Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus

Pompey Trogus was a Roman historian of the Augustan age in the field of Vocontier in the province of Gallia Narbonensis. He was thus a contemporary of the historian Livy.

Life

His grandfather served under Pompey in the war against Sertorius and received by the influence of Roman citizenship - hence the name component adopted Pompey. His paternal uncle served under Pompey as a rider commander in the war against Mithridates. His father served under Caesar as a secretary and translator.

Trogus himself seems to have been a man of encyclopedic knowledge. He wrote on the basis of Aristotle and Theophrastus books about the natural history of plants and animals, and was often cited by Pliny the Elder. However, his main works were the Historiae Philippicae ( Philip Pische history ) in 44 books.

It is a story of the Regions that were the Great and his successors under the reign of Alexander. Why Trogus called the work of all Philip Pische history, is still not satisfactorily resolved, since, unlike the title suggests, was not the Macedonian king and father of Alexander Philip II in the center of the action. The central theme, however, is the rise of Macedon, Alexander the establishment of the empire, its decline and the subsequent rise of Rome, which is but rather treated on the edge. Ultimately, it is an ancient world history with special attention to the Hellenistic East. An important role was played by the succession of world empires.

Ethnographic and geographical digressions are one of the specificities of the work, with the Ninos, the legendary founder of Nineveh, begins and ends almost at the same place as Livy, in 9 The last event of the Marcus Iunianus Justin, the extract of a plant anfertigte ( although it is debatable how he incorporated his own illustrations ) reported the recovery of the Roman standards in the year 20 BC, had conquered the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae. Guide the representation is the sequence of the various empires.

The Roman history up to the time of the Greeks and the East with Rome came into contact remained disregarded, perhaps because Livy had already treated this area sufficiently. In the plant material from the writings of numerous Greek historian flowed, including Herodotus, Ctesias of Cnidus, Theopompus of Chios, Ephorus of Kyme, Timaeus of Tauromenion, Kleitarchos, Hieronymus of Cardia and Polybius.

Mainly for the reason that such a collection of information the possibilities of a Roman well exceeded as well as on substantive considerations, has been suggested already by Alfred von Gutschmid, Trogus did not even collected the information of the leading Greek historian. Rather, they were already merged in another, written in Greek book. Trogus did this then used as a template. As a source of Gutschmid took to the universal history of Timagenes of Alexandria, whose work thematically the Philippic History of Trogus quite similar. This theory was often tries to disprove in recent research, but they are reentered ( in modified form, after which Timagenes could not have been the only one, but an important source ) in more recent times John Yardley and Waldemar Heckel it.

The stylistic approach of Trogus was less rhetorical than that of Sallust and Livy, which he blamed because he. Persons, about which he wrote, put elaborate speeches into the mouth

From his work, only the excerpts of the above- mentioned Justin have been preserved that. Prologi or summaries of 44 books, and fragments in Jerome, Augustine, in the Historia Augusta and other writers But even in this mutilated state, it is often an important authority for the history of the East.