Roman prose was deplorable from the standpoint of science. Cicero, although he said that the duty of the historian is to conceal nothing true, to say nothing false, would in practice have written the kind of history that Polybius denounced. He finds fault with those who are _non exornatores rerum sed tantum narratores_. History for him is the mine from which to draw argument in oratory and example in education. It is not the subject of a scientific curiosity. It should be noted before we pass to Rome that with the expansion of Hellenism the subject of historians expanded as well. Universal history was begun by Ephorus, the rhetorician, and formed the theme of Polybius and Deodorus. Exiled Greeks were the first to write histories of Rome worthy of the name. The Alexandrian Eratosthenes placed chronology upon the scientific basis of astronomy, and Apollodorus drew up the most important _chronica_ of antiquity. History-writing in Rome,--except for the Greek writers resident there,--was until the first half of the 1st century B.C. in the form of annals. Then came rhetorical ornamentation,--and the Ciceronian era. The first Roman historian who rose to the conception of a science and art combined was Sallust, the student of Thucydides. The Augustan age produced in Livy a great popular historian and natural artist and a trained rhetorician (in the speeches),--but as uncritical and inaccurate as he was brilliant. From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides. Tacitus is at least a consummate artist. His style ranges from the brilliancy of his youth to the sternness and sombre gravity of age, passing almost to poetic expression in its epigrammatic terseness. Yet in spite of his searching study of authorities, his keen judgment of men, and his perception of underlying principles of moral law, his view was warped by the heat of faction, which glows beneath his external objectivity. After him Roman history-writing speedily degenerated. Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_ is but a superior kind of journalism. But his gossip of the court became the model for historians, whose works, now lost, furnish the main source for the _Historia Augusta_. The importance to us of this uncritical collection of biographies is sufficient comment on the decline of history-writing in the latter empire. Finally, from the 4th century the epitomes of Eutropius and Festus served to satisfy the lessening curiosity in the past and became the handbooks for the middle ages. The single figure of Ammianus Marcellinus stands out of this age like a belated disciple of Tacitus. But the world was changing from antique to Christian ideals just as he was writing, and with him we leave this outline of ancient history.