Author Description

"Diodoros of Sicily lived and worked in the last century before Christ (c.90-c.30 or c.20). He witnessed the rise of Rome to supremacy, the eclipse of Greek empires in the east, and the unification of the inhabited world (the oikoumene) under Roman dominance, especially through the conquests of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. At some point in his life Diodoros conceived the ambition of writing a history of the world from its mythical beginnings to his own day. For that purpose he read and studied the works of his great predecessors in historiography, Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephoros, Theopompos, Polybios, Poseidonios and many lesser known authors. Over thirty years of labour he produced an encyclopedic compendium of world history in 40 books, which he called the Library (Bibliotheke). Writing in the dying days of Greek historiography, he was uniquely positioned to survey and summarise the continuum of history"--