Latin Historiography (Classics)

Introduction

Latin historiography can mean how history was written in Latin in ancient times and how modern scholars interpret histories written in Latin. Here the works cited cover Latin historiography from its origins in Cato the Elder (2nd century BCE) and the early Roman annalists to the historians of the Late Empire (5th century CE). The biggest controversy in this field comes out of differing interpretations of the relationship between rhetoric and history. Rhetoric was undeniably ever present in Latin historiography, but many modern historians of the ancient world would prefer to see rhetoric as mere ornamentation that we can carefully remove in order to find the truth buried underneath. Literary scholars of historiography, on the other hand, argue that some ancient thinkers thought of history as a branch of rhetoric or at least as inextricable from rhetoric, and that we must remember that rhetorical inventio was basically a process of fictional composition, so sometimes ancient histories may be more fictional than historical in the modern sense. Both sides will agree that ancient histories are much different from modern historical writing, and that the reader must always be aware of rhetoric and other cultural influences in order to get the most out of the texts. History was a fluid genre in the ancient world and had close connections with prose genres such as geography and ethnography as well as poetic genres such as tragedy and epic—these connections help to illustrate just how different Roman histories are from modern historical writing.

General Overviews

Latin historiography has strong connections to Greek historiography, both through its roots in the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides and through the contemporary interactions between Greek and Latin historians writing under the Roman Republic and Empire. Thus some of the overviews here cover the whole classical historiography while a second group concentrates more closely on the Latin historians.

Classical Historiography and Greco-Roman Tradition

Perhaps the best overview here is Marincola 2007, a well-organized collection with chapters by numerous contributors on pertinent subtopics. The single author overviews include Ferrero 1962 in Italian; Usher 1970, which gives a very basic introduction without scholarly apparatus; Fornara 1983, which concentrates more on Greek historiography and traces a chronological development of the genre; Marincola 1997, which is more balanced and examines key traditions in the genre, such as topoi, myth in history, and the glory of history; and Duff 2003, which does a good job tracing the genre’s development while separately discussing the major Greek and Roman authors. Kraus, et al. 2010 is a recent collection of papers on historiography and its contexts.

Duff, Timothy E. 2003. The Greek and Roman historians. London: Bristol Classical.
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A brief and well-written introduction, this book provides an excellent starting point with suggestions for further reading, and Duff does a good job tracing the development of historiography as an ancient genre.
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Ferrero, Leonardo. 1962. Rerum Scriptor: Saggi sulla storiografia romana. Trieste, Italy: Università degli studi di Trieste.
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Ferrero contrasts Greek historians with their Roman peers who are, he argues, less interested in local history, less polemical about style and research, more concerned with politics and prejudice, and generally more personal in their approach to history.
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Fornara, Charles W. 1983. The nature of history in ancient Greece and Rome. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This is a coherent, quite readable account of classical historiography, though Fornara argues, too dogmatically, that Greek historians generally devoted more time and effort to their histories than their Roman counterparts.
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Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth, John Marincola, C. B. R. Pelling, and A. J. Woodman, eds. 2010. Ancient historiography and its contexts: Studies in honour of A. J. Woodman. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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A Festschrift in honor of one of the most influential scholars of Roman historiography today, this volume contains several compelling pieces such as those by Wiseman on Velleius’s mythical history and Chaplin on contemporary resonance in Livy’s account of the Second Punic War.
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Marincola, John. 1997. Authority and tradition in ancient historiography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584831Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The best and most readable single-author account of classical historiography; Marincola is more gracious to the Romans than Fornara, though he still concentrates more on the Greeks.
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Marincola, John, ed. 2007. A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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A massive two-volume companion—the collection is consistently of high quality including, for example, pieces by Woodman on how to process dense historiographic prose, by Wiseman on the origins of history at Rome, and by Levene on Late Rebublican historiography.
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Usher, Stephen. 1970. The historians of Greece and Rome. New York: Taplinger.
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Usher gives a basic examination of the chief classical historians in their historical context without scholarly notes.
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Roman Historiography

Kraus and Woodman 1997 is the oldest and quite short but remains an excellent starting place, especially for Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. Mellor 1999 is a sound overview, though the author does not discuss modern trends in literary historiography in detail. Mehl 2011 is a solid introduction, originally published in German in 2001, which shows different scholarly interests than Feldherr 2009, the most recent and perhaps the most through introduction.

Feldherr, Andrew, ed. 2009. The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This is an excellent collection of introductory essays on typical historiographic topics, including very useful pieces on the audience of ancient historians by Marincola, “Ancient Audiences and Expectations,” pp. 11–23, and on postmodern historiographic research by Batstone, “Postmodern Historiographical Theory and the Roman Historians,” pp. 24–40, as well as Lendon’s enthusiastic polemic, “Historians without History: Against Roman Historiography,” pp. 41–62, against recent trends in historiography, which, he claims, devalue the historical aspect of the texts.
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Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth, and A. J. Woodman. 1997. Latin historians. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Short and superb, this concise account with relevant bibliography is perhaps the best starting place for a schematic overview, especially of Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy.
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Mehl, Andreas. 2011. Roman historiography: An introduction to its basic aspects and development. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Mehl’s approach to historiography is much less literary than we see in much American and English scholarship; he is more concerned with using a knowledge of historiography to recover more historical facts; he is also more inclusive since he treats biography as well as late Christian histories equally with classical history. Reissued in English translation. Originally issued in German under the title Römische Geschichtsschreibung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001).
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Mellor, Ronald. 1999. The Roman historians. London: Routledge.
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A methodical introductory account with a chapter on the origins of Roman historiography and chapters on major Roman historians, this book flows coherently, though it lacks scholarly footnotes, and Mellor does not much discuss modern trends in historiographic research. Reprinted in second edition (2002).
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Collections and Monographs

Storoni Mazzolani 1976 looks at the ideological construct of empire without end and how historians use morality to trace Rome’s strength and glory over time. The historiography of conspiracy narratives, a popular topic in Roman political history, is examined by Pagán 2004. Syme 1979–1991 collects most of the papers published by Syme, an influential British scholar known for his astute combination of prosopography and literary acumen that provides a glimpse into the minds of the Roman historians. Moxon, et al. 1986 and Miller and Woodman 2010 are both collections of papers, the first on perspectives in Greco-Roman historiography and the second more specifically on generic interactions between imperial poetry and historiography. Pigoń 2008 is a collection on the tradition of historiography and related genres, and Marincola 2011 is a collection of some of the best historiographic papers of the late 20th century.

Marincola, John, ed. 2011. Greek and Roman historiography. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Selected papers published from 1960 to 1996—Marincola has included both Brunt and Woodman, who oppose each other in their interpretation of Cicero’s comments about truth in history; other important articles include Luce on the causes of bias in ancient historiography and Gabba on the ambiguous boundaries between history and genres such as paradoxography.
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Miller, John F., and A. J. Woodman, eds. 2010. Latin historiography and poetry in the early empire generic interactions. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004177550.i-248Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Collected papers from a 2008 conference (“Proxima Poetis: Latin Historiography and Poetry in the Early Empire”) at the University of Virginia, as the title suggests, interestingly treat generic allusions and influences from both directions; for example, Ash’s, “Rhoxolani Blues (Tacitus, Histories 1.79): Virgil’s Scythian Ethnography Revisited,” pp. 141–154, looks at Tacitus’s use of Virgilian models, while Gibson in “Causation in Post-Augustan Epic,” pp. 29–48, argues that epic’s concern with causation has historiographic roots.
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Moxon, I. S., J. D. Smart, and A. J. Woodman, eds. 1986. Past perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman historical writing; Papers presented at a conference in Leeds, 6–8 April 1983. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This collection includes useful pieces by Cornell, “The Formation of the Historical Tradition of Early Rome,” pp. 67–86; by Wiseman, “Monuments and the Roman Annalists,” pp. 87–100; and by Rawson, “Cassius and Brutus: The Memory of the Liberators,” pp. 101–119. Cornell and Rawson both stress the factual value of the ancient historiography against those, such as Wiseman, who emphasize its fictive embellishments.
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Pagán, Victoria Emma. 2004. Conspiracy narratives in Roman history. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
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Pagán does not concern herself with uncovering truth about the conspiracies described by the Roman historians but rather, through philological analysis, examines vocabulary they used and considers narrative elements that reappear in such contexts: secrets, digressions, speeches, outsiders, women, and slaves. She enlivens her close reading of the ancient historians by providing comparisons to modern conspiracy stories, Watergate and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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Pigoń, Jakub, ed. 2008. The children of Herodotus: Greek and Roman historiography and related genres. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
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A collection of twenty-two papers on the development of ancient history and related genres such as ethnography over the course of classical antiquity; of particular interest are Chassignet, “L’image des Barcides chez les historiographes latins de la République: naissance d’une tradition,” pp. 206–218, and Raaflaub, “The Truth about Tyranny: Tacitus and the Historian’s Responsibility in Early Imperial Rome,” pp. 253–270.
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Storoni Mazzolani, Lidia. 1976. Empire without end. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
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In a close reading of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus, Storoni Mazzolani argues that they each concern themselves with morality and its affect on Roman Empire without end. Specifically she deals with Sallust on concordia, Livy on the degradation of virtus under Augustus, and Tacitus on the abuse of potestas. Originally published in Italian as L‘impero senza fine, by Lidia Storoni Mazzolani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1972).
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Syme, Ronald. 1979–1991. Roman papers. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.
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These seven volumes reprint most of the papers of Syme, who was perhaps the most influential Roman historian of the 20th century, especially in Anglo-American scholarship. Volumes 1 and 2 were edited by Ernst Badian in 1979. Anthony Birley edited Volume 3 in 1984, Volumes 4 and 5 in 1988, and Volumes 6 and 7 in 1991.
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Bibliographies

Kraus and Woodman 1997 provides a good select bibliography, as does Mehl 2001. Marincola 2007 is the most recent and has a further reading listing for each of the topical chapters.

Kraus, Christina Shuttleworth, and A. J. Woodman. 1997. Latin historians. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Though far from exhaustive in terms of bibliography, Kraus and Woodman provide a good core with discussion of key points in the scholarship.
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Marincola, John, ed. 2007. A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Though not specifically a bibliographic publication, it is more recent than Kraus and Woodman 1997, and the topical chapters each end with a useful list of further reading on the topic.
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Mehl, Andreas. 2001. Römische Geschichtsschreibung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
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Mehl provides a general bibliography divided into four sections: ancient texts, fragmentary texts, literary or historiographic surveys and collections, and the contexts of ancient historiography. Reissued in English translation as Roman Historiography: An Introduction to Its Basic Aspects and Development (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Mehl includes more historical and continental scholarship, while Kraus and Woodman are stronger on Anglo-American literary scholarship.
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Style

Style is everywhere in Latin historiography. Important studies deal with language, rhythm, and various rhetorical devices. Popular topics in recent scholarship on historiographic rhetoric include characterization and exemplary history. As mentioned in the Introduction, debates continue over how much rhetoric alters the facts.

Language and Rhythm

Modern study of classical prose rhythm owes much to de Groot 1921, a work that remains a point of reference. Ullmann 1925, Ullmann 1932, and Ullmann 1933 deal specifically with the prose rhythm of Latin historians. Aili 1979 is the best study of prose rhythm in Sallust and Livy, and Oberhelman and Hall 1984 analyzes rhythm in the Historia Augusta and other Late Antique prose. One of the most striking stylistic features of Latin historiographic language is brevitas (conciseness), which Dziuba 2008 discusses in detail; another is the tendency of Latin historians to use archaizing word choice, as treated by Lebek 1970.

Aili, Hans. 1979. The prose rhythm of Sallust and Livy. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
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The best, most scientific analysis of prose rhythm in these two important historians.
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de Groot, Albert W. 1921. Der antike Prosarhythmus. Groningen, The Netherlands: Wolters.
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Though dated, de Groot’s comprehensive treatment of classical prose rhythm has ensured that modern scholars continue to find it useful whether they cite him in agreement or not.
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Dziuba, Agnieszka. 2008. Brevitas as a stylistic feature in Roman historiography. In The children of Herodotus: Greek and Roman historiography and related genres. Edited by Jakub Pigoń, 317–328. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
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Dziuba provides a concise overview of the Roman historians’ use of brevitas, a feature particularly associated with Sallust.
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Lebek, Wolfgang Dieter. 1970. Verba Prisca: Die Anfänge des Archaisierens in der lateinischen Beredsamkeit und Geschichtsschreibung. Göttingen, West Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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The standard monograph on archaicizing Latin—Lebek has much to say on historians and particularly Sallust, who purposefully employed archaic language as a stylistic choice.
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Oberhelman, Steven M., and Ralph G. Hall. 1984. A new statistical analysis of accentual prose rhythms in imperial Latin authors. Classical Philology 79.2: 114–130.
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Oberhelman and Hall provide a metrical analysis of several late imperial texts and supply statistical data concerning the accuracy and reliability of their findings; they include analyses of portions of the Historia Augusta.
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Ullmann, Ragnar. 1925. Les clausules dans le discours de Salluste, Tite-Live et Tacite. Symbolae Osloenses 3:65–75.
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Ullmann analyzes the clausular prose rhythms in the speeches of Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus; the methodology used by Ullmann remains respectable, and his data can be easily and profitably compared with Aili’s.
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Ullmann, Ragnar. 1932. La prose metrique de l’ancienne historiographie romaine. Symbolae Osloenses 11:72–76.
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Ullmann analyzes the clausulae of early Roman historians Cato and Claudius Quadrigarius, according to the same standards he used with Livy and Sallust.
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Ullmann, Ragnar. 1933. La prose metrique de l’ancienne historiographie romaine, II. Symbolae Osloenses 12:57–69.
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Ullmann discusses his analysis of the prose rhythms of Sisenna and Coelius Antipater, Cicero’s comments on prose rhythm, and de Groot’s previous work on prose rhythm; in conclusion, he decides that Sisenna and Coelius had not yet developed the tendency to dactyl-spondee rhythms commonly seen in Sallust and later Roman historians.
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Rhetoric

Rhetorical elaboration and outright invention are both present throughout the Latin historiographic tradition. No matter what the author’s style and knowledge, the weight of authority meant that historians would use rhetoric to make their words grand enough to fit the grand subjects they treated and, when knowledge failed them (as was often the case in a world with much less data than our own) or when the author’s bias moved them, fictive invention could fill in the blanks or take the emphasis off obvious, but inconvenient truths.

Elaboration and Style

Rhetoric is undeniably important to Latin historiography. Leeman 1963 looks at both Roman rhetorical theory and the actual practice of Roman prose writers; since Leeman treats all prose, he situates history amid stylistic trends in philosophy and oratory. For rhetoric specifically in Roman historians, see McDonald 1975 or Laird 2009. Pitcher 2009 is a longer and more idiosyncratic overview.

Laird, Andrew. 2009. The rhetoric of Roman historiography. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 197–213. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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A compelling introductory treatment of rhetoric and its uses in Roman historiography, Laird weighs varying assessments of rhetoric’s influence over historiography and settles somewhere in the middle.
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Leeman, A. D. 1963. Orationis ratio: The stylistic theories and practice of the Roman orators, historians, and philosophers. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Hakkert.
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Leeman collects all the ancient evidence discussing prose style and discusses them severally, though unfortunately he does not provide a systematic synthetic analysis.
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McDonald, A. H. 1975. Theme and style in Roman historiography. Journal of Roman Studies 65:1–10.
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An excellent brief overview of rhetorical style in the Roman historians—McDonald warns of the omnipresent influence of rhetoric in Roman historiography but strongly advises that one must consider both stylistic and historical features to rightly interpret Roman historical texts.
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Pitcher, Luke. 2009. Writing ancient history: An introduction to classical historiography. London: I. B. Tauris.
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Pitcher argues for a middle path so as to view history neither as the mere account of what happened nor as pure rhetorical art; though he sees ambiguity and pure deceit in some ancient historians, he generally suggests that one can recover much of the truth if one applies source-criticism properly and with an understanding of historiographic style.
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Fictions and Mistakes

Two major charges have been laid against the ancient historians’ use of rhetoric. First, the all-encompassing rhetorical elaboration leads to omissions and expansions that cause unintentional mistakes or at least misleading representations of history—some of these errors being partly due to lack of good information. Second, the rhetorical device of inventio, which historians used to fill in the blanks where sources failed, meant that parts—some would say most—of their narratives were essentially fiction by modern standards. Finley 1986 and Grant 1995 both give a modern historian’s view of how tricky it can be to glean the facts out of the rhetoric. Wiseman 1979 and Woodman 1988 have inspired literary critical approaches to classical historiography, where scholarly emphasis is on the art, not the facts. Plass 1988 and Haynes 2003 provide representative examples of how these new approaches have been applied. Morello 2002 examines a popular passage of alternate history in Livy, which shows just how fictional Latin history can be at times. Woodman 2008 defends its controversial reading of Cicero’s De Oratore in which Cicero basically views history as a branch of rhetoric.

Finley, M. I. 1986. Ancient history: Evidence and models. New York: Viking.
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Finley, as a historian, warns that the ancient histories are full of mistakes and inventions so that the modern scholar must be cautious in using them as sources (especially pp. 9–10).
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Grant, Michael. 1995. Greek and Roman historians: Information and misinformation. London: Routledge.
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A decent general introduction to the misconceptions that a modern reader or scholar might have, with sections on ancient versus modern historians, on the connections between history and poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy, on the kinds of sources used by ancient historians, and on digressions, invented speeches, moralizing, and prejudice.
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Haynes, Holly. 2003. The history of make-believe: Tacitus on imperial Rome. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
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Haynes argues that Tacitus has associated making up (fingere) and believing (credere) in his Historiae; she examines how his depictions of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, and the rebel Julius Civilis reflect a sustained, nuanced attention to the problems of appearance versus reality and the imagination and beliefs of the characters. Her postmodern assertion that Tacitus writes a history not of reality but of an imagined world will upset many.
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Morello, Ruth. 2002. Livy’s Alexander digression (9.17–19): Counterfactuals and apologetics. Journal of Roman Studies 92:62–85.
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A compelling recent treatment of this popular rhetorical passage—Morello shows how Livy betrays a Roman interest in alternate history and compares his counterfactual narrative about Alexander facing Roman generals with modern virtual or alternative histories. She argues that the passage was meant to defend Romans against charges of inferiority.
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Plass, Paul. 1988. Wit and the writing of history: The rhetoric of historiography in imperial Rome. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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A detailed examination of clever wording (quips and pithy epigrams) in imperial historiography, especially Tacitus—Plass unfortunately does not significantly address earlier examples of historiographic wit in order to prove (or disprove) his theory that the political environment specifically fostered this facetious style.
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Wiseman, T. P. 1979. Clio’s cosmetics: Three studies in Greco-Roman literature. Leicester, UK: Leicester Univ. Press.
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Usually seen as the first work to inspire recent trends in classical historiography; Wiseman argues that Roman historians, inspired by their muse Clio, significantly transformed a small core of facts about early Rome through rhetorical embellishment into something much bigger and less historical in the modern sense, and he specifically examines Livy’s stereotyped presentation of the gens Claudia.
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Woodman, A. J. 1988. Rhetoric in classical historiography: Four studies. London: Croom Helm.
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Woodman argues that historiography was viewed as a branch of rhetoric in the ancient world, so even the most rational and supposedly factual historians such as Thucydides were often motivated more by rhetorical objectives than by what modern scholars see as historical truth. He controversially suggests that veritas (usually translated “truth”) often means “fairness” in classical Latin.
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Woodman, A. J. 2008. Cicero on historiography: De Oratore 2.51–64. Classical Journal 104.1: 23–31.
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Twenty years after its initial publication, Woodman revisits his original argument that Cicero viewed history as a branch of rhetoric; he defends his reading against recent criticism and strongly reasserts his view that, in Cicero’s view, history included pure rhetorical inventions, not just elaborations.
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Characterization

Vasaly 2009 and Pitcher 2007 are the best general guides to characterization in historiography. Barlow 1998 looks at Caesar’s propagandistic characterization of Gauls as noble or barbaric. Claassen 1993 looks at Sallust’s complex characterization of Jugurtha. Grünewald 2004 looks at the rhetorical characterizations of the noble bandit versus the common bandit. Adler 2011 examines the historiographic use of foreign characters to voice Roman criticism of empire.

Adler, Eric. 2011. Valorizing the barbarians: Enemy speeches in Roman historiography. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
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Adler uses a nuanced historiographic parsing of enemy speeches in the Roman historians to show how they could use a foreign voice to criticize empire and imperialism.
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Barlow, Jonathan. 1998. Noble Gauls and their other in Caesar’s propaganda. In Julius Caesar as artful reporter: The war commentaries as political instruments. Edited by Kathryn Welch and Anton Powell, 139–170. London: Duckworth.
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Barlow shows through close verbal analysis how Caesar uses two different characterizations in order to display pro-Roman Gauls as respected nobles and anti-Roman Gauls as barbaric outsiders.
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Claassen, Jo-Marie. 1993. Sallust’s Jugurtha: Rebel or freedom fighter? On crossing crocodile-infested waters. Classical World 86.4: 273–297.
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Claassen gives a close reading of Sallust’s character Jugurtha and challenges us to see the ambiguity inherent in his presentation partly through comparison to modern analogues; she does a good job reminding us that character does not mean stereotype in Roman historiography, where complex characters often avoid simple classification.
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Grünewald, Thomas. 2004. Bandits in the Roman empire: Myth and reality. London and New York: Routledge.
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Grünewald looks at the historical reality and the rhetoric of banditry. The chapter, “Guerrilla Leaders as Latrones,” pp. 33–56, contrasts the historiographic characterization of Viriatus, the noble bandit, with Tacfarinas, the common bandit, and reveals the nuances of characterization that we see in the Roman historians. Translated by John Drinkwater, originally published in German as Räuber, Rebellen, Rivalen, Rächer: Studien zu Latrones im Römischen Reich (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999).
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Pitcher, L. V. 2007. Characterization in ancient historiography. In A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Edited by John Marincola, 102–117. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Pitcher outlines how historians from Herodotus through the classical Romans regularly employed both direct and indirect techniques to present their historical characters; he also discusses how character is usually presented by the historians as consistent, not changeable.
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Vasaly, Ann. 2009. Characterization and complexity: Caesar, Sallust, and Livy. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 245–260. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Vasaly deals generally with the tendency of ancient historiography to concentrate on great individuals and specifically explores examples in three major Roman historians; she makes it clear that the characterizations were meant to have didactic moral importance.
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Exemplary History

Mehl 2001 gives a very short introduction to historiographic exempla (moral models). The best overview is Roller 2009. Parker 1998 examines exempla that reinforce cultural ideologies about women and slaves. Chaplin 2000 has been incredibly influential on recent scholarship concerning exempla. Melchior 2009 looks at exempla in the Bellum Africum. Gowing 2009 considers the influence of Roman exempla traditions in Greek historiography. The exemplum of the heroic soldier is the focus of Popov-Reynolds 2010. Stevenson 2011 considers the exempla of women in Livy’s history of early Rome.

Chaplin, Jane D. 2000. Livy’s exemplary history. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Though some will disagree with Chaplin’s views about the power of moral exempla, her analysis of Livy’s prologue proves how important he found them, and her detailed discussion of numerous exempla in Livy shows the benefits of such analysis; her work has inspired other recent scholarship on exemplarity.
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Gowing, Alain M. 2009. The Roman exempla tradition in imperial Greek historiography: The case of Camillus. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 332–347. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Gowing discusses similarities between Roman exempla and the Greek rhetorical paradeigmata and argues that the Roman exempla tradition operates in both Greek and Latin histories, though individual authors make different points with an exemplum, even when telling the same story.
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Mehl, Andreas. 2001. Römische Geschichtsschreibung. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
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Mehl gives a concise overview of exempla in Roman historiography in chapter 6, section 6, “Exempla Literature and Historical Understanding,” on pp. 197–198 in the English translation, Roman Historiography: An Introduction to Its Basic Aspects and Development (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
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Melchior, Aislinn. 2009. What would Pompey do? Exempla and Pompeian failure in the Bellum Africum. Classical Journal 104.3: 241–257.
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Inspired by Chaplin, Melchior argues persuasively that the author of Bellum Africum depicts the Pompeians as poor followers of historical exempla.
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Parker, Holt. 1998. Loyal slaves and loyal wives: The crisis of the outsider-within and Roman exemplum literature. In Women and slaves in Greco-Roman culture. Edited by Sandra Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan, 152–173. London: Routledge.
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Parker provides a deep cross-genre analysis of exempla and rhetorical topoi concerning Roman women and slaves; he neatly concludes that these stories, which we often find in historiographic digressions, ideologically serve to show loyal slaves and women who overcome their allegedly weak natures to support their patriarchal superiors.
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Popov-Reynolds, Nadejda. 2010. The heroic soldier as exemplum in Cato and Livy. In Livy and intertextuality: Papers of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin, October 3, 2009. Edited by Wolfgang Polleichtner, 169–202. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
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Popov-Reynolds gives an intertextual reading of the exemplum of the heroic soldier as it appears in Livy and Cato.
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Roller, Matthew. 2009. The exemplary past in Roman historiography and culture. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 214–230. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Roller examines the usefulness of studying Roman history as exemplary literature that was meant to provide moral models and contrasts this method with a modern historicist study of history that seeks to recover the facts.
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Stevenson, Tom. 2011. Women of early Rome as Exempla in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1. Classical World 104.2: 175–189.
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Stevenson argues that Livy presents exemplary Roman women in Book 1 to show that women should support their society through familial roles, but he warns us that Livy also complicates the issue by making women often provide imperfect exempla—perhaps advising men to watch out for women with too much influence.
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Major Historians

One should consult the separate articles on Sallust and Tacitus. Luce 1978 looks at Livy’s overall conception and argues for a careful plan with regular divisions. Polleichtner 2010 is a collection of papers on Livy and intertextuality. Welch and Powell 1998 also collects conference papers, here on Caesar as an artful reporter. Schmal 2001 is the only general monograph on Sallust. Woodman 2009 is a well-organized collection of topical chapters on Tacitus and his works. The sections of Albrecht 1997 provide basic introductions and bibliography for each of the historians.

Albrecht, Michael von. 1997. A history of Roman literature: From Livius Andronicus to Boethius: With special regard to its influence on world literature. 2 vols. Leiden, The Netherlands, and New York: Brill.
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This edition revised by Gareth Schmeling and the author discusses all the major historians and provides select bibliographies for each.
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Luce, T. James. 1978. Livy: The composition of his history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Luce combines traditional source-criticism with literary criticism to argue persuasively that Livy planned his whole history in advance and divided it into coherent fifteen-book units.
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Polleichtner, Wolfgang, ed. 2010. Livy and intertextuality: Papers of a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin, October 3, 2009. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
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This collection contains papers on Livy and his sources and influence; note particularly Chaplin, “Historical and Historiographical Repetition in Livy’s Thermopylae,” pp. 47–66, and Feldherr, “Hannibalic Laughter: Sallust’s Archaeology and the End of Livy’s Third Decade,” pp. 203–232.
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Schmal, Stephan. 2001. Sallust. Hildesheim, Germany: Olms.
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Schmal, in German, provides the only recent monograph on Sallust’s life and works.
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Welch, Kathryn, and Anton Powell, eds. 1998. Julius Caesar as artful reporter: The war commentaries as political instruments. London: Duckworth.
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This collection of papers succeeds at showing how artfully Caesar composed his historical works in order to make them say what he wanted others to hear, even though his commentaries are not lengthy rhetorical histories.
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Woodman, A. J., ed. 2009. The Cambridge companion to Tacitus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This well-organized collection contains stimulating chapters on Tacitus’s sources and models, each of his works, his style and attitude, and his postclassical reception.
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Early Roman Historiography

For the texts and commentary, the older standard was Peter 1870 (also Volume 2, 1906), which is sometimes still worth consultation. Now one should consult Beck and Walter 2001 (also Volume 2, 2004) or Chassignet 1986 and Chassignet 1996 (also Volumes 2 and 3 published in 1999 and 2004, respectively) for commentary. Chassignet provides the better texts. Courtney 1999 gives a practical introduction to the archaic prose style of the early historians. Cornell 1995 presents a strong defense of the factual content of the early Latin historians, while Wiseman 1987 argues that much by these early annalists is invented.

Beck, H., and U. Walter. 2001. Die frühen römischen Historiker. Vol. 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
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Note Volume 2 with the same title published in 2004. This collection provides a critical text that follows Peter and Chassignet, a modern German translation, and a moderate amount of historical notes, though they mostly ignore stylistic features even though many of the fragments were preserved for their archaisms, which the chief Roman historians, especially Sallust, love to imitate.
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Chassignet, Martine. 1986. Caton: Les Origines (fragments). Paris: Belles Lettres.
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Chassignet provides a good Latin text with French translation and notes in this edition, which paved the way for her work on the other fragmentary historians.
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Chassignet, Martine. 1996. L‘Annalistique romaine. Vol. 1. Paris: Belles Lettres.
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See also Volumes 2 (1999) and 3 (2004) by the same author and publisher. These provide a good original Latin text of the annalists and early historians and rather full notes. They provide an alternative to Peter 1870, though Beck and Walter 2001 has more historical notes. Chassignet is less exclusive than Peter about including fragments. One could quibble with her combination of annalistic and other Roman historical writing.
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Cornell, Tim J. 1995. The beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). London: Routledge.
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Cornell gives us perhaps the best defense of the veracity of early Roman historians and examines literary and other sources for this period.
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Courtney, Edward. 1999. Archaic Latin prose. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press.
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Courtney deals, amid other archaic texts, with the fragmentary historians Cato, Calpurnius Piso, and Quadrigarius. Though brief, he usefully covers linguistic, stylistic, and historical issues for the selected passages and so provides an indispensable introduction to early Roman historiographic prose.
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Peter, H., ed. 1870. Historicorvm Romanorvm reliqviae. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Teubner.
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See also Volume 2 (1906). This magisterial long-standard edition of the fragmentary Roman historians has now been superseded by Chassignet for the Latin text, though Peter’s Latin commentary and differing choices about dating and authenticity of fragments remain of interest. Reprinted with updated bibliography in 1967 and 1993 (Stuttgart: Teubner).
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Wiseman, T. P. 1987. Roman studies: Literary and historical. Liverpool, UK: Francis Cairns.
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These collected papers include two that deal specifically with Wiseman’s doubts about the veracity of the early Roman historians, “The Credibility of the Roman Annalists,” pp. 293–296, and “Practice and Theory in Roman Historiography,” pp. 244–262. These are typical of Wiseman’s influential position and should be contrasted with Cornell.
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Late Antique Historiography

Muhlberger 1990 examines three 5th-century Latin chronicles and their connections to classical historiography and medieval chronicles. Humphries 2008 argues for Rufinus’s historiographic originality in his translation of Eusebius. Croke and Emmett 1983 and Marasco 2003 are both collections of papers on historiography in Late Antiquity—the former being the better overall. Rohrbacher 2002 provides an introduction to the topic by examining twelve separate historians of the period. Holdsworth and Wiseman 1986 looks at the historiographic tradition from the classical period through the Middle Ages.

Croke, Brian, and Alanna M. Emmett, eds. 1983. History and historians in Late Antiquity. Papers presented at a 1981 conference at Macquarie University. Sydney, Australia: Pergamon.
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Collected papers bridge the gap from late classical, Ammianus Marcellinus, to early medieval, Paul the Deacon.
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Holdsworth, Christopher, and T. P. Wiseman, eds. 1986. The inheritance of historiography, 350–900. Exeter, UK: Univ. of Exeter
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Beginning with an introduction on the classical models, this collection includes papers on Ammianus, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Paul the Deacon, among others.
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Humphries, Mark. 2008. Rufinus’s Eusebius: Translation, continuation, and edition in the Latin Ecclesiastical History. Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.2: 143–164.
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Humphries argues that Rufinus’s revised Latin translation of Eusebius corrected deficiencies, updated the text to fit his contemporary world, and generally involved much more historiographic originality than usually acknowledged.
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Marasco, Gabriele, ed. 2003. Greek and Roman historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to sixth century A.D. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
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This collection suffers from poor editing but offers some good chapters, including “Ammianus Marcellinus,” pp. 43–84, by Sabbah and “Latin Historiography and the Barbarian Kingdoms,” pp. 349–389, by Croke.
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Muhlberger, Steven. 1990. The fifth-century chroniclers: Prosper, Hydatius, and the Gallic Chronicler of 452. Leeds, UK: Francis Cairns.
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Muhlberger provides the first detailed treatment of three Latin chronicles of the 5th century and a seminal work for connecting Late Roman historiography to the medieval chronicle genre.
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Rohrbacher, David. 2002. The historians of Late Antiquity. London: Routledge.
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Rohrbacher provides a valuable concise overview of life and work (covering scope, scale, style, and purpose) for twelve Greek and Latin historians of the 4th and 5th centuries.
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Religion

Davies 2004 is a superb monograph on the function of the gods in Roman histories. Davies 2009 is a concise overview of religion in Roman historiography. Levene 1993 specifically looks at the literary aspects of Livy’s use of religion. Mueller 2002 focuses on Valerius Maximus and the connection between religion and moral exempla in historiography. Sommer 2008 looks at historiographic responses to Elagabalus’s religious innovation.

Davies, Jason. 2004. Rome’s religious history: Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus on their gods. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Davies argues that religion was essential for the histories of Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus and explores the importance of textual references to religion; he clearly shows that the Romans historians considered gods as well as men to be historical actors—a fact too often ignored due to modern secularism.
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Davies, Jason. 2009. Religion in historiography. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 166–180. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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As to be expected from the author of a solid monograph on the subject, Davies provides a concise yet clear and compelling overview of the features and functions of religion as it appears in historiography; he is particularly good at steering the reader to bibliography on specific points.
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Levene, D. S. 1993. Religion in Livy. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
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A historiographic (not antiquarian or theological) examination of Livy’s treatment of religion—Levene shows mastery of the huge Livian corpus and argues cogently that Livy intentionally avoided presenting any one consistent religious viewpoint.
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Mueller, Hans-Friedrich. 2002. Roman religion in Valerius Maximus. London: Routledge.
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This monograph looks at Roman religion in the historian Valerius Maximus, whose collection of brief historical exempla shows how much Romans loved to use history as a source of morals; Mueller does a good job of setting the context for Valerius by comparing him with other Roman authors and particularly other historians.
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Sommer, Michael. 2008. The challenge of aniconism: Elagabalus and Roman historiography. Mediterraneo Antico 11:581–590.
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Sommer examines how authorial reactions to Elagabalus’s religious innovations are reflected in the Historia Augusta and other histories that describe his reign and his death.
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Poetry and Myth

For connections to drama, see Dué 2000 on Sallust, Pelling 1997 on tragical dreams, Walsh 1996 on the historiography of the Bacchanalia, Wiseman 1994 on the dramatic sources of the Roman annalists, and Dunkle 1971 on the rhetorical depiction of the tyrant in Roman historiography. Leigh 2007 particularly examines generic connections between history and epic. Fox 1996 and Levene and Nelis 2002 deal more widely with historiography’s connections to poetry and myth.

Dué, Casey. 2000. Tragic history and barbarian speech in Sallust’s Jugurtha. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100:311–325.
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Dué explores the interesting Sallustian allusions to the Medea tragedies of Euripides and Ennius as well as to Catullus 64 and argues that Sallust intentionally creates a tragic narrative.
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Dunkle, J. Roger. 1971. The rhetorical tyrant in Roman historiography: Sallust, Livy and Tacitus. Classical World 65.1: 12–20.
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Dunkle argues that the image of the tyrant in the Roman historians can be traced to Roman familiarity with the stock character of the tragic tyrant; he cites Roman adaptations of Greek tyrant tragedies and allusions to the tragic tyrant in Cicero and Suetonius before looking at key tyrant-related vocabulary employed by the historians.
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Fox, Matthew. 1996. Roman historical myths: The regal period in Augustan literature. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Fox treats the ancient sources—historiographic, antiquarian, and poetic—for the myths about the Roman regal period; he rightly notes connections across genres in his analysis of the literary history.
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Leigh, Matthew. 2007. Epic and historiography at Rome. In A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Edited by John Marincola, 483–492. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Leigh discusses the cross-genre connections between epic and historiography in the Roman world and shows that influence went from epic to history and from history to epic.
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Levene, David S., and Damien P. Nelis, eds. 2002. Clio and the poets: Augustan poetry and the traditions of ancient historiography. Papers presented at a conference at the University of Durham in 1999. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
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The fruits of a 1999 conference—the papers, some by historiographic scholars such as Wiseman and Ash, show how ancient historiography often transcends our modern idea of historical prose, since much Roman poetry was partly or entirely historical.
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Pelling, Christopher. 1997. Tragical dreamer: Some dreams in the Roman historians. Greece & Rome 44.2: 197–213.
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Pelling mentions dreams in Fabius Pictor, Gellius, and Coelius Antipater before examining the dreams of Livy and Tacitus in detail; he finds that Livy’s dreams, as Herodotus’s (and typical tragic dreams), sometimes reveal a prophetic truth missed by the original audience, while Tacitus, more like Plutarch, presents disturbing dreams that are significant but not easy for the reader to interpret.
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Walsh, P. G. 1996. Making a drama out of a crisis: Livy on the Bacchanalia. Greece & Rome 43.2: 188–203.
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Walsh examines Livy 39.8–19 to argue that it can be divided into a prologue and five acts and may be indirectly based on a drama used by Livy’s source—Walsh here follows Wiseman’s lead in believing drama to have been a source for the annalists.
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Wiseman, T. P. 1994. Historiography and imagination: Eight essays on Roman culture. Exeter, UK: Univ. of Exeter Press.
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A collection of essays, all but the first previously published—the first two advance Wiseman’s theory that the details of early Roman history have been shaped by lost Roman historical drama rather than by oral banquet songs.
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Ethnography

Dench 2007 is an excellent overview of the connections between ethnography and history. Cordier 2006, in French, examines Roman ethnography of primitive societies and its influence on historiography. Erickson 2002 looks at a unique naval ethnography in Caesar. Morstein-Marx 2001 examines Sallust’s African ethnography. O’Gorman 1993 considers Tacitus’s interaction with the ethnographic tradition in the Germania. Roman historiography and ethnography of the barbarian is the focus of Webster 1996 and Woolf 2011.

Cordier, Pierre. 2006. L’ethnographie romaine et ses primitifs: Les paradoxes de la préhistoire au présent. Anabases 3:173–193.
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According to Cordier, the presentation of primitive peoples in Roman ethnography reveals implicit beliefs about cultural evolution, and this made the Romans reluctant to look too closely at their own primitive history, lest they find their ancestors to be barbarians.
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Dench, Emma. 2007. Ethnography and history. In A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Edited by John Marincola, 493–503. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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A concise general introduction to the connections between the related genres of history and ethnography in antiquity, as Dench provides a helpful list of further reading at the end.
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Erickson, Brice. 2002. Falling masts, rising masters: The ethnography of virtue in Caesar’s account of the Veneti. American Journal of Philology 123.4: 601–622.
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Erickson argues that Caesar’s naval ethnography of the Veneti (Gallic Wars 3.8–15), which has previously been dismissed as an awkward insertion, presages the cultural superiority and virtue of the Romans that secures their victory in the end.
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Morstein-Marx, Robert. 2001. The myth of Numidian origins in Sallust’s African excursus (Iugurtha 17.7–18.12). American Journal of Philology 122.2: 179–200.
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Morstein-Marx looks closely at how Sallust has reshaped his sources for African ethnography to fit his own agenda for presenting Jugurtha.
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O’Gorman, Ellen. 1993. No place like Rome: Identity and difference in the Germania of Tacitus. Ramus 22:135–154.
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O’Gorman explores Tacitus’s masterful use of the ethnographic tradition and its themes and topoi to present a literary Germany that seems sometimes similar to Rome and sometimes totally estranged from all things Roman; in the end, the reader is left confused and in doubt, as often in the more fantastic Greco-Roman ethnographies.
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Webster, J. 1996. Ethnographic barbarity: Colonial discourse and ‘Celtic warrior societies.’ In Roman imperialism: Post-colonial perspectives: Proceedings of a symposium held at Leicester University in November 1984. Edited by Jane Webster and Nicholas Cooper, 111–123. Leicester Archaeology Monographs 3. Leicester, UK: School of Archaeological Studies, Univ. of Leicester.
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Webster provides a postmodern archaeologically informed perspective on Roman imperial ethnography of the barbarian.
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Woolf, Greg. 2011. Tales of the barbarians: Ethnography and empire in the Roman west. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This recent monograph examines ethnographic writing about outsiders in history and other genres of the Roman imperial world; Woolf does a great job collecting pertinent Greek and Latin passages in English translation and situates his discussion in modern anthropological theory.
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Geography

Engels 2007 has the best general overview of the cross-genre connections, though Riggsby 2009 has much of interest on theoretical approaches to geography. Caesar’s imaginary geography of Germany is the focus of Krebs 2006. Clarke 2001 looks at Tacitus’s use of geographic topoi in the Agricola. The mental geography constructed by Ammianus is treated by Sundwall 1996.

Clarke, Katherine. 2001. An island nation: Re-reading Tacitus’ Agricola. Journal of Roman Studies 91:94–112.
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Clarke argues that Tacitus’s use of the geographic topos of the island nation associates Agricola’s campaigns with historical and pseudohistorical accounts of islands in Oceanus.
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Engels, Johannes. 2007. Geography and history. In A companion to Greek and Roman historiography. Edited by John Marincola, 541–552. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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Provides a general overview of the relationship of geography and historiography in classical antiquity and discusses the presence of geographic material in ancient histories.
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Krebs, Christopher B. 2006. Imaginary geography in Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum. American Journal of Philology 127.1: 111–136.
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As Clarke 2001 and Sundwall 1996 before him, Krebs examines imagined or mental geography and argues that Caesar’s rhetoric and allusions to prior geographic narratives make his Germany into an infinite no-man’s-land at the edge of the world; thus Caesar is made to play the role of Alexander the Great and other world conquerors at the ends of the earth.
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Riggsby, Andrew M. 2009. Space. In The Cambridge companion to the Roman historians. Edited by Andrew Feldherr, 152–165. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Riggsby presents a theoretical view of historiographic space that includes an actual geography of places as well as constructed mental locations that allow a historian to organize his narrative by spatializing battles or intersocietal conflicts.
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Sundwall, Gavin. 1996. Ammianus geographicus. American Journal of Philology 117.4: 619–643.
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Sundwall convincingly argues first that the Romans generally did not have a modern “map conciousness” but rather thought of geography through words; he presents Julius Caesar’s famous introduction to De Bello Gallico as representative and then shows how Ammianus’s geographic digressions provide “mental maps” that situate the narrative so as to guide his reader through in an orderly fashion.
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Reception

Bowersock, et al. 1977 collects papers on the famous Roman historian Edward Gibbon, and Cartledge 1977 offers a brief overview of his life, innovations, and influences. Lianeri 2011 explores the post-classical reception of Greco-Roman historiography in a series of collected papers. Momigliano 1990 collects six lectures tracing historiography from its classical roots to Gibbon, Grote, and Mommsen. Linderski 1990 considers the scholarly contributions of Mommsen and Syme. Potter 2001 traces 20th-century—mostly American—scholarship on Roman history.

Bowersock, G. W., John Leonard Clive, and Stephen Richards Graubard. 1977. Edward Gibbon and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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A celebratory publication to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Gibbon’s first volume—the collection includes papers on Gibbon’s background, influences, views on topics such as Muhammad, civil war, barbarism versus civilization, and even humor.
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Cartledge, Paul. 1977. The enlightened historiography of Edward Gibbon, Esq.: A bicentennial celebration. Maynooth Review 3.2: 67–93.
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A concise and lively examination of Gibbon’s life—Cartledge shows his historiographic influences and innovations, and lasting contribution to our modern views of Roman historiography.
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Lianeri, Alexandra, ed. 2011. The western time of ancient history: Historiographical encounters with the Greek and Roman pasts. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511975998Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A superb collection of papers on ancient historiography and its reception and influence up to the present day; it has much to offer on literary history and the history of ideas.
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Linderski, Jerzy. 1990. Mommsen and Syme: Law and power in the principate of Augustus. In Between republic and empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his principate. Edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Mark Tohler, 42–53. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
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Lindersky gives a seminal, compelling comparison of the approaches taken by these two historians.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. 1990. The classical foundations of modern historiography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A partially revised posthumous publication of six lectures from 1962 on the origins of modern historiography in Persian, Jewish, Greek, and Roman historiography; with his masterful treatment, Momigliano reveals how modern sociologists and pure historians both follow ancient models and particularly discusses such modern historians such as Gibbon, Grote, and Mommsen.
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Potter, David. 2001. Roman history and the American philological association, 1900–2000. Transactions of the American Philological Association 131:315–327.
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Potter concisely examines one hundred years of historical and historiographic research and deals specifically with the work of Francis Kelsey, Tenney Frank, Michael Rostovtzeff, Lily Ross Taylor, Bob Broughton, Ronald Syme, Moses Finley, and Arnaldo Momigliano.