THE ROMANS AND THEIR EARLY HISTORY
At Rome, an active tradition of history writing supplements the evidence of archeology and the brief and fragmentary texts of archaic inscriptions. Rome’s own historians, writing centuries later, gave detailed accounts of the early history of their city. Seven kings supposedly ruled in Rome. Romulus founded the city, along with some of its most important political institutions. Numa Pompilius set the pattern for Rome’s religious life. Their successors built temples, founded institutions, and, like their predecessors, waged war on Rome’s neighbors.
Servius Tullius, the sixth king, was virtually a second founder of the city. Accounts of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, Rome’s last king, justify his fall and the end of the monarchy. The dates that Roman scholars gave to Romulus’ foundation of the city vary widely, although most fall in the eighth century. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 B.C.), one of Rome’s greatest scholars, thought that Romulus founded Rome in 753, a date that came to be generally adopted. The reliability of these histories is far from certain. Their authors wrote centuries after the events they recounted; The Greeks taught the Romans to write histories. Greek and Roman historians came to develop clear ideas about how one should write history and why. Historians, it was thought, should either compose accounts of a single, significant event, such as a war; or they should record a city’s history from its foundation to the author’s own day; or they should describe in general the history of the civilized world.
The first two of these choices would prove popular among Roman authors. Moreover, proper histories should glorify one’s city, and entertain or instruct one’s readers. In order to entertain, historians offered quantities of vivid and dramatic stories adorned with colorful details. To instruct, they focused on leading individuals, the situations that these faced, and the effects of their actions on their city. Such accounts, it was hoped, would provide memorable examples of actions that good citizens should either imitate or avoid.
The first Greek histories were written in the fifth century, but the earliest Roman ones did not appear until over two centuries later. Quintus Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian, offered an account written in Greek, not Latin of Rome’s history from its foundation to his own day (c. 200). Others soon followed. Half a century later, Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder wrote the first prose history in Latin; its title, Origins, indicates one of its major themes. These early works do not survive, although their influence persisted. In fact both Greek and Roman his¬torians composed their works in ways that nowadays we would more or less equate with plagiarism, since they often incorporated segments of the works of others into their own. Today, our knowledge of this historiographical tradition of early Rome derives from two Roman writers in particular Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43), and Livy (Titus Livius, 59 B.C. to A.D. 17)—as well as from such Greek authors as Diodorus Siculus (mid to late first century B.C.), Dionysius of Halicar nassus (late first century B.C.), Plutarch (before A.D. 50–after 120), and Cassius Dio (late second and early third centuries A.D.). Roman historians only rarely undertook what a modern historian might rec¬ognize as research. Undoubtedly, Romans of a later age had access to information regarding earlier centuries that was, in modern terms, reliable. Some documents did survive, although later Romans found them difficult to decipher and inter¬pret. Monuments often carried very brief inscriptions identifying their builders and perhaps the occasion for their construction. One group of priests, the pontiffs, maintained a year-by-year account of significant events, the so-called pontifical annals.