The author first addresses the contents and the nature of the proems of the Histories, secondly the arrangement of Ephorus’ work and, thirdly, the main contents of each of the thirty books that formed it.

In light of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters and the knowledge gained through the fragments, the author addresses the issue of Ephorus’ universality. He tries to understand which reasons led Polybius to mention Ephorus as his only predecessor; and he sets Ephorus’ universality in the context of the historiographical thought of the fourth century BC, to better appreciate its novelty.

The author detects which principles Ephorus stated in his Histories for research, and how he practised his inquiry. This enables the author to see whether Ephorus’ practice of inquiry was in line with the principles he stated or not, and also to draw an overall balanced evaluation of Ephorus’ historiographical method and the nature of his historical discourse.

Perhaps no ancient writer has experienced so great a reversal in modern reception as the fourth-century bc historian Ephorus of Cyme. In his preface to the first edition of Ephorus’ fragments by Meier Marx (1815), the German scholar Friedrich Creuzer depicted Ephorus as a philosophos who might be well compared to Herodotus’ Solon, who travels and observes to learn,1 or – one could add – to Polybius’ Odysseus, who ‘saw the cities and knew the minds of many men’.

The author checks the firmness of the foundations of the negative appraisal of the historian Ephorus. Topics include Ephorus’ Isocratean apprenticeship, the concept of rhetorical historiography, Ephorus and Diodorus, ancient judgements questioning Ephorus’ reliability as a historian, Ephorus’ ‘Cymocentrism’.

Our analysis of Ephorus’ fragments has led to a very different portrait of the historian and his Histories from that which has been offered by Jacoby, Schwartz and many modern critics following their path. Ephorus, we have argued, was not an erudite compiler of previous histories merely interested in ethics, but a professional historian who had a strong interest in politics, and also in both the theory and the practice of research. His advanced historiographical thinking was clearly aware of that of the best fifth-century predecessors, such as Thucydides, and it in turn became a model for later historians such as Polybius. If not the first, Ephorus was among the first who provided a definition of historiography as a discipline, emphasizing, on the basis of both his predecessors’ and his own experience, the differences between historical inquiry and other disciplines.

The chapter begins by looking at Beck’s theory of a Risk Society and how this has denied that risk is a term that can be applied to the ancient world. There is a survey of relevant work that has been carried out on uncertainty in antiquity, before the chapter examines how the term risk emerged and the various ways of defining the term. The chapter argues for a broader, cultural approach that sees risk as more than a modern numerical concept and the development of ideas concerning risk as a historical process.

In the last chapter, I discussed the three means of divine communication enumerated by Posidonius: the personal appearance of a god, the mediation of daimons, and the innate capacity of the soul. Of these, the most direct way that a god can communicate is by appearing in person to a human being, either in a dream or a waking vision. Paul claims to have received knowledge through such means on at least two specific occasions (Gal 1:11–12; 2 Cor 12:1–10), and displays a certain ambivalence about how these fit into the mechanics he works out elsewhere (2 Cor 12:2–3).

Scholarship is divided over how to view the place of visionary experiences in Paul’s life. Some fully embrace the image of Paul as mystic and visionary.A more common approach is to sharply distinguish Paul’s initial encounter with the risen Christ from any subsequent visionary experiences – the former being a pivotal moment of objective revelation and the latter being private and subjective spiritual experiences to which he attaches little importance.Among those who compare Paul’s claims to visionary experience with his broader Graeco-Roman environment, the tendency is to view Paul’s visions not as a method of divination – a means through which to acquire divine knowledge – but as a means through which to assert divine authority. Such experiences are important for his rhetoric, but less so for his thought and practice.

In this chapter, I will assess the nature and functions of Paul’s visionary experiences in comparison with the divinatory functions of dreams and visions in the Graeco-Roman world. Such visions did indeed play a pivotal role in establishing Paul’s authority as an apostle, but this is inextricably intertwined with their role as conveyors of divine knowledge, and they thus form an important part of Paul’s divinatory repertoire.

Dreams, Visions, and Experience: Preliminary Issues

The mode of divination in which “the gods in person converse with men” (Cicero, Div. 1.64) at first sight appears the most straightforward, but it presents particular challenges to historical analysis and classification. Before proceeding, two particular questions must be dealt with. First is how to distinguish and classify dreams, epiphanies, and waking visions in the context of divination. Second is how to treat the relation of dream and vision reports to actual experience.

Dreams

Dreams are a ubiquitous source of divine communication in ancient literature.