The Books of the Pontifices

Résumé En

The surviving remnants of the pontifical books are not rich enough for us to determine issues such as the mode of recording or that of the retrieval of information. Were they well-organized and used ? Or just a mass of unsorted data ? Also the texts do not reveal how and when the priests in their activities actuary made use of the infomation the books evidently contained. The argument here is that the records of the Arval brethren do not provide a useful model in this case. The material that reaches us through the antiquarian tradition indicates that there were traces of organization by theme in the records ; but it is open to doubt and debate whether the organization we detect was imposed by the priestly recorders themselves or by the early second-century B. C. antiquarians who made use of this material in their works. The creativity and independence of these second-century researchers is an issue for the history of the priestly records as it is for the writing of the annalistic history of Republican Rome in general.