These different annals were the only books of history from the earliest times which have been preserved among the Romans. All others mentioned by Livy, libri magistratuum, libri legum, &c. are Fasti, of which there were certainly a great number dating from the commencement of the Republic, the like of which we have still in the Fasti Capitolini and Triumphales, incomplete, even frequently falsified. These Fasti, which are still to be seen on the Capitol, where Augustus set them up, and which originated with Varro or Atticus,—the so-called Capitoline Fasti which formerly stood in the Curia Julia—contained only at the side of some detached yearly dates some memorable events. The Triumphal Fasti, which stood in the same edifice in a different place, had certainly existed from very early times. Every triumph was marked down in them, and very likely with more detail than was done in those which are preserved. The statements of Livy concerning the booty which had been made, are undoubtedly always taken from these Triumphal Fasti; but it is very remarkable that they are first found the year after that in which his extracts from the Annales Pontificum commence.
Another source of information concerning the earliest Roman history are the Commentarii Pontificum. They were a collection of law cases from the old public and ceremonial law, together with the decisions of the pontiffs in cases which came under their jurisdiction, similar to the decisions of the lawyers in the pandects. This mass was the groundwork from which those who studied the laws deduced the general principles. The Sunnah, which is the Mahomedan code of law, and the Talmud are quite corresponding to it in form. An abstract principle is never laid down: there is nothing but an enumeration of decisions in particular cases. We find the same in the Pentateuch in the discussions concerning the inheritance of females. With reference to the case of judicium perduellionis, it is stated how Horatius had slain his sister. But the groundwork of those books is nevertheless made at a different time from that which is given out in it. What we know must date from a later time, indeed still a very remote one for us, anterior to the rise of Roman historical writing, yet not so old as they themselves would have us believe.
The same was the case with the Libri Pontificum and Libri Augurales. From them the historians quote the declarations of war in that definite formula which Ancus is said first to have introduced. The forms of surrender, the formula fœderis feriendi, the appeals to the people, were according to Cicero likewise entered in them. From these books history has been enriched as much as if they had contained authentic historical facts.
Another source of the annalists were the laudationes funebres, spoken of by Livy and by Cicero in Brutus, from which latter it comes out, that very old specimens, dating as far back as from the times before the war of Pyrrhus, were in existence. They were kept in the Atrium, near the images of the ancestors (imagines). They were speeches in commemoration of a deceased person, delivered in the forum by the nearest kinsman, at first quite simple and unpretending. According to Cicero, they always returned to the family and the ancestors, that is to say, the descent of the deceased was traced from the first fathers of the race. But Cicero and Livy both complain of the falsifications which crept from these panegyrics into Roman history. The Romans, in fact, notwithstanding all the veracity which they otherwise possessed, had an extraordinary vanity with regard to political and family relations, deeming themselves bound in duty to extol their state and their families. For this reason forged victories and triumphs are contained in those laudationes.
This was the material when the first historians arose. They had besides, it is true, many laws and other documentary records; but these were a buried treasure noticed by few only. On the whole, the Romans were too careless and negligent to make use of such sources. A remarkable example of it is afforded by Livy, who, among other things, contents himself with stating, that he had heard from Augustus that there existed a certain inscription in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius,[3] without ever thinking of looking himself at it in the Capitol, where he certainly must have been often enough.
The Annals, many of which, as may have been seen, were preserved in later times, form one source of history, of which it cannot be stated at all how early it could have commenced. But this is only the skeleton of history. Besides these there is a living traditionary history. It consists of narrations which pass from the father to the children, and may be very circumstantial;—others are propagated partly by word of mouth, partly in writing, and these are the poetical traditions. Here is a field on which it will never be possible to agree, whilst looking only to one side of the question. I am convinced that great part of the early Roman history has been handed down in songs; that is to say, all that has life in it, all that has pith and meaning, and coherence. This is to me as evident a truth as any in the world. To these belongs the history of Romulus, that of Tarquinius Priscus, down to the battle near the lake Regillus, and others. The passages in Varro, and a fragment of Cato in Cicero, purporting that the Romans sang the achievements of the ancients to the flute, speak distinctly to the fact. Three inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios are poetical, as I have shown in my Roman history. Such is moreover the story of Coriolanus, of Curtius, and others. Besides this there are without any doubt preserved in Livy detached lines from the lay of Tullius Hostilius and the Horatii. With regard to others we have not indeed any thing to bring forward, but we may here appeal to the general experience of mankind.[4]
It matters not in the least, whether the old legends were still in existence at the time when the historians wrote their works, or whether they were in verse or in prose. We may find a parallel illustration in our own (German) literature, and refer to the manifold changes which our epic poems had to undergo. The song of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, which Eckard has edited, and W. Grimm has commented upon, is of much more ancient date than the times of Charles the Great; in the tenth century there existed a Latin version of it. We are acquainted with the ‘Nibelungen’ only in that form in which they have been composed in the thirteenth century. How many phases may there not have occurred in the interval between? Then we have the much tamer version of the same subject in the ‘Book of Heroes;’ and at last that in prose of ‘Siegfried,’ which for some centuries has been in an ever renewed form in the hands of the people. Now if the ‘Nibelungen’ and all the information concerning them had been lost, and some ingenious critic recognised in ‘Siegfried’ the old poem, it would be exactly the same case as in the Roman history. The quotation of some verses from the ‘Nibelungen’ in Aventinus,[5] would then stand quite on the same footing as the three verses cited by Livy in the story of the Horatii. Such lays go for a long time side by side with history. Saxo Grammaticus has tried to change the Danish Saga into history, and on that account he cannot be brought into agreement with the statements of the Chronicles. Just so is it in Grecian history. Rhianus, in his poem on Messene, which he undoubtedly composed from old popular songs, is utterly at variance with the list of Spartan kings which Pausanias found in the old records, and with the facts which are mentioned in the contemporary strains of Tyrtæus. Then comes the time long before a literature exists, when men who have a true vocation write history; as, for instance, the author of the excellent Chronicle of Cologne. In this chronicle, which partly dates from the fifteenth century, and which might be made beautifully complete from the archives of Cologne, we find the poem of Gotfrid Hagen on the feud of the bishops, paraphrased in prose, yet with some traces of the rhyme remaining. (Here then is another example of the continual alteration of the form of old poems.) Yet if we compare this with what is stated by that very chronicle on the same subject, perhaps from church books, they can by no means be reconciled with each other. The same thing happened in the Russian Chronicles, which were continued from the time of Nestor, a monk of the eleventh century, down to a much later period, as I myself can testify from a copy in my own possession. The authors of these, as well as the writer of the Chronicle of Cologne, did not live in a literary age, and their works therefore vanished, as they did not write for the public at large. Similar chronicles had without doubt arisen in Rome also before the literature of history commenced; that is to say, before authors wrote for the Greek public, as Fabius, M. Cincius, C. Acilius did. History as a branch of literature only began when the Romans wished to make themselves known to the Greeks. Those who were not Greeks were everywhere keenly alive to the contempt which they had to suffer from the Greeks.
Cicero and Livy say that by the orations in praise of the dead history had been made fabulous. There can be no doubt of this; yet, for all that, those discourses were not a mere tissue of fables, but they were mostly documents of a very early period. This ancient time may be dated from the expulsion of the kings, that is to say, twenty-eight years before the passage of Xerxes over the Hellespont. How many literary documents of the Greeks have we not of that date? Thus in the case of the seven consulships of the Fabii, as they are told in Livy and Dionysius, in the case of the battle with the Veientines, of the story of Q. Fabius Maximus (in the last book of the first decade of Livy), the relations seem to be taken from such and similar documents; unless we choose to suppose that these stories had been fabricated with such astonishing accuracy of detail. It even seems that Fabius Maximus himself has written his own history, that at least a number of records were at hand in the accomplished Fabian family, and were carefully preserved. Of this intellectual cultivation among the Fabii, we have many proofs before us. C. Fabius Pictor, a hundred years before the war of Hannibal, created a work of art of the highest beauty; the historian wrote in Greek without being ever reproached with barbarisms in his style.
In composing history, men consulted the annals of the pontiffs, wrote out in good faith what was found in them, and put in what they found in the lays wherever they thought it would best suit, little caring whether it closely tallied or not. These different pieces were probably joined together with a greater accuracy than was done in the Chronicle of Cologne. Few only, Fabius possibly, or what is more likely, Cincius Alimentus and M. Licinius Macer first made use also of the documents in the Capitol and the old law books. The brazen law tables may have indeed been taken away by the Gauls, but there still existed other sources of law. The whole of the earlier constitution seems to have been described in the Commentarii Pontificum in law cases, from which Gracchanus took it. The groundwork of these notices is extremely worthy of credit. The march and progress of the constitution from the establishment of the Republic may be completely traced in it, with an accuracy much greater than has hitherto been possible with regard to considerable portions of medieval history.
One ought to take care not to consider the Romans previous to the time when they learned from the Greeks as barbarians. A people which in the age of the kings built those wonderful sewers; which a hundred years before the Punic wars produced the she-wolf of the Capitol; which possessed a painter like C. Fabius Pictor; which made a sarcophagus like that of Scipio Barbatus, takes certainly a high stand in mental cultivation. And such we must deem their written literature to have been, not composed in Greek forms, but endowed with beauties peculiarly its own. The grammarians knew still the moral maxims of Appius Claudius Cæcus, Cicero still read a speech of the same person against Pyrrhus. Where such writings were kept, many others also must have still existed.