The Historian Ephorus: His Selection of Sources

Abstract

An historian is only as good as his sources, and an assessment of any historian rests primarily on an assessment of his ability to find, to choose, and to utilise historical sources. In this regard we may, I believe, credit Ephorus, the most important of the fourth century B.C. historians, with a large degree of achievement. Before we turn to the main body of this paper, however, I must prefix some comments on the size and nature of the Ephoran corpus which chance has transmitted to us. Felix Jacoby consciously chose not to print all that has survived of Ephorus under FGrHist 70. Jacoby limited himself to those passages which specifically cited Ephorus as author of the transmitted information.

De la retórica a la historia: la prosa historiográfica de Éforo

“…24 sobre el método y el criterio de Éforo en el uso de sus fuentes de información puede verse Parker 2004. 26 josÉ aNtoNio CaBallero lÓPez Veleia, 32, 2015 mas unidos por partículas paratácticas que nos recuerdan las más sencillas construcciones sintácti-cas de la λέξις εἰρομένη en las que estaban compuestas aquellas primigenias obras de la logografía (lópez eire 1985, 44). la sintaxis solo se vuelve más compleja cuando Éforo expresa su opinión personal sobre la forma de ser de los beocios (construcciones participiales, subordinadas concesivas, causales y sustantivas).…”