The past is narrated in retrospect. Historians can either capitalize on the benefit of hindsight and give their narratives a strongly teleological design or they may try to render the past as it was experienced by historical agents and contemporaries. This book explores the fundamental tension between experience and teleology in major works of Greek and Roman historiography, biography and autobiography. The combination of theoretical reflections with close readings yields a new, often surprising assessment of the history of ancient historiography as well as a deeper understanding of such authors as Thucydides, Tacitus and Augustine. While much recent work has focused on how ancient historians use emplotment to generate historical meaning, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography offers a new approach to narrative form as a mode of coming to grips with time.

This book explores the tension in ancient historiography between teleological design and narrating the past as it was experienced by historical characters.

This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience with the help of ancient material, exploring our responses to both narratives and images.

The distinction between ancient and modern modes of historical thought is characterized by the growing complexity of the discipline of history in modernity. Consequently, the epistemological and methodological standard of ancient historiography is typically held as inferior against the modern ideal. This book serves to address this apparent deficit. Its scope is three-fold. Firstly, it aims at encountering ancient modes of historical and historiographical thought within the province of their own horizon. Secondly, this book considers the possibility of a dialogue between ancient and modern philosophies of history concerning the influence of ancient historical thought on the development of modern philosophy of history and the utility of modern philosophy of history in the interpretation of ancient historiography. Thirdly, this book explores the continuities and discontinuities in historical method and thought from antiquity to modernity. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates the necessity of re-evaluating our assumptions about the relation of ancient and modern historical thought and lays the groundwork for a more fruitful dialogue in the future.

Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches, opening up new vistas within the study of classical literature while ably deploying the ancient material to demonstrate the value of a historical perspective for cognitive studies. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. The thirteen chapters presented here tackle a broad range of narrative genres, broadly understood: besides epic, historiography, and the novel, tragedy and early Christian texts are also considered alongside non-literary media, such as dance and sculpture. Authored by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, each chapter utilizes a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools drawn from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics that place them at the vanguard of a strong new current in classical scholarship and literary criticism more generally.

From the early modern period, Greek historiography has been studied in the context of Cicero's notion historia magistra vitae and considered to exclude conceptions of the future as different from the present and past. Comparisons with the Roman, Judeo-Christian and modern historiography have sought to justify this perspective by drawing on a category of the future as a temporal mode that breaks with the present. In this volume, distinguished classicists and historians challenge this contention by raising the question of what the future was and meant in antiquity by offering fresh considerations of prognostic and anticipatory voices in Greek historiography from Herodotus to Appian and by tracing the roots of established views on historical time in the opposition between antiquity and modernity. They look both at contemporary scholarly argument and the writings of Greek historians in order to explore the relation of time, especially the future, to an idea of the historical that is formulated in the plural and is always in motion. By reflecting on the prognostic of historical time the volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars, but to all who are interested in the history and theory of historical time.

Crises resulting from war or other upheavals turn the lives of individuals upside down, and they can leave marks on a community for many years after the event. This volume aims to explore how such crises were remembered in the ancient world, and how communities reconstituted themselves after a crisis. Can crises serve as catalysts for innovation or change, and how does this work? What do crises reveal about the 'normality' against which they are defined and framed? People living in post-crisis societies have no choice but to adapt to the changes caused by crisis. Such adaptation entails the question of how the relationship between the pre-crisis situation and the new status quo is constructed, and by whom. Due to the reduced possibility of using the immediate past, which is tainted by conflict and bad memories, it may involve revisions of historical narratives about communal pasts and identities, through the selection of new 'anchors', and sometimes even a discarding of the old ones. Crises affect all areas of life, and crisis recovery likewise spans different spheres. This volume finds traces of such recovery strategies in texts as well as visual representations; in literary as well as in documentary texts; in official ideology as much as in subaltern responses. The contributors bring together the diverse testimonies for such ways of coping that have survived from antiquity.

Charles W. Fornara's Herodotus: An Interpretative Essay (Oxford, 1971) was a landmark publication in the study of the great Greek historian. Well-known in particular for its main thesis that the Histories should be read against the background of the Atheno-Peloponnesian Wars during which it was written, its insight and penetrating discussion extend to a range of other issues, from the relative unity of Herodotus' work and the relationship between his ethnographies and historical narrative, to the themes and motifs that criss-cross the Histories - how 'history became moral and Herodotus didactic'. Interpreting Herodotus brings together a team of leading Herodotean scholars to look afresh at the themes of Fornara's seminal Essay in the light of the explosion of scholarship on the Histories in the intervening years, focusing particularly on how we can interpret Herodotus' work in terms of the context in which he wrote. What does it mean to talk of the unity of the Histories, or Herodotus' 'moral' purpose? How can we reconstruct the context in which the Histories were written and published? And in what sense might the Histories constitute a 'warning' for his own, or for subsequent, generations? In developing and interrogating Fornara's influential ideas for a new generation of scholars, the volume also offers a wealth of insights and new perspectives on the 'Father of History' that attests to the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary engagement with Herodotus.

Anatomies of the Gospels and Beyond is an edited volume structured around essays that focus on one of the four canonical Gospels (and Acts) and/or theoretical issues involved in literary readings of New Testament narrative. The volume is intended to honor the legacy of R. Alan Culpepper, Emeritus Professor and Former Dean at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. The title of the volume (which alludes to the title of Culpepper’s ground-breaking monograph, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel) and the breadth of the essays are apt reflections of his research interests over his academic career of over forty years. The twenty-five contributors are internationally recognized experts in New Testament studies; thus, the essays represent a snapshot of current research.

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.