5 - Roman historians and the Greeks: Audiences and models

Summary

Almost all our earliest documentary evidence demonstrating with certainty an awareness of the myths for the foundation of Rome, and easily our most informative, comes from the Greek world. Despite Momigliano's famous claim that the Greeks did not really pay attention to what non-Greeks said, the Romans were producing stories about the foundation of their city, and these stories were reaching Greek ears, at least by the early second century BCE. This fact should not surprise us. Several scholars have demonstrated recently that there was never a “pure” or “pristine” Rome, detached from the larger culture of the Mediterranean; in particular, earliest Roman culture developed “within the orbit of Greek culture.” When we turn to the production of literature at Rome, several puzzles present themselves. If Rome participated from its inception in Greek culture, and, further, was literate early on, why did it take so long for it to produce a literature?