Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus (c. AD 330 – c. 395) was born into a Greek-speaking family at Antioch in Syria. As a young officer on the staff of the general Ursicinus he served on the eastern frontier against Persia and in Gaul, and later campaigned under the Caesar and then Emperor Julian, whose expedition into Persia he joined in AD 363.

After his service he settled in Rome and wrote, in Latin, a history of the empire in thirty-one books, conceived as a continuation of Tacitus and running from the accession of Nerva (AD 96) to the death of Valens at Adrianople (AD 378). He describes himself in its last lines as a Greek by birth and a former soldier.

The first thirteen books are lost. The eighteen that survive, Books XIV to XXXI, cover the years AD 353 to 378 and are the fullest narrative of the later fourth-century empire, much of it written from his own observation. This archive carries them in C. D. Yonge's English translation of 1862.