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THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 521
T H E F A B I I
R I C H A R D S O N ( J . H . ) The Fabii and the Gauls. Studies in Historical
Thought and Historiography in Republican Rome. (Historia Einzelschriften 222.) Pp. 186. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012. Cased,
E52. ISBN: 978-3-515-10040-3.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X13001005
R. writes with verve and force, and he casts a discerning eye on a murky tradition. He begins from questions. Why did Marcus Brutus (the praetor of 44) feel pressure to emulate Lucius Brutus (the consul of 509)? Why did the son of Decius Mus decide to sacrifice his life in an act of deuotio just as his father had? R. argues that the Romans conceived of character traits as belonging to families, thereby creating the expectation that current members of a family would act as their ancestors had, or even that ones ancestors would have acted as contemporary family members did. Thus when Romes early historians came to fill out the thin account of Romes early years, they found it plausible to extend the qualities of each familys most defining figure(s) either backward or forward in time to other members of the gens. The Claudii are regularly characterised as arrogantly patrician, for example, and R. proposes that the historical tradition gradually saturated all the Claudii with the haughtiness of their defining members. Hence these Claudian characteristics should not be directly attributed to the authorial shaping of any specific author (e.g. Livy), but rather understood as but the clearest demonstration of a conception of family character that imbues the formulation of the entire historical tradition about early Rome.
These arguments, supported by examples involving a number of families, comprise the first of the books three lengthy chapters. The second chapter then studies, as a test case, the representation of the gens Fabia in light of its most famous member, Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, the Delayer against Hannibal. R. first models the distinctive attributes of the achievements of...