ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

VI.Evidentiary CautionsLiteratureUntil recently, modern historians accepted uncritically the colonization accounts not onlyof Livy and Velleius Paterculus, but also of Aulus Gellius and later authors in order tocreate a more or less unchanging blueprint of a Roman colony. These authors and manyothers who discuss colonization in passing had a very firm idea of what the colonizationefforts of their own late Republican or imperial period were, and retrojected this ideaonto narratives of early Roman colonization. Livy, Festus, and Velleius Paterculuspreserve information about Republican colonization more directly than Aulus Gellius,and they are acknowledged to be generally factual because they were derived from anofficial Roman record of the colonies sent out under various commissioners in specificyears. 146These authors, however, couch the details of colonization in terms of their ownunderstanding of the late Republican ideology of colonization offered also by Cicero andDionysius of Halicarnassus, "in which colonization was seen as an ordered, statecontrolledprocess which played a vital part in the success of the Roman empire." 147J.R. Patterson's article, 'Colonization and Historiography: the Roman Republic,'attempts to compensate for the later Republican colonial ideology by carefully analyzingthe Romans' changing attitudes to colonies and the contexts of the ancient authors. 148Heconcludes that ancient historians and politicians portrayed the colonial processambiguously and as a complex phenomenon; it was an agrarian initiative if the authorwanted to emphasize a helpful attitude toward the Roman plebs, but on the whole146 Bradley (2006), p. 163.147 Ibid.148 Patterson (2006), pp. 189-191.44