Introduction

The introduction orients readers to how Romans turned memory into moral history. It traces the path from family legends and priestly annals to crafted prose shaped by rhetoric and the mos maiorum . You’ll meet key voices—Cato and Polybius; Sallust’s partisan diagnosis of decline; Livy’s sweeping narrative; Caesar’s “non-history” commentarii; Tacitus’ psychology of power; Greek-language historians (Josephus, Appian, Cassius Dio, Herodian); and the late Latin master Ammianus. It also sketches Roman biography—from Nepos and Plutarch to Suetonius and the problematic Historia Augusta—and Christian imperial hagiography (Eusebius). A section on the historian’s craft explains why Roman authors valued literary style in their historical writing, how bias affected their treatment of subject matter, and how they conducted research. It also shows how inscriptions, coins, and monuments complement and problematize literary texts. The goal is practical: to help you read primary sources critically, weighing purpose, audience, and style to understand how Romans used the past to argue about their present.