The line between story and history was frequently indeterminate. Ancient history books brim with accounts which are, to our eyes, patently mythical. Herodotus, a writer born in Halicarnassus (modern Bodrum in Turkey) in the fifth century BC, earned the sobriquet ‘Father of History’ for his celebrated Histories of Greece’s wars with Persia in spite of his numerous flights of fancy. Herodotus wove into his accounts what was known in Greek as ‘logoi’ – stories, spoken things, words which might be fictional or might equally be factual. While there is no doubt that the Persian Wars took place, and that much of what Herodotus wrote of them is true, there are also passages in his books which read like pure fiction. Inspired by Herodotus, I have included in this anthology a number of stories from the ancient history books, regardless of whether they are wholly or only partially fictional. It can be so difficult to separate fact from fiction that there is much to be said for enjoying passages in these books on their own terms as vivid stories.

The Romans were particularly partial to this blending of history and story as they sought to establish their own place in the world. In order to trace the origins of their people to the heroes of Homer’s epics, they developed the myth that Aeneas, one of the Trojans who fought in the Iliad, had led a band of refugees free from burning Troy to found a new home in Italy. The Aeneid, a Latin epic by the poet Virgil, provided the Romans with an exciting foundation story. Even Roman historians such as Livy were willing to incorporate it into their accounts of Rome’s past. Such was the power of the story.

Myth, the basis for much storytelling, was the common language through which the ancients defined themselves. Even scientists who rejected myths and the gods who populated them found that they were a useful means of communicating their ideas. Lucretius, a Roman philosopher and atomicist of the first century BC, drew on stories surrounding the love goddess Venus to explain his theories of genesis on earth. The ideas in his account are very different from those proffered by Hesiod in the seventh century BC, but the mythology surrounding Venus provided a link between ancient Greece and late-Republican Rome.