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Narrative in Hellenistic Historiography NARRATIVE IN HELLENISTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY HISTOS The Online Journal of Ancient Historiography Founding Editor: John Moles Histos Supplements Supervisory Editor: John Marincola &. Antony Erich Raubitschek, Autobiography of Antony Erich Raubitschek . Edited with Introduction and Notes by Donald Lateiner (./&0). .. A. J. Woodman, Lost Histories: Selected Fragments of Roman Historical Writers (./&4). 5. Felix Jacoby, On the Development of Greek Historiography and the Plan for a New Collection of the Fragments of the Greek Historians . Translated by Mortimer Chambers and Stefan Schorn (./&4). 0. Anthony Ellis, ed., God in History: Reading and Rewriting Herodotean Theology from Plutarch to the Renaissance (./&4). 4. Richard Fernando Buxton, ed., Aspects of Leadership in Xenophon (./&9). 9. Emily Baragwanath and Edith Foster, edd., Clio and Thalia: Attic Comedy and Historiography (./&:). :. John Moles, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Brutus (./&:). ;. Alexander Meeus, ed., Narrative in Hellenistic Historiography (./&;). NARRATIVE IN HELLENISTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY EDITED BY ALEXANDER MEEUS HISTOS SUPPLEMENT ; NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE . / & ; Published by H I S T O S School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE& :RU, United Kingdom ISSN (Online): ./09-4@95 (Print): ./09-4@44 © ./&; THE INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS To the Memory of JOHN L. MOLES (&@0@–./&4) TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ............................................................................. vii &. Introduction: Narrative and Interpretation in the Hellenistic Historians Alexander Meeus .............................................................. & .. Geographical and Historical Patterning in Diodorus Siculus Tim Rood ...................................................................... .5 5. Implied Motivation in Diodorus’ Narrative of the Successors Shane Wallace ............................................................... 9@ 0. Filling in the Gaps: Studying Anachronism in Dio- dorus’ Narrative of the First Sicilian ‘Slave War’ Peter Morton ................................................................. &&4 4. Emotion and Greekness in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Account of the Exile of Coriolanus Dan Hogg .................................................................... &04 9. A Literary Passage: Polybius and Plutarch’s Narrator Eran Almagor ............................................................... &:& PREFACE Most of the papers in this volume originate in a workshop on history and narrative in Hellenistic historiography held in Lampeter on September &9 and &:, ./&&. I would like to thank the Classics department of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, especially Errietta Bissa and Kyle Erickson, KYKNOS: the Swansea and Lampeter Centre for Research on the Narrative Literatures of the Ancient World, and Peter Hopkins of the Roderic Bowen Library and Archives for their support in setting up this workshop. I would also thank Mike Edwards, who chaired one of the sessions, and the other participants who travelled to Lampeter and made it into an excellent workshop. To John Moles and John Marincola I am greatly indebted for their offer to publish the papers in the Histos Supplements series; I deeply regret that John Moles no longer gets to see the result, and I dedicate the volume to his memory, both because I have learned so much about ancient historiography from him and because he has always been most supportive. I would also like to thank John Marincola for his editorial work. Judith Schönholz deserves gratitude for her help correcting the proofs with her habitual thoroughness. To Melanie Meaker I am greatly indebted for asking so many insightful questions about historiography and life. A.M. Mannheim November, ./&; Histos Supplement ( ) – INTRODUCTION: NARRATIVE AND INTERPRETATION IN THE HELLENISTIC HISTORIANS * Alexander Meeus his volume aims to offer some new perspectives on Hellenistic historiography by focussing on its narra- T tive dimension. After some brief remarks about Hellenistic historiography, I shall in this introduction ad- dress some of the criticisms voiced against narratology in recent scholarship and argue why and how I think a narra- tological approach can be useful; this is followed by an overview of the book’s chapters. Scholarship on the Hellenistic Historians The narratological study of ancient historians has become very popular in the last two decades, after Hornblower’s 889 article demonstrated the fruitfulness of such an approach in the case of Thucydides. 1 This approach has not been applied to Polybius and especially Diodorus and Dionysius as often as to the classical historians. 2 Although * I would like to thank Lisa Irene Hau for reading an earlier draft of this introduction and Melanie Meaker for drawing the version of the historical matrix printer here. 1 Hornblower (889). De Jong ( 9) offers an excellent introduction to narratology for Classicists which includes a chapter on historiography. 2 Cf. Marincola ( =) > on the absence of Diodorus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus from De Jong–Nünlist–Bowie ( 9), a standard work on narratology that does include many other historians. Recent studies of nar- Alexander Meeus the tide seems to be turning in recent years, these authors still seem to attract less interest as writers than their classical counterparts. Although Polybius does fare better than Dionysius and especially Diodorus, even some recent overviews of Hellenistic literature pay scant attention to them, despite their being among the most extensively preserved Hellenistic prose authors. 3 Admittedly, many claim that Polybius is the only preserved Hellenistic historian and situate Diodorus and Dionysius rather in a Roman context, but this seems open to debate. Rome is far more central to Polybius’ historiographical project than it is to that of Diodorus. 4 Dionysius’ perspective on Greece and Rome is very rative in the Hellenistic historians include Wiater ( F) on Polybius, Hau ( ) on Diodorus, and Fromentin ( ) on Dionysius, to name just a few. 3 Cf. Wallace ( ) 8F– . Believe it or not, even Diodorus has literary aspirations: see . .H–F; Palm (8HH), esp. 8=; Schmitz ( ) > . Gutzwiller ( F) F covers the period > >–> BC and thus ex- cludes Dionysius, but Diodorus also makes only a few brief appear- ances, and only as cover-text author for the fragments of lost authors. In Clauss and Cuypers ( ), a highly interesting essay by Gowing argues that Hellenistic historiography ends with Polybius and that Diodorus and Dionysius require a different label, although it is hard to say what that should be (Gowing ( ) > 9). Scanlon ( H) 8 has the Hellenistic period end in 9= BC and places Polybius, Diodorus and Dionysius in the Roman Era ( >F). In Scardino ( 9) the latest authors included are Strabo and Juba II. 4 For Polybius see >..9 and >.9.= with, e.g., Marincola ( ) F, – and 9 n. >; for Diodorus, Rathmann ( =) F–99, 8H–> H and Cohen-Skalli ( ), though see also the different perspective of Yarrow ( =), esp. H –=. That Diodorus can be placed in the ‘Augustan period’ (e.g., Schmitz ( ) >F) seems quite unlikely: on his date, see now Westall ( ). Schmitz’s ( ) interesting analysis recognises some limited proto-classicising features in Diodorus which connect him to the second sophistic, but he may dismiss the role of paideia in Ephorus too easily (Stylianou (88 ) – with references to Schepens and Burde; cf. Hau ( 8) on the method of Sacks) and overstate the classicising dimension of Diodorus’ moralising (cf. Hau =); it is also unclear how some of these proto-classicising features would have compared to other Hellenistic works of history. Introduction: Narrative and Interpretation in Hellenistic Historians > different again, 5 but the question of a definition of Hellenis- tic historiography surely involves more than that. In their language Polybius and Diodorus are very close, and Dionysius’ language is surely closer to theirs than he would have cared to admit himself. 6 Hau has shown interesting narratorial similarities between Polybius and Diodorus which distinguish them from their classical predecessors, and which it would be interesting to compare to Dionysius and later post-classical historians. 7 Obviously, even these issues do not exhaust the question, and it is surely a matter that deserves further study. Periodisation is always arbitrary and no ancient author had any idea that he might have been living in the Hellenistic age, yet it is useful as a way of structuring our answer to the question whether historians living close to each other in time also shared other char- acteristics that they did not share with those who lived at a greater temporal distance from them. In discussing histori- cal narrative from Diodorus to Plutarch whilst also looking 5 Delcourt ( H); Gowing ( ); Wiater ( ) who does, however, use the label ‘Hellenistic’ (89); cf. also Hogg, below, Ch. H, on Roman- ness and Greekness in Dionysius. 6 Palm (8HH) – and =; Usher (8 ), esp. H–> and >F– ; Kim ( ) 9F>–H and ( F) 98–H; Asirvatham ( F) 9F : the change in language only really comes after Plutarch (see also Hogg, this volume, pp. 9F– n. 8). Given the connection between Atticism and identity, the scope of this observation goes well beyond the merely linguistic. In that respect, one may wonder whether a history of Hellenistic historiography should end only with the time of Hadrian, like Chaniotis’ recent history of what he calls the ‘long Hellenistic Age’ (Chaniotis ( )). This somewhat resembles the approach taken
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