Histos Working Papers . CITATION AND THE DYNAMICS OF TRADITION IN LIVY’S AUC In a recent article, titled “Historians without History: Against Roman Histo- riography”, J. E. Lendon provocatively decries the scholarly move towards seeing the Roman historians primarily as literary artists, complete with the poetic license to invent and distort: My contention here is that most contemporary writing in English about the Latin historians slights these historians’ concern for truth, and that indifference to so important a part of what the historians thought they were doing constitutes a pervasive affliction in the scholarship, infecting the cogency even of writing on topics – like the historians’ style – to which the truth or falsity of the historians’ report is strictly irrelevant. Lendon’s concern, that historiography somehow impoverishes history, de- rives at least in part from the notion that a literary approach to the Roman historians licenses a deep skepticism about their truthfulness, by analogy with poetry or the novel. As a consequence, he suggests, historiography has tended towards increasingly ingenious readings which identify the criterion of historical writing with a multitude of concepts in place of truth: probabili- ty, plausibility, verisimilitude, and so on. Literature has thus come to replace history as the template against which to read the historiographical output of the ancients, and with it follows a tendency towards seeing history as no dif- ferent than fiction. But if history remains different than fiction, it is nevertheless a literary genre, as Lendon fully appreciates. As Anthony Grafton has pointed out in a recent book on the footnote, history and literary art (as opposed to literary fiction ) are not easily decoupled: Historical texts are not simply narratives like any other; they result from the forms of research and critical argument that footnotes record. But only the literary work of composing such notes enables the historian to represent, imperfectly, the research that underpins the text. Lendon : . Lendon : -, esp. on source criticism as a marker of historical writing. Grafton : -. Copyright © Ayelet Haimson Lushkov DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION. Ayelet Haimson Lushkov Because literature has been closely identified not simply with the telling of a story but also with its rendition in a stylized fashion, the relationship be- tween content and form has traditionally been the domain of literary critics: genre, topoi , and – the subject of this colloquium – intertextuality and allu- sion. What this paper therefore attempts is not to refute or vindicate Len- don, but rather, by using Livy as a test case, to explore how literary critical features – in this case, intertextuality – can cohere with the historical project of truth correspondence, as expressed in Livy’s “footnotes”. Thus, the main focus of this paper is the historiographical source cita- tion: the range of textual gestures by which an author explicitly points to his sources, whether by name or by reference to a collective tradition. Source citations are ubiquitous in ancient historiography, so much so that they tend to blend into the background, trotted out only to catalogue sources or estab- lish the historian’s working habits. One of Livy’s commentators, Robert Ogilvie, is reflective of a general attitude: “Frequently he [i.e., Livy] will name variants or cite alternatives, but this is no more than the scholarly pe- dantry expected of a historian. It means very little.” But the ubiquity of source citations demonstrates also the central position they occupy in the historiographical tradition, and the crucial role they play in engaging the reader of a history in the dynamics of a particular historical reconstruction. Indeed at the most basic level source citations function as generic mark- ers, not only providing a distinctive feature of historical writing, but also de- fining the genre as concerned with particular issues: their very presence sug- gests research, pedantry, authentication, and a dedication to truth, or at least to an honest and open disclosure of the difficulties of accessing the past. But as generic markers historiographical citations are also literary de- vices and rhetorical gestures, which explicitly focus attention on various fa- cets of engagement between historical texts; in other words, they are the most obvious form of intertextuality, and it is this aspect of citation that this project aims to explore more fully. Citation has not, as a rule, been either theorized or considered in terms of its literary meaning. Fehling remains seminal for the fictive dimension of historiographical ci- tation. An important attempt to catalogue Livy’s citational and authorial reference has been made by Forsythe , which focuses on Livy’s methods in adjudicating the con- flicting evidence of the First Decade. The current paper complements Forsythe’s ap- proach by asking not what attitude Livy shows to earlier traditions, but rather how the historical mannerism of citation serves both Livy’s history and his historiography. Ogilvie : -. Like all generic markers, source citations too can be deployed more or less ably, and with varying degrees of earnestness or artfulness, but this range should not detract from their importance. Whether or not a historian actually told the truth is less important (and often simply impossible to establish) than his investment in appearing to tell the truth. Citation and the Dynamics of Tradition in Livy’s AUC To say that citation is an obvious form of intertextuality should not sug- gest that historiographical citation does a poorer or less sophisticated sort of literary work. Rather, its explicit nature suits the historical medium well: whereas Alexandrian poetry invites the reader to recognize himself as a sharer of knowledge equal to the poet, history’s didactic function demands that the author display his greater store of acquired knowledge to his au- dience. Nor are historians incapable of deploying both kinds of intertextual- ity: as much recent work shows, historians, including Livy, use embedded allusion to great effect. But citation, being so distinctive of historical writing, deserves a closer exploration as a literary feature, one that helps the author to perform the role of the honest researcher and allows for various forms of interaction with a myriad of texts. A comparison with poetry may prove instructive here. We may observe in Latin poetry various types of citation, including the verbatim quotation: tu mihi concilio quondam praesente deorum (nam memoro memorique animo pia uerba notaui) “unus erit, quem tu tolles in caerula caeli” dixisti: rata sit uerborum summa tuorum! (Ovid, Met. .-) You have said to me once in council, in the presence of the gods, (for I remember, and I have noted your faithful words in my remembering spirit): “There will be one, whom you will raise to the blue of the hea- vens.” May your words thus be fulfilled! The speaker here is Mars, and he is quoting Jupiter’s words to him in a council of the gods. That council took place in an earlier epic, Ennius’ An- Other didactic forms, even in verse, show similar tendencies to historiography. So Lucretius, for example, will cite or allude to his philosophical sources (usually those with whom he disagrees, e.g., DRN .- (Heracleitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras); and the scholia tradition, especially on the Aeneid , likewise lists historical variants (e.g., Servius ad. Aen. ., which collects variants from Sallust, Livy and Sisenna). Thus a broader view of citation as a literary device may be applicable to more than just historiography, though the kind of ‘truth’ being dealt with – historical or metaphysical or scientific – might have implications for the particular effect of the intertextuality within each genre. On Livy’s use of intertextuality, see, e.g., Jaeger , Levene : -, and the essays in Polleichtner . For historiography more generally: Kelly : -, O’Gorman . On the historian’s construction of his persona as authoritative, see Marincola , esp. - on sources. The focus, however, is on the distinction between autopsy and written or monumental sources. On citation and authority in the satirical Apocolocyntosis : O’Gorman . Ayelet Haimson Lushkov nales , and Ovid here provides a direct quotation of Ennius, Annales fr. (Sk.). Ovid does not cite Ennius by name, but there is no mistaking the source for anyone else, and the act of quotation itself is so mannered ( tu mihi … dixisti , memoro memorique ) that its significance cannot be mistaken or unde- restimated. Gianbiagio Conte has characterized this type of quotation as creating no “gap”, or discontinuity, between the quoting and quoted text, since the former accepts the latter as a given reality, and he suggests that Ovid quotes Ennius in order to borrow his authority for his own text. This procedure appears very much like historiographical practice, or at least some considerable portion of it: one historian provides a narration of events, which later historians then receive and reproduce in their own text, thus ap- propriating the former historian’s auctoritas . It is this very procedure that has created the characteristic tralatician nature of Roman historiography, which stands in opposition to the autopsy- or interview-based contemporary history advocated by Thucydides and Polybius. We can also see poetic citation operating in a slightly different way. Some poets, though by no means all, explicitly name a predecessor as a pa- radigm for their own work. Thus Ennius is a second Homer, Propertius a second Callimachus: uisus Homerus adesse poeta (Ennius, Annales fr. Sk) Homer appeared to approach the poet. Ennius hirsuta cingat sua dicta corona: mi folia ex hedera porrige, Bacche, tua, ut nostris tumefacta superbiat Umbria libris, Conte : suggests that the term “quotation” should be reserved by philologists for the specific instance in which the original source is cited by name, and offers as an example Persius, Satires , .-, quoting Ennius, Op. Inc. Sk (= Annales V): “Lunai portum est operae, cognoscite, ciues” / cor iubet hoc Enni.