The Historiography of Rome and Its Empire series aims to gather innovative and outstanding contributions that identify debates and trends, and in order to help provide a better understanding of ancient historiography, as well as how to approach 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 mainly on the Republican period and the Principate, as well as 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, and (b) Greek historical responses, some developing their own models (Polybius, Josephus) and the others building on what both the Roman historians and earlier Greeks had written (Dionysius, Appian, Cassius Dio). 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 traditional use of ancient authors as a handy resource, with scholars looking at isolated sections of their structure. This fragmentary use of the ancient evidence makes us forget to reflect on their work in its textual and contextual entirety.