Historical Library
Syracuse (Sicily)
D
Diodorus Siculus
Diodorus Siculus
c. 90 BCE–c. 30 BCE · Syracuse (Sicily)
Diodorus Siculus ("Diodorus of Sicily") was a Greek historian of the first century BCE, active in the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus. He wrote the "Library of History," an ambitious universal history that aimed to cover the whole known world from mythical times down to his own day. Though only part of it survives intact, it is one of our most important continuous narratives for many periods of Greek and Mediterranean history, and it preserves material from earlier historians whose works are otherwise lost.
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Syracuse (Sicily)Magna Graecia
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Syracuse (Sicily)
Syracuse is a city on the southeastern coast of Sicily, Italy. Founded by colonists from Corinth around 733 BCE it became one of the largest cities of the Greek world, resisting both Athens and Carthage. Plato visited three times, hoping to influence its rulers Dionysius I and II, and the comic poet Epicharmus and the pastoral poet Theocritus are associated with it. The mathematician Archimedes was killed when Rome took the city in 212 BCE, after which it became the capital of Roman Sicily. According to the Book of Acts, Paul stayed there for three days, and its early Christian catacombs survive. It was briefly the Byzantine capital (663-668) before the Arab conquest of 878.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Diodorus Siculus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.