Justin: Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. by J. C. Yardley, Pat Wheatley, and Waldemar Heckel. (review)

For the past two decades the Clarendon Ancient History series has provided thorough, carefully researched commentaries on historical texts in translation, a huge boon to scholars and those getting trained in scholarly methodology. In 1997 the second volume in the series, by J. C. Yardley and Waldemar Heckel, presented books 11 and 12 of Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus, a crucial document for the study of Alexander the Great. Now, fifteen years later, these same two scholars have teamed up with a third, Pat Wheatley, to produce a kind of sequel, and have furnished Hellenistic historians and their students with another valuable resource.

Books 13 through 15 of Justin’s Epitomecover the quarter century following the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E., an extremely complex and tangled period dominated by the wars between the Diadochs. Because the detailed account of this era by Hieronymus of Cardia has been lost, and that of Arrian survives only in a thin summary, Justin’s rather fuller précis of Trogus’ Philippic Historystands as one of the two most complete sources for the period, the other comprising books 18–20 of Diodorus Siculus. There are several good modern commentaries on the Diodorus books, but this volume presents the first on Justin’s account of the period, and it sets a very high bar indeed for any that will follow. Yardley’s translation of Justin’s highly compressed prose is lucid and readable; the notes by Wheatley and Heckel are scrupulously detailed, and the bibliographical references are so complete that a researcher can find no better starting point to pursue the many questions and controversies this era presents.

To take one noteworthy episode as an example: as historians of India are aware, Justin (summarizing Trogus) preserves information, unique in both Greco-Roman and Indian traditions, about the rise to power of Chandragupta Maurya. The relevant passage consists of only a few terse sentences, but Wheatley and Heckel have given them over twenty pages of discussion (the volume’s overall ratio of commentary pages to text is more than ten to one). Much of their analysis is original, and though I do not always agree with the conclusions—for example, the down-dating of Chandragupta’s conquest of the Punjab to ca. 311 B.C.E.—the arguments are always cogently presented. A copious bibliography precedes the whole discussion, including primary sources from the Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu traditions, as well as dozens of secondary works.

Specialists in the Diadoch era will be intrigued by the Quellenforschungadvanced in the book’s introduction, making the case that Duris of Samos was the source of much of Justin’s (or rather, Trogus’) unique material. The introduction also deals with the perennial issue of chronology, surveying briefly the struggle between “high” and “low” dating systems and coming to no firm conclusion. The solution to this six-decade debate still lies out of reach, the editors acknowledge, though they do provide a helpful table of chronological fixed points (including the death of Alexander, here intriguingly pegged to exactly 4:30 P.M. on June 11, 323). Also of great utility are the appendices contributed by Yardley, including a very valuable collection of previously untranslated or hard-to-access source texts for the Diadochs.

One criticism: considering the care it takes with literary materials, this book is surprisingly poor in illustrations. Coins that furnish important evidence for the period could have been inexpensively reproduced, but none has. Even more disappointingly, the volume contains only one map—a standard representation of Alexander’s empire—though many of its complex troop movements and satrapal...