When did modern historiography of ancient Greece start? The question is deceptively simple and betrays assumptions far more revealing than any straightforward answer. Its formulation implies distinguishing between ancient historians and modern ones. But this has long been a slippery endeavour, as Nicole Loraux's title Thucydides n'est pas un collègue of some years ago reminds us. Ironically, in telling the history of historical practice, historians' chronology has often been fraught with issues of value and haunted by presentism. In fact, when the origins of modern historiography of the ancient world are sought, the divide between ancients and moderns is repeatedly left behind in favour of privileging some moderns above others. George Grote, the nineteenth-century British banker and political figure turned famous author of the History of Ancient Greece (1846–56), is the most frequently cited founder. Many of these claims, moreover, besides highlighting Grote's differences from previous moderns, reinforce this historian's foundational status by attributing contemporary value to his work. It has been well argued that his ‘is the earliest history of Greece still consulted by scholars’ and that his work has remained influential to most important twentieth-century historians of ancient Greece, including de Ste Croix, Momigliano, Finley and Hansen. Such analyses have taught us a lot about the development of modern historiography of ancient Greece.