Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who...

Diagoras "the Atheist" of Melos was a Greek poet and sophist of the 5th century BC. Throughout antiquity, he was regarded as an atheist, but very little is known for certain about what he actually believed. Anecdotes about his life indicate...

Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays,...

Isocrates, an ancient Greek rhetorician, was one of the ten Attic orators. In his time, he was probably the most influential rhetorician in Greece and made many contributions to rhetoric and education through his teaching and written works....

Xenophon of Athens was an Athenian-born mercenary, philosopher and historian. At the age of 30, he was elected a commander of the Ten Thousand, a force of Greek mercenaries in the service of Cyrus the Younger. He wrote the Anabasis, which r...

Theocritus, the creator of ancient Greek bucolic poetry, flourished in the 3rd century BC. Little is known of Theocritus beyond what can be inferred from his writings. We must, however, handle these with some caution, since some of the poem...

Titus Maccius Plautus, commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of...

Marcus Porcius Cato was a Roman statesman, commonly referred to as Cato Censorius (the Censor), Cato Sapiens (the Wise), Cato Priscus (the Ancient), Cato Major, or Cato the Elder (to distinguish him from his great-grandson, Cato the Younger...

Gaius Lucilius, the earliest Roman satirist, of whose writings only fragments remain, was a Roman citizen of the equestrian class, born at Suessa Aurunca in Campania. The dates assigned by Jerome for his birth and death are 148 BC and 103 B...

Sima Qian was a Chinese historian of the early Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 220). He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his Records of the Grand Historian, a general history of China in the Jizhuanti style covering more than...

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's great...

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem on Epicureanism De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe". According to...

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer active in the 1st century BC. Vitruvius is the author of De architectura, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture, a treatise written of Latin and Greek on architecture...

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues (or Bucolics), the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A nu...

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintillian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyric...