Diodorus Siculus Books 11-12.37.1

<p><b>2007 - A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book</b></p> <p>Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 100-30 BCE) is our only surviving source for a continuous narrative of Greek history from Xerxes' invasion to the Wars of the Successors following the death of Alexander the Great. Yet this important historian has been consistently denigrated as a mere copyist who slavishly reproduced the works of earlier historians without understanding what he was writing. By contrast in this iconoclastic work Peter Green builds a convincing case for Diodorus' merits as a historian. Through a fresh English translation of a key portion of his multi-volume history (the so-called Bibliotheke or Library) and a commentary and notes that refute earlier assessments of Diodorus Green offers a fairer better balanced estimate of this much-maligned historian.</p> <p>The portion of Diodorus' history translated here covers the period 480-431 BCE from the Persian invasion of Greece to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. This half-century known as the Pentekontaetia was the Golden Age of Periclean Athens a time of unprecedented achievement in drama architecture philosophy historiography and the visual arts. Green's accompanying notes and commentary revisit longstanding debates about historical inconsistencies in Diodorus' work and offer thought-provoking new interpretations and conclusions. In his masterful introductory essay Green demolishes the traditional view of Diodorus and argues for a thorough critical reappraisal of this synthesizing historian who attempted nothing less than a universal history that begins with the gods of mythology and continues down to the eve of Julius Caesar's Gallic campaigns.</p>