ABSTRACT
Historical narratives are shaped by the information communities they describe. An information community is that group for whom a work of history is originally composed. It is also the community that provides the bulk of the information used in constructing the narrative. Thus, Thucydides wrote his history with a view that it would be a possession for all time but also allowed as how this gift was the product of the collective experience of people with whom he conversed. His history of the Peloponnesian War was shaped by the experiences of himself and other aristocrats, not by rowers in the Athenian fleet or Laconian helots. Likewise, the senatorial historian Cornelius Tacitus speaks for the experience of his class. He is not interested in giving voice to the experiences of Roman legionaries, except insofar as they impinge on the lives of their betters. This is an interest he shares with his predecessor, Livy, and the generations of annalists before Livy who presented the history of Rome as the product of the deeds done by members of the Roman aristocracy. It is the information community that determines the records that are relevant for the description of its deeds-even a non-historian such as the younger Pliny was drawn to the acta senatus to check up on a moment in the reign of Claudius, and we may rest assured that his notion of the onerosa collatio required of a historian did not involve interviews with bakers around what is now Porta Maggiore (home of the Eurysaches monument, another form of communal historical record). The expansion of the Roman community into the provinces during the course of the first three centuries AD and the shift in the locus of imperial power away from Rome itself had the effect of decentering the experience of the Roman governing class as the privileged voice of Roman memory. Provincials now came to write not histories of their own location, but histories that purported to reflect the experience of the Roman state; the last two extant versions of Roman history before the age of Constantine, those of Herodian and Dexippus, offer fortuitously preserved examples of the way different information communities might make use of their information networks (a term that might be more useful in this case than source) to create contemporary narratives.1
