About this history

Printed plates. Two collections supply the reproduced maps. The first is William R. Shepherd's Historical Atlas (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), long out of copyright, whose clear colour plates cover the whole span of this history; the scans are those of the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. The second is the set of fold-out map sheets from the first edition of The Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge University Press), which are more detailed for the ancient world than anything else of their date. Both are reproduced in the warm palette of the rest of the site so that a plate does not fight the page it sits on; no line, name or boundary has been added to either.

Maps drawn for this history. The scroll-driven campaign maps are new. Their coastlines, rivers and lakes are real geography; their marches, sieges and frontiers are drawn from the ancient narratives named in each map's note, and are schematic. That word matters: no ancient army's exact track survives, so a route on these maps shows where a campaign went and in what order, not the road it took. Where a site is disputed — Cunaxa, the Metaurus battlefield, Hannibal's Alpine pass — the map either says so or declines to pin it.

Borders. Ancient states did not have borders in the modern sense, and where they did the line is rarely recoverable. Territory on these maps is therefore an editorial outline: a people or a province is coloured whole from the date its chief towns came under a given rule, which makes early inland limits look larger than they were. Peoples and kingdoms shown only by a name on the map have no drawn boundary at all, which is the honest way to show them.

Geography and place data. Coastlines, rivers and lakes come from Natural Earth (public domain). Ancient places are located by their records in Pleiades (CC BY 3.0); the few with no usable record are placed by hand and flagged where it matters. Roman provincial outlines follow the Ancient World Mapping Center's shapes for the empire at c. 60 BC, c. AD 117 and c. AD 200 (ODbL, after the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World).

Most of the people in this history left a face behind: a marble bust, a bronze head, a coin struck in their own reign, in later centuries a portrait painted from life. Almost none of them survived intact. Noses break first, then lips and ears; bronze corrodes green, marble greys and loses the paint it once carried, and the inlaid eyes of ivory, glass and lapis were prised out long ago.

Each portrait here is an illustration that puts those things back — colour, complexion, the missing nose, the eyes — working from the surviving likeness and from what the ancient writers say about the person's appearance. It is a considered guess at a living face, not a photograph and not a new piece of evidence. That is why every portrait can be clicked: the surviving original is always one click away, with the museum that holds it named, so you can judge how far the illustration has travelled from it.

Where no likeness survives — as for most Romans of the early Republic, before individual portraiture existed — no face is shown. Some chapters use later paintings and engravings instead, captioned with their artist and date. Those are a later age's imagination of a scene, and the captions say so.

The narrative. For the ancient world the spine is The Cambridge Ancient History, in the second edition where it exists and the first where it does not, checked against the ancient writers themselves. Later chapters name their own authorities — for the Thirty Years' War, C. V. Wedgwood, Peter H. Wilson, J. V. Polišenský and The New Cambridge Modern History; and so on. Each chapter carries its own source note at the foot.

Quotations. Every quotation is genuine and is given in a translation free of copyright — Plutarch in Dryden's version as revised by Clough, Livy in Canon Roberts's, Polybius in Shuckburgh's or Paton's, Tacitus, Suetonius, Appian, Sallust, Cicero and the rest in the standard nineteenth- and early twentieth-century renderings. Nothing is paraphrased into quotation marks.

Doubtful things. Ancient history is full of stories its own recorders half doubted: Regulus keeping his word and going back to Carthage to die, Cato's refrain against Carthage, the second Decius riding deliberately into the enemy line as his father had. They are too good to leave out and too weak to assert, so they are told and labelled as tradition. Casualty figures, crowd sizes and famous last words are given as the claim of the writer who reports them, because that is all they are.

Maps and geography. Natural Earth (public domain) · Pleiades, CC BY 3.0 · Ancient World Mapping Center, ODbL, after the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World · William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas (1911), public domain, scanned by the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection · map plates from The Cambridge Ancient History, Cambridge University Press.

Objects and likenesses. The busts, coins, reliefs and paintings reproduced here are held by, among others, the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre, the Musei Capitolini and the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, the Vatican Museums, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, the Munich Glyptothek, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Museo del Prado, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Alte Pinakothek and the National Museum of Iraq. Each is named where it appears.

Texts. Public-domain translations consulted through the Perseus Digital Library, LacusCurtius, the Internet Classics Archive, Project Gutenberg and Fordham University's Internet History Sourcebooks Project.