Literary Texts and the Greek Historian / Edition 1

by Christopher Pelling

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415073516
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/25/1999
Series:	Approaching the Ancient World
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 A culture of rhetoric; Chapter 2 Rhetoric and history (415 BC); Chapter 3 How far would they go? Plutarch on Nicias and Alcibiades; Chapter 4 Rhetoric and history II; Chapter 5 Explaining the war; Chapter 6 Thucydides’ speeches; Chapter 7 ‘You cannot be serious’; Chapter 8 Aristophanes’ Acharnians (425 BC); Chapter 9 Tragedy and ideology; Chapter 10 Lysistrata and others; Chapter 11 Conclusions;