Sicily

PSI Inv. 6 recto: a second-century CE papyrus fragment preserving the opening of Diodorus's Bibliotheca Historica (I.1.5–11) — among the earliest surviving manuscript witnesses to the work, almost certainly from the first column of the roll. LDAB 10472; MP³ 342.01.

Bibliotheca Historica

Reading companion for Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca Historica — the most ambitious universal history to survive from antiquity, the sole continuous Greek narrative of the wars of the Diadochi, and the largest single repository of lost Hellenistic historiography.

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1848, fol. 48v — opening of Livy Book 23, illuminated by Bartolomeo della Gatta, Rome, c. 1475–1480

Ab Urbe Condita, Volume VI: Books 23–25

Reading companion and full text of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, Volume VI (Books 23–25), translated by F. G. Moore — the aftermath of Cannae, the defection and eventual siege of Capua, the fall of Syracuse and death of Archimedes, and the reverses in Spain.

Nearly 2,300 years ago, a reader in provincial Egypt owned a copy of one of history's greatest works. This fragile papyrus preserves part of Thucydides' account of the Battle of Sphacteria — where a force of Spartan soldiers did the unthinkable and surrendered. Among the oldest manuscripts of Thucydides anywhere in the world, it bridges the ancient and modern transmission of a text that has never stopped being read. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV.36–41 · el-Hibeh, Egypt · Penn Museum, E 2747.

History of the Peloponnesian War

Reading companion for Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War — the foundational text of Western historiography.