Cultural Politics in Polybius's Histories
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A01=Craige Champion
Author_Craige Champion
Category=JPA
Category=NHC
Category=NHD
contradictions
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic groups
ethnicity
freedom
greek statesman
greeks
historiography
ideological presuppositions
literary
political balancing act
political groups
political prisoner
politics of cultural indeterminacy
polybius
predispositions
roman conquerors
roman empire
rome
second century
unappreciated subtlety
Product details
- ISBN 9780520237643
- Weight: 635g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 Aug 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century b.c.e. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. In this original study informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, Craige Champion demonstrates that Polybius' work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore unappreciated subtlety and interest. Champion shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. Champion focuses primarily on the ideological presuppositions and predispositions of Polybius's different audiences in order to interpret the apparent contradictions and incongruities in his text. In this way he develops a 'politics of cultural indeterminacy' in which Polybius' collective representations of political and ethnic groups have different meanings for different audiences in different contexts.
Situating these representations in the ideological, political, and historical contexts from which they arose, his book affords new and penetrating insights into a work whose subtlety and complexity have gone largely unrecognized.
Craige B. Champion is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.
