Introduction This book is about a particular form of writing by Christians in late antiquity, sometimes referred to as “the philosophical dialogue”—although by no means all the dialogues in question can be regarded as philosophical. The subject is central to the much wider question of the development of a specifically Christian rhetoric, […]
13. Aristotle and History Lucio Bertelli The title of my paper may wrongly suggest that I am going to discuss Aristotle’s famous—I should perhaps say infamous—comparison in the Poetics between tragedy and history (Poetics 9). In fact, this passage from the Poetics, one of the rare occasions where Aristotle uses the […]
12. The Tools of Memory: Crafting Historical Legacy in Fourth-Century Greece Sarah Ferrario 1. Introduction Can individuals control the ways in which they are remembered? Achilles saw κλέος ἄφθιτον, ‘undying fame’, as a possible outcome of his own decisions; [1] Alexander undertook a complex campaign of self-promotion that was imitated […]
11. Local History, Polis History, and the Politics of Place Rosalind Thomas The Greek polis was, as we all know, the central and abiding socio-political institution of the Greek world, continuing in the Hellenistic period and even into Roman times, but with vastly reduced political power. Yet it was inherently changeable […]
10. The Sick Man of Asia? Christopher Tuplin If you will take, I don’t say unlimited time or many generations, but only these last fifty years immediately preceding our generation, you will be able to understand the cruelty of Fortune. For can you suppose, if some god had warned […]
9. Greek Monographs on the Persian World: The Fourth Century BCE and its innovations Dominique Lenfant While it is the best-known Greek monograph on the Persian world, Ctesias’ Persica is often cited today as an illustration of the supposed decadence of the historical genre in the fourth century BCE. One symptom of […]
8. Ephorus, Polybius, and τὰ καθόλου γράφειν: Why and How to Read Ephorus and his Role in Greek Historiography without Reference to ‘Universal History’ [1] John Tully I would be making the understatement of the century if I were to say that universal history has never been a clear […]
7. Ephorus in Context: The Return of the Heraclidae and Fourth-century Peloponnesian Politics [1] Nino Luraghi In a famous passage at the beginning of Book 4, Diodorus discusses the difficulties facing the historian who wants to include in his work what Diodorus himself calls “the ancient mythologiai,” i.e. the deeds of […]
6. The Causes of the Peloponnesian War: Ephorus, Thucydides and Their Critics Giovanni Parmeggiani The causes of the Peloponnesian War constitute such a persistent theme in discussions of fifth-century Greek history, in part because of the complexity of the aetiological view of our earliest source, Thucydides. ἤρξαντο δὲ αὐτοῦ Ἀθηναῖοι […]