American Journal of Philology

This study is, as the dust jacket informs us, "the fullest ever undertaken for any part of Diodorus." Stylianou therefore very appropriately offers in his introduction (1-139) many comments that apply to the Bibliotheke Historike; as a whole (some of its forty books are lost, some survive only in fragments). He shares in the generally held low opinion of Diodorus' talent, calling Diodorus (who wrote in the last half of the first century B.C.E.) "a second-rate epitomator" (1) with "not an attractive style," one that is marred by "empty and inept rhetoric" and "poverty of vocabulary" (15). Stylianou describes the Bibliotheke as "entirely derivative" and the product of "slipshod" methods (21)--"a work of compilation, and hastily and incompetently carried out" (132), in which "any revision was of the most perfunctory nature" (139). Saying that a "complete list of Diodorus' blunders would be of a very respectable length," Stylianou is content with providing a full page of just those within book 15 (138).

Alhough he was a less than competent compiler, Diodorus "used first-rate sources" (1); unfortunately most of those sources are now lost, and students of some of the periods covered by Diodorus' extant books have no choice but to work through the confused and confusing filter his extracts provide. Rejecting recent criticisms as unconvincing, Stylianou adheres to the traditional view that Diodorus follows "one main author at a time" (49); for book 15, that author is Ephorus of Cyme, who wrote, Stylianou believes, in the 330s-320s B.C.E. (110). Allowing for the sort of pro-Athenian, anti-Spartan biases one would expect in a student of Isocrates (114), Stylianou has a generally high opinion of Ephorus, believing that most of the errors to be found in Diodorus' account were produced by inept abbreviation of his mostly reliable main source (124).

Book 15 deals with the period 386-360 B.C.E., from just after the imposition of the King's Peace to just before the emergence of Philip of Macedon, a quarter-century filled with many significant events: Sparta's abuses as prostates (enforcer) of the "autonomy" clause of the Peace; the rise of both the Boeotian and Second Athenian Confederacies; the rapid decline of Sparta as a great power, culminating in the disastrous Battle of Leuctra and the first four Theban-led invasions of the Peloponnesus; the meteoric rise and fall of Jason of Pherae; the revolt of the western satraps of the Persian Empire; the climactic (or anticlimactic) Second Battle of Mantinea; the establishment of a Greek "common peace" that excluded the Persian King, etc. This is a period for which the Ephoran tradition in Diodorus is paralleled by the contemporary account in Xenophon's Hellenica. The striking differences between their versions of numerous events have continually fueled scholarly controversies. In most cases (not all; see, e.g., 507-8), Stylianou tends to favor Ephorus over Xenophon--when (as he admits is not always possible) one can discern the Ephoran account [End Page 483] through the mutilations imposed on it by Diodorus. Fortunately help is provided by other sources (contemporary inscriptions and orations, later writers such as Plutarch, etc.). Stylianou seems less inclined to find "doublets" in Diodorus' text than many scholars have been, and he shows plausible ways of explaining some apparent doublets away (242, 382), although he does admit one "minor doublet" in book 15 (439).

No one hereafter will be able to deal responsibly with the first half of the fourth century B.C.E. without carefully consulting Stylianou's commentary. Its pedigree of predominantly Oxonian advisors and readers from 1981 dissertation through 1998 publication (vii-viii) is most impressive, yet Stylianou takes issue with his mentors on numerous specific points. Several new and valuable observations are made: for example, corrections of restorations necessitated by reinterpretation of the pose of the statue of the Athenian...