‘Herakles is stronger, Seleucus’

Abstract Chapter 8 offers a close reading of fragments from the local histories of Pontic Herakleia written by Nymphis in the middle of the third century bce and by Memnon over two hundred years later. It argues that in the Hellenistic period local historiography, as a performative and parenetic medium, afforded citizens of Greek poleis a cautious means of articulating ideologies of independence in the face of foreign kings and empires. The chapter takes its title from a patriotic retort allegedly delivered by the Herakliote philosopher Chamaileon to Seleucus I in 280 bce, a slogan that served for Nymphis as a founding charter of Herakleian autonomy and local identity in the Black Sea region. Yet emic expressions of local historiography, like Nymphis’s history, were by and large the prerogative of autonomous Greek communities: histories of poleis that had been conquered by the Macedonian kings or by Rome tended to be written by non-locals, a phenomenon exemplified by the epitomes of the Aristotelian Politeiai published in the middle of the second century bce by the diplomat and scholar Herakleides Lembos. And when Memnon wrote his own history at the tail end of the Hellenistic period, after Herakleia’s hopes of independence had been decisively extinguished by Roman expansion, he did so with far different aims; the resulting narrative was less an exhortation to local resistance than an exercise in nostalgia.