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Roman historiography

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description: Main article:Roman historiography Rome has a very rich history, which was explored by many authors, both ancient and modern. The first history works were written after the First Punic War. Many of the ...

Main article: Roman historiography

Rome has a very rich history, which was explored by many authors, both ancient and modern. The first history works were written after the First Punic War. Many of these works were made for propaganda of the Roman culture and customs, and also as moral essays. Although the diversity of works, many of them are lost and due to this, there are large gaps in Roman history, which are filled by unreliable works, as the Historia Augusta and books from obscure authors. However, there remain a number of accounts of Roman History. In Roman times There is a huge variety of historians who lived in Roman times and wrote on Rome. The first historians used their works for lauding of Roman culture and customs. By the end of Republic, some historians distorted their histories to flatter their patrons – this happened on the time of Marius' and Sulla's clash.^[157] Caesar wrote his own histories to make a complete account of his military campaigns in Gauland in the Civil War. In the Empire, the biographies of famous men and early emperors flourished, examples being The Twelve Caesars of Suetonius, and Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Other major works of Imperial times were that of Livy and Tacitus.

Polybius – The Histories
Sallust – Bellum Catilinae and Bellum Jugurthinum
Julius Caesar – De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili
Livy – Ab Urbe Condita
Dionysius of Halicarnassus – Roman Antiquities
Pliny the Elder – Naturalis Historia
Josephus – The Jewish War
Suetonius – The Twelve Caesars (De Vita Caesarum)
Tacitus – Annales and Histories
Plutarch – Parallel Lives (a series of biographies of famous Roman and Greek men)
Cassius Dio – Historia Romana
Herodian – History of the Roman Empire since Marcus Aurelius

In modern times After the Renaissance, Roman history occupied a prominent place in Western culture. A new generation of historians, some with views very different from those of their predecessors, revisited the subject, analyzing life in ancient Rome and discussing what it meant to be a Roman.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
John Bagnall Bury (1861–1927) – History of the Later Roman Empire
Michael Grant (1914–2004) – The Roman World^[158]
Barbara Levick (1932– ) – Claudius^[159]
Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831)
Michael Rostovtzeff (1870–1952)
Howard Hayes Scullard (1903–1983) – The History of the Roman World^[160]
Ronald Syme (1903–1989) – The Roman Revolution^[161]
Adrian Goldsworthy (1969– ) – Caesar: The Life of a Colossus andHow Rome fell^[162]

Society The imperial city of Rome was the largest urban center of its time, with a population of about one million people (about the size of London in the early 19th century, when London was the largest city in the world), with a low-end estimate of 450,000.^[163]^[164]^[165]The public spaces in Rome resounded with such a din of hooves and clatter of iron chariotwheels that Julius Caesar had once proposed a ban on chariot traffic during the day. Historical estimates show that around 20 percent of the population under jurisdiction of ancient Rome (25–40%, depending on the standards used, in Roman Italy)^[166] lived in innumerable urban centers, with population of 10,000 and more and several military settlements, a very high rate of urbanization by pre-industrial standards. Most of these centers had a forum, temples, and other buildings similar to those in Rome.

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Roman historiography

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