Greek Historical Influence on Early Roman History

Antichthon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 21-32
Author(s):  
Matthew Trundle
Keyword(s):  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Greek History ◽  
Punic Wars ◽  
Historical Thought

AbstractThis study employs a comparative approach using Greek models of historical enquiry, especially those of Herodotus, to illustrate how Romans prior to the Punic Wars, and indeed as early as the fifth and fourth centuriesBC, might have developed their own historical consciousness and historical traditions concerning their early past in much the same way as we know the Greeks had done by the fifth centuryBC. What follows is not at all new. Many have identified Roman historical and historiographical roots, connections, and even parallels with Greek history and historians.1What follows reiterates those connections, explicitly by assessing how Herodotus presented his inquiries to his Greek audience, laying the foundations for the discipline ofhistoria, and then by examining specifically the story of the Fabii at the Cremera in Livy, Dionysius and Diodorus. Through this one historical example, I hope to show that the roots of genuine historical thought can be found in the sources of our sources for early Roman traditions. Despite the fact that these traditions appear in works written much later than the events they describe, the nature of the stories preserved in our extant accounts suggests similar historiographical roots and interest as those preserved by Herodotus for the Greeks in the stories he told in hisHistories.

Old Testament Realism in the Writings of Erich Auerbach

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-224
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Historical Thought

This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.

scholarly journals The Fifth-Century Crisis

Antichthon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 227-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Smith
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Roman History

AbstractThis essay seeks to establish the parameters of our uncertainty concerning one of the most difficult periods of Roman history, the period between the traditional end of the Roman monarchy and the passing of the Licinio-Sextian legislation. In addition to some methodological observations, the essay attempts to offer a model for understanding Roman choices and decisions in a period of change and transformation.

Greek Light on World History

1950 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Toynbee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
World History ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Western Education ◽  
Good Fortune ◽  
Greek History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Come

Approach.: The subject of this talk is in one sense a rather personal one. I am venturing to say something about my own approach to History. I had the good fortune to be born just not too late to come in for the old-fashioned ‘Early Modern Western’ education in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures; the first grown-up job that I did was to teach Greek and Roman history for the School of Literae Humaniores at Oxford; and, in afterwards exploring other provinces of history, I have always found my way into them through a Greek gate. Greek history has been, for me, the key to world history.

The Policy of Sparta

1912 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 261-269
Author(s):  
G. B. Grundy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Greek History ◽  
New Evidence

In two papers published within the last year, one in the Classical Quarterly of October, 1911, and the other in the last number of this Journal, Mr. Dickins has put forward certain views with regard to the main lines of the policy of Sparta in the latter half of the sixth and in the fifth century B.C.Inasmuch as his two articles aim at refuting certain views put forward by myself and others in this Journal and elsewhere, I should like to reply to his arguments.In the first place Mr. Dickins, who has had and has used special opportunities for acquiring information with regard to the antiquities of Sparta, adduces a large number of new facts. For this part of his work every student of Greek History must be grateful to him. It is in the conclusions which he draws from the new evidence, and the scant courtesy with which he treats some of the old, that the main defects of his arguments lie. He uses some of the evidence of Herodotus, and ignores the rest. That of Thucydides he treats in the same way. As for that of Aristotle, he appears to regard it as wholly misleading, with regard to both Sparta in early times and Sparta in the fifth century. It seems to me that it is not unreasonable to assume that Aristotle in the fourth century before Christ had access to better evidence in support of his statements with regard to the Spartan state of the fifth century than we in the twentieth century after Christ either possess or are ever likely to possess.

Generation Dating in Herodotos

1979 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Ball
Keyword(s):  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Greek History

It is generally believed that a substantial number of time intervals and traditional dates given for early Greek history are the result of calculations based on genealogies and on various values for a generation. Although this method is supposed to have been used by Greek chronographers from the fifth century down at least to Kastor of Rhodes in the first, Herodotos must be our main direct evidence.

Rome's Holy Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Remote Past

Rome’s Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire’s holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome’s most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This book follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill’s tonnage of marble- and gold-bedecked monuments but, rather, an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh century CE. During this time, the triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill’s different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill’s role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state’s disintegration in the fifth century were the hill’s associations with the raw power of Rome’s empire.

Sicily and Roman Republican History in Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe

2018 ◽  
Vol 138 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Daniel Jolowicz
Keyword(s):  
Roman History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Greek History ◽  
Greek Novel

AbstractChariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe is a Greek novel that is extremely rich in historical and historiographical allusions. Virtually all of those so far detected derive from Greek texts and events in Greek history. In this article I shift the focus to Roman history, and suggest that Rome is not as absent as it is usually supposed to be in the Greek novels. In support of this claim, I propose that Chariton's choice of Sicily as a topographical setting can be related to three episodes from the Republican period that all involve Roman interventions in Sicily. Section I: the removal of Callirhoe (described at the beginning of the novel as an ἄγαλμα) from Syracuse recalls Verres’ provincial mismanagement of Sicily (73–71 BC), specifically his removal from Syracuse of Sappho's statue. Section II: the character of the pirate Theron is freighted with markers that point to the ‘pirate’ Sextus Pompey and his conflict with Octavian from 42–36 BC. Section III: Chaereas’ triumphant return to Syracuse at the end of the novel, loaded with spoils from the Persian king, symbolically reverses and redresses Marcellus’ sack of Syracuse in 211 BC. These all have significant ramifications for how readers (ancient and modern) approach the Greek novels.

Greek History

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-119
Author(s):  
Kostas Vlassopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Military History ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Persian Wars ◽  
Greek History ◽  
The Subject ◽  
External Forces ◽  
Continuous Narrative

Political and military history used to be the main staple of ancient Greek history. This review includes a number of volumes devoted to the subject. Matteo Zaccarini's book focuses on Cimon and the period between 478 and 450 bce. Sandwiched between Herodotus’ Persian Wars and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, the Pentekontaetia (478–431) is the most problematic period of classical Greek history, primarily because of the lack of a continuous narrative and our reliance on much later and fragmentary sources. Zaccarini has divided his work into two sections: the first studies the development of narrative traditions concerning Cimon and his age, from the fifth century to the Second Sophistic, and presents a context for interpreting the shaping of the information provided in these traditions. This is undoubtedly the most profitable part of the work, and a good model that others could imitate. The second part attempts to present a historical reconstruction of the period 478–450 on the basis of the conclusions of the first part. Many of Zaccarini's arguments are, in my view, correct: he shows the need to emancipate our narratives from models based on competition between aristocratic/popular or pro- and anti-Spartan leaders and programmes; he argues that the late 460s–450s is the crucial period of change in the balance of internal and external forces; and he minimizes the actual significance of Cimon's role. These sensible conclusions could have been strengthened by engaging with the rethinking of the nature of early Athenian imperialism by scholars such as Lisa Kallet and John Davies. But the volume is still a worthy contribution towards reassessing this crucial period.

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