Roman History

We start this survey in Italy during the early first millennium bce; a context on which Seth Bernard's new monograph offers an exciting, and in several respects transformative, contribution.1 Its general claim is that, while Rome did not develop a historiographical tradition until Fabius Pictor, there was a keen and pervasive interest in history across ancient Italy, since the early Iron Age, which played out across a wide range of venues and media. The brief of the historian must be to jettison any hierarchical approach to the interplay between textual and archaeological evidence, and to take as broad a view on what history amounts to as possible.