Although the relationship of Greco-Roman historians with their readerships has attracted much scholarly attention, classicists principally focus on individual historians, while there has been no collective work on the matter. The editors of this volume aspire to fill this gap and gather papers which offer an overall view of the Greco-Roman readership and of its interaction with ancient historians. The authors of this book endeavor to define the physiognomy of the audience of history in the Roman Era both by exploring the narrative arrangement of ancient historical prose and by using sources in which Greco-Roman intellectuals address the issue of the readership of history. Ancient historians shaped their accounts taking into consideration their readers' tastes, and this is evident on many different levels, such as the way a historian fashions his authorial image, addresses his readers, or uses certain compositional strategies to elicit the readers' affective and cognitive responses to his messages. The papers of this volume analyze these narrative aspects and contextualize them within their socio-political environment in order to reveal the ways ancient readerships interacted with and affected Greco-Roman historical prose.
Author(s): Mario Baumann, Vasileios Liotsakis
Series: Millennium-Studien / Millennium Studies, 98
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 276
City: Berlin
9783110764062
9783110764062
Preface
Contents
Introduction
Sallust, the lector eruditus and the Purposes of History
The Audience of Latin Historical Works in the First Century BCE in Light of Geographical Descriptions
Livy, the Reader Involved, and the Audience of Roman Historiography
From ἐξήγησις to μίμησις: Thucydides’ Readership in the ὑπομνήματα from the Roman Period
Historiography in the Margins and the Reader as a Touchstone
A History in Letters? The Intersection of Epistolarity and Historiography in Pliny
Readership and Reading Practices of Ancient History in the Early Roman Empire: Tacitus’ Accessions of Tiberius and Nero as a Case Study in Affective Historiography
Reading Spaces, Observing Spectators in Tacitus’ Histories
How to Satisfy Everyone: Diverse Readerly Expectations and Multiple Authorial Personae in Arrian’s Anabasis
Multiple Authors and Puzzled Readers in the Historia Augusta
Index locorum
Index nominum et rerum
