Literary Texts And The Roman Historian

Description:
This volume explores literary texts of the Roman Empire which offer a reconstruction of depiction of actual events and the ways in which these texts were created, disseminated and read. The author focuses on how the participants in the literary culture of the Roman empire constructed their own history and how the people attached to the canons of classical historiography created narratives of their own times and times past. In contrast, he also discusses alternative forms of historical narrative, suggesting that those texts were produced to provide alternative paradigms to those offered in the traditional historical narratives. He also dexamines the reception of classical visions of history in the late 20th century and contextualizes the problems of the discipline in antiquity with current developments in the field.

Table of Contents:
Definitions: Historia as Enquiry, Historia as Story, Truth and History, Some Rules, Texts: Sorting Things Out, Participant Evidence, Publication and Literary Fashion, Illustrative Evidence, Narrative, Reconstructing Fragmentary Authors, Scholarship: Standards of Research, Historians and Records, Quellenforschung, Near Eastern Records of the Past and the Roman Imagination, Grammarians and Historians, The Physical Process, Conclusion, Presentation: The Problem, Leopold Ranke, Objectivism and relativism, Fact and Presentation: Lucien and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Fact and Presentation: Cicero, Other Forms of Presentation, Versimilitude, Conclusion, Epilogue: The Discourse of Dominance, Appendix: Classical Authors Discussed in the Text, Bibliography.