"Vixere FORTES ante Agamemnon" (There were great men before Agamemnon) - Horace.

Ctesias was a Greek doctor at the Persian court c400 BC. His books survive in fragments; NG Wilson (Photius, Duckworth, London, 1994, 1,1,54 78)provides a generous English sampling. While his Persian History is sober, with the odd weird moment (e.g. man crushed by falling hailstones), his India is a non-stop avalanche of amazing stories. He wrote just before Greeks went there with and after Alexander the Great. The Ctesian message is clear: foreign is funny.

Livy's Roman History abounds with lists of prodigies. They derived from priestly records, a provenance presiding an inherent portmanteau formula: these things are supernatural, hence need no explanation. Livy himself could sometimes rise above this level, while (rightly) insisting that what people believe is always important in context; cf. FB Krauss, An Interpretation of the Omens, Portents, and Prodigies recorded by Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius (Philadelphia, 1930)

Pliny (AD23-79) addressed his Natural History to Prince Titus. He claims it contains 20,000 facts from 100 authors, plus his own researches. This "lunatic enterprise" (classicist Peter Jones) serves tip fortean fodder alongside mundane fare, often without discrimination, though Pliny does enjoy lambasting "Greek credulity" regarding (e.g.) werewolves. His Preface can sound like Fort himself , e.g,. "Most of us seek agreeable subjects, while topics of immeasurable abstruseness treated by others are dunned in the shadowy darkness of the theme."

Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights, bk. ch4 -second century AD) exemplified the contents of some dilapidated Greek volumes of Mirabilia acquired in Brindisi -cannibals, dog-faced ;aid one-legged men, hermaphrodites mid sex-changes from female to none - in modern tabloid spirit, claiming "disgust with such worthless writings" while eagerly devouring them.

His contemporary Phlegon of Tralles, a secretary to Emperor Hadrian, wrote Long-Lived Persons (fragmentary) and Book of Marvels (Englished by W Hansen, Unit. Exeter Press, 1996). His emphasis is on giant bones, human freaks, multiple and monstrous births, and sexual oddities, especially women becoming men-for an 18th century French parallel to this last, see the Gentleman's Magazine, 4 Aug 1734, p455. Known technically as Paradoxography, Phlegon's stuff is compared by Hansen both to Ambrose Pare's Renaissance tract On Monsters and Marvels and to supermarket tabloids.

For readers unable to stomach the complete Livy-his later books suggestively survive only in epitomes - one Julius Obsequens produced a dumbed-down cull entitled Book of Prodigies, in which each year's forteana are jammed together without discrimination or comment. Obsequens (4th century AD) was probably a pagan seeking to combat the new industry of Christian history and miracle - the reverse being palpable in, notably, Augustine's City of God.

The Byzantines had their paradoxographical cake and ate it, perpetuating the pagan material whilst subordinating it to the Christian strain. Photius is the perfect example. Adoring such stuff, he preserved (e.g. Bibliotheca, chsl88-90) much that would otherwise be lost, but blots his intellectual copybook when (ch190 para146h) blasting one item, the New History of Ptolemy Chennus, thus: "His worst feature is that he does everything he can to explain his absurd yams." What would he have said about Fort's (e.g.) "Procession of the Damned" (Books, pp3-15)?

NB: Genius, Livy, Obsequens, and Pliny are all translated in the Loeb Classical Library series (Harvard University Press).