Ancient Historiography on War and Empire

Timothy Howe · Sabine Müller · Richard Stoneman

Nov 2016 · Oxbow Books

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In the ancient Greek-speaking world, writing about the past meant balancing the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of the present. Ancient Historiography on War and Empire shows the ways in which the literary genre of writing history developed to guide empires through their wars. Taking key events from the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’, the 17 essays collected here analyse the way events and the accounts of those events interact. Subjects include: how Greek historians assign nearly divine honours to the Persian King; the role of the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder in historical narratives of conquest and empire from Herodotus to the Alexander historians; warfare and financial innovation in the age of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great; the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos; Alexander the Great’s combat use of eagle symbolism and divination; Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing as a commentary on political legitimacy and military prowess, and Roman Imperial historians using historical examples of good and bad rule to make meaningful challenges to current Roman authority. 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 both a critical attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world and its focus on war and empire.

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Timothy Howe is Professor of History and Ancient Studies at St Olaf College (USA) and Associate Field Director of the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Project in Southern Turkey. He specialises in Mediterranean agriculture and trade, Alexander the Great, ancient Mediterranean warfare, and Greek and Latin historiography.

Sabine Müller is Professor of Ancient History at Marburg University (Germany) where she specialises in ancient Near East, Greece, Macedonia and Rome including iconography and the study of ancient writers in relation to archaeoligcal evidence

Richard Stoneman is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Exeter (UK) with particular research interest in the continuity of the Greek world and Greek tradition up to the present day and in Alexander the Great, especially in later legend.