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18 results

  • Introduction

  • Edited by K. Scarlett Kingsley, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Giustina Monti, University of Lincoln, Tim Rood, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Authoritative Historian
    Published online:
    02 December 2022
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023, pp 1-16

  • Summary

    The ancient historian’s privileged discursive position within the text depends upon the creation of a circuit of consent with the audience, one that establishes the narrator’s power and authority in detailing the unfolding of past events, their causes, and the agents animating them. The contract between the narrator and audience is brought about by the careful curation of the historian’s agency in and out of the process of textual production. In antiquity, the stakes for this curation were even higher than in modernity because of the widespread association of literary production with individual character. The struggle for authority was uniquely pressing for Greek and Roman historians, as their texts could not call upon the inspiration of the Muse as the poets could. As a result, the self-positioning of the historian was highly self-aware and charged with meaning, constructed in relation to the authority of the poets, but with a degree of distancing from these figures and their Muse in the development of a new mode of narrative.

  • Chapter 16 - ‘When one assumes the ethos of writing history’

  • from Part V - Innovation within Tradition
  • Edited by K. Scarlett Kingsley, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Giustina Monti, University of Lincoln, Tim Rood, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Authoritative Historian
    Published online:
    02 December 2022
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023, pp 315-334

  • Summary

    John Marincola has defined Polybius as ‘a highly intrusive explicator’ of his own narrative.1 Polybius regularly interrupts the main narrative of events to explain and clarify what procedure he is following. Such intrusions always retain a historiographical flavour, and Polybius comes up with words or expressions used in a new way and with a new nuance, which I define as ‘historiographical neologisms’. This chapter will show how Polybius inserts himself into a tradition (which he criticizes as well) in order to establish his own authority, and will highlight two ways: borrowing and revisiting terms from other genres – the much-discussed apodeiktike historie is a famous example2 – to give them a historiographical nuance, or creating new ones.

The Authoritative Historian
  • Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography
  • Edited by K. Scarlett Kingsley, Giustina Monti, Tim Rood
  • Published online:
    02 December 2022
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023
  • In this volume an international group of scholars revisits the themes of John Marincola's ground-breaking Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. The nineteen chapters offer a series of case studies that explore how ancient historians' approaches to their projects were informed both by the pull of tradition and by the ambition to innovate. The key themes explored are the relation of historiography to myth and poetry; the narrative authority exemplified by Herodotus, the 'father' of history; the use of 'fictional' literary devices in historiography; narratorial self-presentation; and self-conscious attempts to shape the historiographical tradition in new and bold ways. The volume presents a holistic vision of the development of Greco-Roman historiography and the historian's dynamic position within this practice.