Classic Authors

Who are the Roman historians from 1st century AD?

Apiano

Appianus(c. 95- 165) was a Roman historian of Greek descent. He was born around the year 95, under the reign of the last of the Flavians, the Emperor Domitian (81-96). He was a Greek from Alexandria (a Greek city in Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great), who always wrote in his mother tongue. The son of Roman citizens, probably belonging to the Alexandrian elite, Appianus must have had a remarkable education and later held the highest magistracies in his hometown, as he himself explains in the prologue to his work. In the year 116, during the revolt of the Hebrews in his homeland, he had to flee because his life was in danger, as he himself recounted in a part of his work that has already been lost (On Arabia ). He wrote a long history of Rome, in 24 books, spanning from its founding to the death of Trajan. In them, he wrote the history of Iberia with an ethnographic character, and also recounted the Celtiberian wars and the conquest of Numancia¹.

Polibio

Polybius was born in Megalopolis (Peloponnese, Greece), 209-208 BC. C. – Greece, 122 a. C. he was taken to Rome as a hostage, after the battle of Pydna, in which the Roman consul Paulo Emilio defeated Perseus, king of Macedonia. From this date, the life of Polybius was linked to Rome.Polybius received excellent philosophical and literary training. He had studied Music and had an inclination for Geography and Medicine. In his work he mentions several poets, such as Homer, Simonides, Pindar and others, but this does not imply that he had a deep knowledge of Greek literature. He had good knowledge of the Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Polybius passes to posterity through his Histories. Nothing survives from other treatises².

Plutarco

Plutarch (c. 46 or 50-D - c. 120) was a Greco-Roman historian. At the age of twenty he moved to Athens to study mathematics and philosophy. He was a disciple of the philosopher Ammonio Saccas. Although he traveled throughout almost the entire Empire, most of his life he lived in Chaeronea, where he held numerous public positions. He owes his fame to “Vidas paralelas”, a series of biographies of famous Greek and Roman characters, grouped in pairs in order to establish a comparison between figures of one and another culture; In this way, for example, the profile of Alexander the Great is matched with that of Julius Caesar. Twenty-two pairs of Lives have been preserved, which constitute an important source of information about Antiquity due to the large number of anecdotes and historical details they contain³.

Suetonio

Suetonius (c.e 70 - 140) was a Roman historian. He became friends with Pliny the Younger, who recommended him to Emperor Trajan, thanks to which he was able to enter the imperial bureaucracy. Under Hadrian’s mandate, Suetonius was in charge of the management of the imperial archives. Thanks to the extraordinary quality of the sources that he came to handle during his tenure at court, Suetonius was able to devote himself to writing what would be his most important work, the Lives of the twelve Caesars or Vida de los Doces Césares, in which he biographed the emperors from Augustus to Domitian⁴.

Tácito

Tacitus (c. 55- 117) was a Roman historian. The few facts that are known about his life indicate that he developed a brilliant political career that led him to the Senate, as well as to hold the position of consul. His wedding in 78 with a daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, a Roman general who fought in Britain, of whom Tacitus wrote a biography: Agricola, is also known. Another important work that must be highlighted is On the origin and country of the Germans, better known as Germania, in which he traces a vivid representation of the life and culture of the Germans. However, his most famous works are the Annals, a history of the emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty beginning with Tiberius; and the Histories, about the Flavian dynasty. Both works represent a grandiose effort to recreate a turbulent period in Roman history, and in them he offers an implacable portrait of the great figures of the time, highlighting their weaknesses. The author’s tone also reflects a certain nostalgia for the times of the Republic and Roman greatness⁵.

Tito Livio

Livy (64 BC - AD 17) was a Latin historian. Installed in Rome probably from the year 30 BC, he became interested in rhetoric and wrote moral dialogues, which he later put aside to devote himself to writing a great history of Rome, Ab urbe condita libri (better known as the Decades). This masterpiece earned him the favor of Emperor Octavian Augustus. Only 35 of the 142 books that made up the work are preserved, which covers from the founding of the city to the year 9 B.C. A top piece of Latin prose from the end of the classical period, for his composition he used archives and ancient historians whom he rarely quotes (which is why his work lacks reliability with respect to some periods) and interspersed small reflections in the middle of the narrative, marked by an epic and dramatic tone. Much admired by his contemporaries, he served as a model for later historians and influenced epic poets⁶.

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