ABSTRACT
Historiography, in the sense of the study of history writing as opposed to the writing of history, tends to be consigned to an ill-defined and twilit zone within the field of classical studies generally and within ancient Greek history in particular. We are all aware that something that might be called “history” first emerged as an intellectual and literary practice (not yet a discipline nor quite a genre) among the Greeks of the fifth century B.C.; and we all agree that in writing history we must start from and eventually somehow come back to the primary sources, including the ancient historians. But very few of us (those of us, that is, who own up to being “historians of ancient Greece”) take historiography in the above sense as the sole or even as a central concern of our research. The Momiglianos of our profession can be counted on the fingers of not many hands, and full-fledged, no-holds-barred historiography tends to be left to “literary” scholars, professors of Greek or Latin rather than of ancient history, or even (tell it not in Gath) to nonspecialists. 1
