Alexander’s campaign had brought Greeks into permanent contact with diverse cultures which stimulated the old Greek curiosity and produced much ethnographic and geographical material. While most of it did not directly deal with the past of the people described, the historical dimension was rarely ignored. Quite often a practical motive joined that of simple curiosity. For example, since the Seleucid monarchy bordered in the East on the subcontinent of India, it became a political necessity for Seleucid kings to keep on good terms with the strong northern Indian kingdom of Chandragupta. A Greek, Megasthenes, stayed at its court in the years around 300 B. c. He recorded his experiences and observations in his Indica, which described the territories and people around the Ganges and Indus rivers. Unfortunately, little remains of his work beyond a few puzzling figures, among them the assertion that the area had 153 kings in 6,042 years, which would result in an average tenure of 39.5 years. Less puzzling was Megasthenes’ attempt to show traces of activities by the god Dionysius in that area. Alexander’s historians had also “found” such traces, particularly some “left” by Heracles. Such quasi-history was a simple way, indeed, for integrating the newly found area into the Greek cosmos.
Babylonian and Egyptian histones. The Greeks of the East could have learned interesting lessons from the non-Greeks, many of whom prided themselves on having a more illustrious past and older records than their conquerors. Two works wished to impress this fact on the new rulers while attempting to court their favor. Between 280 and 270 B. c. Berossus, a priest of Bel in Babylon, demonstrated in his three-part Babyloniaca the venerable age and achievements of the Mesopotamian peoples. He figured that the world was about 468,215 years old and that the history of Babylon and Chaldea reached back 435,600 years. After 432,000 of these years went by, the Great Flood occurred, the event which is the turning point in the Babyloniaca. After the flood, another 3,600 years elapsed until Alexander burst into the Middle East. How did Berossus know all this? Up to the time of the Assyrian Empire he relies on myths and other traditions, but from then on he consults extensive temple archives.
An Egyptian priest at Heliopolis, Manetho of Sebennythus, also could use temple archives for his Aegyptiaca (ca. 280 B. c ), in which he, too, stressed the illustrious career of his native area before the arrival of the new masters. The work, dedicated to Ptolemy II, was chronologically well organized, using as principle of organization the Egyptian royal dynasties.
The works of Berossus and Manetho shared two other features besides chronological finesse: they were written in Greek and they were virtually ignored for generations. Manetho’s sober history yielded in popularity to an earlier Greek history of Egypt by Hecataeus of Abdera; a fanciful, impressionistic, and often unreliable work which intended to let the world know about the greatness of the territories ruled by the Ptolemies. But Berossus’s and Manetho’s histories were eventually appreciated. By 70 b. c. Alexander Polyhistor’s digest of Berossus’s Babyloniaca began to interest the Jews, who found in it much material concerning their early history. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus used the Babyloniaca and the histories of Egypt by Hecataeus and Manetho for reconstructing Jewish history. Early Christian scholars, particularly Eusebius, scrutinized the Babyloniaca in their attempts to date the creation of the world and of Adam.
History and chronology. As culture met culture in the new political units, a long-neglected task needed to be taken up again: the construction of a uniform calendar. Only such a calendar could help historians in coordinating the records left by the many different peoples who inhabited the immense area now penetrated by Greek civilization. When they wrote their works, they could hardly use phrases like “when Pythodorus had four months of his archonship to run at Athens,” which had already meant little to a Spartan and now meant even less to inhabitants of Ptolemaic Egypt or Seleucid Babylonia.
The new attempts to sort out the many different calendars were by no means solely prompted by scholarly interests. Seleucus had gathered into his monarchy a multitude of Middle Eastern regions and people. For administrative reasons Seleucus gave his kingdom a new and uniform calendar, one that began with his conquest of Babylon in October, 312 b. c. With so recent a beginning date, the calendar solved few of the problems of historical scholars but provided a useful chronological standard for the region, so much so that many Jews figured years according to the Seleucid era unt:il the eleventh century a. d. and Syrian Christians still do. Berossus had offered another potentially universal time-scale in his Babyloniaca. He had used as his basic unit the Saros period, which represented the time from a certain constellation of sun, earth, and moon to its exact duplication 6,585 and 1/3 days later. When the Babyloniaca was ignored, the Saros periodization suffered the same fate.
Greek historians eventually found a Greek solution to the synchronization problem, and Timaeus of Tauromenium has been credited with it. The credit is deserved, if given in proper measure. In the third century b. c. he “drew out a comparative list of the ephors and the kings of Sparta from the earliest times; as well as one comparing the archons at Athens and priestesses in Argos with the Ust of Olympic victors.”* In short, Timaeus continued the line of those who had studied existing local time-frames in order to bring them into proper relation to each other. He most likely had access to earlier work done on the issue, including the improvements made by Aristotle in the figuring of the Olympiad and the dated list of victors in the Pythian games by Aristotle’s nephew Callis-thenes. It remained for Timaeus, first, to improve upon the work of his predecessors by his own Olympionicae and, then, to use the Olympiad scale consistently in his work.
The usefulness of Timaeus’s Olympiad calendar is attested to by Eratosthenes. That famous geographer, mathematician, astronomer, and poet also wrote an erudite work. On Chronology. But when he needed a chronology for his own history of Greek comedy, Eratosthenes accepted Timaeus’s system, thereby giving it his sanction. Yet neither he nor Timaeus seem to have extended the Olympic scale backwards beyond the first Olympic Games (776 b. c.).
After Timaeus, Greek historians finally had available a common calendar with which they could synchronize past events. But the lack of political unity of the Greek areas of the Mediterranean world prevented the uniform use of the Olympiad calendar. People still lived their lives in local and regional contexts. They felt no urgent need to accept the uniform Olympiad time-scale as long as local and regional calendars sufficed for their daily life.
The Greeks meet their future: Rome. The people who eventually changed Greek politics decisively lived to the West, untouched by Alexander and the Diadochi. Life in the Hellenistic East went its course while on the Italian peninsula the city of Rome was extending its dominion over the Etruscans, Latins, Samnites, and, by 275 b. c., the Greeks of Magna Graecia (Greater Greece in southern Italy). After Rome had consolidated its hold on central and southern Italy, she eyed Sicily where she would confront her most important opponent; Carthage.
The Greeks of the West were shadowy figures to historians of the Greek heartland, appearing only intermittently in the well-known histories. Only historians in and from Sicily, an island with frequent cultural and military collisions, wrote extensively on the history of the Greek West. Antioch us of Syracuse, a contemporary of Herodotus and Thucydides, described the history of Western Greeks from the mythical age to the Peace of Gela in 424 b. c. In the process he recorded the momentous fact that in 480 b. c., when the Greeks in the East won their famous victory over the Persians at Salamis, the Greeks on
Sicily achieved a similar triumph. The tyrant Gelon of Syracuse defeated the Carthaginians at Himera, thereby rescuing the Greek settlements on Sicily from Carthage’s grasp. The next decisive event in the West was the destruction of the Athenian expeditionary corps by the Syracusans; in the fourth century the Sicilian Philistus told about it. Philistus’s Sicelica also contains some hints on why Sicilian history was not easy to write. The extensive role tyrants played points to the lack of internal stability in many of the city-states, which in turn severely impeded the forming of a stable tradition and the development of a sense of continuity.
Political problems also shaped the life of the third and most important of the Sicilian historians, Timaeus of Tauromenium, who spent fifty years as an exile in Athens. His Olympionicae, already discussed, was a chronological study of Olympic victors. Of his main work, his History (possibly called Sicelica), only 386 fragments remain. We owe much of what we know about it to Timaeus’s relentless critic Polybius, who tells us that Timaeus treated the past of Italy, Sicily, and North Africa. Even fewer fragments are left of a supplementary work, the History of the Pyrrhic Wars.
Timaeus apparently wrote history in the broad manner of Herodotus and seems to have enjoyed an excellent reputation in the ancient world, Polybius’s objections to such a rambling history notwithstanding. It helped that Timaeus wrote about Rome at the historical moment when that city had started its steep ascendancy to dominance. As for the origin of Rome, he mentioned briefly the story of Heracles’ crossing of the Tiber River at Rome, the warm hospitality Heracles received on that occasion, and the promise of a good future contained in the episode. He also knew the stories about Aeneas as the Trojan ancestor of Rome and about the Roman tradition of Romulus and Remus. But Timaeus did not ascribe the founding of Rome to gods, heroes, or Trojans. He linked Rome’s origin with that of Carthage, which, he maintained, was founded by fugitives from the Phoenician city of Tyre. He calculated 814/13 b. c. as the founding year of Carthage on the basis of data he had found in the Tyrian annals. For unknown reasons he then simply stipulated the same date as the founding year of Rome. Timaeus must have known full well what such a comparatively recent date-over 400 years after Troy’s fall-did to the by then well-known affirmation of Rome’s Trojan origin. He granted that a Trojan settlement might have preceded Latin Rome. What other reason could Romans have had for the annual killing of a warhorse on the Campus Martius than to express their anger over the ruse of the Trojan horse which had cost their ancestors so dearly?
Timaeus’s work was typical for the best that Hellenistic historiography could deliver: a sophisticated treatment of the past which, however, stayed within long-established limits of perception and interpretation. In form and content Greek historiography had exhausted its possibilities. Its next stimulus would come from outside the Greek world—from Rome. About half a century after Timaeus’s death, Greek historiography began its role as mentor to Roman historians; it had much to offer its tutees.
The Greeks had created the very concept of history itself when, with Herodotus, loTopia had changed from a general inquiry about the world into inquiry about past events. Unlike the Near Eastern records of the past-lists of kings and dynasties—Greek history became the story of the human world; a world contingent and far from the eternal, changeless essences of philosophers. Accordingly, as the Greek world changed, Greek historiography changed with it. With the triumph of the polis, the epic heroes and deeds were pushed out of the center of attention by the citizens, leaders, and affairs of the city-states. Thucydi-dean political history remained prominent for centuries, although the basis for its prominence had disintegrated with the Macedonian hegemony and its Hellenistic aftermath. However, life in the Hellenistic world gave strength to other aspects of Greek historiography: biography, molded for historical uses by Xenophon, stilled curiosity and provided examples of excellence; ethnographic descriptions, present in political narratives as digressions, became popular in their own right; history as drama and entertainment found favor with people who lacked strong collective allegiances; chronology advanced in sophistication and in the Olympiad scheme created a symbolic Greek unity.
That splendid record had one weak spot. When Greeks attempted to reconcile the past, present, and future they were successful within short ranges in time and small regions of space. But the past found an impenetrable border in the epic period, and the expected future never varied much from the present— from the polis and, later, the monarchies of the Diadochi. The lack of a sense of overall development deprived Greek historiography of a strong dynamism. Not surprisingly, Greek historiography never found an effective approach to writing a universal history of the known world. Ephorus tried to transcend the po//s-oriented political history but could not manage more than a quasi-Panhellenistic Greek history with accompanying sections on the barbarians. Only Rome would bring a new and wider concept of unity, one reluctantly accepted by the Greeks.
In turn, the Romans were offered substantial information and fully developed historiographical forms: the hard-won results of the Greek developments, from epic to prose history. While Roman historians adapted these forms for their use, they simply copied the Greek ideas on the theory of history. The Greeks themselves had not given too much thought to methodology. At an early stage they had replaced the authority of myth and epic by that of reason and, to a lesser extent, experience. Failing to develop any proper means for finding out about the distant past, Greek historians preferred contemporary history, which could be built on the testimony of eyewitness accounts. For the rest of the past a mildly critical reliance on authoritative authors had to do. Since Greek historians never thought of historiography as primarily a reconstruction of the past for the sake of truth or intellectual curiosity but always as an endeavor with a purpose-ranging from the preservation of noble memories to the education of active citizens to the gratification of desires for entertainment or even gossip-the simple methodology posed no problem. None of these purposes required the type of methodology that eventually would become a necessity when historians set out to reconstruct the past, piece by little piece. Antiquarian and local historiography, with their greater interest in sources, were insufficiently prominent to change matters.
World History
