Content area
Full text
The primary purpose of this article is to offer translations of the highly useful entries on Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus from the monumental German reference work, Pauly-Wissowa's Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (RE), so that they are accessible to an English-reading audience. In order to make the translations as useful as possible, a brief introduction to the format is offered below, to help guide the reader in what could otherwise be an overwhelming or confusing experience. I shall then provide a discussion of the author of the entries, Friedrich Münzer, in order to situate these remarkable feats of scholarship in their proper historical context.
To begin, a warning: the entries are not easy reading. Anyone familiar with the RE format may already be steeling themselves to begin digesting the information. The mission statement of the Real-Encyclopädie, as given by Georg Wissowa, was:
to bring to representation in lexical form the areas of the history, geography, antiquities (in the widest sense), mythology, literary history and art history of Antiquity, so that the individual articles might demonstrate and make use of, under assiduous consideration of the recent literature and in the most concise possible way, the entirety of the source material that exists today, so that the whole work might comprise a codification, so to speak, of the present state of our knowledge of antiquity. ('Vorwort', vol. I iv-v)
This utter comprehensiveness is demonstrated nowhere more than in the present entries. On account of the great importance in Roman history of the brothers Gracchi, the lengthy pieces reflect the immense amount of ancient source material on them, and nothing has been ignored. One of the hallmarks of the RE - as indeed one would hope for such a work - is the huge number of references with which each entry is riddled, both internal and external.1 This is important to note, as in the current case these references are so profuse that they can often hinder one's reading of a sentence. The references are always as comprehensive as possible, and thus often quite lengthy. Upon hitting a cluster of references, one can sometimes forget that they were midsentence, and can thus be surprised to see the sentence continue on the other side of the parentheses. Another peril...