On Roman Historiography

This paper tried to demonstrate why and how Cicero reformed historiography. The paper argued that historiography was required to be reformed from three reasons. Firstly, as is well known, the annalistic style of Annals o f Pontifex M aximus w as t oo o ld a nd t hus not suitable t o use for education. Secondly, the reforming of historiography was directly related to the debates on how to see ancient history of Rome. For this, the paper observed that history was used or rather abused for justifying Roman empire by poets like Vergil. The paper reported different views of Roman writers on history and historiography. Regarding this, the paper concentrated on showing that four laws of historiography (leges historiae) mentioned by Cicero might have been very strongly from the status theory and the way of “in utramque partem dicere” of rhetoric. Thirdly, history had to be reformed from the requirement of education ‘market’, because history indeed provides a lot of examples for persuasions. Based on this, the paper suggested that Roman preferred history to philosophy at early Roman empire time. It was Quintilian who listed history into reading catalogue for young student.