The great change in the Roman world under Augustus had taken place; the history of the republic was brought to a close. It was believed that nothing more was to be hoped from constitutional forms and their development, but that the great mass of the state was to be kept together by outward force. After such a catastrophe, history appears altogether in a different light, and is written in a different spirit. In these times, just as in Greece after the downfall of the Athenian state, many historians come forth before the public. After Cæsar’s death, Diodorus Siculus wrote, to whom the Roman history is merely a secondary affair. It is probable, that Timæus also in his history of Italy and Sicily had interwoven the Roman one; though not beyond a very early period. Diodorus had the idea, which none but a prosaic mind could have conceived, of writing the whole of ancient history in synchronistical order; first in large periods, and then year by year, down to the consulate of Cæsar, when the latter commenced the Gallic war. He concludes before the civil war, in order to avoid the offence, which he might have given by his narration to one or the other of the two parties. And it was besides a very convenient break; as in all probability he wrote his work before the conclusion of the troubles. That he composed his history after the death of Cæsar, is evident from the introduction, in which he mentions that event, and calls Cæsar _Divus_. Scaliger had the unfortunate idea of arguing from the passage I, 68 that Diodorus had written as late as 746, that therefore he had left off fifty years before his own time. This opinion passed from Scaliger into the work of Vossius _De Historicis Græcis et Latinis_, and from the latter into the _Bibliotheca Græca_ of Fabricius. That passage states concerning the Olympiads, that these were a period of four years which the Romans called _bissextum_; and from this Scaliger infers, that he could not have written before 746, because at that time Augustus had fixed the _intercalatio_ at four years. This interpretation is most ingenious; but the passage is an interpolation, as some of the earlier and all the later commentators have remarked, so that Wesseling entirely expunges it from the text. The term χρόνος for year, which occurs there, is modern Greek; just as _tempus_ instead of _annus_ is met with after the fifth century. Diodorus is an author whose writings have been falsified. These forgeries were made in the age of the restoration of literature, when manuscripts were much sought after, and dearly paid for. There are for the most part omissions; and from the eleventh to the twentieth book he now and then gives fasti, which do not in the least agree with those which we have. The names in them are often not to be recognised at all. All his accounts of the earliest times he probably had from Fabius. Where Polybius begins, he may have made use of him down to the year 608; and he may also have had