08-24-2014, 06:12 PM
Welp that thread has an...interesting savour to it.
Anyway the thing is it's not always clear cut and in many ways a moot question. Livy was obviously writing later than the punic wars but had access to a variety of sources and traditions. Just as importantly, he is an example of Roman historical thought on the punic wars. All of our Alexander historians are late but one can untangle the complex web of citations in order to delineate their souce usage reasonably well.
Historiography in the Classics has moved in quite a predictable pattern over the past two centuries really. It's moved from always accepting classical sources as accurate and assuming they had access to good information, to attempting to foist a sort of binary choice of true/false onto the data to nowadays taking a much more complex and contextual way of looking at things. The key is on context, I've seen people (especially here) trust Herodotus more easily than they would a modern day newspaper article or assume (dangerously) that he's writing in the same post 19th century historical school as they are reading. No, he's not. None of our written sources are. Yes Propertius can be just as important as Livy for historical purposes.
This isn't tackling the use of documentary evidence or how shoddy the textual traditions of certain texts could be or how uncertain we might be on language...
So if we assess primacy in terms of detailing events, not often, but we aim to investigate some of those other things you bring up: Caesar's complex verbal rhetoric, Thucydides' political ideology, the question of how accurate a source had the ability of being...well everything is primary for that. It varies, it is complex, and the answer varies even within single authors and texts.
Anyway the thing is it's not always clear cut and in many ways a moot question. Livy was obviously writing later than the punic wars but had access to a variety of sources and traditions. Just as importantly, he is an example of Roman historical thought on the punic wars. All of our Alexander historians are late but one can untangle the complex web of citations in order to delineate their souce usage reasonably well.
Historiography in the Classics has moved in quite a predictable pattern over the past two centuries really. It's moved from always accepting classical sources as accurate and assuming they had access to good information, to attempting to foist a sort of binary choice of true/false onto the data to nowadays taking a much more complex and contextual way of looking at things. The key is on context, I've seen people (especially here) trust Herodotus more easily than they would a modern day newspaper article or assume (dangerously) that he's writing in the same post 19th century historical school as they are reading. No, he's not. None of our written sources are. Yes Propertius can be just as important as Livy for historical purposes.
This isn't tackling the use of documentary evidence or how shoddy the textual traditions of certain texts could be or how uncertain we might be on language...
So if we assess primacy in terms of detailing events, not often, but we aim to investigate some of those other things you bring up: Caesar's complex verbal rhetoric, Thucydides' political ideology, the question of how accurate a source had the ability of being...well everything is primary for that. It varies, it is complex, and the answer varies even within single authors and texts.
Jass
