The historical writing of the Greeks and Romans covers some 800 years, from Herodotus’ Histories written in the mid - to late fifth century bce to the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus who composed his history in the late fourth century ce. Within these two boundaries, thousands of men (and a few women) sought to create some record of the past, either of their own or earlier times, in a variety of formats. Of that vast historical literature only the tiniest portion has come down to us, and the surviving literature represents some eras well, while others are hardly represented at all. For the fifth and fourth centuries bce, we have Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon - considered by the ancients the three greatest historians - but for the Hellenistic era, the 300 years from the death of Alexander the Great to the battle of Actium (323-31 bce), where we know the names of over 600 historians just on the Greek side, only three historians - Polybius, Diodorus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus - survive, and even they not entirely. For the Romans, the situation is equally bleak. The entire cadre of early Roman historians, writing from the early second to the mid-first century bce, have completely disappeared, and only a small part of Rome’s three greatest historians has survived: Sallust’s Histories are lost, as are over 100 books of Livy (including all the contemporary portions of his history), and nearly two-thirds of Tacitus’ Histories and Annals. All of our evaluations of the ancient historians, therefore, are based on the tiniest percentage of what was actually written by the Greeks and Romans.
Our knowledge is supplemented in part by fragmentary evidence. This information is of several types. There are testimonia, i. e., informational remarks made by surviving writers (not just historians) about the scope, arrangement, and/or nature of lost historical works. We also have ‘‘fragments,’’ i. e., citations (either verbatim or not) by later writers that inform us of the contents of lost works. Finally, we have summaries or outlines (known as epitomes or periochae) of lost works, though these are often extremely brief: a lost book of Livy, for example, might be summarized in no more than a paragraph, or a mammoth work such as Pompeius Trogus’ forty-four-book universal history (five times the size of Herodotus’ or Thucydides’ work) is known to us only from a later epitome of some 200 pages. These testimonia, fragments, and summations must all be used with great caution for several reasons. First, writers in antiquity often quoted from memory and although they may get the general gist of a passage or remark correct, they can often be vague or confused about details, or can misremember the context of certain remarks. Second, the quoting author will often weave his citation of a lost historian into his own account in such a way that it is nearly impossible to separate the ‘‘fragment’’ from its new context in the author who cites it - not to mention that the quoting author may use the citation in an interpretation that was not the lost author’s own. Third, authors who write summaries will naturally be highly selective, and there can be no certainty that their selection of events or incidents is representative of the lost work. Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, an author who cites or quotes a lost work will often do so in a polemical context, where he is asserting his own superiority vis-d-vis his predecessor, and in such cases he often misrepresents, either by omission or commission, the work of the lost author.
Such limitations must always be borne in mind when approaching the Greek and Roman historians. If even one of the major lost historiographical works from antiquity were to come to light today, it might fundamentally alter our knowledge and understanding of those authors who survive.
World History
