Les inconvénients de l’histoire universelle: la Grèce du Ve siècle dans l’Épitomé de Justin

Justin’s Epitome contains a few traditions that usefully integrate the other sources on the history of 5th-century Greece. However, the hallmark of Books ii-v of Justin’s work, and what constitutes the interesting aspect on the historiographic plan of an account that is full of factual and chronological errors, is the vision of the aggressive Spartan behaviour as the dynamic factor of Greek history after the Persian Wars. This point of view is likely to have originated in the treatment of hegemonies that was launched by the Greek historians of the 4th-century, but in any case it has undergone a significant development thanks to the reflections on the concept of the ‘translation’ of empire or hegemony in the universal historiography of the Hellenistic period.