Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

It is not my intention here to give a history, however brief, of Greco-Roman historiography. Much of that information can be found in other works (see Further Reading) or will emerge in the course of this collection. Instead, I supply here a brief background to some of the issues that will arise in the contributions that follow. The historical writing of the Greeks and Romans covers some 800 years, from Herodotus' Histories written in the mid- to late fifth century bce to the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus who composed his history in the late fourth century ce . Within these two boundaries, thousands of men (and a few women) sought to create some record of the past, either of their own or earlier times, in a variety of formats. Of that vast historical literature only the tiniest portion has come down to us, and the surviving literature represents some eras well, while others are hardly represented at all. For the fifth and fourth centuries bce , we have Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon - considered by the ancients the three greatest historians - but for the Hellenistic era, the 300 years from the death of Alexander the Great to the battle of Actium (323–31 bce ), where we know the names of over 600 historians just on the Greek side, only three historians - Polybius, Diodorus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus - survive, and even they not entirely. For the Romans, the ... log in or subscribe to read full text