Read the forty books of Diodorus Siculus,[299] containing a kind
of history of the world. He is fuller than Cephalion and Hesychius
Illustrius in his description of the same periods. His style is
clear, unadorned, and admirably adapted for history. He neither
excessively affects atticisms or antiquated modes of expression, nor
on the other hand does he altogether descend to the level of everyday
language. He rather takes pleasure in a style midway between the two,
avoiding figures of speech and the like affectations, and only using
the language of fable, after the manner of poets, where he relates
the legends of gods and heroes.
He begins his history with the mythical ages of the Greeks and
barbarians, and goes down to the beginning of the war between the
Romans and Celts, at the time when Gaius Julius Caesar (called
“divine” by the Romans on account of his mighty deeds) subdued most,
and those the most warlike, of the Celtic nations. He spent thirty
years over the history, as he tells us himself, visiting several
different countries for the sake of obtaining information, and
exposing himself to many dangers. He was a Sicilian from Agyrium;
from his long intercourse with the Romans he had become familiar with
that people and their language, and diligently collected accounts of
all their chief successes and failures.
The entire history is comprised in forty books. In the first six the
events preceding the Trojan war and other legends are described; in
the next eleven, the events of the world from the taking of Troy to
the death of Alexander the Great; in the remaining twenty-three, the
events up to the time when war broke out between the Celts and Romans
under the leadership of Julius Caesar. He subdued most of, and the
most warlike, of their nations and extended the Roman empire to the
British islands, at which point the history ends.