It is well known that Athenian orators, when they made reference to the historical past, usually eschewed prolonged narrative in favour of brief allusions to familiar episodes from Athenian history. Perhaps the most striking exception to this custom is the long and detailed account of fifth-century Plataean history in the pseudo-Demosthenic speech Against Neaera . The main interest of this passage, however, lies not in its divergence from contemporary rhetorical practice, but in its clear reliance on Thucydides for its account (...) of the siege of Plataea during the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, it is unique in Attic oratory in the extent of its reliance on an identifiable historical work. Yet, considering its significance, this passage has received very little scholarly attention, and merits a closer reexamination. (shrink)

In an earlier paper Christopher Tuplin and I attempted to establish the date and circumstances of the emergence of the concept of ‘the Greeks of Asia’ and the consequent appearance of ‘the freedom of the Greeks of Asia’ as a political slogan. It was there suggested that concept and slogan first crystallized shortly before the Peace of Antalcidas, and that the freedom of the Greeks of Asia first acquired its full force as a catchword when that freedom had been signed (...) away, apparently for ever. The present paper traces the further history of the slogan, first under Alexander and the Diadochi, then at the time of the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean. No attempt is, however, made to deal with every unanswered question raised by either Macedonian or Roman dealings with Greece. The Greeks of Asia languished under Persia till the time of the Macedonian invasion. Yet when that invasion came, the freedom of the Greeks of Asia was to play little part in Macedonian propaganda, still less in Macedonian practice. The expedition was conceived by Philip as an act of revenge for the Persian invasions of Greece. This theme of revenge was taken up by Alexander at the time of his appointment to command, and recurs in his letter to Darius and his words to Parmenio after the taking of Persepolis. The even broader theme of a crusade of Greeks against Persians to achieve the conquest of Asia is still more frequent. It dictates the sedulous manufacture of parallels with the Trojan war and the inscription on the spoils sent to Athens after the battle of the Granicus; it was also used to justify Alexander's hatred of Greeks who fought on the Persian side. By comparison with these motifs the freedom of the Greeks of Asia receives little attention. When Philip sent out his advance expedition under Parmenio and Attalus, his instructions to them were to free the Greek cities. But just how flexibly that order could be interpreted is shown by Parmenio's treatment of Grynium. Alexander too showed himself ruthlessly pragmatic in his attitude to Greek cities, until the appointment of Alcimachus to liberate the Aeolian and Ionian cities. Yet this development receives little attention in the sources, and the only trace of it in subsequent propaganda is the claim ascribed to Alexander when he was on his way from Miletus to Caria that he had undertaken the war for the sake of the freedom of the Greeks, the only occasion in the surviving evidence on which Alexander makes this assertion. (shrink)

W. R. Connor has argued that Theopompus' critical attacks on almost all the leading figures in Greek history suggest he was writing a ‘history without heroes’. This article will argue that a similar principle applies to Theopompus' attitude towards Herodotus and other earlier historians: all fell short of his ideal, and, in the final analysis, Theopompus had but one literary hero: himself. Theopompus' mysterious Epitome of Herodotus, I will suggest, is best taken not as an independent work, but as a (...) portion of the Philippika in which Theopompus incorporated and adapted a significant body of Herodotean material. This fact, taken together with Theopompus' polemical statements about his predecessors, suggests that Theopompus boldly challenged Herodotus on his own turf, confident he could improve upon him. (shrink)

The modern historian of Greece and Rome often depends for his information on writings whose reliability is no greater, though often much less, than that of the histories, now lost in whole or part, which their authors followed. The quality of these histories can sometimes be detected from the internal evidence of the extant derivative accounts, even when we cannot name the historians with any certainty.

The first Athenian intervention in Sicily is one of the most opaque episodes in Thucydides. The historian for once dispenses with a full record and confines himself explicitly to the major events of the campaign. What then emerges is a disconnected narrative of geographically separate actions, most of them trivial. There is no attempt to give a synoptic picture or explain the problems of strategy, and the lack of coordination has impressed many critics. The episode is remarkable for another reason. (...) For once we have that rarest of rare birds, an independent control source for Thucydides. Since 1930 there has been available a brief fragment of papyrus, usually ascribed to Philistus, which provides an extraordinarily detailed, if fragmentary, report of a portion of the campaign. The fragment has become a standard reference, and it is reported, not always accurately, in the more recent scholarship on the Peloponnesian War. But there has been little attempt to come to terms with the historiographical problem it poses. Not only does the fragment give a large amount of detail which has no counterpart in Thucydides, but its narrative, as it is usually interpreted, is formally inconsistent with Thucydides' chronology. The new fragment is most probably the work of a Sicilian historian, well acquainted with the events of 427/6, and it is – to put it mildly – disturbing to find a contradiction in what should have been an easily verifiable sequence of events. (shrink)