Secondary sources

As described in the Harvard College Writing Center’s A brief guide to writing the History Paper, “Secondary sources are materials produced after the time period under study; they consider the historical subject with a degree of hindsight and generally select, analyze, and incorporate evidence (derived from primary sources) to make an argument. Works of scholarship are the most common secondary source.”

Typical secondary sources in the Classics will be:  

• Books or monographs
• Scholarly articles, including reviews
• Commentaries, dictionaries, and other reference sources
• Archaeological site reports
• Anything interpretative
• Scholia: Scholia are grammatical, critical, or explanatory notes on ancient texts made by premodern authors; they can be separated from the works they address by decades, centuries, or a millennium. Your specific project will determine if scholia are a primary or secondary source.