La guerra del Peloponneso nell'Epitome di Giustino

The history of the Peloponnesian War in Justin’s Epitome (a summary/anthology of Pompeius Trogus’ Historiae Philippicae), has mainly a historiographical interest, though sometimes it preserves a version that adds historically relevant details omitted in Thucydides or in the other extant sources (this is the case of the Athenian expedition to the Black Sea led by Lamachos in 424, reported out of the appropriate temporal context in XVI 3, 9-12 and probably based on the local histories of Pontic Heraclea, and of the premises of the fi rst Athenian expedition to Sicily in 427, reported in IV 3, 4-4, 3 and surely based on Philistus). On the whole the arrangement of the narrative is rather loose and irregular and often betrays the characteristic features of the genre of the ‘universal history’, irrespective of the ultimate sources directly or indirectly employed by Trogus or Trogus’ source (certainly Ephorus and almost certainly, for the last years of the conflict, Theopompus too). For instance, the years 431-415 are covered by only a few sections of III 7; the beginning of the war has no clear-cut chronological threshold, inserted as it is in the exposition of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens since the Persian Wars; its responsibility is attributed to Spartan aggressiveness; the expeditions to Sicily are reported in the Book 4 dedicated to the situs and the history of the island; there is a slant towards highlighting the role of the great personalities like Pericles, Gylippus (but not Hermocrates), Alcibiades, Conon, Lysander, Thrasybulus etc. Perhaps the bellum Deceleicum, and next the Athenian ‘civil war’, is the phase of the war, though itself too flawed by savage omissions and mistakes, that receives the most coherent treatment. The issues worthy of special investigation are the role of Lysander in the definition of the peace-terms and the establishment of the Thirty and a possible different periodization of the end of the war, for there is some evidence that Trogus-Justin considered the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 as the very end of the Peloponnesian War.