Best Parts Of

Almost nobody finishes these books. That is not because the books are bad. It is because most of what is in them is a list.

Ancient historians wrote for readers who wanted the tribute payments of every subject province, the genealogy of every man who commanded a ship, and the course of every river between here and the battle. Between those lists, without warning and without any change of tone, they set down some of the most astonishing things ever written about human beings — a king who forces his bodyguard to look at his wife naked, an emperor who spends an hour every morning alone stabbing flies with a pin, a queen delivered to a general rolled up in bedding, the exact price of the three grades of Egyptian embalming.

This site is those parts, and nothing else.

It is not a summary. Nothing here is retold, paraphrased, modernised or explained away. Every word in the indented columns is the translator's, exactly as he set it down, in translations old enough to be in the public domain and good enough to still be worth reading. We do only one thing: we cut. Where a passage has been trimmed inside, the gap is marked so you can see it happen. The titles and the short italic lines above each passage are ours, and they are set apart so that you never mistake them for the ancient text.

How much gets cut varies by author. Herodotus keeps about one line in fifty. Plutarch, who wrote forty-eight separate biographies, keeps far less. The arithmetic is printed at the top of every edition, because the ratio is the entire point.

Best Parts Of Herodotus The Histories A Greek from Halicarnassus who travelled the known world in the fifth century BC asking people why they did what they did, and wrote the first prose account of the past that tried to explain it rather than sing it. 5,854 words kept of 283,477 · 2.1% · 16 passages Best Parts Of Thucydides The Peloponnesian War An Athenian general who lost a battle, was exiled for it, and spent the next twenty years writing the definitive account of the war that ruined his city. 5,386 words kept of 204,495 · 2.6% · 7 passages Best Parts Of Plutarch Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans A Greek priest at Delphi who wrote forty-eight biographies, pairing a famous Greek with a famous Roman and comparing them. 1,616 words kept of 740,326 · 0.2% · 12 passages Best Parts Of Suetonius The Twelve Caesars A Roman civil servant who became private secretary to the emperor Hadrian, and used the run of the imperial archives to write twelve biographies of the men who had ruled Rome before him. 5,287 words kept of 178,399 · 3.0% · 18 passages

How a passage earns its place

A passage is kept if it does at least one of six things. Every entry on the site is labelled with which, so you can see the judgement being made rather than having to trust it.

Sex & ScandalYou would repeat it at dinner and someone would ask whether it was really in there.
CrueltyIt records what people have actually been willing to do, set down without flinching and usually without comment.
Strange CustomsIt resets your sense of what human beings have considered normal.
ComedyIt is, across two thousand years and two dead languages, still genuinely funny.
Human NatureSomeone behaves in a way you recognise immediately, which is the whole reason these books survive.
Accidentally RightThe author reports something he does not believe, or does not understand, which turns out to be true.

On honesty about the sources: these are public-domain translations, and two of them are Victorian or earlier. Alexander Thomson's 1796 Suetonius silently censors five passages, replacing the offending lines with a row of dashes — four of the five concern the sexual conduct of Tiberius and Nero. None of those passages is used here, and nothing censored is presented as complete. Macaulay's Herodotus prints footnote numbers as bare figures inside the sentences; all 1,029 of them were checked against the numbered notes at the back of each book before being removed, and not one turned out to be a number Herodotus wrote.