Diodoros of Sicily Historiographical Theory and Practice in the Bibliotheke

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Diodoros of Sicily Historiographical Theory and Practice in the Bibliotheke STUDIA HELLENISTICA 58 DIOdOROS OF SICILY HISTORIOGRAPHICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE BIBLIOTHEKE edited by Lisa Irene HAU, Alexander MEEUS, and Brian SHERIDAN PEETERS LEUVEN - PARIS - BRISTOL, CT 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . IX SettInG tHe SCene Introduction . 3 Lisa Irene HAU, Alexander MEEUS & Brian ShERIDAN New and Old Approaches to Diodoros: Can They Be Reconciled? 13 Catherine RUBINCAm DIOdOROS In tHe FIRSt CentURY Diodoros of Sicily and the Hellenistic Mind . 43 Kenneth S. SACKS The Origins of Rome in the Bibliotheke of Diodoros . 65 Aude COhEN-SKALLI In Praise of Pompeius: Re-reading the Bibliotheke Historike . 91 Richard WESTALL GenRe and PURpOSe From Ἱστορίαι to Βιβλιοθήκη and Ἱστορικὰ Ὑπομνήματα . 131 Johannes ENGELS History’s Aims and Audience in the Proem to Diodoros’ Bibliotheke 149 Alexander MEEUS A Monograph on Alexander the Great within a Universal History: Diodoros Book XVII . 175 Luisa PRANDI VI TABLE OF CONTENTS NeW QuellenFOrsChunG Errors and Doublets: Reconstructing Ephoros and Appreciating Diodoros . 189 Victor PARKER A Question of Sources: Diodoros and Herodotos on the River Nile . 207 Jessica PRIESTLEY Diodoros’ Narrative of the First Sicilian Slave Revolt (c. 140/35- 132 B.C.) – a Reflection of Poseidonios’ Ideas and Style? . 221 Piotr WOZNICZKA How to Read a Diodoros Fragment . 247 Liv Mariah YARROw COMpOSItIOn and NaRRatIVe Narrator and Narratorial Persona in Diodoros’ Bibliotheke (and their Implications for the Tradition of Greek Historiography) . 277 Lisa Irene HAU Ring Composition in Diodoros of Sicily’s Account of the Lamian War (XVIII 8–18) . 303 John WALSh Terminology of Political Collaboration and Opposition in Dio- doros XI-XX . 329 Cinzia BEARZOT GODS and MYTHS The Role of the Gods in Diodoros’ Universal History: Religious Thought and History in the Historical Library ............. 347 Cécile DURVYE Diodoros, Mythology, and Historiography . 365 Charles E. MUNTZ TABLE OF CONTENTS VII Diodoros and Myth as History . 389 Abram RING EtHnOGRapHY, LanGUaGeS, and LIteRaCY Ethno-Geography as a Key to Interpreting Historical Leaders and Their Expansionist Policies in Diodoros . 407 Serena BIANChETTI Diodoros the Bilingual Provincial: Greek Language and Multilin- gualism in Bibliotheke XVII . 429 Dylan JAmES Inscriptions and Writing in Diodoros’ Bibliotheke . 447 Peter LIDDEL RHetORIC and SpeeCHeS Diodoros, the Speeches, and the Reader . 473 Dennis PAUSCh The Road Not Taken: Diodoros’ Reasons for Including the Speech of Theodoros . 491 Christopher BARON MILItaRY HIStORY Fate and Valour in Three Battle Descriptions of Diodoros . 507 Joseph ROISmAN The Moral Dimension of Military History in Diodoros of Sicily . 519 Nadejda WILLIAmS BIbLIOGRaPHY . 541 INDEX LOCORUM . 589 GENERaL INDEX . 605 NARRATOR AND NARRATORIAL PERSONA IN Diodoros’ BIbLIOTHEKE (AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TRADITION OF GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY) Lisa Irene HAU Abstract: This paper explores the possibility of gaining fresh insight into Dio- doros’ Bibliotheke by means of the concepts of narrator and narratorial persona. It falls in three parts. Part 1 offers a formal, narratological analysis of the Dio- dorean narrator. Part 2 characterises Diodoros’ narratorial persona and argues that it is more fruitful to regard it as a deliberate ‘persona’ claiming authority by placing itself in the historiographical tradition than as the autobiographical voice of the author. Part 3 analyses the narratorial register of four stretches of narrative from the Bibliotheke based on four different sources. It demonstrates that differ- ent branches of Greek historiography had traditionally used different modes of narration and argues that Diodoros may consciously have aimed to imitate the narrative mode of his predecessors in each area rather than mechanically taking over the narrative mode of his sources. * * * Scholarship on Diodoros usually follows one of two routes: the well- trodden road of using Diodoros as a source for otherwise lost works of history, and the less travelled, but increasingly popular path of uncovering what is original about Diodoros’ work.1 This paper follows neither. Instead we shall take a step back from the question of originality and ask some formal questions about the Bibliotheke. More precisely, I am going to approach the Bibliotheke not with the intention of uncovering its author’s handling of his sources, but in order to describe its narrator, his methods 1 For the Quellenforschung approach see e.g. Volquardsen 1868, Schwartz 1903, Kunz 1935, Meister 1967, Hornblower 1981, and Stylianou 1998. For the revisionist approach see first and foremost Sacks 1990 and Rubincam 1989 and 1998a, but also Green 2006. For an attempt to steer a middle course see Hau 2009 and Rubincam in this volume. For a thorough overview of the debate to date see the Introduction to this volume. 278 L.I. HAU of narrating, and the persona he projects. My guiding question throughout is whether, and how, the narratological concepts of narrator and narratorial persona might be useful for our understanding of the Bibliotheke. Despite a growing interest in narratology among scholars of ancient historiography, it is still not commonplace to talk about the ‘narrator’ of an ancient historical work, and most scholars continue to refer to the ‘author’ when talking about the voice that tells the main narrative and engages in methodological digressions.2 This hesitance to accept the pres- ence of a narrator in works of ancient historiography may be caused by a, more or less conscious, feeling that the difference between historiog- raphy and fiction is partly defined by the latter’s use of a narrator and the absence of a narrator in the former. Such an argument has been voiced by one branch of narratologists, who maintain that the main distinction between fiction and historiography is precisely that a fictional text has a narrator, who is a made-up person or personalised voice distinct from its author, whereas in historiographical texts the narrator is identical with the author.3 Roland Barthes, however, whose writings have greatly influ- enced narratology, had no problem identifying a narratorial voice (before that was the accepted term) in works of historiography, and used medi- eval and ancient works as examples of this.4 Within the field of Classical scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, Carolyn Dewald, John Marincola, and Tim Rood produced important insights into the works of Herodotos and Thucydides by studying their modes of narration.5 More recently, the section on historiography in the magisterial Brill volume Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature edited by De Jong, Nünlist, and Bowie has demonstrated that such an approach is fruitful in the studies of other ancient historiographers as well.6 2 See e.g. such otherwise insightful analyses of historiographical narrative as Gray 2003 (where a preference for ‘historian’ over ‘narrator’ is expressed in n. 1) and 2007; Champion 2007; and Scardino 2012. 3 This has been argued by Gérard Genette (1976 and, in more detail, 1991, 80-8), one of the founding fathers of narratology, and has been reiterated by Dorrit Cohn in her extended attempt to define the formal difference between historiography and fiction (Cohn 1999, 109-31). 4 See e.g. Barthes 1986, 132-3. See also White 1984 and De Jong 2004a: 8-9. 5 Dewald 1987 and 2002; Marincola 1987; Rood 1998. 6 De Jong, Nünlist, Bowie 2004. NArrAtOr And NArrAtOriAl PErsOnA in DiOdOrOs’ BIblIOTHEKE 279 No one, however, has so far approached Diodoros in this way.7 This neglect is no doubt due to his still shady reputation as a ‘mere compiler’, but that is nonsensical: the question of what image Diodoros projects of himself and how he handles his narration is distinct from the question of his originality. By analysing the narrator of the Bibliotheke we can uncover what Diodoros wanted his readers to think about him and how he wanted them to read his work. Whether we think that the Bibliotheke in its actual form lives up to these images is a different matter. The paper falls in three parts. The first part offers a formal description and analysis of the Diodorean narrator according to established narrato- logical categories and compares it with the narrators of the most well- known earlier historiographers. The purpose is to establish the degree to which Diodoros either conforms to or deviates from the established tradi- tion, as well as laying the groundwork for the next two parts of the paper. Part two consists of an analysis of the one passage of the Bibliotheke where the narrator is most explicitly present, namely the preface. This should help us answer some questions about the Bibliotheke, such as what genre Diodoros intended it to be read as, what he wanted his readers to get out of it, and what impression of himself he wanted to project through it — basic questions, perhaps, but questions which have not been adequately confronted with regard to Diodoros and his work. Part three offers a thought-experiment: examining four different stretches of historical nar- rative from four different sections of the Bibliotheke usually thought to owe their different ‘feel’ to their reliance on different sources, I ask what hap- pens if we approach these narratives from a purely narratological perspec- tive. Is it possible, and fruitful, to hypothesise that some of the differences between these narratives are due to conscious decisions about using dif- ferent narratorial voices rather than to mechanical reproduction of the sources? 7 The historiographers
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