Literary Texts and the Greek Historian

ISBN-13: 9780415073516 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 352 str.

Christopher Pelling; C. B. R. Pelling

Opis

This volume aims to provide a survey of the ways in which non-historical texts, as well as historical ones, can be used to construct Greek history. The author introduces the book with a chapter on the inventiveness of ancient authors and explores the genres of literature from which we construct our accounts of ancient history. He examines the fifth century authors Demosthenes, Lysias and Thucydides, as well as Greek tragedy and comedy, to show the different kinds of historical information that can be extracted from apparently recalcitrant texts.

Spis treści

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;

O autorze

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).