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This chapter makes a sustained comparison between the speeches of Calgacus and Agricola in Tacitus's Agricola, and the longer sequence in the narrative of the Batavian revolt in Tacitus, Histories iv, involving orations by Julius Civilis, Petilius Cerealis, and others. Both works use rhetorical topoi current in the tradition of criticism of Roman imperialism; something is also said by way of defence of empire. These rhetorical arguments are deployed in complicated ways and as always, the speeches must be seen in relation to the narrative. The aim is not to reach facile conclusions about Tacitus's view of empire, but to examine the complexities of conflicting views in the texts, both in the speeches and in the authorial narrative.

Taking Plutarch's criticisms in de Malignitate Herodoti as a point of entry into Herodotus' strategies for guiding his readers' response, this chapter argues that Herodotus' reader is motivated to take a particular, active stance towards his text. Herodotus is set in the context of the sophists. The theoretical background of Iser's reader response criticism is introduced, with Herodotus' presentation of the question of the Alcmaeonids' possible medizing after Marathon serving as a test case for a reader-response approach.

This chapter addresses Herodotus' portrayal of characters in the Histories whose inquiries into questions of motivation parallel his own. In discussing the dual persona of the Herodotean narrator, it reformulates Plutarch's charge that Herodotus slid too easily between the categories of ‘historian’ and ‘sophist’. It contends that Leonidas in the Thermopylae narrative (with its interweaving of heroic and more pragmatic motivations) is constructed in the Herodotean narrator's likeness, imitating the methods and purposes of the narrator in his approach to questions of motives, and displaying a polarized personality. The metatextual perspective furthers one's characterization of Herodotus at the same time as it reinforces the importance of questions of motivation.

This chapter considers the way in which evidence from character and action, in the Histories, is not necessarily a guide to motivation; and how, despite the importance Herodotus places on nomoi, these too are no necessary determinant of behaviour. Against the foil supplied by Thucydides' practice in this respect, it examines how Herodotus exposes the difficulties involved in determining motives in his depiction of paradoxical and irrational motivation in the Samian and Persian narratives. Cambyses is taken to be an extreme example of general human behaviour: comparison with others suggests that his behaviour, if extreme, is not entirely idiosyncratic, and deconstructs the idea that Greeks and Persians differ at all in this respect. Herodotus' ascriptions of motives are seen to function as sites of destabilisation that indicate dissonance between intention and outcome, hint at variant readings, or foreground ironies.

In this chapter the Athenians' idealistic expression of 8.144—with its slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘Greek unity’ (to Hellênikon)—introduces a discussion of these key ideal motives and the role of rhetoric in the Ionian Revolt narrative, which proves an important touchstone for assessing the later campaign. Herodotus' text foregrounds the complications of rhetoric, problematising idealising readings and yielding salient ironies, including that of how freedom (as in the case of the ‘polis tyrannos’ of the Athenian democracy) promotes and even entails rule over others. The ideas on motivation in the previous chapter are refined, since the question of whether motives are principled or pragmatic is not after all wholly clear-cut: the Histories' concept of motivation is dynamic, allowing for the possibility of progression in response to changing circumstances, and sensitive also to the potential for complex psychology.

This chapter examines the interaction of ascriptions of motivation with wider patterns of explanation for Xerxes' failure, illustrating how, for example, specific attributions of motive—particularly the alternative possibilities—may encapsulate and draw attention to wider explanations. They may strengthen the impression that different explanations arise from different perspectives (particularly Greek versus Persian), thus illuminating the role of focalization in fashioning motives. The charge of megalophrosunê at Histories 7.24 is reevaluated, with Xerxes' notorious digging of the Athos Canal viewed as a matter as much of display as of hybris. The twin comparisons of Xerxes with his predecessors Darius and Cambyses highlight how Xerxes' behaviour is often at least as much the result of the circumstances in which he finds himself as of his character.

This chapter addresses Herodotus' presentation of Themistocles' motives, taking as a test case the general's rhetoric and conduct at Andros (9.109-110) and after. It reconsiders the possibility of unreliable narratorial comments and the effect of these in eliciting reader response, particularly through the production of shifting perspectives. Herodotus' presentation recalls subsequent history and contemporary - late 5th-century - politics, for example in reflecting sophistic/democratic processes. While underlining the importance of original readers' contemporary experience in interpreting the Histories, the chapter brings out how the narrative in turn exposes the role played by later events in the retrospective fashioning of motivation. It again underlines the complexity of Herodotus' presentation and how it opens up different interpretative possibilities, highlighting the historian's broad intellectual and historiographical—rather than more narrowly political—concerns.

Chapter Three analyses the Valori family's friendship with Niccolò Machiavelli. It considers Niccolò Valori's political support of Machiavelli, their common fortunes following the restoration of the Medici and how those connections became reflected in Machiavelli's historical writings. It looks at a discrepancy between passages in Machiavelli's Discorsi and a small work entitled Nature di huomini fiorentini. In the former, Machiavelli interpreted Francesco, owing to his influential combination of ambition and power, as a potential problem for republican politics, an instigator of controversial policies and a lightning‐rod around which tension and conflict was naturally attracted; in the latter, written during a period of heightened Medici power, Machiavelli interpreted Francesco as a republican patriot who subordinated his private interests to uphold the common good of the republic at all times. The chapter argues that Machiavelli was attempting to downplay his ties to the Valori family and the republican associations that alliance implied.

This chapter examines three conspicuous instances of historiographical synkrisis in Tacitus' Histories (Histories 1.50.2–3; 2.38; 3.51) in which the republican civil wars are the lens through which Tacitus invites his readers to respond to the wars of ad 69: the republican past, these digressions suggest, is trumped by the morally bankrupt narrative present. By foregrounding the act of analysis Tacitus also demonstrates the value of the historian's work for his contemporaries and for posterity.

The aim of this book has been merely to problematize the entire process of imposing disciplinary categories on the ancient sources and marshalling them in such a way as to support a linear narrative of evolution and progress. Viewed in its appropriate context, the invention of ethnographic prose is every bit as interesting and important as the old model of a fifth-century epiphany in reaction to unprecedented levels of contact with non-Greeks. In order to demonstrate this more fully, this chapter turns to what is, if not the earliest, then certainly the largest piece of ethnographic prose to survive in its entirety: the Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. In doing so it returns to broader, overarching questions introduced in Chapter 1 regarding the origins and nature of Greek ethnography, from Homer to Herodotus, the sense of collective identity upon which it was predicated, and the implications these pose for the study of Great Historiography.

Essex and his followers’ attitudes to classical and historical scholarship are examined. The relationship between arms and letters was idealized in praise for Essex’s militarism, but the study of Tacitus fostered a parallel obsession with the likely repression of virtue, and the decline of states that failed to reward virtuous conduct. Readings of Tacitus by Sir Henry Savile, Essex’s mentor and translator of Tacitus’s Histories and Agricola, indicate the frameworks employed by the earl to interpret his political problems as manifestations of a state governed by a weak tyrant. Connections between Essex’s rising in 1601 and the fascination of writers and dramatists with medieval baronial revolts are also examined, especially the deposition of Richard II by Henry Bullingbrook. Noble revolts were widely condemned in sixteenth-century literature as liable to result in the deposition of monarchs. These were the frameworks invoked by contemporaries to define and interpret Essex’s rising in 1601.

Pericles' contemporaries Sophocles and Protagoras depict him as he dealt with the onslaught of the plague, at the end of his life. By contrast, the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who was somewhat younger than Pericles, looks back to Pericles' birth. We do not know exactly when Herodotus was born, but a date around 485 B.C. is not far off the mark. He died around 420, or slightly later. At some point Herodotus participated in the colony in southern Italy at the new city of Thurii that was established with Pericles' support in 444/3. Herodotus also spent considerable time in Athens, where, it is reported, he gave readings from his account of the Persian Wars, which has a distinctly pro-Athenian bias. In his Histories, Herodotus mentions Pericles once. The birth of Pericles culminates Herodotus's account of the Alcmaeonids, the aristocratic family to which Pericles belonged on his mother's side, and their opposition to absolute government. This story of Pericles' Alcmaeonid family in turn immediately follows the narrative of the miraculous Athenian victory at Marathon.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the crucial themes within Machiavelli's three major political writings: The Prince, the Discourses and the Florentine Histories. It challenges what is considered to be misguided interpretive efforts offered by three illustrious, widely influential appraisals of the Florentine's work. Furthermore, the chapter substantiates Machiavelli's consistent advocacy for a new form of muscular, populist politics conveyed across his three greatest works. It also details how and why major interpretive schools of Machiavelli's political thought have either missed or deliberately obscured the radical extent of the Florentine's decidedly democratic form of republicanism. The chapter tackles suspect engagements with Machiavelli's political thought undertaken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, and scholars affiliated with the Cambridge School.

This chapter argues that the people must assert their necessary, salutary role as the guardian of liberty against predatory oligarchs and tyrants. It suggests that once readers appreciate that one of the most frequently quoted passages in the entire Florentine Histories occurs just a mere few paragraphs after Machiavelli has demonstrated this to be a deeply inaccurate assessment of events, they are encouraged to begin rethinking the entire relationship of words and deeds in that book—a reconsideration which reveals that Machiavelli, perhaps more often than not, seems to undermine his own expressly declared evaluative judgments throughout the entire Histories. The chapter also shows how pleasurable, perplexing, and beguiling the careful reading of Machiavelli's political writings can be.

This chapter is concerned with Herodotus' approach to history across a host of methodological and moral domains. The hallmark of Herodotus' method in the Histories, it is argued, is variety. This is true of his approach to subject matter, sources, and causation. In each of these arenas diversity and conflict occur too frequently and too pointedly to be ignored and, as a result, Herodotus' methodology should be seen as notably pluralist in this regard. Herodotus' stance on moral conflicts also shows a pluralist leaning, especially in contrast with Thucydides. His depiction of moral dilemmas (e.g. Gyges) reveals a true understanding of the core pluralist tenet of incommensurability. So too, the portrait of the conflict between East and West is ultimately drawn as incommensurable. Finally, Herodotus' acceptance of and deep fascination with the diversity of different peoples is taken as a mark of cultural pluralism.

This chapter does not aim to not to review (still less to seek to replace) earlier treatments of the ‘origins of history’. Rather, it suggests a different — broader — approach to such a question, and to offer another, complementary answer. In particular, the hypothesis will be advanced that the origins of history writing were (to a significant degree) theological. It argues that Herodotus' beliefs, convictions, and attitudes concerning the divine — far from consisting in a series of isolated and discrete passages — inform his Histories much more broadly. Herodotus' principles of selection, his organisation of his narrative, his presentation of causation, and finally (what we might term) his ‘aims and objectives’: all these can be seen to be underpinned by theological assumptions.

This chapter argues that the Histories are founded on the principle of the instability of human fortune. Herodotus' words echo closely those of Solon to Croesus and of Amasis to Polycrates; the same themes are picked up in the very last chapter of the Histories (9. 122). It has been suggested the even Herodotus saw his own role as enquirer and narrator as analogous to that of the travelling sage Solon. At any rate, the Histories are deeply marked by Solonian ideas. Every reversal in the Histories, every demonstration of the rule of the mutability of fortune is also an illustration of the force of the divine to disturb human affairs.

This chapter addresses two questions: first, that of the nature of Herodotus' belief in divine retribution (its significance in the Histories, the actions which receive retribution, the means by which the conclusion of divine retribution is drawn); and secondly, the question of how Herodotus could have believed such a thing, how such a belief was ‘sustainable’ in the light of experience.