Veni, vidi, vici: When Did Roman Republican Politicians Use the First-Person Singular?

This essay grows out of an ongoing interest in the first autobiographies written in Latin, the remains of which date to the early first century BC.2 We have only small surviving fragments of the memoirs composed by four leading Roman senators in the 90s, 80s, and 70s BC. They are Quintus Lutatius Catulus (cos. 102), Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (cos. 115), Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (cos. 88, 80), and Publius Rutilius Rufus (cos. 105).3 These men seem to have been the first Romans to write about their own lives in the first-person singular.4 Their writings were circulated either in their own lifetimes or immediately after their deaths. They knew each other and were linked by complex networks of competition, mutual influence, and enmities sharpened by a harsh environment of political disintegration and civil war. In other words, this little group represents an intellectual milieu of sorts, operating at a rather specific time of political and military crisis.