- Roman Historians
(By Andrew Lintott)Origins
A small proportion of the works of the Roman historians has survived the hiatus in culture and learning that followed the decline of
the western half of the Roman Empire. We have only about a half of Tacitus' major works, for example, thanks to precisely two
manuscripts, and only thirty-five of the 142 books of Livy. Such is the fate of the acknowledged masters; our information about the
pioneers and many other later historians is confined to brief comments and quotations. Greek historians by contrast fared much
better as a result of Byzantine scholarship.
Generalization from this limited evidence is made easier by the homogeneity of what survives. A Roman historian was first and
foremost a historian of Rome, 'rerum Romanarum auctor'. Like Thucydides or Xenophon, he dealt primarily with public affairs at
home and abroad: 'vast wars, the sack of cities, the defeat and capture of kings, or in domestic history conflicts between consuls and
tribunes, legislation about land and grain-distribution, the struggles of the aristocracy and plebs'-such in Tacitus' view was the
subject-matter of the historians of the Republic.
The basic aims of the historians were simple: to preserve the memory of Rome itself and to transmit to future generations the
exploits and characters of her famous men. To quote Tacitus again, 'I think it a particular function of annals, that virtues should not
be passed over in silence, while those responsible for wrong actions and words should be threatened with disgrace in the eyes of
posterity.' This history was not purely secular, however; it also concerned Rome's relations with the gods who watched over her
growth and prosperity, as revealed in the portents by which the gods communicated with mortals, and the cult practices which were
the human response to them. Ideally the historian of public affairs was a man who had participated in them. With the occasional
exception, notably Livy, Roman historians were senators or had held important positions in public life. Sallust claims that he was
diverted from historiography by political ambitions but, when these failed and he was no longer committed to a particular faction, he
readily devoted his retirement to history rather than to a life of leisure or the 'servile activities of agriculture and hunting'.
The most inspiring topic for a Roman historian was Rome's phenomenal rise to dominance over the Mediterranean during the
Republican period. Yet it was only when they were approaching the zenith of this achievement that the Romans developed both the
will and the ability to chronicle it properly. The first Roman historians, Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus, held public office
during the second Punic War (Cincius was captured by Hannibal) and probably wrote their histories immediately afterwards, in the
first decade of the second century B.C. They wrote in Greek-Fabius has recently been discovered among a group of Greek historians
commemorated by texts painted on wall-plaster at Taormina in Sicily. Fabius and Cincius did not merely write about their own
lifetime, but tried to reconstruct Roman history from its origins. We must therefore briefly consider what sort of historical material
survived from the past and how it affected the subsequent composition of histories.
The Romans maintained records of the consuls of every year (fasti consulares), which, as transmitted to us, stretched back to the
founding of the Republic about 500 B.C. These probably derive from the yearly registers said to have been kept by the chief priests,
pontifices maximi, containing the magistrates and notable events of each year. Questions, which cannot be discussed here, inevitably
arise about the genuineness of these early records and the extent to which, even if basically genuine, they were corrupted later; what
is certain is that at best they were a bare factual account of wars, triumphs, portents (e.g. eclipses), and food-shortages. There was
also a great stock of stories about Rome from its mythical origins onwards, some written down by Greeks like Timaeus (below, p.
639), others deriving from native traditions. By far the most significant of these were the family traditions preserved by the noble
families. These had their particular origin in funerals, whose contribution to Roman self-consciousness of their military prowess was
noted by the Greek historian Polybius. The dead noble was carried to the rostra in the forum amid mourners wearing the clothes and
death-masks of his ancestors, and there his son or a close relative pronounced an encomium (laudatio funebris), which began with
the dead man himself and then embraced the exploits of the other dead ancestors included in the gathering. These orations were
preserved for future exploitation, but both Cicero and Livy complain of their corruption of history by the invention of achievements
and improper genealogical claims.
As far as we can judge, the earliest histories were far from a mere chronicle. Their writers probably had two major purposes,
corresponding to their two different readerships. Now that Rome had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean, the Roman