Ancient Historiography on War and Empire

Timothy Howe, Sabine Müller, Richard Stoneman

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785703027
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In the ancient Greek-speaking world, writing about the past meant balancing the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of the present. Ancient Historiography on War and Empire shows the ways in which the literary genre of writing history developed to guide empires through their wars. Taking key events from the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman 'empires', the 17 essays collected here analyse the way events and the accounts of those events interact. Subjects include: how Greek historians assign nearly divine honours to the Persian King; the role of the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder in historical narratives of conquest and empire from Herodotus to the Alexander historians; warfare and financial innovation in the age of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great; the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos; Alexander the Great's combat use of eagle symbolism and divination; Plutarch's juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing as a commentary on political legitimacy and military prowess, and Roman Imperial historians using historical examples of good and bad rule to make meaningful challenges to current Roman authority. In some cases, the balance shifts more towards the 'literary' and in others more towards the 'historical', but what all of the essays have in common is both a critical attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world and its focus on war and empire.

Table of contents

• List of contributors
• Abbreviations
• Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history
• Part I: Introduction
• 1. Why history? On the emergence of historical writing
• Part II: Persia and Greece
• 2. The political and the divine in Achaemenid royal inscriptions
• 3. Cyrus the Great and the sacrifices for a dead king
• 4. The horse and the stag: Philistus’ view of tyrants
• Part III: Macedon
• 5. Alexander II of Macedon
• 6. ‘The giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride’: a study of the murder of Philip II and its aftermath
• 7. Royal tombs and cult of the dead kings in Early Hellenistic Macedonia
• Part IV: The Empires of Alexander the Great and the Diadochoi
• 8. The financial administration of Asia Minor under Alexander the Great: an interpretation of two passages from Arrian’s Anabasis
• 9. The Eagle has landed: divination in the Alexander historians
• 10. The casualty figures of Alexander’s army
• 11. Alexander’s battles against Persians in the art of the Successors
• 12. How the hoopoe got his crest: reflections on Megasthenes’ stories of India
• 13. Creating the king: the image of Alexander the Great in 1 Maccabees, 1–10
• Part V: Second Sophistic Rome
• 14. The hero vs. the tyrant: legitimate and illegitimate rule in the Alexander-Caesar pairing
• 15. Plutarch’s Alexander, Dionysos and the metaphysics of power
• 16. The artistic king: reflections on a Topos in Second Sophistic Historiography
• 17. Flattery, history, and the Πεπαιδευμένος
• Index