Classical

Alaric spent most of his career trying to win a legitimate place inside the Roman military system, and the sack of Rome looks like his last resort after every offer to negotiate one was refused.

Most of what carries Aristotle's name reached us through students and editors, not Aristotle's own hand for publication, and that fact shapes how confidently anyone can say what he actually thought.

Augustus's genius was making autocracy look like a restored Republic, and almost every source describing how he did it was written by him or long after him.

No Carthaginian account of Hannibal survives, so everything known about his reasoning comes filtered through the historians of the enemy he spent fourteen years fighting in Italy.

The Meditations show Marcus Aurelius arguing with himself about duty in the middle of a war he never asked for, but the notebook carries almost no dates and cannot serve as its own history.

Every detailed account of Nero was written decades after his death by a senatorial class his reign had offended, and the three main sources cannot even agree with each other on what happened.

The funeral oration that shaped centuries of democratic thought may not be his own words at all; even Thucydides admitted reconstructing it from memory.

Even the meaning of his own name is disputed, and scholars still cannot agree whether the Socrates in his dialogues speaks with his teacher's voice or Plato's own.

He wrote nothing himself, so the man scholars still argue over is entirely a construction of students, satirists and a philosopher born after his death.

No original copy of the Edict of Milan survives, historians increasingly doubt it was ever a formal edict at all, and it did not make Christianity Rome's religion, whatever the name suggests.

79

Thucydides wrote the fullest surviving account of this war while much of it was still happening, and openly admits reconstructing the speeches in it rather than transcribing them.

Carthage came close to winning the first war outright and held Rome off in Italy for fourteen years during the second, yet the only history of any of it survives through the eyes of the winner.

410