Book contents
- The Authoritative Historian
- The Authoritative Historian
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Myth, Fiction, and the Historian’s Authority
- Part II Dislocating Authority in Herodotus’ Histories
- Part III Performing Collective and Personal Authority
- Part IV Generic Transformations
- Chapter 13 Thucydides’ Mytilenaean Debate
- Chapter 14 Tradition, Innovation, and Authority
- Chapter 15 Tradition and Authority in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists
- Part V Innovation within Tradition
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
Chapter 13 - Thucydides’ Mytilenaean Debate
Political Philosophy or Authoritative History?
from Part IV - Generic Transformations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2022
- The Authoritative Historian
- The Authoritative Historian
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Myth, Fiction, and the Historian’s Authority
- Part II Dislocating Authority in Herodotus’ Histories
- Part III Performing Collective and Personal Authority
- Part IV Generic Transformations
- Chapter 13 Thucydides’ Mytilenaean Debate
- Chapter 14 Tradition, Innovation, and Authority
- Chapter 15 Tradition and Authority in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists
- Part V Innovation within Tradition
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
Summary
Six decades ago (my chronology is as exact as that of Thucydides’ ‘pentekontaëtia’), A. (‘Tony’) Andrewes, Oxford’s Wykeham Professor, laid down a number of markers for the ways in which a historian of late fifth-century BC Greece (such as he – and I) could or properly should make use of a famous pair of Thucydidean speeches, for purposes of historical reconstruction and analysis.1 Since 1962, there has been a plethora of scholarship published on Thucydidean historiography in general, and on the speeches/rhetoric in particular, some of it very good, including great work by Andrewes himself in Commentary mode.2 But the issues raised in and by the ‘Mytilenaean Debate’ and indeed by Thucydides’ inchoate History as a whole have not gone away, and they will not do so any time soon.3
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- Information
- The Authoritative HistorianTradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography, pp. 261 - 270Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023