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+--- Thread: Primary Sources (/showthread.php?tid=24189)
Primary Sources - Nathan Ross - 08-24-2014
I'd like to pick up a point that came up in this thread about the definition of 'primary sources' in studying ancient history.
I've always assumed a primary source to be one written or produced at the time, usually a document, inscription or artifact but sometimes a literary record, a diary, a collection of letters or a personal account - sort of raw material, undigested and often open to interpretation.
A secondary source would be anything written with historical hindsight, which relies on other (primary) sources for its information.
This gets a bit tricky in ancient history though. Do people here, or historians generally, regard Livy as a primary source on the Punic wars? Is Tacitus a primary source? His 'Agricola' and 'Histories' concern events of a previous generation, even if some of their content may have been gained in personal interview. What about Caesar's 'Commentaries' - written by the man himself, but perhaps at some remove and with an apparent political purpose? Dio would not be a primary source on events before his own lifetime, but does he become one when his story moves into the reign of Commodus?
How strictly do you interpret the primacy of the sources you're using? How important do you feel these definitions to be?
Primary Sources - Lyceum - 08-24-2014
Welp that thread has an...interesting savour to it.
Anyway the thing is it's not always clear cut and in many ways a moot question. Livy was obviously writing later than the punic wars but had access to a variety of sources and traditions. Just as importantly, he is an example of Roman historical thought on the punic wars. All of our Alexander historians are late but one can untangle the complex web of citations in order to delineate their souce usage reasonably well.
Historiography in the Classics has moved in quite a predictable pattern over the past two centuries really. It's moved from always accepting classical sources as accurate and assuming they had access to good information, to attempting to foist a sort of binary choice of true/false onto the data to nowadays taking a much more complex and contextual way of looking at things. The key is on context, I've seen people (especially here) trust Herodotus more easily than they would a modern day newspaper article or assume (dangerously) that he's writing in the same post 19th century historical school as they are reading. No, he's not. None of our written sources are. Yes Propertius can be just as important as Livy for historical purposes.
This isn't tackling the use of documentary evidence or how shoddy the textual traditions of certain texts could be or how uncertain we might be on language...
So if we assess primacy in terms of detailing events, not often, but we aim to investigate some of those other things you bring up: Caesar's complex verbal rhetoric, Thucydides' political ideology, the question of how accurate a source had the ability of being...well everything is primary for that. It varies, it is complex, and the answer varies even within single authors and texts.
Primary Sources - Vindex - 08-24-2014
Quote: It varies, it is complex, and the answer varies even within single authors and texts.
Hear, hear.
Primary Sources - D B Campbell - 08-24-2014
Quote:I've always assumed a primary source to be one written or produced at the time, usually a document, inscription or artifact but sometimes a literary record, a diary, a collection of letters or a personal account - sort of raw material, undigested and often open to interpretation.This is correct. Here are the Oxford English Dictionary entries:
A secondary source would be anything written with historical hindsight, which relies on other (primary) sources for its information.
Primary evidence:
[attachment=10592]OED-Primary_source.jpg[/attachment]
Secondary evidence:
[attachment=10593]OED-Secondary_source.jpg[/attachment]
It makes no difference that neither Polybius nor Livy was present at the Battle of Cynoscephalae. If we wish to study the battle, they are our primary evidence. Our critical evaluation of their evidence then becomes a secondary source. (The term "tertiary source" is often used pejoratively to describe those works of synthesis that appear not to have consulted the primary sources, but have relied only on secondary sources.)
Primary Sources - Gunthamund Hasding - 08-25-2014
I would only like to add a short comment:
I don't think that an objective man exists, everybody is subjective ... even the primary sources
Primary Sources - Nathan Ross - 08-25-2014
Thanks all
My limited training in historical methodology (such as it was) largely involved 19th-century colonial texts in English, so the additional difficulties of interpreting ancient sources in Latin and Greek are often puzzling to me.
Quote:It makes no difference that neither Polybius nor Livy was present at the Battle of Cynoscephalae. If we wish to study the battle, they are our primary evidence.
So although Polybius and Livy are both writing centuries after the fact, we are obliged to treat them as primary evidence of the army and campaigns of the republican era, as we don't have the sources they were working from?
Quote:everybody is subjective ... even the primary sources
Absolutely! Josephus is a primary source on the events of the Jewish War, but surely his account of whatever went on in that cave at Jotopata is far from objective...
Primary Sources - antiochus - 08-25-2014
Nathan wrote:
Absolutely! Josephus is a primary source on the events of the Jewish War, but surely his account of whatever went on in that cave at Jotopata is far from objective.
I'm trying to thing of something funny to say but I can't.
Primary Sources - Dan Howard - 08-25-2014
Objectivity and accuracy are irrelevant. It is up to us to determine the usefulness of the primary source by examining things like bias, access to eye witness accounts, who is funding the author's work, corroborating evidence, and so on. Even if the text was completely fabricated from start to finish, it is still a primary source and we can still get useful information from it. As Duncan said, it is our analysis of that information that becomes a secondary source.
Primary Sources - mcbishop - 08-25-2014
Quote:Objectivity and accuracy are irrelevant. It is up to us to determine the usefulness of the primary source by examining things like bias, access to eye witness accounts, who is funding the author's work, and so on. Even if the text was completely fabricated from start to finish, it is still a primary source and we can still get useful information from it. As Duncan said, it is our analysis of that information that becomes a secondary source.In fact, it just goes to show why ancient history provides an excellent training for dealing with (and interpreting) modern media. Just think of the Daily Mail as Suetonius with attitude ;-)
Mike Bishop
Primary Sources - Renatus - 08-25-2014
We could be in danger of straying into a semantic minefield here. Let me give you a more modern example.
I am conducting some research which involves considering events in the short-lived 18th century British colony of Senegambia on the west coast of Africa. In 1767, the governor of the province, Col. Charles O'Hara (later to be given the task of conducting the surrender of the British forces to the Americans and French at Yorktown), reported the occurence of a disease so virulent that, of the original garrison of 300 men, scarcely 90 survived. A book on convicts sent to Africa in this period mentions this and gives as a reference an article on O'Hara in a journal entitled Irish Sword. The Irish Sword article cites an article in the 1915/16 issue of The United Service Magazine. That article quotes verbatim an entry in the Annual Register for 1767. The Annual Register records the notable events of the year in question and, in this case, notes that it was reported from Lisbon that a ship from Senegal had arrived there on the 24th August with an urgent dispatch from O'Hara for onward transmission to London, setting out the plight of the garrison.
So, which of these sources constitutes primary or secondary evidence? I reckon that the book first mentioned would certainly be secondary or even tertiary evidence. The same goes for the article in Irish Sword. Primary evidence would be O'Hara's original dispatch. But what about the entry in the Annual Register? Would that be secondary because it avowedly cites another source or primary because it is more or less contemporary with the events it records, even though it was published some months later? Or would its status depend upon whether O'Hara's dispatch survives in the National Archives, as well it might? Would it be secondary if the dispatch survives or primary if it does not? Or would it always be secondary, because it takes its information, not directly from O'Hara's dispatch, but indirectly from a report of the dispatch's contents? And what about the article in The United Service Magazine? Is that bound to be secondary or does it take its status from the entry in the Annual Register, because it quotes it verbatim?
Work that lot out, if you can!
Primary Sources - Nathan Ross - 08-25-2014
Quote:Even if the text was completely fabricated from start to finish, it is still a primary source and we can still get useful information from it.
Yep. The panegyrici latini present an entirely slanted picture of their age, but the details of events and attitudes contained within them (and originally presented, for the most part, directly to those concerned or involved) make them invaluable.
Quote: ancient history provides an excellent training for dealing with (and interpreting) modern media.
Which reminds me of this post from Guy Halsall's blog back in 2010: "...the most important thing about an historical education is not the accumulation of knowledge about facts about the past; it is the training to think critically about what you are being told; to be ‘radically sceptical’ about everything, about each and every truth claim."
Primary Sources - Nathan Ross - 08-25-2014
Quote:Work that lot out, if you can!
I'd say the Annual Register for 1767 should also be treated as primary evidence: it provides contemporary corroboration for the arrival of the despatch in Lisbon. As such it is not dependent on the text of the despatch itself (whether it still exists or not), but merely records the context of its transmission (although of course anything that involves the selection of 'notable' events or people necessarily involves a certain amount of framing!).
Primary Sources - Dan Howard - 08-25-2014
When I studied ancient history we were given source analysis exercises every few weeks for two years. Each exercise consisted of three or four passages from various authors. We had to start each analysis with a paragraph on the author himself, explaining things like why he wrote the text, who his patron was, what sources he had access to, and so on. Then we had to analyse the text itself and extract as much useful information as possible from it - taking into account what we knew about the author and any potential biases and prejudices. After months of these exercises I found myself doing it automatically with everything I saw in the media and still do it today. Skepticism is the default scientific position.
Primary Sources - Renatus - 08-25-2014
Quote:As such it is not dependent on the text of the despatch itself (whether it still exists or not), but merely records the context of its transmissionThat takes me back to my days in court, when I often found myself having to explain the hearsay evidence rule. Too often objection would be taken to evidence being given simply because it was of reported speech. I would have to explain that admissibility depended upon the purpose for which the evidence was being adduced. If it was in an attempt to prove that the events described in the statement had taken place, it was inadmissible. If it was adduced to prove that the statement had been made and thereby possibly to explain the occurrence of subsequent events, it was admissible.
Primary Sources - D B Campbell - 08-25-2014
Quote:So although Polybius and Livy are both writing centuries after the fact, we are obliged to treat them as primary evidence of the army and campaigns of the republican era, as we don't have the sources they were working from?It's not really a matter of being obliged to treat them as primary evidence. They are primary evidence.
The terms "primary" and "secondary" have no bearing upon the quality of the sources, only their position in the chain of research.