Trogus and Justin

Pompeius Trogus was a Roman of the 1st century BC who wrote a history of the dynasty of Philip of Macedon, and much miscellanaous related material, in 44 books. Some modern readers have made the mistake of thinking that this means Trogus' history would fill 44 of our modern volumes. Instead, think "book" in the sense of "books of the Bible." 2000 years ago, a book was generally a scroll, and scrolls generally didn't hold as much writing as our books, or codices, as the volumes with covers and writing on both sides of the pages are also called. The Bible, Old plus New Testament, contains 63 books in some versions. Of Livy's 142 books of Roman History, we have 35 books today, plus some smaller bits and pieces. Those 35 surviving books containing approximately the same amount of writing as the 63 books of the Bible, and the 44 books of Trogus' history, as he originally wrote it, mostly likely also contained a similar amount of writing.

Except that only a small fraction of Trogus' original history is known to us today. Some time after Trogus, probably in the 4th century, a writer named Justin (not to be confused with Justin Martyr) collected some excerpts from Trogus' history, a little bit from each of the 44 books, and strung them together with a few of his own remarks. The result is one volume which runs to 300 or 400 pages in most editions. Scholars have tried very hard to separate Trogus' words from Justin's, but the most we can say with near certainty is that most of the volume is fairly close to what Trogus said. In any case, these several hundred pages are one of the major ancient sources for the history of Philip II of Macedon, his famous son Alexander the Great, and their predecessors and successors. Did Justin actually do a good job in selecting and preserving the most interesting and/or the most historically valuable portions of Trogus' work? That's very, very hard to know. What an enormous boon it would be to historians if Trogus' entire work were ever to be recovered!

Other than Justin, there are a few passages from Trogus' history, called prologi, in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, a few words of praise from Livy and some other writers, and that's about all we can say for sure. It's very difficult to say how much Livy and other historians may have borrowed from Trogus.

Although Livy admired Trogus and the admiration seems to have been mutual, the two historians make quite a contrast. Livy's history is patriotic and centered around Rome, and many passages clearly have been invented in order to make the work more dramatic and entertaining. Trogus' history is cosmopolitan and centered around Greece, and, according to Justin, he criticized Livy, and also Sallust, for embellishing their historical works with fanciful speeches put into the mouths of historical figures.

It's very unfortunate that the great majority of Trogus' work has been lost. Justin's selections from that work, on the other hand, made for a very popular codex during late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: more than 200 manuscripts of Justin survive, which derive from 4 separate sources.

It seems to me that Justin has been somewhat less popular reading lately, because I have not been able to find an edition printed later then the 19th century.

[PS, 17 December 2019: WHOOPS! Otto Seel's Teubner edition is from 1972. And it includes the prologi. Clearly the way to go. My thanks to evagre at the Classics subreddit at Reddit for pointing this out.]

[PPS, 18 December 2019: Thank goodness some experts read my stuff: Professor Alice Borgna, a member of the Facebook group Classics International, says: "It is not true that in academia he is neglected, and that the last edition is Seel’s one (!!). In the last decade, in fact, studies on Trogus and Justin have flourished, an element which your post seems to miss. More than 30 contributions, books or paper, has been published in recent years, and also new editions: a digital one (https://www.forumromanum.org/literature/justin/index.html) ) and -most of all - the new critical edition of Justin from the prestigious series Les Belles Lettres, with text edited by Bernard Mineo and historical notes by Giuseppe Zecchini, whose first volume (book I-X) was published in 2016. The second volume (books XI–XXIII) appeared in 2018, while the third (and last) is expected in 2020. But a lot of other stuff (translation, commentary) has also been published, as you can easily find." Thank you, Professor, but, obviously, some things are easier for some of us to find than for others. Yesterday, after I was made aware that Seel's edition was from 1972, not from the 19th century as I had thought, I asked myself, Well then why didn't LD Reynolds mention Seel's edition in his piece on Justin (Reynolds writes it "Justinus") in Texts and Tradition? And, of course, Reynolds did, and I had overlooked it: page 197, footnote 1. Actually, Reynolds points out that Seel published two Teubner editions, in 1935 and in 1972, and a further article and book devoted to Justin. About the middle third of the long note 1. And I just completely missed all of that. Reminder to self: You're old. Be more careful reading the fine print. Skimming may not cut it anymore.]

I have a reprint, made by the University of Michigan Libraries, of an 1858 edition by Jacques LeCoffre et cie of Paris, and it's not the Michigan Libaries' finest work. 4 of the pages, pp 24, 26, 30 and 34, are printed at an angle, with their tops at 1 to 1:30 on a clock dial and their bottoms at 7 to 7:30, with a few words squeezed and a handful missing altogether. Not all of the pages are in the proper order. Between page 72 and the end, page 355, the left-hand pages appear on the right and vice-versa. An introduction on page i through iv is inserted between pages 352 and 353. But much more importantly, on all the pages, except for the 4 pages mentioned above, the type is all quite legible. Although definitely below average for Michigan Libraries, it's far from the worst reprint I've ever seen. The reprint by a company which calls itself Forgotten books, of the 1782 edition of Raphael Landivar's Rusticatio Mexicana, is far worse. It's missing letters from the beginning of all of the lines on almost all of the right-hand pages. That may be the worst reprint I've ever seen, and I've seen a great number of them.

Surely, a new edition of Justin will appear this century. I would think.