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’.