Fascinating Obscure Texts from Ancient Greece and Rome

People often talk about the texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have been lost, but it is worth noting that there are many fascinating texts from ancient Greece and Rome that have survived that are totally obscure and seldom ever read. In this post, I would like to highlight some of these works and hopefully bring them to somewhat greater attention.

Some of the texts I am about to list are better known than others, but the vast majority of them are texts that a person could at least in theory go through an entire undergraduate degree in classics without ever encountering. You will notice that this list skews heavily toward Greek texts over Roman; this is because my main area of interest is in Greek history, so I tend to be more familiar with obscure Greek texts than with obscure Roman texts. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Classical Greek texts

The Greek sophist Gorgias of Leontinoi (lived c. 483 – c. 375 BCE) seems to have relished showcasing his skill as a rhetorician by making persuasive-sounding arguments for ideas that seem intuitively ridiculous.

He wrote a treatise titled On Nonexistence, in which he argues that nothing exists; that, even if something did exist, it would be impossible to know anything about that thing; that, even if something did exist and it were possible to know anything about it, that knowledge could never be communicated; and, finally, that, even if something did exist, it were possible to know something about it, and it were possible to communicate that knowledge, it would be impossible for anyone to understand it.

Sadly, the treatise has not survived, but two lengthy summaries of it, one in Sextos Empeirikos’s Against the Logicians 7.65–86 and one in Pseudo-Aristotle’s On Melissos, Xenophanes, and Gorgias 5–6, have survived.

Gorgias also wrote speeches defending the actions of two prominent figures from Greek mythology, both of which have survived to the present day. The Encomium of Helene is a speech written in Gorgias’s voice defending Helene of Troy, in which he argues that Helene is not in any way responsible for causing the Trojan War. Meanwhile, his Defense of Palamedes is (as the title might suggest) a defense of the Achaian hero Palamedes, whom the Achaians are said to have executed for treason, written in Palamedes’s own voice, as though it were meant for him to deliver at his own trial.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of an Apulian red-figure bell-krater by the Painter of Stockholm dating to between c. 380 and c. 370 BCE, depicting Helene and Paris, now held in the Louvre Museum. Gorgias wrote a speech defending Helene of Troy.

The Dissoi Logoi or Double Arguments is an anonymous Greek rhetorical treatise dating to the end of the fifth century BCE that first explains how to argue for one perspective and then turns around and explains how to argue for exactly the opposite perspective.

The Greek poet Erinna probably lived at some point in the fourth century BCE. It is not known for certain where she was born, but the city of Teos on the western coast of Asia Minor may be the most likely candidate for her birthplace. Her best-known work is her fragmentary poem The Distaff, a lament for her friend Baukis, who is said to have died young. The poem was probably originally three hundred lines and is composed in dactylic hexameter in a mix of Dorian and Aiolic Greek.

Three additional complete poems attributed to Erinna are preserved in the Greek Anthology. Scholars debate whether she actually wrote these poems; some think she didn’t write any of them, some think she wrote some of them, and some think she wrote all of them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of PSI 1090, a papyrus fragment bearing a portion of the text of Erinna’s Distaff

The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) is easily one of the most widely known ancient Greek writers. At least twenty-six philosophical dialogues written by him have survived to the present day and are well known. Few people are aware, though, that, in addition to his surviving dialogues, there are also thirteen surviving supposed personal letters attributed to him. Of these letters, only one (the Seventh Epistle) might actually be authentic; the others are all generally agreed to be much later forgeries written by other people under Plato’s name.

The Athenian writer Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) is famous for works such as his Anabasis, his Hellenika, and his Kyrou Paideia, as well as his major Socratic works such as his Apologia of Socrates, his Memorabilia or Memoirs of Socrates, and his Symposion, but he also wrote some lesser-known works about fairly everyday topics. For instance, he wrote a Socratic dialogue about household management titled Oikonomikos or The Estate Manager, which is an invaluable source of information about what daily household management was like on a Greek aristocratic estate in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE.

Xenophon also wrote a treatise titled On Horsemanship, in which he gives directions on how to buy, keep, train, and ride a horse, and On Hunting, in which he gives directions on how to hunt, including how to keep, train, and use hunting dogs. All of these works have survived to the present day complete.

The Athenian orator Isokrates (lived 436 – 338 BCE), who was an older, but much longer-lived contemporary of Xenophon, is a relatively famous author. Among his more obscure surviving works, though, is an oration titled Bousiris, in which he heaps extravagant praise upon the legendary Egyptian lawgiver Bousiris. The work is interesting because it reflects an idealizing Greek perception of ancient Egypt. Isokrates also wrote his own Encomium of Helene in imitation of Gorgias.

The Greek poet Archestratos of Sicily (fl. c. mid-fourth century BCE) wrote a comedic didactic poem in dactylic hexameter titled Hedypatheia (sometimes given the alternate title Gastronomia), which is all about how someone is to go about finding various items of fine cuisine. Sixty-two fragments of the poem have survived to the present day, all of them preserved through quotation by the much later writer Athenaios of Naukratis (who I will discuss later in this post) in his Deipnosophistai or Wise Men at Dinner. The surviving portions of the poem discuss fish, wine, and appetizers.

ABOVE: Title page of an 1842 printed edition of the surviving fragments of Archestratos’s Hedypatheia or Gastronomia

The Batrochomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and the Mice is an anonymous comic mock epic poem that was most likely written in around the late fourth century BCE. It is composed in dactylic hexameters, much like the Iliad or the Odyssey, and it very much imitates the epic poetic style of Homer, but, instead of being about a war involving legendary mortal heroes, it is about a war between frogs and mice.

The poem begins with King Physignathos of the frogs offering to give Prince Psycharpax of the mice a ride on his back across a pond. Midway through their journey, though, Physignathos sees a water snake and, panicked, dives under the water to hide from it, forgetting that Psycharpax is riding on his back. Psycharpax, who cannot swim, drowns. Another mouse sees this happening and mistakenly concludes that Physignathos deliberately lured Psycharpax out into the middle of the pond in order to drown him. He runs to tell the other mice and the mice declare war against the frogs.

Naturally, the Olympian deities take notice of this conflict and start taking sides, showing partiality for either the frogs or the mice in the same way that they support either the Trojans or the Achaians in the Iliad. In the end, the mice win the day and Zeus is forced to send an army of armored crabs to stop them from committing complete genocide against the frogs.

ABOVE: Illustration from an 1878 illustrated edition of a German translation of The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, showing the frogs and the mice battling

At some point in the mid-to-late fourth century BCE, a woman named Philainis of Samos supposedly wrote a sex manual titled Περὶ Ἀφροδισίων, which literally means something like On Aphrodisian Matters or, less euphemistically, On Sexual Pleasures. This sex manual was notorious in antiquity and is referenced in many surviving texts.

For millennia, the text itself was thought to have been lost, but, around the turn of the twentieth century, the British archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt excavated fragments of a papyrus roll bearing portions of a manual claiming to have been written by Philainis in the rubbish dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt. In 1972, the papyrologist Edgar Lobel published the editio princeps (i.e., first published edition) of the three surviving fragments of the Oxyrhynchos sex manual attributed to Philainis as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2891, fr. 1–3.

The fragments include the beginning of the introduction and a few fragmentary passages from near the beginning of the treatise. They don’t contain anything particularly salacious and there is scholarly disagreement over whether the treatise was intended as a serious work or a work of parody. In any case, our ability to interpret the text is severely limited by the fact that the vast majority of it remains lost.

ABOVE: Photograph from the website Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts: Virtual Exhibition showing Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2891, fr. 1–3, bearing portions of the introduction to On Aphrodisian Matters, attributed to Philainis of Samos

The Greek philosopher Theophrastos of Eresos (lived c. 371 – c. 287 BCE) wrote a work titled On Moral Characters, which is a series of thirty brief character sketches describing specific personality types. Probably the most famous of these character sketches is the description of the “superstitious man,” which preserves invaluable information about some of the superstitions that were common in Greece in the late fourth and early third centuries BCE.

The obscure Greek writer Palaiphatos, who most likely flourished in around the late fourth century BCE, making him roughly a contemporary of Theophrastos, wrote a rather hilarious treatise titled On Incredible Tales, which I have previously discussed at greater length in this post I wrote in January 2020 about whether the ancient Greeks really believed in their myths.

In the treatise, Palaiphatos starts out with the assumption that all myths must ultimately have some basis in historical reality, but he holds that the versions of the myths that are commonly told are ridiculous and cannot possibly be true. He therefore systematically goes through various stories from Greek mythology and tries to provide rational-sounding explanations for them.

For instance, the first myth he addresses is the myth of the centaurs. He argues that, maybe, the myth might have arisen when people saw raiders on horseback fleeing into the distance from behind, so that it looked like they had the upper bodies of men and the lower bodies of horses.

A single biblion (i.e., what would have originally been one roll of papyrus) of Palaiphatos’s On Incredible Tales has survived to the present day. It is unclear whether this is the complete original text, the first biblion of what were originally several, or an epitome of a work that was originally much longer.

ABOVE: Roman mosaic from the dining room of Hadrian’s Villa dating to between c. 120 and c. 130 CE depicting a battle between centaurs and wild animals

Hellenistic Greek texts

Anyte was an ancient Greek poet from the city of Tegea in Arkadia who flourished in around the late fourth or early third century BCE. Twenty-five complete poems attributed to her are preserved in the Palatine Anthology, of which she is generally agreed to have written at least nineteen, making her possibly the best-attested female poet from ancient Greece.

Her poems are written in an unusual blend of Doric, Attic, and Homeric Greek and modern scholars have generally dismissed them as possessing little literary merit. She is still, however, of historical and literary interest because she is one of the very few female authors with any works that have survived to the present day.

Nossis was an ancient Greek poet from the city of Epizephyrian Lokroi in southern Italy who lived in around the early third century BCE. She drew inspiration from Sappho and possibly also Erinna and Anyte. Twelve complete poems attributed to her are preserved in the Palatine Anthology. Her surviving poems are mostly religious dedications and epitaphs, but Meleagros of Gadara (fl. c. first century BCE), who compiled one of the anthologies that later became incorporated into the Palatine Anthology, says that she mostly wrote poems about love.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a bust by the Italian sculptor Francesco Jerace (lived 1853 – 1937) depicting what he imagined Nossis might have looked like. (No one knows what she actually looked like.)

As I previously mentioned in this post I wrote in June 2021 about the survival of works of ancient Greek drama, there was a Jewish tragic playwright named Ezekiel the Tragedian who lived in Alexandria at some point in around the third century BCE who wrote an adaptation of the Jewish story of the Exodus in the Greek language in the form of a Greek tragedy, with Moses as the protagonist. God himself even has a speaking role, which suggests that an actor portrayed him on stage! Roughly 269 lines of the play, comprising somewhere between one fifth and one fourth of the complete play, have survived to the present day.

Phintys, daughter of Kallikrates, was apparently a Greek Pythagorean philosopher in the third or second century BCE. Two lengthy extracts from a treatise attributed to her titled On the Moderation of Women have been preserved through quotation by the Greek anthologist Ioannes Stobaios, who lived in around the fifth century CE.

The surviving extracts from the treatise focus on correct female behavior, which it distinguishes from correct male behavior. The extracts argue in favor of women being allowed to study philosophy, maintaining that the study of philosophy is open to all sexes. They also, however, urge women to uphold traditionally feminine virtues, be absolutely faithful and obedient to their husbands, only ever have sex with their husbands, bear their husbands children, dress in modest clothing, stay at home and manage the household, not participate in the orgia (i.e., nocturnal religious rites) associated with the cult of Kybele, and show piety with respect to the deities.

Some scholars, including Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, think that Phintys either never really existed or never actually wrote the treatise attributed to her and that it was actually written by a man writing under a female pseudonym as a rhetorical exercise.

The Hellenistic Greek poet Nikandros of Kolophon, who flourished in roughly the 130s BCE, wrote a poem titled Alexipharmaka, which is all about different kinds of poisons, how they kill their victims differently (complete with graphic descriptions of people dying of poisons in all sorts of horrifying ways), and how to treat someone who has been poisoned with them. He also wrote a poem titled Theriaka, which is all about different kinds of poisonous animals and how they kill their victims differently.

ABOVE: Illustration from a Byzantine Roman manuscript copy of Nikandros of Kolophon’s Theriaka, dating to the tenth century CE

Texts dating to the early Principate

The Appendix Vergiliana is a collection of poems in the Latin language that are traditionally said to have been the juvenilia of the eminent Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro (lived 70 – 19 BCE), better known in English as “Vergil,” who is best known today as the author of the Aeneid, the most famous epic poem in the Latin language. In reality, virtually all modern scholars agree that the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana were not actually written by Vergil and that they are actually the works of various unknown minor poets. Nonetheless, they are worth reading for their own value.

One of the more peculiar poems included in the Appendix Vergiliana is “Culex,” which means “The Gnat,” an epyllion or mini-epic that was most likely composed during the reign of the emperor Tiberius (ruled 14 – 37 CE). In the poem, a shepherd who lies down to sleep in a grove of trees kills a gnat and the gnat subsequently appears to him in his dream to tell him about the underworld and all the dead heroes it has seen there. When he wakes up, the shepherd builds a heroön, or hero shrine, to the gnat.

Another interesting poem included in the Appendix Vergiliana is “Moretum,” which describes a poor farmer named Simylus making moretum, a kind of ancient Roman herb cheese spread similar to pesto. As I previously mentioned in this article I wrote in November 2020 debunking the Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s speech that year about the so-called “First Thanksgiving,” the “Moretum” is the source of the phrase “E pluribus unum,” which is a traditional national motto of the United States that appears on the Great Seal of the United States and on U.S. currency.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of moretum, an ancient Roman herb cheese spread

The Periplous of the Erythraian Sea is a work that was written in the Greek language at some point between c. 40 and c. 70 CE by an anonymous author who probably lived in the major port city of Berenike Troglodytika, which is located along the east coast of Egypt along the Red Sea.

The periplous describes the trade networks of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in considerable detail and talks about various important centers of trade. It is interesting because it reveals much about trade in the ancient world and the knowledge that well-traveled merchants from Roman Egypt had of cultures far away from the Mediterranean.

The periplous describes in great detail the many trade centers of East Africa. The southernmost trade center that is mentioned is the city of Rhapta, which is believed to have been located on the coast of what is now Tanzania. The periplous also describes in great detail many trade centers located as far east as the Ganges River in eastern India. The author of the periplous seems to have been aware of the existence of China, but it is clear that he had never actually visited China himself, since his description of it is very vague and lacks details.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the locations and trade routes described in the Periplous of the Erythraian Sea

Pamphile of Epidauros was a prolific Greek historian and essayist who flourished in around the middle of the first century CE. She was best known in antiquity for her Ἱστορικὰ Ὑπομνήματα, or Historical Commentaries, a collection of disjointed and miscellaneous historical anecdotes that spanned thirty-three biblia.

This work is especially significant because it is the earliest known work in the genre of miscellaneous history, which is exemplified through the surviving works of later male authors. Dina Guth of the University of Manitoba has argued that Pamphile may invented this genre and its known eccentricities as part of her self-fashioning of her own voice as a female historian.

According the Souda, a Byzantine Roman encyclopedia in the Greek language written in around the tenth century CE, Pamphile also wrote many other works, including an epitome of the writings of the earlier historian Ktesias of Knidos in three biblia, a work titled On Controversies, which might have been a collection of essays on controversial topics, and a work titled On Aphrodisian Matters, which was probably a sex manual following in the tradition of Philainis.

Sadly, no work that is known to have certainly been written by Pamphile has survived to the present day, but her Historical Commentaries is relatively well attested for a lost work from antiquity, since the later male writers Aulus Gellius (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) and Diogenes Laërtios (fl. c. third century CE) reference it extensively in their surviving works and the medieval Greek bishop Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) includes a book review of it in his Bibliotheke or Myriobiblos 175. I have written a whole blog post that is solely about Pamphile for those who wish to learn more about her.

One surviving work that Deborah Levine Gera has argued might have been written by Pamphile is the Treatise on Women Famous in War, an anonymous compendium of fourteen short biographies of famous women from ancient history written in the Greek language. Gera argues that this work matches what Photios says about Pamphile’s style in his review of her Historical Commentaries and that the subject matter of the treatise matches what is known about Pamphile’s interests. (Notably, the work draws heavily on Ktesias, of whose works Pamphile is known to have written an epitome.)

Regardless of whether Pamphile really wrote it, the Treatise on Women Famous in War is a fascinating and unusual work for a number of reasons. All the women whose lives are described in the treatise are said to have lived in historical times, not the mythical age of heroes, and they are all said to have wielded immense power and influence, either as rulers themselves, through influence over kings, or through influence over large numbers of people.

Additionally, the work shows peculiar interest in non-Greek, non-Roman cultures. None of the women discussed in the work are Roman and only a handful of them are Greek; the vast majority of them are so-called “barbarians.”

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the city of Pompeii dating to between c. 10 BCE and c. 45 CE, depicting the Trojan prince Aineias with Queen Dido of Carthage, who is the subject of one of the biographies included in the Treatise on Women Famous in War

On a completely different note, the Carmina Priapeia is a collection of eighty anonymous poems written in the Latin language in diverse meters dating to the first and early second centuries CE. There is disagreement about whether the poems in the collection were written by one author or many, but all the poems center around the common theme of the fertility god Priapos, whom the ancient Greeks and Romans represented as having an enormous, permanently erect penis.

As might naturally be expected, given the risqué theme, the poems are all extremely filthy. Many of them involve Priapos issuing severe threats of all kinds of sexual punishments against anyone who might dare to trespass on the gardens he protects, including oral, anal, and vaginal rape. The collection is interesting, sometimes funny and sometimes disturbing, to read. It reveals a filthy side of the ancient Romans that not all modern people have encountered.

ABOVE: Fresco from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, dating to the first century CE, depicting the phallic god Priapos weighing his absurdly massive penis on a set of scales

The Greek writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE) wrote a travel guide to Greece titled Description of Greece or The Guide to Greece, in which he describes all the major sites and tourist attractions of the Greek world in the second century CE. The whole work has survived to the present day.

Pausanias’s travel guide is considered an invaluable source of information for Greek archaeology, because it provides the only surviving ancient descriptions of many archaeological sites. It is also an invaluable source for the study of Greek religion, mythology, and folklore, because Pausanias retells many ancient local legends and religious traditions that are not found in any other sources.

ABOVE: Illustration from the first page of a manuscript of Pausanias’s Guide to Greece held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, copied in around 1485, including an illustration of what the manuscript illustrator imagined Pausanias himself might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

The Syrian writer Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) has over eighty works that have survived to the present, nearly all of which are works of hilarious satire. His longest and most famous surviving work is his novel A True Story, which, as I summarize at greater length in this post I wrote in January 2020 about surviving ancient Greek and Roman novels, is a satire against people who tell incredible tales and try to pass them off as true.

The novel begins with an introduction in which Loukianos informs the reader that absolutely nothing they are about to read is true. He then goes on to tell a wild tale about all kinds of crazy adventures he supposedly went on with his companions. They journey out into the Atlantic Ocean, discover a new land with a river of wine and trees that look like women, have their ship caught in a tornado and taken to the moon, participate in an interplanetary war between the king of the moon and the king of the sun, involving all sorts of bizarre extraterrestrial life forms.

They then live on the moon for a while, return to earth, get swallowed by a giant whale, fight a war against fish people in the whale’s belly, escape from the whale, visit the Underworld, meet all the heroes of the Trojan War, along with renowned poets and philosophers of old, and (ironically) see the famous historians Herodotos and Ktesias being tortured for all the “lies” they told. The novel leaves off mid-narrative with the promise that the story will be continued in an upcoming sequel—except no sequel was ever written, because everything in the book is a lie.

Some of Loukianos’s other surviving works include The Lover of Lies (a dialogue making fun of superstitious beliefs), Alexandros the False Prophet (a satirical work making fun of the religious leader Alexandros of Abonoteichos, whom Loukianos portrays as a charlatan), Dialogues of the Gods (a set of satirical dialogues making fun of the Greek deities), Dialogues of the Dead (a series of satirical dialogues making fun of traditional beliefs about the afterlife), Dialogues of the Courtesans (a series of satirical dialogues involving various prostitutes), The Passing of Peregrinos (a satirical letter making fun of a man named Peregrinos that contains extensive mockery of early Christians), and Philosophies for Sale (a satire against contemporary philosophers).

Loukianos’s works were wildly popular in antiquity and he was considered a first-rank canonical author on par with Homer, Aristophanes, Plato, Cicero, Vergil, or Plutarch throughout the Italian Renaissance and the Early Modern Period. His writings fell out of favor with classical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in part due to the fact that scholars came to perceive him as superficial and lacking in “classical” seriousness, but also in part due to prejudice against him for his Syrian ethnic background.

For instance, the eminent German classicist Eduard Norden (lived 1868 – 1941) dismissed Loukianos and his literary output in his Die antike Kunstsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (first published in 1898), calling him “an Oriental without depth or character . . . who has no soul and degrades the most soulful language.”

ABOVE: Fictional seventeenth-century illustration by the English engraver William Faithorne depicting what he imagined Loukianos of Samosata might have looked like. (No one knows what Loukianos really looked like.)

The Roman grammarian Aulus Gellius (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE), who was almost an exact contemporary of Loukianos, wrote a work in Latin titled Noctes Atticae or Attic Nights, which is considered a “commonplace book.” It’s an interesting collection of disjointed and miscellaneous anecdotes, legends, notes, musings, and “fun facts” (or, in many cases, factoids) collected from various sources. The style and organization of the work probably owe much to Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries, which it explicitly references. Unlike Pamphile’s Historical Commentaries, though, it has actually survived to the present day.

At some point during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 – 180 CE), most likely between the years 175 and 177 CE, an obscure Greek philosophical writer and controversialist named Kelsos wrote an anti-Christian polemic titled On the True Word, which was a full-out assault on Christian communities and Christian teachings, in which he denounced Christianity as a false and superstitious religion.

No complete manuscripts of Kelsos’s polemic have survived, but, in around 248 CE or thereabouts, the Christian scholar, theologian, and apologist Origenes of Alexandria wrote a response to Kelsos titled Against Kelsos, in which he quotes large portions of On the True Word and summarizes the portions of the work that he does not quote, thereby accidentally preserving for posterity all or nearly all of Kelsos’s arguments and very large portions of his actual text. On the True Word is fascinating because it provides a uniquely direct glimpse into the arguments that philosophically-minded opponents of Christianity were making in the late second century CE.

ABOVE: Photo of the beginning of Origenes’s Against Kelsos, Book Eight, in Manuscript Grec 945, a handwritten manuscript copy dating to the fifteenth century CE

The Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodoros is a mythographic work written in the Greek language. Although the work has traditionally been attributed to the Hellenistic grammarian Apollodoros of Athens (lived c. 180 – after c. 120 BCE), it has definitively been shown that the work cannot possibly have been written by him. Modern scholars therefore refer to the author of the work as “Pseudo-Apollodoros.”

The date of the work cannot be settled with exactness, but it was most likely written in the first or second century CE. The first three biblia of the work have survived to the present day complete, as well as an epitome of the later biblia that have not survived.

The Bibliotheke attempts to summarize all the stories of Greek mythology, including different versions of the same stories, in the same place. It can therefore be thought of in some sense as a kind of ancient handbook to help people understand mythology and be able to recognize mythic allusions in literature. Because the work seeks to be comprehensive and it tells some stories that are not attested in other extant sources, it is invaluable as a source of information about Greek mythology.

ABOVE: Title page of a modern printed edition of the Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodoros from 1805

There are five ancient romance novels written in the Greek language during the Roman Principate that have survived to the present day complete in the original Greek. Of the surviving ancient Greek romance novels, Leukippe and Kleitophon, which was written by Achilleus Tatios, an author who lived in Alexandria in the late second century CE, seems to have been the most popular in antiquity, since a number of surviving papyrus fragments of the novel have been found in Egypt, attesting that it was widely read.

The surviving ancient Greek romance novel that is probably best known today, though, is Daphnis and Chloë, a pastoral romance set on the Greek island of Lesbos that was written by an obscure Greek novelist named Longos of Lesbos, most likely in around the late second century CE.

ABOVE: Daphnis and Chloë, painted c. 1850 by the Swiss-French painter Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre, depicting how he imagined the central characters in the ancient Greek romance novel Daphnis and Chloë, written in around the late second century CE by Longos of Lesbos

Texts dating to the third century CE

The Roman orator Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE) wrote two works of miscellaneous history in the Greek language that have survived to the present day. The longer of the two works is On the Nature of Animals, a collection of disjointed and miscellaneous notes, anecdotes, legends, and fables about animals spanning seventeen biblia. The shorter of the two works is Miscellaneous History, a collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, legends, and “fun facts” (or, again, in many cases, factoids) about history more generally that spans fourteen biblia.

The Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis (fl. c. late second – c. early third centuries CE) was a contemporary of Klaudios Ailianos who was born in the Greek city of Naukratis in Egypt. He wrote a rather peculiar work in fifteen biblia titled Deipnosophistai or Wise Men at Dinner, which is written in the format of an extended dialogue set at a Greek symposion, or drinking party, involving twenty-four named speakers, all of whom are surpassingly well-read.

The speakers in the dialogue discuss a wide array of different topics, including history, literature, philosophy, rhetoric, grammar, food, sex, and much else. They also quote many extended passages from earlier works of Greek literature, including many passages from obscure works that Athenaios had access to at the time that have since been lost.

In some cases, the passages that Athenaios’s speakers quote in the dialogue are the only passages from those works that have survived. For instance, all sixty-two fragments of Archestratos’s Hedypatheia that have survived have survived solely through quotation in Athenaios’s Deipnosophistai. Because of this, Athenaios’s work is of incalculable value for the study of ancient Greek cultural history.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the title page of a printed edition of Athenaios’s Deipnosophistai or Wise Men at Dinner from 1535

Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) was a Greek sophist who wrote at least five surviving works. Between c. 217 and c. 238 CE, he wrote a lengthy work titled The Life of Apollonios of Tyana, which chronicles the life and deeds of the Neopythagorean philosopher Apollonios of Tyana (lived c. 3 BCE – c. 97 CE).

Apollonios was almost certainly a real historical figure, but Philostratos’s account of his life records many legends that are not historically trustworthy and is probably partly fictionalized. The work is fascinating and well-written. It is of particular interest in part because Apollonios was a contemporary of Jesus and Philostratos tells many of the same kinds of stories about him as are told about Jesus in the Christian gospels. As I discuss in this article I wrote back in October 2021 about the origins of Halloween monsters, it also includes a very famous ancient story of a vampire-like revenant.

Between c. 231 and c. 237 CE, Philostratos wrote another work about the lives of famous Greek orators titled Lives of the Sophists. This work covers the lives of both Classical orators like Gorgias of Leontinoi and later orators of the Second Sophistic era who lived under the Roman Empire like Favorinus of Arelate, Polemon of Laodikeia, Herodes Attikos, and Ailios Aristeides.

In addition to the works I have already mentioned, Philostratos’s other three surviving works are his Heroikos (a dialogue between a vine-tender and a Phoenician traveler, in which they discuss the lesser-known mythical Achaian hero Protesilaos), his Gymnastikos (a work about athletic contests), and his Epistles (a collection of somewhat racy love letters).

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a statue of a wandering philosopher dating to the second century CE, found at Gortyn on the island of Krete, currently held in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum, believed by some to be a depiction of Apollonios of Tyana, the subject of Philostratos’s biography

Diogenes Laërtios (fl. c. third century CE) was a Greek writer who wrote a collection of biographies of famous Greek philosophers titled The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The work has survived to the present day complete and is chock-full with all sorts of colorful and entertaining anecdotes.

Diogenes often repeats stories that he has read uncritically. Consequently, his work is only as trustworthy as the sources he was relying on. Sadly, much of the time, he does not cite his sources, making it difficult to assess his reliability. Nonetheless, his work is one of the most valuable surviving sources about the lives of ancient Greek philosophers and the history of ancient philosophy, if only because so many other sources that might have been more reliable have been lost.

Diogenes also helpfully preserves many writings and fragments of philosophers that otherwise would have been lost. He notably seems to have been something of an admirer of the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epikouros of Samos (lived 341 – 270 BCE) and he devotes the entirety of the tenth biblion of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers to an in-depth description of Epikouros’s teachings.

In this description, he quotes the full text of three letters attributed to Epikouros himself, at least two of which Epikouros is generally agreed to have really written, and a collection of quotes from Epikouros known as the Principal Doctrines. These writings have been preserved solely through Diogenes Laërtios’s quotation of them.

ABOVE: Engraved illustration from a 1688 edition of Diogenes Laërtios’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers showing what the illustrator imagined Diogenes Laërtios might have looked like. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Texts dating to late antiquity

Metrodora was a physician and medical writer who flourished at some point in the third, fourth, or fifth century CE. She wrote a treatise on medicine in the Greek language titled On the Diseases and Cures of Women, which has survived to the present day complete in two biblia. The treatise primarily discusses matters of gynecology, including treatments for vaginal infections, but it also discusses general medicine, including treatments for hemorrhoids and hair removal. It is believed to be the oldest surviving medical text written by a woman.

The Philogelos is a late antique jokebook written in the Greek language, most likely in around the fourth century CE. The jokes it contains have an affinity with Greek New Comedy and rely primarily on making fun of popular stereotypes. For instance, it includes many jokes making fun of ditzy intellectuals, eunuchs, people from the cities of Abdera, Kyme, and Sidon, men with hernias, grouchy old men, misers, and men with bad breath.

The Apicius or, more properly, De Re Coquinaria is a late antique Roman cookbook written in a form of Latin very close to Vulgar Latin. It was most likely compiled in the late fourth or early fifth century CE, relying on older cookbooks that have not survived. It contains many ancient Roman recipes and provides invaluable information about the kinds of foods the Romans ate.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a medieval manuscript copy dating to c. 900 CE of the ancient Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, which was originally compiled in around the late fourth or early fifth century CE

Koïntos of Smyrna was a Greek poet who flourished in around the late fourth century CE and is known today for his epic poem Posthomerica or The Fall of Troy, which retells all the mythical events of the Trojan War that are said to have taken place after the point where the Iliad ends.

The Posthomerica begins with the funeral of Hektor and concludes with a terrible storm scattering the Achaian ships as they are sailing back home from Troy. The poem is fourteen biblia in length. It is composed in dactylic hexameter and Homeric Greek and clearly imitates the style of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is seldom studied by classicists and is often dismissed as a work of inferior literary quality.

Nonnos of Panopolis was a poet who was born in the city of Akhmim or Panopolis in Egypt and flourished in around the fifth century CE. He composed his poems in the Greek language. He wrote two works that have survived. The shorter and probably earlier of the two works is his Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, a retelling of the narrative of the Gospel of John in poetic verse.

The longer and probably later of Nonnos’s two surviving works is the Dionysiaka, an epic poem in dactylic hexameter in Homeric Greek about the history, deeds, and adventures of the god Dionysos. The poem is 20,426 lines long and it spans forty-eight biblia, making it longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. It is by far the longest surviving epic poem ever composed in antiquity in either the Greek or the Latin language.

Despite being such an extraordinarily long work and one of the very few epic poems from antiquity that have survived to the present day complete, the Dionysiaka is rarely studied and has generally been regarded for centuries as a work of inferior literary quality.

There have been efforts to reassess the Dionysiaka in recent years and there is growing recognition that, although its baroque style with lots of invented words and perpetual allusions to all kinds of different classical myths and texts may not be to modern readers’ taste, it is a work of extraordinary literary artistry. Nonetheless, Nonnos’s work remains seldom read.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman mosaic dating to the fourth century CE now held in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome depicting Dionysos fighting Indians, a conflict also described in Nonnos’s Dionysiaka