The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians and Macedonians.

Charles Rollin's Ancient History was, for well over a century, the book from which the educated world learned its antiquity. First published in Paris between 1730 and 1738 as the Histoire ancienne, it gathers the whole sweep of the ancient Near East and the classical world, the Egyptians and Carthaginians, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, and the Greeks and Macedonians down to the conquests of Alexander, into a single grand and endlessly readable narrative. Rollin (1661 to 1741) was no dry pedant but a beloved teacher, twice rector of the University of Paris and professor of eloquence at the Royal College, who wrote history as a succession of vivid moral lessons and thrilling set pieces, from the wonders of Egypt and the hanging gardens of Babylon to Leonidas at Thermopylae and Hannibal storming across the Alps. Enormously popular in its own day and reprinted and translated without cease, the Ancient History shaped the historical imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was devoured by schoolboys and statesmen alike, admired by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and carried across the Atlantic to the libraries of the American founders, where it helped furnish the classical vocabulary of the new republic.