Diodorus Siculus

Diodorus Siculus was a Greek historian from Agyrium in Sicily who wrote during the first century BCE, almost three centuries after Alexander the Great’s death. His enormous Library of History attempted to present the history of the known world in forty books, drawing together material from many earlier Greek historians. Diodorus devoted the whole of Book Seventeen to Alexander’s reign, from his accession in 336 BCE to his death at Babylon in 323 BCE. Although Diodorus was not an eyewitness, he could consult histories that no longer survive and were written much closer to the events. His principal source for Alexander was probably Cleitarchus, whose influential account may have incorporated testimony from soldiers, officials and other people associated with the expedition. Diodorus therefore preserves an early narrative tradition that would otherwise have been almost completely lost.

Diodorus is especially valuable because his is the earliest surviving continuous historical account devoted to Alexander’s reign. He describes the destruction of Thebes, the battles of Issus and Gaugamela, the burning of Persepolis, the campaigns in Central Asia and India, and Alexander’s final illness and death. His universal-history format also places Alexander within the wider histories of Macedonia, Persia and the successor kingdoms rather than treating his conquests in isolation. However, Diodorus usually condensed and rearranged his sources without consistently identifying them, and his interest in dramatic reversals, moral lessons and extraordinary events sometimes produced simplified chronology or exaggerated figures. His account should therefore be compared with Arrian, Curtius Rufus, Plutarch and Justin, but it remains indispensable because it preserves material from an older and sometimes less favourable tradition than Arrian’s commander-centred history.