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This chapter focuses on chronography, that is, the scholarly field which concerns the organization and articulation of time. It examines the extant fragments of the ancient chronographic tradition, which was initially dominated by competitive culture of Hellenistic scholarship, and by figures such as Eratosthenes of Cyrene and Apollodorus of Athens. Methodological problems, such as that of generic classification, are addressed throughout. The chapter deals first with works concerning Greek city-calendars, especially the festival calendars, before moving on to those which focus on the articulation and expression of linear, historical time. Here are treated issues of synchronism; the establishment of important dates, such as that of the fall of Troy and the acme of Homer; the correlation of fixed chronological markers with continuous systems, such as lists of eponymous magistrates, kings, or Olympic victors; the development of universal chronologies; and the notion of literary time-frames.

This chapter discusses the distinctiveness of Herodotus' interest in the wondrous and the peculiarities of the rhetoric he employs in describing wonders, through comparisons with Thucydides and Aristotle. It examines Herodotus' relationship to Hellenistic paradoxography. It also considers evidence that Herodotus influenced both the types of works that came to be included in Hellenistic lists of the Seven Wonders of the World, as well as some of the descriptions of these works. Additionally, it argues that Callimachus and Posidippus sometimes appropriated or rejected Herodotus' rhetoric of wonder to highlight their own aesthetic concerns, such as the relative merits of the small and the large scale, and the appropriate criteria for evaluating the works of humans and gods. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of a possible parallels between Herodotus' attitude towards wonders and wonder as an impulse for Hellenistic scholarly inquiry.

Despite the vigorous military profile of Mithridates VI, he presided over a court that was typical of the era, with a large extended family and an emphasis on the arts and scholarship. About eighty personalities are known who were members of the court, including poets, artists, physicians, and scholars. The best known is the historian Metrodoros of Skepsis, who was not only his ambassador to Armenia but a polymath writing on a wide variety of subjects. The king himself was a scholar, writing on medical research and botany. He was a noted pharmacologist, and his name is still attached to certain plants and medicines. He was also a scientific gardener. Numerous artworks are known from his environment, some of which survive.

As prelude to the discussions of the six chapters that follow, this introduction gives an overview of the evidence for the accessibility of Old Comedy—beyond Aristophanes’s extant plays—during the Imperial era. It also lays out what have been perceived as the two primary ways that Imperial-era authors approached the genre: as a linguistic source and as a problem. In doing so, it provides a survey of the scholarly approaches adopted by the lexicographers (Julius Pollux, Phrynichus, the Anti-atticist) and Athenaeus. It also considers the persistent influence that the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic critics exerted on how later Greeks understood the genre. As examples of this, it discusses Dio Chrysostom’s commentary on the comic poets in Or. 33 (First Tarsian) and Aelian’s account of Socrates’s trial and execution in Historical Miscellany. The chapter concludes with an outline of the structure and argument of the other sections of the book.