material prepared for him and to discussing the various aspects of each subject with the assistants specially versed in the matter. This will seem to him the natural method of procedure and he will utilize the specialized knowledge of all the trained men he can secure. There will be ample need of "spade-work". Each member of the group will have responsibilities and should have credit for his share in the finished product. But the leader, after full discussion, will, by his ability, fuse the mass together and produce an organic whole, in good literary form. In this way, I think, some great histories will be written.

Some of the historians will probably try to find and state historical laws and draw lessons from history for the guidance of their fellow-men. A tendency in this direction is already apparent. Langlois and Seignobos, nearly thirty years ago, laid stress upon the necessity of constructing formulas in history. The question whether it is possible to find historical laws was brilliantly discussed by Cheyney in his presidential address three years ago. There can be little doubt that this subject will command more attention in the future.

It is frequently asserted that the social sciences are lagging behind. The progress of the natural sciences has increased our national wealth, has prolonged human life, and has made our civilization ever more complex. Man has not learned from the social sciences how to organize government or administration to handle this complexity, so as to make life better worth living. To do this requires education and research in which history as the necessary foundation, in part, of all the other social sciences ought to take the leadership. This is being more fully recognized and is, in part, the cause of the greater interest in history. If any laws of history can be ascertained, it will be a great step forward in making the social sciences more useful for guidance. This fact will be a stimulus to historians in seeking to find historical laws.

It may be interesting to note, in conclusion, that while historiography before the war had a tendency to confine its attention mainly to the description of the normal life of a nation and to the study of its institutions and customs, neglecting, as far as possible, the portrayal of wars, the Great War has made history more popular and may lead to its wider usefulness.

DANA CARLETON MUNRO.

ROMAN HISTORIOGRAPHY BEFORE CAESAR

As archaeological discoveries at Rome are confirming much of the tradition which Mommsen and his successors rejected it is becoming necessary for us to revise our conception of the methods of the early Roman historians. We now know that in its essentials the traditional picture of a large and prosperous Rome at the end of the regal period is correct. We know something of its extensive walls, of its imposing temples, and of its far-reaching commerce. We are gaining no little respect for Livy's conception of a strong Sabine element in Rome, of the participation of Latins and Etruscans in the revolutionary wars that ended the regal period, and of a temporary weakening of Rome in the early decades of the Republic, when the Latins gained their independent status and the Sabellic tribes threatened the existence of the Latin League. If Mommsen were writing to-day he would certainly accept a large part of the early political history as he himself in his Staatsrecht rehabilitated much of the constitutional history which he had previously excluded from his volumes. I do not mean that we are ever going to reinstate the embroidery of fictitious battle-scenes and long senatorial debates woven from family legends into Livy's first decade. Livy himself warns the reader adequately when he explains why he has freely included legend in the first part of his work. But with the archaeological evidence before us, it is now possible to estimate what knowledge of the earlier period was available to the annalists and to judge from this what use they made of their knowledge. We know, for example, that they had access to large collections of laws, senatus consulta, treaties, and priestly annals, and that they drew the correct inferences from the extensive remains of the city about them, a city which did not greatly change its ancient aspect until after the Second Punic War. The fact that in the attempt to synchronize the consular list with temple records they fell into a slight discrepancy of a few years in the chronology of the early period does not materially affect its value.

Various recent books 1 on historiography make little or no reference to these revisions of our knowledge. They are being written as though nothing had been discovered since Wachsmuth and the

1 E.g., Rosenberg, Einleitung und Quellenkunde (Berlin, 1921); and J. T. Shotwell, Introduction to the History of History (New York, 1922).

early vagaries of Païs. What is equally disturbing, they continue to assume that Roman senators like Fabius and Cato, who constantly had to consult Rome's laws and treaties in order to direct senatorial debate on intricate matters of international relations, immediately forgot the value of facts when they undertook to write history. It is no longer justifiable, however, to group all Roman annalists together in one category. If the early annals of Rome tell practically the same story as the remains there must have been a great difference between the statesmen who first recorded the facts and the romancers of Sulla's day who wrote popular books for the purpose of entertainment.

2

We may classify the historical writers of the republic into three distinct groups with reference to their methods and their employment of their sources. In the century before Tiberius Gracchus we know of some eight statesmen who told the story of Rome from the beginning up to their own day. These are Fabius Pictor, senator and pontifex, who had served in the army in 225 B. C., L. Cincius Alimentus, a praetor and general in the Hannibalic War, C. Acilius, a senator, Postumius Albinus, a consul, Cato, consul and censor, Cassius Hemina, Fabius Servilianus, consul and commentator on pontifical law, Calpurnius Piso, consul, censor, and reformer of the courts, and Sempronius Tuditanus, a jurist, who while consul conquered Histria. They all wrote at a time when there were few "general readers", and their works were intended for the information of magistrates, senators, jurists, and a small circle of readers closely connected with the ruling classes. These men were all thoroughly acquainted with Rome's laws and treaties.

After the Gracchan revolution we find a decided change in the tone and purpose of history. The democratic upheaval had enlarged the circle of readers by bringing large masses into the political arena, and had created a demand for histories that were more easy to read and more sympathetic toward the aspirations of the common people. In addition, a diffusion of the knowledge of Greek, which made available the colorful histories that Alexandrian culture had produced, and which fostered a taste for a more florid style in written and spoken Latin, tended to turn readers away from the dry factitive annals of the preceding century and to encourage professional writers to satisfy the new taste. The first story-teller to meet the new demand was Gellius of the Gracchan age, who not only wrote in a popular style but was the first to fill in the

2 The fragments are edited by Peter, Historicorum Romanorum Fragmenta (Berlin, 1883).

meagre outline of early Republican history with an abundance of interesting legends. The period that had been covered in seven rolls by the sober Piso required ninety-seven in the library that Gellius produced.

surmise

This feat marks an epoch in Roman historiography. Where Gellius found all his material we are not told, but we may with some degree of accuracy. He seems not to have added much to the legends of the regal period, for even the earlier annalists had, with due warning to the reader, repeated the household tales of that epoch. Most of the padding appears in the section devoted to the first two centuries of the Republic. In this portion the older statesmen-historians had shown their restraint by excluding all oral tradition and confining themselves to the bare statements found in the priestly annals and in the archives. Piso, for instance, gave only two books to the two hundred years from 500 to 300 B. C., an average of about twelve lines per year. He apparently adhered closely to archival material. Gellius devoted twenty books to this period. To do so he must have gathered up every family legend available for the period before the Third Samnite War. After him Sempronius Asellio and Claudius Quadrigarius, although both were popularizers, nevertheless reverted to a conservative treatment of the semi-historical period, but Valerius Antias of the Sullan age, the most successful of the romancing historians, followed the dangerous example of Gellius. Thereafter it was quite impossible to satisfy the general taste in history without including the legendary stories of the middle period. It was this group, writing for a large semi-educated public, and providing patriotic, dramatic, and attractive sets-in which vivid pen-pictures served the purpose that colored illustrations might to-day-that destroyed the taste for the sober old annals.

During the same period and catering to the same taste, many histories of special periods and propagandizing biographies appeared. Coelius, a professional writer, produced a history of the Second Punic War in which dramatic composition and stylistic values counted for more than reliability. He wrote not for the information of statesmen but rather for the delectation of the young and the leisured dilettanti. Some of the autobiographies and histories of the time were produced by important statesmen, but their value was in many cases marred by a willingness to cater to the lower public standards of the day and by a desire to excuse their political behavior at a time when factional strife had raised dangerous animosities. Fannius, indeed, seems to have written with some sobriety regarding

his part in the Gracchan struggle, but Aemilius Scaurus, Sulla, Marius, and Catulus pleaded their cases with more or less open effrontery. Of similar tendency, though more restrained, were men like Licinius Macer, Cornelius Sisenna, and Sallust, who, having engaged in the factional struggles of their day, wrote history with a political bias and furthermore heeded the new demand for stylistic attractiveness to the extent of disregarding now and then the requirements of accuracy.

The third group of writers, the professional researchers, appears during the Ciceronian period. As the first extension of a superficial culture had created a demand for easy and interesting general histories, so the spread of a more thorough education produced a class of readers who became suspicious of popular accounts and demanded solider works on special topics. Furthermore the increasing number of writers desired reference books that presented details in more compendious and reliable form than did the voluminous histories of the Sullan age. It was in response to such demands that dry antiquarians now wrote their crabbed commentaries and encyclopaedias. Varro, for instance, compiled reference books on Roman law, on religious institutions, on the Roman tribus, and on geography. The great jurist Sulpicius wrote commentaries on the Twelve Tables and a history of the praetorian edicts. Tubero in his history submitted the careless remarks of Licinius Macer to sharp criticism, and even Cicero so far entered the field of the specialist as to write a history of Roman oratory, in the preparation of which he carried out extensive investigations. Such special studies naturally did not supplant the popular accounts-in fact a score of less serious writers were busy at the same time-but their influence upon historiography was abiding. Livy, for example, not only used their digests of material but learned from them to be skeptical of the Sullan romancers and to respect the data provided by the early annalists whose books were no longer in general circulation. Hence, while endeavoring to create a great work of art that might supplant the most fascinating of his predecessors, he also attained to a higher standard of accuracy than his rivals.

In this brief sketch of Republican historiography it becomes apparent that it is in the second period, the time of popularization and of Hellenistic influence, that the historical conscience weakened. We must now revert to the earlier annalists to see how they worked, and to understand how it was that they succeeded in preserving the essential basis of facts that modern discoveries are verifying. The field covered by these annalists may be divided into three parts:

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXXII.—17.