CHAPTER FIFTEEN PRINCIPES SEMPER GRAECIAE: POMPEIUS TROGUS/JUSTINUS AND THE AETOLIAN POLITICS OF HISTORY JACEK RZEPKA Historical arguments are invariably present in political debates, and it is certain that the Greek world did not differ from our age too much in this respect. A more or less mythologized past was often a device of political struggle, both in the internal discussions within Greek states and on the inter-state level. Arguments borrowed from both more distant and very recent history were applied in border disputes of shadowy communities and could be exploited by states competing for the status of super power in Greece. To some extent we are able to estimate how rich and how different these local historical traditions of Greece were (partly owing to Pausanias, partly to local historians, today lost, but quoted in the Late Antiquity), but we cannot give a comprehensive picture of this richness. The areas not being covered by Pausanias, like North-Western Greece, are much less known. On the other hand, modern ancient historians are the last people to cry for these shortfalls, since they most often seem content to view the Greek history from the Athenian perspective. Thus, when one thinks about states that effectively exercised hegemony over Greece for a time, it is Sparta, Athens and Thebes or Macedonia that comes to mind. Admittedly, in the eyes of the Ancient Greeks the same were principal competitors in the never-ending struggle for supremacy in Greece (probably the Greeks would add to the above list the city of Argos in the Archaic period). A series of literary texts discussing the hegemony from the theoretical and practical point of view