The rhetoric of documentary quotation in Roman historiography

Since ancient historiography strives for vivid narration that makes the past come alive before the eyes of the reader, it is a bit of a paradox that historians generally avoid quotation, whether of archival documents, official records, published speeches, personal letters, or inscriptions. In this dissertation, I examine the places where Roman historians from Cato the Elder to Tacitus do engage with such verbal relics that can claim to provide direct access to the past, and I argue that when historians expressly incorporate, reject, or qualify such authentic words, they reflect on the fundamental process of converting the materia of history into a narrative with literary, social, and political import. I show that the so-called convention by which ancient historians generally avoid direct quotation of documents and individuals needs to be understood in terms of literary and social authority. Historians are keen to avoid being perceived as mere mouthpieces for the words of historical speakers or the narratives put forward by impressive public monuments and documents, but they also exploit the convention that quoted words reveal the authentic self, using prosecutorial techniques borrowed from forensic oratory to make dicta and documents reveal hidden truths. Each of my chapters concentrates on a single historian engaging with documents of types and in modes characteristic of the historical moment in which he writes: Sallust uses transcribed letters to contest the attempts of individual politicians control history with their published speeches and commentarii, while showing how words from the past reveal the corrupted language and values of the present; Livy contrasts the (merely) antiquarian interest of monumental inscriptions and published speeches with the comprehensive monumentum of AUC historiography; Tacitus shows how historiography can commemorate the true significance of ipsa verba in spite of the attempted manipulation of quotations to construct damning or flattering portraits of their authors. My dissertation shows that where these historians show themselves engaging with verbal relics of the past, whether to include or pointedly exclude them from their narratives, they are self-consciously commenting on what historiography does as a mediator, even a gatekeeper, between past and present