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What famous roman said 'fortune favours the brave?
A Second Century BC playright of the Roman age known as Terence, in his play 'Phormio'
Who were famous Roman writer in Ancient History?
Some of the men who wrote Roman history were Roman and some were Greek. They emerged around 200 BC with Quintus Fabius Pictor who was the first historian. Polybius (Greek) wrote the history of Rome in the period of the three Punic Wars in the second century BC. The major writes of the early history of Rome were Livy (Roman) Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Greek) and Diodorus Siculus (Greek). They wrote in the 1st century BC and have been called annalist because they relied on the annals to reconstruct the previous centuries of Roman history.The main sources of information for the earlier Roman history were the annals and the fasti. During Roman Republic the Pontifex Maximus, the head of Roman state religion, kept the annales maximi. These annals recorded the key public events of the year (hence the name annals) and the names of each officer of state for that year. The Pontifex Maximus kept a detailed record and published an abbreviated version on a white board (tabula dealbata) outside the Regia, his residence, from the Republican period onward. The Romans also kept the fasti triumphales, a record of all Roman triumphs in battle, and, in the republican period, the fasti consulares, a list of all the consuls, the two annually elected heads of the city and the army during the Republic. The men who started writing the history of early Rome relied on these documents.Important historians in the first century AD were Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Cassius Dio and Josephus (A Roman Jew). The major historians in the second century AD were Suetonius and Appian (Greek).The quality of historiography after this was not as good and there were many writers of brief histories, such as Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Festus and Epitome de Caesaribus.The early Roman history also has mythologised accounts of important events. It is likely that these were stories which were passed on to the next generations orally and were written at a later stage. In oral tradition story telling was very important. Therefore, aspects of these stories were fictionalised and mythical elements were also inserted. They are often inaccurate as detailed memories were lost.Prestigious families also wrote their own family histories. Livy noted that these histories were untrustworthy because they usually were aimed at aggrandising the families.
