Appian

Appian of Alexandria was a Greek-speaking historian and Roman citizen who lived in the second century CE. Born in Alexandria, probably around the end of the first century, he pursued a legal and administrative career before settling at Rome, where he eventually obtained the rank of procurator. Little is securely known about his private life, but his writings show an educated provincial elite deeply interested in the long process by which Rome conquered the Mediterranean and then turned its military power inward during the late Republic.

Appian organised his Roman History largely by peoples and wars rather than as a single year-by-year narrative. The surviving Civil Wars are especially valuable because they preserve material on the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, and the triumviral conflicts from earlier histories that are now lost. His chronology and interpretation can be difficult, and he wrote centuries after many events he describes, but the breadth of his source material makes him indispensable for reconstructing the political violence that destroyed the Roman Republic.

Appian’s own The Civil Wars is the central linked work: its surviving books trace Rome’s internal conflicts from the Gracchi through Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, and the wars of the triumviral age. Because Appian wrote in the second century CE from earlier sources now largely lost, the work is both the principal reason for his historical importance and a crucial, if sometimes difficult, witness to the collapse of the Roman Republic.