Histos (Journal)
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Scholarly Exchanges In Mommsen’s Italy (on M. Buonocore, ed., Lettere di Theodor Mommsen agli Italiani)
Get PDFEine Bibliographie zu Ammian (on F. W. Jenkins, Ammianus Marcellinus: An Annotated Bibliography. 1474 to the Present)
Get PDFThe Blessed Isles and Counterfactual History in Sallust
Get PDFSallust’s digression on the Blessed Isles in the Histories is an exercise in ‘what if?’ or counterfactual history. Sertorius dreamed of flight to the Isles. He never went, but what if he had? Pompey would not have been granted proconsular imperium to wage the Spanish War; this was an unlawful honour, and the first of many. Sallust invites us to imagine a different history in which Pompey’s early career was constrained by law and custom, and which, in turn, did not open the door for Octavian’s equally transgressive rise to power
An Aristocratic Dilemma: Do It Right, Or Do It Better? (on C. B. Champion, The Peace of the Gods: Elite Religious Practices in the Middle Roman Republic)
Get PDFActio in Historiography (on I. Moreno and R. Nicolai, edd., La representación de la actio en la historiografía griega y latina)
No full textMémoire et Expérience à Rome (on K. Galinsky, ed., Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity)
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Ch. 6. A Literary Passage: Polybius and Plutarch’s Narrator
No full textThis article deals with the presence of Polybius in the narrative world of Plutarch’s works. It assumes that the explicit references made by Plutarch’s narrator to Polybius have artistic, literary, and historiographic aims (to shed light on the protagonist of Life or on the narrative). Four passages in Plutarch’s works are examined which correspond to passages within the extant complete five books of Polybius: Aratus 38; Cleomenes 25 and 27; and De fortuna Romanorum 12.
Published in Alexander Meeus, ed., Narrative in Hellenistic Historiography (HISTOS Supplement 8), p. 171-209
Herodotean Ironies
Get PDF‘Irony/ironic’ are terms frequently used in discussion of Herodotus, whether applied to particular passages or to the text as a whole. This paper aims to distinguish different types of irony which have been or can be detected in the text of the Histories, and to map these on a spectrum ranging from those which are clearly indicated by the narrator to those which demand more by way of interpretation and supplement from the reader. Types described and illustrated include dramatic, oracular, historical, cross-cultural and situational ironies; but the idea that the entire work is in some sense ironic is rejected. Irony as a tool of interpretation seems indispensable, but needs to be handled with circumspection and self-conscious care. The paper ends with some suggestions for further explorations of the topic. Endnotes provide further documentation, principally on ironies of the oracular type
Reading Diachronically: A New Reading of Book 36 of Cassius Dio’s Roman History
Get PDFThe recent revision of Cassius Dio (e.g. Lange and Madsen (2016b)) has underlined the complexity of his work and the independent interpretations therein, but Book 36 has been studied almost exclusively with a focus on the lex Gabinia (Coudry (2016)). In this article, I propose a new approach: to explore Book 36 diachronically from beginning to end and through this to demonstrate Dio’s skilful structuring of his narrative with the purpose of presenting political competition as the central destructive factor of the Late Republic. Dio presents this competition as an institutional problem, rather than a moral one, and his explanation of the decline of the Republic is thereby distinctive