Talia Boylan, Yale University
This paper takes as its subject Andrea Alciato’s Rerum Patriae Libri IV (1504-5), a local history of the colony of Mediolanum (Milan) from pre-Roman times up until the joint reign of Valentinius and Valens in 364. Its aim is two-fold. First, I will demonstrate how Alciato refashions ancient historiography to raise the idea, commonly held among early-modern exponents of settler colonialism, that the political history of the Roman Empire could be apprehended through that of its colonies (see e.g. Pelgrom and Weststeijn 2020, Somos 2020). Second, I will explore what Alciato’s approach may tell us about that of Livy, his foremost source for the history of the Roman Republic. The Rerum Patriae, I will argue, teaches us to apply the same skepticism of Romanocentrism to the very texts that propagate it, to note even within the Ab Urbe Condita local perspectives that may have run counter to the historian’s own.
I begin by examining two case studies from the Rerum Patriae: Alciato’s account of the pre-Roman settlement of Insubrium (later re-named Mediolanum) and his narrative of the third-century Gallic War. In both, I will employ as a critical lens the concept of translatio imperii et studii— an innovation of the ninth century that correlated the transfer of imperial dominance from one geographical area to another with that of knowledge. By relating the history of the Insubrian Gauls in language that refashions canonical histories such as those of Cato, Livy, and Tacitus, Alciato invites us to read the different phases of the history of Mediolanum described in the Rerum Patriae as foreshadowing the decentralized form of empire he believed existed in his native city in his own day. For example, in the first of the aforementioned case studies Alciato re-writes a decentralized, Catonian tale of colonization using language drawn from the beginning of the Ab Urbe Condita, thus figuring the early inhabitants of Mediolanum as proto-Romans.
In the second part of this paper, I will demonstrate how the Rerum Patriae helps us read imperial historiography with an eye for local perspectives. A close-reading of the opening two paragraphs of the Ab Urbe Condita will suggest that Livy is engaged in precisely the opposite process of Alciato: at the outset of his history he presents himself as struggling to convert a local Catonian account of the settlement of Italy into a tale of settlement that suits his Romanocentric conception of empire. This interpretation of the very beginning of Livy’s history complements recent scholarship from the fields of ancient history and archaeology that has rightly sought to deconstruct the traditional understanding of Roman colonization as a well-ordered, statist enterprise by emphasizing the complex set of local factors that inflected it (see e.g. Bispham 2006, Roselaar 2011, Stek and Pelgrom 2014, and Tarpin 2014). By attending to Alciato’s approach, we may discern the strands of colonial historiography that run like fractures through the imperial edifice of Livy’s illustre monumentum.