I'm going to start reading through the historiography on Rome. Is there an order in which I should do this?

by mweuste

Title

qsertorius

When you say historiography, what exactly are you picturing? Do you want to understand the changes in the way historians have studied Rome or do you want to read books about various events of Roman history from different points of view? Either way I would start with a textbook overview. Something like H.H. Scullard's From the Gracchi to Nero which covers the most well-known and well-sourced period of Roman history 133 BCE - 64 CE. If you want something more scholarly, I suggest you check out the Cambridge Ancient History volumes 7 and onwards. It's split into articles that have overviews of different topics. The reading list in the wiki has plenty of good suggestions. I would also recommend reading the primary sources like Polybius, Livy, Plutarch, and Suetonius. The early books of Livy (1-10) and the early lives of Plutarch (Numa) are impossible to tell history from legend, just to warn you.

As for understanding how historians have changed, I will admit that I do not follow the study of early Rome, so I can't help you there. I consider it a hopeless case to decipher the truth from the legends and use it only as a way to explain Roman morals, like many historians (and even Livy himself). For the more grounded portions of Roman history I would begin with Gelzer's The Roman Nobility. Gelzer was the first person to propose that Rome was dominated by ancestral, permanent bonds that allowed a small oligarchy to dominate politics. From there you can read Lily Ross Taylor's Party Politics in the Age of Caesar and Syme's The Roman Revolution. Both authors use Gelzer's theory and expand upon it to explain the explosive political atmosphere of the late Republic and the success of Augustus, respectively. Next you can scope out P.A. Brunt's articles on the Clientele and Amicitia which are a dismantling of Gelzer and "The Army and the Land" and "The Fall of the Roman Republic" which are his alternate view of the social forces which aided the creation of the Empire. Gruen's The Last Generation of the Roman Republic gives a narrative from 70-45 that removes the Gelzer effect. A couple of articles from Fergus Millar about the Contio and the comitia, published in the '90s went even further from Gelzer and argued that we can view Rome as a basically democratic society. He has been confronted by Henrik Mouritsen's Plebs and Politics in the Late Republic and Robert Morstein-Marx's Mass Oratory both of which argue for elite control through institutions if not through direct reciprocal bonds. Both are heavily indebted to Christian Meier's Res Publica Amissa a German work which has not been translated into English but which essentially argued that Roman politics ran on a set of cultural norms (the mos maiorum) which empowered the elite. This more or less brings you up to the current state of the historiography of Roman politics (though a lot of articles are now being published pushing back on Mouritsen and Morstein-Marx, one of which was written by Morstein-Marx).

At any rate, I'm sure this post has made it clear that Roman historiography is quite extensive. You also have entirely different historiographies for Roman Law, Roman provinces and expansion, the Roman Empire, Roman religion, and Early Rome, so let me know if you want a little more guidance. If you are really masochistic I can even share my old reading list.