"The Livian Tradition"
After Titus Livius began work on his life's work, the Ab urbe condita, at the beginning of the Augustan period, his account quickly replaced the Roman annalists' historical works as the standard work on the Republican period. However, the immense size of his opus (142 libri) made it necessary to make abridged forms of his work available to the public. From the Tiberian period deep into late antiquity, therefore, the tendency of a programmatic abridgement of the Ab urbe condita developed. Some of the works of these so-called post-Livian authors are available to us in their entirety, in contrast to the Livian original (here only libri 1-10 as well as 21-45 have survived).
The main goal of the dissertation project is now to develop a theoretical foundation for reconstruction attempts of significant aspects of Livius' libri amissi (e.g. personal portraits of middle and late republican actors). To this end, the renarrative methodology of the authors in the "narrower circle" of the Livian tradition must be subjected to a precise analysis in order to enable conclusions to be drawn about their respective autonomous handling of Livius' historical information samples. Taking the results into account, it will then be demonstrated by means of selected examples to what extent it is possible to access lost material of the Livian opus magnum via the works of post-Livian authors. Authors and works that will be evaluated in their direct comparative possibilities to the Ab urbe condita are (in the presumed chronological order) Florus, the Periochae, the Oxyrhynchia, Eutrop, Rufius Festus, Iulius Obsequens, Orosius and Cassiodorus.
For the common field of research, the study of the authors of the Livian tradition is of interest because the autonomy of heteronomous texts is revealed here from an entirely historical-source-critical perspective: The historical information of Livius is handed down, reproduced, but also contaminated. The dissertation will therefore attempt to reconstruct lost material of the pre-text via the preserved metatexts.