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

The author examines the epistles attributed to one of Plato’s pupils at the Academy, Chion of Heraclea Pontica, an actual historical figure who was at the head of a conspiracy that led to the killing of the tyrant Clearchus in 353/2 BC. The seventeen letters of this corpus are obviously inauthentic and were written several centuries after the facts: they form a coherent and continuous narrative group that is essentially an epistolary novel with a historical theme. In this chapter, the author proposes a new interpretation of the letters as an example of counterfactual history by drawing attention to a usually overlooked difference between the story of the historical Chion and that told in the correspondence. At the same time, the author shows how pseudo-Chion, influenced by the dominant ideology of his time, conceived this epistolary as a text open to multiple levels of interpretation. Finally, the author draws attention to a frequently neglected testimony preserved by the Suda, which may shed some light on the problem of the authorship of the text, connecting it to the figure of Timagenes/Timogenes of Miletus.