IV. Hellenistic Historians

Abstract

The two centuries that separate Thucydides and Polybius saw a vast change in the historical map of Greece. The cosy world of the Aegean, upon which the destinies of Sparta and Athens had played themselves out, became the larger oikoumenê extending from Spain to India. From the north, the mainland Greeks had to contend with the rising power of Macedon, which eventually swept all before it. Then Alexander’s conquests, on a scale never previously seen, opened up the entire world of the Near East and part of the Far East to Greek arms and Greek culture, and this interaction left in its wake a series of kingdoms of varying size in Macedon, Egypt, and Syria, with an appetite amongst themselves for competition and conquest. In the other direction, the Celtic incursions, culminating in the great attack on Delphi in 278, compelled the Greeks to turn their eyes westward. The Sicilian Greeks, of course, had their own varied history during this time, both amongst themselves and against the great power of Carthage. And also from the west, Rome slowly but steadily began to come within the purview of the Greeks. Not surprisingly given such changes, the ways of writing history changed as well. Numerous writers in the fourth and third centuries penned histories of great breadth and variety, and by the time Polybius came to write his own work, he had before him a vast array of approaches to the past. As we shall see, Polybius expressed himself forcefully on these types of historiography, and it will be worth while here to give a brief summary of them.