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19 results

  • 18 - Narratives of Thucydides and the 19th-Century Discipline of (Ancient) History

  • from Part III - After Thucydides
  • Edited by Polly Low, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides
    Published online:
    02 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023, pp 282-300

  • Summary

    Thucydides’ reception in the 19th century is a key moment for modern historical thought. This was a period when history was becoming institutionalized as a university discipline, and this chapter shows how Thucydides was invoked as a predecessor by a number of major figures in the field. The chapter also explores why this was the case, drawing attention to the paradox that this invocation of Thucydides entailed: how did a discipline that was seeking to establish itself as ‘modern’ find legitimacy in this ancient text? And how did this influence the way in which Thucydides’ historical project was read and understood?

The Western Time of Ancient History
  • Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts
  • Edited by Alexandra Lianeri
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    31 March 2011
  • This book examines the conceptual and temporal frames through which modern Western historiography has linked itself to classical antiquity. In doing so, it articulates a genealogical problematic of what history is and a more strictly focused reappraisal of Greek and Roman historical thought. Ancient ideas of history have played a key role in modern debates about history writing, from Kant through Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger, and from Friedrich Creuzer through George Grote and Theodor Mommsen to Momigliano and Moses Finley; yet scholarship has paid little attention to the theoretical implications of the reception of these ideas. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of relevant topics and approaches and boast distinguished authors from across Europe in the fields of classics, ancient and modern history and the theory of historiography.

  • Unfounding times: The idea and ideal of ancient history in Western historical thought

  • from INTRODUCTION
  • Edited by Alexandra Lianeri
  • Book:
    The Western Time of Ancient History
    Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    31 March 2011, pp 3-30

  • Summary

    TIME AND CRITIQUE

    Any new interpreter must be aware of past interpreters: he who is not aware of past interpreters will still be influenced by them, but uncritically, because, after all, awareness is the foundation of criticism. The historian must therefore be able to account not only for all the data he possesses, but also for all the interpretations he is aware of.

    Such was the critical task posed by a master of the discipline of history, whose object of study was not the past as a realm that delimits certain events and actions, but historical thought in context: the modes of speaking and writing through which the past locates itself within history and in doing so makes a claim to historical knowledge that both conditions and confronts that of the present. Readers of Arnaldo Momigliano's writings will remember his penetrating remarks about the critical role of the history of historiography in the field of historical research. The works of past historians, as this excerpt implies, do not enter the present fields of historical investigation as any other cultural product of the past. These works are undoubtedly part of the same historical matrix that gives rise to all other forms of cultural production. Yet, as an object of historical knowledge, past historical thought acquires a distinct relation to the subject of knowing constituting at once its precondition and its alternative.