Diodorus Siculus

• 1. Introduction

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  Diodorus Siculus set himself a task that would consume decades of his life: to write a single history of the entire world. Not one region, not one civilization, not one era. The entire world, from the first myths of creation through the age of Alexander the Great and beyond, collected into forty books. He called it the Bibliotheca historica, the Historical Library, and he meant that name literally. The question the rest of this documentary will explore is what kind of man attempts such a project, and what survives when most of it is lost.

• 2. A Man From Agyrium

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  Diodorus was born in Agyrium, a town in Sicily now known as Agira. Beyond that single fact, drawn from his own writing, antiquity offers almost nothing about his personal life. The one external reference comes from Jerome, writing in his Chronicon under the year of Abraham 1968, which corresponds to 49 BC. Jerome notes simply that Diodorus of Sicily, a writer of Greek history, became illustrious. That is the full extent of what a contemporary or near-contemporary recorded about him.

  His English translator Charles Henry Oldfather noted what he called a striking coincidence. Among only two known Greek inscriptions found at Agyrium, catalogued as Inscriptiones Graecae XIV, 588, one is a tombstone. It reads: Diodorus, the son of Apollonius. No one can say with certainty whether this is the historian's grave, but the coincidence has drawn comment from scholars for generations.

  The final work attributed to Diodorus dates to 21 BC, giving historians a rough endpoint for his career. He is said to have flourished in the first century BC, and his major work was composed between 60 and 30 BC.

• 3. Forty Books, Fifteen Left

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  Of the forty books Diodorus completed, only fifteen survive intact. Books one through five and books eleven through twenty made it to the present day in full. The remaining twenty-five books are lost, though fragments of them were preserved in two later sources: the writings of Photius and the Excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, a massive Byzantine compilation project.

  The intact books cover a striking range. Books one through five move geographically rather than chronologically, describing the history and culture of ancient Egypt, then Mesopotamia, India, Scythia, and Arabia, then North Africa, then Greece and Europe. Books eleven through twenty follow a different structure, recounting the history of the world from the Trojan War down to the death of Alexander the Great.

  The lost final section is particularly tantalizing. It dealt with the successors of Alexander and was supposed to carry the narrative down to the beginning of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. Whether Diodorus actually reached that endpoint is unknown, because the ending is missing. One reading of the evidence suggests he stopped short at 60 BC, old and tired from his labours.

• 4. The Library and Its Sources

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  Diodorus chose the title Bibliotheca, meaning library, as an explicit acknowledgment that he was assembling a composite work drawn from many other authors. He did not pretend to have witnessed the events he described or to have invented a new account. His project was one of synthesis and preservation.

  The authors he drew on form a substantial roster of ancient scholarship. Among the identified sources are Hecataeus of Abdera, Ctesias of Cnidus, Ephorus, Theopompus, Hieronymus of Cardia, Duris of Samos, Diyllus, Philistus, Timaeus, Polybius, and Posidonius. Some of these writers survive in their own right; others are known today largely because Diodorus quoted or paraphrased them. In that sense, the Bibliotheca became a vessel for works that would otherwise have vanished entirely.

  The three-part structure of the whole work reflects the scope of his ambition. The first section takes mythic history as its subject, covering the non-Hellenic and Hellenic worlds up to the destruction of Troy. The second section moves into recorded history, from the Trojan War to Alexander. The third runs from Alexander's successors toward Diodorus's own century, ending somewhere around 60 BC.