The Discovery of Numa’s Writings: Roman Sacral Law and the Early Historians

Abstract

The study of documentary evidence is pivotal for the historian. As always, Herodotus sets the benchmark. When visiting Thebes in Boeotia, Herodotus was intrigued by a series of inscribed tripods in the Temple of Apollo Ismenios that allowed him not only to reconstruct the genealogy of the Labdakids of Thebes – or independently confirm his reconstruction of it – but also to explore the early history of writing in Greece (5.59–61). Documentary evidence thus provided external authority to the apodeixis of Herodotus’ inquiries, and has continued to do so ever since throughout the history of the genre. From tangible objects with tiny scribbles to modern day statistics, which are essentially nothing more than hyper-convoluted compilations of external data, documentary evidence amplifies the interpretative force of the display of history. The world of republican Rome was full of tangible objects that had their own histories to tell. Modern historians have given much consideration to the countless monuments in the city of Rome and its places of memory, both in examinations of individual lieux de mémoire and in systematic memory studies. From this emerges an increasingly thick description of Rome and its memorial cityscape in the era of the Republic; incidentally, it is worthwhile asserting that this description of memory markers at Rome, and the message and meaning they convey, has become more compact, if not crowded, than that of any other urban realm in premodern times.1 Documentary evidence, understood in a very broad way, comes in shapes and sizes that tend to be less imposing than those of magnificent monuments.