... the careers of these writers [Livy's predecessors] cover the period from (roughly) 200 BC to 35 BC. But, since the traditional date for the foundation of Rome is the mid-eighth century BC, we are left with an interval of over five hundred years during which no history was written in Rome at all. Where, then, did the earliest historians derive their information for the earliest centuries of Rome?
The traditional story of how history grew at Rome is that told by Cicero and elaborated by later critics: it is a dismal tale of plain, unadorned, thin narratives, a mere 'compilation of chronicles' (Cic. De orat. 2.52 annalium confectio) even up through the orator's own lifetime...
According to this picture, Roman history began with the (lost) Annales maximi, a year-by-year chronicle that is said to have been posted for public view on white boards (tabulae dealbatae), later codified in some form, perhaps as a large inscription, and maintained by the pontifex maximus (high priest). It is said to have dated back (perhaps) to the fifth century BC and to have contained the names of annual magistrates and other officials, and notices of famines and eclipses and of primarily ritual material. Yet, even if the earliest historians had access to a record which pre-dated themselves by so long a time, there still remains a period of about three centuries from the founding of the city for which no information other than some form of traditional memory was available, but which Livy nevertheless took four books (more than 300 pages of Oxford Text) to describe.
... The consensus of modern research is that the Romans had a persistent disregard for the retrieval of information, which no doubt explains the commonly accepted view that 'Roman historians did not, as a general rule, carry out original research.' As far as we can tell, in fact, from the very beginning historians of early Rome primarily used other written historians as sources, modelling their own work on, and polemically engaging with, their precursors' in ways generally familiar to us from the work of poets... The earliest Roman historian, Fabius Pictor, who wrote in Greek, looked, as Cornell has remarked [in The Beginnings of Rome (1995)], to the canons and methods of Greek historiography, using Greek accounts of early Rome as his source...
Roman historians did on occasion consult the research of others, conveniently grouped under the general heading of 'antiquarian'. Even here, however, it does not follow that their methods were the same as ours: for instance, Livy famously refers to 'sources' (auctores) in the plural when he means a single source; and it has been argued that many 'scholarly' conventions of historiographical narrative are purely mendacious. What is more, as Cicero and Livy knew, antiquarian genealogical research was itself often characterized by distortion and free invention (Cic. Brut. 62, Livy 8.40.4-5). Finally, none of these possible sources for early Roman history provided more than a bare-bones structure, nothing like the elaborate narratives we find in Livy and others. [fn: "Scholars often speak of a 'hard core' of factual information that was preserved , to be elaborated by freely invented details."] It is certainly true that by the time Fabius Pictor wrote, the Romans had a 'highly developed sense of their past', and it has been argued that the remarkably coherent account of early Roman history found in the extant sources can only be explained as relying on the 'collective, and accepted, oral memory of the nation': that is, oral tradition and the fierce Roman sense of identity themselves constitute an important source for early Rome. as Cornell has reminded us, however, this sense of the last is not unproblematic: 'the historical tradition of the Roman Republic was not an authenticated official record or an objective critical reconstruction; rather, it was an ideological construct designed to control, to justify, and to inspire.'
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French." - P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins[This message has been edited by Pitt (edited 09-26-2012 @ 00:49 AM).]