84 alfredo viggiano
criticism demands that history be supported by documents of state
(la diplomatica).” He thus praised the archive as the exclusive place of
repose for a state’s historical memory, which was thus not to be consid-
ered as something alive and circulating in the living body of society: “If the
Greeks had learned from the Egyptians among many other customs that
of having the priests register events on a daily basis and protecting these
registers among their most sacred things, the first histories of the Greeks
would be less like fables.” Unlike the imprecision of the Greeks, “the exact-
ness of Roman histories derives from their being founded on the basis of
their greatest annals which they produced and maintained with greater
circumspection [than the Greeks].” “A Nation precise in the daily regis-
tering of its own internal affairs, as is the Republic, could not find a more
reliable source [than such annals] from which to draw its history.”