Chapter 7 considers stylistic imitation and appropriation in the debate over Atticism and Asianism, with a special focus on how Cicero distorts the aims and positions of his detractors in the diatribe against the Atticists (285–91). He trades on various meanings of Atticus/Attici in order to make a rhetorical – rather than strictly logical – case. He downplays Atticism as outdated and relegates its stylistic virtues to the plain style (genus tenue). Rejecting Atticism does not entail rejecting the plain style. Instead he acknowledges it as one of many oratorical virtues to be subsumed under the capable orator’s broad stylistic repertoire. Cicero promotes a model of stylistic diversity, examples of which are found in the long histories of Greek and, especially, Roman oratory.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

Chapter five demonstrates how the ambition to preserve the past in song and stone leads to the hope of securing a stable sense of the future in the poetry of Pindar and the tragedies of Aeschylus. Here we see how the mere image of writing becomes a vehicle in epinician and tragic poetry not only for imagining systems of memorialization and justice, but also for questioning the systems thus imagined.

The first chapter looks at one half of song, namely rhythm. It seeks to understand how the idea of rhythm relates to the movements of the body, and particularly the heartbeat, starting with the earliest uses of the word rhythmos in poems of Archilochus of Theognis, moving back again to Homer and then forward to Aristophanes and Plato to understand the shifting ways that rhythm was understood to connect poems and bodies.

The title of this chapter is an adaptation of the title of an important book about linguistic structures and processes of early Indo-European as they experienced transformed expression in the evolved, and evolving, linguistic structures of ancient Greek.1 Like that work, this study is concerned with the diachronic and synchronic intersection of structures. But while that work chiefly and expansively addresses morpho-phonological matters of dialect development, this one is a much more modest lexical study (a set of fairly fine-grained lexical analyses) of specific elements of Greek divination, one that finds particular inspiration in Benveniste’s (1969) Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. What follows is a study of linguistic and cultural structures in which I hypothesize (1) that deliberate intellectual or cognitive engagement is the expected response to the production of Greek prophetic signs and (2) that this state of affairs continues, at least in part, idealized practices of ancestral Indo-European cult. Given that the idea that oracles are puzzles in search of a solution is fundamental to the ancient literary presentation of Greek divination, the first half of this hypothesis may appear trivial; however, what I hope to show is that intellectual engagement with an oracle is a cult act of a more “requisite” nature and attitude than perhaps typically imagined – it is the religiously right response – and that this is so (part two of the hypothesis) for reasons having to do with inherited religious structures (the appearance of the forest may not be substantially changed, but some new understanding of the trees may possibly present itself). I begin with Roman Jakobson, a master analyst of linguistic and cultural structures.

Like other literary genres in fifth-century Athens, such as tragedy and oratory, ancient historiography responded to the continuous wars of the Greek city-states with an intense literary effort, producing the first prose descriptions of warfare in the western hemisphere. This chapter examines the representation of warfare in fifth-century Athenian literature against an historical background, taking account of Homeric epic as well as of political and normative contexts, in order to clarify textual priorities and narrative strategies. It begins by analyzing representations of extreme conditions: death in battle, often cast as the ultimate test of manhood, and military defeat. It then backs up to look at representations of the course of warfare, analyzing the role of victorious leadership, intelligence, and courage together with the accompanying descriptions of bodily suffering and human error. Finally, the chapter examines representations of the human causes of war: greed, retaliation for insult, and the desire for power, profit, and rule over others. As a short coda, it reflects on the popularity of war as a literary theme, noting the emergence of war fiction with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.

Chapter 3 studies the beginnings of Greek historiography against the background of the intentional history described in the first two chapters. This clearly shows the innovative character of the new genre. The decisive factor for this was the influence of the new philosophical thinking that had initially developed in Ionia. The emphasis on rational procedures and the search for true knowledge was in the foreground, coupled with the curiosity of the researcher. The numerous stories of the Greeks were critically questioned by intellectuals of this provenance (e.g., Xenophanes, Hecataeus). Herodotus also felt obliged to the new rational-philosophical method, but at the same time he integrated many of the traditional stories into his new type of historical work. The critical direction then culminates in Thucydides, who in his own way and with the logic of power connects the present and the past. He was only too aware that he had strayed very far from traditional views of the past, and he himself underscored it very clearly.

For ancient authors, hope tends to be a dangerous thing. It can set us up for practical as well as moral failure. Elpis, the Greek word we translate as hope, is typically an attitude or emotion that is desiderative and goal-oriented, but it can also denote neutral expectation of evils as well as goods. The first author to treat elpis as an unqualified good, given a very specific object of desire (eternal life in Christ), is St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament. Before him, good hopes – including eschatological hopes expressed in other ancient mystery religions – had to be designated as such to be distinguished from bad hopes, which preponderate in Greek literature. But the ancients recognize good hope, foremost in the competitive strife that defines public life. Hope could be seen as a necessary motive, linked to confidence and courage. The ancient world, especially in Jerusalem and Rome, knew also hope in a future ruler, a hope more soteriological than political. Whatever hopes might be expressed for the city-state or empire, the philosophical schools of antiquity developed the case against personal hope and passionate agitation.

The second chapter examines literary and historical sources writing about theoria, including those by Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Euripides, as a means of providing the larger cultural background against which Plato's use of theoria must be considered. Two analogies to traditional theoria are here considered, that of pilgrimage and cultural sight-seeing, both of which contribute elements to the distinctive intellectual conception of theoria developed by Plato and Aristotle with which the chapter concludes.

This chapter focuses on the increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards wonder which arose in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth century BCE. The chapter begins by examining Aristotle’s thoughts about the connections between wonder, language and rhetoric. The perceived power of rhetoric and language to create effects of wonder which destabilise previously clearly drawn boundaries and cultural oppositions is then explored further through examinations of the place of marvels and the marvellous in Aristophanes’ Birds and Thucydides’ History. The association between wonder, Athens and Athenian imperial power in this period is also explored.

This chapter focuses on the increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards wonder which arose in Athens in the late fifth and early fourth century BCE. The chapter begins by examining Aristotle’s thoughts about the connections between wonder, language and rhetoric. The perceived power of rhetoric and language to create effects of wonder which destabilise previously clearly drawn boundaries and cultural oppositions is then explored further through examinations of the place of marvels and the marvellous in Aristophanes’ Birds and Thucydides’ History. The association between wonder, Athens and Athenian imperial power in this period is also explored.

Chapter 7 considers stylistic imitation and appropriation in the debate over Atticism and Asianism, with a special focus on how Cicero distorts the aims and positions of his detractors in the diatribe against the Atticists (285–91). He trades on various meanings of Atticus/Attici in order to make a rhetorical – rather than strictly logical – case. He downplays Atticism as outdated and relegates its stylistic virtues to the plain style (genus tenue). Rejecting Atticism does not entail rejecting the plain style. Instead he acknowledges it as one of many oratorical virtues to be subsumed under the capable orator’s broad stylistic repertoire. Cicero promotes a model of stylistic diversity, examples of which are found in the long histories of Greek and, especially, Roman oratory.

Chapter 2 surveys and analyzes the greatest ideas and theorists in war theory and strategy – including the philosophies of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Jomini, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, and Mao. This chapter makes war theory and its recurring themes more accessible by presenting diverse perspectives spanning all eras of military thought from classical through the twentieth century. Each theorist’s background and main ideas are presented, and their strengths and weaknesses are summarized. As history’s preeminent but also most misunderstood war theorist, special attention is given Clausewitz. Principal themes include war’s fluidity, unpredictability, violence, and reciprocity; concentration and momentum; adaptability, intelligence, and relative capacity; military genius; centers of gravity and decisive points; fog, friction, chance, and policy; guerrilla, asymmetric, and nuclear warfare; and war’s moral and physical dimensions.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus discusses the Athenian funeral orations in his Antiquitates Romanae and his literary-critical essays. He takes a negative view of both the Athenian public funeral and of three specific examples of funeral orations –the Periclean epitaphios in Thucydides, Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Menexenus, and the funeral oration ascribed to Demosthenes (Dem. 60). The nature of his negative pronouncements suggests that his moral aversion to the orations, and to what the public funerals had represented, guided his aesthetic responses to the individual texts. While the encomiastic commonplaces on view in the funeral orations provide the blueprint for Dionysius’ idealised conception of Athens, the speeches themselves are vehicles unworthy of conveying those ideals. The case of the funeral oration offers a good illustration of how Dionysius’ classicism is inherently, recursively nostalgic and so ultimately chimerical. His idealised view of Athens is defined not by the funeral orations themselves, but by the valorisation of authors who made a project of berating their compatriots for failure to live up to the example, and exempla, of earlier generations.