Marshall Buchanan

My main research interests are Roman historiography (esp. early Roman historians and Tacitus) and early Chinese historiography.

My dissertation answers two related questions: When did Roman historians first treat their history as a narrative of decline and how did this narrative evolve? By first considering the earliest historiographic fragments in the context of the Second Punic War and its aftermath, I undermine the common assumption that pessimism in the style of Sallust and Livy prevailed ab initio. Likely it emerged only in the later second century B.C., perhaps in the annals of Piso Frugi. I then address the issue of how the annalistic form can articulate a grand narrative. The early Chinese chronicle Chunqiu and its annalistic Zuo commentary show that grand narratives can emerge by deliberate implication from the selection and shaping of anecdotes. On this model, we can see in Piso and other annalists the possible vestiges of an implicit, thematically complex narrative of decline that has been obscured by the later, explicit accounts. The further evolution of the decline theme, particularly in Tacitus’s histories, also belies the assumed ubiquity of Sallust’s and Livy’s visions of a golden age followed by decay. In sum, a decline narrative was absent in the earliest historians; later, in Piso and others, it may have emerged in a form quite different from Sallust and Livy.

My further research includes comparative lexicography, focusing the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, where I was a pre-doctoral research fellow and the Ci Hai and Hanyu Da Cidian.