Autopsy, Oral Tradition, and Documents

Abstract It should not be inferred from occasional citations of eyewitnesses that classical historians made no use of documents, an inference conclusively disproven by Syme’s analysis of Tacitus’ research methods. In the case of their late antique and Byzantine successors, documentary material can be detected more easily, sometimes because it is identified as such, more often because its characteristics (exactitude, high specific gravity, and lucidity) show through. Dispatches and reports are the most valuable documents, qua conveyors of data gathered, collated, and shaped into narrative by higher authority, itself accountable to the centre. Communiqués are important but must be handled with care, since their function may be as much to influence as to inform. The great service performed by written documentary sources is to transmit large quantities of detailed information to the historian, without being subject to the vagaries of memory, reshaping, embellishment, etc. of oral communication.