A Brief History of History Trivia Quiz

Answer: Herodotus

Born in Halicarnassus, Herodotus lived between 484 and 420 B.C. His "Histories" are not entirely "accurate" by the standards of contemporary scholarship, but they add a great deal to our understanding of the ancient world.

Answer: Athens and Sparta

Thucydides lived from 466 to 400 B.C., and the war was fought in various stages between 434 and 401, so he have had contemporary knowledge of the conflict as he penned his famous "History of the Peloponnesian War".

Answer: Plutarch

Plutarch lived from about AD 46 to 120, and he had a great deal of influence on many later writers, including Shakespeare, who borrowed from his work. There is even a character called Plutarch in the "Hunger Games" series. Besides his "Parallel Lives", Plutarch also write a work called "Moralia".

Answer: Voltaire

Voltaire, whose name was really Francois-Marie Arouet, lived from 1694 to 1778. He was a prolific author whose work included poetry, drama, scientific studies and copious letters. His second historical work is "Essays on the Customs and Spirit of the Nations" (1756). He set new standards for the exclusion of bias and the application of scholarly rigour in historical writing.

Answer: Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived from about 1100 to 1155, began his history with Brutus, the son of one of the heroes of the Trojan War. He also included the exploits of King Arthur, and wrote about Merlin in "The Prophecies of Merlin" and "Vita Merlini".

These works have had a major impact on the popularity of the Arthurian legends to the present day. Shakespeare, however, was clearly more intrigued with his accounts of two other monarchs: King "Leir" and King Cymbeline.

Answer: Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli (1469-1527) is of course best known for his book "The Prince", the treatise about how to conduct matters of state that has made his name synonymous with a talent for unscrupulous cunning to attain a desired end. His history begins with the fall of Rome and is an argument in support of the power of the Medici family. (In fact, one of them, who later became Pope Clement VII, commissioned the book, which was printed in 1532.)

Answer: The Roman Empire

"The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" took Gibbon twelve years to write and was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. (Gibbon lived from 1737 to 1794.) The work is referred to in many other books; for instance, Evelyn Waugh wrote a 1928 comic novel called "Decline and Fall". In Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend", one character pays another to read Gibbon's history to him. The unscrupulous reader pretends to be doing so, but makes most of it up since he can't really understand it himself.

Some aspects of the work, in particular his claim that the adoption of Christianity undermined the fighting spirit of the Romans, are controversial and are not widely accepted.

Answer: Winston Churchill

Churchill wrote "The Second World War" in six volumes and "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples" in four volumes that covered the time of Roman occupation of Britain up to World War I. The multi-talented politician was also an accomplished painter.

Answer: Len Deighton

Deighton, born in 1929, also wrote "Blitzkreig: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk" (written in 1979) and "Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II". He is best known for his often-filmed spy fiction, including "The IPCRESS File".

Answer: The Guns of August

As a military historian, Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989) is a rare woman in a field that is very much dominated by men. She wrote numerous popular histories covering various eras, from "The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain Since 1700" (written in 1938) to "The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution" (1988).

Incidentally, "Goodbye to All That" is by Robert Graves; "All Quiet on the Western Front" is by Erich Maria Remarque, while "A Farewell to Arms" is by Ernest Hemingway.