ABSTRACT
Since the nineteenth century, uncovering and recording the factual truth of what happened in the past has been the aim of most self-respecting historians.1 It was long a common assumption that commitment to this particular brand of truth was shared with the ‘good’ ancient historians, i.e. Thucydides and Polybius, but that the truthfulness of most other Greek historiographers was compromised because of love of a good story (Herodotus), political bias (Xenophon), or a preoccupation with rhetoric and moralising (all Hellenistic historiographers apart from Polybius). In recent decades, the degree to which Thucydides was actually living up to this ideal and, indeed, the extent to which he shared it at all, have been brought into question by a number of scholars, and it has become acceptable to say that he was sometimes (e.g. in the Melian Dialogue) engaged in communicating a ‘general’ or ‘higher’ truth-of human nature or of how the world works-rather than a factual truth.2 It is also becoming increasingly widely accepted that all historiography, modern as well as ancient, is rhetorical, but that this does not necessarily impact on its truth value.3 Despite these postmodern insights, however, Hellenistic historiography is still routinely assumed to have ‘degenerated’ from a pinnacle of scientific and literary excellence into a ‘rhetorical’ genre concerned primarily with moralising and sensationalism.4 It is surely time to look more closely at Hellenistic historiography and ask explicitly what connection, if any, its practitioners saw between their historical endeavour and truth, and how they conceptualised historical truthfulness.
