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HISTORY
Not all Republican or early Imperial historians had been senators, of course.
Some were probably clients of great senatorial houses, like Claudius Quadrigarius
or Valerius Antias. Others were independent men of letters, pursuing
no public career and owing allegiance to no patron. The greatest of these was
Livy. Livy wrote at a time when men were sharply conscious of change. A
historical epoch was coming to an end within his own lifetime. As his later
books have perished we scarcely know with what thoughts and feelings he
greeted the end of the Republic and the institution of autocratic rule — however
much tempered by formal concessions to the authority of the Senate. But we
can hardly suppose that the sense of radical change was absent from his mind
as he wrote his rich, slow-moving nostalgic panorama of the history of the
Roman people from Romulus to Augustus. That sense of change, of movement
from one epoch to another, was no longer present in Roman society after the
Julio-Claudians. However much things did in fact change, the changes were
slow and almost imperceptible. They did not awaken in men's minds a sense of
crisis and a need to re-examine the whole of their historic past. So Livy had no
successors, only epitomators.
In the Greek world Clio was not silent. There the writing of history had
different roots, going back to Polybius, Isocrates, Thucydides. Some of it was
merely belles-lettres, designed to give pleasure or to move the emotions harmlessly.
Much was concerned with understanding and edification. Much of it,
such as the history of Polybius, had a political side to it — Polybius strove for
pragmatic understanding of what had made Roman power, at a particular
conjuncture in the history of the Mediterranean world, irresistible; what he
was not concerned with, overtly at any rate, was the justification of his own
conduct or that of a faction to which he belonged. This was a stance very
different, and much more 'intellectual' than that of the Roman senatorial
historian. So Greek historiography was less dependent on the survival of a
particular political and social structure than was that of the Roman world.
In fact all the many strands of the rich Greek historical tradition continued to
run through the 230 years after Tacitus, and there was a continuous and varied
succession of historians writing in Greek on a variety of topics throughout the
period.
In the second century Arrian of Nicomedia wrote not only a history of
Alexander based on reliable contemporary sources, but also a whole series of
local or provincial histories — Bithynica, Parthica etc. — and a history of the
Greek world under the successors of Alexander; none of these last has survived.
His contemporary Appian of Alexandria wrote twenty-four books of Roman
history. Lucian's satirical How to write history reveals a dozen or more historians
writing in a variety of styles — largely archaizing — on the Parthian war
of Lucius Verus. In the first half of the third century Cassius Dio Cocceianus
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