Diodorus Siculus

Diodorus was born in Agyrium (modern Agira) in Sicily, probably around 90 BC. He spent years in Rome and travelled in Egypt, gathering material for his life's work: the Bibliotheca Historica (Historical Library), a universal history in forty books covering the period from mythological times to Caesar's Gallic Wars.

Only books 1–5 (mythological and ethnographic) and 11–20 (480–301 BC) survive complete, with fragments of the rest. Diodorus was not an original historian — he compiled and simplified the works of earlier writers, often without much critical judgement. Ancient and modern critics have treated him harshly for this. But his very lack of originality makes him valuable: he preserves, in accessible form, the substance of lost historians like Ephorus, Timaeus, and Hieronymus of Cardia. For the history of Sicily, the Diadochi (Alexander's successors), and the earlier Hellenistic period, Diodorus is often our primary or only continuous narrative source.

His prose is clear and unpretentious. He tells a good story. And his universal approach — treating Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern history as parts of a single narrative — was more ambitious than most of his critics have acknowledged.