andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 9:43 am
Just to clarify. Horsfall is not using the CoE to argue that the sack of Rome by the Gauls occurred. Horsfall is arguing that since:
a/ some accounts claim that the Gauls took Rome but the Capitoline Hill successfully held out under siege
b/ some accounts claim that the Gauls took the Capitoline Hill as well as the rest of Rome
we should prefer the type b/ accounts to the type a/ accounts because the b/ accounts are more embarrassing to Roman pride than the a/ accounts.
Andrew Criddle
Part of the reason why your discovery of Horsfall's heuristic is so useful is that it illustrates the weakness of the criterion as it's actually applied.
In this case, why should we assume that either version of the story was first told by a Roman? Why would a Roman defense contractor be embarrassed to invent or pass on version b as an argument for SPQR to invest more in homeland security? Mightn't the invaders have pimped up their after-action report by claiming the whole city was taken? Or maybe just omitted the detail: pockets of resistance are routine features of urban warfare; depending on the mission objective, it may be cost-effective just to loot around them rather than attempt to crush them.
And what about those geese? Were the Roman sentries asleep, or ought we to fancy that even the brute beasts serve Rome?
Bottom line If we knew enough to apply CroEm, then we would observe whether someone was embarrassed and what they did about it, rather than assume that a hypothetical somebody was embarrassed and then stick them with what we would do if we were somehow similarly situated.
andrewcriddle wrote: ↑Sat Mar 11, 2023 5:31 am
I think there is good evidence for some sort of sack of Rome although the actual details are hard to recover. See Plutarch Camillus
That's fine -- but we are not discussing whether there was a sack of Rome in 390, are we. We are addressing the nature of historical evidence.
If one decides that it is a historical fact that the Gauls sacked Rome it will not be on the basis of a "criterion of embarrassment". I quoted Mary Beard noting the various reasons that later claims for that event had nothing to do with "embarrassment". Quite the contrary.
If Horsfall back in 1981 expressed the view that "criterion of embarrassment" gave us reliable grounds for believing in the event (while acknowledging that he was swimming against the tide on that view), and since then we have seen a leading classicist criticize such naive readings of the sources and another modern historian point out the reasons we have to doubt that such an event took place, --- I have not seen in any of this any room for the use of the "criterion of embarrassment" as the grounds for concluding that a particular event was most likely historical.
It's just not in the tool kit of any books I have read about historical methods or in any works by historians explaining their craft.
As far as I am aware it is only used in biblical scholarship and has of more recent years come under fire even there.
Just to clarify. Horsfall is not using the CoE to argue that the sack of Rome by the Gauls occurred. Horsfall is arguing that since:
a/ some accounts claim that the Gauls took Rome but the Capitoline Hill successfully held out under siege
b/ some accounts claim that the Gauls took the Capitoline Hill as well as the rest of Rome
we should prefer the type b/ accounts to the type a/ accounts because the b/ accounts are more embarrassing to Roman pride than the a/ accounts.
Andrew Criddle
Okay -- I lost sight of the specifics. But as pointed out in my original reply, and what I think we both agree on, is that Horsfall does say that it would be without precedent for the Romans to turn a historical victory into a memory of a defeat.
That is the instance of his use of the criterion of embarrassment, yes?
But I think it is clear from what has been written subsequently in the field that Horsfall's reasoning is not accepted as establishing "the historicity" or "the factual truth" of the event.
It is even evident in Horsfall's own article that he finds it necessary to try to argue his point -- it is not presented as a self-evident method for establishing a historical event.
