Hellenica Oxyrhynchia after 100 Years (In Memoriam I.A.F.Bruce: 1937–2007)

2008 was the 100th birthday of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia: the first set of papyrus fragments—the part now known as “The London Fragments”—of this important text, obviously a major historical work composed in the first half of the fourth century bc, was published in 1908, in Volume 5 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Since that time two other sets of papyrus fragments have come to light, the first in Florence (editio princeps 1949), the second in Cairo (editio princeps 1976). The result is a substantial, but nevertheless tantalizingly incomplete, remainder of a second “continuator of Thucydides” besides Xenophon.

The papers in this issue originated in a special session of the Classical Association of Canada meeting at the Université de Montréal, in May 2008. This event had two purposes: to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the first publication of the London fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, the most substantial addition to the corpus of Greek historiography to emerge from the sands of Egypt, and to pay tribute to the enduring value of the scholarship of Iain Bruce, the author of the 1967 commentary on the papyrus historian, who died late in 2007.

We take great satisfaction in being able to publish these papers in a journal that from 1994 to 2002 had its editorial home in the Department of Classics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where Iain Bruce taught from 1963 to 2003. It seems particularly serendipitous that, as this issue is going to press, three of the Editors of Mouseion (Brad Levett, Kathryn Simonsen and Craig Maynes) are now from that same department.

There are only eleven Greek historical authors from pagan antiquity of whose works a substantial portion survives complete: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Josephus, Arrian, Appian, Dio, and Herodian. Thus the recovery of a significant piece of historical narrative written in the fourth century bc represented a major addition to this corpus. The two major fragments of the H.O. (one in London, published 1908, the other in Florence, published 1949) ran to something over 6,000 words, i.e., 86% of the length of Xenophon Anabasis 2 (the shortest bookroll among the works of the five earliest historians listed above). The content of the new text aroused particular excitement, since it clearly belonged to the non-Xenophontic tradition concerning early fourth-century bc history, hitherto known only through Diodorus and therefore depreciated.

Much of the scholarship since 1908 has concentrated on two major questions (neither finally resolved): who is the author? and is his version of events to be given more credence than that in Xenophon’s Hellenica? On the issue of authorship a century of work has narrowed the choice to one of the two other men besides Xenophon attested in antiquity to have been “continuators of Thucydides”: the Athenian Cratippus and the Chian Theopompus, who became famous later as the historian of Philip II of Macedon. Richard Billows’ paper, “The Authorship of the “Hellenica Oxyrhynchia”,” reminds us that the claims of Theopompus need to be taken seriously, as some of the principal arguments made against his authorship can be shown to be not well founded.

The papers by Cinzia Bearzot, George Pesely, and Kathryn Simonsen all contribute, indirectly, to the second of the thorny questions mentioned above, the relative credibility of the narratives of late fifth-/early fourth-century bc Greek history composed by the papyrus historian and Xenophon. The particular details discussed here (the internal politics of Athens [Pesely and Simonsen] and of Thebes and the Boeotian Federation [Bearzot]) are not found in Xenophon’s Hellenica, so that there is not the same imperative here to choose between two incompatible historiographic traditions as arises in the case of the same event being narrated very differently in each. The arguments made here, however, generally contribute to the picture of the papyrus historian as someone with excellent, if not always unbiassed, sources of information on this period of Greek history.

Catherine Rubincam’s paper does not engage directly with the question of the authorship or the credibility of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia...