Diodorus Siculus, Books 11-12.37.1: Greek History, 480-431 by Diodorus Siculus,Peter Green

Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 100-30 BCE) is our in basic terms surviving resource for a continual narrative of Greek historical past from Xerxes' invasion to the Wars of the Successors following the dying of Alexander the good. but this significant historian has been always denigrated as a trifling copyist who slavishly reproduced the works of previous historians with no realizing what he used to be writing. against this, during this iconoclastic paintings Peter eco-friendly builds a resounding case for Diodorus' advantages as a historian. via a clean English translation of a key component of his multi-volume background (the so-called Bibliotheke, or "Library") and a remark and notes that refute past checks of Diodorus, eco-friendly bargains a fairer, larger balanced estimate of this much-maligned historian.

The component to Diodorus' background translated the following covers the interval 480-431 BCE, from the Persian invasion of Greece to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian warfare. This half-century, often called the Pentekontaetia, used to be the Golden Age of Periclean Athens, a time of unheard of fulfillment in drama, structure, philosophy, historiography, and the visible arts. Green's accompanying notes and remark revisit longstanding debates approximately historic inconsistencies in Diodorus' paintings and provide thought-provoking new interpretations and conclusions. In his masterful introductory essay, eco-friendly demolishes the conventional view of Diodorus and argues for a radical serious reappraisal of this synthesizing historian, who tried not anything below a "universal background" that starts with the gods of mythology and maintains all the way down to the eve of Julius Caesar's Gallic campaigns.