The Ancient Greek Historians : Harvard Lectures

The classical historian J. B. Bury (1861-1927) was the author of a history of Greece which was a standard textbook for over a century (and of which the first edition is also reissued in this series).

His interests ranged over a very wide period, and this 1909 work discusses the ancient Greek historians themselves. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard University in 1908, this book unsurprisingly focuses on Herodotus and Thucydides, but in a chronological survey examines the evidence for the rise of historical writing in Ionia, and the influence on it of myth and epic poetry.

Bury also surveys those historians after Thucydides whose work is less well attested, and the likely influence of the development of rhetoric and philosophy upon their writing, and considers the influence of Greek writers, including Polybius, during the Roman republican period, and their influence on later, Latin historiography.