How was ancient Rome's history documented?

Answer 1

By their historians. Serious writing of Roman history did not occur until after the Second Punic War ended in 202 BCE, at which stage Rome had entered the European stage as a recognised power.

The writers were both Roman and Greek. From a beginning in the Second Century BCE by Quintus Fabius Pictor, seeking to record from the founding of the city, and a parallel one by the Greek historian Polybius who was a political hostage in Rome, the histories proliferated, with first rate authors such as Livy and Dionysus of Halicarnassus and lightweights such as Diodorus Siculus, on to Caesar, Sallust, Plutarch, Tacitus and Seutonius. The tradition faded in the Second Century CE onward, with considerable gaps with no reliable historical coverage.

The main sources of information for the earlier Roman history were the annals and the fasti. During Roman Republic the Pontifex Maximus, the head of Roman state religion, kept the annales maximi. These annals recorded the key public events of the year (hence the name annals) and the names of each officer of state for that year. The Pontifex Maximus kept a detailed record and published an abbreviated version on a white board (tabula dealbata) outside the Regia, his residence from the Republican period onward. The Romans also kept the fasti triumphales, a record of all Roman triumphs in battle, and, in the republican period, the fasti consulares, a list of all the consuls, the two annually elected heads of the city and the army during the Republic. The men who started writing the history of early Rome from about 200 BC on used these records to reconstruct history.

The early Roman history also has mythologised accounts of important events. It is likely that these were stories which were passed on to the next generations orally and were written at a later stage. In oral tradition story telling was very important. Therefore, aspects of these stories were fictionalised and mythical elements were also inserted. They are often inaccurate as detailed memories were lost.

Prestigious families also wrote their own family histories. Livy noted that these histories were untrustworthy because they usually were aimed at aggrandising the families.