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Updated: June 3, 2025
The oldest and most important of the early historians, Quintus Fabius Pictor, the contemporary of Naevius and Ennius, actually wrote in Greek, though a Latin version of his work certainly existed, whether executed by himself or some other hand is doubtful, at an almost contemporary date. Extracts are quoted from it by the grammarians as specimens of the language of the period.
He is supposed to be miscalled by Cicero, Fabius Pictor, for Cicero mentions a work in Latin by the latter author, whereas it is certain that the old Fabius wrote only in Greek. The best authorities now assume that Fabius Maximus, as a clansman and admirer of Pictor, translated his book into Latin to make it more widely known.
It is presumably a piece of my inventing, for I have neither read it nor heard it related. But by this time it has acquired a certain traditional veracity in my eyes, and I give to the reader rather as historical fact than as fiction the study which I have always called to myself: Pictor Sacrilegus.
Other fragments of deep interest are preserved by Augustine. One, showing the conception of the state religion as a purely human institution, explains why human antiquities are placed before divine, "Sicut prior est pictor quam tabula picta, prior faber quam aedificium; ita priores sunt civitates, quam ea quae a civitatibus instituta sunt."
Fabius Pictor relates, that the parents of a Roman lady, having detected her picking the lock of a chest which contained some wine, shut her up and starved her to death. Women were liable to be divorced by their husbands almost at pleasure, provided the portion was returned which they had brought along with them.
At the head of the list of Roman prose annalists stands the name of Quintus Fabius Pictor, at one time a senator, who wrote a history of his nation beginning, probably, like other Roman works of its class, with the coming of Æneas, and narrating later events, to the end of the second Punic war, with some degree of minuteness.
This is the legend given by one Promathion, the compiler of a history of Italy. III. But the most credible story, and that has most vouchers for its truth, is that which was first published in Greece by Diokles of Peparethos, a writer whom Fabius Pictor has followed in most points.
Even in the time of Pictor and Cato Greek culture was widely diffused in Rome, and there was a native Roman culture; but neither of them had then got beyond the initial stage.
And if the potentiality of all resided in every man, the teaching on this point most forcibly has been, Qui se cognoscit, in se omnia cognoscit He who knows himself, knows all in himself as Q. Fabius Pictor tells us.
Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay killed, is a happier instance. And there may here and there also have been a poet or novelist like that "Pictor Ignotus" of Browning's, who cried: "I could have painted pictures like that youth's Ye praise so!" He would have had a painter's fame: "But a voice changed it.
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