Exploration of Aeolian foundation traditions and the localizing of such traditions in both the eastern Aegean and Magna Graecia, and of the reflexivity and reciprocality of Aeolian ethnic identity that these mythic traditions entail.

A linguistic investigation of the Aeolic dialect group, examining linguistic traits of the Lesbian, Thessalian, and Boeotian dialects and those traits common to all three and thus traits belonging to ancestral Aeolic.

This chapter presents eleven epigrams (forty-nine dodecasyllables) copied in the margins of a number of manuscripts of Herodotus’ Histories, the most important being Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 70.6. The epigrams comment on the text of Herodotus next to which they appear, and thus can be characterized as verse scholia. These poems, which the author of this chapter has critically edited in a recent article, were known to scholars, but they had been misattributed to John Tzetzes. In fact, Tzetzes’ verse scholia on Herodotus survive in another manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 70.3), whereas our poems have more in common with the verse scholia on Diodorus Siculus in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 130. The authorial voice of Tzetzes and the attribution of the poems in Vat. gr. 130 to Niketas Choniates are investigated to help determine the context of composition of our verse scholia on Herodotus. On the basis of this comparison and other internal evidence, this chapter concludes that our eleven epigrams were first copied in the model of Laur. Plut. 70.6 at some point between 1204 and 1318, and probably before 1261.

This chapter discusses Plutarch’s On the Oracles at Delphi, and in particular the account of the grammarian Theon as to how prose came to replace verse, not just in the delivery of the Delphic oracle, but in literary discourse as a whole. Theon’s account of the history of Greek literate culture is an important document of how learned Greeks in the Roman empire imagined how their world had changed, along with the literature in which it was represented. The first part of the chapter considers another Plutarchan account of cultural and intellectual change, namely the opening of On the Obsolescence of Oracles, which tells the foundation story of Delphi. Both texts lay weight upon the fact of change itself, rather than on any detailed plotting of that change, let alone a chronology for it; so too, both illustrate a tendency to see recurrent patterns of change, by which the outlines of Greek literary history are found already adumbrated in classical literature itself. Among the classical texts which are central to this appropriation of past models are the programmatic chapters of Thucydides and Aristotle’s account of the development of poetic language.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

Socrates’ claim that he is engaged in a cooperative inquiry (506e3-5) may surprise readers of the dialogue. In particular, some readers take Callicles to be a hostile interlocutor; his views about philosophy, ethics, and politics seem to be designed to give us a vivid picture of everything that Socrates rejects and of the whole outlook that vehemently rejects Socrates. Socrates, however, attributes the success of his argument to cooperation between himself and Callicles; he implies that Callicles fulfils the promise that Socrates saw in him when he described him as the ideal interlocutor. Evidence drawn from Thucydides shows that Callicles holds the views of an enlightened (in his view) Periclean supporter of democracy. Socrates exposes a conflict between the acceptance of hedonism and the recognition of non-instrumental goods that belong to this Periclean outlook. Hedonism is fairly attributed to Callicles, and Callicles acknowledges it. Since Callicles is willing to make the effort to ‘view himself correctly’, he recognizes the fairness of Socrates’ argument, and accepts its consequences. Despite appearances, he participates in the cooperative inquiry that leads to Socrates’ conclusion.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’s ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ funeral speech of Pericles (2.35–46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focussed on one of the epitaphic commonplaces, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional courage. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this funeral speech in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians.

In light of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters and the knowledge gained through the fragments, the author addresses the issue of Ephorus’ universality. He tries to understand which reasons led Polybius to mention Ephorus as his only predecessor; and he sets Ephorus’ universality in the context of the historiographical thought of the fourth century BC, to better appreciate its novelty.

The author detects which principles Ephorus stated in his Histories for research, and how he practised his inquiry. This enables the author to see whether Ephorus’ practice of inquiry was in line with the principles he stated or not, and also to draw an overall balanced evaluation of Ephorus’ historiographical method and the nature of his historical discourse.

Perhaps no ancient writer has experienced so great a reversal in modern reception as the fourth-century bc historian Ephorus of Cyme. In his preface to the first edition of Ephorus’ fragments by Meier Marx (1815), the German scholar Friedrich Creuzer depicted Ephorus as a philosophos who might be well compared to Herodotus’ Solon, who travels and observes to learn,1 or – one could add – to Polybius’ Odysseus, who ‘saw the cities and knew the minds of many men’.

The author checks the firmness of the foundations of the negative appraisal of the historian Ephorus. Topics include Ephorus’ Isocratean apprenticeship, the concept of rhetorical historiography, Ephorus and Diodorus, ancient judgements questioning Ephorus’ reliability as a historian, Ephorus’ ‘Cymocentrism’.

A few brief reflections on the timeliness and importance of rediscovering moderation in our age of extremes following the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also comments on the fragility of civilization and makes a strong case for moderation conceived of as a fighting faith.

After defining ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ in relation to character or behaviour and to setting, this chapter notes that, whereas the other four Greek ‘ideal’ novelists create a realistic background, whether using personal observation or historiography, Longus draws chiefly on literary texts that themselves present a fictional world (Homer and Theocritus) or one that is semi-fictional (archaic melic poetry). ‘The Country’ explores Longus’ debt to Theocritus’ landscape, especially that of Idyll 1, advertised by his preface as several steps removed from the real world. The chapter then discusses the relation of 2.32 to Theocritus 1; of 1.17.3 to Sappho and Anacreon via Theocritus 11, complicated by the term ἀληθῶς, ‘really’; and of the apple at 3.33.4 to Sappho’s epithalamia, Ibycus, and Theocritus 28. ‘The city’ explores the literary forebears of Longus’ Megacles; ‘The sea’ looks at his ‘Tyrian’ pirates’ origins in earlier novels, especially Chariton’s; and ‘Reality’ considers how his use of Thucydides underlines his own fictionality. Overall it is the chapter’s stress on the fictionality, rather than on the poetic status, of most of Longus’ intertexts that differentiates its writer’s position from those of Richard Hunter and Maria Pia Pattoni.

Chapter 7 considers stylistic imitation and appropriation in the debate over Atticism and Asianism, with a special focus on how Cicero distorts the aims and positions of his detractors in the diatribe against the Atticists (285–91). He trades on various meanings of Atticus/Attici in order to make a rhetorical – rather than strictly logical – case. He downplays Atticism as outdated and relegates its stylistic virtues to the plain style (genus tenue). Rejecting Atticism does not entail rejecting the plain style. Instead he acknowledges it as one of many oratorical virtues to be subsumed under the capable orator’s broad stylistic repertoire. Cicero promotes a model of stylistic diversity, examples of which are found in the long histories of Greek and, especially, Roman oratory.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.