Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus,
1st century BC Roman historian, of the
Celtic tribe of the
Vocontii in
Gallia Narbonensis, flourished during the age of
Augustus, nearly contemporary with
Livy.
His grandfather served in the war against
Sertorius with
Pompey, through whose influence he obtained Roman citizenship; hence the name Pompeius, adopted as a token of gratitude to his benefactor. His father served under
Julius Caesar in the capacity of secretary and interpreter.
Trogus himself seems to have been a man of encyclopaedic knowledge. Following
Aristotle and
Theophrastus, he wrote books on the natural history of animals and plants, which were frequently quoted by
Pliny the Elder.
His principal work was
Historiae Philippicae in forty-four books, so called because the
Macedonian empire founded by
Philip is the central theme of the narrative. This was a general history of those parts of the world that came under the sway of
Alexander and his successors. Trogus began with a legendary
Ninus, founder of
Nineveh, and ended at about the same point as Livy (AD 9).
Justin wrote an
epitome of Trogus' lost work, and a series of
prologi or summaries of the books. The last event recorded by Justinus is the recovery of the Roman standards captured by the
Parthians in
20 BC. Ethnographical and geographical digressions were such a feature of the work that it developed the unwarranted reputation of being a
universal history, never Trogus' intention.
Trogus left untouched Roman history up to the time when Greece and the East came into contact with Rome, possibly because Livy had sufficiently treated it. The work was based upon the writings of Greek historians, such as
Theopompus (whose
Philippica may have suggested Trogus' subject),
Ephorus, Timaeus, Polybius. Chiefly on the ground that such a work was beyond the powers of a Roman, it is generally agreed that Trogus did not gather together the information from the leading Greek historians for himself, but that it was already combined into a single book by some Greek (very probably
Timagenes of Alexandria).
His idea of history was more severe and less rhetorical than that of
Sallust and Livy, whom he blamed for putting elaborate speeches into the mouths of the characters of whom they wrote. Of his great work, we possess only the epitome by Justin, the prologi or summaries of the 44 books, and fragments quoted in
Vopiscus, Jerome, Augustine and other writers. But even in its present mutilated state it is often an important authority for the ancient history of the East.
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