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 ‘...

Diodorus may seem an odd choice of focus for an entire chapter. He is widely known for having taken over long stretches of text from his sources, paraphrasing and summarising, but not adding anything new in terms of historical analysis or interpretation. I have argued my point of view on Diodorus’ source usage in detail elsewhere, but it is necessary to restate my case briefly here before embarking on an analysis of Diodorus’ moralising.¹ It is clear from the sections of Diodorus’ Bibliotheke for which the sources are extant that Diodorus generally stayed close to the text of the source,...

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...

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.¹ 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...

The question of moral didacticism has in recent years increasingly become part of the discussion of Herodotus’ Histories. Scholars are largely divided into those who are content to see some moral aspect to the Histories, and those who apparently believe that admitting such an aspect to the work denies it the title of history.¹ I hope to show in the following that the moral lessons are certainly there, but also that this places Herodotus completely in line with the genre of historiography that developed after him, rather than separating his work from it.

In the opening lines of the Histories,...

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.¹ 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.² I would argue that, like other Greek historiographers before and after him, Thucydides did not distinguish between moral...

If Thucydides is often regarded as too good a historian to moralise, Xenophon is often regarded as too much of a moralist to be a good historian. Scholarship in the nineteenth century regarded Xenophon as an incompetent historian who wanted to think and write like Thucydides, but was intellectually incapable of doing so.¹ This trend persisted throughout much of the twentieth century;² but at the same time a trickling stream of scholars began to study the Hellenica on its own terms and discuss what its purpose may have been.³ Such discussions have generally concluded that the work’s purpose was to...

In Chapters 1–3 we examined the form and content of moral didacticism in what remains of Hellenistic historiography until Diodorus Siculus. In Chapters 4–6 we have seen that the three extant Classical historiographers also moralised, and we have traced many of the moralising techniques of Hellenistic historiography back to them. However, it has also become clear that the Classical historiographers’ primary means of moral didacticism were different from those of their Hellenistic successors in that the moralising took place partly on the macro-level of structure, partly in a less explicit form than what is mostly seen in Hellenistic...