The Greeks were great thinkers and are credited with developing philosophy, creating drama, and inventing certain literary genres. One such genre was history. History emerged from other styles of non-fiction writing, particularly travel writing, based on the voyages of curious and observant men. There were also ancient biographers and chroniclers who produced similar material and data used by historians. Here are some of the major ancient writers of ancient history or the closely related genres.
Ammianus Marcellinus, the author of a Res Gestae in 31 books, says he is a Greek. He may have been a native of the Syrian city of Antioch, but he wrote in Latin. He is an historical source for the later Roman empire, particularly for his contemporary, Julian the Apostate.
Cassius Dio was an historian from a leading family of Nicaea in Bithynia who was born around A.D. 165. Cassius Dio wrote a history of the Civil Wars of 193-7 and a history of Rome from its foundation to the death of Severus Alexander (in 80 books). Only a few of the books of this history of Rome have survived. Much of what we know of the writing of Cassius Dio comes from Byzantine scholars.
Diodorus Siculus calculated that his histories (Bibliotheke) spanned 1138 years, from before the Trojan War to his own lifetime during the late Roman Republic.
15 of his 40 books on universal history are extant and fragments remain of the rest. He has until recently been criticized as having simply recorded what his predecessors had already written.
Almost nothing is known about the man Eutropius, 4th century historian of Rome, other than that he served under Emperor Valens and went on the Persian campaign with Emperor Julian. Eutropius' history or Breviarium covers Roman history from Romulus through the Roman Emperor Jovian in ten books. The focus of the Breviarium is military, resulting in the judgment of emperors based on their military successes.
Herodotus (c. 484-425 B.C.), as the first historian proper, is called the father of history. He was born in the essentially Dorian (Greek) colony of Halicarnassus on the southwest coast of Asia Minor (then a part of the Persian Empire), during the Persian Wars shortly before the expedition against Greece led by the Persian king Xerxes.
Jordanes was probably a Christian bishop of Germanic origin, writing at Constantinople in 551 or 552 A. D. His Romana is the history of the world from a Roman point of view reviewing the facts concisely and leaving conclusions to the reader, and his Getica is an abridgement of Cassiodorus' (lost) Gothic History.
Flavius Josephus (Joseph Ben Matthias) was a first century Jewish historian whose writing includes a History of the Jewish War (75 – 79) and Antiquities of the Jews (93), which includes references to a man named Jesus.
Titus Livius (Livy) was born c. 59 B.C. and died in A.D. 17 at Patavium, in northern Italy. In about 29 B.C., while living in Rome, he started his magnum opus, Ab Urbe Condita, a history of Rome from its foundation, written in 142 books.
Manetho was an Egyptian priest who is called the father of Egyptian history. He divided the kings into dynasties. Only an epitome of his work survives.
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
| 