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1. Ancient Historiography
on War and Empire
edited by
Timothy Howe, Sabine Müller
and Richard Stoneman
Hardback edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-299-0
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-300-3 (epub)
© Oxbow Books 201Ĉ
Oxford & Philadelphia
www.oxbowbooks.com
AN OFFPRINT FROM

2. Foreword: Ancient historiography
and ancient history
It is a tradition of sorts for introductory chapters in edited collections to begin by
unpacking the title of the book. μere ν have decided to do something diferent. ν have
deliberately avoided using the word ‘introduction’ in the title of this short paper
because Mark Munn’s work more than serves to introduce and explain the title by
showing the ways in which the literary genre of historiography developed to guide
empires through their wars. Instead, I have chosen to use this space to frame the
issues and identify the weave of ancient historiography and ancient history that our
readers will ind in the chapters that follow.
As the chapters in this book will show, ancient historiography balanced the
reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of its
audience. Each author, in his day, responded to an ever evolving contemporary need to
see the past in light of present circumstances. Over time, historians became ever more
conscious of the fact that they wrote to show contemporaries what past events justiied
the present status of this or that place; what heroic or semi-divine lineage gave
legitimacy to this or that noble family; and what actions led to a great men’s (and great
empire’s) triumphs and tragedies. As Thucydides argues, historiographers created
history to serve as an aid to judgement (ὠ έ α ί ), so that contemporaries
could develop the ability to make informed decisions regarding imminent events based
on an authoritative understanding of the past (1.22.4; Munn, this volume). And this
trend of using the past to shape and inform the present and future only increased over
time – by the time of Alexander, the Diodochoi and the Roman Emperors, historical
writing was capable of playing a signiicant role in the formation of reputations, and
was therefore an integral part of the rhetorical currency of politics, even in a world
now dominated by monarchs and autocrats. Thus, the various Histories provided
salutary lessons on how to reckon the boundaries of empire and anticipate the
efects of policies, and even on what might happen if one failed to recognize the
great danger that lay in testing the boundaries of greatness. The underlying current
that impelled all of this was war and its uncompromizing consequences. Certainly
by the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, historiographers were actively and
intimately involved in the historical process as they sought to shape current decisions
by creating and curating history. And yet, because we moderns are not contemporary
with these ancient authors, and are thus not their intended audiences, we can often
miss important historiographic contexts. Hence, the need for both the historian and

3. xii Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history
the literary critic. The challenge confronting modern scholars, then, is how to situate
the historical context about which the Histories were written, but at the same time,
attend to clues that link texts to contemporary concerns.
This book, which began as a 2013 conference in Athens focused on Greek language
historiography and history, attempts to root out those historical contexts and clues.
The essays ofered here take λreek historiography and ground it in speciic cultural
settings, all the while emphasizing the importance of literary and cultural context.
The book, then, is about both ancient Mediterranean historiography AND history
(hence the title of this ‘Foreward’). These papers sift through historical literature from
the Achaemenid, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’ to tease out context,
identify elements of cultural meaning, and deconstruct traditional literary topoi and
later interpolation in order to gnaw at the historical kernels underlying them and
thereby make sense of the way events and the accounts of those events interact. In
some cases, the balance shifts more towards the ‘literary’ and in others more towards
the ‘historical’, but what all of the essays have in common is an attention to the genre
and context of history-writing in the ancient world. The book has been divided into
ive parts: an νntroduction, where ςark ςunn asks the question ‘όhy μistory?’; a
section on Achaemenid Persia and Classical Greece; a section on Macedon; a section
on εlexander and the Diadochoi; and a inal section on Second Sophistic Rome.
These categories were chosen less out of a desire to create some sort of geographic
coverage than as an attempt to follow the evidence and focus of extant Greek language
historiography.1
Thus, Darius, υhilip νν and εlexander igure prominently; so too do
war, politics and the nature of empire itself.
‘Achaemenid Persia and Greece’ begins with Eran Almagor’s source-rich essay on
the textual relationships between the Achaemenid king and personal divinity.
Here, Almagor analyzes both Persian royal inscriptions and Greek historiography
to explain how and why Greek authors came to assign the Great King seemingly
divine honours that he himself never explicitly claimed. Next, Josef Wiesehöfer’s
paper probes a similar dynamic – the interplay between Greek historiography and
Persian traditions relating to the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder, in order to identify
the role sacriicial rites performed at the Tomb played in historical narratives from
Achaemenid times down through the Age of Alexander. Continuing the theme of
traditions, historiography and royal (self-) presentation, Frances Pownall investigates
the received characterizations of Philistus as ‘the most tyrant-loving’ of all historians.
By investigating Philistus’ role in the factional politics at the court of the Dionysii in
Syracuse, her study ofers insight into both an ancient historian’s political inluence
and the consequences thereof.
‘Macedon’ opens with William Greenwalt’s study of the poorly-understood
Alexander II. Here, Greenwalt considers the presentation of Macedonian royal power.
1
All of the historiographic works analysed here are in the Greek language, with the notable exceptions
being the Alexander histories of Quintus Curtius Rufus and Justin-Trogus.

4. xiii
Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history
Of particular interest are the ways in which discussions of royal military authority
are centred round Philip II and his son, Alexander III, thus overshadowing earlier
rulers such as Philip’s older brother Alexander II. In the next essay, Waldemar Heckel,
Sabine Müller and I examine the historiographic context surrounding the murders
of Philip II, his last and seventh wife, Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos. By taking
these murders in tandem, as the ancient historiographers do, rather than treating
them piecemeal, as individual murder-mysteries, we underscore the importance of
context and, in so doing, ofer a diferent way of seeing. κranca ρanducci λattinoni
closes the theme of Macedonian royal power by analysing the political elements
embedded in Macedonian funeral ceremonies and the cult of the dead – especially
those sponsored by Cassander, son of Antipater in 317 BCE – as reported in the
historiography of Diodorus and now seen among archaeological remains of the Great
Tumulus at Vergina.
Maxim Kholod initiates discussion of Alexander the Great’s empire by investigating
the ςacedonian inancial administration of εsia ςinor. εs οholod demonstrates, the
words α and had a long life before the time of εlexander, in both the
Achaemenid and Athenian empires, and this historiographic complexity makes for an
interesting, often intertextual, study about taxes and their collection in Alexander’s
empire. Next, Hugh Bowden considers eagle symbolism as a vehicle for understanding
how stories of mantic activity facilitated the didactic, ideological and narrative
purposes of the Alexander historians. As with taxation, prophesy had a rich life in
λreek literature and culture before the ςacedonian conqueror, and Bowden ofers
a richly learned study of how prognostication might function for both Alexander
and Alexander historians. Jacek Rzepka continues the themes of narrative and
intertextuality by examining casualty igures among the εlexander historiographers.
μis observations about the irst-generation authors’ level of access to oicial or
contemporary casualty reports do much to deepen our understanding of the ways
in which historiographers might employ and contextualise battle statistics. The next
essay ofers a change in focus: τlga υalagia takes the conversation in a proitable
new direction by investigating the artistic evidence concerning the military actions
of Alexander against Darius. Her study thus illustrates how artists, in much the same
way as writers of ‘histories’, deployed symbols (in this case a ‘visual historiography’ of
artistic symbols) to report and curate Alexander’s deeds for posterity. With the next
paper, we move in another direction entirely, to the worlds that Alexander’s empire
opened to Greek intellectual discourse. Here, Richard Stoneman explores ‘fantastic’
India, and what Greek historiography might ‘know’ about the real India, by asking
‘Where did Aelian derive his story of the Indian hoopoe?’ For Stoneman, the hoopoe
is a way to understand the historiographical aims of Megasthenes, a man ‘who loved
to wander and talk to educated Indians’. In the last essay of this section, Aleksandra
οlęczar returns to the subject of εlexander to consider μellenistic ξewish culture’s
adoption of the great man’s mythos. In her essay, she uses the literary ‘Alexander’ as
a case study for how historical characters were appropriated and historiographically

5. xiv
reinvented and reinterpreted by Jewish intellectuals to assist Jewish culture as it
navigated the dangerous world of the Seleukid and Ptolemaic empires.
The last part of the book explores the inal great movement of ancient λreek
historiography, the so-called Second Sophistic. The section opens with a paper by
Rebecca Frank, who analyses Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-
Caesar pairing to show how Plutarch crafted his Alexander in such a way that it
could ofer commentary on the political legitimacy of ξulius Caesar (and perhaps
all Caesars to come). Continuing the theme of royal legitimacy and improper use
of power, ιlias οoulakiotis relects on images of royal character and charisma in
Plutarch’s Alexander. Here, he uses Plutarch’s portrayal of Alexander and Dionysus
to illustrate Plutarch’s own thoughts on the metaphysics of power and monarchic
ideology. These metaphysics of power also interest Sabine Müller, who traces the
development of the ‘artistic king’ topos across time. In her view, Second Sophistic
authors played with traditional conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate ways
to enjoy the arts so that their audiences might better understand their own Imperial
Rome. By linking inappropriate enjoyment of the arts with historical examples of
tyranny, these authors both delected criticism from contemporary rulers and gave
their audiences much food for thought regarding proper uses of leisure time. The inal
essay of the collection, by Sulochana Asirvatham, continues to follow royal power and
its criticism. By analyzing royal lattery in υlutarch, ρucian, Dio Chrysostom, εrrian
and μerodian, εsirvatham identiies the ways in which Second Sophistic authors
used historiography to uphold their status as λreek intellectuals (π πα έ )
within a Roman power structure that simultaneously supported and subordinated
them. Here, Asirvatham demonstrates that for the authors of the Second Sophistic
the only meaningful challenges to Roman authority were those that happened in
the realm of intellectual discourse, and so, like the other periods under discussion,
where powerful rulers controlled politics, the lessons of the past were used to teach
both rulers and ruled how to behave.
In the end, Asirvatham’s analysis of historiography’s participation in conversations
about status draws together many of the strands of the book and reiterates Munn’s
seminal point that ancient historiographers aimed to shape history and not simply
to report it. All here agree that Greek writers used historical data to create not just
an interpretation of the past for their audiences but also to establish and curate their
own authorial personae. Consequently, a common theme that runs through these
studies is that readers analyze and interpret historical content and literary context
in parallel, as the authors originally intended, and not read historiography simply
as reports of ‘what happened’.
At this point, it is necessary to say a word about editorial choices. Richard, Sabine
and I decided to include bibliographies with each chapter, rather than synthesize
them into a common list at the end. While this did allow for a (small) amount of
duplication, we felt this was outweighed by the fact that each chapter could stand
as a complete article, with the references close to hand. Following this theme, we
Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history

6. xv
also chose not to impose a ‘house’ style for Latinizing (or not) ancient names, and
so there is some variation throughout. While these variations have resulted in a
lighter editorial footprint than some might have wished, we hope that readers will,
in general, approve.
Timothy Howe
σorthield, ςinnesota
January 2016
Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history