Université de Strasbourg

16th USIAS Fellows Seminar - Ancient Greek war writing: Why is it still interesting and how can it be useful?

September 29, 2015
12:00

Edith Foster, Fellow 2014, Case Western Reserve University

The ancient Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon wrote the history of a continuous period in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. All three focused on the wars that were the major catastrophic events of their times. Edith Foster analyzes the rhetorical characteristics of battle and campaign narratives they used to tell the stories of these wars. She looks at the role of battle and campaign narratives in the structure of the histories and also at the links between the three historians. She also examines how the historians met their audience’s expectations while at the same time remaining true to the events of battles and campaigns. In this respect she focuses especially on the historians’ accounts of their audience’s own defeats, since these accounts will have been both politically and emotionally challenging for their readers.

During the seminar, Edith Foster will present her work and suggest that the ancient historians’ battle and campaign narratives are still a useful paradigm for us today.

France 2030