Primary Sources

[Flavivs Aetivs]

Constantine Porphyrogenitos is considered a Primary Source on the War in the Crimean Peninsula in 297, and he wrote in the 10th century.

Another one of his books from his gigantic series he commissioned is how Priscus survives, and without Priscus, the 5th century would be even darker to us than it already is.

[Renatus]

It's not really a matter of being obliged to treat them as primary evidence. They are primary evidence.

So, a primary source is one that you cannot go beyond - or is that too simplistic?

[Nathan Ross]

It's not really a matter of being obliged to treat them as primary evidence. They are primary evidence.

So, a primary source is one that you cannot go beyond - or is that too simplistic?

I'm quite puzzled too now! Without disputing the quality of Livy's work, or his importance in the study of Latin historiography - or indeed in the study of the earlier Roman republic - I still don't understand how he is a primary source on the events he describes. An ancient source, sure, our earliest source - but surely 'primary' implies that he is the origin of the 'chain of research', rather than forming a link in that chain?

So can we really draw no practical distinction - or even a semantic one - between a writer who participated in or witnessed the events he describes and who writes from experience (Cicero, say, in his letters and speeches, or even Ammianus Marcellinus) and one who composed a history centuries later using sources now lost to us?

[mcbishop]

So can we really draw no practical distinction - or even a semantic one - between a writer who participated in or witnessed the events he describes and who writes from experience (Cicero, say, in his letters and speeches, or even Ammianus Marcellinus) and one who composed a history centuries later using sources now lost to us?

No, Duncan is quite right. Livy is the primary source, my (hypothetical) book about Livy would be a secondary source, Fred Bloggs' (imaginary) book about XYZ that uses my book (but not Livy) is a tertiary source (as, usually, is Wikipoo, which ignores primary sources for much of its stuff on the Roman army).

You can infer the existence of earlier material upon which Livy is basing his work (or, in the case of Vegetius, copying it out pretty much verbatim!), but that is source criticism and doesn't affect Livy's status as a primary source.

Mike Bishop

[Renatus]

So, in my Senegambian example, the Annual Register, in our present state of knowledge, is the primary source and everything else is secondary or tertiary. If O'Hara's original dispatch were to be found, that would become the primary source and the Annual Register would be demoted to secondary.

[Nathan Ross]

that is source criticism and doesn't affect Livy's status as a primary source.

Interesting! Thanks... So would we say that Tacitus is a primary source on the Boudica revolt? How about Cassius Dio on the same event?

Is ancient history known and accepted as different in its attitude to sources? I suppose to an extent it has to be, but in most other fields of history I've encountered the idea that a writer working several hundred years after the fact could be referred to as 'primary evidence' would cause raised eyebrows at the very least! :dizzy:

[Urselius]

It seems to be down to variations in survival. Take the Res Gestae, if we had the original bronze inscription set up in Rome, then that would be primary; as we only have provincial copies then they are the primary sources. If no physical inscription had survived to the modern day, then any excerpt from the Res Gestae written by a contemporary, or near contemporary, author would have been the primary source.

[Renatus]

So would we say that Tacitus is a primary source on the Boudica revolt? How about Cassius Dio on the same event?

If I am understanding this correctly, both would be primary sources as they each represent the earliest examples we have of different traditions as to the course of the revolt. It is then a matter of source criticism to attempt to ascertain which is the more reliable or whether there are plausible elements in each. Am I getting near?

[Nathan Ross]

as we only have provincial copies then they are the primary sources. If no physical inscription had survived to the modern day, then any excerpt... would have been the primary source.

That seems fairly unproblematic - a provincial copy, or a later copy, would still preserve the original text. But how about if all we had a gloss on the text by a 3rd century author? It would tell us what the text said, but not the original wording. Still primary? Or would it be 'a text with another text as the subject', i.e secondary according to Duncan's set of definitions earlier?

they each represent the earliest examples we have of different traditions as to the course of the revolt.

That's a good way of looking at it. Even so, while being primary evidence of the traditions as they survived in later Roman writing (in the 2nd and 3rd centuries respectively), would they still be primary source evidence about the event itself?

[Lyceum]

Well if you read, for example. Papaioannou on the Res Gestae you'll see a summary of differences between Greek and Latin versions as well as cultural explanations for those differences. It wasn't a case of simply copying. Romans (and most ancients really) meant for their documents to be used in different ways than ours.

Anyway the point above about other periods of history and eye raising is an important one, that is the case here as well but often our sources are limited.

Here is a video from Glenn Most on Quellenforschung/kritik: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBkIgNkRv50

here are some important wikipedia pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_criticism

I'm also going to recommend a) any work by Pelling on this since it's example based (e.g his "literary texts and the Greek historian" or "tragedy and the Greek historian") and N G Hammond's work on the Alexander source tradition. Normally you'd be expected to cut your teeth on Roman legal and/or religious (basically the same thing tbh) documents but that can be tricky.

I'd recommend more Roman based stuff but I don't know what languages people can read. Actually, Nathan, you've read Forsythe on early Roman history right? that (or Gabba in Italian) would be a perfect introduction to the Roman tradition.

Note this isn't getting into textual or philological or cultural problems, or really touching epigraphy and other documentary evidence since I think the former is more to do with evaluation and the later is actually something else. Either way, that stuff is good.

[Nathan Ross]

Romans (and most ancients really) meant for their documents to be used in different ways than ours.

Certainly, and I understand that ancient texts in particular cannot be held to the same (often rather legalistic) standards of evidence as modern documents. They come from a differing tradition, and have a different purpose, in a way.

However, if we look at the Lambaesis Inscription, for example, we have what is surely a primary text: although Hadrian's actual speech may have been subject to revision, the inscription was created at the time (or shortly thereafter) and presumably intended to convey the emperor's words - we have the 'speaker' (Hadrian) and the 'audience' (the officers and men of III Augusta), besides a reasonable idea of the date. We might question the reasons for this speech being recorded and displayed in this way, and whether it relied on formal conventions of speech-construction (etc), but the text itself contains no interpretative framework that would address it to an outsider; it is of its time and for its time.

Compare this to Vegetius's epitoma rei militaris - while he uses (and often cites) prior sources, Vegetius is all interpretation! Would there really be no way, within the academic definitions of ancient historiography, to distinguish between the Lambaesis inscription and Vegetius? Or is that just a faulty way of looking at things?

Here is a video from Glenn Most

Thanks! Many of Most's points were rather beyond me, but it's always good to have an insight into the complexities of interpretation. I was reminded of various debates I've noticed about the status of the gospels as primary sources on the life of Jesus - obviously so, to some people; obviously not to others... :neutral:

you've read Forsythe on early Roman history right?

I haven't, I'm afraid - my reading and general historiographic knowledge is more absence than presence in most cases (which could be why I ask questions like these! ;-) )

But I'll try and track down some of the titles you've mentioned... once I clear my current backlog of reading...

[mcbishop]

Compare this to Vegetius's epitoma rei militaris - while he uses (and often cites) prior sources, Vegetius is all interpretation! Would there really be no way, within the academic definitions of ancient historiography, to distinguish between the Lambaesis inscription and Vegetius? Or is that just a faulty way of looking at things?

Speidel's edition of the Lambaesis inscription makes it clear he thinks there is an editorial layer between the original speech and what ends up on the stones, and that, just as with Vegetius, you are getting some of Hadrian's words (although, as Eric Morecombe might have said(, not necessarily to the ful extent or in the right order ;-). The quantity of Hadrian in each is unknown, probably unknowable (although Schenk had a damned good try in the former case), and probably subject to the law of diminishing returns in trying to quantify the difference. The problem is that the Vegetius MS tradition looks so dodgy, and that Lambaesis inscription so tempting, that one automatically leans towards believing the latter over the former.

Mike Bishop

[Nathan Ross]

just as with Vegetius, you are getting some of Hadrian's words

Aha! But surely the inscription, whether a verbatim transcript or not (and probably not), was created in or shortly after the summer of AD128 and read by the soldiers and officers concerned? It was not an attempt to interpret what the emperor meant by his words, for some outside reader with little knowledge of the subject. Therefore it doesn't matter so much if the text is verbatim or not... it is historical raw material, which we must interpret ourselves as best we can.

Vegetius, on the other hand, interprets his sources for us...

[Sean Manning]

So although Polybius and Livy are both writing centuries after the fact, we are obliged to treat them as primary evidence of the army and campaigns of the republican era, as we don't have the sources they were working from?

It's not really a matter of being obliged to treat them as primary evidence. They are primary evidence.

The terms "primary" and "secondary" have no bearing upon the quality of the sources, only their position in the chain of research.

For what its worth, I say that a source is a primary source for something when that source had direct knowledge of it, and a secondary source for it otherwise. Clearly other people use these terms differently, and it seems to me that arguing about definitions is not helpful.

Instead, I will step back and suggest that the principle that sources closer to an event are more reliable is so important that it needs to be called something. If we want to study Gaugamela, using a secondary source for the battle like Arrian faces challenges which using a primary source for the battle like the Astronomical Diary does not, because its hard to tell how the story was changed as it passed from mouth to mouth to produce Arrian's version. A source with direct knowledge of an event is not necessarily "better" than one without, but its usually easier to assess its perspective and limits. On the subject of early Rome, it would obviously be easier to decide whether to believe stories about the early republic if we had versions earlier than Livy's, Diodorus', and Dionysius of Halicarnassus' summaries!

What people call sources with more direct knowledge of something and sources with less is less important than that they think about which is which.

[Renatus]

it seems to me that arguing about definitions is not helpful.

I don't think it's a question of arguing about definitions. It's a question of knowing the conventions, so that, if someone speaks of primary or secondary sources, we know what they're talking about.