Tradição e renovações da identidade romana em Tito Lívio e Tácito / Tradition and renovations of the Roman identity in Livy and Tacitus

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

There is one particular reading of identity in the Roman world, among many possible others, that derives from the tradition of Latin historiography. Roman historians have created a specific discourse on the past, aiming at uniformity but also showing their distinctive peculiarities due to the circumstances of their own times. We aim here to discuss the case of two of them, Livy and Tacitus, with a goal to understand their views on what "being Roman" meant, based on the premises of the interplay between the historiographical genre and the authorscontemporary contexts. The difficulties when trying to reconstruct this second topic are a standard issue in the studies about Livy and Tacitus, focusing primarily on their relationship with the emperors, but here we intend to make a connection of this issue with the singularities of their reconstructions of the past, which were based on a fairly regular set of writing rules. The new trends on the question of identities in the Ancient world add to this inquiry, helping to refresh the analysis of, as we chose, four concepts that help to define the Roman identity in Livy and Tacitus: concordia, pietas, fides and mos maiorum. In the end, both the process of reconstruction of the past through a shared and regulated memory and the constant call for a fixed set of moral standards ultimately reveal the changes that the city of Rome goes through under the development of the Principate, so that this Roman identity end up making a symbol out of the city itself.

ASSUNTO(S)

tradição tito lívio tradition identity tacitus historiografia antiga tácito historiografia latina historiografia romana roman historiography ancient historiography latin historiography identidade livy

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