Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-923129-4
Verlag: OUP Oxford

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 145 mm x 222 mm, Gewicht: 618 g

In his extraordinary story of the defence of Greece against the Persian invasions of 490-480 BC Herodotus sought to communicate not only what happened, but also the background of thoughts and perceptions that shaped those events and became critical to their interpretation afterwards. Much as the contemporary sophists strove to discover truth about the invisible, Herodotus was acutely concerned to uncover hidden human motivations, whose depiction was vital to his project of recounting and explaining the past. Emily Baragwanath explores the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represented this most elusive variety of historical knowledge. Thus he was able to tell a lucid story of the past while nonetheless exposing the methodological and epistemological challenges it presented. Baragwanath illustrates and analyses a range of these techniques over the course of a wide selection of Herodotus' most intriguing narratives - from those on Athenian democracy and tyranny to Leonidas and Thermopylae - and thus supplies a method for reading the Histories more generally.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baragwanath, Emily

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike Griechische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Griechische & Byzantinische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 1: The Histories, Plutarch, and reader response

- 2: The Homeric background

- 3: Constructions of motives and the historian's persona

- 4: Problematized motivation in the Samian and Persian logoi (Book III)

- 5: For better, for worse.: motivation in the Athenian logoi (Books I and VI)

- 6: `For freedom's sake.': motivation in the Ionian Revolt (Books V-VI)

- 7: To medize or not to medize.: compulsion and negative motives (Books VII-IX)

- 8: Xerxes: motivation and explanation (Books VII-IX)

- 9: Themistocles: constructions of motivation (Books VII-IX)

- Epilogue

Über Autor(innen)

Emily Baragwanath is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.