The Fragile Legacy of Roman Historical Writing

When the western half of the Roman Empire declined, a cultural and intellectual rupture occurred that left only fragments of Roman historical works preserved for posterity. The survival rate was shockingly low even for the most celebrated historians – we possess merely half of Tacitus’s major works through two surviving manuscripts, while only 35 of Livy’s original 142 volumes endure. This pattern of loss becomes even more pronounced for earlier and later historians, where we’re often limited to brief commentaries and citations. In contrast, Greek historians fared considerably better thanks to the Byzantine scholarly tradition that actively preserved their works.

The relative uniformity of surviving materials makes generalizations about Roman historiography somewhat easier. Roman historians primarily concerned themselves with the history of Rome itself (“rerum Romanarum auctor”). Like their Greek predecessors Thucydides and Xenophon, they focused on public affairs both domestic and foreign. As Tacitus articulated, proper subjects included “great wars, the sack of cities, the defeat and capture of kings; and in domestic history the conflicts of consuls and tribunes, land and grain laws, and the struggles between the aristocracy and plebs.” Their fundamental purpose was straightforward: to preserve Rome’s memory and transmit the achievements and character of its notable figures to future generations.

The Moral and Religious Dimensions of Roman History

Roman historiography served more than just secular purposes. Tacitus famously stated that annals had the particular function of ensuring “that virtue would not be forgotten in silence, while those responsible for evil words and deeds would have reason to fear the judgment of posterity.” This historical tradition also maintained a strong religious dimension, focusing on Rome’s relationship with the gods who had blessed its growth and prosperity. Divine favor manifested through omens (the gods’ medium of communication) and cult worship (humanity’s response).

With rare exceptions like Livy, Roman historians typically came from senatorial backgrounds or held significant public offices. Sallust notably claimed that political ambitions initially distracted him from historical writing, but after these aspirations failed, he devoted his retirement to historiography rather than indulging in leisure or what he dismissively called “the slave-like activities of farming and hunting.” This aristocratic background profoundly shaped the perspective and priorities of Roman historical writing.

The Birth of Roman Historiography

The most compelling subject for Roman historians was Rome’s remarkable rise during the Republic to eventual domination of the Mediterranean world. Ironically, Romans only developed the capability and inclination to properly record this history as they neared completion of this achievement. The earliest Roman historians, Quintus Fabius Pictor and Lucius Cincius Alimentus, held public office during the Second Punic War and likely wrote their histories shortly afterward in the early 2nd century BCE. Significantly, they wrote in Greek – Fabius was commemorated in recently discovered Taormina frescoes as part of a group of Greek historians.

These pioneer historians didn’t merely record contemporary events but attempted to reconstruct Roman history from its origins. This ambitious project relied on several sources: the annual consular lists (fasti consulares) dating back to around 500 BCE; the Annales Maximi (yearly records supposedly kept by the pontifex maximus); and various stories about Rome’s mythical origins and later history from both Greek writers like Timaeus and local traditions. Particularly influential were the aristocratic family legends preserved through funeral orations (laudationes funebres), though Cicero and Livy both complained these distorted history through fabricated achievements and implausible genealogies.

Greek Influences on Roman Historical Writing

From its inception, Roman historiography showed clear Greek influences in three main forms. First was the antiquarian tradition exemplified by Timaeus of Tauromenium, a Sicilian writer of the early 3rd century BCE who became the first historian to write about Rome while chronicling Sicily and the western Mediterranean. Second came the “tragic” approach associated with some Hellenistic writers, characterized by pathos, sensationalism, and grotesque elements. The third and most significant influence was Polybius of Megalopolis, the Greek hostage brought to Italy in 168 BCE who became close friends with Roman aristocrats.

Polybius aimed to write a “practical” political-military history explaining causal relationships and evaluating human behavior under pressure as examples for future action. His work represented the pinnacle of Hellenistic historiography, combining traditional city-state focused history with universal chronological scope. Like Thucydides, Polybius consciously reflected on historical methodology, discussing source selection, speech composition, character portrayal, and causal explanation. He emphasized the historian’s personal contribution through emphasis (Greek “emphasis”) – creating authoritative impressions, highlighting significant subjects, and leaving vivid memories.

The Evolution of Republican Historiography

Roman historians generally lacked Polybius’s theoretical interests or his grand synthesizing approach. However, Polybius firmly established Rome’s central place in world history while making history respectable as practical education. His preference for history written by politicians and generals rather than academic scholars also aligned with Roman tradition.

By the late 2nd century BCE, a distinction emerged between strict year-by-year annals (annales) and histories (historiae) incorporating freer analysis. Cato the Elder pioneered using history as a political weapon, and by 100 BCE, politicians began writing memoirs to shape their historical legacies – a trend culminating in Caesar’s Commentaries and Augustus’s Res Gestae. Biography also developed as a genre, with notable figures like Caesar, Pompey, Cato, and Cicero receiving biographical treatment from admirers.

Antiquarian historical writing flourished alongside contemporary history, often expanding earlier annals with dubious archival materials and fabricated stories. Cicero’s contemporaries complained about the poor literary quality of existing histories, urging him to write something more worthy of an orator. After Cicero’s death, Cornelius Nepos lamented the missed opportunity to refine the rough, disorganized mass of material into valuable literature.

Caesar and the Art of Historical Memoir

Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic Wars and Civil War represent our first significant example of advancing Roman historiography. Though politically motivated memoirs, they share many features with less tendentious histories. Stylistically, Caesar showed progress over predecessors with clear, flowing narrative – though Cicero praised precisely its lack of literary ornamentation as appropriate for its genre.

The Gallic War particularly exemplifies mature Roman historical writing, chronicling Rome’s expansion through warfare enlivened by geographical and ethnographic digressions. Caesar presents it as proof of Roman virtue – both his own and his soldiers’ (whose abilities few other works describe so thoroughly). The work also carries a political message, with Caesar surprisingly endorsing conservative political stances when discussing Gallic tribes, warning against demagogues who gained popular support through handouts and revolution.

The Civil War proves more complex to interpret along traditional Roman lines, though Caesar still portrays his soldiers as heroes and justifies his actions through traditional values – defending his dignity and Roman people’s freedom against a small clique of aristocrats.

Sallust’s Moral Histories

Gaius Sallustius Crispus (born 86 BCE), a follower of Caesar who turned to history writing around the time of Caesar’s assassination, made more innovative stylistic contributions. He developed a concise, epigrammatic style influenced by early annalists like Cato but with greater linguistic and tonal variety. Unfortunately, his major work Historiae (covering late Republican history to 67 BCE) survives only in fragments, leaving us to judge him primarily through his monographs The Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jugurthine War.

Sallust openly acknowledged his focus on moral portrayal, suggesting the importance of aristocratic ancestor masks in inspiring descendants – recalling how funeral traditions influenced historiography. However, he gave equal emphasis to vice as to virtue, extending his analysis beyond individuals to entire social groups. While patriotically detailing Rome’s military glories, he simultaneously charted contemporary moral decay that accompanied imperial expansion. The nobility’s self-destructive greed and ambition either oppressed the poor or corrupted them, with Rome saved only by a few leaders’ exceptional virtue.

Sallust sympathetically portrayed plebeian suffering (having served as tribune of the plebs himself), but in analyzing Rome’s late Republican crisis, he condemned both senatorial conservatives and popular reformers as equally self-interested. For Sallust, evil and decline proved as compelling as virtue and victory, providing his best opportunities for character portrayal like Catiline, Jugurtha, and minor figures such as the educated woman Sempronia in Catiline’s Conspiracy.

Livy and the Summation of Republican Historiography

Titus Livius (Livy) represents the first annalist whose work survives in substantial quantity, allowing us to evaluate Republican annalistic tradition through him and elements traceable to earlier writers. Born in 59 BCE at Patavium (Padua), Livy spent about twenty years writing his history from age thirty onward, living through Rome’s civil wars and transition from Republic to Principate.

As a diligent scholar without exceptional political career or brilliance, Livy nearly achieved what Cicero’s friends had hoped from Cicero – producing a readable Roman history. His linguistic richness and material organization matched Cicero’s ideals, avoiding Sallust’s abruptness in favor of a lively, varied narrative built on extensive vocabulary and complex sentence structure. His treatment remained conservative (likely following annalistic tradition), patriotic in military matters, and pro-senatorial in politics while opposing demagogic tribunes.

Though somewhat sympathetic to plebeians in their struggle against patricians, Livy showed greatest admiration for uncompromising traditionalists who resisted concessions to plebeians. He probably maintained this attitude in his lost books on the Republic’s collapse, possibly viewing their defeat as contributing to its demise. Writing during the empire’s zenith under Augustus, Livy – like Sallust – saw Rome as crushed by its own success.

As a historical interpreter, Livy showed little originality in causal analysis, compensating with vivid humanitarian sympathy in both his reconstructed speeches and narrative – essentially an imaginative approach. Nobody had recorded how Veians felt when Romans expelled them from their city (later razed), or Roman soldiers’ humiliation passing under the Samnite yoke (both 4th century BCE events). Accounts of Roman reactions to Hannibal’s victory at Lake Trasimene (217 BCE) were likely equally sparse. Yet these became some of Livy’s most memorable passages, showing greater influence from “tragic” historiography than Polybius’s “pragmatic” method.

The Transformation Under Empire

Augustus’s Principate and those of his successors transformed political life and literary style. As people and Senate gradually lost power to make consequential political decisions (now made privately by the emperor and his inner circle), and career advancement depended ultimately on imperial favor, political secrecy left contemporaries and later historians ignorant of true imperial policies. This vacuum bred rumor and suspicion, with court atmosphere encouraging intrigue and slander.

Ciceronian oratory gave way to Sallustian refinement and conciseness. More remarkably, historiography’s language became particularly suited for irony and denunciation. Some historians recording Rome’s transition from Republic to Principate remained independent of the new regime, like Cremutius Cordus whose work was burned under Tiberius though later restored in censored form under Caligula. But generally, as Tacitus noted, historiography suffered from flattery of living emperors and vilification of dead ones.

Traditional subject matter also disappeared. After Augustus’s reign, most emperors attempted no major new conquests, while large-scale political conflicts of Republican politics vanished. Aristocratic rivalries now focused on treason trials and currying imperial favor or senatorial respect. The early Principate’s significant developments – provincial and domestic policy changes, expanding citizenship and Greco-Roman culture, urban development – didn’t suit traditional historians’ interests or provide opportunities for pathos or sensationalism. Yet Rome’s greatest historian would work precisely in this seemingly narrow, unglamorous field.

Tacitus: Historian of the Principate

Cornelius Tacitus (born mid-1st century CE) entered the Senate under the Flavians, holding high office and writing mainly under Trajan during an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity following Domitian’s assassination. In his early work Agricola (a written funeral oration for his father-in-law) and his two major histories – Histories (69-96 CE) and Annals (14-68 CE) – he articulated traditional views of good and evil adapted to imperial times.

Tacitus’s purpose extended beyond moral instruction through exempla to practical guidance. He explained that under the Republic, when power alternated between people and Senate, one needed to understand both how to manage crowds and influence aristocratic senators. Similarly, under autocracy, insight into an emperor’s thinking proved valuable – an approach later admired by Renaissance figures like Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

While impartial toward those destroyed by emperors, Tacitus reserved highest praise for survivors like himself and Agricola: “Those accustomed to admire rebellious acts should know that great men can exist under bad rulers. Obedience and humility, if backed by energy and hard work, can achieve glory that most reach only through ostentatious, untimely martyrdom.” He didn’t uncritically admire famous Julio-Claudian victims, contrasting their self-display and extravagance with new senators’ modesty and frugality.

Remarkably for a historian of Roman empire, Tacitus effectively ventriloquized anti-Roman sentiments through captured enemies like British chieftain Caratacus asking: “If you want to rule everyone, does that mean everyone must accept slavery?” Yet he also balanced this with portrayals of Roman peace and justice versus tribal instability. More disturbingly, he recorded a Roman general refusing a German tribe’s settlement request by stating: “Men must obey their betters; the gods they appeal to have given Romans power to decide what to give and take, tolerating no other judges.”

Tacitus lamented scarce military sources, and while capable of vivid, accurate battle narratives (excelling like Livy at portraying participants’ emotions), his style often frustratingly obscures details. However, it perfectly suits imperial politics through irony contrasting public appearances with power’s hidden realities, and deliberate ambiguity – sometimes offering multiple explanations (his own and others’) that increase rather than resolve uncertainty about motives.

His masterpiece was Tiberius’s portrayal. Confronted with sources showing this brilliant, empire-conscious emperor ending his reign insecure and hated, Tacitus used Tiberius’s notorious hypocrisy to solve the puzzle, presenting his life as gradual unmasking of monstrous evil beneath unctuous veneer. Guicciardini noted: “Cornelius Tacitus excellently teaches subjects how to live prudently under tyrants, just as he shows tyrants how to establish tyranny.”

Writing during perceived happiness, Tacitus remained pessimistic. The Republic’s fall seemed inevitable, Tiberian misery attributed to divine anger. Tacitus apparently doubted free will’s existence, perhaps discouraging direct advice-giving. He alternated between seeing events as chance occurrences or fate’s workings – whether Stoic rational causality or astrological determinism. While skeptical of individual astrologers, he shared contemporaries’ respect for their art. Regarding traditional gods, he rarely mentioned rituals and interpreted omens ambiguously – Rome’s misfortunes might prove gods cared not for its welfare but punishment. Yet this didn’t hinder his moral purpose; fate might explain but never excuse human actions.

The Shift to Biography

Tacitus’s achievement was applying traditional principles to early imperial history in a style reflecting his era. For over two centuries, no Latin writer attempted to rival him. During his lifetime, biography surpassed history as the dominant genre, emphasizing psychology and personal relationships that Tacitus also highlighted. From the upper-class perspective, emperors’ lives had become history’s main thread.

The best practitioner was Tacitus’s younger contemporary Suetonius Tranquillus, whose approach centered on Roman epitaphs and funeral orations – recording emperors’ public deeds and moral qualities contrasted with private lives. While emperors could be criticized for military failures, fiscal waste, or cruelty to elites (Suetonius generally ignored administrative reforms), these public faults often appeared as extensions of personal vices exposed domestically – especially in dining rooms and bedrooms. Thus Suetonius alternates between political chronicles and scandalous personal revelations, both packed with anecdotes that effectively (if not always accurately) portray character.

Parallel Lives by Plutarch of Chaeronea, the ancient world’s greatest biographer, offered more sophisticated ethical analysis through paired Greek and Roman biographies. Plutarch deliberately shaped character portraits (comparing his work to sculpture and painting), softening minor faults without ignoring them to balance truthfulness with highlighting life’s main trajectories. Unlike chronological narration, he added general observations about behavior at key moments (like Suetonius introducing anecdotes here). Working from Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, Plutarch evaluated subjects through virtues like courage without recklessness, modesty without self-abasement, measured wealth use, and controlled emotions. Roman biography proved ethically cruder by comparison – Roman historians judged character narrowly through contribution to Roman success rather than philosophical virtue.

The Decline of Roman Historiography

Why did Roman historiography wither after Tacitus? Notably, the next major Roman history came from Cassius Dio, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Bithynia writing in Greek in the early 3rd century CE. His comprehensive history to his own time attempted Thucydidean analysis and political generalization. Despite Polybius’s brilliant example, Romans rarely advanced beyond simplistic understanding of political terminology in explaining their history. After Livy or Tacitus’s eloquent accounts, there seemed little reason to retell these periods.

With empire and Principate firmly established and apparently unchangeable, imperial biographies easily became stale sequels to a completed story. Later, in the 4th century, Ammianus Marcellinus (an Antiochene Syrian writing in Latin) attempted to restart the tradition by covering history from Tacitus’s endpoint to his own time. He found conventional materials – wars, geography, ethnography, trials, urban unrest, and especially moral episodes – but despite vivid narration, he barely explained the 4th century’s crises and social changes. This may explain why Roman elites abandoned traditional historiography – the old framework had nothing new to offer.