Scholars' incredible inability to add two and two

[fpb]

125 years ago, Theodor Mommsen gave crushing evidence to prove that no piece of Roman history - meaning the traditional history, as told by Livy, Appian, Polybius and the other ancient historians - before 380 BC, and few before 275 BC, were reliable. Theodor Mommsen was not only one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome who ever lived, but one of the most widely read. Every specialist since is familiar with his work. And in fact his powerful argument - first set out in an article in a magazine called Hermes in 1886 - has been expanded and proved again and again by many other scholars, in particular the Italian Ettore Pais.

Get it? No story told about Rome before 380 BC, and precious few before 275 BC, are reliable history. The matter is complicated by the fact that, while the stories are certainly unhistorical, the stages in political evolution they describe do seem to have happened as they are described. Rome started out as a monarchy of sorts; it was ruled by Etruscan kings for about a century; when the Etruscans were driven out, it became a republic. And there seems to be a basic reliability, in spite of numerous variants, about the lists of consuls and other officials that were handed down. But the history, the history itself, is not history. It is a bunch of stories. It is a vast, indeed amazing, body of legends.

This is perhaps more significant to me than to many of my readers, because, being Italian - and with family connections with the city of Rome itself - these are my heroic past. Italian children learn stories about Romulus, Numa, Tarquinius the Proud, or Furius Camillus, at school, like American children learn about Washington and Lincoln and Irish children about Brian Boruma and Daniel O'Connell. But the fact that these stories are all just stories struck me very forcefully.

Now when the Greeks came to look at the Romans, the one thing they did not find was a large body of stories such as they had, about various gods and their interactions with each other and with heroes who were themselves sons of gods and often hardly to be distinguished from gods. (Herakles, Helen, Menelaus and Diomedes, to mention only a few, received divine as well as heroic cult.) And not seeing the kind of mythology they were familiar with, they concluded that the Romans - these people with their enormous amount of "historical" stories and heroes - had no mythology.

The Greeks could be excused for this gross category mistake. Scholars ever since Mommsen cannot. That textbooks, and indeed scholarly investigations, about Roman origins, continue to be produced, in which "the problem of Roman mythology" is seriously argued and repeated, is inexcusable and an intellectual scandal.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Yes, but "unreliable" doesn't necessarily mean "false." It's quite possible that every single one of the Roman kings was historical (indeed, given the length of time I would imagine that some minor kings were left off the canonical list) and that even the stranger stories, such as Numa Pompilius being taught mysteries by the nymph Egreria, might have a foundation in truth (Egreria might have been a priestess/scholar rather than a magical nymph).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

NO,no,no, no, no, no.That is not how stories develop (in fact, they don't develop at all). This sort of arbitrary invention replaces something we know is a fable with something we would like to believe is true and which has no particular importance if so. It is exactly the kind of sentimental clinging to mistaken notions from which we must guard. There is more factual content to be got from knowing that something or other is a myth (and, at that, a tremendously impressive amount of myths, that completely disproves the traditional slander against the flat-footed, unimaginative, stick-in-the-mud Romans) than from trying to keep some character of factual reality to it when we have no reason whatever to. I have said that the main stages of Roman civilization and, to a large extent, the list of eponymous officials, are correct; I might add that there is at least a good chance that the list and date of various laws and the dates of the establishment of various temples may be correct or close to the truth. (Some, but by no means all. I have the evidence that there was a serious reshuffle in the meaning and importance of Roman magistracies, and that the tribunate of the people was both much more ancient than the stories admit and the real headship of the state - the rise of the Consuls to acknowledged heads of state was an usurpation. My reasons At any rate, legends develop by replacing facts with a pre-existing pattern of events and ideas, turning historical characters into patterns. A little known fact, for instance, is that the same legend about the definitely mythological figure of Guinevere/Gwennhwyvar (who turns up in Irish epic as Findabair) was told not only of Arthur but also of Cei, Indeed, the poem in which this is shown has been consistently misunderstood, although what it says is perfectly clear. Why is that? Because, in different tribal areas, both the historical Arthur and the historical Cei were seen as heroic sovereigns in love with glory and doom, who eventually died in a last great battle. And Guinevere/Gwennhwyvar/Findabair was the mythological incarnation of this love of glory and doom. Therefore she would tend to appear in the mythological biography of any sovereign who was remembered as the one of highest glory and most awful doom; and only one figure in each culture (Arthur triumphed and Cei was reduced to a worthless retainer) could be seen in that light. In modern culture, it would probably be Napoleon I. But by the time a historical figure is cast as the husband of Gwennhwyvar, he has ceased being historical, because being the bridegroom of Gwennhwyvar involves a whole series of story tropes - abduction by Melwas/Meleagant, rivalry with a hero who incarnates the supreme god Lleu/Lug (in Arthurian epic, this is Lancelot), and so on - which dictate the form that the legend of the Great King will have. From Iceland to India, the Indo-Europeans had patterns of epic legend that all resemble each other, and by the time we have our Arthurian documents, Arthur's historical character is almost subsumed into one no different from Yudhisthira or Agamemnon or the Latin Aeneas. Myth does not preserve historical features, it replaces them. And of all myths, those to do with the inspiration of a mortal by a goddess - or any other love affair of the kind; Gwennhwyvar is clearly a goddess - are the most obviously alien to reality and most conformed to existing patterns of imagination.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

WhoooooopSIIIEE!!
In the above paragraph, talking about the Consulate and the Tribunate, there is a bit missing. It ought to have said: "...was an usurpation. My reasons to think so are too long to set out here, but they arise from analysis of these same stories - the obvious thing to do once you know they are stories. That is, what point are they trying to prove, who are they doing propaganda for, and who are they doing propaganda against?)"