Dionysius OF HALICARNASSUS, a learned critic, historian, and rhetorician, was born about 50 B.C. He came to Rome about 29 B.C., and lived there on terms of intimacy with many distinguished contemporaries till his death, 7 B.C. His most valuable work is unquestionably his Greek Archæologia, a history of Rome down to 264 B.C., a mine of information about the constitution, religion, history, laws, and private life of the Romans. Of the twenty books of which it originally consisted, we possess only the first nine in a complete form, the tenth and eleventh nearly so, coming down but to 441 B.C.; of the rest, only a few fragments are extant. He was a greater rhetorician and critic than historian, and his extant works on oratory, on the criticism in detail of the great Greek orators, on the characteristics of poets and historians from the time of Homer to Euripides, and upon Thucydides and Dinarchus, possess great interest and value.
There are editions by Reiske (1774-76), Schwartz (1877), and Jacoby (3 vols. 1885-91).