Historia, annales, res gestae as the titles for the writings of Roman Republican historians

Abstract

Ancient historians as a rule didn’t entitle their own works. Those titles appear over time as a result of the work of grammarians or are found as such in the works of authors of later times. First of all that practice could be applied to the works that were written in Greek and native language by early Roman historians. On the basis of the study in the possible titles of those works – historia, annalles, res gestae – the issue of their genre is raised, judging by the content of the terms that denoted those works. Their terminological analysis led to the following conclusions: in the process of the formation of the annalistic narration as a form of account about the past, the “annals” began to be distinguished from the “history” as a work in which events contemporary to the author were represented. On the contrary the content of the term res gestae was close to what the Greeks called historia.