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St Photius the Great, tr. Freese, 1920; selections

70. Codex 70: Diodorus Siculus

Read the forty books of Diodorus Siculus,¹ containing a kind of history of the world. He is fuller than Cephalion and Hesychius Illustrius in his description of the same periods. His style is clear, unadorned, and admirably adapted for history. He neither excessively affects atticisms or antiquated modes of expression, nor on the other hand does he altogether descend to the level of everyday language. He rather takes pleasure in a style midway between the two, avoiding figures of speech and the like affectations, and only using the language of fable, after the manner of poets, where he relates the legends of gods and heroes.

He begins his history with the mythical ages of the Greeks and barbarians, and goes down to the beginning of the war between the Romans and Celts, at the time when Gaius Julius Caesar (called “divine” by the Romans on account of his mighty deeds) subdued most, and those the most warlike, of the Celtic nations. He spent thirty years over the history, as he tells us himself, visiting several different countries for the sake of obtaining information, and exposing himself to many dangers. He was a Sicilian from Agyrium; from his long intercourse with the Romans he had become familiar with that people and their language, and diligently collected accounts of all their chief successes and failures.

The entire history is comprised in forty books. In the first six the events preceding the Trojan war and other legends are described; in the next eleven, the events of the world from the taking of Troy to the death of Alexander the Great; in the remaining twenty-three, the events up to the time when war broke out between the Celts and Romans under the leadership of Julius Caesar. He subdued most of, and the most warlike, of their nations and extended the Roman empire to the British islands, at which point the history ends.

Notes

Of Agyrium in Sicily, flourished in the time of Augustus, and certainly lived till after 21 B.C. His Historical Library in forty books was a history of the world down to Caesar’s Gallic wars. Only books 1-5 and 11-20 are extant. The chief value of the work consists in the employment of authorities whose works are now lost, the preservation of old tradition, and especially of chronological material.