All the threads about the (alleged) ahistoricity of Jesus make me wonder-how much do we really know about people in the ancient world.
Take Julius Caesar-Roman Emperor and general. He wrote several books (like “The Gallic Wars”) which survive-how do we know if his writings are true?
Or some of the later emperors-was Caligula really an insane monster?
Given that most of the ancient historian’s writings were preserved by being recopied (by medieval monks), were most of the copied manuscripts faithful to the originals? The fall of Rome is one of the major historical events-writer such as Gibbon had written their own, highly personal opinions on it-did he bend the facts to suit his conclusions?
Moving from IMHO to General Questions.
True not only of him, but of any historical character, right down to the present day. One question any historian takes on is how much to believe of any work. And it might not be that the author lied – it could be he was mistaken. Or he was biased. Or copyists through the centuries have miscopied or edited his work, or taken notes written in the margin and incorporated them into the text. Or any number of other things.
In Caesar’s car, he wasn’t writing an objective history for Posterity – his books were advertisements for his greatness, so he could continue holding power. So you take that into consideration.
But he probably didn’t Make it All Up – that’s too tall a task in any case, and there were lots of people who’d cry foul if he strayed too far.
And we have the writings of other historians, and the archaeological record to corroborate Caesar’s writings, so it’s not as if we have absolutely nothing to check this against. Of course, for a great many of the details in the Gallic Wars we really don’t have anything else – Caesar is our only source for the numbers on each side and which tactics were used. And, of course, nobody else could say why he did certain things – only he knew what he was thinking.
But Caesar gets read with the same critical eye as everyone else, and if he says something that’s obviously wrong, people will notice it. And, if there’s some doubt, people will comment on that, too.
I haven’t read him extensively – I’ve got The Gallic Wars and The Civil War in translation, and I actually read some of the Gallic Wars in Latin, eons ago. And I’ve read a few historians, ancient and modern.
I certainly agree with Cal, so consider this an extension of what he said.
The problem of history applies to everything. There are a million threads going on right now that argue about recent events that everybody lived through without any agreement on the facts, the context, the background, or the meaning. There’s no real conceptual difference between arguing over the success or failure of the Bush years and the historic reality behind the Bible. Both cases involve much Special Pleading (i.e., having a preconceived view determine the way that the arguments are structured and considered) as well as imperfect understanding of just what went on. We may know more about what happened five years ago than in Biblical times, but nobody knows everything.
Every aspect of history is a weighing game. You usually give more weight to contemporary accounts than to later ones. But contemporary accounts may be skewed by imperfect information (think of the earliest accounts of any disaster, the ones forgotten later by everybody except conspiracy theorists) and may be put forward to give one side’s point of view. Later accounts can put together many sides into a fuller picture. On the other hand, when people give their memories decades later, those memories are almost always wrong because humans construct stories automatically to make sense of what happened. The stories told by people in Dealey Plaza in Dallas in November 1963 often are wildly different from the ones they told later after competing narratives tried to explain the events of Kennedy’s assassination. But we now have better forensic techniques and computer recreations that make many conspiracy accounts physically impossible. That’s history too and that has to be weighed in. The equivalent of that is archaeological evidence, from which we get a sense of whether 1000 or 100,000 people were in a place at a given time just by the debris they would have left behind.
The flip side of weighing is cherrypicking, although that’s part of Special Pleading. Amateur historians almost always cherrypick. They go through the evidence only to pick out the pieces that support them. They don’t weigh, they don’t give context, they don’t make the long, slogging effort to work through the technical details that have been painfully developed.
Yes, even professionals will sometimes succumb to “if this, then if that, then if this, then if that, then this conclusion.” That’s bad history. It’s also easy to spot when it happens. Popular accounts of Shakespeare are full of it, in both senses. Popular accounts are not the primary material, though. That’s especially true in archeology, where the professional literature is almost never readable by amateurs.
If we mostly believe Caesar today, it’s because so much work has gone into understanding all the details of the world in which he lived from every other possible source. It’s all that hard work from large numbers of historians that give us our best understanding of history, not any one individual work by anybody.
Another important thing to remember is that ancient history wasn’t something that happened one weekend. Just because a classical historian was writing about classical history doesn’t mean he knew the facts.
Plutarch, for example, was an ancient historian who wrote a number of well-known biographies of ancient figures. But Plutarch wrote his biographies sometime around the year 100. He was writing about people who, in many cases, had lived centuries before he was born. Plutarch was relying on ancient, and possibly unreliable, sources for his information just like we are now.
You’re absolutely right to assume that our sources about many ancient historical figures are pretty flawed. Some are much worse than others, though. Julius Caesar is a person we know fair amount about- we have a lot of writing from his own hand, in addition to the writings from some pretty good historians who followed him quite quickly thereafter. Alexander the Great is the opposite- we have only the writings from his biographers, most of whom were writing centuries later, with the result that in many biographies Alexander marries the Queen of the Amazons.
One way (certainly not the only way) any reader can get at the truth is to read different accounts of the same historical event. Historians have biases and blind spots just like everyone else, but different historians often have different faults. Sometimes they are competing accounts, directly disagreeing on specific parts of the story, and sometimes one account is written to refute the other, or to supply a new understanding.
Similar to deciding what movie reviewer to trust, you can form your own opinion of a given historian’s credibility and interpretive powers if you’ve read the works of a lot of different historians and gotten a feel for what’s typical and where this author is being creative (or too creative.)
Further, you can apply a form of set theory to different historical accounts. If Bob’s analysis of Julius Caesar is pictured as a a circle containing facts and stories and events, and Suzy’s is also a circle, there’s a hypothetical area where those circles overlap. Events that Bob and Suzy both agree on are probably more likely to be true versions than areas in which they vehemently disagree.
Does it sound like a lot of work? Yeah, it is, unless you enjoy it. But seeking truth is a universal quest that will never end, and “history” is basically “everything that ever happened (that we can know about).” So it really is a never-ending quest for everything, in a sense – it shouldn’t be a surprise that it would take time and commitment.
And as a corollary to the above, the internet is a terrible place to read history. Unless all you want are the most basic facts, you need the room of books - or at least of formal articles and papers - to develop an argument and provide context.
Wikipedia is particularly awful because it pretends to be objective and yet almost always does more than merely present a series of facts. History is a sustained argument and that can only come coherently out of a single mind, not a committee which doesn’t work together.
In fairness to wikipedia - I’d be surprised if many encyclopedias do better. I know it’s been said many times, but it bears repeating - wikipedia is exceptionally valuable as an introduction to a given subject, but utter dreck for in-depth knowledge. The correct way to use wikipedia is to get an idea of the contours of the field, then go off and read other things - possibly, but not necessarily, using the references in the article.
Didn’t Cicero claim that Caesar had his bio ghost-written by his military secretary (male), & alledge that the two were lovers?
Or was it somebody else who claimed that?
My memory…
In fact, encyclopedia articles are generally written by individual experts in those fields, although editors go over them for consistency. A good encyclopedia article on history would almost always be better as an introduction to that subject.
Wikipedia wants online references to everything. That can’t possibly work.
Obviously Wikipedia is enormously useful. But few people do use it properly as a mere starting point and it’s lack of decent references is a huge handicap. I do see more references to books than I used to, so maybe this is changing.
Probably, although Caligula was an early Emperor (third one, in fact). There’s enough details about what he did that he almost certainly did a number of very terrible things.
He didn’t invent any facts, but he defintiely twisted things to suit his own preconceptions. Not many give any credence to his claim that “weak” Christianity really destroyed the Empire.
This is simply wrong. Tons of entries reference books and magazine articles.
Robert Graves used “Life of the 12 Caesars” by Suetonius as a source for his Claudius novels. Was Suetonius affected by his punishment for a possible affair with the wife of Hadrian (who preferred boys) when he recorded, of Julius Caesar?
Don’t shrink from ancient sources & more modern interpretations. Read as many as you can & make your own decisions.
Sexual relationships between men were viewed very differently back then. Being the top was fine, but being the bottom was not.
Well, you can’t trust that plutocratic, rent-gouging intellectual catamite. I recommend Michael Parenti’s “The Assassination of Julius Caesar”, a nice dissident work which takes the unpopular line that Cicero was a scumbag. To show how from the same materials different historians can reach opposite conclusions, that is.
Zombies make good history.
I thought historians tried to cross reference multiple sources (ideally from antagonists) to identify the “truth”. For instance the differences about Kadesh in the Egyptian and Hittite account.