Roman historical
composition had its origin in the pontifical college of
ecclesiastical lawyers, and preserved to its close the uncritical
spirit which characterised its fountain-head. It possessed from
the outset a most voluminous collection of the materials of
history, which, however, produced merely antiquarians, not
historians. It is so hard to use facts, so easy to accumulate
them.
Wearied of the dull monotony of the pontifical annals, which dwelt
on little else but the rise and fall in provisions and the eclipses
of the sun, Cato wrote out a history with his own hand for the
instruction of his child, to which he gave the name of Origines,
and before his time some aristocratic families had written
histories in Greek much in the same spirit in which the Germans of
the eighteenth century used French as the literary language. But
the first regular Roman historian is Sallust. Between the
extravagant eulogies passed on this author by the French (such as
De Closset), and Dr. Mommsen's view of him as merely a political
pamphleteer, it is perhaps difficult to reach the VIA MEDIA of
unbiassed appreciation. He has, at any rate, the credit of being a
purely rationalistic historian, perhaps the only one in Roman
literature.
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