Histos (Journal)
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History and Plutarch \u27De Garrulitate\u27
No full textThis article examines an anecdote about the loquacity of an imaginary friend of Socrates which Plutarch tells to illustrate the vice of talkativeness at De garrulitate 21. It argues that the anecdote derives more meaning when read against Thucydides Book 8, as Plutarch invites the reader to do. Read thus, the talkative man’s ramblings take on a complexity and menace which they would not otherwise possess. Thus, the article demonstrates the validity of recent models in thinking about historiographical intertextuality in Plutarch
A Commentary to Caesar\u27s Setbacks in Gaul and Britain (BG 5 and 6) (on J. Gerrish, Julius Caesar: The Gallic War, Books V–VI).
No full textBroad Strokes with a Fine Brush. Pliny Pan. 25 and its Sallustian Intertexts
Full text linkJustifying the lengthy details of his thanksgiving to the emperor (Pan. 25), Pliny alludes to two programmatic statements by Sallust. He first quotes the historian’s explicit choice of narrating history in selection (carptim, Cat. 4.2) in order to reject such a selective approach in his own case; and he justifies his rejection by adapting Sallust’s silence on mighty Carthage (Iug. 19.2). Pliny thus—indirectly and wittily (both in character)—contradicts Sallust with Sallust. In sum, the passage offers further evidence of Pliny’s dialogue with historiography, his ‘combinatorial imitation’ and, more generally, art en miniature, as well as his self-fashioning
Cassius Dio and His Emperors (on C. Burden-Strevens, J. M. Madsen, and A. Pistellato, edd., Cassius Dio and the Principate and C. Davenport and C. Mallan, edd., Emperors and Political Culture in Cassius Dio\u27s Roman History)
No full textDionysius of Halicarnassus on the Historian\u27s Disposition (Pomp. 3.15)
No full textBy comparing the Iliadic scholia that discuss the διαθέσεις of the epic’s characters and of the narrator himself, the article seeks to elucidate what Dionysius of Halicarnassus means in his Letter to Pompeius when he speaks of the historian’s ‘disposition’ (διάθεσις)
Firmus and the Crocodiles Revisited: Paradoxography and the Historia Augusta\u27s Life of the Four Tyrants
Full text linkThis article reassesses the Historia Augusta’s Vita Quadrigae Tyrannorum as a source for paradoxographical allusions in the collection. Prior studies have noted occasional intertexts to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia in the Vita, but the thematic and structural significance of the author’s engagement with Plinian and paradoxographical miscellany has been largely overlooked. As this article illustrates, identifying the Vita’s Plinian and paradoxographical intertexts is key to understanding the author’s characterisation of his last pseudonymous narrator, ‘Flavius Vopiscus’, and allows for a reexamination of the author’s unusual interest in usurpation at a critical juncture at the closure of the series
