If universal historians are ‘‘those who study the history of mankind from the earliest times and in all parts of the world known to them’’ (Alonso-NUnez 2002: 117), then not all of the historians mentioned in this chapter can be considered such. Since, however, generic boundaries in antiquity were fluid and constantly capable of redefinition (Marincola 1999), the term may still be of some use in covering a wide range of Greek authors (for the Latin Trogus, below, p. 287) who, by their own admission or in the judgment of later writers, ‘‘wrote universally’’ (ta katholou graphein, Pol.
5.33.2) or treated ‘‘world events’’ (Green’s felicitous translation of koinai praxeis, Diod. 1.4.6). In antiquity, to write universally comprehended at least two different types of history: first, histories that covered the entire known world (oikoumene) from earliest recorded times to the author’s own day, i. e., universal in time and space; second, histories that treated known events within a restricted time period, i. e., universal only in space. Although the seeds of such interest can be traced back as far as Herodotus (Burde 1974: 9-17; Vattuone 1998; Vannicelli 2001), it was the fourth century that saw the first truly universal historians, a genre that thereafter was attempted by many. The main Greek practitioners of the first type were Ephorus (§2), Timagenes of Alexandria (author of an On Kings that went from earliest times down to Julius Caesar: Jacoby, Komm. II. C.222), Diodorus (§4), and Kephalion (a history from Ninus and Semiramis to Alexander the Great: FGrHist 93 T 2). The most comprehensive history (and the longest written in antiquity) was that of Nicolaus of Damascus (FGrHist 90), tutor of Antony and Cleopatra’s children, friend and advisor to Herod the Great, who in 144 books treated earliest times down to the death of Herod in 4 bce (Toher 1987). Practitioners of the second type included Theopompus of Chios (§3), Polybius (below, p. 245), and his continuators,
Posidonius of Apamea (fifty-two books covering 146 to the mid-80s bce: below, p. 250) and Strabo of Amaseis (FGrHist 91: forty-three books from 146 probably to 27 bce; Dueck 2000: 70).
World History
