another was the lack of a real biographical tradition in Greece. For such reasons it was left to the
Romans to discover the fascinations of imperial history and of political biography; the most successful
political historians in the Hellenistic age continued to write Hellenica, usually chronicles of their own
day, merely incorporating the new Hellenistic kingdoms into the old framework.
The best of these histories was that which lies behind Books 18-20 of Diodorus, by Hieronymus of
Cardia, an administrator of public affairs in various kingdoms, whose adult life covered three
generations from Alexander to about 260 B.C., when he died in full possession of his faculties at the age
of 104; not surprisingly his history was so long that 'no one could read it through to the end', But it was
also clearly a marvellously accurate and balanced account of an age when politics and war spanned the
world from the Indus to the Nile and the Danube; in particular these books of Diodorus offer a version of
military history better even than that in Thucydides. The lesson that Hieronymus learned from the
dismemberment of Alexander's empire and the creation of the great successor kingdoms was perhaps
that most important of all truths in history, that it is chance, not human skill, that rules human affairs.
The goddess Tyche presides over his history and over that of his successors down to Polybius-chance
both blind and yet capable of being used by those who understand her ways: 'there is a tide in the affairs
of men'.
The other main development in political history is known largely through the polemics of Polybius
against his predecessors: it is aptly named the 'pathetic school of history', in which rhetoric and history
join hands, to recreate through pathos the sensations of the past. Whether this school, which only too
easily sacrificed truth to effect, had a basis in an Aristotelian theory of 'tragic history' is disputed; the
claims of these historians do, however, foreshadow some aspects of the theory of Benedetto Croce, that
all history is contemporary history, the re-enactment of past experience relevant to the present.
The early Hellenistic period also saw the renewal of the Herodotean tradition. Already writers such as
Nearchus had recognized the relevance of Herodotus to their experience; when the new kingdoms began
to consider their native subjects, they felt the need to understand these alien customs, and to create some
sort of identity for their kingdoms. The result was a revival of the Herodotean logos in a systematic form
as scientific ethnography, often patronized by kings and written by experts who might be non-Greek,
resting on records and inside knowledge, and arranged in a standard form-myth and religion, geography
and natural history, political history, social customs. The earliest of these authors, Hecataeus of Abdera,
wrote for Ptolemy I of Egypt, and is the source for Diodorus Book 1; in the next generation he was
followed by the Egyptian priest Manetho, whose chronology is still the basis of Egyptian history. In the
Seleucid kingdom, Berossus, a bilingual priest of Baal, -wrote a Babylonian history, and Megasthenes,
ambassador of Seleucus to the court of Chandragupta in India, wrote an impressive survey of the
beginnings of the Mauryan empire. This renewal of the relation between history and geography in
ethnography was undoubtedly the most important cultural result of Alexander's conquests. For a brief
period once again the Greeks were able to stand outside themselves and their city-states, and wonder at
the world around them.
The city-state rapidly reasserted itself and drove ethnography into the area of Utopian philosophical
romance, with the imaginary worlds of Euhemerus and Iamblichus. There continued to be good