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Scanlon ( T.F. ) Greek Historiography . Pp. xii + 333. Chichester, Malden, MA and Oxford : Wiley Blackwell , 2015. Cased, £45, [euro]60.80, US$69.95. ISBN: 978-1-4051-4522-0 .
Reviews
This is in many ways a helpful introductory textbook for use in courses on Greek historiography or for the interested general reader. Its virtues are several. It offers a generous treatment of the contexts of historical writing in antiquity (though much more so for the earlier periods of the genre's development). While devoting most space to Herodotus and Thucydides, it devotes full chapters to Xenophon (the ambition of whose writings is sympathetically treated) and Polybius. It has a larger chronological range than some of its competitors: the final chapter on 'Greek Historians in the Roman Era' includes brief discussions of writers from Fabius Pictor and Posidonius to Cassius Dio and Herodian. Throughout, it offers a flexible guide to the intellectual aspirations of the writers it covers: the Greek historians are attractively presented not as narrow dogmatists but as rich exploratory thinkers, and their interests are brought out through sensitive thematic readings and linear surveys. S. also foregrounds some of the important Greek terms the historians employed, notably the vocabulary of power (this is explored to particularly good effect in the chapter on Herodotus). Finally, there is a helpful section of 'Further Reading' to supplement the chapter-by-chapter bibliographies.
Against these positive features must be set a few awkward choices and interpretations. While W.R. Connor's 1984 Thucydides is acknowledged as an inspiration for the format of some of the discussion, S.'s book-by-book treatments are at times little more than paraphrases: one wonders whether fuller thematic sections...