The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

LECTURE VII

THE INFLUENCE OF GREEK ON RPOMIAN
HISTORIOGRAPHY
THE political genius of Rome might lead us to
expect that the Romans would have possessed a
home-grown historiography of their own, reflecting
their national character. But Greek influence
intervened before they had time to discover a
form of historiography for themselves; and in
this, as in all branches of literature, they found
Greek influence irresistible. Their history was
moulded by the Greeks; in its methods and
principles it is Greek.
Its birth from Greek history was undisguisedly
proclaimed by the fact that its founders, aristocrats
contemporary with the Second Punic war, wrote
their Roman annals in the Greek tongue. The
chief of these writers, and the only one of whose
work we can form any idea, was Q. Fabius Pictor,
whose book was consulted and respected by
Polybius. Greek was at that time recognised
as the language of the educated world; it was
the Esperanto of those parts of the universe that
counted; and this fact outweighed the strong
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