Literary Texts and the Greek Historian
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Argive Alliance
Athenian Political Life
attic
Attic Agora
attitudes
audience
Audience Prejudices
Author_Christopher Pelling
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Category=NH
Category=NHC
Category=NHD
Court Room Analogy
De Ste Croix
Dead Pan
decree
Devious
Draw Back
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
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Extravagant Inference
Hellenica Oxyrhynchia
Human Suffering
megarian
Megarian Decree
Modern USA
Mytilenean Debate
Nicias
Party Games
peloponnesian
Reliable Person
Sparta's Allies
Spartan Expedition
Sparta’s Allies
suppliant
Suppliant Women
Timeless Register
trojan
Trojan Women
war
women
Xenophon's Ischomachus
Xenophon’s Ischomachus
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780415073516
- Weight: 440g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 25 Nov 1999
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discussing how we should and should not try to exploit the texts. In some instances we can investigate 'what really happened', and the ways in which the texts manipulate, remould, or colour it according to their own rhetorical strategies; in others the most illuminating aspect may be those strategies themselves, and what they tell us about the culture - how it figured questions of sex and gender, politics, citizenship and the city, the law and the courts and how wars happen. Literary Texts and the Greek Historian concentrates on Athens in the second half of the fifth-century, when many of the principal genres came together, but includes some examples from earlier (Aeschylus ^Oresteia>) and later (including Aristotles poetics). Literary Texts and the Greek Historian examines the range of responses to these texts and suggests new ways in which literary criticism can illuminate the society from which these texts sprang.
Christopher Pelling is Fellow in Classics at University College, Oxford. He has written extensively on Greek biography and historiography and edited Greek Tragedy and the Historian (1997).
