The Historiography of Rome and Its Empire series (HRE) aims to gather innovative and outstanding contributions that identify debates and trends, in order to help provide a better understanding of ancient historiography, as well as to identify fruitful approaches to Roman history and historiography. The series welcomes proposals that look at both Roman and Greek writers as well as manuscripts which focus on individual writers, or individuals in the same tradition. It is timely and valuable to bring these trends and historical sources together in the series, focusing on the whole of the Roman period, from the Republic to the Later Roman Empire.
Historical writing about Rome in both Latin and Greek forms an integrated topic. There are two strands in ancient writing about the Romans and their empire: (a) the Romans’ own tradition of histories of the deeds of the Roman people at home and at war, including the fragmentary early Roman historiographical tradition and (b) historical responses in Greek, written by Greeks and Romans alike, some developing their own models and others building upon the writings of earlier historians. Whereas older scholarship tended to privilege a small group of ‘great historians’ (the likes of Sallust, Livy, Tacitus), recent work has rightly brought out the diversity of the traditions and recognized that even ‘minor’ writers are worth exploring not just as sources, but for their own concerns and reinterpretation of their material, as well as their place within the tradition. The study of these historiographical traditions is essential as a counterbalance to the outmoded use of ancient authors as a handy resource, with scholars looking at isolated sections of their structure. This use of the ancient evidence makes us forget to reflect on their works in their textual and contextual entirety. Recent years have also witnessed an expansion of what is understood as ‘historiography’ to include memorabilia and antiquarian studies. With the widening of a previously narrow definition to encompass other traditions, the horizon of historiography expands beyond the limits of a fixed genre to include a range of approaches to the past.