Download C. Caesare V et M. Antonio consulibus

Sources (I)
Sources for antiquity
• How do we know what happened in the
Greek and Roman world?
• How do we know when it happened?
• How do we know what events meant to the
ancients?
• Chronology and time-reckoning
• Literary Sources
– Language
– Greek and Latin Literature
– Inscriptions
• Archaeology
– Architecture
– Painting
– Sculpture
Chronology and time-reckoning
• This course focuses on the period ca 1500 BC to ca AD
476.
• These dates are a modern convention, reflecting the
modern calendar.
• The ancient situation was more complex:
– a strong awareness of the changing seasons and months
(astronomy)
– there were many calendars for individual cities
– Caesar reformed the Roman calendar, bringing it close to the
modern system.
• The ancient situation (cont.)
– Historical events were typically dated by the
year of a particular priest or magistrate in which
they fell.
– Often reference is made to a particular season.
– Rough lengths for a single generation were
used to date past dynasties.
– The ‘acme’ system was widely used in ancient
biography.
– Occasionally the distance is measured from
some single event, common era (e.g., the first
Olympics 776 BC, founding of Rome 753/2
BC, Trojan War 1183/2 BC).
• Modern statements of historical chronology
represent a conversion of ancient modes of
time-reckoning to modern.
– e.g., a Roman writer would say that Caesar was
murdered on the Ides of March C. Caesare V et
M. Antonio consulibus.
– We would say that Caesar was killed on 15
March 44 BC.
• This modern ‘fact’ represents a series of
interpretations.
Literary Sources
Languages: Greek and Latin
• Greek is descended from Indo-European,
and Indo-European speakers seem to have
moved into the Greek world some time
before the Mycenaean Age (ca 2000 BC).
• This new language seems to have displaced
an indigenous language (or languages), but
traces of pre-Greek vocabulary remain in
the lexicon of classical Greek.
• The Greek world is geographically disparate, and during
the classical period Greeks inhabited not only mainland
Greece, but the Aegean islands, the coast of Asia Minor,
parts of north Africa and southern Italy.
• A number of dialects flourished, each with considerable
variation in phonology, morphology and vocabulary.
• Although to the modern student ancient Greek is often
synonymous with Attic Greek, in fact a standard version of
Greek did not emerge until the later part of the Hellenistic
period when koinê was used throughout much of the
Greek-speaking world.
• Latin began as the language of Latium, the region
of which Rome is the most important centre, and
Latin belongs to the Italic group of Indo-European
languages.
• Having originally been spoken at Latium from ca
800 BC, Latin came to be the dominant language
of Italy, and later became the common tongue of
the western Mediterranean world and as far as the
Balkans to the east.
• The diffusion of Latin is a direct reflection of the
growing influence of Rome, the city that
dominated Italy politically and culturally.
• After the middle of the third century BC there
emerged a formal literary language, which is
conventionally called Classical Latin.
• The Romans themselves spoke of sermo urbanus,
a phrase which suggests both ‘urbane speech’ and
‘speech of the city.’
• In sharp contrast to early Greece, where the
literary language reflects the influence of a
number of dialects and so a number of regions,
other Italian dialects seem to have had little or no
influence on the development of Latin literary
culture.
The character of Greek and Latin
• Very different from English.
• Inflected languages (i.e., meaning and
syntactical function are determined by
word-forms, not word-order).
• Extensive vocabularies.
• Translation is a difficult and often inexact
science.