Die Livius-Tradition. Studien zu den Postlivianern und den libri amissi des Livius

(Dissertation submitted in 09/2025)

The study has two main objectives:

1. to analyse the relationship between Livy and the respective authors of the Livian tradition.

2. to reconstruct, as far as possible, selected portraits of individuals from Livy's lost books (libri amissi).

To this end, the study is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the authors of the Livy tradition. These are divided into two groups: The inner circle includes authors of historiographical genres whose portrayal of the Roman Republic is largely based on historical information from Livy. These include Florus, the anonymous authors of the Periochae and the Oxyrhynchia Liviana, Eutropius, Festus, Julius Obsequens and Orosius. The wider circle, on the other hand, includes authors who either used Livy only as a secondary source (Velleius Paterculus, etc.) or belong to genres that deviate greatly from historiography in their genre patterns, such as epic poetry (Lukan, etc.) or exempla literature (Valerius Maximus, etc.).

The authors belonging to the inner circle of the Livian tradition are then examined in individual chapters (chapters 2–8). Each of these chapters is divided into a section that examines the contexts of the author and work, addressing issues such as dating and author identity, and a second section that examines the relationship to Livy. The term ‘relationship’ is to be understood in a multivalent sense in this context, because on the one hand it includes the source relationship (direct or indirect?), for which a revision of the results of older Quellenforschung, now superseded by numerous recent individual studies, is required, and on the other hand it also refers to the methods of processing Livy’s pretext. These methods involve the selection and transformation of Livian information and the ideological and literary agenda – in short: what do the authors of the Livian tradition do with the Livian pretext and for what reason? The authors of the wider circle of the Livian tradition are also dealt with in a subsequent overview chapter (chapter 9). Overall, these chapters paint a picture of an extremely heterogeneous spectrum of works, each of which involves a process of strategic selection and transformation of Livian information. Their common characteristic is therefore a striking tension between derivative and autonomous text design.

In an intermediate step, based on the findings from the previous individual studies, a picture of the overall connection of the Livian tradition is presented (chapter 10). This initially involves combining the findings on the source relationships of the Livian tradition in the form of a visualised overall diagram. The Livian tradition is then described as a historical discourse: Post-Livian authors instrumentalise the memory of the republican past for their respective literary, ideological and political agendas. They thus communicate on two levels: on the one hand, with the Livian pretext, whose canonical authority they utilise; on the other hand, with the readers and contexts of their present, on whom they attempt to influence through the strategically formed image of the past. The works of the Livian tradition thus played a central role in the intersubjective perception of the republican past as transformed echoes of Livy.

The second part of the study finally follows with reconstructions of Livian character portrayals from the libri amissi (chapter 11). Methodologically, these are based on three pillars. The first pillar, which bears the main burden, consists of the findings on the authors of the Livian tradition developed in the first part. The second pillar is the exploration of ‘annalistic’ traditional origins and tendencies that have significantly influenced Livy's work. The third pillar consists of intratextual references in the surviving Livian text. A selection of portraits of Scipio Aemilianus, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Marius, Mithridates VI Eupator, Pompeius Magnus and – as a review of the lost second decade in Ab urbe condita – Pyrrhos, Fabricius Luscinus and Curius Dentatus are examined. Some of the suggested reconstructions (Marius, Pompey, Mithridates) produce extremely ambivalent interpretative frameworks, which illustrate the open character of Livy's work, a feature that has been repeatedly emphasised in recent research. However, we can also see Livy's great flexibility, as he portrayed some individuals (Scipio Aemilianus, Tib. Gracchus) one-sidedly and integrated them into aspects of his literary macro-strategy. Overall, the findings on the libri amissi reveal a high degree of intra-connectivity in the entire work, which, despite its considerable length, must be understood as a whole. The republican crisis, whose overall assessment by Livy emerges in outline from the analysis, seems to have been based more on the individual moral failings of key players than on systemic imbalances.