Making Time for the Past: Local History and the Polis

by Katherine Clarke

Overview

This book has two main and connected themes - the conception and articulation of time in the Greek world and the creation of history, especially in the context of the Greek city. Both how time is expressed and how the past is presented have often been seen as reflections of society. By looking at the construction of the past through the medium of local historiography, where we can view these issues in the relatively restricted world of individual city-states, we can gain a clearer insight into how different versions of the past and different constructions of time were offered to the community for approval. In this way, the citizens were able to negotiate time past and indeed their own history, and thereby to express their values and aspirations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199291083
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/02/2008
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Katherine Clarke teaches mostly late republican and early imperial Roman History, covering the fascinating period of dynamic change during which Rome moved from a relatively democratic form of rule to the monarchical power of, albeit often benevolent, emperors. She has published extensively on the works of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Polybius.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations xiii

I Introduction 1

1 Man is the measure of all things: counting the days 1

2 The multiplication of times 7

3 Time for everyone 27

II Making a business of time 47

1 Constructing calendards 47

2 Chronographical works 56

III The world outside the polis 90

1 Thucydides and the problem of supra-polis time 90

2 Inventing universal history: Ephorus' contribution 96

3 Extending time across space: the Olympiadic revolution 109

4 Diodorus Siculus and the culmination of universal chronology 121

5 Strabonian strategies: between local and universal 140

6 Telling the time for the non-Greek world 150

IV 'City is history incarnate': Writing the past of the polis 169

1 From the city of Byzas to constantinople 169

2 Tracing the history of local historiography: resurrecting Jacoby's Atthis 175

3 Time for local history: pacing the past 193

4 Bridging the gap between local and universal 230

V Persuasion and plausibility: history and rhetoric in the polis 245

1 Parameters of plausibility 245

2 Addressing Athens: Presenting the past 252

3 'Learning from history': models from the past 274

4 Escaping the ravages of time: the preservation of history 286

5 Marking time 293

6 Past, present, and persuasion in the polis 297

VI Time for the polis: audiences and contexts 304

1 The city of the sundial 304

2 Valuing the past: Promoting the polis 313

3 Local heroes: placing the historian in the polis 338

4 From local hero to supra-political ambassador 346

5 Itinerant intellectuals, Mediterranean mobility: negotiating the world of Rome 354

6 Returning to the polis 363

Epilogue 370

References 372

Subject Index 391

Index of Passages discussed 399