Christopher Simon
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
corpus of a single historian or history. This fact about the Roman historical tradition, which has often
been exploited as grist for the scholarly mill (e.g. Wiseman 2008), exists in tension with the textual
critical practices used to evaluate and compile its fragmentary remains. It is with this tension in mind,
occasioned by the recent three-volume edition of Fragments of the Roman Historians (Cornell et al.
2014), that this paper considers contradiction and its relationship to the fragmented historical narratives
represented by these fragmentary texts.
Textual critical practices have shaped how modern scholars approach contradiction as a feature
of fragmentary texts, and as a consequence, how they assess contradiction as a feature of fragmentary
narratives. Scholars, recognizing a contradiction between fragments, identify it with a given problem,
which they then attempt to ameliorate or resolve by means of various textual critical tools – interpretive
commentary, emendation, or more dramatically, transposition, omission. These editorial decisions, in
turn, inform other choices related to the fragments – e.g. inclusion, extent of quotation, relative order. If
many of these editorial decisions would be difficult to contest on textual grounds, indicative of a problem
are instances where narrative, and not textual, contradictions result in editorial interventions (e.g. FRH
5.17, 21). Indeed, these latter instances strongly suggest that ancient and modern thinking about the
relationship between contradiction and historical narrative has become disjunct, especially with regard to
fragmentary narratives.
In contrast, contradiction has long been a recognized feature of Roman historiography, whether
as a result of socio-political exigencies (e.g. Wiseman 1974, Roller 2010, Farney 2010) or for the purpose
of entertainment (e.g. Cornell 1975, Woodman 1988: 17 ff., Feldherr 1998). Although it remains
impossible to gauge how much and to what extent Roman audiences tolerated such contradictions, it
appears that certain amount of contradiction must have been accepted and that their threshold for
contradiction was relatively higher. Textual criticism, however, and other traditional modes of studying
fragments such as Quellenforschung pit one fragment against another or against the variant accounts
whose narrative and underlying source materials often survive better intact. As Fox has noted, default
assumptions about what has and has not survived closes this circle of interpretation (1996). Narrative
contradictions in Roman historical fragments should thus be distinguished from other forms of
contradiction, and subsequently (re)evaluated on an individual basis. A failure to do so artificially
conflates the exceptional status of fragmentary texts with fragmentary narratives, whose nature is of a
different kind altogether