The purpose of this volume is to provide students and scholars with a selection of documents in translation intended to supplement standard histories dealing with the Hellenistic period from 300 to 30 BC (unless otherwise noted, all dates are BC).

The criteria for the selection of the texts translated are essentially the same as those for the other volumes in the series. Passages from authors readily available in English translation have been avoided except in those cases where they provide the only or best evidence for events or trends too important to be omitted. A few texts are drawn from secondary sources, some of which, such as the Suda or Photius' Bibliotheca, date from the Byzantine period, but contain information derived from earlier sources or fragments – quotations or summaries – of the works of now lost historians. The primary source for the latter is F. Jacoby's incomplete Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, which contains collections of the fragments of over eight hundred lost Greek historians together with a critical commentary on them in German (except for the two volumes which deal with the historians of Athens). The majority of the documents translated in this volume consist, however, of contemporary non-literary epigraphical and papyrological texts.