Ivan Matijašić, Shaping the Canons of Ancient Greek Historiography: Imitation, Classicism, and Literary Criticism. Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 359. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Pp. xii+293. €99.95 (cloth).

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 341-343
Author(s):  
Mathieu de Bakker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Historiography

Arguing over Texts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Camper
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Textual Meaning

Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.

Reflections on Chinese Historical Thinking

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
First Generation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Chinese Historiography

Of this series of reflections, one of the most important is that the first generation of Chinese historians who were exposed to Western influence only in a limited way produced historical scholarship far superior to that of the later generations who applied the so-called scientific method. Comparing Chinese historiography to Western theories since the 18th century, China seems backward, but compared to ancient Greek historiography as far as underlying assumptions, principles, and methods are concerned, there appear to be as many similarities as differences. The essay argues that fundamental to Chinese historical thought is the centrality of human agency in the making of history, and that Chinese historiography was also very much concerned about the Rankean notion of “What had actually happened?”

Thucydideses: authorship, anachrony, and anachronism in Greek historiography

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
Emily Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Greek Historiography

Abstract This article revisits the theme of temporality in ancient Greek historiography through the lens of the Byzantine Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, who fastened onto the device of the anachronic, proleptic future in Herodotus and Thucydides to license his apparently anachronistic device of writing in the language and persona of both, eighteen centuries after they wrote. In Laonikos’ account, his narrative is part of the future of ‘Greek’ history anticipated by Herodotus and Thucydides. Laonikos’ clever assimilation of Herodotus and Thucydides sheds new light on Thucydides’ own reduplication of himself to project an authorial and textual future. This strong, anachronic move has made Thucydides’ work assimilable by future readers and also opened up the work to the contingencies of reception, with its potential for anachronism.

scholarly journals THE “CYROPAEDIA” OF XENOPHON AND THE “HISTORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE” OF HERODIAN: STRUCTURAL SIMILARITIES THROUGH CENTURIES OF ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY (A REVIEW OF THE RECEPTIONS IN MODERN CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY)

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Fedir Dovbyshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The present article is an attempt to analyze the narrative strategies and scope of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History of the Roman Empire” as viewed within the modern reception in classical philology. This paper presumes that the narrative techniques of writing historiographical biographies in antiquity might be the same across the whole period which separates the two works in question. The distance in time did not result in radical changes of the narrative structure in historiography, as the example of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History” shows. The analysis of the ancient histories, as this article argues, can be conducted not only to understand the level of their factual reliability, but also to describe their possible impact on contemporary readers or listeners. It is also shown in the present article that the narrative structure of the two histories is far from being that of the non-fictional prose, and that modern classicists tend to consider them as fictional texts. Moreover, the whole ancient historiography, unlike the modern one, has to be treated as fiction, for the strategies of creating it were similar to the narrative strategies of other genres.

scholarly journals Approaching Questions of Text Reuse in Ancient Greek Using Computational Syntactic Stylometry

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa B. Gorman ◽  
Robert J. Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Shortest Path ◽  
Clustering Analysis ◽  
Preliminary Test ◽  
Leaf Node ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Dependency Syntax

AbstractWe are investigating methods by which data from dependency syntax treebanks of ancient Greek can be applied to questions of authorship in ancient Greek historiography. From the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank were constructed syntax words (sWords) by tracing the shortest path from each leaf node to the root for each sentence tree. This paper presents the results of a preliminary test of the usefulness of the sWord as a stylometric discriminator. The sWord data was subjected to clustering analysis. The resultant groupings were in accord with traditional classifications. The use of sWords also allows a more fine-grained heuristic exploration of difficult questions of text reuse. A comparison of relative frequencies of sWords in the directly transmitted Polybius book 1 and the excerpted books 9–10 indicate that the measurements of the two texts are generally very close, but when frequencies do vary, the differences are surprisingly large. These differences reveal that a certain syntactic simplification is a salient characteristic of Polybius’ excerptor, who leaves conspicuous syntactic indicators of his modifications.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document