Perspectives On and Of Livy's Tarpeia - EuGeStA

170 TaRa WeLCh
perspectives not always able to be reconciled to each other. horatia’s story
offers a particularly rich point of comparison, for there the outcome is
much more comfortable. In contrast to Tarpeia’s story, in which no one is
heroic, horatia’s story is full of commendable behaviors.
In both episodes, Livy exploits the language of seeing and seeming so
as to frame the latent questions about identity that these foundational
stories explore in terms of vision and perspective. Unfortunately, the distance
of time and the panoramic view Livy offers in his first book do not
help the reader of either tale come to a firm conclusion about the moral
lessons these stories offer. Rather, like the actors within the stories, we are
faced with a fragmented and fragmentary picture that makes it difficult
for us to label as good/imitable or bad/inimitable. What Livy’s readers can
have that Livy’s characters lack is the realization that their own perspective
is partial and that they are studying a process of assimilation as much as
an outcome. and this is the conclusion one takes from Livy’s narrative
of the Roman traitoress: more than a character in Roman myth, she is a
process personified.
Between History and Historiography:
The Exemplum and its Requirements
Livy’s famous preface announces that history is a useful moral tool:
hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum,
omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde
tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum
exitu quod uites (praef. 10) 1 .
In understanding (past) events, this especially is salutary and beneficial:
that you can see records of every sort of example set on display
in this illustrious monument, from which you can take for yourself and
your country both that which you should imitate, and that which, being
shameful from start to finish, you should avoid.
This statement makes clear Livy’s goal of moral instruction, but this
is no simple goal nor is it a simple statement of that goal 2 . The natural
reading is to take this as a generalizing statement about history, but the
words themselves give rise both to general and to more specific interpretations.
Livy’s specific wording in this passage links history with historiography
as partners in moral instruction, and draws in his audience not only
1 — The text is Ogilvie’s Oxford edition (1974).
2 — Ogilvie 1965 ad loc. notes the ease of understanding the general sense but the difficulty of
locating the “precise force of these words”.