Of course, the interpretative, as well as evidential, role of the eyewitnesses whose testimony a Greek or Roman historian took into his work is by no means incompatible with the historian’s own interpretative task, which involved selectivity as well as the shaping of the overall narrative into a coherent story. In the best practice, advocated, for example, by Polybius, the historian tells an interpretative story, but “only history in its factual pastness” was allowed “to be part of his interpretative