Table Of ContentHegemony
and
Greek Historians
Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
General Editor: Gregory Nagy, Harvard University
Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece
by Laurie Kain Hart, Haverford College
The Scepter and the Spear: Studies on Forms of Repetition in the
Homeric Poems
by Steven Lowenstam, University of Oregon
Hegemony and Greek Historians
by John Wickersham, Ursinus College
Solon the Singer: Politics and Poetics
by Emily Katz Anhalt
Excursions in Epichoric History: Aiginetan Essays
by Thomas J. Figueira, Rutgers University
The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the
Goddess in the [kad
by Joan V. O’Brien, Southern Illinois University
On the front cover: A calendar frieze representing the Athenian months,
reused in the Byzantine Church of the Little Metropolis in Athens. The cross
is superimposed, obliterating Taurus of the Zodiac. The choice of this frieze
for books in Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches reflects this series’
emphasis on the blending of the diverse heritages—Near Eastern, Classical,
and Christian—in the Greek tradition. Drawing by Laurie Kain Hart, based
on a photograph.
Hegemony
and
Greek Historians
John Wickersham
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706
3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright© 1994 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
British Cataloging in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
WickershaJmo,hn M. (John Moore).
Hegemony and Greek historians / John Wickersham.
cm. — (Greek studies : interdisciplinary approaches)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Greece—History—Athenian supremacy, 479-431 B.C.—
Historiography. 2. Greece—History—Peloponnesian War,
431-404 B.C.—Historiography. 3. Greece—History—Spartan
and Theban Supremacies, 404-362 B.C.—Historiography.
4. Hégemonia (The Greek word) I. Title. II. Series.
DF227.5.W47 1993 938—dc20 93-8828 CIP
ISBN 0-8476-7780-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8476-7781-8 (paper : alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
m The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984.
Contents
Foreword Vil
Preface ix
1 Herodotus
The Hidden Hegemony. Getting Hegemony—Four
Instructive Contests. A Högemön Unseated. Aftermath?
Conclusions.
Appendix on Herodotus 8.3.2
Thucydides 31
Dunamis. The Spartan Hegemony against Xerxes. The
Athenian Hegemony. Another Way of Terminating
Hegemony. Rules for Hégemones. Pericles. The Future:
Another Spartan Hegemony? Conclusions.
3 Xenophon’s Hellenica 81
The Organization of the Hellenica. The Hegemony See-
saw. The Hegemony Carousel. Conclusions.
4 Ephorus 119
Sparta. Thebes. Limitations on the Study of Ephorus.
Conclusions.
Bibliography 179
General Index 183
Index of Authors, Passages, and Sources 191
About the Author 197
Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Foreword
by Gregory Nagy, General Editor
Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of
philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, this series spans the
continuum of Greek traditions extending from the second millennium
B.C. to the present, not just the Archaic and Classical periods. The aim
is to enhance perspectives by applying various different disciplines to
problems that have in the past been treated as the exclusive concern of
a single given discipline. Besides the crossing-over of the older disci-
plines, as in the application of history to literature, the series encour-
ages the application of such newer disciplines as linguistics, sociology,
anthropology, and comparative literature. It also encourages encoun-
ters with current trends in methodology, especially in the realm of lit-
erary theory.
Hegemony and Greek Historians, by John Wickersham, is an original
analysis of a fundamental political and cultural concept that pervades
the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon (Hellenica), and
Ephorus. It is not so much the word itself, hégeronia, that interests
Wickersham: rather, it is the actual concept as it is thought through by
these four authors in the construction of their respective narrative
master-plans. At one point in his engaging analysis, Wickersham
refers to the concept of arkhé, that driving force of Empire that likewise
pervades the works of these four authors, as the “evil twin” of hége-
monia. Wickersham’s insights into the interplay of Hegemony and
Empire in the thinking of the Greek historians will be of value not
only to students of ancient history but to all humanists and social sci-
entists interested in the shifting conceptual worlds of the greatest an-
cient historians.
Vii
Preface
This book began as a detailed study of Ephorus’s treatment of hege-
mony. I had been drawn to Ephorus because the fragment F 119 sug-
gested that he had a clear and incisive opinion, and because previous
scholarship led me to believe that further work on the fragments and
the indirect tradition would enable me to confirm the hints of the
fragment and extend its implications. I ultimately saw that this
method would not produce solid results. I thought, however, that the
negative conclusions were valuable as corrections to the traditional
approach to Ephorus, and I have, therefore, included them as the final
section to Chapter 4.
I was then persuaded to broaden the scope of the book in order to
discover how other Greek historians had handled the problem of
hegemony, and what part it played in their writings. For study I chose
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon’s Hellenica. This choice needs
no apology. I was surprised, however, to find that the question I was
asking had not really been handled by previous students. As a result, I
was neither able nor obliged to make great use of existing scholarship.
Although these are important authors, with mountains written upon
them, very little was directed precisely at my topic. My project re-
quired the examination of fundamental material from a point of view
not used even in the basic studies, such as de Romilly’s Thucydides and
Athenian Imperialism or Luschnat’s excellent and radical Pauly article
on Thucydides. I was surprised to discover that H. Breitenbach’s new
Pauly article on Xenophon has 520 columns of indices with no appar-
ent reference to hégemonia.
These were frustrations, but I drew pleasure from the way focusing
on hegemony seemed to give new insights into the historians.
Especially pleasant is the prospect of contributing to the appreciation
of Xenophon’s Hellenica.
1X
x Preface
This book, therefore, consists of separate studies on the role of
hegemony in four historical writers. I must make clear at the outset
what it is not. It is not a semantic study of högemonia and words of the
same “field.” The status referred to by högemonia is, to be sure, isolated
from others—especially arkhé—in the chapters on Herodotus and
Thucydides. When, however, Xenophon and Ephorus are reached, one
is dealing with the broad term “hegemony” as also used by modern
students. Nor does this book describe changing Greek attitudes to-
ward hegemony, using the historians as evidence; it asks only what
each writer did with hegemony in his work. Lastly, it is not an exami-
nation of how hegemony (in the modern sense) actually worked and
behaved in Greek history from 481 to 362; it could not, therefore,
profit from recent historians’ explanations of those events—nor from
the works of jurists, such as Triepel’s Die Hegemonie. This is a set of
literary studies carried out on historical writers.
Ephorus remained as the concluding specimen, although there are
many other attractive fourth-century historians, witnesses and victims
of turbulent events, who were likely to have had hegemony on their
minds. The Atthidographers seem to be too limited in their scope. But
Theopompus of Chios, I would guess, had ideas about political suc-
cess and supremacy that were shocking to his teacher Isocrates and
startling to his contemporaries. Ephorus still deserves front seat, be-
cause he focused explicitly? on the problem of Greek hegemony,
because the range of his Histories—all of bona fide Greek history—
gives him the opportunity for a comprehensive theory, and especially
because, where all are fragmentary, Ephorus enjoys a uniquely large
indirect tradition. For him, the temptation to exploit that tradition is
particularly acute, since there is an apparently great likelihood that it
can be used to clarify his ideas. But there are equally deep pitfalls, and
the difference between promise and fulfillment was an overwhelming
reason for keeping Ephorus as the object of the final study.
1. See Connor 1967.146, according to which Theopompus felt that Philip’s habits—
“drunkenness, licentiousness, extravagance, flattery, incontinence, perversion, all the
artifices of corruption—would assure him a glorious triumph in the Europe of his day.”
2. The word hégemonia does not appear in the fragments of Theopompus, according
to the index of Connor 1968.185-306.
