Modern Histories of Ancient Greece: Genealogies, Contexts and Eighteenth-Century Narrative Historiography

17 Pages Posted: 1 Jul 2009

Date Written: February 2008

Abstract

This essay is a response to Aleka Lianeri's call to reflect on how encounters with antiquity were foundational to modern categories of historiography, by exploring both the idea of the historical and the discipline's concepts and practices. In taking up such questions I chose to focus on the earliest modern narrative histories of ancient Greece, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century. I examine these works' wider contexts and singular features as well as their reception in the discipline. I argue for the formative role of this moment for modern historiography. Although they were often dismissed as simple narratives, these early modern works provided later historians with a sense of their own modernity. These texts prefigured modern narrative historiography's relationship of simultaneous dependence and independence from its ancient models.

Suggested Citation

Ceserani, Giovanna, Modern Histories of Ancient Greece: Genealogies, Contexts and Eighteenth-Century Narrative Historiography (February 2008). Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Paper No. 020805, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1427422 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1427422

Giovanna Ceserani (Contact Author)

affiliation not provided to SSRN

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