Diodoros of Sicily

STUDIA HELLENISTICA 58 DIODOROS OF SICILY HISTORIOGRAPHICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE BIBLIOTHEKE edited by Lisa Irene HAU, Alexander MEEUS, and Brian SHERIDAN PEETERS LEUVEN - PARIS - BRISTOL, CT 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................. IX SETTING THE SCENE Introduction ......................................... 3 Lisa Irene HAU, Alexander MEEUS & Brian SHERIDAN New and Old Approaches to Diodoros: Can They Be Reconciled? 13 Catherine RUBINCAM DIODOROS IN THE FIRST CENTURY Diodoros of Sicily and the Hellenistic Mind ................ 43 Kenneth S. SACKS The Origins of Rome in the Bibliotheke of Diodoros .......... 65 Aude COHEN-SKALLI In Praise of Pompeius: Re-reading the Bibliotheke Historike..... 91 Richard WESTALL GENRE AND PURPOSE From Ἱστορίαι to Βιβλιοθήκη and Ἱστορικὰ Ὑπομνήματα . 131 Johannes ENGELS History’s Aims and Audience in the Proem to Diodoros’ Bibliotheke 149 Alexander MEEUS A Monograph on Alexander the Great within a Universal History: Diodoros Book XVII ................................... 175 Luisa PRANDI VI TABLE OF CONTENTS NEW QUELLENFORSCHUNG Errors and Doublets: Reconstructing Ephoros and Appreciating Diodoros ........................................... 189 Victor PARKER A Question of Sources: Diodoros and Herodotos on the River Nile ............................................... 207 Jessica PRIESTLEY Diodoros’ Narrative of the First Sicilian Slave Revolt (c. 140/35- 132 B.C.) – a Reflection of Poseidonios’ Ideas and Style? ....... 221 Piotr WOZNICZKA How to Read a Diodoros Fragment ....................... 247 Liv Mariah YARROW COMPOSITION AND NARRATIVE Narrator and Narratorial Persona in Diodoros’ Bibliotheke (and their Implications for the Tradition of Greek Historiography)... 277 Lisa Irene HAU Ring Composition in Diodoros of Sicily’s Account of the Lamian War (XVIII 8–18) ..................................... 303 John WALSH Terminology of Political Collaboration and Opposition in Dio- doros XI-XX ........................................ 329 Cinzia BEARZOT GODS AND MYTHS The Role of the Gods in Diodoros’ Universal History: Religious Thought and History in the Historical Library .............. 347 Cécile DURVYE Diodoros, Mythology, and Historiography . 365 Charles E. MUNTZ TABLE OF CONTENTS VII Diodoros and Myth as History .......................... 389 Abram RING ETHNOGRAPHY, LANGUAGES, AND LITERACY Ethno-Geography as a Key to Interpreting Historical Leaders and Their Expansionist Policies in Diodoros . 407 Serena BIANCHETTI Diodoros the Bilingual Provincial: Greek Language and Multilin- gualism in Bibliotheke XVII ............................. 429 Dylan JAMES Inscriptions and Writing in Diodoros’ Bibliotheke ............ 447 Peter LIDDEL RHETORIC AND SPEECHES Diodoros, the Speeches, and the Reader . 473 Dennis PAUSCH The Road Not Taken: Diodoros’ Reasons for Including the Speech of Theodoros ........................................ 491 Christopher BARON MILITARY HISTORY Fate and Valour in Three Battle Descriptions of Diodoros ..... 507 Joseph ROISMAN The Moral Dimension of Military History in Diodoros of Sicily . 519 Nadejda WILLIAMS BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................ 541 INDEX LOCORUM ..................................... 589 GENERAL INDEX ...................................... 605 INTRODUCTION Lisa Irene HAU, Alexander MEEUS & Brian SHERIDAN Modern Scholarship on Diodoros Diodoros has not been a celebrated historian in the past two centuries, though the situation was rather different before c. AD 1800.1 The foun- dation for the changing view seems to have been laid in three lectures presented to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences by Christian Gottlob Heyne in the 1780s.2 Heyne noted that scholars had often tried to judge the reliability of the information found in Diodoros in the same way as they did with Herodotos, Thucydides, Xenophon, or Polybios. Although he himself had made the same mistake in the past, he had come to realise that such an approach was not justified, because Diodoros had relied on the research of others in writing his pioneering universal history. Heyne therefore deemed it of the utmost importance for his studies on ancient Egypt and other early cultures to establish which sources Diodoros had used. This primary interest in establishing the value of the Bibliotheke as a source rather than in identifying Diodoros’ sources for their own sake sets Heyne apart from several of the later Quellenforscher.3 1 On the reception of Diodoros over the centuries see e.g.: Farrington (1937, 5-8), who claims that ‘it would not be difficult to show that from the 15th to the end of the 17th century Diodorus was a living influence on English thought’; Hornblower 1981, 18-21; Seibert 1983, 27-36; Sacks 1990, 162-4; Zecchini 1991 and 2008; Botteri 1992, 11-9; Pinzone 1998; Rubincam 1998c, 505-8; Cresci 2008; Achilli 2012b, 471-4. 2 The three studies and the Epimetrum of 1793 can be accessed together in Dindorf 1828, lix-cxxxi and 1866, xxxviii-cviii. For a complete overview of the original publications, see the catalogue in Heidenreich 2006, S18.1, S18.2 and S18.3; she notes that it is possible that the first one was never actually presented as a lecture (531 n. 644). Heyne was mainly interested in myth and thus paid most attention to books I-V. Heidenreich (2006, 531-50) offers a convenient summary of Heyne’s analysis of Diodoros’ sources with brief, but helpful contextualisation. On Heyne’s interest in myth see also Graf 1993, 9-11 and passim; Carhart 2007, 105-34; Scheer 2014. For his importance on the European intellectual scene at the time see Heidenreich (2006, passim), Carhart (2007, esp. 105 and 128-9) and most recently Harloe (2015, 435) with further references. 3 Heidenreich 2006, 531. 4 INTRODUCTION While Heyne’s own appreciation of Diodoros was largely positive, the results of his study combined with the nearly contemporary rise of historicism as the dominant approach to history seems to have caused a dramatic shift in the way Diodoros’ work was judged.4 As ‘historical research was more than ever safely founded on the careful examination of old sources and the discovery of new ones’5 and the idea of historia magistra vitae was abandoned by historical scholars, it is unsurprising that Diodoros fell out of favour.6 Indeed, by 1836, Johann Gustav Droysen could claim in the first edition of his Geschichte des Hellenismus that the negative view of Diodoros was generally accepted.7 This is illustrated by the sneers of leading ancient historians of the time like Niebuhr, who ‘was universally hailed as the great master of the new historical method’,8 and Mommsen, whose authority requires no further comment to this day. They castigated Diodoros for being ‘simple-minded’, loose with the facts, and ‘the most miserable of all writers’.9 Lord Macaulay, who actively pursued classical studies in his leisure time while in India, probably 4 The combined influence of Heyne and Historicism can for instance be seen in Creuzer’s Die historische Kunst der Griechen, which Momigliano (1966, 76) called ‘nothing more or nothing less than the first modern history of Greek historiogaphy’. Creuzer, who clearly takes very little interest in Diodoros, for instance states with reference to Heyne that the structure of the work of Dionysios Skytobrakhion can still be grasped from Diodoros’ faithful excerpt (Creuzer 1803, 125-6). On Creuzer and historicism see Momigli- ano (1966, 75-90), who notes further influence of Heyne on Creuzer’s view of Greek historiography. Schmid and Stählin (1920, 406 n. 5) still cited Heyne’s work as the basis of Diodorean Quellenforschung in 1920. 5 Momigliano 1966, 105. 6 For the rejection of the moral-didactic purpose of historiography in this age see Koselleck 2004 and Assis 2014, 20-62. 7 Droysen 1836, 669: ‘Man ist jetzt wohl darüber einig, daß Diodor ein sehr mittel- mäßiger Historiker ist und daß sein Werth besonders nur darin besteht, daß er die Quel- len, die er benutzte, mehr excerpirt als bearbeitet hat; auf eigene Hand scheint er nur darin zu verfahren, daß er den so gewonnenen Stoff annalistisch vertheilt. Vor Allem kommt es darauf an, zu erfahren, aus welchen Quellen er schöpft und wo möglich über diese ein Urtheil zu gewinnen; s. Heyne comment. III. De fontibus et auctoritate histo- riarum Diodori in den comment. Societ. Goett. 1782. 1784.’ 8 Momigliano 1966, 105. 9 Niebuhr (1847-51) reproaches Diodoros for his ‘Einfältigkeit und Unschicklichkeit’ (3:204) and for his ‘Unfähigkeit und Albernheit’ (3:223), calls him ‘unwissend’ (3:8) and deems his work ‘gänzlich urtheilslos und schlecht’ (2:3; cf. further also e.g. 1:229-30, 2:251-2, 2:317). Mommsen (1859: 25) speaks of the ‘unglaublichen Einfalt und noch unglaubli- cheren Gewissenlosigkeit dieses elendsten aller Scribenten’. INTRODUCTION 5 phrased the most famous condemnation of Diodoros when styling him ‘a stupid, credulous, prosing old ass’ in a letter of 1836 (although he continued by observing ‘yet I heartily wish that we had a good deal more of him’).10 In the 1860s Diodoros’ close dependence on his sources in the historical part of the Bibliotheke, which had largely been ignored by Heyne, was further demonstrated, first in Nissen’s study on the sources of Livy, which voiced the theory that Diodoros only ever used one source at a time (Nissen’s Law, later to be known as the Einquellentheorie), and then in Volquardsen’s ground-breaking work on Diodoros’ source usage, which offered a methodology for investigating what this source might be and when exactly Diodoros

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