← Fame through time1000-1 BC
The 1st millennium BC
Whose working lives fell in the 1st millennium BC. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1st millennium BC, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Homer22 decades - 2
Virgil22 decades - 3
Herodotus22 decades - 4
Sophocles22 decades - 5
Ovid22 decades - 6
Sappho22 decades - 7
Aeschylus22 decades - 8
Thucydides22 decades - 9
Euripides22 decades - 10
Horacenot measured- - 11
Hesiod22 decades - 12
Aristophanes22 decades - 13
Sima Qian9 decades - 14
Livy22 decades - 15
Solon22 decades - 16
Emperor Wu of Han8 decades - 17
Polybius22 decades - 18
Catullus22 decades - 19
Lucretius22 decades - 20
Qu Yuan11 decades - 21
Pindar22 decades - 22
Diodorus Siculus22 decades - 23
Menandernot measured- - 24
Plautus22 decades - 25
Terencenot measured-
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.