Times have been good for fragmentary ancient Greek and Roman historians in the Anglophone scholarly world. The online Brill’s New Jacoby Project (BNJ) is now complete, providing new editions of Jacoby’s fragmentary Greek historians (FGrHist). The fragmentary Roman historians have The Fragments of the Roman Historians, in three volumes, editors T. J. Cornell et al. (OUP, 2014). Giovanni Parmeggiani has now given us a penetrating, insightful, and meticulous new study of one of the most important Greek fragmentary historians of the fourth century B.C.E., Ephorus of Cumae.
Parmeggiani’s book consists in four chapters: 1) “Questions and Answers” (10-60); 2) “Ephorus’ Histories: The Method” (61-150); 3) “Ephorus’ Histories: The Content” (151-331); and 4) “Ephorus the Universal Historian” (332-60). An Appendix studies Ephorus’ fragments in relation to the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia (362-65).
In his Introduction, Parmeggiani makes it clear that his brief is to rehabilitate Ephorus from the withering dismissal he suffered at the hands of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century classical scholars such as Karl Müller, Friedrich Blass, Eduard Meyer, Georg Kaibel, Kurt Wachsmith, Georg Busolt, and, above all, Felix Jacoby. According to this near consensus, Ephorus was a second-rate historian, exemplifying the falling away of fourth-century historiography from the qualitative heights set in the fifth century by Herodotus and Thucydides. The Hellenistic period, a designation coined by Gustav Droysen, was generally disregarded as an anemic and debased shadow of the brilliance that preceded it in the Classical period. And so, the treatment of Ephorus was part and parcel of deeply rooted disdain of fourth-century Greece and succeeding times. Part of the criticism of Ephorus centered on an alleged inability to distinguish myth from history. As Parmeggiani puts it, “Ephorus’ universal history-writing was an exercise in translating myth into history, a way to fabricate ancient history in the manner of rhetoricians, with the aim of impressing readers; he was a dull rationalist and an insignificant moralist, who exemplified the lack of rigor in historical methodology among post-Thucydidean historians” (5).
Guido Schepens began to destabilize this dismissive orthodoxy concerning Ephorus, and fourth-century Greek historiography generally, in the 1970’s.[1] Parmeggiani has taken Ephorus’ rehabilitation, and vindication, further in this careful study of the fragments and their contexts. He begins by reviewing the dominant questions and debates concerning Ephorus’ historical writing: authorship of the thirtieth book of the Histories, the putative apprenticeship under Isocrates, problems associated with Diodorus as “cover text” for Ephorus, and above all the question of Ephorus and “rhetorical historiography.”
As most of us now realize, “rhetorical history” was always a wrong-footed, fuzzy, and unhelpful conception, but it had great staying power in modern works on Greek historiography. As Parmeggiani drily notes, “As a matter of fact, any historiography—be it ancient or modern—is a rhetorical construct insofar as it is a discourse that cares for the representation of facts, provides evidence and argues for or against a thesis, and reconstructs events by presenting its own point of view” (37).
But what is “rhetorical historiography,” anyway? Parmeggiani identifies six features variously leveled against its supposed practitioners: 1) “rhetorical historians substituted their interest in style for their interest in truth and method”; 2) “they enlarged the spatium historicum uncritically, to celebrate and/or devalue events and to change or alter facts in the distant past as well as in the present”; 3) “they substituted consultation of written works for direct inquiry (autopsy), showing a lack of political and military knowledge”; 4) “they marginalized the interest in politics, and emphasized the moral instruction of the reader by expressing personal judgement, praise and blame (epainoi and psogoi), and by giving paradigms of moral conduct”; 5) “they plagiarized the work of other historians, falsifying events by manipulating details”; 6) “they lacked the ability to explain historical events” (19). Parmeggiani proceeds to demolish each of these charges against Ephorus in turn, showing that there are hardly more grounds for these accusations against Ephorus’ historical work as revealed in the fragments than there are for Polybius’ history. And no one has ever called Polybius a “rhetorical historian.”[2]
More fruitful is the idea of universal historiography, with Ephorus having some claim to being its originator.[3] Ephorus reached back into the distant past for the starting point of his history, taking up his narrative with the return of the Heraclidae.[4] The chosen (a)temporal opening, as we have seen, provided ammunition for his modern detractors (see #2 in the preceding paragraph). But all indications are that he did not proceed uncritically, even in recounting the earliest of times, and Parmeggiani stresses Ephorus’ methodological rigor. For Ephorus, “historical research demands the comparative examination of various types of evidence” (142). Indeed, he was sensitive to chronological sequencing (when evidence allowed him to employ it) and causal explanations resulting from it. Moreover, Ephorus eschewed no type of evidence, from critical examination of the poets (e.g. 61-66, 75, 97) to scrutiny of epigraphical texts (106-107, 125). Painstaking attention to thoroughness and accuracy is apparent in the key Ephoran prerequisite for the historian: diakriboun (cf. FGrHist 70 F 122a).[5] As is well known, Polybius famously saw the 140th Olympiad as marking the symplokē, or interweaving of world events, creating one theater of the interstate system, as it were.[6] But Ephorus also had symplokai in his historiographical conceptions, though his chronographies differed from predecessors and contemporaries.
Parmeggiani’s claims for Ephorus as universal historian warrant quotation in full. “Apart from the relevance of symplokai, the picture that we have reconstructed elicits further reflection on the inconsistency of several modern assumptions. First, Ephorus’ Histories did not result from a mechanical juxtaposition of particular histories, which were unrelated to each other; rather, they were an organic whole, whose parts interacted with each other. Second, Ephorus’ historical perspective was sophisticated, and cannot be reduced to a mere transposition of Isocrates’ interest in hegemony to history. Third, Ephorus’ project appears to have been very different from the historical projects of such predecessors as Hellanicus and Herodotus. Unlike Hellanicus, Ephorus’ work was not a catalogue of particular histories; differently from Herodotus, Ephorus emphasized the impact of the outcome of the battle of Himera on Greek history, extended the period examined in the Persian Wars to 449 B.C. and described how conflicts arose again and further developed in the fourth century B.C. Ephorus’ sustained attention to the broader scene and the continuous interrelations among events—both diachronic and synchronic—clearly makes him a precursor of Polybius” (347).
Parmeggiani demonstrates that overall Ephorus blurs the distinction between fifth-century Greek historiography and what came after. He also shows that Ephorus was an independent thinker, as in his exposition of the Ephoran tradition on Pericles (247-62). “Looking back from the fourth century BC to the issues of the causes of the war, Ephorus considered data that Thucydides had neglected, thereby adhering to his methodological principle that all the available evidence must be examined when the tradition is doubtful…. While Plutarch makes doubt the conclusion of his analysis…Ephorus made it the start of his research” (261).
The received tradition on Ephorus, formed largely by scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was of a dull “scissors-and-paste” compiler, or a rhetorical master posing as historian, or as an uncritical and sloppy antiquarian. These and other negative assessments all fulfilled the task of demonstrating that Hellenistic historiography was a pathetic and weak reflection of classical history-writing of the fifth century B.C.E. Parmeggiani demonstrates that these interpretations are far wide of the mark, revealing an Ephorus who was a critical and independent thinker, an indefatigable and thorough researcher, and a creative and resourceful historian. In doing so, Parmeggiani blurs the bogus distinction between fifth-century Greek historiography and that which followed. He also shows that Ephorus and Polybius were much closer together in terms of exacting historiographical standards than scholars have allowed, thus making Polybius’ admiration of his Cumaean predecessor more understandable. Each worked hard to painstakingly execute rigorous historiographical demands, establishing credentials as authoritative historian in the process.[7]
But, as is the case with any fragmentary historian, the recovery of the intellectual qualities of the author can only be tentative in the final analysis. Parmeggiani admits as much in his concluding meditation on the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia and the question of Ephorus as possible author of that work. “Fascinating as it may appear, the identification of the author of the HO with Ephorus is not a certainty but a possibility, which, as such, should not be taken as a premise for the study of Ephorus’ fragments” (365).
Such tentativeness is mandatory for fragmentary historians for the obvious reason that their works have come down to us in tatters. One can imagine how our ideas about Herodotus, for example, would be affected were we to possess passages on King Xerxes’ hubristic excesses during his march against Greece in Book 7 (e.g., 7.35, 38-9), but lack the aporetic ending, with the brutal execution of Artayctes at the hands of Xanthippos, father of Pericles, and the admonition of restraint for would-be imperialists by Cyrus, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty (9.120.1-22.4; cf. 7.33).
Another reason for cautious circumspection lies in the fact that fragmentary historians are presented to us by “cover texts.” This is to say that snippets of the fragmentary historian are selected, and perhaps shaped, by the narrative objectives and rhetorical needs of the historian (as “cover text”) who quotes, and embeds, distorted snapshots of the lost work. Inferences drawn about the character of the lost work in its entirety must be built up from cover texts’ somewhat random selections, and, it goes without saying, such inferences are always hazardous.[8] A corollary danger is to engage in special pleading to reconstruct a seamless, consistent narrative in the presence of fragments that seem to tell a different story of inconsistency and contradiction.[9] Quentin Skinner famously called this the cardinal sin of imposing a “mythology of coherence” of a given author’s thought and discourse where none exists.[10] I know well that these temptations are great when one devotes the bulk of an academic career to a chosen author, even when that author’s work is completely or largely intact. The problems are compounded and the temptations greater when one is dealing with a fragmentary historian. Parmeggiani has worked mightily to rehabilitate his author, but he has commendably steered clear of most of these pitfalls.
Notes
[1] G. Schepens, “Éphore sur la valeur de l’autopsie (FGrHist 70 F 110) = Polybe XII 27.7),” AncSoc 1 (1970) 163-82.
[2] For Polybius’ appreciation of Ephorus, see e.g. Polyb. 4.20.5; 12.28; FGrHist 70 T 18a. The best work in English on Polybius’ historiographical precepts remains K. S. Sacks, Polybius on the Writing of History (Berkeley 1981).
[3] A series of international conferences in 2021 and 2022 on Universal Historiography was held at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (Oslo) and Università Sapienza di Roma. The published proceedings—39 authors, 52 chapters, and over 1,000 pages of text—will appear as an Oxford Handbook of Universal History Writing (OUP).
[4] Polybius briefly mentions the return of the Heraclidae, and the mythological figures of Orestes, Tisamenos, and Ogygos, in his Achaean prokataskeuē (2.41.4-5).
[5] For an exemplary study of Ephorus’ historiographical method, see Parmeggiani 114-25 on F 149 (Strabo 10.4.16-22).
[6] On the symplokē in Polybius’ historical conceptions, see assembled references in C. B. Champion, Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories (Berkeley 2004) 102 n.4.
[7] See now K. S. Kingsley, G. Monti, and T. Rood (eds.), The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge 2022).
[8] See G. Schepens and J. Bollansée (eds.), The Shadow of Polybius: Intertextuality as a Tool in Greek Historiography (Leuven, 2005), with my review in Sehepunkte: Rezensionsjournal für die Geschichtswissenschaften (Munich), vol. 6 (2006) nr. 7/8.
[9] Parmeggiani comes close to committing this methodological sin in his treatment of Ephorus and mousikē (61-66).
[10] See collected essays, especially “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in J. Tilley (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, 1988).