The Letters of Chion of Heraclea as Counterfactual History : With Some Remarks on Timagenes/Timogenes of Miletus

In 353/2 BC, Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea Pontica, was killed by a group of conspirators led by one of Plato’s students, Chion of Heraclea Pontica. We have a small collection of 17 letters attributed to Chion, written about a century later, which recount these historical events. It is, to all intents and purposes, an epistolary novel on a historical subject. In this article, drawing attention to a usually overlooked difference between the story of the historical Chion and the one told in the correspondence, the author proposes a new interpretation of these letters as an example of counterfactual history. At the same time, the author shows how the pseudo-Chion, influenced by the dominant ideology of his time, conceived this collection of letters as a text open to multiple levels of interpretation. Finally, the author draws attention to a usually overlooked testimony preserved by Suda, which could shed light on the question of the authorship of this text.