The Western Time of Ancient History
Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts

This book discusses the conceptual and temporal frames through which modern Western historiography has linked itself to classical antiquity.

Alexandra Lianeri (Edited by)

9780521883139, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2011

372 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.4 cm, 0.73 kg

'This book of essays, uniformly learned, perspicuous, and philosophically sophisticated, constitutes a genuine revision of traditional notions of the relation between Greek and Roman ideas about temporality and historicity and their modern counterparts. The essays question the presumed genealogical affiliation between the Greek 'founders' of a historical idea of time and their modern avatars. Not only is history shown to have taken on many different forms and modes in antiquity, but the mainstream tradition begun by Herodotus and Thucydides is shown to have been quite alien to much of what is taken to be the orthodoxy of modern, post-Rankean historiography. The 'past' of the classical age will never look quite the same again.' Hayden White, University Professor of the History of Consciousness, Emeritus, University of California

This book examines the conceptual and temporal frames through which modern Western historiography has linked itself to classical antiquity. In doing so, it articulates a genealogical problematic of what history is and a more strictly focused reappraisal of Greek and Roman historical thought. Ancient ideas of history have played a key role in modern debates about history writing, from Kant through Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and from Friedrich Creuzer through George Grote and Theodor Mommsen to Momigliano and Moses Finley; yet scholarship has paid little attention to the theoretical implications of the reception of these ideas. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of relevant topics and approaches and boast distinguished authors from across Europe in the fields of classics, ancient and modern history and the theory of historiography.

Introduction. Unfounding times: the idea and ideal of ancient history in Western historical thought Alexandra Lianeri
Part I. Theorising Western Time: Concepts and Models: 1. Time's authority François Hartog
2. Exemplarity and anti-exemplarity in Early Modern Europe Peter Burke
3. Greek philosophy and Western history: a philosophy-centred temporality Giuseppe Cambiano
4. Historiography and political theology: Momigliano and the end of history Howard Caygill
Part II. Ancient History and Modern Temporalities: 5. The making of a bourgeois antiquity. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Greek history Stefan Rebenich
6. Modern histories of Ancient Greece: genealogies, contexts and eighteenth-century narrative historiography Giovanna Ceserani
7. Acquiring (a) historicity: Greek history, temporalities and eurocentrism in the Sattelzeit Kostas Vlassopoulos
8. Herodotus and Thucydides in the view of nineteenth-century German historians Ulrich Muhlack
9. Monumentality and the meaning of the past in ancient and modern historiography Neville Morley
Part III. Unfounding Time In and Through Ancient Historical Thought: 10. Thucydides and social change: between akribeia and universality Rosalind Thomas
11. Historia magistra vitae in Herodotus and Thucydides? The exemplary use of the past, and ancient and modern temporalities Jonas Grethlein
12. Repetition and exemplarity in historical thought: ancient Rome and the ghosts of modernity Ellen O'Gorman
13. Time and authority in the chronicle of Sulpicius Severus Michael Williams
Part IV. Afterword: 14. Ancient history in the eighteenth century Oswyn Murray
15. Seeing in and through time John Dunn.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Historiography [HBAH]