Not long after the time of Ennius, whom we rightly reckon among the Roman historians, Roman history began to be written in Latin prose; and the first work of this kind was the most important which has ever been composed on the history of ancient Italy, viz. the Origines of the elder Cato. They show that Cato had indeed found out the only right way of treating Roman history. He wrote not the history of the Romans only, but also that of Italy. As he described the widening the Roman sway in Italy, he seems to have told the history of each Italic people separately. We know from Nepos the plan of his seven books. In the first, there was the history of the kings; in the second and third, the subjugation of Italy; in the fourth book, the first, and in the fifth, the second Punic war; in the sixth and seventh, the later wars down to the time with which he concluded. Cato was a great man in every respect, he rose far above his age. Of his work we have many detached quotations; but of real extracts we have only one in Gellius, viz. the passage of the Tribune Q. Cædicius, which is from the second Punic war, and consequently belongs to the fourth book. It shows Cato’s peculiar manner of writing; and we understand from it why Cicero, who on the whole vacillates between praise and censure with regard to Cato, distinguishes him above all his contemporaries. He wrote about the year 600. In Livy there is a strange anachronism in the discussions about the lex Oppia, when, in the year 561, the tribune cites against Cato his Origines. But so slavish was formerly the belief in Livy, that the most positive information was less considered than that passage. Gerh. Jo. Vossius is the first who points out that Livy was here most likely rather speaking himself. What we have from the work of Cato is unfortunately very little, but all of it excellent. This book and that of Fabius are by far the most important accounts which we might wish for Roman history. His work stands alone in the whole collection of Roman annals.
A short time after Cato, about the time of the destruction of Carthage, the history of Rome was written by L. Cassius Hemina, of whose work we have historical quotations in the Grammarians. Several writers call him antiquissimus auctor, which is not said of Piso and others. He had concerning Alba still the old native chronology: the earlier times of Rome he made to synchronize with Grecian history. He began from the very earliest times; and, what was indeed quite different from all the annalists, from before the foundation of the city. One finds of him several things concerning the Sicilian towns in Latium; from whence it would appear that the archæology of the towns was his principal object. As to his style we may form an idea of it from a single larger fragment: it is worse than that of Cato. The fourth book, according to Priscian, had for its title Bellum Punicum Posterior; consequently at the time when he wrote the third war had not yet begun. The secular festival, 607 according to Varro, he has indeed mentioned; yet it may have been quite at the end of his work. We must not, however, believe that his history consisted of four books only; as the whole of the fourth was taken up by the second Punic war, and thus there must have been at the very least five or six of them.
From that time, history was written repeatedly, and therefore no original way of treating the subject is any more to be thought of. The Rhetores Latini have surely made use of the books which then existed, and have besides consulted the ancient annals. How far this may have been the case with each of them in particular is indeed no more to be decided; but on the whole we shall not be mistaken in this supposition. It is in this time that the Fabius Pictor is to be placed, whom Cicero mentions in his work—de Oratore. He was a learned writer: his work entitled Res Gestæ, seems to have been very diffuse, as it mentions the burning of the city by the Gauls in the fourth book; yet the number of the books is unknown. No fragment of any import has been preserved of it. His name was Servius, or perhaps Sextus; for in the Brutus of Cicero Ser. Fulvius, and then Ser. Fabius is spoken of, whom he terms juris pontificii peritissimus. Yet the books de Oratore and Brutus, which seem to have such an excellent text, are corrupted in many little passages, which a clever copyist of the sixteenth century furbished up. Of the books de Oratore, only one old manuscript has been found in Milan, which is particularly indistinct. The Brutus does not fare better: none of the manuscripts date higher than 1430. There is therefore much doubt about the names in these books. A MS. at Heidelberg has Serius Fabius, and it is probable that it ought to be Sextus, as the prænomen Servius is unheard of in the family of the Fabii. Perhaps this Pictor is the same as he who in a fragment quoted is called Fabius Maximus Servilianus, since he at least belonged to that time. The fragment refers to the arrival of Æneas.
Here I also mention the tedious Cn. Gellius, a credulous, uncritical, and second-rate writer. The time when he lived is uncertain. Vossius conjectures that he is the very same against whom Cato the Censor made a speech; but we have fragments of his which do not seem to tally with such an early period. Much rather should he be placed in the second half of the seventh century; partly on account of his style, and partly because he already criticizes, and tries to make the improbabilities of the old tradition more credible by small but dishonest alterations. The numbers of his books, as they were quoted, betoken an immense prolixity. Charisius cites the ninety-seventh book, and that distinctly written in full letters in the Neapolitan original Codex. Other citations do not go beyond the thirtieth book.
Cicero mentions after Pictor an annalist, Vennonius, of whom we have only one passage in Dionysius, referring to the history of the kings. He therefore most likely wrote annals from the building of the city. In that fragment, he shows himself to be a man without judgment; which also corresponds with Cicero’s unfavourable opinion of his manner of writing.
An author whose period we cannot fix with certainty, is L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi Censorius, an opponent of C. Gracchus, a supporter of the aristocratical party, but an honest one. The time of his censorship occurs between the tribunates of the two Gracchi, and he may have written his history not long afterwards. He has quite a peculiar character. He wished to bring the old historical matter, which his predecessors unconcernedly rendered just as they found it in ancient poems and Fasti, into the consistency of an actual possibility, and thus to fashion out a true history by cutting off the improbabilities. He finds, for instance, that Tarquinius Superbus could not possibly have been the son of Tarquinius Priscus; and so without any further ado, he makes him at once his grandson. He is also startled at the fact of Tarpeia’s having had a tomb on the Capitol; not considering that she was a Sabine heroine to whom such a tomb had been erected on the Capitol,[13] as Tatius had a monument on another hill. He is therefore the original author of all those falsifications,—a sad prosy undertaking which Cn. Gellius also has entered into. That magnificent story of Curtius he explains thus, that a warrior with his charger had been swallowed up in a gulf on the same spot, which could only have happened when Romulus and Tatius were waging war against each other; and that Curtius must therefore have been a Sabine general. It does not occur to him, that a whole army cannot find a footing in a place where the general sinks down. In the same spirit, it has once been attempted to change the northern Sagas into history; and there were people who affected to see in the struggle of the Nibelungen an historical war of the Burgundians. A similar course was adopted forty or fifty years ago with regard to the interpretation of the New Testament. The title of Piso’s book was Annales. He was a plodding man; for it is to be seen that he has made use of sources like the Fasti and such like. The number of his books is undecided. In his third book, he treats of Cn. Flavius (450); in the seventh, of the year 516. He came down to his own times, since he mentions the Secular Games of the year 607.
In the course of the same century, several historical books were written. I do not, however, mean to speak here of those who merely composed a history of their own time, but of such only who wrote the entire Roman history. Among these, there were in Cicero’s youth, about the period when the books ad Herennium were written, 680, or rather about the date of Cicero’s consulship, two who wrote a general Roman history, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias. Both of them, according to Velleius, are later than Cœlius Antipater and than the older contemporaries of Sisenna. They wrote after the time of Sylla. Quadrigarius belongs to those authors who, in later times, after the restoration of the older literature, were frequently read. He forms, as did Cassius Hemina, an exception to the general rule, according to which the annalists commenced from the building of the city. Whilst the latter went yet much farther back than this, Claudius began his history with the destruction of the city by the Gauls. We have of him some considerable fragments from which this is evident. For, in the numerous fragments of his first book, much is told of the Gallic war; likewise the beginning of the war against the Samnites,—we have even the battle near Caudium; one of them alludes to the end of the third Samnite war; and all this not cursorily. As therefore he comprehended in it a period so ample and rich in incidents, he could not have had room for the older history. Another argument for our assertion, is a statement of Plutarch, that a certain Clodius (Kλώδιος) said that nothing whatever could be grounded upon the older Roman accounts; as owing to the calamitous invasion, the old documents had been destroyed, and all that remained was merely the production of family vanity. In the second, or third book, he speaks of Pyrrhus; in the fifth and sixth, of Hannibal; in the eighth, of Tiberius Gracchus the father; in the thirteenth, of Metellus; in the nineteenth, of Marius: there are quotations from him as far as the twenty-third book. His history was brought down to about the time of Cicero’s consulship. Fragments, in which we may clearly recognise the unwieldiness of language of these old annalists in general, in whose writings regularly constructed periods[14] are not yet at all to be thought of, are found in Gellius; and they fully justify Cicero’s opinion with regard to the old writers. The Chronicles of Cologne and Limburg are for the most part much better written. Little was therefore read of Roman prose writers before Sallust and Livy. Gellius finds the old writers pleasant; which may be accounted for by the fact that the taste of his time was completely palled, so that it now betook itself to highly spiced dishes, and then to ice. Let only the fragment of Claudius in Gellius[15] be consulted. The golden age of Roman literature was certainly under Augustus, as that of the French was in the days of Louis XIV.; but precisely because this was its first blossom, the thoughts and ideas were more simple, the language more calm, and in some respects having greater breadth and fulness. Afterwards spirit rather, and wit, were called forth into existence; every thing was required to be expressed, and was expressed, in more terse, polished, and pointed language. Thus the time down to Tacitus was like the age of Louis XV. in France. But now, when the Romans carried every thing to the highest pitch, this manner of thinking and writing was also overstrained: it was still to be made more and more pointed, more polished, and more witty; and then they reached that extreme which borders very closely upon what is absolutely spiritless and insipid. At this period lived Gellius, a very clever man, who was so tired of this tendency of his age, that he had no more feeling for the better literature preceding it, and turned to the earliest times, in which he found a relish.
Valerius Antias is of all the Roman historians certainly the most untrue, the only one who can be directly taxed with falsehood. Livy says of him, adeo mentiendi nullus modus est, and si Valerio Antiati credere libet. He knows the most circumstantial details of the old times, and is always inclined to exaggerate without bounds, especially with regard to numbers. His fictions have a character quite different from the older ones. The numbers of the latter are not at all meant to deceive any one; they merely mention a number (e. g. sexcenti, μύριοι, ter centum tonat ore deus in Virgil,) in order to denote an indefinite quantity. This poetical mingling of what is definite with what is seemingly indefinite, every where pervades the Roman legends. Thus the thirty Sabine maidens are in fact no definite number, but an equivalent to many. Valerius Antias, for his part, has five hundred and forty-seven. Thus he has written an immense huge work, in the latter portion of which especially he becomes quite prolix; nevertheless he has not been able to compose a circumstantial and lively narrative, but has drily recorded the detached incidents. He is cited as far as the seventy-fifth book. In the second, he mentions Numa; and in the twelfth, the tribune Tib. Gracchus. Fragments, from which we might judge of his style, are not extant.
One might be inclined to take this Valerius for a gentilis of the Maximi and Poplicolæ. He might have been so in the widest sense; but he did not belong to the gens of the patrician Valerii. In the war of Hannibal, one meets with a L. Valerius Antias, who probably was a citizen of Antium. From him our annalist may have descended.
It is strange, that although Livy himself repeatedly acknowledges the untrustworthiness of Valerius Antias, there are nevertheless in his own first book some passages which he can only have taken from him.