Sources I

1
Sources (I)
2
Sources for antiquity

• How do we know what happened in the Greek and
  Roman world?
• How do we know when it happened?
• How do we know what events meant to the ancients?

3

• Chronology and time-reckoning
• Literary Sources
• Language
• Greek and Latin Literature
• Inscriptions
• Archaeology
• Architecture
• Painting
• Sculpture

4
Chronology and time-reckoning

• This course focuses on the period ca 1500 BC to
  ca AD 476.
• These dates are a modern convention, reflecting
  the modern calendar.
• The ancient situation was more complex
• a strong awareness of the changing seasons and
  months (astronomy)
• there were many calendars for individual cities
• Caesar reformed the Roman calendar, bringing it
  close to the modern system.

5

• The ancient situation (cont.)
• Historical events were typically dated by the
  year of a particular priest or magistrate in
  which they fell.
• Often reference is made to a particular season.
• Rough lengths for a single generation were used
  to date past dynasties.
• The acme system was widely used in ancient
  biography.
• Occasionally the distance is measured from some
  single event, common era (e.g., the first
  Olympics 776 BC, founding of Rome 753/2 BC,
  Trojan War 1183/2 BC).

6

• Modern statements of historical chronology
  represent a conversion of ancient modes of
  time-reckoning to modern.
• e.g., a Roman writer would say that Caesar was
  murdered on the Ides of March C. Caesare V et M.
  Antonio consulibus.
• We would say that Caesar was killed on 15 March
  44 BC.
• This modern fact represents a series of
  interpretations.

7
Literary Sources
8
Languages Greek and Latin

• Greek is descended from Indo-European, and
  Indo-European speakers seem to have moved into
  the Greek world some time before the Mycenaean
  Age (ca 2000 BC).
• This new language seems to have displaced an
  indigenous language (or languages), but traces of
  pre-Greek vocabulary remain in the lexicon of
  classical Greek.

9

• The Greek world is geographically disparate, and
  during the classical period Greeks inhabited not
  only mainland Greece, but the Aegean islands, the
  coast of Asia Minor, parts of north Africa and
  southern Italy.
• A number of dialects flourished, each with
  considerable variation in phonology, morphology
  and vocabulary.
• Although to the modern student ancient Greek is
  often synonymous with Attic Greek, in fact a
  standard version of Greek did not emerge until
  the later part of the Hellenistic period when
  koinê was used throughout much of the
  Greek-speaking world.

10

• Latin began as the language of Latium, the region
  of which Rome is the most important centre, and
  Latin belongs to the Italic group of
  Indo-European languages.
• Having originally been spoken at Latium from ca
  800 BC, Latin came to be the dominant language of
  Italy, and later became the common tongue of the
  western Mediterranean world and as far as the
  Balkans to the east.
• The diffusion of Latin is a direct reflection of
  the growing influence of Rome, the city that
  dominated Italy politically and culturally.

11

• After the middle of the third century BC there
  emerged a formal literary language, which is
  conventionally called Classical Latin.
• The Romans themselves spoke of sermo urbanus, a
  phrase which suggests both urbane speech and
  speech of the city.
• In sharp contrast to early Greece, where the
  literary language reflects the influence of a
  number of dialects and so a number of regions,
  other Italian dialects seem to have had little or
  no influence on the development of Latin literary
  culture.

12
The character of Greek and Latin

• Very different from English.
• Inflected languages (i.e., meaning and
  syntactical function are determined by
  word-forms, not word-order).
• Extensive vocabularies.
• Translation is a difficult and often inexact
  science.