Volume Editor's introduction

Summary

The primary purpose of this volume is to supplement the standard and easily accessible sources of the history of the Greek world from the Archaic period to the end of the Peloponnesian War.

The predominance of fifth-century Athenian inscriptions in the documents translated here is due almost as much to the unflagging willingness of the Athenians to carve their decrees and accounts on marble and to the long and successful excavations in the Athenian Agora as to their intrinsic importance. An attempt, nevertheless, has been made to provide a selection of the more important, or interesting, non-Athenian documents. Here I follow closely and owe a debt to Marcus Niebuhr Tod for volume I of his Greek historical inscriptions and to Russell Meiggs and David Lewis for their expanded and updated successor volume.

Much of the material in this volume derives from secondary authors, particularly scholiasts, ancient scholars who themselves wrote commentaries on the ‘classical’ authors. Mainly, these were men living in Hellenistic times, having access to sources not extant today, and their work, in turn, was quoted (and abbreviated) by scholars who came after them. The scholia (material written by ancient scholars in the margins of texts) to Aristophanes and Pindar provide examples of such mines of information, and the lexicographers of Roman and Byzantine times – e.g. Harpocration in his Lexicon and the compilation called the Suda – provide another.