Appian

Born around 95 in Alexandria, Appian climbed the colonial ladder: senior posts in Roman Egypt, then west to Rome itself around 120, where he worked as an advocate pleading cases before emperors. By 147 he'd been named procurator - likely back in Egypt - a position reserved for the equestrian class, marking him as a man from means. Somewhere in those years he started writing. His "Roman History", finished before 165, runs to 24 books in Greek and works more like a stack of monographs than a single thread: each volume tracks a people or war from their start to the moment Rome absorbed them. The core - books 13 through 17, called "The Civil Wars" - covers the Republic's final decades and remains the only surviving blow-by-blow of that unraveling. He cited no sources, but his account is all we have for stretches no one else documented in full.