The past is narrated in retrospect. Historians can either capitalize on the benefit of hindsight and give their narratives a strongly teleological design or they may try to render the past as it was experienced by historical agents and contemporaries. This book explores the fundamental tension between experience and teleology in major works of Greek and Roman historiography, biography and autobiography.
The combination of theoretical reflections with close readings yields a new, often surprising assessment of the history of ancient historiography as well as a deeper understanding of such authors as Thucydides, Tacitus and Augustine. While much recent work has focused on how ancient historians use emplotment to generate historical meaning, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography offers a new approach to narrative form as a mode of coming to grips with time.
Author(s): Jonas Grethlein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 436
City: Cambridge
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Introduction
I. Experience and teleology
II. From ‘narrative sentences’ to ‘futures past’
III. Narrative and experience
‘The New Romanticists’
Narrative re-experience
Re-experience in historiographic narrative
Narrative re-experience and enargeia
IV. Outline
Goals
Focus
Synopsis
Part I Experience: making the past present
Chapter 2 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
I. Phormion’s double victory (2.83-92)
Graphic description and tense
Internal focalization
Speeches
Composition
II. The capitulation of Mytilene (3.25-35)
Internal focalization and composition
Narrative and narrated time
‘Sideshadowing’
Indirect evaluation
III. Teleology and authorial presence
Chapter 3 Xenophon, Anabasis
I. Graphic description and internal focalization
The gaze of Cyrus
Internal focalization through Xenophon
II. Speeches
Speeches of Clearchus and Tissaphernes
Xenophon’s justificatory speeches
III. ‘Sideshadowing’: the motif of colonization
A colony as Persian fear and last resort of the Greeks
Xenophon’s aspirations as oecist
IV. Narrative closure and historical telos
Nostos and narrative dynamic
False endings
Nostos dissipated
V. The limits of mimesis
Distribution of knowledge and prolepsis
Narratorial interventions and ambiguity
Source citations
VI. Xenophon, epigone of Thucydides?
Chapter 4 Plutarch, Alexander
I. Enargeia in the Gaugamela narrative
Narrative speed
Internal focalization
Further vivid scenes
II. The drama of Alexander
Theatre and self-fashioning
Concern with fame
Play-acting and reality
III. Plutarch’s narratorial presence
Digressions and references to the present
Citations and alternative versions
IV. Foreshadowing and teleology
Foreshadowing
Teleology: capture of Persia
Alexander and other Lives
V. Episodic structure
Episodic structure and teleology
Episodic structure and experience
Vividness and teleology: the taming of Bucephalas
VI. Enargeia and moralism
The spatial notion of Plutarch’s narrative
Spatial narrative and moralism
Chapter 5 Tacitus, Annals
I. Germanicus’ visit to the Teutoburg Forest
Mimesis
Mimesis reflected
II. Ambiguity as mimetic device (i): the death of Germanicus
An emperor’s intrigue?
Investigating Germanicus’ death
Tiberius and Tacitus
III. Ambiguity as mimetic device (ii): the Pisonian Conspiracy
‘Sideshadowing’
Art and life
Narratorial uncertainty
IV. Teleology in the Annals- the Annals as telos
Prolepses and teleology
Historiography as telos
History and agency
Summary of Part I
Part II Teleology: the power of retrospect
Chapter 6 Herodotus, Histories
I. How (not) to do history: Darius and Xerxes
Darius and memorials
Xerxes as recorder of his own deeds
Xerxes’ gaze and historian-like stance
History East and West
II. The teleological design of the Histories and its reading experience
Digressions, prolepses and patterns
Oracles
III. The Histories’ closure: teleology corroborated and undermined
IV. Histories and oracles: ‘signs’ of past and future
Histories, ‘signs’ of the past - oracles, ‘signs’ of the future
Oracle on the past
Histories on the present and future
V. Socles’ speech: Histories, oracles and shifting vantage points
Oracular comment on Athens’ tyranny
The continuous proliferation of historical meaning
Historicizing the Histories
Chapter 7 Polybius, Histories
I. Teleology: history and narrative
The telos in universal historiography
Polybius’ teleology, Aristotle’s Poetics and German historicism
The gap between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum
II. Telos qualified
The deferral of the telos
III. A conspicuous narrator
Digressions and anachronies
Alternative versions and counterfactuals
Rhetorical questions and exclamations
IV. Reflections on mimetic historiography
Polybius’ critique of mimesis
Polybius’ critique reconsidered
V. Mimetic narrative
The battle at Zama (15.5.3-16)
Mimesis in central passages
VI. Polybius, Thucydides and Hellenistic historiography
Chapter 8 Sallust, Bellum Catilinae
I. A teleological view of Rome’s history
Teleology and archaeology
Teleology and Catiline
Teleology and imagery of disease
Teleology and chronology
II. Alternative views of the conspiracy in ancient and modern historiography
III. Alternative views of the conspiracy within the BC (I): Catiline’s letter
IV. Alternative views of the conspiracy within the BC (II): Caesar’s speech
An alternative view of Rome’s history
An alternative assessment of Catiline
V. Mimesis in the BC
Sallust’s un-Thucydidean and un-Tacitean voice
The closure of the BC
Ambiguity
Summary of Part II
Part III Beyond experience and teleology
Chapter 9 Augustine, Confessions
I. Conversion and experience
Mimesis
Mimesis undermined
Life narrated and life lived
II. Conversion and teleology
Story and teleology
Discourse and teleology
Narrative frame and teleology
III. Beyond experience and teleology
Human time vs God’s eternity
The Confessions as transcendence of human temporality: spatial form
IV. From Ricoeur to Augustine
Chapter 10 Epilogue
I. The fall of the Roman Republic: virtues and vices of hindsight
II. Experiential narratives in contemporary historiography
Simon Schama, Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)
Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine (1988)
Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (1999)
Jonathan Walker, Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy (2007)
Experience in ancient and modern historiography
III. Historiographic metafiction
Bibliography
Index locorum
Index of Greek and Latin words
General index
