Cultural Politics in Polybius's Histories (Volume 41) - Hardcover

Champion, Craige

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520237641 ISBN 13: 9780520237643

Publisher: University of California Press, 2004

Synopsis

Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century b.c.e. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. In this original study informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, Craige Champion demonstrates that Polybius's work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore unappreciated subtlety and interest.

Champion shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. Champion focuses primarily on the ideological presuppositions and predispositions of Polybius's different audiences in order to interpret the apparent contradictions and incongruities in his text. In this way he develops a "politics of cultural indeterminacy" in which Polybius's collective representations of political and ethnic groups have different meanings for different audiences in different contexts. Situating these representations in the ideological, political, and historical contexts from which they arose, his book affords new and penetrating insights into a work whose subtlety and complexity have gone largely unrecognized.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"Smart and sophisticated. A work that is simultaneously a sensitive study of a major Greek historian and a probing analysis of the Greco-Roman society in which his history was produced."―John Marincola, author of Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography

About the Author:

Craige B. Champion is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0520237641
• ISBN 13: 9780520237643
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 343