Introduction

Three recent articles, published in Historia, have raised again the difficult problems of historiography and history surrounding the events in the year 379/8. The two major continuous accounts of Xenophon and Diodorus are in many instances contradictory. Plutarch also supplies information concerning this period, but he has been regarded with suspicion as a later writer who is not an exacting historian. The tendency of most modern scholars has been to prefer the evidence of the contemporary witness, Xenophon, to the clumsy and suspicious accounts in Diodorus or Plutarch. This attitude should now be altered.

The recent work by I. A. F. Bruce on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia has, in my judgment, provided real reason to believe that Diodorus may very well have had access, through his main source Ephorus, to accounts of the history of Greece after Thucydides which are no less reliable, if not superior to, the information contained in Xenophon's Hellenica. It is clear enough that Xenophon is a contemporary witness to much of what he reports, but he is subject to bias in favor of the Spartans, and, more specifically, to bias in favor of his friend, benefactor and hero – Agesilaus. Attempts to establish the relative superiority of one or another of the accounts through methods of Quellenforschung have not yielded very suitable results, nor do they focus on the events themselves.