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IN the last chapter much was made of the Greek characteristics of the Latin legends of origin. It is possible, however, that the taste for indigenous historical materials was stronger in Rome than one would suspect from the slight remains we possess. Cicero tells us how the Roman nobles loved to be glorified in poetry.1 The ancestral cult of Rome, combined with this aristocratic tendency of noble houses to exalt their deeds, was, naturally, one of the mainsprings of Roman history. It was a tainted spring, but bountiful.
“It was customary (says Cicero in another place2) in most families of note, to preserve their images, their trophies of honor, and their memoirs, either to adorn a funeral when any of the family died, or to perpetuate the fame of their ancestors, or to prove their own nobility. But the truth of history has been much corrupted by these laudatory essays; for many circumstances were recorded in them which never happened, such as false triumphs, a pretended succession of consulships, and false connections and distinctions, when men of inferior rank were confounded with a noble family of the same name; as if I myself should pretend that I am descended from Manius Tullius, who was a Patrician, and shared the consulship with Servius Sulpicius, about ten years after the expulsion of the kings.”
Such records of noble families, reaching back to primitive tradition and written down later by slaves or dependents, formed one of the chief sources for Roman historians when dealing with the early period. They knew, as Cicero did, that the material was not worth 226 much;3 but they did not know how to apply the canons of historical criticism so as to move surely and safely through their treacherous offerings.
By way of these specious antecedents of history we pass from poetry to prose, that farthest flung line of the scientific advance. Prose literature, developing slowly and late in Rome as elsewhere, naturally came more directly under Greek influence than poetry. Written Latin prose did not rise to rival the spoken Latin until Cicero’s day, which partly explains why there is so much about orators in Cicero’s essays and the echo of a similar interest in the historians — even in Tacitus. Moreover, Latin prose literature had a short period of flower, declining after the first century of the empire, partly because the formalism of the patrician periods was out of keeping with the realism of business, and partly because the men of the provinces developed their varied forms of speech. History-writing among the Romans did not, therefore, develop its own natural media of expression, but like a borrowed or captured piece of art remained more or less out of place in its setting. The façade was Attic, or affected by Attic influences; yet the structure of most Roman histories was of the simplest and homeliest of designs — that of the annal.
The starting point for this annalistic treatment was that register of annual events kept by the Pontifex Maximus in the Regia, which has been described above in the passage from Cicero.4 It was there where “all the people had liberty to inspect it.” So important was it, that its style was “adopted by many” of the 227 earlier Roman historians, a style “without any ornaments,” “simple chronicles of times, persons, places and events.” In the eyes of Cicero, history at Rome developed mainly along the lines of this annalistic writing; and so it had up to his time. The description he gives is confirmed by an examination of the available references to obscure authors and by the traces they have left upon the method of Livy and Tacitus themselves.
The extract from Cicero on the Annales Maximi, slight as it is, is matched by only one other paragraph in the Latin literature which has come down to us. In the closing part of the fourth century of our era, Servius, a grammarian, who wrote an exhaustive commentary on Vergil, described the pontifical annals as follows:
“The annals were made in this way. The pontifex maximus had a white tablet (prepared) every year, on which, on certain days,5 he was accustomed to note, under the names of the consuls and other magistrates, those deeds both at home and in the field, on land or at sea, which were worthy to be held in remembrance. The diligence of the ancients inscribed 80 books of these annual commentaries, and these were called Annales Maximi from the Pontifices Maximi by whom they were made. . . .”6
The starting point for our survey is therefore the Regia, or house of the head of that college of priests, the pontifices, who had perpetuated the religious duties of the abolished kingship, having charge of the calendar and the archives, that is, both the measurement and the record of time. The album or white wood tablet which our sources describe — and the two quoted are practically all there are on the Annales Maximi — was therefore but one of several records in their keeping. In addition to those which dealt more especially with sacred science, the Libri pontificum and the Commentarii pontificum, there were also Fasti calendares or Fasti consulares, with the names of officials and items for the calendar. The Annales 228 differed from the rest in that they were prepared for the public. How extensive they were is a matter of conjecture. Cicero rhetorically dates them from the very origin of Rome.7 The repeated destruction of the Regia by fire really left the later Roman antiquaries in the dark as to their actual extent. It seems likely, however, that no contemporary pontifical annal of the kind described was kept during the long period when Rome grew from a group of farming villages to be the chief city of Latium. The contemporary history began rather in the period of the conquest of the Mediterranean.8 In any case the sack of Rome by the Gauls destroyed whatever the pontiffs had preserved. Livy tells us that “whatever was contained in the commentaries of the pontiffs and other public and private records, was lost, for the most part, in the burning of the city.”9 The great pile of dry wood in the Regia was right at hand for the Gauls to warm themselves, and the tablets must have made good fuel.10 The result was that, whatever historical data the early pontiffs prepared, the later Romans could not profit from them. Year by year, however, during the robust period of the republican expansion, the Pontifex would hang up the white tablet on the wall of his house for the citizens to see, and for such as could, to read. The practice lasted until about 120 B.C. when, owing to the growth of the histories by private individuals, it became superfluous. Then P. Mucius Scævola published the whole extant collection in one volume of eighty books, as Servius intimates in the extract above.11 Upon the whole it would seem that this official history shared the defects of such compositions, as we have noted them elsewhere, with only this in its favor, that in a republic the rival claims of leaders and clans act in some degree in the place of criticism. Whether it was the prominence of these official annals 229 or not which, in the absence of genuine historical literature, made the annalistic, or at least chronological, structure the chief orthodox form for history-writing in Latin, the fact remains that Roman historiography is strikingly held to the annalistic mould. Even Tacitus’ Annales bear (though disguised) the common impress.12 Indeed the word annal was much more the synonym for “history” than historia. Not only was it used in that general sense in which it is used in England in such phrases as “the annals of the poor” or “the annals of the Empire,”13 but in the eyes of the grammarians it was the only correct term for the history of the past. Historia was properly used only of contemporaneous narrative.14 So, indeed, we find the works of Tacitus which deal with his own day named Historiae and those dealing with an earlier period Annales, although these titles probably do not come from Tacitus’ own hand.15
The official annals, therefore, seem to have played a considerable rôle in early Roman historiography. Of the remaining books of the priesthood, the Fasti are, perhaps, the most important. These began as lists of days for the calendar, the lucky and unlucky days — dies fasti and dies nefasti; and as such remained, through a varied history, the basis of calendar-making on down, 230 even through the Julian reform and into the Christian era. The name was therefore naturally transferred as well to denote annalistic chronicles, lists of years giving the names of the consuls, etc. (Fasti consulares) and the lists of triumphs (Fasti triumphales). Two such lists were drawn up in the reign of Augustus.16
In addition to the Annales Maximi and the Fasti of the pontiffs, there were lists of secular magistrates, such as the Libri magistratuum or Books of the Magistrates, reminding one of the Eponym lists of the Assyrians. Some of them were written on linen (libri lintei) and kept in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Goddess of Memory, on the Capitol. Livy may have these in mind when he refers repeatedly to the libri magistratuum,17 or he may use the term to cover all similar sources and even the Annales Maximi. For, by the end of the republican era there were a number of such collections, and antiquarians were already working on them.
When we turn from these materials for history to history itself, we find, significantly enough, that the line of Roman historians is headed by one who wrote in Greek. Q. Fabius Pictor is commonly recognized as the first Roman historian.18 Born about 254 B.C. of distinguished family, he played a leading part in the wars with Ligurians and Gauls, before the war with Hannibal, in which he also took part. His History (ἱστορία), which carried the story of Rome from the days of Æneas to his own time, was enriched by access to the archives of his family, in which — as has been the case so often in our day — the official documents of official members of the family had found a resting place. He wrote for the nobles, not for the commonalty (as did his contemporary Plautus, the author of comedy), and memoirs of nobles are also traceable in his work. In fact, history-writing in Rome remained down to the 231 days of Sulla, a privilege of the upper class, from which it drew its readers and to which it appealed, leaving a perspective for Roman social history which only modern scholarship has been able in part to correct. As for Fabius Pictor, he furnished Polybius with his main guide for the second Punic war, in spite of Polybius’ uncomplimentary remarks about him, due, perhaps, as has been suggested, to the rivalry of the Scipios (Polybius’ patrons) with the Fabii.19 While Livy apparently included him in the indefinite references to the “most ancient writers,” he also twice refers to him specifically as “the oldest historian” and once as the trustworthy contemporary of the events described, whose name cited in the texts would substantiate the narrative.20 After Livy’s day he ceased to be known to Roman authors, although he was still used by Greek historians.
The real father of Roman history, however, was M. Porcius Cato, that most Roman of Romans, who fought the influence of Greece, yet revealed a mind saturated in Greek thought, and who, according to Cicero and Nepos, learned Greek itself late in life.21 Born about 234 B.C. he lived a busy public life, holding the highest offices, and meanwhile writing earnestly and much at those earliest books of Latin prose, his treatises on agriculture, war, oratory, as well as history. His history, the seven books of Origines, was a national work, but it repeated the Greek myths of origin. The prefaces to his books recall the school of Isocrates which he ridiculed;22 and his pragmatic outlook recommending history for practical uses,23 while natural enough in a Roman, was also to be found in the Greeks from whom he professedly turned away. Again, although he kept to the annalistic form, he found it admirably suited for the insertion of orations in the formal style, and inserted them to such an extent that the speeches were even brought together as a special collection by themselves.
Cato was a thorough and careful worker; all Latin writers bear witness to that. Cicero refers to his study of the inscriptions on 232 tombstones24 — which may also reflect a lesson from the Greeks. But his interest did not extend to the varied data of the social life, it was strictly limited to politics. A citation preserved by Aulus Gellius, a chatty antiquary of the second century A.D., is worth quoting:
“They (the Romans) were not very strenuous in their endeavours to explore the causes of the eclipses of the sun and moon. For M. Cato, who was indefatigable in his researches after learning, has spoken upon this subject indecisively and without curiosity. His words in the fourth book of Origins are these: ‘I have no inclination to transcribe what appears on the tablet of the Pontifex Maximus, how often corn is dear, how often the light of the sun or moon is, from some cause or other, obscured.’ ”25
From the valuable treatise on agriculture which he left us, we can imagine that Cato followed the grain quotations of the Regia very closely, and as he brought to the task of history-writing the training of a practical man, we have every reason to regret that he did not do exactly the thing here he refuses to do. The one thing, however, which the whole of this survey teaches, is that history reflects the major interests of the society which produces it, and that the insight of historians into the importance of events is relatively slight, except as they are interpreters of their own time. The dominant interest of the men around Cato was no longer agriculture, as in the early days of the farmer-state, but war and politics and the struggle with Carthage. Hence the trivial incidents of the priestly annals were to be ignored.
Subsequent historians at Rome agreed with Cato in this, but they ceased to struggle as he did against the Greek invasion, and as rhetoric gained the day more and more, Cato was less and less read until, in Cicero’s day, he was almost entirely left aside. It is interesting, therefore, to find Cicero himself turning to Cato’s defence, for it shows what solid worth there must have been in the first of the Roman historians:
“Not to omit his [Cato’s] Antiquities, who will deny that these also are adorned with every flower, and with all the lustre of eloquence? And yet he has scarcely any admirers; which some ages ago was the case of Philistus the Syracusan, 233 and even of Thucydides himself. For as the lofty and elevated style of Theopompus soon diminished the reputation of their pithy and laconic harangues,26 which were sometimes scarcely intelligible from excessive brevity and quaintness; and as Demosthenes eclipsed the glory of Lysias; so the pompous and stately elocution of the moderns has obscured the lustre of Cato. But many of us are deficient in taste and discernment, for we admire the Greeks for their antiquity, and what is called the Attic neatness, and yet have never noticed the same quality in Cato. This was the distinguishing character, they say, of Lysias and Hyperides. They are fond, they tell us, of the Attic style of eloquence; and their choice is certainly judicious, provided they do not only copy the dry bones, but imbibe the animal spirits of these models. What they recommend, however, is, to do it justice, an agreeable quality. But why must Lysias and Hyperides be so fondly admired, while Cato is entirely overlooked? His language indeed has an antiquated air, and some of his expressions are rather too harsh and inelegant. But let us remember that this was the language of the time; only change and modernise it, which it was not in his power to do; add the improvements of number and cadence, give an easier turn. . . .27 I know, indeed, that he is not sufficiently polished, and that recourse must be had to a more perfect model for imitation; for he is an author of such antiquity, that he is the oldest now extant whose writings can be read with patience; and the ancients, in general, acquired a much greater reputation in every other art than in that of speaking.”28
There was another reason, however, besides the severity of his style, for the neglect of Cato’s history by the contemporaries of Cicero. If history was prized at Rome by the aristocracy for the glory it reflected on their noble houses, there was little use preserving Cato’s Origins. For this confirmed enemy of the upper class made it a point to omit the names of leaders in describing the achievements of Roman arms; and carried his grim humor so far, on the other hand, as to preserve for future generations the name of an especially fierce elephant which fought bravely in the line of battle.29
We must leave it to more detailed surveys to describe the writers who carried the story of Rome down to the last years of 234 the republic, writers such as P. Mucius Scævola, who in 123 B.C. as Pontifex Maximus ended the old Annales Maximi, and published them; L. Cœlius Antipater the jurist, who broke with the old annalistic style; thoughtful scholars like Sempronius Asellio, who sought in the manner of Polybius to establish the causes of events;30 Q. Claudius Quadrigarius and the more popular but less critical Valerius Antias; L. Cornelius Sisenna, the historian of the period of Sulla; or C. Licinius Macer, whose Annales seem to have been more controversial than accurate. Although these writers were gratefully used by later Latin historians, and above all by Livy,31 so little has been left of their works or about them as to render comment a matter of minute erudition, out of place in a study like this. Cicero, however, viewing history from the standpoint of literature, offers an illuminating comment on Antipater, who wrote at the close of the second century. Historians up to that time, says Cicero, were simply makers of annals (annalium confectiores) and for him history in the proper sense began with Antipater, the first to adorn his tale with art or artifice (exornator rerum) instead of being, as his predecessors were, mere narrators.32
L. Cœlius Antipater was a distinguished jurist and teacher of oratory, who lived a scholarly and retired life. Perhaps owing to this retirement he gave up the pragmatic principle and substituted for his aim rather that “pleasure to the ear” (delectare) which Thucydides had once denounced but which the followers of Isocrates had made the vogue.33 He lacked the restraint and good taste of the Greek, however, carrying rhythm to extreme, and introducing not only speeches, but also anecdotes and breaking the narrative with all kinds of diversions so that the reader should not suffer ennui. For instance, instead of giving the figures of Scipio’s expedition to Africa, he tells us that birds fell from heaven at the noise of the shouting soldiers. As Thucydides had done, he chose 235 a single war, the second Punic,34 as his theme, rather than the whole story of Rome. In his preface he tells frankly that he takes it from those authors who are deemed reliable,35 meaning Fabius Pictor and Cato; there is naturally no trace of Polybius. The seven books of this history were used as texts for criticism in the days of Cicero’s youth, and where rhetoric flourished more than history, Antipater flourished with it. Hadrian is said to have preferred him to Sallust — the student of Thucydides, the first real Roman historian in the eyes of the modern.
1 Cicero, Pro Archia, Chaps. X-XI, Sects. 26-27. The description given here of the means taken by the Roman dignitaries to preserve their names and exalt their glory reminds one somewhat of the inscriptions of Egypt or Babylon. Cf. , H. Peter, Die geschichtliche Litteratur über die römische Kaiserzeit bis Theodosius I und ihre Quellen, Vol. I, Chap. II (Das geschichtliche Interesse des Publikums).
2 Cicero, Brutus, Chap. XVI. (Translation based on Watson’s.)
3 In this connection mention should be made of the use of the old inscriptions by later historians. Monumental inscriptions were used by both Greek and Roman historians of early Rome, but they were sometimes misled by what they saw, and the monuments became foundations for new myths, as is likely to be the case anywhere if full contemporary records are missing. Vide supra, the myth of Osiris. E. Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Chap. VII, has a good discussion on this point.
4 Cf. p. 213. On the Annales Maximi there has been considerable discussion. The few fragments concerning them are given in H. Peter’s Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae (2 vols., 1906-1914, with Bibliography to 1914), Vol. I, pp. iii-xxix (De Annalibus Maximis); cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, History of Roman Literature, Vol. I, Sects. 73-77. The contributions of O. Seeck, Die Kalendertafel der Pontifices (1885), and of W. Soltau, Römische Chronologie (pp. 442 sqq.) may be cited; but the field is intricate as can be seen from the article Annales (by Cichorius) in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. I, pp. 2248 sqq.
5 Per singulos dies, not every day, but when the event happened. Hence the acta diurna, or official daily bulletin from the time of Julius Cæsar, was not a continuation of this. Vide O. Seeck, Die Kalendertafel der Pontifices, p. 62; H. Peter, Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae, Vol. I, p. x.
6 Servii Grammatici qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, edited by George Thilo and Hermann Hagen (3 vols., 1878-1887), Vol. I, Bk. I, l. 373. This paragraph occurs only in the manuscript published by Daniel in 1600. On whether it belongs to Servius or to a later commentator see the edition by Thilo and the bibliographical indications in Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. II, Sect. 431, n. 2.
7 “Ab initio rerum Romanorum.”
8 Cf. W. Soltau, Die Anfänge der römischen Geschichtschreibung, p. 228; A. Enmann, Die aelteste Redaction der Pontificalannalen (in Rheinisches Museum, Vol. LV (1902), pp. 517-533), places the origin of the yearly tablet for public use at about 400 B.C.
9 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. VI, Chap. I.
10 O. Seeck, Die Kalendertafel der Pontifices, p. 74. In fact the menace to the safety of the surrounding buildings was almost as great as the pile of inflammable papers by the baking plants of some of the buildings in Washington.
11 E. Pais announced in Ancient Legends in Roman History (1905), Chap. I, that he has been gathering the fragments of the Annales Maximi for publication.
12 On the influence of the old annalistic forms on Tacitus’ works, see E. Courbaud, Les procédés d’art de Tacite dans les «Histoires» (1918), p. 34 and references.
13 So Ennius calls his epic Annales; and when Vergil refers to the content of early history he uses the same general term. Cf. Æneid, Bk. I, l. 373, Et vacet annales nostrorum audire laborum.
14 Thus Servius, commenting on the line of Vergil quoted here, says: “There is this difference between history and annals: history deals with these times which we witness or have been able to witness. The word comes from ἱστορεῖν , that is ‘to see’ (dicta ἀπὸ τοῦ ἱστορεῖν, id est videre); but annals are of those times of which our age is ignorant. Hence Livy consists of both annals and history. Nevertheless they are freely used one for the other, as in this place where he says ‘annals’ for ‘history.’ ” Aulus Gellius had earlier (Noctes Atticae, Book V, Chap. XVIII) cited the authority of Verrius Flaccus the lexicographer for this distinction of meaning and adduced practically the only fragment we have of Sempronius Asellio, one of the later annalists, to show that the narrower meaning of the word, a yearly list of happenings, was their ideal of history. Asellio is impatient with the narrowness of those who do not connect the isolated items of war or conquest with the broader theme of politics, and terms such monastic annals fabulas pueris, unworthy the name of history. For discussion of this point see Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, Sect. 37, n. 3.
15 It is doubtful if they bore any such titles, but more likely, as in the case of Livy, whose work was termed Ab urbe condita libri, the annals of Tacitus were probably Ab excessu d. Augusti.
16 See the articles Fasti in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités, and (by Schön) in Pauly-Wissowa’s Real-Encyclopädie. The Fasti Triumphales have just been published in an exhaustively critical edition by E. Pais (2 vols., 1920) in the Collezione di feste e monumenti romani of E. Pais and F. Stella Maranca.
17 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. II, Chap. IV; Bk. IV, Chaps. VII, XX.
18 Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 273 sqq., whose account has been mainly used for what follows. For the fragments of Fabius Pictor see H. Peter, Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae, Vol. I, pp. LXIX-C, pp. 5-39. There was apparently a Latin translation or version.
19 The Histories of Polybius, Bk. III, Chaps. VIII-IX; cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, Sect. 116, n. 2, with references.
20 Cf. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Bk. I, Chap. XLIV; Bk. II, Chap. XL; Bk. XXII, Chap. VII.
21 Cf. H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst, pp. 282 sqq.
22 Cf. Plutarch, Vitae Parallelae, Chap. XXIII (Cato).
23 Cf. H. Peter, Historicum Romanorum Reliquiae, Fragment 3.
24 Cicero, Cato Maior, Chap. XI, Sect. 38; Chap. VII, Sect. 21.
25 The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, Bk. II, Chap. XXVIII. (Translated by W. Beloe.)
See Aulus Cornelius Gellius, Attic Nights, Bk. II, Chap. XXVIII, translated by J. C. Rolfe, on Bill Thayer’s site. — Elf.Ed.
26 Thucydides eclipsed by Theopompus! Cf. Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, Sect. 185, with references.
27 Cicero, Brutus, Chap. XVII.
28 Ibid., Chap. XVIII.
29 Cf. Pliny, Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII, Bk. VIII, Chap. XI; Plutarch, Vitae Parallelae, Chap. XXV (Cato).
30 Vide supra, p. 229, n. 3.
31 Livy cites Antias thirty-five times, Quadrigarius ten times. On the remains of these writers see the works of H. Peter quoted above, and Teuffel-Schwabe, op. cit., Vol. I, Sects. 155 sqq.
32 “Ceteri non exornatores rerum, sed tantummodo narratores fuerunt.” Cicero, De Oratore, Bk. II, Chap. XII.
33 H. Peter’s admirable account of Antipater in Wahrheit und Kunst has been summarized in this paragraph.
34 Belli Punici Alterius Historiae.
35 Ex scriptis eorum qui veri arbitrantur.
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