Introduction

For students of, say, the causes of the Second World War the amount of relevant material is such that no one person could master the whole of it; but one person can master the whole of the material on the causes of the Peloponnesian War. For recent times, in Europe and North America, there has not been either the lapse oftime or an upheaval so great as to destroy most of the documents that were placed in archives or retained by families, and since the invention of printing there has been a fair chance that a copy will survive somewhere of any text that has been printed. But classical Greece is separated from us by many centuries and major upheavals. Only a fraction survives of texts which we know were written - the works of many fourth-century historians including Ephoros and Theopompos are known only from quotations and from later works making use of theirs; of the works of the second-century historian Polybios and the first-century historian Diodoros parts survive but not the whole; the account by Diodoros, written nearly three hundred years later, is the earliest account of Alexander the Great to survive - and many other texts must have been written of which we know nothing at all. The literary works which have survived are those which were thought worth copying, in generation after generation, and are not always what we should most like to survive. It is important for historians of antiquity to make as much use as we can of all the evidence which does survive - literary, to be discussed in this chapter, other kinds of written text, to be discussed in Chapter 3, non-written sources, to be discussed in Chapter 4 - and if we are to approach a correct understanding of classical Greece it is important to realize how the evidence should and how it should not be interpreted.