The Ancient Historians

by Michael Grant

s/t: : Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Xenophon, Polypolus, Josephus, Caesar, Cato, Livy, Sallust, Eusebius, Ammianus, Suetonius
If Greece and Rome are held to be the cradles of Western civilization, this is in part due to the fact that they are the cradles of written history. Between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. men such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus virtually invented the discipline of history as we know it. To these men history was a dual art; the art of recording the truth as accurately as possible and the art of writing as lucidly as the great men of letters. This text offers an examination of the primary chroniclers of the ancient world. Beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and their very different approaches to narration, the book discusses the works and methods of the founders of the historical discipline. After a further discussion of the important later Greek historians, Xenophon and Polybius, the book then examines the Roman masters of the form - Cato, Sallust and Julius Caesar, Livy, Josephus and Tacitus. It then encompasses two masters of biographical history, Plutarch and Suetonius, before concluding with a very different view of the later Empire, Eusebius and Ammianus. It records the thousand-year struggle to create a durable record of human affairs.

Genres: History, Ancient History, Biography, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient, Roman History

486 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Michael Grant was an English classisist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. He once described himself as "one of the very few freelances in the field of ancient history: a rare phenomenon". As a popularizer, his hallmarks were his prolific output and his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Solid on individual historians. Little historiography.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Grant displays his usual mastery of subjects ancient, this time bringing to life a dozen or so primarily Greek and Roman historians whose writings have survived. He tells us about the historians' lives, many times tying their personal travels or careers to their choice of subjects or treatments of them. Though it's often tough sledding, verging on more information than I'd like, it was worth sticking to it. The epilogue proved to be one of the more fascinating sections of the book, where Grant traces the survival and subsequent translations of the surviving manuscripts of the works.

[Brady Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic.

[Googoogjoob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A survey of 13 major ancient historians in great detail (and a bunch of others in lesser detail), from Herodotus to Ammianus. Grant is very much in command of his material, and it feels like he could go on at greater length about any of the writers he covers here. He covers the subject matter of these historians; their lives, as far as they can be known; their predilections, biases, and idiosyncrasies; their methods and reliability, and so on and so forth, as stolidly and thoroughly as one could want. It's necessarily pretty dry, and not evenly interesting (eg somebody like Tacitus is a lot more interesting to read about than someone like Eusebius). An epilogue covers the survival and influence of the historians' works, though in a heavily compressed and almost telegraphic way- it feels like an afterthought, which could've been spun off into another book of its own.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book was an interesting and well-written high-level description of several ancient civilizations. The second half, unfortunately, was a vague and convoluted call for history teachers to condemn warfare. Frankly, I started skimming after a couple of chapters of Section V, then started skipping whole sections. While "war is bad" is an easy concept to get behind, the author's presentation of his ideas was erratic, and I had a sense of being preached at instead of being guided through a logical discussion.

So, four stars for chapters 1-3, three stars for chapter 4, and two stars for the rest of the book.

[Jerry-Book · Rating 3 out of 5]

History, ancient

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little bland, but I did learn a good deal not only about some of our earliest historians, but how the genre of history writing was shaped.