Everyone who wrote,
and what is left of it.

Rome's last major tragedian, adapting Greek plots with violent action and heavy rhetoric. He also wrote the Didascalica, a history of Greek and Latin drama. Some seven hundred lines survive from over forty plays.

One of the earliest Greek prose writers. He rewrote Hesiod as genealogy and argued with him, beginning the habit of testing a myth against another version of it.

The Suda says his book was copied from bronze tablets his father dug up: how antiquity explained an unexpectedly old text.

Athenian, pagan-born, daughter of a sophist; married Theodosius the Second, took the name Eudocia in place of Athenais, lost a court struggle with his sister, and retired to Jerusalem to build churches and write Christian poetry in Homer's own lines.

Italian who wrote only in Greek, and so well that he was nicknamed the honey-tongued. His animal book preserves hundreds of lost anecdotes because he never checked one and never threw one away.

Philostratus says he spoke Attic as purely as an Athenian, and that he never left Italy.

Grammarian at Rome in the 350s. His school primer was still being set for children a thousand years later, and Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, learned his Latin from him.

The first Roman to study his own language as a scholar. He taught Varro and Cicero, explained the archaic hymns of the Salian priests, and sorted the genuine Plautus from the forgeries.

He followed Metellus Numidicus into exile at Rhodes, out of friendship rather than politics.

A Veronese who put birds and snake venoms into hexameters, following Greek models. Ovid, still a young man, sat and listened to him read them aloud; about a dozen lines survive.

He died in Asia, Jerome says, in 16 BCE, on the road east.

He broke with the Academy and revived Pyrrho's suspension of judgement, organising the sceptical case into ten modes of conflicting appearance. His eight-book Pyrrhonian Discourses is lost; Photius summarised it in the ninth century.

Name attached to a short Doric treatise arguing that a person who examines their own soul finds in it the pattern of law, both for the household and for the city. The argument runs from self-knowledge outward to politics.

The fragment makes the tripartite soul a constitution: mind judges, spirit fights, desire loves, and justice is their proportion.

The earliest Greek tragedian whose plays survive. Seven of roughly ninety remain, among them the only complete trilogy, the Oresteia, which ends a chain of blood killings with a jury vote.

He fought at Marathon in 490 BCE, and his brother Cynegirus died there. The epitaph carved at Gela, in Sicily, where he died, records the battle and says nothing about the plays. He wrote perhaps ninety; seven survive. The Persians, staged in 472 with the young Pericles paying for the chorus, is the only Greek tragedy about recent events, and it seats the audience inside the Persian court at the moment the defeat is reported — an enemy's grief, performed for the victors eight years on. The Oresteia of 458 is the only complete trilogy to come down from Athens: a killing, a revenge killing, and then a jury, invented on stage, that ends the sequence by voting. Prometheus Bound is transmitted under his name, but its metre and staging point elsewhere and most scholars now assign it to a later hand, possibly his son Euphorion. He added the second actor, which is what made dialogue, and so drama, possible.

Tradition says an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone.

A slave on Samos in the sixth century BCE, according to Herodotus, and nothing else about him is certain. The fables gathered under his name were written down by other hands, centuries afterwards.

Herodotus, writing about a century later, calls him a slave on Samos belonging to a man named Iadmon, and a fellow slave of the courtesan Rhodopis. That is the only near-contemporary evidence that he existed at all. Everything else is accretion: that he was Phrygian or Thracian, that he was ugly, that he was mute until a goddess granted him speech, that the Delphians executed him on a planted charge of temple theft and were punished with a plague. He wrote nothing. The fables attached to his name were an oral stock anyone could draw on — Aristophanes and Plato quote them casually, as common property. Demetrius of Phalerum made the first written collection around 300 BCE, and it is lost. What we read comes through Phaedrus in Latin verse, Babrius in Greek verse, and the anonymous prose Augustana collection, all far later, all growing by addition. The fox and the grapes, the tortoise and the hare, the boy who cried wolf: anonymous property under a single name.

Herodotus mentions him once, in passing, as another slave in the same Samian household as a famous courtesan.

He wrote comedies in Roman dress rather than Greek, setting plots of the Menandrian kind among Italian families. Forty-two titles survive and no complete play. Cicero admired his language; his comedies were still staged under Nero.

A geographer at the Ptolemaic court whose account of the Red Sea coasts survives because a Byzantine patriarch summarised it. His description of the gold mines is the ugliest thing ancient geography wrote.

Of the condemned worked to death in the Egyptian gold mines he says that no one who has seen them can call misfortune anything else.

The tragedian whose victory party Plato used for the Symposium. He wrote the first tragedy with a plot he made up himself, and cut the chorus loose from the action.

Aristophanes put him on stage in women's clothes; Aristotle noted, more soberly, that his choral songs had stopped belonging to the play.

Thessalian woman who, Plutarch says, understood the periods of the moon and knew in advance when it would be eclipsed, and told people she was pulling it out of the sky. The claim is the oldest record of a Greek woman doing astronomy.

Plutarch's point is the deceit, not the astronomy: she knew the eclipse was coming and let the neighbours think it was her doing.

Figure in a single story: an Athenian woman who cut her hair, studied under Herophilus, practised on women in disguise, was tried for seduction, and won when her patients filled the court. Almost certainly a tale, not a person.

In the story the wives tell the judges: you are not husbands but enemies, since you condemn the one who found us health.

Author of five modes for suspending judgement: disagreement, endless regress, relativity, bare assumption, and arguing in a circle. Three of them are still the standard skeptical objections to any claim.

His name survives on the modes and nothing else. Sextus, who preserved them, does not say who he was.

Consul of 503 BCE, remembered for one story: sent to the plebeians who had walked out of Rome in 494, he told them the fable of the belly and the limbs, and they came back.

Livy says he died so poor that the plebeians paid for his funeral out of their own pockets.

Empress who wrote a memoir of her family and left it as a record. Tacitus cites it by name in the Annals, and says he found in it the story of her mother appealing to Tiberius for a husband, which the other historians had passed over.

Tacitus names her book among his sources; it is one of the very few times he names any source at all.

Presented as chancellor to Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, betrayed by his adopted nephew and spared by his executioner. His proverbs travelled further than almost any other ancient text.

The oldest copy comes from a Jewish garrison on an island in the Nile, written on papyrus that had already carried a customs account.

A naval officer under three kings who had his service record cut into his tomb. It is the fullest eyewitness account of the expulsion of the Hyksos and the founding of the New Kingdom.

He counted his career in hands taken and captives granted, and had the running tally cut into the wall of his tomb.

The earliest named materialist in India. He taught that a person is four elements, that at death each returns to its kind and the faculties pass into air, and that talk of merit is empty chatter.

His epithet is a garment: he wore a blanket of human hair, which the sources call the most wretched thing to put on a body.

The king who closed the temples and made a single visible sun the only god. The hymn to that sun is the one text of the reign that has been read as personal composition rather than court product.

The long hymn survives in exactly one place: the tomb of Ay, a courtier who later took the throne himself.

Built the method that turned scripture into law, reading meaning from particles and repeated words. The organisation of legal material that the Mishnah inherited is largely his and his pupils'.

He backed Bar Kokhba as messiah. Rome executed him for teaching Torah, and he died reciting the Shema.

An aristocrat of Mytilene, exiled by the faction fights he never stopped writing about. Songs of politics, wine and hatred of tyrants, in the stanza Horace took from him. Survives in papyrus scraps and quotations.

Alcaeus wrote from inside a losing faction. Mytilene's old aristocracy was being displaced, first by the tyrant Myrsilus and then by Pittacus, and Alcaeus spent much of his life in exile plotting a return that never came. The poems are drinking songs and songs of faction, addressed to the men in the hall with him: a ship in a storm that is also the city in trouble, a room hung with armour, an order to break out the wine because Myrsilus is dead. Almost none of it survived by manuscript. What we have comes from quotations in later grammarians and from papyrus dug out of the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, still arriving through the twentieth century. Horace read him whole and took his metre; the alcaic stanza is the shape of a book we no longer possess. The Alexandrian editors made at least ten books out of him. We have pieces of perhaps three hundred poems, most of them a line or two long.

He lost his shield to the Athenians at Sigeum and sent home a poem announcing it. They hung the shield in a temple.

A physician of Croton who located thought in the brain rather than the heart, traced channels running to it from the sense organs, and defined health as an equal balance of opposed powers in the body.

The earliest Greek choral poet whose work survives in quantity, writing maiden-songs for Spartan girls' choruses. The Louvre papyrus preserves most of one, with its performers named and teasing each other by name.

Holder of an imperial chair of Aristotelian philosophy at Athens. Later readers called him simply the Commentator, and Arabic and Latin philosophers argued about his account of mind for a thousand years.

His On Fate is dedicated to two reigning emperors as a thank-you for the professorship they had paid for.

The bridge between Middle and New Comedy: about 245 plays across a career of some seventy years, of which some 340 fragments remain, most of them quoted for food, cooks and parasites.

Plutarch says he was still winning prizes at a hundred and six, and died on stage while being crowned.

Queen of Kush who fought Rome from 25 to 22 BCE and came out of it exempt from tribute. The stela she and Akinidad raised at Hamadab carries forty-five lines of Meroitic that nobody can read.

Her people buried a bronze head of Augustus under a temple step, so that everyone who entered walked on the emperor.

Courtesan of Vesali, rich enough to give the Buddha's order her mango grove, who became a nun. Her poem inventories her own ageing body part by part, hair, brows, teeth, breasts, feet, and repeats after each that nothing was promised otherwise.

The early canon records her outbidding the princes of Vesali for the right to feed the Buddha first.

Governor of Milan, acclaimed bishop by the crowd while still unbaptised, and within fifteen years strong enough to make an emperor do public penance for a massacre. He baptised Augustine at Easter 387.

Augustine watched him read without moving his lips or making a sound, and could not stop thinking about it.

Founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, assassinated by his own guards. The poem in his name is spoken from beyond death, warning his son to trust nobody — including the men who guard his bed.

A murdered king speaks: they came at him in the dark, in his own bedroom, while he slept and had eaten.

A Ramesside scribe whose thirty chapters of advice were read, adapted and in places translated into the Hebrew Book of Proverbs — the clearest case of one ancient scripture borrowing from another.

A misread word in Proverbs — three days ago, for thirty — hid the borrowing until Adolf Erman spotted it in 1924.

Architect and scribe of recruits to Amenhotep III, who built the temple whose ruins are the Colossi of Memnon. Egypt deified him, as it had deified Imhotep, and paired the two as healers.

Like Imhotep, a commoner made into a god. Unlike Imhotep, he was given a funerary temple while he was still alive.

A Greek soldier from Antioch who wrote the last great Roman history in Latin, carrying it from Nerva to the catastrophe at Adrianople in 378. Thirteen of its thirty-one books are lost.

Ammianus Marcellinus was a Greek from Antioch who wrote the last great history of Rome in Latin. He served as a staff officer under the general Ursicinus, was inside Amida when the Persians stormed it in 359, and marched with Julian into Persia in 363. He retired to Rome and wrote thirty-one books, picking up where Tacitus stopped, at the death of Domitian, and running to the Roman defeat at Adrianople. The first thirteen books are lost. What survives, books fourteen to thirty-one, covers only twenty-five years, but they are years he lived through, and the writing thickens as he approaches them. Almost the whole text descends from a single ninth-century manuscript from Fulda, now in the Vatican; Poggio Bracciolini had it copied in 1417. He wrote in a strained, mannered Latin that was not his first language, called himself a former soldier and a Greek, and made a point of ending on the battlefield.

Trapped in Amida when the Persians took it in 359, he slipped out at night with two companions and rode a stray horse clear.

The teacher who wrote nothing. Plotinus attended him for eleven years at Alexandria, and later Platonism has been traced back to him by scholars who cannot say what he actually taught.

A Judahite herdsman and tender of sycamore figs who walked north to Bethel and accused Israel's elite of selling the poor for a pair of sandals. The earliest of the prophetic books.

Ordered to stop prophesying and go home, he replied that he was no prophet by trade — he kept livestock.

Trained as a rhetorician under Libanius and practised law before Basil had him made bishop of Iconium in 373. Basil's book on the Holy Spirit was written for him; his verse letter to Seleucus lists the biblical canon.

His canon list marks Revelation as accepted by some and rejected by most, which is how the Greek church long treated it.

The first named translator of Buddhist texts into Chinese. He settled at Luoyang in 148 CE and rendered meditation and doctrinal works, borrowing Daoist vocabulary for want of any other.

Tradition makes him a Parthian prince who gave up a throne. No Parthian source knows of him.

A Scythian who travelled in Greece in the sixth century and was remembered as the wise outsider judging Greek customs from outside them. Everything under his name was written by Greeks, later.

Court poet at Samos under Polycrates and then at Athens, writing short, light, exact poems about wine, desire and growing old. The poems that made his name famous in Europe were written by other people.

The Buddha's attendant for the last twenty-five years and his cousin. Every discourse in the canon opens by claiming his memory: thus have I heard. He also argued the case for admitting women to the order.

The four words that open every Buddhist discourse, thus have I heard, are a claim about him.

He said the sun was a glowing stone larger than the Peloponnese, and that Mind set the mixture of all things turning. Athens put him on trial for impiety; Pericles, his pupil, got him out.

Anaxagoras brought Ionian natural philosophy to Athens and it nearly killed him. He held that the sun was a mass of glowing metal larger than the Peloponnese, that the moon shone by reflected light and had plains and ravines on it, and that everything contains a portion of everything else, sorted out by Mind. That last claim disappointed Socrates, who says in Plato's Phaedo that he bought the book expecting Mind to explain why things are arranged for the best, and found instead air and aether and water. Anaxagoras spent roughly thirty years in Athens as Pericles' teacher and friend. When Pericles' enemies moved against him they charged Anaxagoras with impiety, the sun being a god and not a stone, and he withdrew to Lampsacus. The city there gave him a public funeral and let its schoolchildren take a holiday each year on the anniversary of his death. The book survives in about twenty quoted sentences.

Asked what he was born for, he said: to look at the sun, the moon and the sky.

A Middle Comedy poet with ten victories, first in 376 BCE. Ancient critics credited him with putting love affairs on the comic stage, the plot that New Comedy then ran on for two centuries.

When a play lost, he is said to have sent it to the incense sellers to be torn up for wrapping rather than revise it.

He proposed the boundless as the source of everything, hung the Earth unsupported at the centre of the cosmos, and drew what later Greeks called the first map of the world. One sentence of his prose survives.

Anaximander of Miletus wrote the first Greek prose book we know of, and one sentence of it survives: things pay penalty and recompense to one another for their injustice, according to the ordering of time. He proposed that the source of everything is the apeiron, the boundless, which is not water and not air and nothing you can point at. He put the Earth unsupported at the centre of things, held in place by nothing but symmetry, and that is the first argument in Greek thought that dispenses with a physical prop under the world. He set up a gnomon at Sparta to mark the solstices, drew what later writers call the first Greek map of the inhabited world, and built a model of the heavens. He also thought the first humans grew inside fish-like creatures and came ashore when they could feed themselves. Everything we have is quotation and paraphrase, filtered through Theophrastus and then through much later compilers. The book itself was gone by late antiquity.

He left the Earth hanging at the centre of the cosmos supported by nothing at all, held there, he said, by symmetry.

The third Milesian. He made air the underlying stuff and explained all change by one mechanism, rarefaction and condensation, which is the first attempt in Greek thought at a quantitative account of qualitative difference.

An Athenian caught up in the mutilation of the herms in 415, who informed on his associates, went into exile, and later talked his way to acquittal. Three speeches survive, including that defence.

King at Kanesh whose account of his conquests is the oldest surviving text in any Indo-European language. He destroyed Hattusa and cursed whoever rebuilt it.

He razed Hattusa, sowed the ground with weeds and cursed anyone who rebuilt it. It became the Hittite capital.

A Demotic wisdom book whose maxims are blunt, funny and practical where earlier Egyptian instruction is stately. Its frame puts its author in prison, writing on broken pottery.

The frame says he wrote the maxims on potsherds because his jailers would not give him a roll of papyrus.

He broke with the Academy's scepticism and claimed to be restoring the Old Academy, absorbing Stoic epistemology as he went. Cicero heard him at Athens in 79 BCE and never stopped citing him.

An epigrammatist whose poem listing the wonders of the world put the temple at Ephesus above all of them, and gave later ages the idea of a fixed set of seven.

Cicero says he could improvise verse on any subject, ran a fever every year on his birthday, and died of one.

Head of the Stoa when Carneades was demolishing it from the Academy across the city. He answered in writing rather than in debate, and taught Panaetius, who carried Stoicism to Rome.

Carneades argued in public; Antipater stayed indoors and wrote replies, which earned him the nickname Pen-shouter.

An epigrammatist attached to a Roman governor of Macedonia. One of his poems sets out nine women poets as nine earthly Muses, and is the fullest such roll call antiquity left behind.

He named nine women poets and called them the nine earthly Muses. Very little of any of them survives.

The most prolific poet of Middle Comedy, with between 260 and 365 plays credited to him in antiquity and thirteen festival victories. Around 140 titles and 330 quotations survive, and not one complete play.

The earliest of the Attic orators, who wrote speeches for others and spoke for himself only once, at his own trial for treason in 411. Thucydides called it the finest defence he had known.

A close companion of Socrates who held that virtue is enough for happiness and can be taught. Ten volumes of his writing were known in antiquity; two short declamations survive.

A Coptic-speaking farmer's son who gave away his land and went into the tombs, then into the desert. Athanasius's life of him carried the idea of withdrawal across the empire and made monasticism a movement rather than a habit.

He left the desert twice: once to support the confessors during persecution, once to preach against the Arians at Alexandria.

A Greek surgeon whose operation for aneurysm, tying the artery above and below the swelling then opening and packing the sac, remained standard practice into the nineteenth century. His own books are lost.

A scribe attached to a queen's household whose book of advice ends with something no other Egyptian instruction attempts: the son answers back, and the father has to argue with him.

The son objects that the advice is beyond an ordinary man. The father argues back. Nobody else in Egyptian wisdom writing gets a reply.

An Arcadian epigrammatist who wrote grave inscriptions for a dolphin, a war horse and a cricket, and turned the epigram toward landscape. About twenty of her poems survive.

Meleager opened his Garland by calling her poems lilies, and named her first among the women he collected.

One of the women to whom the traditional index of the Rigveda assigns a hymn. Hers is a bargaining song: she offers Indra soma pressed in her mouth and names exactly the three things she wants growing in return.

Later Vedic prose tells the sequel: Indra draws her three times through the openings of his chariot and her skin comes out new.

Wrote twenty-three treatises in Syriac from inside the Persian empire, untouched by Greek theology and by the councils then reshaping the church to the west. The earliest substantial Syriac Christian prose.

The first twenty-two open with the twenty-two letters of the Syriac alphabet, in order.

The only Roman cookbook to survive carries his name, though it was assembled three centuries after he died. He was a gourmet under Tiberius who took poison when his fortune ran low.

Seneca says ten million sesterces were left. Apicius counted that starvation and drank poison.

Bishop of Laodicea in Syria and a defender of Nicaea who held that in Christ the divine Word took the place of the human mind. Condemned in 381; his followers saved his books by putting orthodox names on them.

When Julian barred Christians from teaching the classics in 362, he and his father recast the Bible as Homeric epic and Platonic dialogue.

A pupil of Aristarchus who wrote a verse chronicle fixing the dates of Greek writers and events, and a long treatise on the gods. Both are lost, and the mythological handbook that carries his name is not his.

A New Comedy poet with five victories at the Athenian festivals. Nothing of his Greek survives whole, but two of his plots do, in the Latin Terence made from them.

The Hecyra failed twice in Rome, once to a rope-dancer and once to a rumour of gladiators, before an audience sat through it.

He gave the conic sections the names they still carry, parabola, ellipse and hyperbola, and showed all three could be cut from a single cone. Books five to seven of the Conics survive only in Arabic.

He wrote a Homeric epic in an age that preferred short poems, and put at its centre a girl who cannot sleep. Virgil's Dido comes out of his third book.

Apollonius wrote a four-book epic about the Argo at a time when the fashion in Alexandria ran to short, polished, learned poems. The Argonautica is Homeric in metre and diction and entirely unlike Homer in temper: Jason is hesitant and often at a loss, and the third book turns aside from the voyage to watch Medea fall in love and then lie awake all night deciding. Virgil read it closely, and Dido owes a great deal to that book. The ancient Lives tell a story of a quarrel with Callimachus, a failed first edition, a retreat to Rhodes and a triumphant return. Scholars now treat almost all of it as invention, the standard biographical formula of the underdog, and read the two poets as close in method rather than opposed. A papyrus list of Alexandrian librarians puts Apollonius in the post between Zenodotus and Eratosthenes. The poem survives entire. His prose studies of Homer, Hesiod and Archilochus, and his poems on the founding of cities, do not.

The one book of the Argonautica everyone remembers is the one that leaves the ship: Medea awake all night, deciding.

A wandering Pythagorean ascetic remembered as a wonder-worker. The biography Philostratus wrote a century later for an empress turned him into a pagan counterweight to Christ. His book on sacrifice survives in quotation.

An Alexandrian who became a Roman advocate and wrote Rome's history province by province rather than year by year. His five books on the civil wars are the fullest continuous account that survives.

Censor in 312 BCE, who built the Appian Way and Rome's first aqueduct. Blind by 280, he had himself carried into the Senate to refuse Pyrrhus's terms; that speech was still readable in Cicero's day.

The oldest Latin prose whose author has a name belongs to a blind man refusing to negotiate.

A North African orator and Platonist who wrote the only Latin novel that survives entire, and won a real trial for magic. Cupid and Psyche is a story told inside his book about a man turned into a donkey.

Apuleius came from Madauros in Roman Africa, studied at Carthage and Athens, and made a living as a travelling speaker. On his way to Alexandria he fell ill at Oea, was taken in by a former fellow student, and married the man's wealthy widowed mother. Her relatives took him to court for winning her by magic. He defended himself before the proconsul and won, and the speech survives as the Apology, the only Roman courtroom defence we have from the defendant's own hand. His novel, the Metamorphoses, follows a young man who tries a witch's ointment, turns into a donkey, and passes through a series of owners until the goddess Isis restores him. Set inside it is the story of Cupid and Psyche. It is the only Latin novel that survives whole, and it does so through a single eleventh-century manuscript from Monte Cassino, now in Florence, which also carries Tacitus. He wrote on Plato and on daemons as well; the Florida is a set of extracts from his performances, put together by someone else.

Accused of using magic to make a rich widow marry him, he answered the charge in open court and won. The speech survives.

He turned Eudoxus of Cnidus's prose account of the constellations into a hexameter poem that everyone then learned by heart. Cicero, Ovid and Germanicus each translated it; Paul quotes a line of it in Acts.

He took over Plato's Academy and turned it sceptical, arguing both sides of every question and withholding assent from all of them. He wrote nothing, on principle, and taught by demolition.

The man who carried Ionian natural philosophy from Anaxagoras into Athens, deriving the world from the separation of hot and cold. He is the only candidate the tradition offers for Socrates' teacher.

A Syrian physician practising at Rome under Trajan. He classified the pulse into ten qualities, described migraine and cancer of the breast, and amputated with a tourniquet.

Juvenal uses his name as shorthand for the doctor you send for: a mark of how well known he was, and how little survives.

A soldier-poet from Paros who wrote about running away, hating his enemies and being hungry. The recovery of his work has been almost entirely by papyrus, and it is still going on.

Archilochus of Paros wrote in the first person about things a hero would not admit. He threw away his shield running from Thracians and said so in a poem: the shield can be replaced, he cannot. He was a colonist on Thasos and a fighting man, and his invective was savage enough that ancient tradition had Lycambes and his daughters hang themselves over it. He mentions a total eclipse of the sun. Ancient chronographers matched it to the eclipse of 711 BCE, which pushed his life far too early; it is now taken to be that of 6 April 648. Almost nothing of him came down by manuscript. The recovery has been by papyrus: the Cologne Epode, published in 1974, produced a nearly complete poem of seduction in a meadow that had gone unread for two thousand years, and fragments keep surfacing. On Paros itself, an inscription set up in the third century BCE by one Mnesiepes records his life and quotes his verse in stone.

He left his shield in a bush for some Thracian to enjoy, and wrote a poem saying he would simply buy another.

He weighed geometrical shapes against each other to find the volume of the sphere, then proved it properly. Killed at the fall of Syracuse in 212 BCE; his most revealing work was recovered from a scraped-off parchment in 1906.

Archimedes worked at Syracuse and sent his results to the mathematicians at Alexandria, sometimes with false theorems mixed in to catch anyone who claimed to have found the proofs independently. He established the law of the lever and the law of buoyancy, found the surface and volume of the sphere in terms of its circumscribing cylinder, and bracketed pi between 3+10/71 and 3+1/7. He asked for the sphere and cylinder on his tomb; Cicero, serving as quaestor in Sicily in 75 BCE, found the monument overgrown outside Syracuse and identified it by that figure. He was killed when the city fell to Marcellus in 212. His most revealing work, the Method, explains how he actually found results, by weighing geometrical figures against one another before proving them by exhaustion, and it was unknown until 1906, when Johan Ludvig Heiberg photographed a prayer book in Constantinople whose parchment had been scraped clean of Archimedes in the thirteenth century and written over. The undertext is still being read.

The Method was recovered in 1906 from a prayer book: scribes had scraped Archimedes off the parchment and written liturgy across it.

A Pythagorean elected general of Tarentum seven times, who solved the doubling of the cube by a construction in three dimensions and worked out the ratios of the musical scales. Plato's friend and, once, his rescuer.

Named as the author of two poems of the Trojan cycle: the arrival of Memnon and the Amazon queen after the Iliad ends, and the sack of the city itself. Both survive only as summaries.

He described diabetes as the melting of flesh and limbs into urine, and named it for the siphon. His accounts of tetanus, pleurisy and coeliac disease are still recognisable case by case.

Of the diabetic he writes that life is short, disgusting and painful, thirst unquenchable, and the patient cannot be stopped from drinking.

Nabataean king who called himself lover of his people, first on his coinage in 1 BCE. His reign is the calendar of Nabataean Arabia: the tomb texts cut above the doorways at Hegra are dated by his regnal years.

The Hegra tomb texts are deeds, not epitaphs: who owns the tomb, who may lie in it, and the fine for breaking the terms.

Daughter of Aristippus of Cyrene and the link that kept the Cyrenaic school alive. She taught her son, who was known afterwards as the mother-taught, and through him the doctrine that pleasure of the moment is the end.

Her son's standing name in the sources is Metrodidaktos, the one his mother taught.

Herodotus says he was the first to compose a dithyramb, name it, and stage it, at Corinth under Periander. The rest of the story, thrown overboard and carried ashore by a dolphin, is legend.

He moved the Earth. The book arguing that it turns on its axis and orbits the Sun is lost; we know of it because Archimedes needed to describe how large a universe the idea implied.

Aristarchus put the Sun at the centre and set the Earth turning on its axis and moving in a circle around it. We know this because Archimedes says so, in the opening of the Sand Reckoner, while explaining that he needs a bigger number system to handle the size of universe the hypothesis requires: the sphere of the fixed stars has to be enormous, or the stars would visibly shift as the Earth moved. Aristarchus's own book on the subject is lost, and nothing else in antiquity took it up except Seleucus of Seleucia. Plutarch reports that Cleanthes the Stoic thought the Greeks ought to charge him with impiety for setting the hearth of the universe in motion. What does survive is a different and probably earlier treatise, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. It is geometrically exact, entirely geocentric, and wrong in its numbers, because the angle it depends on cannot be measured by eye. He had the method right and the measurement badly out: the Sun is far further away than he made it.

Cleanthes the Stoic held that Aristarchus should be charged with impiety, for setting the hearth of the universe in motion.

Head of the Library at Alexandria and the most influential editor Homer ever had. His readings and his critical marks survive in the margins of medieval manuscripts, long after his own books vanished.

He collected short, coarse, twist-ending tales set in Miletus and gave the genre its name. Sisenna translated them into Latin; Petronius and Apuleius work in the form. The originals are gone.

After the defeat at Carrhae the Parthians displayed a copy taken from a Roman officer's baggage, as evidence of Roman softness.

An Athenian philosopher who addressed the emperor in defence of Christians, sorting humanity into barbarians, Greeks, Jews and Christians and judging each by the god it worshipped. The earliest Christian apology that survives whole.

Lost for centuries, it turned up in 1889 in a Syriac manuscript at Sinai; the Greek had been sitting inside a medieval monastic novel.

A follower of Socrates who concluded that the good is present bodily pleasure and lived accordingly, taking money for teaching and attending the court of Dionysius at Syracuse. His grandson supplied the arguments.

Taught philosophy by his mother Arete, which earned him the nickname Mother-taught. He gave Cyrenaic hedonism its structure and restricted the good to pleasure in motion, not to the absence of pain. The scheme reported for him has three states: pain as a stormy sea, pleasure as a gentle swell, and between them a dead calm that is not itself a good.

Zeno's pupil, who threw out logic and physics and kept ethics alone, holding that everything except virtue and vice is genuinely indifferent, with no preferences among them. He was called the Siren for his voice.

The earliest Jewish philosopher writing in Greek whose words survive. He read the Torah allegorically to argue that Plato and Pythagoras had learned from Moses, a claim later Christians repeated for centuries.

To explain the hand of God without a body, he told a Ptolemaic king it meant power, and left the anatomy behind.

The only Old Comedy that survives whole: eleven plays that put living Athenians on stage by name — Cleon, Socrates, Euripides — in wartime, before an audience that included them.

Eleven of about forty comedies survive, and they are the only complete Old Comedy we have. He wrote for the Lenaea and the City Dionysia while Athens fought Sparta, and he named names. His second play, The Babylonians, showed the allies of the Delian League as slaves grinding at a mill; Cleon denounced him before the council. Nothing came of it, and the following year he produced The Knights, which is an attack on Cleon from the first line to the last. The plays reached us unevenly. Byzantine schoolmasters kept a teaching triad — Wealth, Clouds, Frogs — and copied it constantly; the other eight ride on a handful of manuscripts, and Lysistrata on essentially two. Plato, who was a boy when most of them were staged, later gave Aristophanes a speech on love in the Symposium, and a fit of hiccups before it. The Clouds outlived them all in the worst way: at his trial in 399 BCE Socrates named it among the accusations he could not answer.

The mask-makers were too frightened to caricature Cleon, so, the ancient commentators say, he smeared his own face with wine lees and played the part.

Head of the library at Alexandria from about 194 BCE. He compiled a glossary of rare words, wrote the plot summaries still printed in front of Greek plays, and edited Homer, Hesiod and Pindar.

The accents over Greek vowels are credited to him: marks for readers who no longer heard the pitch they recorded.

Twenty years in Plato's Academy, then his own school in the Lyceum. He wrote the first formal logic, the first systematic biology and the first physics, and dissected enough animals to describe some five hundred species.

What we read is not what he published. The dialogues he wrote for the public, which Cicero called a river of gold, are lost; what survives are the lecture courses, compressed and cross-referenced and full of false starts, meant for people already in the room. Strabo says those manuscripts passed to Theophrastus, then to a family at Skepsis in the Troad, who hid them in a cellar to keep them from the book-collecting kings of Pergamum. They lay there for well over a century, damp and worm-eaten, until Apellicon bought them; Sulla took them to Rome as plunder in 86 BCE, and Andronicus of Rhodes edited them there around 60 BCE. That accident of storage decided which Aristotle the Middle Ages inherited. He spent two years on Lesbos looking at marine animals and got the heart's function wrong and the cuttlefish's mating arm exactly right. Charged with impiety in 323 BCE, he withdrew to Chalcis so that Athens, he is said to have remarked, would not sin twice against philosophy.

He described the cuttlefish's detachable mating arm; zoologists dismissed it as a fable until Steenstrup confirmed it in 1856.

Everything Aristotle wrote for the public is gone; everything he wrote for himself survives. The dialogues antiquity actually read are fragments. The lecture notes he never meant to publish became the foundation of European philosophy.

Aristotle published. The books he put before the reading public were dialogues in Plato's manner — On Philosophy, Eudemus, the Exhortation — and those are the books antiquity actually read. Cicero, who had them on his shelf, described Aristotle as pouring forth a golden river of speech. Not one survives. What we have instead is the Corpus Aristotelicum: working notes for lectures at the Lyceum, unpolished, repetitive, occasionally contradicting themselves within a page, never meant for a reader outside the room. Strabo tells the story that the manuscripts passed to Theophrastus, then to Neleus of Scepsis, and lay in a cellar in Asia Minor eaten by damp and worms until a collector bought them. Whether or not the cellar is true, the reversal is: the polished half vanished and the rough half held Europe for two thousand years. Diogenes Laertius catalogued 156 titles running to 445,270 lines. Roughly a third of the output survives.

Aristotle's school collected the constitutions of 158 cities. One came back, on a papyrus the British Museum bought in 1890.

A Pythagorean's son who studied with Aristotle and then argued that music must be judged by the trained ear, not by number ratios. His Elements of Harmonics is the oldest surviving treatise on music theory.

The Suda credits him with 453 books. Two survive in part, both on music; everything he wrote about philosophers is gone.

Presbyter of the Baucalis church in Alexandria. He held that the Son was created by the Father and so had a beginning, and set the argument in verse and songs. The Council of Nicaea condemned him in 325.

His one long work survives only in the quotations of the man who spent forty years refuting it.

A teacher of rhetoric in Africa who converted late and, to convince a bishop who doubted him, wrote seven books against the pagan gods. He knew the cults far better than he knew Christian doctrine.

Everything we have of him depends on one ninth-century manuscript in Paris, copied from a damaged exemplar.

A Greek from Bithynia who became a Roman consul and governed Cappadocia. He took down Epictetus's lectures as they were spoken and wrote the soberest surviving account of Alexander's campaigns.

As governor he drew up the Roman line against the Alani, then wrote the order of battle down: the only such document from antiquity.

An Egyptian Jew who rewrote Abraham, Joseph and Moses as founders of Egyptian civilisation. His Moses invents philosophy, ships, weapons and the division of Egypt into thirty-six districts.

He made Moses the teacher of Orpheus, and credited him with founding the Egyptian animal cults.

He states that the apparent turning of the stars is the Earth rotating, gives a value of pi accurate to four decimal places, notes that it is approximate, and explains eclipses by shadows rather than demons.

He gives pi as 3.1416 and adds the word approximate, which may be the first recorded suspicion that it is irrational.

Nagarjuna's pupil, and the one who turned the argument outward. The first half of his four hundred verses is practical, on impermanence and conduct; the second half takes apart rival philosophical positions.

The Sanskrit of his main work is in fragments; the complete text exists only in Tibetan, and half of it in Xuanzang's Chinese.

He built the Yogacara account of mind, in which what we take for an outer world is the ripening of stored impressions. He also converted his half-brother, who then became the school's best writer.

Tradition says he received the teaching from the future Buddha Maitreya, in a heaven, over twelve years.

He failed as a rhetorician in Rome and then made his name in medicine by throwing out the humours for particles moving through pores. His treatments were diet, wine, massage and bathing: swiftly, safely, sweetly.

He wagered Fortune that he would never fall ill, and, the story goes, won: he died old, from a fall down a staircase.

About forty of his epigrams survive in the Greek Anthology: short poems on wine, locked doors and the passing of youth that set the register for the whole Hellenistic tradition, and for Catullus after it.

Theocritus praises him under the pen name Sicelidas, which is nearly all we know about how his contemporaries saw him.

A pharmacologist known only through Galen, who quotes his ten books of recipes at length and with approval: five on remedies applied to the body's surface, five on remedies taken inside.

He cited Dioscorides and Scribonius Largus, which is how we date him; his own name survives only inside other men's books.

He wrote notes on Cicero's speeches for his sons, checking each claim against archives now lost. Five commentaries survive, and historians still depend on them for events Cicero only glances at.

Poggio Bracciolini found the manuscript at Saint Gall in 1416; every later copy descends from it.

His inscriptions are the oldest datable texts in India and the oldest surviving Indian writing that names its author. In the thirteenth rock edict he states the Kalinga death toll and says he regrets it.

Nobody could read the edicts for a thousand years. James Prinsep cracked the Brahmi script in 1837 and gave India back its third-century BCE.

King of Assyria who could actually read the tablets he collected, in Sumerian as well as Akkadian. His library at Nineveh is why most Mesopotamian literature exists at all.

He boasted of reading tablets from before the flood. Thirty thousand from his library are now in the British Museum.

The first Sanskrit poet whose work survives entire. He wrote the Buddha's life as high court poetry, which meant using the ornament of a courtly tradition to argue against the world that produced it.

He is the earliest Sanskrit poet with a surviving corpus, and he used the full machinery of court poetry for an argument against the court. The Buddhacharita tells the Buddha's life in ornate kavya verse, complete with the set pieces the genre demanded, seasons, a garden, women; the point of the ornament is that the prince walks away from all of it. The Sanskrit survives for only the first fourteen of twenty-eight cantos. The rest is readable because it was translated into Chinese in the fifth century and into Tibetan in the seventh, an early instance of a text preserved by its exports rather than its home. His plays were thought entirely lost until German expeditions to Turfan in the first decade of the twentieth century brought back palm-leaf fragments in Kushan-period script, among them part of a drama about Shariputra, which pushed the origins of Sanskrit theatre back by centuries. He is placed around 80-150 CE and is described as an associate of the Kushan king Kanishka.

Half the Buddhacharita's Sanskrit is lost; the rest is readable only through Chinese and Tibetan translations.

Consul, general, and the first Roman to open a public library. His history of the civil wars is lost, but Appian and Plutarch worked from it, so we read the man at one remove.

He accused Livy of Patavinitas, a provincial flavour in the prose. Nobody has since worked out what he could hear that we cannot.

A Milesian woman in Athens, Pericles' partner and mother of his son. The comic poets attacked her constantly; Plato has Socrates say she taught him rhetoric and wrote Pericles' funeral oration.

King of Kush at Napata. His enthronement stela sets out how a Kushite king was actually selected — by a council of twenty-four commanders and priests — rather than merely asserting that he was.

Twenty-four officers and priests chose him, and his stela records the procedure rather than only the result.

Bishop of Alexandria from 328, driven out five times and out of his see for seventeen of his forty-five years. His Easter letter of 367 is the first document to list exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

Hidden in the desert during one exile, he wrote the life of the hermit Antony; a Latin copy of it converted two officials at Trier.

His Learned Banqueters stages a Roman dinner party at which the guests quote everything they have ever read. Hundreds of lost Greek works survive only because he cited them over the fish course.

Nearly all we have of Greek comedy after Aristophanes reaches us through his dinner-table quotations about food, cups and courtesans.

An Athenian philosopher who turned Christian and addressed the emperor directly, answering the three standing charges against Christians: atheism, cannibalism, incest. He argued from reason and Greek poetry, not from scripture.

To rebut the charge of infanticide he asked how people who will not attend the arena, lest they watch a killing, could be killing children.

Bishop of Hippo for thirty-five years and the most copious writer of antiquity: the Confessions, the City of God, and some five million further words. He died while the Vandals besieged his city.

He converted in a Milan garden in the summer of 386, hearing a child next door chanting take it up and read, opening Paul at random and stopping at the first sentence his eye fell on. Ten years later he wrote the scene down in the Confessions, the first book in Europe to treat a life as an inward event rather than a record of deeds. The survival is Possidius's doing: his friend and biographer catalogued everything Augustine had written, and the library at Hippo came through the Vandal siege of 430 when the rest of the city did not. Nearly all of it is still here: more than a hundred books, three hundred letters, five hundred sermons. And it is still growing. Twenty-nine unknown letters surfaced in a Marseille manuscript in 1975, and twenty-six unknown sermons in a Mainz manuscript in 1990, both in codices catalogued centuries earlier and never read.

He had the penitential psalms copied out and hung on the wall facing his bed, and read them weeping as he died.

He began a commonplace book during a winter outside Athens and published it as twenty books of Attic Nights: grammar, law, philosophy and anecdote, preserving fragments of authors otherwise entirely gone.

The story of Androcles and the lion is his, quoted from Apion, who claimed to have watched it happen in the arena.

A Bordeaux professor of rhetoric who tutored the future emperor Gratian and was made consul for it. The Moselle describes a river journey and names its fish, one after another, with real attention.

He built an entire wedding poem, obscene ending included, out of nothing but half-lines lifted from Virgil, then apologised for it in the preface.

His short book on the turning sphere is the oldest complete Greek mathematical text we have, older than Euclid, and already written in the form of statement, diagram and proof.

He proves that on a turning sphere the stars that never rise and never set lie on two fixed circles.

Forty-two fables in elegiac couplets, taken from the Greek verse of Babrius when everyone else was working from prose. Medieval schools read him for a thousand years.

The dedication to a learned Theodosius is the only thing that dates him; the man is probably Macrobius.

Three poems: the stars after Aratus, the world after Dionysius, and a coastal survey in iambics that may preserve, at several removes, a Greek sailing manual older than Herodotus.

The coastal poem carries the earliest named mention of Ireland and Britain, if its sources are as old as it claims.

The name is an honorific, respected elderly woman, and at least three poets across a thousand years carry it. The Sangam one wrote for the chieftain Athiyaman and served as his envoy.

Athiyaman gave her a rare gooseberry said to lengthen life, having kept none for himself. Her poem on his death is the reply.

She read the Republic in Phlius, walked to Athens, and studied in the Academy in men's clothes. When the disguise was discovered she stayed, and continued under Speusippus after Plato died.

One of two women named as members of Plato's Academy. Not a word she wrote or said has been preserved.

He put the Aesopic fables into Greek verse for a boy at a Syrian court. His collection is the reason so many of the fables reached the Middle Ages with their wording intact.

The manuscript that carries him was found at Great Lavra on Mount Athos in 1842 and taken to Paris.

Simonides's nephew, competing with Pindar for the same commissions from the same tyrants. Little but scraps was known until an Egyptian papyrus surfaced in 1896 and gave back fourteen victory odes and six dithyrambs.

In 476 BCE he and Pindar both wrote odes for Hieron's Olympic victory. We now have both, and can read the competition.

The Brahma Sutras are so compressed that some run to two words, and they cannot be read without a commentary. Every later school of Vedanta had to write one, and each read the same sentences differently.

The aphorisms are so terse that Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva built three incompatible metaphysics on the same lines.

Began the continuation of Sima Qian that became the Book of Han. He died with it unfinished, and it passed to his son and then his daughter.

He judged Sima Qian's history unorthodox and set out to correct it; his family spent three generations doing so.

Wrote the Book of Han, which set the template of the single-dynasty history. It includes the bibliographic treatise that is our only inventory of what the imperial library held.

Arrested when his patron fell, he died in prison at sixty-one with the tables and the astronomy treatise still unwritten.

Finished the Book of Han after her brother died in prison, supplying the eight tables and the astronomical treatise, and taught the classics to the empress and her court.

The Book of Han was a family project that outlived two of its authors. Ban Biao began it and died; Ban Gu carried it for thirty years and died in prison in 92 CE with the chronological tables and the treatise on astronomy unwritten. The emperor summoned his sister to the Eastern Pavilion library to finish them, which she did, and the completed history was so difficult that scholars had to be sent to her to be taught how to read it. She lectured in the palace, was tutor to Empress Deng, and was consulted on policy when Deng became regent. Her own Lessons for Women is seven short chapters written for her daughters, and its afterlife is uncomfortable: it argues for humility and yielding, and was quoted for nineteen centuries to keep women in place. It also argues, flatly and in the same breath, that girls should be taught to read, since it is absurd to instruct a boy and leave his sister ignorant.

Scholars had to be sent to her to learn how to read the history she had just completed.

Wrote from outside the aristocracy and about it, in the rough registers of folk song. The earliest poet known to have used the seven-character line for shi verse.

Killed at about fifty-two when the mutinous troops of the prince he served turned on the household.

The first named author in Syriac. He argued from the varying customs of nations that human conduct is not fixed by the stars, and set his theology to music that Edessa sang for a century.

Ephrem wrote hymns in Bardaisan's own metres to drive Bardaisan's hymns out of the churches. It worked.

Jeremiah's scribe, who wrote the prophet's oracles to dictation, read them aloud in the Temple when Jeremiah could not, and rewrote the scroll after the king destroyed it.

Two seal impressions reading 'Berechyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe' reached the antiquities market; most scholars now call them forgeries.

Bishop of Caesarea from 370. He wrote the rule that shaped Greek monasticism, defended the divinity of the Spirit against Eunomius, and built a hospital and poorhouse outside the city large enough to be called a new town.

His nine sermons on the six days of creation were preached in one week, some of them before breakfast to an audience of working men.

He taught in Alexandria under Hadrian that 365 heavens stand between God and us, each with its own angels and its own ruler. His twenty-four books of commentary survive only inside the quotations of his opponents.

The name Abrasax, ruler of his 365 heavens, works out to 365 when its Greek letters are added up as numbers.

Priest of Bel Marduk at the Esagila temple who wrote Babylon's history in Greek for a Macedonian king. It is the only attempt by a Babylonian to explain Babylon to the Greek world.

He was a priest at the Esagila, the temple of Marduk, and he wrote for Antiochus I in a language his own city did not use. The Babyloniaca ran to three books: cosmology and the fish-sage Oannes who taught men writing and agriculture; the kings from Alulim through the flood to Nabonassar; then the recorded past down to the Macedonians. He had access to the temple's chronicles, and where his king-lists can be checked against cuneiform they hold up. None of it survives directly. The text passed to Alexander Polyhistor, from him to Josephus and Eusebius, and from Eusebius partly through an Armenian translation and the ninth-century Byzantine chronicler Syncellus. So a Babylonian priest reaches us in Greek, through a Jewish historian and two Christian ones, each quoting for reasons of their own. Vitruvius says he later opened a school of astronomy on Kos; historians treat that as a story invented to give Greek astronomy a Babylonian pedigree.

A Babylonian priest survives only because a Jewish historian and two Christian chroniclers quoted him to make arguments he never made.

Daughter of the martyr Hanina ben Teradion and wife of Meir, and the only woman in rabbinic literature whose legal opinions are cited as opinions. The tradition records her correcting men in argument.

Told to pray for the death of local thugs, she read the verse again and said to pray for the end of sin, not sinners.

The last Jain teacher said to have known the full body of the oldest scriptures. Tradition has him lead twelve thousand monks south during a famine, a migration that opens the split between the two Jain orders.

Inscriptions at Shravanabelagola pair him with Chandragupta Maurya, who tradition says died there fasting as a Jain monk.

He argued that a sentence is not built from words but grasped whole, in a single flash, and that words are an analysis imposed afterwards. Language for him is not a description of thought but its substance.

His theory says the meaning of a sentence arrives entire, before the mind has finished taking it apart into words.

Kalidasa names him as a predecessor, and for centuries that was all anyone had. Then in 1910 a scholar in Kerala found thirteen anonymous plays in palm-leaf manuscripts and the case for attribution began.

Until the twentieth century Bhasa was a name in other people's prologues. Kalidasa cites him as an established master, later critics quote lines, and nothing survived. Then in 1910 T. Ganapati Sastri, working through palm-leaf manuscripts in Kerala, found thirteen anonymous Sanskrit plays sharing a common style, a common stage idiom and a common set of departures from the rules. He argued they were Bhasa's. The argument has never been fully settled, partly because none of the manuscripts names him and partly because these are Kerala performance texts, adapted over centuries by the Kutiyattam theatre that still stages them. What is not in doubt is that the plays are old and that they break rules later Sanskrit drama observes. Urubhanga ends with its protagonist dying on stage, which the dramatic theory forbids, and treats the villain of the Mahabharata sympathetically while doing it. Dating rests on relative position: after Ashvaghosha, before Kalidasa, so most often the first or second century CE, though proposals run from the fourth century BCE to the fourth century CE.

Thirteen plays turned up in Kerala palm-leaf manuscripts in 1910. Not one of them carries his name.

The third compendium of the Atreya school, and the one that nearly vanished. Its structure runs parallel to Charaka's, section for section, but the content diverges sharply where the two overlap.

It survives in one damaged palm-leaf manuscript of about 1650 in Thanjavur, plus a single ninth-century fragment recovered from Tuyoq.

One of the Seven Sages, who worked as an advocate at Priene and took no fee. He urged the Ionians to abandon Asia and refound themselves in Sardinia, together, before Persia arrived.

Fleeing the sack of Priene with nothing, asked why he carried no goods: I carry everything I own with me.

A woman of Delphi, in Pausanias's words, who wrote a hymn for the Delphians on the origin of their own oracle. Four of her lines survive in his description of the sanctuary, and nothing else does.

Her lines make the Delphic oracle a foreign import, founded by men who walked down from the Hyperboreans.

The commentator who began the tradition of reading Aristotle line by line, working from the newly edited texts. He held that the soul is a form that cannot outlast the body.

Strabo says he studied Aristotle alongside him, which puts two of the best-known Greek writers of the age in the same classroom.

He went to Sri Lanka, translated the old Sinhala commentaries into Pali, and in doing so replaced them. The originals were not copied again and are gone. Theravada doctrine has read the canon through him ever since.

By turning the Sinhala commentaries into Pali he made them portable, and made the originals redundant. None survives.

Roman visitor to Egypt who cut three Greek epigrams into the singing colossus at Thebes. Her verse survives on the stone she wrote it on, which is why we have it at all, and she signs the last one with her own name.

She writes that the stone had lost its voice to Cambyses, and that a mother's grief is what she hears in it.

An Insubrian Gaul brought to Rome as a slave and freed, he wrote comedy between Plautus and Terence. Forty titles and about three hundred lines survive; one critic ranked him above both.

Terence read his first play aloud to him at dinner; after a few lines he moved the young man to a couch.

A wealthy Roman woman in Cicero's circle who got hold of On Moral Ends from Atticus before Cicero meant it to circulate. Nothing she wrote is known; she survives in his letters and in gossip.

Cicero complained that she had a complete copy of his book before he had finished releasing it.

Wrote his own war dispatches in the third person and in plain Latin: seven books on Gaul, three on the civil war. His treatise on grammar and his attack on Cato are lost. He was never emperor.

The Gallic War is a set of reports from a proconsul to the city he intended to rule, in a Latin so stripped that Cicero said it deterred sane men from trying to improve on it. Caesar never writes I. He writes Caesar, which converts a commander's decisions into observed facts and lets the reader forget who is talking. Seven books cover 58 to 52 BCE; his officer Aulus Hirtius added an eighth after the murder. Three more cover the war against Pompey and break off in Alexandria. What is missing matters: a treatise on Latin usage written while crossing the Alps, an Anticato answering Cicero's eulogy of his dead enemy, poems, and a journal. Antiquity read those; we do not. He was dictator four times, was publicly offered a diadem and publicly refused it, and died before any title resembling emperor existed. He was stabbed in the hall attached to Pompey's theatre on 15 March 44 BCE.

He wrote the Gallic War in the third person, so the man who conquered Gaul never once says I.

Taken north by Xiongnu raiders in 195 and held twelve years. Cao Cao ransomed her, and she wrote the first long autobiographical poem by a woman in Chinese.

Ransomed home, she had to leave the two sons born in captivity behind. The poem is about the moment of parting.

Catalogued the Alexandrian library in a hundred and twenty rolls and argued against long poems: a big book is a big evil. Six hymns and some sixty epigrams survive whole; the Causes is papyrus scraps.

He worked at the Museum in Alexandria without ever running the Library, and produced the Pinakes: a hundred and twenty rolls listing every author the Library held, with biography, first lines and book counts. It is the first library catalogue we know of, and it is entirely lost. His poetry took the opposite scale from Homer, being short, worked, allusive and full of obscure cult origins. The Causes opens with a reply to critics who wanted a continuous heroic poem; he answers that Apollo told him to keep his Muse slender. Antiquity turned this into a feud with Apollonius of Rhodes, but no ancient text records a quarrel between the two men, and most scholars now treat the story as later invention. The Lock of Berenice, on the queen's hair set among the stars by Conon, was known for centuries only through Catullus's Latin version; Oxyrhynchus papyri returned parts of the Greek in the twentieth century.

He wrote that a big book is a big evil, then catalogued the Alexandrian library in a hundred and twenty rolls.

Ephesian elegist of the mid-seventh century BCE, the earliest whose verse survives. Roughly two dozen lines remain, one of them a call to his countrymen to stand and fight the Cimmerians then overrunning Ionia.

The longest fragment is twenty-one lines telling young men to stop lying about and pick up a spear.

Rebuilt Eudoxus's homocentric spheres, adding seven to fit the planets better, and replaced Meton's nineteen-year calendar with a seventy-six-year cycle one day shorter. Nothing he wrote survives; Aristotle and Simplicius report him.

He began counting his seventy-six-year cycle at the summer solstice of 330 BCE, and later astronomers were still dating observations by it.

Aristotle's great-nephew, hired to write Alexander's campaign as it happened. He refused to prostrate himself before the king, was implicated in the Pages' Conspiracy, and killed in 327 BCE. His histories survive only in quotation.

He wrote that Alexander was a god's son, then refused to bow to him, and did not survive the contradiction.

Seven pastorals in Virgil's manner, with a young god newly on the throne and a wooden amphitheatre described by a farmhand who cannot take it in. Which emperor he means is not settled.

His poems travelled through the manuscripts joined to those of Nemesianus, two centuries later, as one collection of eleven.

Warlord, chancellor and poet. His verse is bare four-character lines about ageing, campaign roads and unburied bones, and it gave the Jian'an style its tone.

The old warhorse in the stable still dreams of a thousand miles, he wrote at fifty-two, in the middle of a winter campaign.

First emperor of Wei, and the first Chinese writer to treat literature as a subject in itself: he graded his contemporaries by genre and called writing a great affair of state.

He wrote that a man's rank and pleasures end with his body, but writing has no term set to it.

Lost the succession to his brother, was moved from fief to fief under watch, and wrote the most admired verse of the Jian'an era. Over ninety poems survive.

Ordered to compose in the time it took to walk seven paces, he produced the poem about beans boiling on a fire fed with their own stalks.

Head of the Academy who published nothing. Sent to Rome in 155 BCE, he argued for justice one day and against it the next; Cato had the embassy sent home. Everything comes through his pupil Clitomachus.

He said that without Chrysippus there would have been no Carneades, having built his whole method on refuting him.

Alexandrian teacher whose followers held that Jesus was one soul among many to escape the makers of this world, and that the law's rules were made to be broken. Everything known comes from hostile Christian reports.

His son Epiphanes wrote a book arguing that private property is theft from nature, and died at seventeen.

Bithynian senator, twice consul, who wrote Rome's history in Greek across twenty-two years. For the late republic and the early empire he is often the only continuous narrative that survives.

Platonist critic and polymath who taught Porphyry, advised Zenobia at Palmyra, and was executed by Aurelian in 273. Almost everything he wrote is lost, and the treatise on sublimity that long carried his name is not his.

His farm manual is the oldest complete prose work in Latin, a manager's book about pressing olives, buying slaves and selling off the worn-out ones. His seven-book history of Rome, the first in Latin, is quotations only.

Consul in 195 BCE and censor in 184, he made a career of prosecuting other men's luxury and defending his own severity. Cicero could still read more than a hundred and fifty of his speeches; almost nothing of them is left. The Origines, in seven books, was the first history of Rome written in Latin rather than Greek, and it refused to name commanders, on the ground that the Roman people did the deeds. It survives only in quotation. What came through whole is De agri cultura, a manual for running a slave estate near Rome around 160 BCE: how to plant, how much wine the chained field hands are allowed, what to do with a slave too old to work. Sell him. It is the oldest complete work of Latin prose, and it is not a literary performance at all. It is a set of instructions, which is part of why it lasted. In 155 BCE he had Carneades and the Athenian embassy sent home before Roman youth acquired the taste for argument.

He ended speeches on any subject by saying Carthage must be destroyed. Three years after he died, it was.

A hundred and sixteen poems from a single lost manuscript: love, obscenity, a wedding epic, and Sappho translated into Latin. Lesbia is generally identified with Clodia, sister of the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher.

The book survives by one thread. A single manuscript surfaced at Verona around 1300, was copied, and vanished again; every text of Catullus descends from copies of that lost codex. Without it we would have one poem preserved in a ninth-century anthology and a handful of quotations. What it preserved is a hundred and sixteen poems that behave like nothing else in Latin: epigrams obscene enough that editors left them untranslated well into the twentieth century, a long Alexandrian epic on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the self-castration of Attis in a metre almost nobody else attempted, a version of Sappho, and the Lesbia sequence, which invents the idea of an affair told as a book with a beginning and an end. Lesbia is generally taken to be Clodia, the aristocratic sister of Cicero's enemy Clodius; the pseudonym scans like Sappho's island. He served a year on the governor's staff in Bithynia, came home with nothing, and wrote a poem at his brother's grave in the Troad.

Suetonius says Caesar dined with him the same day he forgave the poems calling him a stain on Rome.

His encyclopaedia covered farming, war, rhetoric, philosophy and law; only the eight books on medicine came through. They give the four signs of inflammation and Latin's first account of plastic surgery.

Printed at Florence in 1478, it was the first medical book of antiquity to be set in type.

A birthday present for a patron, written in 238, that becomes a treatise on time: how a child is formed, what the ages of man are, and how the world's rival eras line up against each other.

Because he dated his own year in several calendars at once, chronologists still use him to fix ancient dates.

The standing text of Indian internal medicine. It sets out the ethics of the physician, the rules of clinical debate, a theory of digestion, and a long argument that disease has natural causes.

The Charaka Samhita is not a book so much as a stratigraphy. Its own account says a physician named Agnivesha, taught by Atreya, wrote a compendium; that Charaka revised it and gave it his name; and that a later scholar, Dridhabala, supplied seventeen missing chapters and the whole final section. Each of those layers is real, and none of them is dated. What the finished text contains is a working medical curriculum: eight divisions covering diagnosis, pharmacology, therapeutics and the physician's conduct, with a chapter on how to argue a clinical case that reads as a manual of debate, and a sustained insistence that illness has causes in the body rather than in offence given to a god. It travelled: a version was translated into Arabic by the ninth century and circulated in Baghdad as Sharaka Indianus. Meulenbeld, who spent decades on the history of Indian medical literature, concluded that Charaka cannot have lived later than about 150-200 CE nor much earlier than about 100 BCE. That is as close as the evidence gets.

It has a chapter on how to argue a case at a patient's bedside, and how to tell a debate worth entering from one worth leaving.

A local historian of the Hellespont who wrote on Persia, possibly before Herodotus. Some twenty fragments survive, one of them the story of the Bisaltian boy who spoke to his people in Greek.

He is the source for Themistocles' end: not the bull's blood of legend, but simply death in Asia, of illness.

Wrote the history of the three states from inside the losing one, having served Shu before its fall. Terse to a fault, which is why an emperor later ordered it annotated.

A century and a half later an emperor found it too thin and commissioned annotations that run longer than the history itself.

Spartan ephor of the 550s, counted among the Seven Sages for the compression of his advice. The three maxims cut into the temple at Delphi were credited to the sages, and the shortest of them to him.

He is said to have died of joy at Olympia, embracing his son as the boy came off the field a victor.

Named in antiquity as the first Athenian comic poet, winning when comedy entered the state festival about 487 BCE. Three titles and a handful of words survive.

Aristotle mentions him in the Poetics only to say that comedy's beginnings were already unrecorded by his own day.

One of the first Athenian tragedians, competing from about 520 BCE and still competing when Aeschylus began. The Suda credits him with 160 plays and thirteen victories; not a line survives.

He is said to have improved the masks and costumes of tragedy. Of 160 plays we have one title and no text.

Third head of the Stoa and the man who made it a system: propositional logic, a theory of the passions, a defence of fate that leaves room for responsibility. Of 705 books, only quotations survive.

Diogenes Laertius attached a catalogue of titles to his life of Chrysippus and counted 705 books. Not one survives entire. He was a long-distance runner before he was a philosopher, studied under Cleanthes, took over the Stoa in 232 BCE, and did the work that made Stoicism able to argue back: a propositional logic that anticipates the modern connectives, an account of the passions as mistaken judgements rather than bodily storms, and a defence of fate built on a cylinder that rolls because it is shaped to roll, once pushed. Ancient readers found him unreadable, and one critic said that if you removed the quotations from his books there would be blank paper left. Galen preserves long stretches of On Passions in order to attack them, which is why we have them. A single carbonised roll from the villa at Herculaneum has given back part of the Logical Investigations. The ancient verdict was blunt: without Chrysippus, no Stoa.

Diogenes Laertius says he died laughing, having given his donkey wine and watched it try to eat figs.

Fifty-eight speeches, seven books on rhetoric, a dozen philosophical works and some nine hundred letters survive. He built the Latin vocabulary for Greek philosophy, then was proscribed and killed for the Philippics.

At twenty-six he defended Sextus Roscius on a charge of killing his father, and in doing so accused a freedman of the dictator Sulla of arranging the murder and buying the estate cheap. He won, then left Rome for two years. The rest is public: the prosecution of Verres, the consulship of 63 BCE and the execution of Catiline's associates without trial, exile, recall, and the fourteen Philippics against Antony. When politics closed to him he wrote philosophy at speed, inventing Latin words for Greek terms as he went; quality, essence and moral all come out of that effort. The strangest survival is the correspondence. Around nine hundred letters were published after his death, among them the letters to Atticus, which no one was meant to read: indecision, vanity, panic, and grief for his daughter Tullia. No other ancient figure can be watched this closely. Antony's men caught him in December 43 BCE and nailed his hands to the speakers' platform.

Antony's men nailed his head and hands to the speakers' platform, the hands that had written the Philippics.

An Athenian dithyrambist of the New Music whose work is lost entirely. He survives as a target: gaunt, ridiculed on the comic stage, and prosecuted in a speech of Lysias.

In the Birds he asks for wings so he can gather his preludes from the clouds, and is beaten off the stage instead.

Officer's wife on the northern frontier of Britain who invited her friend to a birthday on the third day before the Ides of September. The four words she added in her own hand are the earliest known writing in Latin by a woman.

Her own hand adds: farewell sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

Court poet to Honorius and propagandist for Stilicho: panegyrics, invectives against eastern ministers, and an unfinished epic on the abduction of Proserpina. He wrote in Latin though he came from Greek-speaking Alexandria.

He came from Greek-speaking Alexandria and wrote the last great classical hexameters in a language he learned second.

His annals began not with Aeneas but with the Gauls burning Rome in 390 BCE, the point where he judged the records began. Livy followed him; Gellius quoted him for his plain, hard Latin.

Gellius set his account of the duel with the Gaul against a florid version and let readers see which was better.

Second head of the Stoa, said to have carried water at night to pay for his days of study. His Hymn to Zeus, under forty lines preserved by Stobaeus, is the fullest surviving early Stoic theology.

He wrote his lectures on potsherds and ox shoulder-blades because he could not afford papyrus.

Read Homer, Plato and the Stoics as preparation for the gospel and quoted hundreds of pagan authors, many of them otherwise lost. He left Alexandria during the persecution under Septimius Severus and did not return.

Much of what we have of Greek philosophy before Socrates reaches us because Clement quoted it to argue against it.

Wrote from the Roman church to Corinth about a congregation that had deposed its presbyters. The letter argues for order by analogy with the Roman army and the seasons, and was read aloud in churches for centuries.

Its only complete Greek copy is a Constantinople manuscript of 1056, found in 1873; the older Codex Alexandrinus has a leaf missing.

Daughter of Cleobulus of Lindos, one of the Seven Sages, and composer of riddles in hexameter. Aristotle used one of hers in the Poetics as his model of the good riddle, which says a true thing in impossible terms.

Her riddle Aristotle quotes: I saw a man welding bronze onto another man with fire. The answer is a cupping glass.

One of the canonical Seven Sages and ruler of Lindos on Rhodes. Riddles and the maxim that moderation is best are attributed to him, as is a verse epitaph for Midas that Simonides mocked.

His daughter Cleobulina became better known for riddles than he was, which is rare in the sixth century BCE.

A two-book Stoic textbook of astronomy, surviving complete. It is the only source for how Eratosthenes measured the Earth, and it preserves a great deal of Posidonius. Nothing whatever is known about the author.

Everything we know about Eratosthenes measuring the Earth comes from one paragraph in a textbook by a man nobody can date.

Alexandrian alchemist, not the queen. She is credited with the still and the design of the vessel for heating substances over a fire, and with a page of diagrams that later chemistry copied for a thousand years.

Her page carries the serpent eating its own tail with the motto one is the all, the oldest such drawing in alchemy.

Born Hasdrubal at Carthage and taught philosophy in Punic before moving to Athens at twenty-four. He wrote down what Carneades had only said aloud, and headed the Academy for seventeen years.

When Rome levelled Carthage in 146 BCE he sent his surviving countrymen a book of consolation. Cicero was still reading it eighty years later.