Books by Ammianus Marcellinus

Written primarily in Latin, 1978/1999 edition.

Ammianus (c. 325-c. 395 CE), a Greek from Antioch, served many years as an officer in the Roman army, then settled in Rome, where he wrote a Latin history of the Roman Empire. The portion that survives covers twenty-five years in the historian's own lifetime: the reigns of Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valentinian I, and Valens.

Ammianus Marcellinus was the last great Roman historian, and his writings rank alongside those of Livy and Tacitus. The Later Roman Empire chronicles a period of twenty-five years during Marcellinus' own lifetime, covering the reigns of Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valentinian I, and Valens, and providing eyewitness accounts of significant military events including the Battle of Strasbourg and the Goth's Revolt. Portraying a time of rapid and dramatic change, Marcellinus describes an Empire exhausted by excessive taxation, corruption, the financial ruin of the middle classes and the progressive decline in the morale of the army. In this magisterial depiction of the closing decades of the Roman Empire, we can see the seeds of events that were to lead to the fall of the city, just twenty years after Marcellinus' death.