Christopher Pelling is Fellow in Classics at University College, Oxford. Literary Texts and the Greek Historian examines possible responses to these texts and suggests new ways in which literary criticism can illuminate the society from which these texts sprang. Literary Texts and the Greek Historian concentrates on Athens in the second half of the fifth century, when many of the principal genres came together, but it includes some examples from earlier (Aeschylus’ Oresteia) and later periods (including Aristotle’s Politics). In others, the most illuminating aspect may be those strategies themselves, and what they tell us about the culture - how it figured questions of sex and gender, politics, citizenship and the city, the law and the courts, how wars happen.
In some instances, we can investigate ‘what really happened’, and the ways in which the texts manipulate, remould, or colour it according to their own rhetorical strategies.
HIPPEUS HEROES AND GENERALS HACKS SERIES
How is the historian to use them? This book takes a series of extended test-cases, and discusses how we should and should not try to exploit the texts. These texts are among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts-not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works.