do not quite fit that you feel would benefit from further study to confirm or deny?  Remember, what you might consider an outlandish description may in fact have more grounding in truth that you would expect.

Never assume, always corroborate.  Happy hunting!

Over this past weekend, the once mighty northern border of the Roman Empire – a stone wall stretching from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne to the Solway Firth built by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 122 – was lit up with burning beacons to honour the men who once guarded the ramparts.  It is also a bid by Tourism UK to jumpstart the 2010 spring tourist season and, by all accounts, this is one powerful publicity stunt.

The wall once ran right across northern England for 117km and cut off the Caledonian ‘barbarians’ from the romanized civilians to the south.  Hadrian built it as part of his campaign of peace and stabilitythroughout the empire (he also had another border built along the farthest reaches of Roman Africa.   Following the massive expansion efforts under Trajan (including the conquest of Dacia in AD 106 and the campaigns against the Parthians beginning in AD 107), Hadrian was faced with a formidable task when he came to power following Trajan’s death in AD 117:  how to consolidate power and stabilize the Roman empire when it had been overstretched for far too long.  Among his various solutions – some successful, some not – were the construction of the wall in Britain and the huge pallisade across North Africa.

Among the benefits of such an undertaking, the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain kept some potentially rebellious soldiers occupied with other tasks.  The wall took years to build as legionaries dug the foundation from the cold, wet clay-mud of northern England and built the forts and milecastles to maintain security at the Empire’s northern border.

The Wall is a rather surprising thing to see, particularly when you only realise after the fact that you have indeed seen it.  During one train trip to Edinburgh, the train I was on passed by a rural neighbourhood near the east coast and there, nestled in a little valley between the train tracks and a farm house, was a small pile of cut stone.  Nothing so spectacular as some of the taller sections and certainly less impressive than the restored section of the wall, this little bit of Hadrian’s political power was enough to catch in my throat all the history that it stood for, and still does stand for.

Also from The Guardian, here is a cute little video of the lighting of the wall this weekend.  THe music may be a bit schmalzy, but it’s a lovely event none-the-less.

In New York Times columnist Steve Coates’ response to various outraged comments about the death of King Priam of Troy, the author replies that it is true that the death of Priam is not chronicled in Homer’s epic, The Iliad (which is obvious, when one is aware of the fact that the Iliad concludes with the death of Achilles, not with the end of the war), but rather in the Roman epic, The Aeneid, by Publius Vergilius Maro or Virgil, if you will.  It is the concluding comments in this article that took me aback more profoundly than any argument over the source of the death of King Priam:

No matter how skillful these translations, Virgil’s Latin suffers far more in translation than does Homeric Greek. It’s worth learning Latin just to read the “Aeneid.”

Clearly there are some people who enjoyed translating the mightily convoluted 4th Eclogue more than my high school latin class who condemned the technicolour sheep for their very presence in our busy lives.

Not to condemn the value of learning Latin, of course.  Yes, to read the Aeneid, you must have some sincere appreciation for the beauty of the language Virgil uses throughout his poetic epic.  But you need that same appreciation to recognize Caesar’s wit and political prowess, to sympathize with Catullus’ sparrow, and to understand what a conceited wretch Cicero really was.  To know the people, you must know the language so that you can know how they thought about the world they lived in.  It’s as simple as that.