Edith Foster
Fellowship 2014
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Edith Foster obtained her B.A. in Classics and History from the University of Toronto in 1989, her M.A. in classics, also from the University of Toronto, in 1993, and her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2002. She was a visiting assistant professor at the College of Wooster (United States) from 2004 to 2007, assistant professor at Ashland University (United States) from 2008 until 2012, and became an associate professor in 2012. Since 2014 she is a senior research associate at the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States. In the fall of 2014 she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India,
Dr Foster works on ancient Greek prose writers, primarily historiography. She has published a monograph called Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism, with Cambridge University Press in 2010, and an edited volume, co-edited with Donald Lateiner, called Thucydides and Herodotus, with Oxford University Press in 2012. Another edited volume, Kinesis: Essays for Donald Lateiner on the Ancient Depiction of Gesture, Motion, and Emotion will appear with University of Michigan Press in 2015. She is also the historiography editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, and is preparing a commentary on book four of Thucydides for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series of Cambridge University Press.
The Battle Narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon: A Rhetorical Study
This study undertakes an analysis of the battle narratives of the three founding historians of the western historiographical tradition. The study lays special emphasis on analyzing how the historians’ narratives appealed to their post-war audiences in each case, and on how the necessity and desire to appeal to this audience affected the composition of the battle narratives. Thus it begins by analyzing the battle narratives for their role in the structure of the histories and for their individual rhetorical characteristics, and by elucidating how the three historians relate to one another, in respect to their representation of battles, since their writings cover a continuous period of history in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, and the historians were intensely aware of their predecessors’ examples, including the Homeric example. It continues by examining how the historians met their audience’s expectations, while at the same time remaining true to the events of battles and campaigns, perhaps focusing especially on narratives of the audience’s own defeats, which will have been painful for readers to hear or read about. It concludes with analysis of the significance of these battle and war narratives for the historians and for us.
