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The many and varied works of the Greek historians of the Roman Empire in the first three centuries CE constitute a relatively neglected chapter in the cultural history of ancient Rome. Their literary accomplishments have been overshadowed by the cultural stars of the period, brilliant orators who performed before large audiences and who represent the 'second sophistic'.
This is a term coined by Philostratus in his ʻLives of the Sophists,̕ which included only one historian among the 40 biographies. Greek historiography was less performable than rhetorical set pieces and brilliant improvisations, its materials and subjects were more complex and dangerous than theatrical speeches, and the Greek historians were for the most part provincials with a provincial view of Rome. The Greek historians of the first three centuries CE can be considered a coherent literary and intellectual group. They mostly used a classicizing Greek and wrote in the style of Thucydides or Herodotus; they competed with, corrected, and polemicized with each other and across generations; as a group, they preferred panoramic, universal history; and they wrote subtly and critically about the Roman conquest of the Greek world. Given the decline of Latin historiography in the same period, these aspects of the Greek histories of Rome have exerted considerable influence on modern constructions of the history of the Roman Empire.
Jonathan J. Price is a professor of Classics and Ancient History at Tel Aviv University specializing in Greek and Roman historiography and Jewish epigraphy.