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This paper offers a new approach to the generation-old problem of “democracy” in the Roman Republic by looking at democratic features in the most prominent institution within the Republican state--the citizen army. In the past thirty years, much ink has been spilled on the extent that the Roman state can be classified as a democracy (the debate largely sparked by Miller 1984). Most scholars have focused exclusively on voting in assemblies in Rome to elect magistrates and pass laws, although Nicolet 1980 does explore some of the political implications of military service.

Scholars have traditionally considered the military one of the key factors underpinning the distinctively egalitarian political trajectory of ancient Greece. Whether it is the influence of hoplite tactics on Archaic government or the contribution of the navy to Athenian democracy, military participation has been thought to have a significant effect on the broadening of political participation (Hanson, Strauss, Raaflaub).

In his collection of Essais, Michel de Montaigne communicates with antiquity through its textual remains; in nearly every single one of his essays, classical fragments are interspersed with his narrative in French.

This paper analyzes the fragments of two of Livy’s predecessors, Coelius Antipater and

Valerius Antias, and argues that Livy incorporates elements from these texts into the AUC through

the use of internal narrators and focalizers. This analysis reveals Livy’s engagement with the

Roman historiographic tradition outside of the direct citation of his sources. Recent editions of the

corpora of the fragmentary historians of Rome (Chassignet 1996-2004; Beck and Walter 2001-

This paper is motivated by the notion that maxims have a powerful aura owing to their

incompleteness (Elias 2004), and the observation that attitudes voiced by characters in an

author’s work are often taken as that author’s opinions (Garber 2003). I develop the suggestion

that the work, now only book-fragments, of the Roman Republican author Gaius Lucilius,

inventor of Latin verse satire, was always intended to be experienced in fragmentary form

(Henderson 1989). Lucilian poetry possessed an improvisatory air, labelled by the poet a

In a fragment of Theopompus’ lost comedy “The Pleasure-Loving Man” (Ἡδυχάρης, fr.

16), one character explains to another that nobody can be sure of anything these days, “since one

is no longer one, and even two is hardly one, as Plato says.” The speaker’s reference to the

philosopher Plato led August Meineke, the great 19th century editor of comedy, to suppose that

Plato was a character in the play, that the title was an ironic nickname for him, and that the play

was, therefore, essentially a joke about Plato’s infamously dry manner of living.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that the edition of a fragmentary work can be no

more reliable than those of the sources upon which it draws. Less widely recognized, but

no less true, is an important corollary: arguments based on the testimony of a fragmentary

work will be no more reliable than the edition on which they are based. So, to take a

simple example, a character in Ennius’ Annales certainly referred to the city’s founding

as some 700 years before his own time (154-5 Sk.), but to say the speaker is Camillus and

Contradictions are scattered across the Roman historical tradition. Some of them are evidentiary,

such as the number of troops or the quantity of spoils recorded for a certain military campaign, while

others comprise features of the (whole) narrative – competing and (apparently) exclusive claims about

events, as well as their order, cause, outcome, interpretation etc. (cf. White 1973). Contradictions of both

sorts can be found not only by comparing the works of different historians, but also by examining the

“Whole texts are bullies” (Goldberg 1995: v). They are not the only ones; bigger fragments

jostle the smaller, too. Important new work on Cato and Ennius has reaffirmed their importance for

Roman literary and political histories (e.g. Sciarrino 2011; Elliot 2013; Goldschmidt 2013; even

Cicero’s hexameters: Volk 2011). Fragments are more accessible than ever before, as well

demonstrated in this Call for Papers. But it remains the case that most ancient authors are known

Fragmentary oratory raises a specific and challenging set of problems for the classicist. As with other

genres, fragmentary texts pose familiar questions of authorship, ordering and the interpretation of

syntactically and semantically incomplete material. In addition, however, the ambiguous relationship

between oratory as performance and oratory as text generates fresh concerns. The importance of

oratory within ancient historiography makes authorial ascription of ‘fragments’ highly problematic: it