THE YEARS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
The emperors’ encroaching presence also warps the distinctive Roman form of
historiography, that of annalistic history (annales), inaugurated by the first Roman
to write history, Fabius Pictor.^100 The narratological correlative to the monumen-
tal fastiwith their paired consuls, annalesare organized around the Republican for-
mat of the successive pairs of annually elected consuls and give a year-by-year
account of the life of the city and its empire.^101 Ideally, the subject matter and the
format are mutually determining “due to the structure of the state,” which is based
precisely on “annually elected magistrates who actually ran the state.”^102 The con-
suls not only provide a backbone for the city’s dating system together with an
organizing principle for the events of a given year; they also generate the action
that is the material for the historian.
The richest and best-studied departures from this tradition are to be found in
Tacitus, and a fine study exists on the subject in Ginsburg (1981). Already in Livy,
however, whom Ginsburg and others take as the norm from which Tacitus departs,
there are numerous examples of self-conscious variation to show how pressure on
Republican patterns is mirrored in the narrative. Rich (1997) has well demon-
strated the way that Livy departs from his year-by-year format “probably for the
first time” when he comes to the tangled and constitutionally hideous years from
the Social War to the revolt of Lepidus in 78 b.c.e.(books 71 – 90); here he narrates
“in a single section events taking place in one region over two or more years,”
using flashbacks as he covers widely disparate events. As Rich says, “Republican
institutions were in disarray in those years, and it would have been wholly inap-
propriate, and indeed impossible, to retain the old regular pattern for the annual
narratives.”^103 When he came to the final collapse of the Republic, Livy may well
have forsaken the annalistic patterning and returned to the personality-dominated
format of his first book, where the narrative of the kings is not structured around
the annual rhythm.^104 Even within the securely Republican period of the early
fourth century, a constitutional crisis can produce a narratological one. When the
tribunes Licinius and Sextius veto the election of the curule magistrates for the
years 375 – 371 b.c.e.(Livy 6.35.10), then dating and proper narrative both become
impossible: “by eliminating the authorities by whom time is measured the tribunes
effectively take control of narrative authority as well, while the state and its record
simply stop.”^105
In the light of these highly self-referential Livian moments, Rich is certainly
right to say that the Livian norm that Ginsburg posits as the foil for Tacitus’s aber-
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti