ROMAN HISTORIANS WRITING ABOUT EARLY ROME
Roman historians, like their Greek models, felt free to invent parts of their narratives. In principle, historians were bound by the facts: They should describe only wars that had actually taken place, and they should accurately identify the victors and the vanquished. But they could also embellish their nar¬ratives when they had little factual guidance. Thus they added minor actions, claims about motives, and even specific words and deeds when they thought their accounts required them. To be sure, there were a few agreed guidelines: Attributions should be plausible; they should be both true to character and illustrative of it; and they should not contradict known events. Inevitably, however, a common consequence of such additions was to project back into the past the attitudes and practices of the author’s own day. Roman historians tended to think that their city, in its essentials, was unchanging from an early date. Thus, they had no difficulty in believing that Romans of earlier centuries had the same attitudes and values as did their descendants, and that in the distant past the city had func¬tioned socially and politically in much the same way as it would later.
Separating fact from fancy is always a difficult task, and modern scholars have long disagreed over the degree to which Roman tradition can be considered reli-able. In this regard, today’s scholars are often better disposed to the Romans than their predecessors were. Roman histories do contain an uneasy mixture of fact, supposition, and outright invention. Much is doubtless true. From the sixth century on, the main outline of wars, conquests, and the dedication of new temples is in all likelihood substantially correct. The prominent individuals we read of may not only actually have lived, but they may also have done things that resemble, if only remotely, the deeds attributed to them. This said, there are also unquestionably elements that were shaped by their dramatic possibilities, or by their usefulness as a means of praising virtue and condemning vice. There is no shortage of lurid stories and moralizing tales in which heroic men and women do great deeds or suffer tragic fates, and no dearth of villains either, some of whom suffer for their misconduct.
As a result, the Roman historical tradition, when coupled with the evidence from archeological excavations and from inscriptions, does permit the broad out¬lines of the city’s early history to be known with some confidence—for the sixth and fifth centuries especially. On some specific points, moreover, this picture of the city and its institutions in the Orientalizing and Archaic periods can be supplemented by using evidence from later practices that are known to have had their origins in this early period. The earliest forms of these institutions may well have varied considerably from later and better known versions, but in certain cases we can be sure that they were present in one form or other.