Storia controfattuale e great men in Erodoto e Tucidide

Thinking about the role of great men in virtual history of contemporary age, in this paper we intend to conduct an analysis of this theme starting from some significant texts of Herodotus and Thucydides, to evaluate the existence of a recourse to counterfactual reasoning in connection with the role of the individual also in Greek historiography. It emerges that counterfactuals, used perhaps not always intentionally, but, in any case, as a powerful narrative tool, help to define causal relationships and to highlight the important factors, moral and political responsibilities, including above all the ability of the leader to take reasonable decisions. The story of the past as it could have been, or, in other words, counterfactual history and not just real history, could thus encourage readers to reflect in a more engaging way than through the historical account alone, judging more actively the behaviour of great men of the past and learning from their decisions, both correct and incorrect.

Krew i kurzawa w greckiej historiografii klasycznej albo o zmarginalizowanych elementach Homerowego opisu pola bitwy

Contemporary historians believe that Greek historiography emerging on the eve of the classical period adopted numerous elements from the Homeric description of battle scenery. The aim of this paper is to analyze the earliest historical works while looking for the blood and dust, the two greatly important attributes of the Homeric world of warfare. However, it turns out that blood and dust, so intimately associated with the portrayal of the physical site of battle in Homer, did not become a per- manent element in the historical accounts of military clashes in Greek historiography, even though it was an inevitable component of the military experience of historians and their readers.

Thucydideses: authorship, anachrony, and anachronism in Greek historiography

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.