Ancient Greek Historiography of Science

2020 ◽  
pp. 268-288
Author(s):  
Leonid Zhmud
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historiography Of Science ◽  
Greek Historiography

Reflections on Chinese Historical Thinking

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying-shih Yü
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
First Generation ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Western Influence ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Chinese Historiography

Of this series of reflections, one of the most important is that the first generation of Chinese historians who were exposed to Western influence only in a limited way produced historical scholarship far superior to that of the later generations who applied the so-called scientific method. Comparing Chinese historiography to Western theories since the 18th century, China seems backward, but compared to ancient Greek historiography as far as underlying assumptions, principles, and methods are concerned, there appear to be as many similarities as differences. The essay argues that fundamental to Chinese historical thought is the centrality of human agency in the making of history, and that Chinese historiography was also very much concerned about the Rankean notion of “What had actually happened?”

Time, Tense, and Temporality in Ancient Greek Historiography

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Grethlein
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Historiography

Thucydideses: authorship, anachrony, and anachronism in Greek historiography

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
Emily Greenwood
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Greek Historiography

Abstract This article revisits the theme of temporality in ancient Greek historiography through the lens of the Byzantine Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, who fastened onto the device of the anachronic, proleptic future in Herodotus and Thucydides to license his apparently anachronistic device of writing in the language and persona of both, eighteen centuries after they wrote. In Laonikos’ account, his narrative is part of the future of ‘Greek’ history anticipated by Herodotus and Thucydides. Laonikos’ clever assimilation of Herodotus and Thucydides sheds new light on Thucydides’ own reduplication of himself to project an authorial and textual future. This strong, anachronic move has made Thucydides’ work assimilable by future readers and also opened up the work to the contingencies of reception, with its potential for anachronism.

scholarly journals THE “CYROPAEDIA” OF XENOPHON AND THE “HISTORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE” OF HERODIAN: STRUCTURAL SIMILARITIES THROUGH CENTURIES OF ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY (A REVIEW OF THE RECEPTIONS IN MODERN CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY)

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Fedir Dovbyshchenko
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Classical Philology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The present article is an attempt to analyze the narrative strategies and scope of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History of the Roman Empire” as viewed within the modern reception in classical philology. This paper presumes that the narrative techniques of writing historiographical biographies in antiquity might be the same across the whole period which separates the two works in question. The distance in time did not result in radical changes of the narrative structure in historiography, as the example of Xenophon’s “Cyropaedia” and Herodian’s “History” shows. The analysis of the ancient histories, as this article argues, can be conducted not only to understand the level of their factual reliability, but also to describe their possible impact on contemporary readers or listeners. It is also shown in the present article that the narrative structure of the two histories is far from being that of the non-fictional prose, and that modern classicists tend to consider them as fictional texts. Moreover, the whole ancient historiography, unlike the modern one, has to be treated as fiction, for the strategies of creating it were similar to the narrative strategies of other genres.

scholarly journals Approaching Questions of Text Reuse in Ancient Greek Using Computational Syntactic Stylometry

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa B. Gorman ◽  
Robert J. Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Shortest Path ◽  
Clustering Analysis ◽  
Preliminary Test ◽  
Leaf Node ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Salient Characteristic ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Dependency Syntax

AbstractWe are investigating methods by which data from dependency syntax treebanks of ancient Greek can be applied to questions of authorship in ancient Greek historiography. From the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank were constructed syntax words (sWords) by tracing the shortest path from each leaf node to the root for each sentence tree. This paper presents the results of a preliminary test of the usefulness of the sWord as a stylometric discriminator. The sWord data was subjected to clustering analysis. The resultant groupings were in accord with traditional classifications. The use of sWords also allows a more fine-grained heuristic exploration of difficult questions of text reuse. A comparison of relative frequencies of sWords in the directly transmitted Polybius book 1 and the excerpted books 9–10 indicate that the measurements of the two texts are generally very close, but when frequencies do vary, the differences are surprisingly large. These differences reveal that a certain syntactic simplification is a salient characteristic of Polybius’ excerptor, who leaves conspicuous syntactic indicators of his modifications.

scholarly journals «Theatricality» in Ancient Greek historiography

2018 ◽  
Vol XXII ◽  
pp. 986-992
Author(s):  
O. Osipova
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Historiography

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Irene Hau
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Historiography

The Introduction defines the perimeters and terminology of the book. In addition, it offers a brief overview of the role of moral didacticism in historiography from antiquity to the 21st century and discusses the distinctiveness of moralising in ancient Greek historiography compared with other genres at the time. It then offers a narratologically based typology of moralising techniques, which is used throughout the book.

scholarly journals Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Irene Hau
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Feminist History ◽  
Diodorus Siculus ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Postcolonial History

This book offers an interpretation of the first 500 years of history writing as a moral-didactic genre, and argues that this does not invalidate ancient Greek historiography as history. In Part I, it offers a thorough analysis of the moralising techniques and moral-didactic lessons of Polybius and Diodorus Siculus and then analyses the fragments of a range of less well-preserved Hellenistic works of historiography (Timaeus, Phylarchus, Duris, Hieronymus, Agatharchides, and Posidonius) to see how far it is possible to trace similar techniques and lessons in these works. In Part II, the roots of Hellenistic historiographical moralising are traced in the Classical works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and the fragments of the Oxyrhynchus Historian, Ephorus, and Theopompus. The book concludes that the Greek genre of historiography was moral-didactic from its inception, like most of the Classical Greek literary genres, and that this purpose became explicit and its techniques formalised in Hellenistic times, but that neither the writers nor the readers of the genre believed this moral-didactic purpose to be detrimental to the truth-value of historiography. Ancient historiography was history writing with an agenda: it was Moral History (in the same way that some modern historiography can be defined as, say, Feminist History or Postcolonial History), but it was still History.

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