Although Plutarch is often regarded as a historian who believes in the power of providence and its influence on the lives of his protagonists, there is considerable evidence that his concept of history was more complex. His Parallel Lives feature numerous techniques of sideshadowing which confront the reader with the idea of history as a contingent, not a determined process. These narrative strategies, by means of which Plutarch frequently alludes to different possible outcomes of past events, offer short glimpses on what else might have happened.A comparison with Polybius shows that Plutarch drew upon concepts and techniques which had already been established in Hellenistic times and which presented a contingent past. But he did not simply copy these techniques, as is evident from a comparison with Polybius. He developed them further and took them to a new level by adapting them to the needs of his comparative approach to the lives of famous Greeks and Romans.

This chapter is a response to the volume’s arguments. It explores the book’s two central claims – that literary works must be seen as products of their time, and are best understood as being in dialogue with one another. It argues that ‘being of one’s time’ is a complex idea that requires a sophisticated sense of ‘situatedness’. Specifically, it first explores how the imperial and colonial conditions of Hellenistic culture produce contested performances of belonging that change over time as the imaginary of empire is constructed. Second, it looks at how ‘dialogues’ between texts are gestures of self-authorisation for ancient writers and for modern historians. Third, it draws attention to the physical affordances of the construction of belonging – from how a person speaks and walks to the material culture of empire. Finally, it suggests that the book’s unwillingness to discuss the full range of, say, Jewish Greek writing from the period restricts how we can understand cultural translation and cultural belonging in the Hellenistic age, and produces a potentially misleading literary history of the era.

This chapter explores the dialogue between civic rhetoric and literary texts, especially works of history and geography, in the later Hellenistic world. It argues for complex processes of mutual exchange and influence between the particularist civic ideology preserved in poleis’ inscribed decrees and the cosmopolitan ideas and projects of intellectuals. Citizens of some later Hellenistic poleis, such as Priene, strove to reconcile particularist and universalist perspectives, taking account of the cosmopolitan arguments and language of Hellenistic philosophers and other intellectuals. At the same time, later Hellenistic literary authors drew on, and reimagined, local civic ideals and institutions in order to give more concrete form to the abstract cosmopolitan ideals developed earlier in the Hellenistic period. The two main authors studied here, Diodorus and Strabo, were both deeply imbued with the values and forms of thought characteristic of the later Hellenistic poleis, which left their imprint even on those thinkers’ contrasting moves to transcend the small-scale polis and advocate more expansive forms of literary and political community. Whereas Diodorus strove to preserve aspects of the civic ideal within his cosmopolitanism, Strabo’s cosmopolitanism was more of a reaction against polis particularism – which remained, nonetheless, a foundational point of reference for him.

This chapter maps out some key themes and questions for the volume as a whole. Studies of late Hellenistic Greek literature have tended to focus narrowly on individual texts and authors. The goal of this volume is to generate a set of new readings that do justice to the intertextual richness of the writings of this period. The introduction also aims to move beyond rigid accounts of the start and end-points of the ‘Hellenistic period', bringing late Hellenistic literature into dialogue with its later imperial equivalents in ways which draw attention to both the similarities and the differences between them.

This chapter takes up the volume’s key notion of ‘dialogue’ by comparing – and thus bringing into dialogue – two periploi from the late Hellenistic and the imperial period, the description of the Red Sea in Diodorus’ Bibliotheke 3.38–48 and the island ecphrasis 2.17 in Philostratus’ Imagines. To the volume’s larger themes, the chapter adds the aspects of mediality and reader response. It shows how both texts employ a fairly similar ecphrastic technique characterised by contextualisation, historicisation and narrativisation, in order to afford their readers quite different experiences. The key element is their divergent strategies of mediality: the Bibliotheke is characterised by a marked ‘bookishness’, whereas the Imagines creates a feigned orality. Both strategies have their place in contemporary discourses and contexts. The Bibliotheke situates itself in the late Hellenistic debate on writing and reading history, and particularly in the discourse on the pleasures of reading historiographical texts, while the Imagines is part of a broader trend of enriching texts with structures and elements of oral communication in the imperial period.

This chapter draws on approaches from the environmental humanities in exploring the hypothesis that late Hellenistic literature was unusually positive in its representations of landscape alteration. It first sketches out the predominantly negative tradition of representing landscape alteration in ancient literature from Herodotus onwards, before examining the more celebratory versions that we find in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. At the same time it points out, with special reference to the work of Diodorus, that even the most positive treatments of that theme tend to show signs of equivocation and ambiguity. That conclusion has implications for our understanding of the long history of human interaction with the environment: it helps to expose the risks of over-simplification involved in any account that seeks to generalise about the idea that ancient culture either anticipates or stands in contrast with modern anthropocentrism. In the process the chapter also explores some of the similarities and differences between ancient and modern representations of environmental damage, pointing out especially that ancient accounts anticipate in some respects modern concerns with the impact of environmental alteration on human populations.

This chapter explores how the experience of Roman power impacted Polybius’ image of the shape of the world under Roman rule. Developing further classical uses of the body as political metaphor, Polybius is the first author we know of to use the body to conceptualise the impact of Roman rule on the oikoumene. He thus foreshadows the metaphor of the corpus imperii, a core element of Roman concepts of their empire in the imperial period. This significant and innovative development was prompted, I argue, by Polybius’ experience of the nature of mid-Republican Roman power and its material representation in the cityscape of Rome. Crucial to this process is the interlinking of previously unconnected parts of the world through the expansion of Roman rule. Movement is key to this process and Polybius’ geographical ‘digression’ (3.36–9), which inscribes Hannibal’s march into a global perspective, illustrates this. Evoking archetypal representations of Roman order and control, such as milestones, itineraries and building inscriptions, Polybius’ text both exemplifies how large-scale movements interconnected different parts of the world in concrete and tangible ways and how those movements, even when initiated by Rome’s enemies, eventually resulted in the establishment of Roman power all over the inhabited world.

In this chapter, I address the question of the relationship between the styles of the non-classicising sophistic prose of the imperial era and the so-called ‘Asianist’ oratory of the Hellenistic period; I also assess the connection of both to the style of Gorgias, with whom they have often been linked. I base my study on a comparison of a limited selection of texts: five of the longest excerpts quoted in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Gorgias’ Helen and Epitaphios Logos, the fragments of Hegesias of Magnesia (3rd c. BCE), and three late Hellenistic inscriptions. I conclude that, although the passages of Hellenistic and imperial ‘sophists’ undeniably share a broad stylistic similarity that sets them apart from ‘classical’ or ‘classicising’ oratory like that of Lysias, Demosthenes or Dio of Prusa, the differences between them, especially regarding their relation to Gorgianic prose and their preferences for rhythmical clausulae, are more significant.

This chapter examines two aspects of Strabo’s self-definition, both of which are indirect and reveal the twin preoccupations with intellectual distinction and political utility, especially in connection with the value of Greek education for the Roman imperial project. The geographical aspect of Strabo’s self-definition inscribes him in a tradition whereby Asia Minor is the main source of intellectual capital, from where it flows largely towards Rome. Strabo’s philosophical self-definition ranges much more widely than the doctrines of the Hellenistic schools: the Geography opens with an argument aimed at demonstrating that geography is a philosophical pursuit, which appeals to a tradition of wisdom going back to Homer. Geography’s philosophical credentials also include ‘wide learning’ (exemplified primarily in technical mathematical knowledge), as well as manifold benefits under the general umbrella of the ‘art of living’. The chapter nevertheless argues that there is more than ‘pseudo-philosophisation’ in Strabo’s work, in the form of clear Stoic echoes, albeit not centred around the theme of divine providence, where Strabo makes innovative, ‘un-Stoic’ remarks.