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Hindsight in Greek and Roman
History
Anton Powell (Ed.)
ISBN 13: 9781905125586, hardback,
300pp, 2013,
Nine new studies here explore, and reconstruct,
determinant episodes of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman history. The
authors argue that
hindsight – especially in modern works – has falsified the past, by playing down
or eliminating the record of ancient unfulfilled forecasts, and of trends in
events which in the long term did not obviously prove predominant. The authors
also highlight the efforts of the best-placed writers in Antiquity not to be
misled by hindsight, but rather to give due weight to the working of hopes and
fears, and of trends in events, which with remote retrospect would tend to be
belittled or forgotten.
The techniques demonstrated in this book open new fields
of research across Ancient History: they illuminate almost every ancient episode
for which there is evidence of what historical agents planned or anticipated.
The authors show convincingly that, by giving due respect to trends observable,
and to political predictions made, in Antiquity, historians of today are better
placed to evaluate outcomes: to see how easily events might have developed differently,
or even to show that concrete outcomes were different from those conventionally
portrayed
from hindsight.
Contents
Introduction - Anton Powell
1 Historical explanation
and what didn’t happen: the virtues of virtual history - Christopher
Pelling
2 Herodotos and the avoidance of hindsight - Emily Baragwanath
3 Athens’ Sicilian expedition: contemporary scenarios of its outcome
- Roger Brock
4 The shadow of what might have been: sideshadowing in
Thucydides and Xenophon - Lisa Irene Hau
5 Spartan supremacy: a ‘possession for ever’? Early-fourth-century
expectations
of enduring ascendancy - Helen Roche
6 Confusing aim and result? Hindsight and
the disintegration
of Alexander the Great’s empire - Alexander Meeus
7 How to avoid being a backward-looking
prophet – counterfactuals in Polybius Felix - K. Maier
8 Anticipating Octavian’s failure: from Tauromenium to the death of Cleopatra
- Anton Powell
9 Memoriae eximere: AD 41 and the survival of republicanism under
the Principate
- Katherine Low