Among Latin authors we have Justinus’ epitome of the so-called Philippic Histories of the Gaul Trogus Pompeius (the title of this ‘universal’ history indicates his approach, independent of the Roman patriotic tradition) and, more importantly, Livy, who fortunately used Polybius as his primary source for eastern affairs. But Livy’s history, written under Augustus, is itself fragmentary, for only books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, taking us to 168 and the end of the Third Macedonian War (172–168). Both the geographer Strabo, also writing under Augustus, and Pausanias, who composed his periegesis of Greece in the middle of the second century AD, furnish valuable historical and topographical information, while for Jewish history several books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (especially the Maccabees) are of relevance, as is Josephus, who wrote his Jewish Antiquities under the Flavian emperors (AD 69–96) at Rome (see further pp. 222 ff.). Later Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), composed a chronicle of universal history which is important for chronology. It was translated into Latin and expanded by St Jerome.
This rapid review of fragmentary sources, all of which present many problems of accuracy and reliability, must also include Memnon of Heraclea Pontica, who wrote an important history of his native city, probably in the first century AD, and Polyaenus, whose book on military stratagems was composed a century later. With the help of these, along with other, minor sources, uneven in scope and often quoting incidents out of context, it is possible to write some kind of history of some parts of the three hundred years which constitute the hellenistic age. Fortunately this can be supplemented from other sorts of historical evidence which, it is true, generate problems of their own, but allow us to check the statements of literary historians against more immediate and normally non-literary documents. It is thanks to the regular growth in the amount of such evidence that the history of this period (and of others in antiquity) is constantly being reshaped in detail as the availability of new information leads to the revision of current hypotheses.
III
This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.
Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of
the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).
But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.
The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.
If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.
IV
A second category of document important for the study of this period consists of papyri, mainly from middle Egypt and especially the Fayum, where the dry soil and climate have preserved through the centuries scraps of paper consigned to rubbish tips or reused, for example in stuffing the mummy-cases of sacred ibises, cats or crocodiles. The information contained in these papyri is in many ways different from that furnished by inscriptions. The latter have survived because they were intended to be preserved, the former because they were discarded. Papyri, too, furnish information which is usually more local in its relevance. If we ignore the fragments containing extracts from literary works, which range from the discovery nearly a century ago of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Athens to that, more recently, of long sections of lost plays by Menander, we are dealing in the main with the waste-paper baskets of minor civil servants – correspondence, petitions and drafts of replies, summonses, depositions, records of judgements, administrative details concerning the billeting of troops, the passing on of edicts and orders, the auctioning of leases, the making of contracts and submission of tenders, the uneasy relations with the temples and public announcements