Diodōrus Siculus

Diodōrus Siculus, a Greek historian, was born at Agrarium, in Sicily. Little is known of his life beyond what is told by himself. He lived in the times of Julius Cæsar and Augustus, travelled in Asia and Europe, and lived a long time in Rome, collecting the materials of his great work, the compilation of which occupied thirty years. This work, the Bibliothēkē Historikē, was a history of the world, in forty books, from the creation to the Gallic wars of Julius Cæsar. It was divided by the author into three parts—the first of which, in six books, comprises all the Greek and foreign mythical history down to the Trojan war; the second, in eleven books, contains the history from the year 1184 B.C. to the death of Alexander the Great; the third, in twenty-three books, continues the narrative of events from that date to the year 60 B.C. Of this great work, the first five books are extant entire; the next five books are wholly lost; the next ten are complete; and of the remainder of the work, considerable fragments have been preserved in the Excerpta in Photius, and in the Eclogæ prepared by command of Constantine Porphyrogénitus. Had Diodorus Siculus possessed any powers either of criticism or of arrangement, his work would have been of the greatest importance; but he was in both respects so deficient, that his history has no practical value beyond what belongs to an immense mass of raw and now scarcely available material. His narrative is colourless and monotonous, and his diction, generally clear and simple, holds a sort of middle place between the pure Attic and the colloquial Greek of his time. The best editions of Diodorus Siculus are Wesseling's (Amst. 1746), L. Dindorf's (1828–31), and Bekker's (1853–54); re-edited by Vogel (1888–93).