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Chapter 5 considers another book that calls itself a library, the Library of History of Diodorus Siculus. Here the book has a particular world view, which demonstrates that the library may have a particular function in the world. Diodorus espouses a cosmopolitanism that sees all history and all mankind as inextricably linked, with harmony as the ideal and enmity as a non‐ideal. This is the substance of his narrative. At the centre of this cosmopolitan paradigm is Rome, which accepts everyone into itself and governs other nations peacefully. The Library of History is a work that draws together humanity and its experiences of justice and injustice, kindness and cruelty, as the inhabitants of a single, ‘civic’ community.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Diodorus source problem and its bearing on the argument. It then offers a thorough analysis of the moral-didactic lessons and moralising techniques of Diodorus Siculus. It finds that Diodorus’ story universe is governed by divine forces, which are largely just, and that this makes piety the cardinal virtue of his historical actors. Diodorus also condemns brutality and cruel behaviour in any context, and especially when perpetrated against civilians or prisoners of war. Throughout, he recommends epieikeia, decent treatment of those in one’s power, as the most moral and most practically beneficial course. The chapter ends with an overview of differences in moralising between parts of Diodorus’ work based on different sources and briefly hypothesises about the moralising of these sources, some of which are going to be analysed in more detail in chapter 3.

This chapter discusses the first surviving part of Velleius Paterculus' history (1.1-8), which covers the period from the Trojan War to the reign of Romulus, with particular reference to the foundations of cities and colonies, and the succession of monarchical power (imperium) in Greece and Asia. The discussion concentrates on Velleius' interest in Hercules, whose apotheosis he even uses as a dating marker like the Trojan War or the foundation of Rome. Comparison with Diodorus's narrative of Hercules' deeds, and with the first Nemean Ode of Pindar (written for a Sicilian patron), suggests that Velleius may have been following a western tradition in which Hercules became a god after the defeat of the Giants in Campania. Velleius himself was Campanian, as was his patron M. Vinicius, whose family's presence there can be traced back to the 5th century BC.

Skelton's titles give some sense of the views of the poet available to him, and the way in which he redefines them depends not on theory but on his own practice as a writer. This chapter begins with a re-examination of its implications, focusing on his early translation of the Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus (c.1487). Although the Bibliotheca has been neglected critically, it is none the less central to Skelton's understanding of the writer's authority. It provides him with a number of commonplaces on the subject of writing that recur again and again in his later works. More importantly, however, his practice as translator repeatedly demonstrates the extent of the writer's influence over his subject. Where his source-text presents the historian as one whose authority is derived from his material—that is, in the writings of previous historians—Skelton's translation proposes an altogether different relation between the writer and his subject-matter. His source consistently discusses the writer's res (or subject-matter) in classical terms, as independent from the verba (or the words in which it is clothed). Thus, the meaning of the original may be transferred intact, unaffected by its treatment by a new writer or translator.

This chapter works outward from the final scene of Virgil's Aeneid in order to examine three interlocking themes. The first is the importance of the Social (or Marsic) War (91-88 BC) as an analogue for the battles waged for Italy in the second half of Virgil's Aeneid. Here historiographical texts (Sallust, Diodorus, Posidonius) are adduced in order to show the issues surrounding the Social War. The second theme is the dilemma between mercy and vengeance, and the difficulty for Roman authors in portraying civil war. It is argued that the ‘open’ endings of both Aeneid and Sallust's Catiline are not accidental, but rather one strategy for dealing with those difficulties. The third theme is the role that spoils play in late Republican discussions of their empire and treatment of their subjects, and the way in which this is related to the question of civil war.

At 13.19–33 of his Bibliotheke historike Diodorus Siculus provides a unique presentation of the fate of Nicias and Demosthenes, Athenian generals captured along with their troops while leading the Sicilian Expedition of 415–413 BCE. Speeches by the Syracusan citizen Nicolaus and the Spartan general Gylippus outline opposing options: humane (philanthropos) or brutal treatment. This discussion is highly stylized by Diodorus, becoming a rhetorical tour de force which showcases his estimation of Classical Athenian democracy. The strong redolence of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue and Mytilenian Debate, both archetypal discussions of the effects and ethics of Athenian imperialism, underpins my labelling 13.19–33 the ‘Sicilian Dialogue’. The primary purpose of this chapter is to highlight, through an extended discussion of the literary and ethical underpinnings of the Sicilian Dialogue, Diodorus’ views on fifth-century Athenian imperialist democracy and his interaction with Athenian political thought, centred on the virtue of philanthropia, crucial for his historical vision.

This chapter discusses the Roman slave revolts of the second and early first centuries bc. It notes that although the first Sicilian is little studied by historians, it contains some unique features, and that its leader, Eunus, was in his own way as remarkable a man as Spartacus. The chapter further notes that the main evidence for the revolt and its background is to be found in Diodorus Siculus. It reports that Diodurus was a Sicilian, from Agyrium; that his account post-dates the revolt by less than a century; and that he may have drawn material from the Greek philosopher and historian Posidonius—himself, like Eunus, a native of Apamea. Posidonius was widely traveled and had an interest in the problem of slavery.

Though Polybius is on occasion critical of the Rhodian historian Zeno, his detailed knowledge of Rhodian activities in Lycia, and her dealings with Philip V and Antiochus III, and with Rome, points to Polybius making significant use of Zeno's historical work. Diodorus' writings on the legendary Rhodian past are also likely to reflect Zeno's treatment of this early period, especially in relation to the cult of Lindian Athena, reflecting the importance of local traditions and myths in much Hellenistic historiography. Diodorus' account of Demetrius Poliorcetes' siege of Rhodes may likewise usefully be read as reflecting a lively and patriotic account of the siege in Zeno, in keeping with Polybius' critique of Zeno and Antisthenes as historians who were too partial when writing about Rhodian history.

Ducetius, a native Sicel, created a synteleia, or federation, that at its height controlled a large portion of east-central Sicily. Yet, although the corpus of work that aims to decipher Ducetius' ethnic identity continues to grow, political historians — who generally pass over Ducetius completely in discussions of Sicilian tyranny — have ignored the broader implications of his territorial and political conquests. This chapter first gives a brief account of the life of Ducetius as recounted by Diodorus Siculus. It then examines the nature of Ducetius' synteleia and his role in Sicel politics, arguing that his importance in Sicel state-formation is often overemphasised. It also places Ducetius in the context of current discussions of the ‘Hellenisation’ of native peoples. Finally, the chapter locates Ducetius' synteleia within the trend towards the creation of multi-poleis states and alliances in Sicily, and suggests that redistributing land, relocating populations and refounding cities were not actions limited to Greek tyrants, but a response to the political realities of fifth-century Sicily.

This chapter shows what the term philosophos could have meant at the time for which it is attested, and thus what meaning Pythagoras or his followers would have sought to spin in accepting the term for themselves, had they done so. It pays close attention to the peculiar archaic use of phil-prefixed names, their normative valence, their application, or the contribution of their second element to the overall meaning. The chapter also considers the meaning of that particular second element, soph-, at the end of the sixth century BCE. This chapter thus begins by turning again to Cicero's version of the Pythagoras story. It looks in more detail to a non-Heraclidean but probably still fourth-century BCE version, found in Diodorus Siculus, which in effect dramatizes the thesis of this book: that the word philosophos was formed in reference to sophoi considered as “sages.”

This chapter discusses accounts of violence in so-called tragic history and suggests that this Hellenistic subgenre may better be understood as an attempt to write experiential history. It begins with defining what characterized ‘tragic’ or ‘sensationalist’ accounts of violence and atrocities, taking Diodorus Siculus’ account of the sack of Selinus (Diod. Sic. 13.57) as its case study, comparing it with passages of Thucydides and Polybius to illustrate the differences. The second part of the chapter examines the possible purpose with such experiential representations of atrocities. It proceeds by examining Polybius’ famous criticism of Phylarchus for confusing history and tragedy (Plb. 2.56) as well as fragment 21 of Agatharchides’ On the Red Sea, which discusses the correct way to write about disasters, and finally some of Diodorus’ many remarks on the didactic purpose of historiography. It concludes that the ‘tragic’ historiographers, like Thucydides and Polybius, considered their works (moral-)didactic and believed that certain things can best be learned through an experiential representation. In the third and final part of the chapter, this ideal is compared with modern history writing and parallels are drawn both with the presentist/experientialist movement and with the call from some quarters for historians to take a moral stand on their subject matter, particularly when writing about atrocities.

This chapter focuses on our surviving historiographic texts from the fifth to the first century BC : Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Diodorus of Sicily. Greek historiography dealt with a limited number of types of situations and within these situations was concerned with a limited number of themes. This observation leads to a preliminary typology of such stock events and their concomitant themes, or topoi. There are four other distinct characteristics of Greek historiography: interest in causation, didactic purpose (practical or moral), even-handedness in narrative treatment of opponents in conflict, and alternation between remote, omniscient narration – feigning non-narration – and involved, polemical first-person argumentation. Although none of these traits is in itself uniquely Greek, the specific combination of them seen in these five historiographers is.

This chapter examines the reception of the Theogony in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, with special attention to the Alexandrian poets, the Stoic view of an all-powerful Zeus creator-god, and Euheremus’s Sacred History in the Hellenistic period. In the Roman period, Ovid parodies the Theogony in his Metamorphoses and Lucian never ties of making fun of Hesiod’s poem while Christian apologists assault it, taking seriously what Lucian finds amusing.

Connected with textual unfinishedness are several concepts. Chapter 3 explores two such concepts and their connection to the idea of textual stability and authorial intentionality: accidental publication and postpublication revision. Unfinished texts often became what Larsen calls “accidentally published.” Publication was notional and social in antiquity, as the form of a published text would not necessarily differ from an unfinished one. The idea of accidental publication did a lot of different kinds of work for different writers. Moreover, even if a text was intentionally published, it could undergo substantive postpublication revision. All of the above calls into question what it means to talk about a “final” version of a textual tradition.

The history of war is replete with examples of novel diseases that have suddenly and unexpectedly erupted into human consciousness. As we noted in Section 2.2, ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Diodorus Siculus provide classical accounts of the devastation wrought by mysterious war pestilences—diseases which, in many instances, elude classification in modern disease systems, and to which the appellation ‘antique plague’ is occasionally given (Smallman-Raynor and Cliff 2004b: 66–73). In more recent times, we saw in Table 1.7 how maladies such as the idiopathic English sweating sickness, along with venereal syphilis, typhus fever, and yellow fever, appeared— ostensibly for the first time—in association with wars of the late medieval and early modern periods. In the twentieth century, trench fever (World War I, 1914–18), scrub typhus (World War II, 1939–45), and Korean haemorrhagic fever (Korean War, 1950–3) provide further instances of the emergence phenomenon (Macpherson et al. 1922–3; Philip 1948; Gajdusek 1956). In addition to sponsoring apparently wholly new conditions, military conflict has also promoted the re-emergence of many infectious and parasitic diseases. Recent examples include African trypanosomiasis (Ugandan Civil War, 1979–86; Berrang Ford 2007), diphtheria and tuberculosis (Tajikistan Civil War, 1992–7; Keshavjee and Becerra 2000; Usmanov et al. 2000) and epidemic louse-borne typhus fever (Burundian Civil War, 1993–2005; Raoult, Ndihokubwayo, et al. 1998). Figure 8.1 illustrates schematically the sample factors that underpin the war-related emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases. As Price-Smith (2002: 129) observes, military conflict acts ‘as a direct disease ‘‘amplifier,’’ creating those physical conditions (poverty, famine, destruction of vital infrastructure, and large population movements) that are particularly conducive to the spread and mutation of disease’. High-level population mobility and mixing, differential patterns of disease exposure and susceptibility, the breakdown of public health infrastructure, and insanitary living conditions are all pertinent to an understanding of the (re-)emergence complex (Lederberg et al. 1992: 110–12). Additional factors also attain prominence. Within the schema of Figure 8.1, heightened exposure to the zoonotic pool has played a particularly important role in the war-related precipitation of disease emergence and re-emergence.