‘At the very beginning of non-contemporary history there was myth.’1 Thus wrote John Marincola, in a much-cited section of Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography devoted to history and myth or, more precisely, the ways in which historians established authority by their exclusion, and occasional inclusion, of myth. One of the attractions of Marincola’s discussion is that he stresses not just the reaction against the ‘mythical’ that was one of the hallmarks of the historiographic tradition at least from Thucydides onwards, but also the continuing importance of myth for writers such as Diodorus Siculus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. ‘The charms of myth, like those of the Sirens’, he concludes, ‘were simply too great to resist.’2