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: Suggested Citation