In Chapters 1–3 we examined the form and content of moral didacticism in what remains of Hellenistic historiography until Diodorus Siculus. In Chapters 4–6 we have seen that the three extant Classical historiographers also moralised, and we have traced many of the moralising techniques of Hellenistic historiography back to them. However, it has also become clear that the Classical historiographers’ primary means of moral didacticism were different from those of their Hellenistic successors in that the moralising took place partly on the macro-level of structure, partly in a less explicit form than what is mostly seen in Hellenistic historiography. In this final chapter we shall examine the fragmentary remains of three famous works of the late Classical period and ask how this development from Classical to Hellenistic moralising happened. We have already seen that the moralising of Xenophon in some ways points towards the works of Hellenistic historiography; now we shall see whether the trend continues throughout the late Classical period or the development is less straightforward.

Three once famous universal and/or continuous histories from the fourth century survive only in fragments: those of the so-called Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus of Cyme and Theopompus. We shall look at the remaining evidence of their works in turn. The methodological issues involved in interpreting fragments which were discussed in the introduction to Chapter 3 are equally relevant for the fragments of Classical historiography, but will not be repeated here.

THE OXYRHYNCHUS HISTORIAN

The Oxyrhynchus Historian (also known as P) was probably contemporary with Xenophon, although we cannot know for certain. His work is known from three papyrus fragments named after the places where they are kept: the London fragment (POxy 842, published in 1909 by Grenfell and Hunt), the Florence fragment (PSI 1304, published in 1949 by Bartoletti) and the Cairo fragment (published in 1976 by Koenen). This makes the text of the Oxyrhynchus Historian especially interesting because, unlike the other fragments of historiography looked at in this study, it represents the actual text written by the author (as closely as any second-century papyrus can be said to represent the exact words of a fourth-century writer) rather than a string of quotations, paraphrases and references by later authors.