“Has olim virtus crevit Romana per artes:
Namque foro in medio stabant spirantia signa
Magnanimûm heroum; hîc Decios, magnosque Camillos
Cernere erat: vivax heroum in imagine virtus,
Invidiamque ipsis factura nepotibus, acri
Urgebat stimulo Romanum in prælia robur[107].”
History, therefore, among the Romans, was not composed merely to gratify curiosity, or satiate the historic passion, but also to inflame, by the force of example, and urge on to emulation, in warlike prowess. An insatiable thirst of military fame—an unlimited ambition of extending their empire—an unbounded confidence in their own force and courage—an impetuous overbearing spirit, with which all their enterprises were pursued, composed, in the early days of the Republic, the characteristics of Romans. To foment, and give fresh [pg 57]vigour to these, was a chief object of history.—“I have recorded these things,” says an old Latin annalist, after giving an account of Regulus, “that they who read my commentaries may be rendered, by his example, greater and better.”
Accordingly, the Romans had journalists or annalists, from the earliest periods of the state. The Annals of the Pontiffs were of the same date, if we may believe Cicero, as the foundation of the city[108]; but others have placed their commencement in the reign of Numa[109], and Niebuhr not till after the battle of Regillus, which terminated the hopes of Tarquin[110]. In order to preserve the memory of public transactions, the Pontifex Maximus, who was the official historian of the Republic, annually committed to writing, on wooden tablets, the leading events of each year, and then set them up at his own house for the instruction of the people[111]. These Annals were continued down to the Pontificate of Mucius, in the year 629, and were called Annales Maximi, as being periodically compiled and kept by the Pontifex Maximus, or Publici, as recording public transactions. Having been inscribed on wooden tablets, they would necessarily be short, and destitute of all circumstantial detail; and being annually formed by successive Pontiffs, could have no appearance of a continued history. They would contain, as Lord Bolingbroke remarks, little more than short minutes or memoranda, hung up in the Pontiff’s house, like the rules of the game in a billiard room: their contents would resemble the epitome prefixed to the books of Livy, or the Register of Remarkable Occurrences in modern Almanacks.
But though short, jejune, and unadorned, still, as records of facts, these annals, if spared, would have formed an inestimable treasure of early history. The Roman territory, in the first ages of the state, was so confined, that every event may be considered as having passed under the immediate observation of the sacred annalist. Besides, the method which, as Cicero informs us, was observed in preparing these Annals, and the care that was taken to insert no fact, of which the truth had not been attested by as many witnesses as there were citizens at Rome, who were all entitled to judge and make their remarks on what ought either to be added or retrenched, must have formed the most authentic body of history that could be desired. The memory of transactions which were yet recent, and whose concomitant circumstances every one could remember, was therein transmitted to posterity. By these means, [pg 58]the Annals were proof against falsification, and their veracity was incontestibly fixed.
These valuable records, however, were, for the most part, consumed in the conflagration of the city, consequent on its capture by the Gauls—an event which was to the early history of Rome what the English invasion by Edward I. proved to the history of Scotland. The practice of the Pontifex Maximus preserving such records was discontinued after that eventful period. A feeble attempt was made to revive it towards the end of the second Punic war; and, from that time, the custom was not entirely dropped till the Pontificate of Mucius, in the year 629. It is to this second series of Annals, or to some other late and ineffectual attempt to revive the ancient Roman history, that Cicero must allude, when he talks of the Great Annals, in his work De Legibus[112], since it is undoubted that the pontifical records of events previous to the capture of Rome by the Gauls, almost entirely perished in the conflagration of the city[113]. Accordingly, Livy never cites these records, and there is no appearance that he had any opportunity of consulting them; nor are they mentioned by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in the long catalogue of records and memorials which he had employed in the composition of his Historical Antiquities. The books of the Pontiffs, some of which were recovered in the search made to find what the flames had spared, are, indeed, occasionally mentioned. But these were works explaining the mysteries of religion, with instructions as to the ceremonies to be observed in its practical exercise, and could have been of no more service to Roman, than a collection of breviaries or missals to modern history.