Narratives of Decline in Roman and Chinese Historiography

Abstract

This dissertation answers two related questions: When did Roman historians first treat their history as a narrative of decline, and how did this narrative evolve? The answer emerges from three main areas of analysis, namely the fragmentary beginnings of Roman historiography, comparison of these fragments with the early historiographic tradition of China, and examination of the later reception of the decline narratives in Tacitus’s histories. The argument first defines the ‘decline’ as constructed in historiographic narrative in distinction to the formulation of decline as a general theory. Then, by considering the earliest Roman historiographic fragments in the context of the Second Punic War and its aftermath, it under-mines the common assumption that pessimism in the style of Sallust and Livy prevailed ab initio. Probably it emerged only in the later second century B.C.E., perhaps in the annals of Piso Frugi. The argument then addresses the issue of how the form of annals and chronicles can accommodate grand narratives such as that of general decline. The early Chinese chronicle Chunqiu 春秋 and its annalistic commentary Zuozhuan 左傳 demonstrate that grand narratives can emerge by deliberate implication from the selection and shaping of anecdotes. On this model, we can see in Calpurnius Piso Frugi and other Roman annalists the possible vestiges of an implicit, thematically complex narrative of decline that has been obscured by the later, explicit accounts. A further evolution of the decline theme, particularly in the ways that Tacitus’s histories respond to Republican and Imperial narratives, also belies the assumed ubiquity of Sallust’s and Livy’s visions of a golden age followed by decay. Thus the answer to the initial questions is that a decline narrative was absent in the earliest historians; later, in Piso and others, it may have emerged in a form quite different from Sallust and Livy.