Appian of Alexandria lived in the early-to-mid second century AD, a time
when the pax Romana flourished. His Roman History traced, through a
series of ethnographic histories, the growth of Roman power throughout
Italy and the Mediterranean World. But Appian also told the story of the
civil wars which beset Rome from the time of Tiberius Gracchus to the
death of Sextus Pompeius Magnus. The standing of his work in modern
times is paradoxical. Consigned to the third rank by nineteenth-century
historiographers, and poorly served by translators, Appian's Roman
History profoundly shapes our knowledge of Republican Rome, its empire
and its internal politics. We need to know him better. This collection
of 15 new papers from a distinguished international team studies both
what Appian had to say and how he said it. The papers engage in a
dialogue about the value of Appian's text as a source of history, the
relationship between that history and his own times, and the impact on
his narrative of the author's own opinions - most notably that Rome
enjoyed divinely-ordained good fortune. Some authors demonstrate that
Appian's text (and even his mistakes) can yield significant new
information, others re-open the question of Appian's use of source
material in the light of recent studies showing him to be far more than
a transmitter of other people's work.
