Agatharch today

There's an ethnographer who wrote in Greek called Agatharch, or maybe Son Of Agatharch, or maybe he was Agatharch Junior.

There's talk that this "Agatharchides" is obscure. He got quoted by Josephus, Pliny, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus none of which are obscure today. And his book on the Erythraean Sea (that's the Red Sea) survived to get copied in Byzantium up to the ninth century where Photius found it, possibly next to Philostorgius, because there was quite the demand for books on west-Arabia by then. (A previous blog did wonder what befell Ouranius' Arabika however.) I'd not call an historian so widely quoted to be obscure in Roman classical antiquity.

As to why his other books got lost: there was a book on Europe, which maybe didn't seem as relevant as Polybius' book nor, for that matter, all that later stuff in Latin. I suspect it concentrated on Greek colonies on the coast.

Agatharch's book on Asia fared better - by getting hate-quoted. (Philostorgius would empathise.) Josephus and other Jewish historians were on the lookout for anything that might mention their race from a remove. Jews appreciated when someone backed up their own books, but mostly these gentilic books tended to levy scurrilous accusations which Jews then had to refute. Ptolemy of Mendes claiming to be "Manetho" was, I think, the worst; Apion the archantisemite had a field day relaying that one's slanders. Josephus cites Agatharch's work as "the Acts of the Diadochi", which I suspect comprises a volume of that Asian text.

Today, these classical historians' ahadith continue to be cited, not so much to refute their bias (that job is long done) but more to collate parallel data. Which is great; but we must always remember that quotes come without context, and the context might even be the more important data we want. This is something readers of Robert Hoyland should understand for Islamic origins.