annals of the priests

In ancient Rome, the Annales or Annales pontificum were a collection of texts containing the record of some important facts of the life of the city. The Pontifex Maximus was the one in charge of writing them and did it at the beginning of the year on a clean slate of all text, called tabula dealbata that had calendar form. At the end of each year, what was written on it was transcribed into parchment and became part of the Annals or chronicles of the pontiffs. At the end of the second century a. C., all these chronicles were ordered and published.

According to Cato the Elder, in the Annales Pontificum, no useful information was available to historians, since there were only periods of economic crisis, eclipses and other phenomena, with no data on political or military issues. Momigliano asserts that such a difference can be explained by the fact that Cato speaks of the Annals before the published edition; Cicero and Servius, on the other hand, refer to them after their publication (which would have been more than pure transcription and, in fact, would have been scientific work). To prove this, Momigliano recalls that Cicero referred to an edition of the Annales which contained the history of Rome "from the beginning of Roman affairs" and even before and that such information could not have been written by Romulus. Therefore, an editor would have added such parts of the document, so he tries to prove that there was more work than the transcript in the book he knew. Notes Bibliography

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