Dionysius on Romulus: a Political Pamphlet?

Abstract

Dionysius of Halicarnassus arrived in Rome at one of the most exciting moments in Roman history, on the morrow of Actium in 30 B.C. He lived in Rome for twenty-two years and at the end, in 7 B.C., his history was finished, an authoritative—indeed, he claimed, the first authoritative—history of Rome from the Foundation down to 265 B.C. His work would be the first in the triad of reliable Greek histories of Rome. Possessing his book and the books of Polybius and Posidonius, a Greek reader would at last have a continuous and reliable history of Rome written for him in Greek and by Greeks from the Foundation down to the late Republic.In chapters 7 to 29 of book 2, Dionysius gave an analytic account of the ordinances of Romulus, painting him in the character of a Greek nomothetes, responsible for nearly everything that was fundamental in Romanità.