Die ersten zwei Jahrhunderte römischer Geschichtsschreibung: Entwicklungslinien – Bedingungen – Besonderheiten

Abstract

Since they started writing during the Hannibalic war Roman historians used to take a Romecentered view of the world. The paper summerizes the most salient features of the first two centuries of Roman historical writing systematically, treating the causes and prerequisites of its emerging, literary and cultural contexts, and the specific annalistic structure of the later narratives, though Roman historical writing up to and including Livy cannot be subsumed under the umbrella term ‘annalistic’. The development of the genre was in the main determined by individual authors and their works, at its conclusion, in Sallust and Livy it produced authors whose works offered to the Renaissance and the French Revolution archetypes of civic virtue and its decay.