Though history had been written at Rome since the third century B.C., the earliest historiographical works in Latin to have been preserved in their entirety are, aside from the Caesarian commentarii, the two monographs of Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86–35 B.C.). Whether or not Cicero’s is a fair description of the now lost histories written before the death of Caesar (above, p. 3), some time in the 40s B.C. Sallust published two short works that were good enough to last. In the Bellum Catilinae (= BC) Sallust narrates the career of the revolutionary Catiline in the years 64–62 B.C.; the Bellum Jugurthinum (= BJ), a work of almost twice the length, explores the intertwined themes of Rome’s war in north Africa against the Numidian leader Jugurtha and the concomitant political upheavals in Rome (118–105 B.C.). A third work, the Historiae, a five-book annalistic history of the period 78–67, was in all likelihood left unfinished at the author’s death and survives only in fragments.

Memoria rerum gestorum (literally, ‘memory of deeds’) is yet another way of saying ‘history’, in the sense both of ‘collective memory, tradition’ and of ‘history-writing.’ Memory and time are important concepts in all three of the major historians whom we are treating, but perhaps most for Livy, whose history must have consumed all of his working life and, when intact, spanned the period from the sack of Troy through to the writer’s own day. He signals the importance of time from the start of his preface, which was published together with the first unit of his history: Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nec satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim . . . utcumque erit, iuuabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro uirili parte et ipsum consuluisse (Praef. 1, 3, ‘Whether I will do something worthwhile if I write a detailed record of the deeds of the Roman people from the origin of the city I do not really know nor, if I knew, would I dare to say so . . . However that may be, it will nevertheless please me to have taken thought, to the best of my ability, for the history of the greatest nation in the world’). The tenses of the sentences quoted (facturus . . . sim, erit, iuuabit) put Livy’s own potential literary achievement and resulting profit firmly in the future: this preface looks ahead, towards the moment of publication and beyond, to the reaction readers will have to his book. Yet the force of the past is felt here, as well: it is memory (memoria rerum gestarum) with which Livy concerns himself, and that concern is imagined as having already happened (the perfect infinitive consuluisse): the preface is written as if from the simultaneous vantage points of one looking ahead and of one looking back on a task already completed.

‘The Roman historians subsequent to Livy’, pronounced Sir Ronald Syme, ‘have perished utterly.’ It is true that most of the historians who wrote in the century between Livy and Tacitus, whether well known (e.g. the elder Seneca and the elder Pliny) or less familiar (e.g. Servilius Nonianus and Fabius Rusticus), have survived only in fragments or not at all; but there are two exceptions, Velleius Paterculus and Curtius.

The younger Pliny in one of his letters repeats a story which had been told to him by Tacitus (Ep. 9.23.2-3):

Engaging though it is to visualize the seemingly austere historian as a racing devotee, Pliny’s delight at the knight’s uncertainty was perhaps not reciprocated by Tacitus. Nevertheless Pliny elsewhere makes out that the two authors were fellow spirits and the best of friends (Ep. 7.20.4), and it is from references in Pliny’s correspondence that we know the period during which Tacitus was writing his Histories.