Appian of Alexandria

Appian was a Greek born at Alexandria in Egypt, in the later first century AD. He rose to the highest offices of his native city, then moved to Rome, where he pleaded cases as an advocate before the emperors. Under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius he was made a procurator, an imperial financial official, a post that he himself records in the preface to his history.

He wrote in Greek a Roman History in twenty-four books, arranged not year by year but by peoples and wars, so that each nation's conquest is followed from its first contact with Rome to its end. Of this work the preface and the Foreign Wars, together with the Civil Wars, survive in whole or in large part, while several books are known only from excerpts preserved by later writers.