Sam wrote:
It is quite clear that Roman history was often told from a completely biased point of view, and that the purpose of Roman history was to induce a sense of patriotism in a reader and teach him or her a moral, but then what was the purpose of Roman fiction?
Sincerely
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Dear Sam,
The answer I am about to give you is from my own perspective, and since it is somewhat of a subjective response, it may very well open the door to controversy, which is quite alright, by the way. I, unlike some PhD's in academia, do not have a reputation as a definitive authority on the subject matter to protect! I am simply another student and history enthusiast who happens to own more books than my wife would really like to see underfoot and who has a keyboard available and nervous fingers that can't seem to stop typing at times :-)
As I see it, Roman fiction per se did not really exist. Yet in the same light, you might say that much of the history that the Romans gave themselves was, in fact, a very precisely constructed fiction that was required to adhere to some quite stringent rules. Another loterary genre popular amongst the Romans was farcical or slapstick comedy. They were particularly fond of what we would call lowbrow humour. Much of it was performed in celebration of human sexual exploits and perversions. Much of the farcical comedy was also of a scatological nature as well. As some readers might not be familiar with the term more polite term "scatological", I will more clearly explain myself by stating that they absolutely loved crude jokes and "asshole humour" This type of fiction was performed rather than written in most cases, even though much of it was also written down. The Greeks also enjoyed this type of humour. Favorite topics included situations involving flatulence (farting) and punning allusions to turds, body parts, sexual intercourse with the same sex, the opposite sex, cooperative and uncooperative beasts. In fact, much of this type of humour might make one of us moderns think that the whole society, when not enjoying a good death spectacle in the arena, resembled a boys' locker room at a modern middle school gone totally out of control. One reference that comes to mind without actually looking this up is the comment in "The Frogs", one of the early Greek comedies by Aristophanes, about "farting in the face of the Thalamite". Oddly, this little piece of bathroom humour has helped us to better ascertain the relative positions of the rowers in early Greek trireme warships. It just goes to show you that scholarlship can glean valuable bits of information in the strangest of places. This anecdote is repeated in more than one treatise on Naval history and is used in those particular authors' argument for his theory of the exact placement of the rowing benches.
Going on to the fiction integrated into Roman history, I need mention only one word -- Aeneid. It is beyond the scope of this brief commentary to go into the entire spectrum of heroic legend taken from Homer and other sources that Vergil so freely adapted to create the early history of Rome as set forth in this classic and very widely appreciated work, which remains immensely popular today. In truth, there is much to be said for the point of view that history should not so rigidly adhere to the ofttimes drab facts that it won't admit the validity of legend. The Romans themselves believed that their history should contain factual content but that it should also be artfully interwoven with allegorical fables that accurately reflect the values and character of the people about whom the history is being written.
I hope this helps,
Jay King