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I think it goes without saying that every modern historian obviously knows far less about ancient Rome than even the most ill-informed ancient Roman. The best historical writing of the last forty years or so has brought to our attention how much we don't know; a definite improvement on the work of the preceding two centuries, which has often tended to assume that our knowledge of classical Rome is more-or-less complete. When it comes to the ancient historians, it is not even clear to us exactly what they were trying to achieve in their historical works. The nineteenth-century assumption that Roman historians were trying to do exactly the same thing that their modern counterparts were claiming to do - to provide an objective and unbiased account of past events - no longer seems to stack up. Ancient history-writing was a rhetorical enterprise rather than an antiquarian one, and so the questions we ask when we read Tacitus or Livy always have to be 'what argument is the author trying to make?' rather than simply 'is this account actually true?' It is not the case that modern historians are wiser or better-informed, but merely that modern scholars may misunderstand what the sources are saying if they simply assume that Tacitus is trying to do the same things they are, or working with the same standards of historical judgment. We don't really know what kinds of sources Suetonius had access to, though he probably didn't have access to the imperial archives by the time he got around to writing about Tiberius. He may indeed have had access to 'mountains' of source material, but if so he doesn't seem to have been very discriminating in his use of it (and much of this material may itself have been invective postdating the Emperor's death). Modern historians are generally in the business of being suspicious. They do not usually assume that ancient sources are simply telling us the unvarnished truth(or at least, any truth that would be immediately obvious to us). You might or might not think that this is the best attitude to adopt towards ancient sources, but it is - in my experience - the attitude of most scholars writing today. In relation to Filip's question about other writers on Tiberius' sexuality, I have merely pointed out that most historians writing today are likely to treat Suetonius' account of Tiberius' debaucheries with considerable scepticism. |