Ancient Rome

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.

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.

Almost everything vivid about Cleopatra, her wit, her languages, her death, comes from Roman writers who had reason to make her either glamorous or monstrous, and rarely both at once.

The two earliest accounts of the vision that supposedly turned Constantine to Christianity do not even agree on whether he was asleep or awake when he saw it.

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.

Caesar wrote his own war reports to sell his campaigns back home, and his account of the Gallic Wars is still the main source historians have for what happened in them.

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.

-600

Almost everything known about Rome's conquest of Gaul comes from the conqueror's own dispatches home, and his casualty figures do not survive contact with basic arithmetic.

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

476

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.

Rome's own historians wrote its early conquest of Italy centuries after the fact, and modern archaeology increasingly disagrees with the story they told about it.

Rome's move from republic to empire was declared in a single year, 27 BC, but historians still argue whether anything about the republic it replaced was still real by then.

410