Greek and Roman Authors on LacusCurtius

[ complete Latin text ]

The Natural History of Pliny the Elder: the complete Latin text as established by Karl Mayhoff in 1897‑1908. Here and there, annotated, illustrated with photos of my own, and linked to the Gazetteer, the Atlas, and the best and most stable sites on the Web.

[ complete Latin text, English translation ]

Frontinus on the Water Supply of Rome: In the early 2c A.D. Sextus Julius Frontinus was called on to administer the city's water, and methodically set out to discover and put an end to endemic theft of the resource, and prevent it in the future. Having done so, he wrote a very accurate and engagingly sober book about it, which is a mine of information for modern archaeologists and historians. Of everything Roman I've ever read, this is my favorite work, and I'm pleased to be able to share it with you.

In progress, if at a glacial pace: I'm linking each paragraph of the Latin to a photograph of it in the only surviving ancient manuscript, sometimes commented with a rudimentary apparatus: so far, 13 of these 130 paragraphs of the facsimile are online.

[ complete Latin text, English translation ]

Vitruvius on Architecture: another work I expected would have been online long before this. Since it has failed to appear courtesy of anyone else, I entered it myself. [The next step would ideally be to add commentary and many, many drawings.]

[ complete Latin texts, English translations ]

Sallust's Catiline and Jugurthine War are among the best-written works onsite. The story of Catiline's revolt is interesting to students of Roman history as a dry run for Caesar's revolution; but also to modern man, dealing as it does with terrorism, the infiltration of republican government, and preëmptive strikes at them to preserve liberty. Similarly, the war with Jugurtha deals among other things with conducting a foreign war with a polarized citizenry, in which the defeatist half may have been bribed by the enemy to call off the war.

Other material by Sallust and ps‑Sallust are also available from the page.

[ complete Latin text, English translation ]

The Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius is the primary source for all kinds of information on the first twelve rulers of imperial Rome; some of it strange, some of it titillating, almost all of it just plain interesting.

[ 11/29/07: complete except for the proofreading of two Lives ]

The Historia Augusta is also a primary source, sort of: picking up where Suetonius left off, but mixing in great gobs of fantasy, falsification and forgery; not so much a mine, as a minefield of information.

[ complete Latin text with critical apparatus ]

Quintus Curtius: The history of the conquests of Alexander the Great. If you are new to Latin, in addition to being an interesting, readable story — it's also a very easy text to read in the original. For this reason, excerpts of this work are often given as homework; therefore I have no intention of putting any translation of it online.

[ complete Latin text ]

Isidore of Seville: Etymologies. Last of the writers of Roman antiquity, first of the medieval world, the bishop of Hispalis left us both more and less than he lets on from the title of the work. Less, because as etymology goes, he shares with all Roman scholars (even Varro) a taste for the most facile, dubious or even fantastic word origins; far more, because sensing the end of a world, he preserved us an encyclopedic record of it. The Latin is so very easy, by the way — except for Book II — that almost all of the Origines can be read by any first-year Latin student: another text to cut your teeth on.

[ 2/22/04: complete English translation,
although not fully proofed ]

Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria is his only work to have come down to us: a teacher's manual to the education of a young orator, it's essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Roman education, literature and style, trial procedure. Quintilian's warm personality and his sympathetic and commonsense approach to teaching (a good teacher is a wonderful resource) and many vignettes of Roman life make the book a surprisingly good read.

[ 10/12/06: complete Latin text ]

The Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius are a large miscellany of antiquarian and philological notes. The text on LacusCurtius was rescued from another website that suddenly vanished — see my orientation page.

[ 4/8/03: complete Latin text and English translation,
although not fully proofed ]

The De Medicina by A. Cornelius Celsus is properly only a rather small part of what ought to be the third encyclopedic work on this site, since in addition to medicine it included agriculture, military science, rhetoric, philosophy and jurisprudence; but only the section on medicine has survived.

[ complete Latin text and English translation ]

Cato's handbook on farming (the de Re Rustica or de Agricultura) is probably not all by him, and it's not very well put together, and it's been further disarranged over centuries of copying — and it's well worth reading if you want to get an idea not only of a Roman farm, but of the stuff the older Romans were made of.

[ complete Latin text and English translation ]

Varro's handbook on farming (the de Re Rustica) is a longer and more organized work, covering not only crops but livestock and the raising of poultry, game fowl, fish, bees, and dormice.

[ 3/21/05: Latin text and English translation, in progress ]

Columella's work on farming (also known as the de Re Rustica) is longer still and more even detailed, the main source of our knowledge of Roman agricultural practices.

[ complete Latin text and English translation ]

The Cynegeticon of Grattius, a Roman author of the 1c A.D., is a 500‑line didactic poem on hunting. It's about weapons and nets and horses: but mostly about Dogs. Opinions differ as to just how good it might be.

[ Latin text and English translation ]

A second work on the hunt, Nemesianus' Cynegetica, less technical and better versified — but he'd read Grattian. Unfortunately, not at all of it, probably not even most it, has survived.

[ complete Latin text ]

Macrobius: Saturnalia. Although we only have parts of it, this book, written in the 5c A.D., is one of the longest extant works from Late Antiquity; it purports, in the tradition of such works as Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, to be a transcript of dinner table conversations over the December holidays in the house of Vettius Agorius Praetextatus (a major pagan literary and political figure of his time: see this page), and is thus an informative if curious hodge-podge of antiquarian and philological lore, of medicine and literary criticism mostly of Vergil, in which many fragments of now lost ancient literature give us an idea of authors who would otherwise be mere names.

[ complete Latin text, French translation ]

Censorinus: de Die natali. An ancestor of the modern Festschrift, it was written in the 3c A.D. as a birthday gift for the author's beloved teacher. It is a clear-headed little book containing some fascinating information on music, astrology, and ancient philosophy and biology; it is particularly valuable today for its information on ancient chronology and the Roman calendar.

[ complete Latin text, English translation ]

The Strategemata of Frontinus are a collection of over 500 examples of devices, ruses, ploys, creative ideas from history, intended by the Roman author as a sort of checklist for the military commander. The work is an appendix to his work on the Art of War, which has not survived; I suspect the interesting "stories" appealed far more to medieval copyists and readers than the deeper theoretical work: it is a great pity.

[ complete bilingual Latin and Greek text with English translation ]

The Monumentum Ancyranum (often called the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, which translates loosely as "The Achievements of the Emperor Augustus") is an unusual text in a couple of ways: it was written by an emperor, and it has come down to us not on parchment or paper, but chiseled on the stone walls of a building in Turkey. It is an exceptional first-hand source for the career of Augustus; presented here in 3-column facing text, with critical apparatus and a wealth of notes for the mid-level student.

[ complete Latin text, English translation ]

Velleius Paterculus: a brief history of Rome from the beginning of time to the author's own days. Uninspired, and heavy on the flattery of the reigning emperor, but useful and finally not that bad.

[ Latin texts and English translations ]

Claudian was a better poet than most of his subjects deserved, with the exception possibly of his hero the Roman general Stilicho. Most of his verse is political propaganda, panegyrics, and invective, and is thus of primarily historical interest, giving us a snapshot of Rome in the decade after the death of Theodosius.

[ complete Latin text and English translation;
1 map, 2 photos; a related journal article ]

Within the decade after the sack of Rome by Alaric — an unthinkable event that stunned the ancient world — an imperial functionary goes back to his native Gaul, and describing his trip, leaves us a moving and fascinating glimpse into the New Normal of his time: Rutilius Namatianus' Returning Home.

[ complete Latin text and English translation ]

Paulinus of Pella was a very ordinary man who wound up living a somewhat extraordinary life because of the tenor of his times. He tells us that when he was in his twenties he liked pretty girls and fast cars, trendy fragrances and falconry — but he loses almost everything in the barbarian invasions and eventually gets religion. At 83 he summarizes his life for us: God has watched over him.

[ Latin texts, English translations ]

There's also some Cicero onsite; as of Mar 08, only about 3% of his output: the Cato de Senectute, the Laelius de Amicitia, and the de Divinatione. I'm more interested in technical writing than in polemics or philosophy, so he's not high on my list; but more will probably follow.

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Ampelius' Liber Memorialis is a summary of the essentials of world history, probably written in the 3c A.D., for a little boy who "wanted to know everything". It gives us a view of history as younger Roman schoolboys were expected to learn it; it survived in a single manuscript, which in turn is now lost.

[ complete Latin text and English translation ]

The Excerpta Valesiana are in fact two different works written a century and a half apart. Both of them are short and surprisingly dull considering their interesting subjects: the first of them is a brief Life of Constantine; the other, written in some very nasty Latin, is a chronicle of the fall of the Roman empire and the reign of Theodoric.

[ complete English translation ]

The Roman History of Cassius Dio is one of the principal sources for what we know about the imperial period; but among the fragmentary Books come down to us we also find fairly complete accounts of the Punic Wars and the Civil Wars of the late Republic.

[ complete English translation ]

The Histories of Polybius, as might be expected, include large portions dealing with Greek history; but the author, a military man, was also a friend of Scipio's, and an eyewitness, at just the right time to leave us the most careful description of the Roman republican army, when it was conquering much of the Western world.

Plutarch was a Romanized Greek author of many books; their survival rate, much higher than that of many other copious writers, is due to his engaging personality, his popular approach, and his flexible, attractive style.

The Parallel Lives are onsite — this is the only site to have them complete — and some of the Moralia: since I have only a very mild interest in ancient Greece, and none at all in philosophy, only by and large those portions that deal with Rome.

These are 20c English translations, thus different from the 18c translations found elsewhere; they also have the advantage of a full complement of local links allowing quick cross-referencing from one to the other, and from other parts of LacusCurtius or any other site that finds them useful.

[ complete English translation ]

The 6c Greek historian Procopius wrote 3 major works on the events and personalities of his own time: the History of the Wars is the most important, and I'll eventually put it online. For now, the other two: Buildings, a catalogue of Justinian's construction spree throughout the empire; and the Anecdota or Secret History, a malevolent, scandal-raking account of Justinian and Theodora.

[ complete English translation ]

For a thousand years, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos was one of the most popular technical manuals in the world, that taught the rudiments of casting an astrological chart to many generations of practitioners. Compared to his other works — the Geography, the Almagest, and the Optics — it is a rather slight work; but it provides fairly comprehensive coverage of a subject essential for understanding ancient history and literature.

[ complete English translations; some of the Greek originals ]

Dio Chrysostom wrote well, mostly practical philosophy — what today would be called self-help, self-improvement, or even popular psychology — but also some speeches connected with his involvement in local municipal politics, and even a few items that seem to have been written just for the fun of it.

Precatio Terrae • Precatio Omnium Herbarum (Latin and English)

[ 11/29/03: 3 primary sources, 4 modern works;
Strabo's Geography in progress ]

Topographia Antiqua: a number of ancient and early medieval topographical texts have survived, and I'm putting good editions of them onsite. Currently:

• Ptolemy's Geography
• the Regionary Catalogues of the City of Rome
• the short route map known as the Ordo Benedicti.

The site also includes modern topographical works: Codrington's Roman Roads in Britain, Lanciani's Pagan and Christian Rome, Hülsen's Il Foro Romano, and a constantly increasing selection, now up to several hundred entries, of Platner & Ashby's Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome.

Finally, this seems to be a good place also to mention my Latin Inscriptions Site that includes

• a bare listing of all the Etruscan and Roman inscriptions currently available onsite (currently over 200), each one transcribed
• a student's primer, with a selection of about 25 photographed inscriptions, sorted by level of difficulty: each one is first presented without comment, then linked to a "solution" — follow that light bulb in the navigation bar at the bottom of each page.