Chapter FiveDidymus and the Greek historians

Abstract

We lack positive evidence that Didymus composed scholarly works specifically devoted to Greek historians. Even more, the very origins and characteristics of the Alexandrian interest in the historiographic genre, not to say in literary prose, represent open issues for the historian of Hellenistic scholarship. In this chapter, the rare and sparse pieces of information are gathered, in order to obtain a possibly systematic and organic overview on the very defective puzzle of the Didymean approach in this field. In the first part, clues from testimonies and fragments directly concerning historians (Herodotus, Thucydides) and antiquarian subjects (Solon’s axones) are taken into special consideration. The second part deals with the use and abuse of history and historical sources detectable in fragments from Didymean works which were devoted to fields and genres other than historiography. As a result, the testimony of the Pindar scholia and of the writing On Demosthenes attested to by P.Berol. inv. 9780 recto (second century ad) proves to be especially decisive for a reassessment of Didymus’ approach to historiography and history.