Dionysius of Halicarnassus
This project was inspired by this outline of Livy Books 1-5.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek antiquarian and rhetorician. He lived in Rome, working as a teacher of rhetoric and collecting information for his work Roman Antiquities. He lived during the 1st century BC and is considered an important source for early Roman history.
Living as a Greek of the 1st century BC under Roman rule, Dionysius, along with his fellow countrymen, had to come to terms with Roman rule. Born just three years after the death of Greece's last real hope for liberation from Rome, Mithridates the Great, Dionysius grew up in a Greece that was solidly controlled by the Italian power. As he presents in chapter five of book one, he must reconcile how Fortune can bestow the blessing of the Greeks upon a foreign power. Well, of course, the answer is right there for anyone who examines the evidence carefully: the Romans are naturally Greek in origin. To us, perhaps, his solution is laughable, but the cultural, political, and social forces involved in his conclusion are significant.
Although we have to look at his work with a critical eye, he often goes on wordy tangents which have endured the millennia, providing historians with a better glimpse into the past. He often presents us with conflicting accounts of events, giving us copious amounts of data to be able to analyze as we attempt to shed some light on a dimly recorded era.
Links to my outlines are found below. Within each page, I have also provided a link to Bill Thayer's page where he has published the public domain English text of the Loeb edition of Roman Antiquities. Plutarch references have been linked to their corresponding page of the text on Bill Thayer's site (also the Loeb version). I have linked the Livy citations to the Perseus text of Livy.
Note on dates in the project: Especially for the earliest books, the dates (and even existence of certain figures) are highly contested by modern scholars. In the interest of simplicity, I am sticking to the traditionally attested dates. When Dionysius gives us a specific date (usually given according to the Olympiad system of timekeeping) I give it according to the modern Western calendar. When the traditional date conflicts with Dionysius, I opt to give Dionysius' reckoning instead.
Header is from the Wikipedia page "Dionysius of Halicarnassus" titled: "Engraving depicting Dionysius of Halicarnassus from the Ambrosian Codex"