How did the Romans make sense of their own past? And how can we make sense of it, when the evidence for early Rome and the Republic is so inadequate? In this volume, Professor Wiseman focuses on some of the more unfamiliar aspects of the Roman experience, where the historian needs not just knowledge but imagination too. The first essay in the book, the 1993 Ronald Syme Lecture 'The Origins of Historiography', argues that dramatic performances at the public games were the medium through which the Romans in the 'pre-literary' period made sense of their own past. All Latin and Greek source material is translated.