Introduction to the second edition

Summary

Although I have regularly cited Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography in the twenty-five years or so since it appeared, it is only with the current reissue of the work that I have gone back and read it through from beginning to end. About ten years after it was published, I gave serious thought to writing a revised version, both to incorporate much material that I had left out of the original and also (naturally) to update it in the light of more recent scholarship. In the end, I decided not to do so, mostly from the belief that scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and that a work, once published, becomes part of that conversation, dependent on its time and context. Authority and Tradition appeared at a particular point in the discussion of the nature of Greco-Roman historiography, when the linguistic and literary turn was becoming more and more prominent, and the book reflects that moment.