Greek History

The study of ethnicity and the interaction between cultures has been a popular topic with ancient historians recently, and this trend continues. While the interconnection between Greek identity and culture and Roman power during the Second Sophistic has attracted significant attention in the last few decades, the earlier periods have remained relatively unexamined. This is now nicely redressed by an important collection of essays edited by Thomas Schmitz and Nicolas Wiater, which focuses on the first century bce. One main theme of the volume concerns the interaction between Greek and Roman identities, and the ways in which authors reinterpret and destabilize them: the interaction between Rome and Greek classicism (Dihle), the rethinking of Greek and Roman cultures and identities in Dionysius (Wiater), the impact of Rome on its resident Greek authors (Hibder), the interpretatio graeca of Augustus by Nicolaus of Damascus (Pausch), the Roman context of Mytilenean intellectuals and their self-fashioning (Bowie), and Greek poets and their Roman patrons (Whitmarsh). A second main theme concerns the interaction with the Greek past and its classics, and the extent to which the classicist approaches of the Second Sophistic are already present in the first century. This is variously explored, from Dionysius’ exploration of stylistic models (Fox), Diodorus’ image of Athens (Schmitz), the tendency to systematization in various intellectual fields on the basis of the classics (Most), the grammarians’ attitude to Greek dialect (Hintzen), and the Homeric quotations in Chariton (Baumbach), to the (re)building projects in Athens (Borg).