This chapter first deals with the main literary and archaeological sources for early Roman history. Then, it considers the type of material which was at the disposal of the historians of Rome for the regal period and the fifth century and how they used it. Roman historiography began at the end of the third century BC, but the earliest historical work was almost certainly the epic poem on the First Punic War written in the later third century by one of the combatants, Cn. Naevius. Iunius Gracchanus and Sempronius Tuditanus, Cincius, Q. Cornificius, Nigidius Figulus, Cornelius Nepos and Atticus, who made the first serious attempts to utilize the principles set by Eratosthenes to establish Roman chronology. At all events the surviving inscriptions earlier than the tombs of the Scipios in the third century are meagre and highly controversial, adding knowledge of early Roman history. Roman historical information comes mainly from the annalists particularly Livy and Timaeus.

The trivium and quadrivium of medieval education descend ultimately from Varro's Disciplinae, a work of his eighties. Indeed traces of Varronian systematization still lurk in modern university syllabuses. Characteristic methods, of research and of disposition, can be detected in widely scattered areas: they serve to reveal the Roman polymath at work and to explain how, in a full life, one man's output could be so colossal. Varro found in Menippus, a third-century Syrian freedman writing under Cynic influence, a model for profitable imitation and his 150 Menippeae, combining prose and verse, humour and moral improvement, dominated the literary output of his active public life. Nepos is an intellectual pygmy whom one finds associating uneasily with the literary giants of his generation. Cornelius Nepos and Varro diverge sharply from the narrow traditions of Roman and familial pride, which constitute the origins of Roman biography. Cicero acknowledges with embarrassment his pleasure in the mime's humour.