geographers like Eratosthenes and Strabo (whose work survives), and from time to time a figure of
interest emerged to unite the main strands of history. The most important of these was Posidonius,
philosopher and polymath, whose lost history continued Polybius and recorded the harsh realities of
Roman imperialism in the late Republic. But it is Polybius who represents the way forward, as the
emergence of Rome on the Mediterranean scene gave a new unity and direction to political history in the
tradition of Thucydides. So the culmination of this tradition in Greek historical writing was in a history
of Rome, whose importance must be explored in Chapter 25.
Towards the end of the millennium that encyclopedic tendency emerged which heralds the closing of a
cultural tradition; for us the importance of the tendency is that many of these bulky works survived to
drive out their predecessors, but also to offer the evidence for reconstructing the historical tradition. The
late Hellenistic world is a world of big books and small men with big pretensions. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus in his Roman Antiquities provided Rome with a respectable local history like a proper
Greek city; in the same age the Historical Library of Diodorus is important, both for its attempt to
improve on Ephorus by including all civilizations (not just all Greece) in the realm of history, and as a
quarry for lost historians-for the work is genuinely a library, a succession of abbreviations of other
people's books.
In the course of 350 years the Greek tradition of history-writing had invented most of the styles of
history that we still practise, and tried to analyse most of the political and social problems that we still
face. It had established standards of accuracy and a variety of approaches which make it clearly superior
to any other historical tradition. If it had one defect, it was a defect we share, the inability to cope with
the power of God in history; happy the age that can afford to ignore God. The end of the Hellenistic
period saw the beginnings of a new religion, and the flowing together of the traditions of Greece and
Judaea into a new form of history, the working out of God's salvation on earth. The Books of Maccabees
and the works of Josephus are products of this fusion of cultural traditions which survive, to point the
way forward to the Church History of Eusebius and the Christian world of Byzantium.