The traditional Diodoran scholarship has been challenged in the last decades by a revisionist approach, which concentrates on Diodorus Siculus’ contribution rather than on his lost sources. Building on that approach, this book focuses on the Bibliotheke’s first pentad, which has usually been neglected as a subject of research, and explores the author’s depictions of journeys made by gods and culture-heroes. A thorough investigation of his historiographical methods and his representation of mythical figures demonstrates that the mythological narrative is not only an essential part of his universal history, but also an important supplement to our knowledge of Hellenistic civilization, especially its mentality and historical geography.

Examining Diodorus Siculus’ historiographical methods and his representation of mythical culture-heroes, this study demonstrates the significant contribution of the author’s first pentad to his universal history and its importance as a supplement to our perception of Hellenistic civilization.

Euhemerism and Its Uses offers the first interdisciplinary, focussed, and all-round view of the long history of an important but understudied phenomenon in European intellectual and cultural history. Euhemerism – the claim that the Greek gods were historically mortal men and women – originated in the early third century BCE, in an enigmatic and now fragmentary text by the otherwise unknown author Euhemeros. This work, the Sacred Inscription, has been read variously as a theory of religion, an atheist’s manifesto, as justifying or satirizing ruler-worship, as a fantasy travel-narrative, and as an early ‘utopia’. Influencing Hellenistic and Roman literature and religious and political thought, and appropriated by early Christians to debunk polytheism while simultaneously justifying the continued study of classical literature, euhemerism was widespread in the middle ages and Renaissance, and its reverberations continue to be felt in modern myth-theory. Yet, though frequently invoked as a powerful and pervasive tradition across several disciplines, it is still under-examined and poorly understood. Filling an important gap in the history of ideas, this volume will appeal to scholars and students of classical reception, mediaeval and Renaissance literature, historiography, and theories of myth and religion.

Building upon the explosion of recent work on mythography, contributions to this volume direct attention to less frequently explored questions of how ancient poets, historians, and philosophers themselves adopted and adapted the work of mythographers. Study of the way that mythographers and their contemporaries take on positions of, alternately, “host” or “parasite” in relation to the other exposes the richness mythographic practice and the roles that mythographers played in the evolving Greco-Roman discourse of myth. From, among others, the seeds of mythographic discourse in Pindar and Plato, to the mythography of the Peripatics, the in-between mythography of Diodorus Siculus, and the “mythographic topography” of Pausanias, this volume invites a reappraisal of the role that mythography played at every stage of Greek thought about myth. Through contributions that explore both mythographers’ distinctive style of studying myth to other contributions that focus primarily on the how and why of non-mythographers’ use of mythographic techniques, what emerges is a picture of mythography that broadens our conception of mythography while at the same time inviting scholars to seek out more such echoes of mythographic discourse in the work of poets, historians, philosophers at large.

Diodoros of Sicily’s book XIX is the main source for the history of the Diadochoi, Alexander the Great’s Successors, from 317 to 311 BCE. With the first full-scale commentary on this text in any language Alexander Meeus offers a detailed and reliable guide to the complicated historical narrative and the fascinating ethnographic information transmitted by Diodoros, which includes the earliest accounts of Indian widow burning and Nabataean culture. Studying both history and historiography, this volume elucidates a crucial stage in the creation of the Hellenistic world in Greece and the Near East as well as the confusing source tradition. Diodoros, a long neglected author indispensable for much of our knowledge of Antiquity, is currently enjoying growing scholarly interest. An ample introduction discusses his historical methods and sheds light on his language and style and on the manuscript transmission of books XVII-XX. By negotiating between diametrically opposed scholarly opinions a new understanding of Diodoros’ place in the ancient historiographical tradition is offered. The volume is of interest to scholars of ancient historiography, Hellenistic history, Hellenistic prose and the textual transmission of the Bibliotheke.

Diodoros of Sicily (c.90–c.30 BC) spent thirty years producing an encyclopedic compendium of world history from its mythical beginnings to his own day. His is the only surviving, connected account of Greek affairs from 480/79 to 302/1. The books translated in this volume cover the years from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the aftermath of the Battle of Mantineia in 362/1. These were crucial years in the struggle for supremacy in Greece amongst the Greek states, Sparta, Athens and Thebes, before they were overtaken by the unexpected rise of Macedon. Diodoros also provides the only extant account of the career of Dionysios I of Syracuse and the Cypriot war between Persia and Evagoras of Salamis. The translation is supported by extensive notes and the Introduction examines Diodoros' moral and educational purpose in writing, the plan of his work, his sources, and his qualities as a historian.

In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely considered to be an important source for the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.

A fresh approach to the Roman imperial tradition on Alexander the Great

In the south-east Mediterranean region, the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’, the modern world began its development at the very beginning of human civilisation. People living there were among the first in the world to domesticate plants and animals, and many of the ideas and objects that are in common use today originated from that area. The papers collected in this volume are based on papers presented at an international conference titled “The Land of Fertility: The South-East Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Muslim Conquest”, which was focused on this very special region, and the processes prevalent there after the end of the Stone Age.

This volume contains eight studies written by scholars from Great Britain, Israel, Poland, and the United States. The contributors are all specialists in Greek history, and their essays deal with different aspects of the period's history, focusing on historiography, political evelopments, and military actions and events.