Historia in Early Greek Writing and Thought

Knowing Future Time In and Through Greek Historiography, 2000

Science and Education a New Dimension. Philology, VII(61), Issue: 210, 2019

The present article is an attempt to summarize the theoretical achievements which allow to analyze narratives within the methods of narratology, reader-response criticism, Euclid’s theory of the golden ratio and Aristotle’s concept of the peripeteia. In particular, the analysis of the ancient histories, as this article argues, can be conducted not only to understand the level of their factual reliability, but also to describe their possible impact on contemporary readers or listeners. It is also stressed in the present article that the narrative structure of histories is a perspective object of study, for it may reflect that of the ancient tragedy.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2008

This essay is a response to Aleka Lianeri's call to reflect on how encounters with antiquity were foundational to modern categories of historiography, by exploring both the idea of the historical and the discipline's concepts and practices. In taking up such questions I chose to focus on the earliest modern narrative histories of ancient Greece, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century. I examine these works' wider contexts and singular features as well as their reception in the discipline. I argue for the formative role of this moment for modern historiography. Although they were often dismissed as simple narratives, these early modern works provided later historians with a sense of their own modernity. These texts prefigured modern narrative historiography's relationship of simultaneous dependence and independence from its ancient models.

Mnemosyne, 2008

History of Humanities, 2020

Written for a Historiography class, the approaches of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius are examined as to how they approached the task of recording and writing history.

2014

Greek Monographs on the Persian World The Fourth Century BCE and its innovations dominique lenfant W hile 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 this 'decay' is Ctesias' choice of subject matter: rather than a politico-military history focused on the contemporary Greek world, Ctesias' history concerns conflicts that took place within the Persian Empire-court intrigues, for example, and local revolts. The apparent decline has also been observed in Ctesias' historical method and is linked to his alleged motivation for writing history: the vain desire to supplant Herodotus, rather than the search for truth that is thought to lie behind the projects of Herodotus and Thucydides. 1 Ctesias has, moreover, been accused of ethnic prejudices, particularly in his malicious portrayal of the Persian court. 2 Similar charges have also been brought against Dinon, a later writer of a Persica, who tends to be seen in relation to Ctesias as Ctesias is to Herodotus, namely as a plagiarist who tweaks the text in order to conceal his plagiarism. 3 Such views are for the most part overly simplistic, since they take into account neither the fragmentary nature of the evidence nor the biases of our sources. They compare Ctesias, moreover, only to the few historians whose works have survived intact, such as Herodotus, without paying any attention to other accounts of the same genre, about which we do indeed know something. As a result, they are unable to account for the distinctive features of the Persica as a whole. It is my purpose, therefore, to suggest another way of looking at these Greek monographs on the Persian world, a genre that may have assumed 1

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014

One of the most important trends in recent scholarship on ancient historiography is to explore how historical meaning is constructed through the form of narrative. This essay argues that the narratives of ancient historians can and should also be seen as an engagement with temporality. Such a view, combining the lenses of narratology, philosophy, and linguistics, yields a "grammar of historiographic time": ancient historiography engages with different levels of the past including the "plupast," depends on the dynamics of "futures past," and tries hard to restore "presence" to the past. Other than these various temporal levels, ancient historians also deploy the subjunctive when they consider counterfactuals.

J. Moore, I.Macgregor Morris & A. Bayliss (eds.), Reinventing History: The Enlightenment Origins of Ancient History (London 2008) 247-90.

The Classical Review / Volume 65 / Issue 2 / October 2015 , 2015

Histos 17, 2023

A Companion to Late Antiquity, 2012

The production of complex literary narrative requires economic and physical security. In Late Antiquity, the economic and physical security that most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had enjoyed since the time of Augustus came to an end. It was for that reason that the period witnessed the rise and triumph of the chronicle as the primary vehicle for the transmission of historical knowledge. A chronicle was, in essence, a list of successive years, and included one or more brief notices concerning events that had occurred during each year. It differed little, either in content or in form, from the annales maximi that the pontifex maximus had kept at Rome during the republican period. Roman historiography ended, therefore, much as it began, and we are forced to rely upon various sparse chronicles for our knowledge of much of the period c. AD 300-750, particularly for events in the west. Fortunately, the different political fortunes of the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire insured that the production of complex historical narrative did not cease at the same time throughout the empire as a whole. The production of complex historical narrative in the west seems to have ceased with the work of Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, whose history covered the period from c. AD 395 to 425. There was a long hiatus then, before the production of the next complex historical narratives by bishop Gregory of Tours (c. AD 538-94) and the English monk Bede (c. AD 673-735). Writing c. AD 594, Gregory produced his Historiae Francorum in ten books, which formally began with the creation of the world and ended with events in AD 591, although they focused mainly on the period after AD 573. He is our only source for the work of Frigeridus, which has not itself survived. Working c. AD 731, Bede produced his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in five books, beginning with the first invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in 55 BC and ending in AD 731, although he focused mainly on the period after AD 596. The works of Gregory and Bede are, however, the exceptions that prove the rule-namely, that the composition of complex historical narrative in the west ceased during the early fifth century. Furthermore, they are national