著者

松原 俊文

出版者

日本西洋古典学会

雑誌

西洋古典學研究 (ISSN:04479114)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, pp.78-93, 2003-03-20

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Diodorus' accounts of the Sicilian Slave Wars have been a source ofcontroversies This paper deals with two particular problems among them the blaming of C Gracchus' equestrian jury in the aetiology of the First War, a notorious anachronism that has vexed scholarship since Mommsen, and the accusation against 'Italian' landowners as having encouraged the highway robbery by their slaves, but whose presence in any large number on Sicilian soil at this period is not much attested by other evidence Some scholars maintain that these passages go back to Posidonius, whose contribution, to whatever extent, as a source to the Diodoran narrative of the First War is beyond doubt I shall below present some likeliest routes for the transmission of the information that has caused these problems 1) Roman Sources The ubiquitous criticisms of Roman magistrates in the narrative smack of narrow partisan hostility within the ruling oligarchy, and it has been suggested that our difficulties result from Posidonius' use of a Roman source coloured by conservative pique against the knights Among Posidonius' Panaetian connexions the most important was P Rutilius Rufus, whose semi-autobiographical history in Greek was certainly one of Posidonius' sources, and whose sorry experience at the repetundae trial in 92 might well suggest a Rutilian origin of the troublesome passages Yet evidence reveals Rutilius' attentiveness to the niceties of law, and his work, like other Republican memoirs, was written primarily for his own political apologia Thus I doubt that this Roman Stoic dared jeopardise the whole credibility of his apologia by a trifling distortion of the history of the extortion court Furthermore, if we allow for an interpreter, Posidonius' potential Roman sources need not be restricted to works written in Greek The annals of Fannius, if the historian is to be identified with C Fannius M f, yet another disciple of Panaetius and the anti-Gracchan consul in 122, are a strong possibility Another candidate would be Sempronius Asellio, who, like Rutilius and Posidonius, belonged to the same Polybian school of history and whose kinsman Diodorus alone in ancient traditions praises for his governorship of Sicily immediately after the Second War 2) Posidonius' Narrative Pattern Many scholars have perceived a structural and thematic parallelism between the accounts of the two wars One school of thought further stretches this deductive tendency of Posidonius the Philosopher-Historian into a strictly formulated 'narrative pattern', claiming that the philosopher, for want of information, retrojected the conditions in Sicily around the time of the Second War, or those in Southern Italy at the time of the Spartacus War, to the island of the 130s, and that in this process he 'reduplicated' an equestrian/Italian involvement in the First War Yet in my view the whole idea of a narrative pattern stands on far too many unattested premises, and hence to attribute our particular problems to this nebulous paradigm risks circularity In fact the similarities between the two Diodoran accounts are no more striking than the obvious differences This fact suggests that the author had fairly detailed knowledge of each war, thus rendering it unlikely that he, simply out of horror vacui, made up part of the account of one war on the analogy of another 3) Local Sources These details include 'folkloric' anecdotes, which all concern Sicehot Greeks, and without doubt go back to the same community But how did they find their way into the current text? Posidonius' famous trip to the West may have included an investigative sojourn in Sicily, but Diodorus himself was a Sicilian, born in a town only a few tens of miles away from the epicentres of both wars within thirty years after the Second War Thus he would have been as well placed as Posidonius to draw on locals for first-hand information The fact that in Bk 11 Diodorus added his own digression on the sanctuary of the Palici, with a cross-reference to the Second War, shows that he had at least some local knowledge of this war Thus the censure against the equestrian jury and the 'Italian' landowners may also have been transmitted through the same intermediary, echoing provincial indignation among Diodorus' contemporaries, if not of the historian himself whose critical views of the Romans and the Italians are known from other examples, over the activities of the equestrian businessmen and Rome's laissez-faire policy The past Quellenkritik has variously attempted to explain these problems, but the desperate dearth of external control precludes any definitive conclusion Yet internal evidence points to two distinctive groups of ultimate informants, Roman and Sicilian The passages in question could derive from either of them If the former is the case, I suggest Posidonius transmitting a non-Rutilian, alternative source If the latter, however, it could have been any provincial Siceliot, Diodorus included, who had garbled part of the picture of the First War