Histos (Journal)
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Rewriting Caesar: Cassius Dio and an Alternative Ethnography of the North
Get PDFIt has gone generally unnoticed in scholarship that Cassius Dio is unique among the Greek writers of the imperial period in not using the ethnic term Γερµανοί to refer to the peoples dwelling east of the Rhine. This paper argues that this absence is a polemical response to the innovative geography of Caesar’s commentarii, and part of a larger project undertaken by Dio to critically rewrite the history of Caesar and reinterpret Roman imperialism in the north. The removal of the Γερµανοί from the map ultimately supports Dio’s attitudes, based on his experience as a senatorial governor, towards contemporary frontier policy
The Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia as ‘Poor History’? Historiography, Rhetoric, and the Controversies about Solon in the Fourth Century
Get PDFThis article examines the kind of historiographical thought that the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia reveals in its use of sources, especially in chapters 2–17, which deal with Solon’s political activity. It confronts the scholarly view of the Athenaion Politeia as poor history and argues that its historical reasoning employs the same kind of rhetorical argumentation that would have been acceptable in the intellectual context of fourth-century Greek historiography
Visioni del mondo fra Oriente e Occidente (on R. Rollinger, ed., Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West 750 v. Chr.–550 n. Chr./Looking at the World, from the East and the West 750 BCE–550 CE)
Get PDFNew Light on Arrian’s Praenomen from Digital Epigraphy
Get PDFThis article reconsiders the evidence for Arrian’s long-disputed praenomen using digital imaging techniques that have only recently become available. Through the application of Reflectance Transformation Imaging and 3-D scanning combined with traditional epigraphic methods, the authors clarify the text of the only inscription preserving Arrian’s praenomen, thus contributing to the body of knowledge about an important historical personage and his relationship to elite communities in the eastern Mediterranean. The uses and limitations of these technologies are discussed to illuminate their value for original epigraphic research, which, the authors argue, is greater than has generally been recognized
How (Not) to Commemorate Cicero: Asinius Pollio in Seneca’s Sixth Suasoria
Get PDFThe article examines the three references to Asinius Pollio in Seneca the Elder’s sixth Suasoria. It reads them as an authorial meta-reflection about the interplay between cultural memory and literary or rhetorical emulation. While attempting to canonise Cicero as a cultural and political icon, Seneca invites his readers to participate in this canonisation by imitating both Cicero’s own works and earlier declaimers and historians who have written about him. Asinius Pollio is a key figure for this programme in the Suasoria, in that he does not participate in this game and therefore acts as a negative exemplar for Seneca’s readers
Ignorance is Bliss? Geographical Knowledge in Herodotus and Thucydides
Get PDFThis article explores the value attached to geographical knowledge, firstly in the work of Herodotus and then in comparison with a key Thucydidean episode. Having established the desirability of knowledge at least for the historian himself, it considers Herodotean episodes in which the geographical knowledge of characters within the narrative is limited, or even deliberately distorted, not always to their disadvantage. It then places against this backdrop Thucydides’ puzzling account of Athenian ignorance in advance of their ill-fated expedition to Sicily. It proposes that Thucydides exaggerates the Athenians’ lack of geographical knowledge in order to characterise them as tragically overtaken by an irrational desire for the fatal expedition
The Hasmonean Dynasty and the Promised Land (on K. Berthelot, In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy, transl. M. Rigaud)
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