3. Rome. At a time when events carried or acquired
religious associations, the chief of the priests in Rome
would note them (as well as omens, prodigies, etc.) on
a white board which recorded the names of the officials
of the year and then served as a kind of calendar. The
boards were kept available for future reference (though
they were liable to be destroyed by fire, as when the
Gauls sacked Rome in 390 B.C.), and the people of the
city came to have a sentimental attachment to them.
Such records were curiously typical of the character
of Roman historiography in general, which was gov-
ernmental in a sense (written by and for members of
the senatorial class), annalistic in form (beginning each
year with the names of the officials, and including the
omens, prodigies, etc.) but also flavored by religion,
by a certain piety towards the past, and by a deep
regard for public morality. The sense for history was
also—and perhaps primarily—promoted by the tradi-
tional devotion of the aristocratic families to their
ancestors, the religious observances connected with
these, the care taken over the preservation of domestic
archives, and the regular recital of old funeral orations.
All this intensified, if it did not generate in the first
place, the special feeling of piety towards the past,
and it helped to bring biography into favor in Rome.
It ensured also, however, that historical writers—more
than usually dependent on private archives—would
produce narrative distortions based on family preju-
dices or interests.
In a sense the Romans took to history more fervently
than the Greeks, who had their “antihistorical” side;
and at least their genius was more adapted to history
than to philosophy. They produced historical writing
that had a character of its own. Yet they contributed
nothing essential to the development of scholarship or
technique. They came to appreciate the finished
product but they learned historical writing from the
Greeks, and they met Greek historiography when it
was overripe. The result was that, from a compara-
tively early stage, they saw it as really a species of
rhetoric, and gave their minds to the problem of pres-
entation. They knew that history ought to be true,
of course; but they never realized (as Thucydides
realized) the amount of thought and labor and science
which is needed for the establishment of the truth over
and above the ordinary requirement of honesty. They
never really gave themselves to the task of investi-
gation.
It was the Greeks who began the writing of Roman
history; for, just as Herodotus had interested himself
in the peoples further east, his successors came to be
interested in their neighbors to the west of them, espe-
cially when warfare in Sicily brought home to them
the expansion of Roman power. The Greeks in any case
were inclined to enquire and speculate about the origin
of other people's cities and from them came some of
the legends concerning the foundation of Rome. The
first history produced by the Romans themselves was
written in Greek; and this is not so paradoxical as it
might seem, for, after the conquests of Alexander the
Great, a number of peoples—the Babylonians and
Egyptians, for example—showed a desire to present
their history in the language of what had become the
prevailing culture. The earliest Roman example of this,
Fabius Pictor, emerges in connection with the Second
Punic War, towards the end of the third century
B.C.—an important stage in the development of some-
thing like a national consciousness—a moment, too,
when it might have been felt that the Greeks were
seeing things too much from the Carthaginian point
of view.
The first historical work in Latin was in verse, and
the first prose work in this field was written towards
the end of his life by Cato (d. 149 B.C.), who was
influenced by the Greeks and was exceptional in his
desire to escape the annalistic form. In the subsequent
decades Greek culture exercised an increasing influence
on aristocratic circles in Rome that were interested
in public service, in literature, in philosophy, and in
the work of Polybius. They developed Latin prose,
sought to promote history rather than annals, and
picked up Stoic ideas of morality which were to help
still further to give Roman historiography its special
character. They produced historical writing of no spe-
cial distinction, however, and towards the middle of
the first century B.C., Cicero, in whom Latin prose
reached the stage of maturity, was clearly dissatisfied
with the general condition of Roman historiography.
But though he drew from Polybius some notions about
the objectives of historical writing, he called attention
mainly to questions of form—the need to follow the
rhetorical rules which had been developed under Greek
influence.
By this time there had begun to appear monographs
on limited themes (such as the Second Punic War) and
works which had the character of memoirs or autobi-
ographies—works which statesmen and soldiers pro-
duced for the purpose of self-justification. The Com-
mentaries of Julius Caesar (d. 44 B.C.) are particularly
important representatives of this latter class; partly
because they are so precise and sober, so rich in their
incidental information and so skillful in their conceal-
ment of their propagandist purpose. To the class of
monographs, however, belong The Conspiracy of
Catiline and The Jugurthine War by Sallust who, during
the few years after the assassination of his patron,
Caesar, withdrew from public life to produce history
of remarkable quality. Behind everything he was pre-
occupied with the decline and fall of the Roman Re-
public, which he attributed to a moral collapse; and
he emphasized the Stoic teaching which regarded the
evils as the result of luxury and ambition. He supported
with his intellect and fame a notion of ancient Roman
virtue which was already current and which came to
be of crucial importance, though it looks like a legend
produced and regularly transmitted by Roman histori-
ography. Though he had no love for the populace and
hankered after older aristocratic ideals, he wrote his-
tory with an antisenatorial bias, so that some people
have seen in it a propagandist purpose. It was history
in which Fortuna played an important part, and reli-
gion made perhaps only a conventional appearance,
the passions of men occupying the central place, with
the result that situations are dramatically developed,
and characters are presented with power. Sallust owed
much of his fame to his style, which was suited to his
subject; tense, rugged and dynamic, but with studied
archaisms—itself a creative achievement, owing much
to Thucydides and Cato, but a challenge to Ciceronian
ideals.
Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) produced 142 books of Roman
history which carried the narrative from the foundation
of the city to A.D. 9, though only about thirty-five of
these books survive. He conforms to the Roman ideal
of a historian—the ideal which Cicero did so much
to create—not the discoverer of new facts, not the
scientific analyst, but the narrator who looks for mo-
tives, discusses results, portrays character, supports the
cause of virtue and moves the reader by literary
artistry. The past inspires him with a mood of
pietas
and he tells us that, when he is dealing with the early
history, he feels that he has been captured by the spirit
of those times. In this mood he seems unable to allow
even the legendary to be forgotten and in so far as
he did not create it, he expresses Rome's tradition about
herself, including an element of the mythical which
even the modern European has found it difficult to
sweep out of his mind. Livy presents—not without a
vein of poetry and a sense for drama—the whole tre-
mendous procession of the centuries, Rome being
chosen for greatness by the gods, who remain not
inattentive to her story throughout the generations.
Above all, the rise of Rome was a reward for a certain
virtue and greatness of heart which seemed to survive
only here and there in the present, but belonged to
earlier generations, comprising the things which the
Stoics loved—the simple life,
gravitas, due deference
to authority, and some regard to religious observances.
But, although the discussion of authorities may add
plausibility to the narrative, it is evident that the au-
thor does not realize the need to come to grips with
the problem of sources. And in spite of his general
honesty, Livy can distort the narrative in favor of
Rome.
Tacitus (ca. A.D. 55-120) expressed the view that the
deeds of good men ought not to be forgotten and that
evil men ought to be made to fear the judgment of
posterity. It is not clear, however, that he believed in
the possibility of altering things in his degenerate age;
and, as he realized that the moral decay reached back
to republican times, he seems to have felt that there
was no point in attacking the imperial system as such.
In his Histories and Annals he directed his hostility
against the individual emperors who ran the system,
and whom he described from the point of view of that
senatorial aristocracy which was the chief sufferer from
their misdoings. In his bitterness, he painted some of
these emperors as worse than modern scholars would
regard them, worse than would be suggested by the
facts that he himself adduced; and sometimes where
he recognized their good deeds he connected even
these with malignant motives. His narrative communi-
cates, therefore, something of the anguish of his soul,
and he speaks so much in terms of the way in which
he experienced the system that he fails to produce what
we should regard as the larger history of the empire
and of imperial policy. Even where he suggests some-
thing like supernatural action, he is sometimes tempted
to feel this (and the operation of Fortune itself) as
actively malignant. He was careful in his researches,
skillful in the production of dramatic effects, most
distinguished of all perhaps in his pithy style, charac-
terized by epigram and irony. His eulogies of the
Teutonic tribes, whose virtues appeared as an oblique
criticism of Roman decadence, seem to anticipate the
methods of French writers in the eighteenth century.
He emerges as the most remarkable historian that
Rome produced.
