Fragments from Theory to Practice

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.