The modern portrait of the development of Greek historiography is quite different from that of the ancient one. Admittedly, the latter must be pieced together from various writers, but the outlines are clear. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his On Thucydides envisioned a process that began with writers of local histories and chronicles, in which authors wrote down in a plain style with little adornment material preserved in temples, archives, and so forth. The next step was to take that raw material and apply to it literary skill and polish: that role in Dionysius is reserved for Herodotus, who incorporated these local histories and wove them together into a comprehensive and, one might say, universal account. Thucydides, though influenced by Herodotus, moved off in another direction, treating not the deeds of Greeks and barbarians, but a single war through which he himself had lived. All later historians could be seen as variations or offshoots of the two founders and best practitioners of the genre.

Centuries before the first historian put pen to papyrus, Greek poets sang the great deeds of their ancestors. These songs have vanished and what we have is the result of a centuries-long tradition of oral poetry, two massive epics under the name of ‘Homer’, one the story of the events in the last year of the long conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, the other a tale of wanderings and adventure, with the eventual successful homecoming of one of those heroes. The narrator of the Iliad already has a sense of history, a sense that the deeds he narrates occurred long ago, and that those who accomplished them were vastly superior to ‘the men of today’, or ‘such mortals as now live on earth’. Within the epic itself we find a receding mirror effect, since its hero Achilleus sings to himself the renowned deeds of men (κλέα άνδρών), those of an even earlier generation that the Trojan War heroes saw as great. Celebration and remembrance of great action pervade the Iliad, establishing a standard against which the heroes can measure themselves and validating the sacrifice of their lives in exchange for imperishable fame (κλέος ἄϕθιтον).

Reactions to Herodotus’ work have varied greatly both in ancient and modern times, and his reputation has always contained something paradoxical about it. In antiquity, he was on the one hand acknowledged as the ‘father of history’, the first writer to compose a narrative of the past with the sufficient care and adornment required of high literary endeavour and moral purpose, while treating his theme in a manner that came to be recognized as ‘historical’. On the other hand, his history contained much material that was problematic, especially stories of marvels and strange (and unbelievable) customs that seemed to undermine the serious purpose of history. The modern era has had different concerns and interests, yet here too Herodotus’ reputation has fluctuated; he has at times been considered a serious practitioner of an activity that in its essentials constitutes what is today considered a historical method, and at other times an amiable writer of fiction. It has also been difficult for him to escape from the shadow of his successor Thucydides, who seemed so much closer to modern notions of a historian. Possibly the greatest change that the last thirty years have seen is the near abandonment of the portrait of Herodotus as an well-intentioned, if imperfect, investigator, a man whose striving to become a historian overcame his obvious failure to actually be one. Such a portrait was based ultimately on a supercilious indulgence and a conviction that we knew so much better than he how to do what he so clearly tried to do and failed. Now things are not so clear: what history is and what purpose it fulfills seems to be very complex and driven largely by the needs of the individual societies that use it.

Throughout antiquity, Thucydides was considered the greatest historian and the one most worthy of emulation. In the opinion of the ancients he had managed to compose a work that for technical virtuosity, moral point, and emotional impact rivalled the greatest monuments of poetry and prose: what Homer was to epic, Demosthenes to oratory, Plato to philosophy, Thucydides was to history. Such was the power of his spell that when Dionysius of Halicarnassus comes to treat Thucydides’ work as a literary effort, he has to apologize even for suggesting that certain elements in the work could be improved.

The two centuries that separate Thucydides and Polybius saw a vast change in the historical map of Greece. The cosy world of the Aegean, upon which the destinies of Sparta and Athens had played themselves out, became the larger oikoumenê extending from Spain to India. From the north, the mainland Greeks had to contend with the rising power of Macedon, which eventually swept all before it. Then Alexander’s conquests, on a scale never previously seen, opened up the entire world of the Near East and part of the Far East to Greek arms and Greek culture, and this interaction left in its wake a series of kingdoms of varying size in Macedon, Egypt, and Syria, with an appetite amongst themselves for competition and conquest. In the other direction, the Celtic incursions, culminating in the great attack on Delphi in 278, compelled the Greeks to turn their eyes westward. The Sicilian Greeks, of course, had their own varied history during this time, both amongst themselves and against the great power of Carthage. And also from the west, Rome slowly but steadily began to come within the purview of the Greeks. Not surprisingly given such changes, the ways of writing history changed as well. Numerous writers in the fourth and third centuries penned histories of great breadth and variety, and by the time Polybius came to write his own work, he had before him a vast array of approaches to the past. As we shall see, Polybius expressed himself forcefully on these types of historiography, and it will be worth while here to give a brief summary of them.

From the wreckage of Hellenistic historiography only Polybius survives in large part, and even he did not get through the storm unscathed. His fragmentary text has hampered efforts to trace consistent lines of interpretation and thematic reinforcement. This is no doubt one of the reasons that the shift from historical to literary and historiographical criticism so characteristic of recent treatments of Herodotus and Thucydides has only recently begun to touch Polybius. But of course there are others. Although Walbank’s great commentary consistently treats historiographical and (somewhat less often) literary matters, the brusque and pragmatic manner of Polybius seems to have guided most scholars in the direction where Polybius himself felt that he was most competent. The historian’s apparent disdain for literary artifice, and his insistent concern with the business of history may have distracted attention from his careful structuring of events, and his consistent invocation of principles of common culture. Yet his achievement is visible even in the patchwork of quotations that make up the standard texts of his work. Indeed, it is perhaps the finest testimony to Polybius’ achievement that despite the loss of most and the most important part of his history, he is ranked by moderns as one of antiquity’s great historians. Nevertheless, the treatment of him and his work in this chapter must reflect both the nature of the evidence presented by his text, as well as the slow movement by scholars towards new interpretations of Polybius.