In this chapter, we shall examine the remnants of some of the most famous and influential works of history written in the Hellenistic period. These works have fared less well across the millennia than those of Polybius and Diodorus and only survive in fragmentary form, but it is important to remember that in their day they were as real, tangible and genre-defining as the works that have accidentally been transmitted in fuller form. If we want to understand moral didacticism in Hellenistic historiography, we have to examine these ‘fragments’ and try to catch as many glimpses a possible of the magnificent works they once were. In the previous chapter we saw how Diodorus’ moralising changes with his change of sources, but also how many of his moralising themes are present regardless of the identity of his source, although with different degrees of emphasis. I argued that this shows that not just moral didacticism but moralising on a specific set of themes was a ubiquitous feature of late Classical and Hellenistic historiography, present in all the authors Diodorus used as sources. In this chapter we shall test that hypothesis against the evidence of the ‘fragments’ of some of his likely sources.

We know hundreds of names of authors who wrote history in this time period, and a selection has to be made somehow. The works examined in this chapter have been chosen on the basis of two criteria. The first criterion is their importance for the development of the genre of historiography, to judge from the number and type of references to them in later authors including Polybius and Diodorus – except for Hieronymus of Cardia, who is included because of a twentieth-century scholarly obsession with seeing his work as more ‘serious’, which at least partly equals ‘non-moralising’, than those of his peers and close successors. The other criterion is genre: I have included only historians who wrote the same subgenre(s) of historiography as Polybius and Diodorus, namely ‘universal history’ or ‘continuous history’, rather than local history or monographs about single wars or events. In practice, this means leaving out the Alexander historians (despite the fact that Diodorus certainly used one of them as his main source for book 17) as well as local historians including the Atthidographers.