How many copies of the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia have been found?

di George E. Pesely

The Ancient History Bulletin, 8/2 (1994), pp. 38-44

B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt discovered portions of a previously-unknown Greek historian during their excavations at Oxyrhynchus in 1906. The papyrus fragments, which are now the London fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, were published in 1908 as POxy. V 842. The text, written by two scribes toward the end of the second or in the early part of the third century, is on the verso.¹ The recto has a land survey of crown land in the vicinity of the village of Ibion Argaei in the Arsinoite nome, which was published in part as POxy. VI 918.

The Florence fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, found during the Italian excavations in 1934 at Oxyrhynchus, were first published by V. Bartoletti in 1949 as PSI XIII 1304.² The writing, of the second century, resembles the first hand of POxy. 842, but not in every respect, and the text is written on the recto (the verso being blank); it is unquestionably from a different copy of the work.³ The narrative resembles POxy. 842 in style and bears the same relationship to Diodorus Siculus (i.e., Diodorus’ ultimate but not his immediate source) as POxy. 842 does; that these fragments are from the same historian has been generally accepted.⁴

The Cairo fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (PCairo temp. inv. no. 26/6/27/1-35) were published by L. Koenen in 1976.⁵ This copy, written in the late first century, is on the recto; the verso was used for a demotic list of expenditures.⁶ While the fragments were found in a collection of Theadelphia papyri, Koenen notes that these are in fact ‘a mixture of several lots, including papyri from Oxyrhynchos and Karanis.’⁷ The narrative’s style and relationship to Diodorus justify assigning it to the same historian as POxy. 842 and PSI 1304.⁸

We have therefore three generally accepted sets of fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, representing three separate copies; at least two, and perhaps all three, of these copies were actually found at Oxyrhynchus.

I would like to draw attention to two other papyri which may also preserve portions of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, both published in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

POxy. XI 1365 (Pack² 2181, FGrHist 105 F2), from the first half of the third century, deals with the rise of the Orthagorid tyranny at Sicyon. Grenfell and Hunt sought to identify the author as Ephorus, but their case rested partly on their belief, following E. M. Walker, that Ephorus was the author of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, a view now generally abandoned.⁹ Their comments on the language of POxy. 1365 fit the Oxyrhynchus Historian better than they do Ephorus. The text in question is related to a fragment of Diodorus about the Sicyonian tyranny (VIII. 24). I would suggest that POxy. 1365 comes from a digression on archaic tyranny in the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia which sought to point the lesson that popular leaders are potential tyrants by portraying earlier tyrants as military heroes and demagogues.¹⁰

POxy. II 302 (Pack² 2254) was published in 1899 under the rubric ‘Fragment of a historical work.’¹¹ The writing is of the early first century. It is a small fragment, only 6 by 8.6 cm, with the ends of 8 lines and the beginnings of 7 lines; the editors transcribed only lines 3-7 of the second column.

W. Crönert drew attention to similarities between the fragment and Xenophon, Hell. 1. 1. 20-22, while admitting that some of the words in the fragment could not be matched to Xenophon’s text.¹²

In 1969 Donald F. Jackson published an improved transcription with photograph of POxy. 302.¹³ Jackson’s transcription yields 97 certain and 33 dotted letters, vs. Grenfell and Hunt’s 41 letters (8 of which Jackson dots), but we still have only 5 to 12 letters in a given line.¹⁴ To the proper names Κυ]ζικηνων (II, 3) and Ξ]ρυσοπολιν (II, 7) read by Grenfell and Hunt, Jackson’s readings add Ε]λληνων (I, 4).¹⁵ That the text is a narrative rather than a geographical treatise is indicated by the verbs προσπλευσας[ (II, 2) and πληρωσαι (II, 4). Jackson’s enhanced text rules out even more strongly any identification of POxy. 302 with any part of Xenophon’s Hellenica.

That POxy. 302 might derive instead from the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia was suggested twice in 1908 — by the author of an unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement for 20 February 1908 (58-59), and more tentatively by Crönert in Literarisches Zentralblatt 59 (4 January 1908), 23.¹⁶ This suggestion is neither confirmed nor excluded by Jackson’s improved readings of POxy. 302; the fragment is too meager for any secure conclusion. It appears to come from an historical work, as Grenfell and Hunt thought. The apparent allusions to Cyzicenes and to Chrysopolis invite the conjecture that the subject-matter is the Hellespontine War of 411-405 B.C. If that is correct, there are a number of possible authors, including Ephorus, Theopompus, Duris of Samos, the Oxyrhynchus Historian (and Cratippus, for those who decline to identify him with the Oxyrhynchus Historian).¹⁷ One point in favour of this fragment belonging to the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia is its provenance. No definite fragments of Theopompus from Oxyrhynchus are known,¹⁸ and of Ephorus none except for two debatable cases, POxy. XI 1365 (cf. above) and POxy. XIII 1610 (FGrHist 70 F191). On the other hand, Jacoby lists a number of unidentified historical fragments from Oxyrhynchus,¹⁹ so POxy. 302 has company if it must remain adespoton. POxy. 302 is too small a scrap to yield any information about the historical events being described in the text or to allow a definite identification of the author. Nevertheless, it may be useful to bear it in mind when considering the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia.

The London, Florence, and Cairo fragments come from separate ancient copies of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. If the suggestion of the TLS Anonymous concerning POxy. 302 is correct, or my suggestion concerning POxy. 1365, we may have bits of four or five ancient copies. There may be further fragments awaiting recognition among unpublished papyri (or so we may hope). That the recovered fragments of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia come from three and perhaps more ancient copies does not mean that the work must be by a well-known author — i.e., Theopompus.²⁰ To date all known fragments, with the possible exception of the Cairo fragments, were found in one provincial town, far from Alexandria.²¹ Perhaps those who caused these copies to be made had a limited choice of historical texts to copy — that is, if the copying was done locally.²² For all we know, a single copy of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia brought to Oxyrhynchus in the Ptolemaic or the Julio-Claudian era may have been the archetype of all the copies discovered to date.

Sir Frederic Kenyon noted that the historians, apart from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, seem somewhat underrepresented among the literary texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus.²³ Thucydides was consistently popular, and the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia may owe its popularity to being a continuation of Thucydides. Or perhaps the contents of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia gave it special appeal in Egypt — for example, if it devoted more attention than rival accounts to Dynasties XXVIII and XXIX or to the participation of individual Egyptians in the events of the early fourth century B.C.²⁴ We cannot fully account for the literary tastes of Greek-speaking residents of a town in Roman Egypt.²⁵

So far, as I have said, no copies of Theopompus have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus. Certainly an Oxyrhynchite who wanted a text of Theopompus could have obtained one from Alexandria — or perhaps even locally (since the surviving papyri give us an incomplete picture of the books available in Oxyrhynchus) — but we should expect to find a copy of Theopompus’ Philippica sooner than his Hellenica, since the Philippica seems to have been a much more widely-read work.²⁶ That multiple copies of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, but none of Theopompus’ Philippica, have been found could be taken as another indication that this work is not Theopompus’ Hellenica. The comparative unimportance of rhetorical studies at Alexandria²⁷ may have contributed to the preference we find in Oxyrhynchus not for the highly rhetorical Theopompus but for the conspicuously unrhetorical Oxyrhynchus Historian.

The Hellenica Oxyrhynchia is the work of a contemporary of the events being described in the late-fifth and early-fourth centuries — that is to say, almost certainly, the work of Cratippus of Athens²⁸ — and was published before 355 B.C.²⁹ On chronological grounds alone it cannot be Theopompus’ Hellenica, which was certainly published after 346 and probably after 338, to judge from Polybius.³⁰ It would be hard to find two historians more dissimilar than Theopompus and the Oxyrhynchus Historian: Theopompus being exceptionally rhetorical and harsh in his judgments on individuals, the Oxyrhynchus Historian in contrast being ‘sparing in comments, whether of approval or of the reverse’ and showing a ‘dislike of rhetoric.’³¹ Had Theopompus been the Oxyrhynchus Historian, there would be no anecdotes of Isocrates saying that Theopompus needed the rein.³² It may be surprising to find a preference in Oxyrhynchus for Theopompus’ obscure forerunner and rival, Cratippus, but the choice does not reflect badly on the cultivated readers of Oxyrhynchus.³³

Footnotes

1     The Oxyrhynchus Papyri V (London, 1908), 110-12.

2     Papiri greci e latini 13:1 (1949), 61-81.

3     Bartoletti, op. cit., p. 62, n. 2, 71; H. R. Breitenbach, ‘Hellenika Oxyrhynchia’, RE Supp. XII (1970), cols. 384-86.

4     Bartoletti, op. cit., 63-64, 71; Breitenbach, op. cit., cols. 409-10. L. Canfora, ‘I frammenti storici fiorentini e le Elleniche di Ossirinco’, RhM 115 (1972), 14-19, regards this as only an unproven possibility.

5     ‘Papyrology in the Federal Republic of Germany and Fieldwork of the International Photographic Archive in Cairo’, Studia Papyrologica 15 (1976), 39-79, esp. 55-67, 69-76.

6     Op. cit., 55.

7     Op. cit., 52. For papyri from Oxyrhynchus showing up elsewhere, see E. G. Turner, ‘Roman Oxyrhynchus’, JEA 38 (1952), 80.

8     Koenen, op. cit., 61-66. In the new Teubner edition edited by Mortimer Chambers, Hellenica Oxyrhynchia post Victorium Bartoletti (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1993), the Cairo fragments have been divided into 3 chapters, the Florence fragments renumbered as chapters 4 through 8, and the London fragments as chapters 9 through 25.

9     POxy. XI (London, 1915), 104, 107; K. Münscher, Phil. Woch. 48 (28 July 1928), col. 915; I. A. F. Bruce, An Historical Commentary on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (Cambridge, 1967), 23-25; Breitenbach, op. cit., cols. 413-14.

10     I hope to argue this case more fully elsewhere. The Oxyrhynchus Historian was ‘extremely fond of digressions’ (POxy. V, 121, cf. 130) and reveals his hatred of demagogues in 10.2 (= 2.2 Gr.-H.): cf. A. v. Mess, ‘Die Hellenika von Oxyrhynchos’, RhM 63 (1908), 384, and L. Pareti, ‘Cratippo e le “Elleniche” di Oxyrhynchos’, SIFC 19 (1912), 472.

11     POxy. II (London, 1899), 303.

12     AFP 1 (1901), 530-31.

13     ‘The Papyri of Xenophon’s Hellenica’, BASP VI, 2 (1969), 51-52.

14     The N in the fourth space of col. II, line 3, is a misprint, as the photograph indicates. Jackson dots the zeta, iota, and final nu of ζικηνων (II, 3) and the rho and lambda of Ξ]ρυσοπολιν (II, 7), as well as the first lambda and the eta of Ε]λληνων (I, 4) and the first pi and the omicron of προσπλευσας[ (II, 2).

15     The νιων at the beginning of II, 1, may be part of another proper name, perhaps Καλκηδονιον, Ξαλκηδο]νιων or Λακεδαιμονιων.

16     ‘Aus demselben Literaturkreis, vielleicht sogar demselben Werke, stammt das kleine Stück P. Oxyr. II, 302...’.

17     The TLS Anonymous, incidentally, agrees with Blass that Cratippus was the author of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. Ξρυσοπολις, cites Ephorus (FGrHist 70 F83) and Theopompus (FGrHist 115 F7), but this proves little, since any detailed narrative of the war would have mentioned Chrysopolis.

18     Cf. F. Kenyon, ‘The Library of a Greek of Oxyrhynchus’, JEA 8 (1922), 136; J. Krüger, Oxyrhynchos in der Kaiserzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 217, 220, 338. Theopompus F 165 (POxy. VII 1012) does not count: this is a later writer who quotes Theopompus.

19     Under FGrHist 105 he includes POxy. XI 1365, VI 857, VI 867, and VII 1014, and cites in the commentary also POxy. III 444 and IV 679-681 (FGrHist IIC p. 336). A. Platt observed that POxy. 1014 ‘looks like a description of the siege of Motya by Dionysius’ (Berl. phil. Woch. 30 [1910], col. 477): cf. Diodorus 14. 47. 4—53.5 (397/6 B.C.) and Polyaenus 5. 2. 6. Unfortunately there are no proper names on this third-century papyrus.

20     When publishing the Cairo fragments, Koenen used the discovery of a third copy of the work as an argument against an anonymous author. In light of the serious obstacles to Theopompus and to the other names proposed, he decided with some hesitation in favour of Cratippus’ authorship (op. cit., 65-66).

The case for Theopompus’ authorship, long virtually berefit of supporters, has been championed in recent years by G. A. Lehmann, ‘Die Hellenika von Oxyrhynchos und Isokrates’ “Philippos”’, Historia 21 (1972), 385-98, and ‘Theopompea’, ZPE 55 (1984), 19-44, and especially by E. Ruschenbusch, ‘Theopompea: αντιπολιτευεσθαι’, ZPE 39 (1980) 81-90 and ‘Theopompea II: Theopomps Hellenika als Quelle in Aristoteles AP’, ZPE 45 (1982), 91-94. P. R. McKechnie and S. J. Kern, in their edition of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (Warminster, 1988), are sufficiently impressed by the new arguments put forward by Lehmann and Ruschenbusch to lean towards Theopompus while declaring the question of authorship still open (7-14). G. S. Shrimpton, Theopompus the Historian (Montreal and Kingston, 1991), 191-94, offers a rebuttal to Ruschenbusch’s arguments; cf. Chambers, op. cit., xxi-xxii.

21     Oxyrhynchus was about 400 kilometers from Alexandria: cf. I. F. Fikhman, Oksirinkh-gorod papirusov [Oxyrhynchus, City of the Papyri] (Moscow, 1976), 14. As E. G. Turner insists, ‘Oxyrhynchus was an important place’: ‘Roman Oxyrhynchus’, JEA 38 (1952), 78. Fikhman puts its population in the Roman era at roughly 30,000 (p. 39).

22     It is not known whether the London fragments of the Hell. Oxy. were copied near Ibion or at Oxyrhynchus (POxy. V, p. 111); Ibion Argaei was 30 Roman miles north of Oxyrhynchus (cf. Itin. Ant. 157, 2-3). For copyists at Oxyrhynchus, cf. Turner, ‘Scribes and scholars of Oxyrhynchus’, Akten des VIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Papyrologie Wien 1955 (Vienna, 1956), 141-46; Krüger, op. cit. 192-98; A. K. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 161. In other cases we know books were obtained from Alexandria (cf. POxy. VIII 1153 and XVIII 2192, and that Oxyrhynchites went to Alexandria for education (POxy. XVIII 2190; cf. Turner, ‘Oxyrhynchus and Rome’, HSCP 79 [1975], 5-10). On how Oxyrhynchites built up their private libraries, cf. N. Lewis, Life in Egypt under Roman Rule (Oxford, 1983), 60-61, and on the difficulty of determining whether a text found at Oxyrhynchus was copied there, cf. Turner, JEA 38 (1952), 91. Turner concludes that the Harpocration mentioned in POxy. 2192 is the well-known lexicographer and that second-century Oxyrhynchus was in contact with the best Alexandrian scholarship of the day (JEA 38 [1952], 92; cf. ‘Scribes’, 142-43, and Krüger, op. cit., 198-204, 208-13). POxy. 2192 is a tantalizing text, open to different interpretations; H. Gärtner is more cautious about the dating of Harpocration (‘Harpokration [2]’, KP II (1967), col. 144). Alexandria was ultimately the source of the classical Greek literary works available elsewhere in Egypt (cf. Bowman, op. cit., 233).

Turner has an interesting sketch of an upper-class family of Oxyrhynchus (JEA 38 [1952], 86-90). The second Σαραπιων οκαι Απολλωνιανος was strategos in the Arsinoite nome from 207 until at least 210 and held high offices in Oxyrhynchus as well. He was fined for having retained in his possession official documents from his service in other nomes; it could even be at his behest that POxy. 842 was copied on the verso of POxy. 918 — a land survey from the Arsinoite nome. Of course this cannot be demonstrated, and this Sarapion is perhaps too late, but the original owner of POxy. 842 may have been someone very much like him. On this Sarapion see also G. Bastianini, ‘La carriera di Sarapion alias Apollonianus’, Aegyptus 49 (1969), 149-82.

23     JEA 8 (1922), 136.

24     Under the year 396/5 Diodorus reports a Spartan attempt (ignored by Xenophon) to form an alliance with the Egyptian king Nephereus, the king’s gift of materials for triremes and 500,000 measures of grain, and the capture by the Rhodians and Conon of the grain-ships (14. 79. 4, 7). Justin has a similar notice (6. 2. 1-2, with a garbled version of the king’s name). Diodorus’ information comes in his main narrative and must derive from a passage in his ultimate source, the Hell. Oxy., not far removed from some of the extant portions. (On the relationship between Diodorus 14. 79. 6 and Hell. Oxy. 18 [= 10 Gr.-H.], cf. Grenfell and Hunt, POxy. V, 212.) Justin is certainly based on the Hell. Oxy. a few lines further on (6. 2. 11) when he mentions a mutiny among Conon’s men (cf. Hell. Oxy. 23 [15 Gr.-H.] and Grenfell and Hunt, op. cit., 236).

25     For a survey of the classical Greek authors and genres represented in the Oxyrhynchus papyri, by period, see Krüger, op. cit., 144-260, 309-50. F. Kenyon’s earlier sketch in JEA 8 (1922), 129-38, although outdated in some respects, is still worth reading.

26     Jacoby’s edition of the fragments of Theopompus (FGrHist 115) includes 223 fragments of the Philippica against 19 from the Hellenica, 4 from the Epitome of Herodotus, and 150 from other or unidentified works. The 38 citations of Theopompus by Harpocration break down into 32 from the Philippica, 1 from the Hellenica, and 5 unspecified; of nearly 80 citations in Athenaeus, only 4 are to the Hellenica.

27     Cf. P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria I (Oxford, 1972), 810; Turner, HSCP 79 (1975), 5. Of course this does not mean complete neglect: papyri of most of the ten Attic orators have been found at Oxyrhynchus, and Demosthenes is among the most commonly-found prose authors (cf. Krüger, op. cit., 214, 218, 223, 248, 250-53, 255-56). POxy. LIII (London, 1986) includes a rhetorical treatise by an unknown author (POxy. 3708). In Krüger’s table of literary papyri (214-15), the most frequently-found prose authors at Oxyrhynchus are Plato (50 papyri), Demosthenes (38), and Thucydides (32), but POxy. LVI (1989) and LVII (1990) have added another 10 papyri of Demosthenes and another 25 of Thucydides.

28     The case for Cratippus has been supported recently by P. Harding, ‘The Authorship of the Hellenika Oxyrhynchia’, AHB 1 (1987), 101-104, and by Chambers, op. cit., xxii-xxv. Cf. also AHB 2 (1988), 31, n. 1.

29     I would see the Hell. Oxy. as the source of the story that the demos agreed to share in repaying the money borrowed from Sparta by the oligarchs, first found in Demosthenes 20 (Lept.). 11 (355/4 B.C.) and Isoc. 7 (Areop.) 68-69, later in Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 40. 3. (For Aristotle and Demosthenes having a common source here, cf. P. Harding, ‘Androtion’s View of Solon’s Seisachtheia’, Phoenix 28 [1974], 285, n. 22, who does not identify the source.) In any case there is reason to put the composition of the Hell. Oxy. before the outbreak of the Sacred War in 356 (cf. POxy. V, 134).

30     8. 11(13). 3 = FGrHist 115 T19: Theopompus’ decision to abandon his Hellenica and to write about Philip must have been taken after Philip’s accomplishments surpassed such figures as Jason of Pherae. Theopompus was born in 378/7 (Photius, Bibl. 176, 120b19-25 = 115 T2), and diu fuerat orator before turning to history (Quintilian, Inst. 10. 1. 74 = T21). It is widely believed that he published his Hellenica before 343 because of the supposed letter of Speusippus to Philip (Ep. Soc. 30), but the date and authenticity of this letter are open to question: cf. L. Bertelli, ‘L’epistola di Speusippo a Filippo: un problema di cronologia’, AAT 110 (1976), 275-300, and ‘La lettera di Speusippo a Filippo: il problema dell’autenticità’, AAT 111 (1977), 75-111.

31     POxy. V, 123, 137-38. If Theopompus were the author of the Hell. Oxy. it would be hard to make sense of Cicero’s question ‘quid...Theopompo acrius...inveniri potest?’ (Hortens. fr. 18 Us. = FGrHist 115 T40) or of Lucian’s allegation that Theopompus denounces almost everyone in a quarrelsome way, as if he were a prosecutor rather than an historian (Hist. conscr. 59 = FGrHist 115 T 25a).

32     Cic. Brut. 204, de Orat. III.36, ad Att. VI.1.12; Quintilian, Inst. 2. 8. 11; Anon., Vita Isoc. 257, 98-108 Westermann; Suda, s.v. Εφορος Κυμαιος και Θεοπομπος Δαμασιστρατου, Ξιος. For recent studies of the question of the authorship of the Hell. Oxy., see Breitenbach, op. cit., cols. 410-22, Koenen, op. cit., 65-66, McKechnie and Kern, loc. cit., Shrimpton, op. cit., 13-14, 183-95, and Chambers, op. cit., xviii-xxv. As Shrimpton remarks, ‘The conclusion that P was not Theopompus seems difficult to avoid’ (191). Shrimpton makes the attractive suggestion that Theopompus’ Hellenica may have been written as a work hostile to P with the intention of displacing the Hell. Oxy. as the generally accepted continuation of Thucydides (192). That Theopompus used P as a source was proposed earlier by W. A. Goligher, ‘The New Greek Historical Fragment Attributed to Theopompus or Cratippus’, EHR 23 (1908), 281, and by Breitenbach, op. cit., col. 412.