I Diadochi

Books XIII-XVII of the Epitome of Justin are devoted to the history of the Diadochi (323 - 281/0 BC). They represent for us the only historiographical continuum about the years between 302 (date of the end of the twentieth and last surviving book of the Library Book Diodorus) and 280. From the analysis of books XIII-XVII we notice a great interest not only and not so much for individual events, but rather for a "problematic" reconstruction of the origin of the Hellenistic monarchies. A particular attention is reserved to some of the Diadochi, to which are dedicated ad personam passages, focusing on the characteristics of their personality and, in some cases, on the omina imperii characterizing their youth. This “problematic” reconstruction is inserted in a structure "compact and basically unitary" that definitely depends on the collation of many existing sources. In this respect, it is still open the problem that already the nineteenth-century criticism had clearly evidentiated. Has this collation been made by Pompeius Trogus ? Or, instead, did he use an ad hoc source, of course not to be copied, but to use as a basis, without further strenuous research, for the construction of that Latin universal history which, as Justin tells us in his Praefatio, was the fundamental objective of Trogus’ history? In the latter case, the reference to Timagenes’ name still keeps great validity, at least for the Hellenistic period, with regard to which it was not easy, in the Augustan age, to find a single source, similar to the Philippic Histories by Theopompus for the history of Philip II: indeed the very multiplicity of Diadochi led inevitably to find information in several different sources, none of which could be considered exhaustive.