The Children of Herodotus

Book excerpt: This book consists of 22 papers originally presented during the conference on ancient historical writing held in May 2007 in Wrocław, Poland. The authors are classical historians and philologists from academic institutions in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The collection responds to a growing interest among classical scholars in historiography and such related genres as ethnography and biography. The focus of the volume is, on the one hand, on the ancient historians’ methods of approaching the external world, especially a non-Greek (or non-Roman) world, and, on the other, on the political dimension of historical writing, especially of Roman imperial historiography. There are also papers devoted to pointing and defining links between historiography and other literary genres such as epic or novel. Much attention is given to classical Greek historiography (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon), but other authors and periods are also discussed. The book is addressed to classical scholars, historians of historiography and anyone interested in ancient world. With a view to a non-specialist reader, all Greek and most Latin quotations are translated.