Fragmentary Historians

Catalog description

This is research seminar in which students will be expected to prepare translations of and commentaries on a wide range of lesser-known and fragmentary historians of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, ranging from Duris of Samos to Dexippos of Athens. Students will use the model of Jacoby's Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker for the presentation of their work and will report on the major genres of later Greek historiography: ethnography, regional history, universal history, genealogy ands horography. The semester will consist of three units. In the first part, the emphasis will be on acquiring familiarity with and confidence in working with Jacoby’s brilliant but idiosyncratic masterwork. Students will be assigned short entries from FGrH in order to practice translation, writing commentaries and mastering the format of the genre. In addition, students will be reading a wide range of contemporary historians on the general subject of Greek historiography and will be expected to acquire a broad grasp of the development of Greek history writing in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Topics to be discussed will include the development of Universal histories, geographic and periegetic literature, local histories, genealogy, mythography and Greek writing by non-Greeks. In the second unit we will work on longer entries in Jacoby. Each student will have responsibility for an historian for whom we have approximately 20-30 pages of testimonia and fragments. Each week each student will present a portion of the overall FGrH entry and will be receive comments and help from the other seminar participants. Students will be free to choose which historian they wish to work on and will be encouraged to find authors whose interests intersect with the students’ proposed course of research. In the third unit the entire seminar will work collaboratively on a single, lengthy…