It is a common statement that Hellenistic historiography is ‘moralising’. This is often combined with statements to the effect that Hellenistic historiography is ‘rhetorical’ and less ‘serious’ or in some other way less worthy and less plain good than Classical historiography. That what makes historiography ‘good’ is a matter of taste and changing values has been discussed in the Introduction to this book and will also be a topic for its Conclusion. In the present part we shall face the claim that ‘moralising’ is a phenomenon exclusively of Hellenistic historiography. Through an examination of the works of the three extant Classical historiographers – that is, Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon – I shall demonstrate that moral didacticism was a central concern of each author, and that their histories do, in fact, moralise. We shall see how the Classical works show forerunners of the types of moralising we have become familiar with from the Hellenistic histories, but also how they employ different moralising techniques of their own. We shall also consider what messages their moralising conveys. In the final chapter we shall then look at the fragments of three late Classical works of history, namely those of the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus and Theopompus, in order to get a sense of how the development from Classical to Hellenistic moral didacticism took place.

The three extant Classical historiographers will be discussed chronologically. In each chapter we begin with a look at the preface and programmatic passages in order to see what they say about the purpose of the work; then we proceed to examine the moralising techniques used and then the moral lessons offered by the work. Chapter 7 discusses what can be surmised about the moral didacticism of three late Classical historiographers from their preserved ‘fragments’ and what this might tell us about the development from Classical to Hellenistic moral didacticism.

No one could hope to take account of everything written about Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon in a single book, much less in a part of a book. I do not aim to give an overview of scholarship on any of these historiographers, or to reference every important or interesting monograph or article that discusses their works.

In this chapter, we shall examine the remnants of some of the most famous and influential works of history written in the Hellenistic period. These works have fared less well across the millennia than those of Polybius and Diodorus and only survive in fragmentary form, but it is important to remember that in their day they were as real, tangible and genre-defining as the works that have accidentally been transmitted in fuller form. If we want to understand moral didacticism in Hellenistic historiography, we have to examine these ‘fragments’ and try to catch as many glimpses a possible of the magnificent works they once were. In the previous chapter we saw how Diodorus’ moralising changes with his change of sources, but also how many of his moralising themes are present regardless of the identity of his source, although with different degrees of emphasis. I argued that this shows that not just moral didacticism but moralising on a specific set of themes was a ubiquitous feature of late Classical and Hellenistic historiography, present in all the authors Diodorus used as sources. In this chapter we shall test that hypothesis against the evidence of the ‘fragments’ of some of his likely sources.

We know hundreds of names of authors who wrote history in this time period, and a selection has to be made somehow. The works examined in this chapter have been chosen on the basis of two criteria. The first criterion is their importance for the development of the genre of historiography, to judge from the number and type of references to them in later authors including Polybius and Diodorus – except for Hieronymus of Cardia, who is included because of a twentieth-century scholarly obsession with seeing his work as more ‘serious’, which at least partly equals ‘non-moralising’, than those of his peers and close successors. The other criterion is genre: I have included only historians who wrote the same subgenre(s) of historiography as Polybius and Diodorus, namely ‘universal history’ or ‘continuous history’, rather than local history or monographs about single wars or events. In practice, this means leaving out the Alexander historians (despite the fact that Diodorus certainly used one of them as his main source for book 17) as well as local historians including the Atthidographers.

Polybius is our starting point because he is obviously, explicitly and unashamedly a moral-didactic historian. He repeatedly stresses that the purpose of studying the past is to learn lessons that will be of use in the present. This is recognised by most Polybius scholars, but there is a widespread tendency to think of these lessons as purely practical rather than moral: Pédech, in his monumental La Méthode Historique de Polybe, devotes chapters to Polybius’ notions of psychology and his rhetorical method of comparison, but only touches on his moral didacticism in passing; Walbank says that Polybius saw history as ‘a way to attain practical ends by learning lessons’; Sacks in his monograph on Polybius’ views on historiography argues that his practical didacticism so far outweighs his moral didacticism that the latter ‘ought to be considered random digressions without historiographical import’; and even two otherwise excellent – and very different – more recent monographs on Polybius, by McGing and Maier, largely ignore the moralising aspect. In this way the moralist Polybius has been played down in favour of the image of the practical, pragmatic and often rather cynical Polybius, who wrote a ‘handbook for statesmen’ with digressions on such amoral topics as fire-signalling and how to calculate the needed length of scaling ladders.

This image, with which the present study wants to take serious issue, is often coupled with the equally dubious idea that Polybius wrote his work partly to justify his ‘collaboration’ with Rome and only used moral outrage to cloak his partisanship. There is no denying that Polybius shows political bias: he is obviously sympathetic to Achaea and scornful of the Aetolians, and also often sides with Rome against its opponents. However, his bias is commonly exaggerated: Polybius is not simply a blind approver of everything Roman. Furthermore, as already argued in the Introduction, moral views and political views do not exist in separate spheres, but feed off each other. Polybius supported the Achaean League because he had been born into its leading circles, but also because he believed that the League's laws were the most morally just of any political organisation he knew (2.38).

Thucydides is generally considered the paragon of an amoral historiographer. Even if most scholars (classicists, at least, if not historians) nowadays agree that his History is not an ideal, objective account of events ‘just as they happened’, few are happy to talk about ‘moralising’ or even moral didacticism in the work. Rather than moralising, it is common to look for Thucydides’ political views, psychological insights, political theory or personal opinions, which are assumed to be more or less hidden in the text. I would argue that, like other Greek historiographers before and after him, Thucydides did not distinguish between moral and political opinions, or between moral and practical didacticism. In this chapter, we shall search Thucydides’ History, first for the types of moralising we have seen in Polybius and Diodorus, then for other ways of teaching moral lessons, and finally we shall ask what those moral lessons might be. At the end, I hope it will be clear that Thucydides is not a lone non-moralising historiographer, but that there are features of his moral didacticism that set him apart from his predecessor and successors.

PREFACE

The introduction to Thucydides’ History is deliberately structured on the same framework as the introduction to Herodotus’ Histories: a brief proem presenting the author and his work (1.1) followed by a quick overview of ancient/mythological history (the Archaeologia, 1.2–19), followed by a second first-person statement setting out part of his methodology (1.21–2).

An important purpose of the proem is to distinguish his work from that of Herodotus, without ever mentioning the latter's name: the war (not even the account of it, but the actual war) is ‘written’ rather than ‘a presentation’, and the fact that the author himself lived through the war and experienced it is emphasised, whereas Thucydides insists that it is ‘impossible’ to find reliable information to do what Herodotus did, namely write about earlier time periods. Moreover, Thucydides’ topic is the ‘greatest disturbance there has ever been for the Greeks and a part of the barbarians’, these latter surely being mentioned exclusively for the benefit of readers who might think that Herodotus’ topic was greater in geographical scope, at least, if not in importance. We shall soon see that Thucydides and Herodotus have more in common than Thucydides is letting on.