Historiography

Study of the literary sources on Agathokles has been characterized by speculation on the lost sources that our surviving sources might have used. This chapter endorses the recent trend of seeing the surviving texts as works of literature in their own right, but emphasizes that to do this it remains necessary to understand what we can of the sources that confronted surviving sources. Firstly, what is known about the lost authors—Antandros, Kallias, Douris, and Timaios—is presented with an emphasis on the limits of our knowledge about them. Then, Diodoros, Justin/Trogus, Polyainos, and other surviving sources on Agathokles are discussed, focusing on how the sources that they had available to them and their approach to them shaped their narratives of Agathokles and how their accounts of him were also shaped by their broader narrative purposes and themes.