Alexander may be taken to represent popular tradition: some of these, which are
interesting in themselves and may well be true, I have included in my work.The writings referred to by Arrian do not survive, so his judgement here is critical. Is
Arrian right in regarding a more interesting version as necessarily also the more
probable? Might these two criteria be pulling in opposite directions? Is his assumption
that Ptolemy is more honourable because he is a king convincing? Might Ptolemy
not have had a strong motive for re-writing history to bring glory and honour to
himself?
Polybius
Polybius (c200–120), a Greek born in Megalopolis in the Peloponnese, writes mostly
of the later period in which the Hellenistic kingdoms came into conflict with Rome,
a period and topic for the most part outside the scope of this book. However, he has
interesting things to say about the historian’s task that shed light on the vices of his
predecessors:
It is not a historian’s business to startle his readers with sensational descriptions,
nor should he try as the tragic poets do, to represent speeches which might have
been delivered, or to enumerate all the possible consequences of the events
under consideration; it is his task first and foremost to record with fidelity what
actually happened, and was said, however commonplace this may be. For the aim
of tragedy is by no means the same as that of history, but rather the opposite. The
tragic poet seeks to thrill and charm his audience for the moment by expressing
through his characters the most plausible words possible, but the historian’s task
is to instruct and persuade serious students by means of the truth of the words
and actions he presents, and this effect must be permanent not temporary. Thus
in the first case, the supreme aim is probability, even if what he says is untrue, but
in the second it is truth, the purpose being to benefit the reader.
(2, 56)This is to rehearse the distinction that Aristotle makes between tragic poetry and
history but in the historian’s favour. Polybius in at least one respect has been true to
his word; nobody has ever read him for his style.
The city state before the Persian Wars
The Mycenaean world to which the Homeric poems look back is one in which the
basic unit consisting of the royal household and outlying farms, like that of Odysseus
HISTORY 45