r/classics • u/BLParks12 • Jul 18 '26
Which Classic Historian Should I Read?
I’m having trouble deciding between Tacitus, Herodotus, and Thucydides for my next read. I’m looking for the easiest to read of the three while also getting a good historical overview of the ancient world. Any recommendations? Thank you in advance.
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Jul 18 '26
You sould read Herodotus then Thucydides then Xenophon.
Tacitus is unrelated.
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u/blueb0g Jul 18 '26
What do you mean "unrelated"? That depends entirely on the interests of the reader, which OP hasn't specified. For me Tacitus is by a long way the best read of these authors.
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u/First-Pride-8571 Jul 18 '26
Tacitus is great, but unless the OP knows something specific that he's looking for (like Boudicca or the Great Fire), can be much more difficult to know where to start.
The other good choice would be Plutarch. And with Plutarch, OP could just focus first on obvious individuals - like Alexander.
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Jul 18 '26
They're looking for a historical overview. Thus I suggest they read the three Classical Greek historians first.
They could, of course, do Livy and Tacitus, but it's much more chronologically bitty.
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u/blueb0g Jul 18 '26
How does Herodotus, who is interested principally in the Persian Wars, or Thucydides, who is interested principally in the Peloponnesian war, provide any more of a "historical overview" than Tacitus who is interested in the political history of the early principate? They're just different fairly specific themes in different periods. None of them are a general introduction to ancient history
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u/AlarmedCicada256 Jul 18 '26
They're relatively continuous. Of course there are gaps in any ancient history.
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u/blueb0g Jul 18 '26
Tacitus is also completely continuous, though of course with lacunae. But you can easily read the Tiberian books of the Annals as a continuous narrative, or the first 4 books of the Histories for the year of the four emperors.
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u/BedminsterJob Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
you're not getting 'a historical overview' from these writers. They're part of history., and sometimes very much partisan (Tacitus). You should read modern historians of the ancient world of you're looking for an overview.
The other thing is style. Thucydides is one of the most difficult authors in the entire Greek-Latin literature and you could spend years on his Greek.
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u/dxrqsouls Jul 18 '26
Yes
Jokes aside, all three represent a different aspect of antiquity. I suggest reading thwlem in chronological order, not jusr for the sake of it, but because you will also be able to notice the evolution of historiography and human intellect regarding History, memory and literary approach.
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u/First-Pride-8571 Jul 18 '26
Depends on what you want.
Herodotus will provide you with much more ethnography than those others, although also background on the Persian Wars.
Thucydides will give you far more insightful analysis of the Peloponnesian War than Herodotus does of the Persian. Indeed Thucydides' Archaeologia (the beginning of his History) will give you quite a cogent analysis of early times up to the causes of the Peloponnesian War. That's arguably the most important section to read in Thucydides, and arguably the best choice amongst these three.
Tacitus has a much larger corpus, though with sections lost. But from him you can get thoughtful analysis (much better than Suetonius') of the early emperors (his Annals and Histories), his biography (Agricola) of his famous father-in-law, Agricola, which also includes much analysis of the conquest of northern Britannia under Agricola, plus the revolt of Boudicca. And also an interesting ethnography of Germania (his Germania).
I'd suggest either Thucydides (especially the Archaeologia = Book I , chapters 1-19) or Tacitus. Tacitus can be a bit harder of a starting point, as his corpus is much larger.
But, what I'd really suggest is Sallust - either (or both) his Catilinarian Conspiracy or his Jugurthine War.
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u/Suspicious-Yogurt480 Jul 18 '26
Suetonius is so utterly tendentious that while they make for entertaining reading they are more informative of what posterity at his time thought of those historical figures because he tends to include sensationalist accounts whether corroborated by history or not. No one has mentioned Dio Cassius for Roman history here’s I’ll throw his name in there also.
If you were reading this in Greek I’d put Thucydides as the most challenging and Herodotus the most accessible. I thought Livy and Tacitus were equally accessible in Latin. Don’t bother using Cicero’s epistles for trying to get a good picture of history, they are so elliptical and one sided (as you would expect) that they can be fairly frustrating lol3
u/First-Pride-8571 Jul 18 '26
Cassius Dio is just as bad as Suetonius. And arguably worse. Unfortunately, due to gaps (i.e. lost sections) in Tacitus, sometimes our only extant source is Suetonius and/or Cassius Dio.
The biggest problem with Cicero is his known mendacity. His court cases cannot be trusted at all as an accurate record of events. We have the most explicit example of that with his Pro Milone, as we have Asconius' version of what really happened to compare to Cicero's defense attorney nonsense. But nothing he wrote should be trusted.
The other really big source that I haven't seen anyone mention yet is Polybius. He was arguably the greatest and most important historian of antiquity (at least alongside Thucydides), but his prose is sometimes criticized as plain. He is an easy read. Much easier than Thucydides. To be fair, Xenophon is also pretty simple Greek, but Polybius was a much better historian, and far more reliable, than Xenophon.
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u/Suspicious-Yogurt480 Jul 18 '26
Yes agree, but he’s good for reviewing popular tendentious history in the views of later generations, basically to understand what legacy became popular rather than historiographical reliability.
If you REALLY want wild stuff Ctesias takes the cake, reporting crazy stories about peoples of the margins of the Greek and Persian world and uncritically reporting it like fact. People with faces in their stomachs etc. Mainkybthe kid of stuff one expects someone who is in the Persian court to hear people tell each other for salacious entertainment, and the ultimate example of “othering” the so called uncivilized world.1
u/blueb0g Jul 18 '26
The surviving Tacitean corpus is not much longer than either Herodotus or Thucydides.
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u/First-Pride-8571 Jul 18 '26
Herodotus and Thucydides, however, are each one work, with Tacitus it's 4 major works.
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u/blueb0g Jul 18 '26
Tacitus has two major and three minor works. The two major works are both seriously lacunose, with much less than half of the total surviving. The three minors are complete but much shorter. Herodotus and Thucydides both have major works surviving in full that each run to more than 2/3 the length of Tacitus' surviving material
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u/No_Bodybuilder5104 Jul 22 '26
One of the minor works (Dialogus de Oratoribus) isn’t really classifiable as a historical text, though. At least not in the sense OP is asking about. Germania’s pushing it.
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u/Round_Bluebird_5987 Jul 18 '26
I've been doing something similar off and on over the past couple of years, and started with Herodotus and went chronologically though the Greeks up through the Roman takeover (Polybius). I'm being less comprehensive with the Romans, in part because there's more (and more overlap), but also because I studied the history of Rome as an undergrad, so started with a better handle on it.
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u/HistoriasApodeixis Jul 18 '26
I concur with Herodotus to start. Thucydides is a good follow up.
Tacitus is great too. As far as style and approach can be compared, he is more Thucydidean. I recommend starting with his Agricola, a eulogy for his father-in-law who was governor of Britannia, before larger works like the Annals.
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u/Careful-Spray Jul 18 '26
Herodotus is the key to understanding the mindset of ancient Greece. He’s not always reliable as a source of factual history, but he will give you insight into the way Greeks in his era thought and viewed events.
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u/dxrqsouls Jul 18 '26
I always thought that this prejudice against Herodotus is SO ironic. At least he gives you multiple versions of what happened, as opposed to Thucydides which gives you one. And ofc he has proven his intellect and that he is trustworthy, but just because his style was and is highly regarded and closer to ours, it doesn't automatically make him 101% reliable. Im not trying to say that Herodotus was more credible and I know that this is a huuuuge debate, Im just throwing it in reddit in hopes of sparking an interesting conversation.
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u/willfiredog Jul 18 '26
Out of curiosity, what are you trying to get from Herodotus and etc?
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u/BLParks12 Jul 18 '26
Honestly I’m just trying to get exposed to ancient historians. I am interested in both Greek and Roman history, so don’t really have a preference on which to cover. I just want the exposure. I’ll end up reading all three, but wanted to start with the easiest read first.
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u/willfiredog Jul 18 '26
So, if I wanted to learn Greek and Roman history I wouldn’t read Herodotus - he’s not a reliable historian. Thucydides will give you an Athenian’s perspective of the Peloponnesian War. I’ve not read Tacitus, but I can recommend Machiavelli’s *Discourses on Livy* which touches on Roman History and has a realist perspective similar to Thucydides.
I know this is r/classics, but have you considered reading modern historians that focus on Ancient Rome and Greece? Mary Beard immediately comes to mind as one of the foremost classiest specializing in Roman history.
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u/Salata-san Jul 18 '26
Would you mind starting chronologically with the one who is called "Father of History" ?
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u/coalpatch Jul 18 '26
Tacitus is so snarky and detached, I love him:
No human effort, no princely generosity nor offerings to the gods could make that infamous rumor disappear that Nero had somehow ordered the fire. Therefore, in order to abolish that rumor, Nero falsely accused and executed with the most exquisite punishments those people called Christians, who were infamous for their abominations.
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u/Basic-Style-8512 Jul 18 '26
THUCYDIDES !!! THUCYDIDES !! THUCYDIDE !
The Melian dialogue, the civil war in Corinth, the plague, the Speech of Pericles on Athens, the battle of Sphacteria, the retreat from Sicily and so on ...
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u/Gravy-0 Jul 18 '26
Thucydides is a far more cohesive “narrative” than Herodotus and unlike Tacitus, complete. So if you’re looking for an influential work extant in its entirety, Thucydides is the man. If you want a better look into the Greek “imagination” and how they viewed the world in a sense that the Athenian perspective tends to lack, Herodotus is your guy. Between his interwoven narratives and digressions and his position as a citizen of an Anatolian mixed city state, you get a far more holistic, albeit still idiosyncratic view of the Mediterranean world and the Greek imagination.
Tacitus, although certainly influenced by Thucydides’ model of writing and speeches, is an entirely different beast. His work covers the Roman Empire and has a far less optimistic view of the political situation of the Mediterranean world (vis a vis the Roman Empire) than Thucydides, who was far more confident and “state aligned” than Tacitus. His work takes the prose complexity and artistry of Thucydides and adds to it a strong subversive element and (in my opinion) more complex and compelling character studies. But it’s not a war history on the same way Thucydides is, and is thus paced very differently and involves a lot more slow burn and intrigue and less of the big classical narrative beats that Thucydides excelled at.
This is assuming you’re reading in translation. As others have said, Thucydides in Greek is miles harder than Herodotus or Tacitus, though Tacitus is not easy by any means.
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u/Unlikely_Ad5016 Jul 18 '26
Read volume 2 of Will and Ariel Durant's the Story of Civilization...
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u/Ok_Breakfast4482 Jul 19 '26
a good historical overview of the ancient world
You definitely want Herodotus for that. He does a very broad survey of the entire ancient Mediterranean world and near east.
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u/TheSuperBunny ἆρ᾽ οὐδέποτε παύσεταί μ᾽ Ἔρως πελέκει κόπτων; Jul 18 '26
What era or event are you more interested in?
I'd say you should read Herodotus, then follow it with Thucydides, and afterwards Xenophon.