The first sentence of the Annals reads urbem Romam a principio reges habuere. Commentators observe the echo of Sallust, Catiline 6.1 urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani, and of Claudius, ILS 212 quondam reges hanc tenuere urbem.Footnote ¹ In a stimulating recent contribution David Levene also compares the first sentence of Justinus' Epitome of the Histories of Pompeius Trogus: principio rerum gentium nationumque imperium penes reges erat.Footnote ² A fourth potential model may now be taken into consideration: Ἀθηναῖοι τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐχρῶντο βασιλɛίαι.

The line quoted is the first sentence of a short work illustrating features of 44 different constitutions and transmitted along with the Historia Animalium of Aelian as ἐκ τῶν Ἡρακλɛίδου πɛρὶ πολιτɛιῶν.Footnote ³ In his 1847 edition, Schneidewin identified this work as deriving from Aristotle's Politeiai.Footnote ⁴ Rose in turn included it in his 1886 edition of the fragments of Aristotle.Footnote ⁵ Yet it was only with the January 1891 publication of the papyrus of the Athenaiôn Politeia that this hypothetical identification could be proved. The crucial contribution here was von Holzinger's detailed analysis of the language of the Athenian section of the Peri Politeiôn against that of the surviving portions of the Aristotelian original.Footnote ⁶ As for the Heraclides to whom the excerpts are attributed, Müller's Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum identified him as the fourth-century b.c. scholar and pupil of Aristotle, Heraclides Ponticus.Footnote ⁷ This view was in turn challenged by Unger, who argued that a much more likely candidate was the Alexandrian excerptor Heraclides Lembos.Footnote ⁸ Unger's proposal was accepted by von Holzinger.Footnote ⁹ Both the attribution of the excerpts to the Politeiai of Aristotle and the identification of the excerptor as Heraclides Lembos remain unchallenged.Footnote ¹⁰

The first claim that I would therefore wish to make is that Annals 1.1.1 (and with it also the other Latin historical works conventionally adduced as parallels for its form and content) alludes first and foremost to the opening sentence of Aristotle's Athenaiôn Politeia. The naming of a specific polity, the reference to what was done from the very beginning, and the representation of kingship as the earliest mode of government are common to both sentences. What Aristotle will go on to describe, however, is the historical evolution of the world's first democracy up to the reconciliation that followed the second oligarchic coup of 403 b.c., followed by a briefer statement of the city's institutions as they exist in the author's own day. Tacitus, by contrast, sketches in minimo the movement from kingship back to kingship with scarcely a mention of the Republican institutions that came in between.

This claim must, however, be modified by some further discussion of the work that gives us our best witness to the beginning of the Athenaiôn Politeia and to the style of Annals 1.1.1. For when the Athenian portions of the Peri Politeiôn are compared to the extant sections of the Athenaiôn Politeia, it becomes clear that they are entirely derivative in content but only substantially so in their phrasing.Footnote ¹¹ Bloch's comparison of the style of the Peri Politeiôn to papyrus remains of Heraclides' epitome of the works of Hermippus on the lawgivers, the seven sages, and Pythagoras further reveals one distinctive feature of his own style: the tendency to begin each new entry with a lemma in the form of the name of a given city or individual.Footnote ¹² When therefore we read Ἀθηναῖοι τὸ μὲν ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐχρῶντο βασιλɛίαι, the claim may be compared with that made at the start of the Politics, that monarchy was the earliest human political institution, and taken as authentically Aristotelian.Footnote ¹³ The phrasing, by contrast, is likely to be an amalgam of Aristotle's words and Heraclides' distinctive lemmatic style.

The suggestion that Annals 1.1.1 potentially reflects the style of an excerpted Aristotle may open up a second level of investigation. For what all the passages considered in the course of this note have in common is their status as abbreviations: Sallust, Catiline 6–13 is an epitome of Roman history from the foundation of the city to the time of Catiline; Justinus is introducing his own epitome of the works of Pompeius Trogus; and what makes Tacitus, Annals 1.1 so breathtaking is its epitome of all Roman history from the first kings to the coming of Augustus.Footnote ¹⁴ Essential to the work of any excerptor or epitomator is to decide not only what to include but also what to omit.Footnote ¹⁵ In the case of Annals 1.1, what remains of Roman history from Brutus to Augustus are but those instances where the city resorted to quasi-monarchical institutions or was indeed overtaken by aspirants to monarchy.Footnote ¹⁶ What is omitted is any account of how and how long the institutions designed as an alternative to monarchy actually worked. In short, if the opening sentence of the Annals recalls as much the epitomated as the original form of the Athenaiôn Politeia, it is perhaps because this is the best way to remind us of all that a more extensive history of the Republic would perforce have contained: a Rhomaiôn Politeia.