The memory of Marathon and Miltiades in Late Republican Rome, in K. Buraselis-E. Koulakiotis (eds), Marathon, the Day After, Athens 2013, 151-166 (original) (raw)
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Classica Cracoviensia, 2020
A well-known tradition has it that after the victory of the Greeks over the Persian army at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.E.) one of the Athenians ran forty kilometres from Marathon to Athens and died soon after his arrival in the city, after giving the good news. However, the story is more complicated than it seems, and several issues have claimed the attention of scholars, such as what the Marathon runner's name was, what form of greeting he used and whether the episode really happened or not. The first part of my paper offers a reconsideration of the extant sources in order to express my point of view on the abovementioned issues. The second part aims at showing a selection of parallel passages which could possibly prove useful in trying to illustrate how the legend of the Marathon runner evolved into the shape it assumed in the Lucianean account, which is still considered as the 'official' version of the story.
Any attempt to understand the slave rebellion of Spartacus must contend with the two very different historical traditions which provide the source of all our evidence concerning his revolt: the overtly hostile Senatorial aristocratic tradition which derives from the monumental work of Livy and his sources, the post-Sullan annalists, and the more sympathetic legendary Roman populares and Greek eastern tradition which has come down to us from the fragments of the earlier Histories of Sallust and perhaps the Universal History of Posidonius or his lost appendix to it on the Life of Pompey, as well as the works of the more anti-Roman Greek historians of the early Augustan age. Because of the paucity of the surviving brief literary sources, modern historians have felt compelled to patch together pieces deriving from both these traditions in order to get as complete a picture as possible, particularly for the first years of the war, even though, for the final campaign, those pieces were often mutually contradictory. Because of these inconsistencies, the modern historiography of the war of Spartacus, has come down to various sets of individual choices between the two traditions that different scholars have made. The simplest and most consistent approach for scholars would have been to ignore one version altogether. However, to choose the Livian version would result in what seems to most modern scholars to be a far too distorted account of events, leaving out a number of significant Roman reverses during the final campaign; but choosing the Sallustian version derived from Plutarch and Florus would leave out other important earlier Roman defeats from the previous campaign against the consuls described only in Appian and the Livian epitomists’ versions. Thus, most scholars have made their selections from both traditions. In contrast with their relatively consistent accounts of the campaigns against the consuls, the Livian and Sallustian sources’ versions of Spartacus’s final campaign, fought against Marcus Licinius Crassus, are much more clearly demarcated; indeed they are radically divergent. This is particularly unfortunate, yet probably understandable, because, despite Spartacus’ almost miraculous earlier victories over the armies of the Roman consuls, it is the events of the final campaign against Marcus Crassus, particularly those of the final battle, that provide the best measure of how great a threat he actually posed to Rome. Unfortunately the process of amalgamation of the two traditions has led to a blurring of the lines between them, hiding both the ultimate futility of Spartacus’s challenge to Rome embodied in the Livian tradition and the real potential threat of that challenge which emerges when the Sallustian version is pushed to its limits. In particular, regarding Spartacus, many historians seem unable or unwilling to accept the possibility that what the Sallustian and eyewitness sources, including Cicero, are telling them is actually true. Thus, the time has now arrived for a reappraisal of the two conflicting historical traditions. Because the accounts of the final phase of the war found within the two traditions are so much at variance in their details and yet internally so self-consistent, each alternative account should be considered in relative isolation, enabling us to see the Livian/Senatorial Spartacus at his minimum historical stature and the Sallustian Spartacus at his maximum. This work presents in detail the source materials for both the Sallustian and the Livian versions of the final campaign of the slave war as well as for the most important military events which led up to it, with extensive commentary. The book provides a carefully argued analysis, comparison and critique of the two patently incompatible accounts of the final campaign of the war of Spartacus that derive from the two historical traditions. Through analysis I rationalize and clarify both accounts, perhaps shedding some new light on the controversies and mysteries surrounding them, to produce two distinct but coherent pictures. I have tried to let the sources from each tradition speak for themselves and, for each point of contradiction, to allow the reader to choose between them. Having confronted each account individually without inclusion of any, or almost any, particularly contradictory elements from the other, except where logic and analysis demand it, allows us to then ask which of these contradictory pictures of events is more likely to be true overall, if not in every detail. Taking into account both Livian and post-Sullan annalist biases and the distortions introduced by Plutarch into the Sallustian version, I have offered critiques of both traditions. In analyzing the two traditions, I have also attempted to introduce some new interpretations and, using our contemporary knowledge of Roman social and military history and Italian geography and demography, offer a contribution to the now ongoing debates about a number of outstanding military, chronological and geographical questions arising out of each tradition. Detailed discussions of these special topics are relegated to approximately two dozen appendices. I believe my analysis provides convincing arguments that, as far as the final campaign is concerned, a large part of the Livian/Senatorial aristocratic version, as passed down to us by Appian, Florus and the Livian epitomists, is, in crucially important ways, an historical fabrication swallowed whole by Livy and nearly so by Appian from their likely sources, the duplicitous patriotic post-Sullan annalists such as Q. Claudius Quadrigarius and Valerius Antius. On the other hand, I argue that certain important aspects of Plutarch’s contradictory account represent deliberate distortions by the great biographer of what his source Sallust actually wrote, in the service of better illustrating the moral lessons he wished to impart and of his own unconscious aristocratic biases. In my conclusion I have also used the results of my analysis to identify the nearly fatal Spartacus war as perhaps the first crucial link in the chain of events which finally brought down the Sulla's Roman Republic some three decades later. See Addendum pg. 11 below. I also use evidence from both traditions to re-evaluate the severity and historical impact of the insurgency carried on in Southern Italy by the survivors of the war over the next decade and to gauge the slave rebellion’s future prospects during that period had Spartacus lived to fight on. This work thus encourages historians to re-examine the literary evidence and the resulting logical arguments critiquing the Livian and the Sallustian derivative traditions as well as those illuminating and supporting the original Sallustian version and to form their own independent judgments about the magnitude of Spartacus’ achievements, his chances of surviving the final Roman offensive, his longer term prospects for success had he done so and whether the five century Roman Empire that followed was inevitable or strongly contingent upon the Romans' good fortune. Addendum pg. 11 Failing to mention the nearly fatal crisis of the late 70's but perhaps thinking of how much difficulty the future monarch Tiberius, at the head of fifteen legions, fully half of the total armed power of Rome, had in finally crushing the great three year Illyrian revolt of 6-9 AD, "the most serious of foreign wars since those with Carthage" (Suetonius, Life of Tiberius 16,1), and of the enduring chagrin of Augustus, the emperor himself, at the subsequent total loss of Varus and his three legions in the Teutoberg Forest in Germany, ending any Roman ambitions of conquest there, Edward J. Watts cautions: “It is, of course, quite possible that an empire of some sort would have emerged from the wreckage of Rome’s republic. But there also might not have been a Roman Empire at all. It is surely just as likely that if the first Roman to try to create a permanent Roman autocracy had been less skilled or less long-lived than Augustus, Rome’s Mediterranean primacy might have ended with the Republic itself. As the dictatorships of Caesar and Sulla both showed, an empire involving all of Rome’s territory was by no means inevitable. Spain had split off from Sulla’s regime. It had almost succeeded in doing the same under Caesar. Syria, too, remained incredibly difficult to control for both Caesar and the triumvirate with figures such as Labienus easily peeling it off from central Roman control. Augustus managed to create a stable Roman autocracy that dominated the entire Mediterranean world. If he had not come along, Rome’s empire may well have fallen apart.” Watts, Edward J., Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, New York, Basic Books, 2018 pg. 279