Fragmentary Classical Historiography

This chapter analyses the moralising techniques and moral lessons of the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus of Cyme, and Theopompus of Chios. Using the techniques and lessons discovered and analysed throughout the book so far as a point of departure, it is tentatively concluded that both the Oxyrhynchus Historian and Ephorus seem to have been close to Thucydides and Xenophon in their moralising, but that Theopompus may have been radically innovative. It is therefore suggested that the ‘first moralising historian’ was not Ephorus, as is often claimed, but Herodotus, and that the innovator who made moralising more explicit and created the form seen in Polybius and Diodorus was likewise not Ephorus, but Theopompus.

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