Didn't Cervantes pen Don Quixote while imprisoned? Pretty impressive, if true.
Kyl Von Kull Well, you're limiting yourself to the Greeks and Old Gods. And not a very wide range.
I’m limiting the discussion to epic poetry that can be defined even as pseudo history. I doubt you mean to include something lyric like The Charge of the Light Brigade, since you are not a scrub.
I’ll spot you old Anglo Saxon epics—not much different from the sagas—and some of the gaelic cattle raid epics, and the Persian book of kings and even the song of Roland. I know there’s supposed to be a good Tamil historical epic but I’ve never read it. At a certain point, though, it’s not history anymore: not the Kelevala, not Gilgamesh etc... although maybe that’s being unfair if I’m counting the Iliad.
The thing is, you stop getting history as poetry pretty quickly once people learn to read in meaningful enough numbers. I don’t think romances count—they’re more like proto novels and were meant to be read, not spoken.
And yes, I've read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. Thucydides was best. But the pre-Socratic philosophers were the best reads for me (Heraclitus)
It’s a tragedy that we have so little left of Heraclitus, who is indeed the best (although that may be because his best sayings were preserved while his dumber stuff, if it existed, didn’t survive. Whereas we have nearly all of Plato and Aristotle’s bad ideas). Did you read Xenophon’s Socrates or the Anabasis? Because his philosophy is ok, but the memoir is incredible.
If you like your ancient history dry like Thucydides, read some of the Romans. Tacitus is unparalleled in terms of his prose—more of a sense of humor than Thucydides, but a very dry one. During the French Revolution, Desmoulins, the guy who led the taking of the Bastille, published a passage from Tacitus about the brutal reign of Domitian in his newspaper as an indirect-but-on-the-nose critique of the terror and it was enough to get him executed despite being one of Robespierre’s best friends.
Less dry, Ammianus Marcellinus and Procopius have a bit more of a memoir feel to them. Neither is as punchy as Tacitus but they tell a damn good story. Honestly, even some old Athenian and Roman trial transcripts can have more drama, albeit of a down to earth variety, than epics.
