What is more, it was during the first century BCE that Roman writers themselves began systematically to study the earlier centuries of their city and their empire. Curiosity about Rome’s past certainly goes back further than that: we can still read, for example, an analysis of the city’s rise to power written by a Greek resident in the mid second century BCE. But it is only from the first century BCE that Roman scholars and critics began to pose many of the historical questions that we still pose even now.
