The author first addresses the contents and the nature of the proems of the Histories, secondly the arrangement of Ephorus’ work and, thirdly, the main contents of each of the thirty books that formed it.

In light of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters and the knowledge gained through the fragments, the author addresses the issue of Ephorus’ universality. He tries to understand which reasons led Polybius to mention Ephorus as his only predecessor; and he sets Ephorus’ universality in the context of the historiographical thought of the fourth century BC, to better appreciate its novelty.

The author detects which principles Ephorus stated in his Histories for research, and how he practised his inquiry. This enables the author to see whether Ephorus’ practice of inquiry was in line with the principles he stated or not, and also to draw an overall balanced evaluation of Ephorus’ historiographical method and the nature of his historical discourse.

Perhaps no ancient writer has experienced so great a reversal in modern reception as the fourth-century bc historian Ephorus of Cyme. In his preface to the first edition of Ephorus’ fragments by Meier Marx (1815), the German scholar Friedrich Creuzer depicted Ephorus as a philosophos who might be well compared to Herodotus’ Solon, who travels and observes to learn,1 or – one could add – to Polybius’ Odysseus, who ‘saw the cities and knew the minds of many men’.

The author checks the firmness of the foundations of the negative appraisal of the historian Ephorus. Topics include Ephorus’ Isocratean apprenticeship, the concept of rhetorical historiography, Ephorus and Diodorus, ancient judgements questioning Ephorus’ reliability as a historian, Ephorus’ ‘Cymocentrism’.

Our analysis of Ephorus’ fragments has led to a very different portrait of the historian and his Histories from that which has been offered by Jacoby, Schwartz and many modern critics following their path. Ephorus, we have argued, was not an erudite compiler of previous histories merely interested in ethics, but a professional historian who had a strong interest in politics, and also in both the theory and the practice of research. His advanced historiographical thinking was clearly aware of that of the best fifth-century predecessors, such as Thucydides, and it in turn became a model for later historians such as Polybius. If not the first, Ephorus was among the first who provided a definition of historiography as a discipline, emphasizing, on the basis of both his predecessors’ and his own experience, the differences between historical inquiry and other disciplines.