{"product_id":"9780292712775","title":"Diodorus Siculus, Books 11-12.37.1","description":"2007 — A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 100-30 BCE) is our only surviving source for a continuous narrative of Greek history from Xerxes' invasion to the Wars of the Successors following the death of Alexander the Great. Yet this important historian has been consistently denigrated as a mere copyist who slavishly reproduced the works of earlier historians without understanding what he was writing. By contrast, in this iconoclastic work Peter Green builds a convincing case for Diodorus' merits as a historian. Through a fresh English translation of a key portion of his multi-volume history (the so-called Bibliotheke, or \"Library\") and a commentary and notes that refute earlier assessments of Diodorus, Green offers a fairer, better balanced estimate of this much-maligned historian.  The portion of Diodorus' history translated here covers the period 480-431 BCE, from the Persian invasion of Greece to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. This half-century, known as the Pentekontaetia, was the Golden Age of Periclean Athens, a time of unprecedented achievement in drama, architecture, philosophy, historiography, and the visual arts. Green's accompanying notes and commentary revisit longstanding debates about historical inconsistencies in Diodorus' work and offer thought-provoking new interpretations and conclusions. In his masterful introductory essay, Green demolishes the traditional view of Diodorus and argues for a thorough critical reappraisal of this synthesizing historian, who attempted nothing less than a \"universal history\" that begins with the gods of mythology and continues down to the eve of Julius Caesar's Gallic campaigns. ","brand":"Peter Green, Peter Green","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45752171036990,"sku":"9780292712775","price":955.0,"currency_code":"ZAR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4357\/7662\/products\/9780292712775_1f5956e0-77c1-41d9-b9ba-7d6691c53ced.jpg?v=1707238598","url":"https:\/\/exclusivebooks.co.za\/products\/9780292712775","provider":"Exclusive Books Online","version":"1.0","type":"link"}