Here we touch upon a historical situation to which Ephorus was quite sensitive, and in which he contextualized Pericles’ affairs-quite a different circumstance from what we see in comedy or pamphlets. This view is deeply historical and has nothing to do with the supposed fiction or exaggerations on the part of the Athenian comedy or the pamphletistic tradition. On the contrary, Ephorus was keenly aware that the Athenians’ original ambitions for thalassocracy would and did have a negative impact on the politics of the Delian League. With regard to Ephorus, we could ask Jacoby if it would have been possible or conceivable for a historian of the fourth century to examine the internal politics of fifth-century Athens without considering the comic tradition and, more generally, the literature of the time, which was an situation in which Pericles was to be involved, after some years of autocratic and certainly flawed financial politics, was intriguing to Ephorus not because of his hunger for scandals. I would suggest instead that, as is evident from Thucydides’ text, at the time when he was writing (after 431 BCE, at least), Pericles was commonly viewed as responsible for the war Thucydides thus writes to counter this opinion. In his view, Thucydides had unduly neglected Athenian internal politics, and so Ephorus would have written an account of the causes of the Peloponnesian War better than that of Thucydides had he both paid attention to Thucydides’ text and at the same time examined Athenian internal politics without surrendering to the lethal seduction of comedy or pamphlets. With his alethestate prophasis, then, Thucydides tries to raise his reader’s awareness and encourage an original, philosophical vision of history.Īmong Ephorus’ detractors is Felix Jacoby. Without depriving the aitiai of their aetiological function, the concept of alethestate prophasis allows Thucydides to emphasize the inevitability of the war. Thucydides’ answer, in short, is that the war was necessary: if there had been no Corcyra and Potidaea, there would have been no Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE the war would instead have erupted at a different time. Was the war accidental or necessary? This is the problem for which the alethestate prophasis is invoked. The second is a philosophical problem and concerns the nature of the war between Athens and Sparta. How did the war actually break out? This is the problem for which the aitiai are invoked. The first is a problem of historical contingency and properly concerns the origin of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. In other words, he distinguishes between two sets of causes because there are two different kinds of problems to solve. In his disclosure of the alethestate prophasis, Thucydides brings into play the concept of ananke, which is entirely absent from his discussion of the aitiai. Sarah Ferrario, The Tools of Memory: Crafting Historical Legacy in Fourth-Century Greeceġ3. Rosalind Thomas, Local History, Polis History, and the Politics of Placeġ2. Christopher Tuplin, The Sick Man of Asia?ġ1. Dominique Lenfant, Greek Monographs on the Persian World: The Fourth Century BCE and its innovationsġ0.
EPHORUS OF CYME FRAGMENTS HOW TO
John Tully, Ephorus, Polybius, and τὰ καθόλου γράφειν: Why and How to Read Ephorus and his Role in Greek Historiography without Reference to ‘Universal History’ĩ. Nino Luraghi, Ephorus in Context: The Return of the Heraclidae and Fourth-century Peloponnesian PoliticsĨ. Giovanni Parmeggiani, The Causes of the Peloponnesian War: Ephorus, Thucydides and Their Criticsħ. Cinzia Bearzot, The Use of Documents in Xenophon’s HellenicaĦ. Roberto Nicolai, At the Boundary of Historiography: Xenophon and his Corpusĥ. John Marincola, Rethinking Isocrates and HistoriographyĤ. Riccardo Vattuone, Looking for the Invisible: Theopompus and the Roots of Historiographyģ.
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