James H. Richardson – författare

The study of Regal and Republican Rome presents a difficult and yet exciting challenge. The extant evidence, which for the most part is literary, is late, sparse, and difficult, and the value of it has long been a subject of intense and sometimes heated scholarly discussion. This volume provides students with an introduction to a range of important problems in the study of ancient Rome during the Regal and Republican periods in one accessible collection, bringing together a diverse range of influential papers. Of particular importance is the question of the value of the historiographical evidence (i.e. what the Romans themselves wrote about their past). By juxtaposing different and sometimes incompatible reactions to the evidence, the collection aims to challenge its readers and invite them to join the debate, and to assess the ancient evidence and modern interpretations of it for themselves.

The study of Regal and Republican Rome presents a difficult and yet exciting challenge. The extant evidence, which for the most part is literary, is late, sparse, and difficult, and the value of it has long been a subject of intense and sometimes heated scholarly discussion. This volume provides students with an introduction to a range of important problems in the study of ancient Rome during the Regal and Republican periods in one accessible collection, bringing together a diverse range of influential papers. Of particular importance is the question of the value of the historiographical evidence (i.e. what the Romans themselves wrote about their past). By juxtaposing different and sometimes incompatible reactions to the evidence, the collection aims to challenge its readers and invite them to join the debate, and to assess the ancient evidence and modern interpretations of it for themselves.

This e-book explores how Roman ideas about human behaviour and historiography affected the ways in which the Romans wrote about their past. The first of the e-book's three chapters considers Roman views concerning human behaviour and the impact that these had on the traditions of Rome's past. The second looks at the presentation of the gens Fabia in the literary evidence and at the ways individual Fabii were said to have behaved. The final chapter examines the evidence for the Gallic sack of Rome and considers the influence that Greek historical traditions had on Rome's own traditions. Numerous members of the gens Fabia were said to have acted in a similar manner and even to have done the same things, while the tradition of the Gallic sack bears a striking resemblance to the tradition of the Persian sack of Athens. Scholarship usually maintains that individual historians such as Fabius Pictor were responsible for devising these sorts of parallels, and that they did so for their own literary and political purposes. The principal argument put forward here is that they are the inevitable product of Roman historical thought, and so need not be attributed to any one historian.

Andreas Alfoldi (1895-1981) was an eminent ancient historian, numismatist, archaeologist and epigraphist. His scholarly output, as vast as it was diverse, covered archaic Rome, the late Republic, the provinces of the Roman Empire, especially the Danube region, and late antiquity. Alfoldi's work was marked by extraordinary erudition, by his ability to draw on all manner of evidence, no matter how disparate, and by astonishing fertility and originality, and yet, while a number of his publications remain influential, others - some of which were controversial even when they first appeared - are now largely ignored. This volume, which comes some thirty years after Alfoldi's death and a century after his first publication (at just 19 years of age), contains a collection of papers that shed light on Alfoldi's life and discuss his work on a variety of topics, from earliest Rome to late antiquity. It offers a wide-ranging assessment of Alfoldi's arguments and ideas, both those that have been influential and those that have been superseded or neglected, and explores an academic career that began in Alfoldi's native Hungary and ended in exile in the United States.