Christopher Pelling
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1100452 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Christopher Pelling |
| NOMBRES | Christopher |
| APELLIDO | Pelling |
| FIRMA | PELLING C |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Oxford |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 54 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 204 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 45 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 9 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1973 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Clarendon Ancient History Series: Plutarch: Alexander: Translated with Introduction and Commentary
Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography
How did Greek and Roman historians claim the authority to narrate the deeds embraced by their histories? In this acclaimed and influential book, John Marincola examines all aspects of their self-presentation, surveying the entire field from Herodotus (fifth century BCE) to Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century CE). He shows how each historian claimed veracity by imitating, modifying, and manipulating the traditions established by his predecessors.…
Stereotyping Sparta, Stereotyping Athens
Chapter 6 begins with the impact on Plutarch of some famous Thucydidean and Herodotean characterizations of Athenians and Spartans. Thucydides’ contrast between Athens and Sparta (1.70) is the first in a series of examples of his profound influence on Plutarch’s depictions of Athens in the Lives , despite his other sources, e.g. comedy, Ion of Chios, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, etc. Plutarch’s depiction of Spartan character owes much less to Thucydid…
Ch. 2. Homeric and Herodotean Intertextuality
Published in Ivan Matijašić, ed., Herodotus - The Most Homeric Historian? (HISTOS Supplement 14), p. 39-58
And Now … ?
The epilogue provides some thoughts on the past and future directions of Cassius Dio studies, while responding to the chapters presented in this volume.
Classical Scholarship and Its History
It is unusual for a single scholar practically to reorient an entire sub-field of study, but this is what Chris Stray has done for the history of UK classical scholarship. His remarkable combination of interests in the sociology of scholars and scholarship, in the history of the book and of publishing, and (especially) in the detailed intellectual contextualisation of classical scholarship as a form of classical reception has fundamentally change…
Ch. 1. Homer and the Question Why
Historiography’s debt to Homer is immense, especially in exploring matters of cause and effect. The epics trace things back to beginnings, even if those are only ‘hinges’ in a still longer story; they use speech-exchanges not merely to characterise individuals but also to explore features of their society; the interaction of human and divine is complex, but the narrative focus characteristically rests more on the human level; allusiveness to narr…
Rediscovering E. R. Dodds
Rediscovering E. R. Dodds offers the first comprehensive assessment of a remarkable classical scholar, who was also a poet with extensive links to twentieth-century English and Irish literary culture, the friend of Auden and MacNeice. Dodds was born in Northern Ireland, but made his name as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1936 to 1960, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Before this he taught at Reading and Birmingham, was active in the Associati…
Herodotus and the Question Why
In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus wrote the first known Western history to build on the tradition of Homeric storytelling, basing his text on empirical observations and arranging them systematically. Herodotus and the Question Why offers a comprehensive examination of the methods behind the Histories and the challenge of documenting human experiences, from the Persian Wars to cultural traditions. In lively, accessible prose, Christopher Pelling e…
Dionysius on Regime Change
Velleius and Biography
Herodotus
Book VI of the Histories is one of Herodotus' most varied books, beginning with the final collapse of the Ionian Revolt and moving on to the Athenian triumph at Marathon (490 BC); it also includes fascinating material on Sparta, full of court intrigue and culminating in Kleomenes' grisly death, and there is comedy too, with Alkmeon's cramming clothes, boots, and even cheeks with gold dust, then Hippokleides 'dancing away his marriage'. In Herodot…
Herodotus' Persian Stories
Herodotus' Persian stories have a distinctive shape, well-rounded, often centring on the king and his court, with women prominent. This shaping has interpretative value, and so does the 'biographical' character of the Persian books: the stories are like that because the world is like that. Greek history is messier and less linear. How far does this explain Persian imperialism? Perhaps by explaining the difficulty of persuading the king to exercis…
Syme, Ronald (1903–1989)
Sir Ronald Syme was a New Zealand‐born, Oxford‐based scholar, often regarded as the greatest Roman historian of the twentieth century. His two great works, noted for their distinctive style as well as for their historical acumen, are The Roman Revolution (1939) and Tacitus (1958), but he wrote prolifically on other periods and authors, including late antiquity and the Historia Augusta .
Preparing for Posterity
Xenophon’s Authorial Voice
Rhetoric of The Roman Revolution
Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution is generally recognised as his literary masterpiece as well as a brilliant work of historical interpretation: that makes it a suitable subject for some of the techniques of literary analysis that are now applied to ancient historical writers. A manuscript of an earlier draft makes it possible to trace its genesis: some of his most famous epigrammatic formulations are late additions to his text, while some of his exp…
New Worlds from Old Texts
Despite earlier expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, ‘maps matter’ today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. In contrast to the traditional ‘topographic’ perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived though a ‘topological’ lens, in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the phys…
Xenophon’s and Caesar’s third-person narratives—or are they?
Caesar’s third-person narrative style has recently attracted much attention, especially regarding his motives for using it, and its relation to those points in the text where he lapses into the first person. This chapter focusses on the nature of Caesar’s third-person style: it differs from ‘typical’ third-person usage in that the reader knows that Caesar-the-narrator and Caesar-the-character are one and the same. Caesar-the-narrator assumes and …
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the Rhetorica and Alexandrum, and the Speeches in Herodotus and Thucydides
Rhetoric and historiography are cousins. Like orators, historians wrote to persuade; orators included narratives; historians included speeches. It would be odd if the study of rhetoric — even though it is on the whole inevitably fourth-century rhetoric — failed to illuminate Herodotus and Thucydides. This chapter has a narrower focus, concentrating less on the speeches themselves and more on the works of rhetorical theory, the Rhetorica ad Alexan…
Clarendon Ancient History Series
Herodotus and Samos
What role does Samos play in Herodotus' narrative? Sometimes he shows the ‘warm sympathy’ that scholars have claimed, but more often Samian dysfunctionality is in point. Often events in Samos prepare for later episodes where Greek states offer more spirited, committed, or organised opposition to external threats; but the threat that they too might collapse into the Samian pattern is never far away. There are ways too in which Samos points forward…
On the daimonion of Socrates
Plutarch's dialogue »On the daimonion of Socrates« is a unique combination of exciting historical romance and serious philosophical and religious discussion: A narrator from Boeotian Thebes tells his Athenian friend how Thebes was liberated from Spartan domination in a fateful night of midwinter 379/8 BC and connects this with the retelling of a fascinating philosophical discussion about the famous daimonion of Socrates in the afternoon and eveni…
The Spur of Fame
This chapter gives a close reading of a famous speech in Tacitus, where the emperor Tiberius rejects a request to allow a temple to be built to him in Spain. The reasons he gives seem exemplary, in particular the priority he gives to genuine respect in the eyes of posterity rather than empty divine honours; and yet, Tacitus goes on to say, he was viciously criticized by contemporary observers. This episode is suggestively juxtaposed with others, …
Tacitus’ personal voice
“As for myself, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were not known to me through doing me either good or harm. I would not deny that my career owed its beginnings to Vespasian, its advance to Titus and its further progress to Domitian; but those who have promised to be unbiased must describe everyone without either affection or hatred. If I live long enough, I have reserved for my old age the richer and less troublesome material of the principate of the d…
Literary Texts and the Greek Historian
Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discuss…
East is East and West is West - Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus
This paper started life on 23 February, 1995, given as one of an informal Oxford series on 'boundaries'. The purpose of the seminar was to stimulate discussion, and to give researchers an outline of developments in fields with which they might be unfamiliar. Those purposes suit Histos too, and so the paper is given here in its raw, unfootnoted, oral state, with only a few local pleasantries suppressed
The urine and the vine
Astyages, son of Cyaxares, now inherited the throne. A daughter was born to him, whom he called Mandane; and Astyages dreamed that she urinated so much that the urine filled his city, then went on to flood all of Asia. He consulted the dream-experts among the magi, and was alarmed by the details which he heard from them. Later, when this Mandane was already old enough for marriage, he did not give her as wife to any of the Medes who were worthy o…
Bringing Autochthony Up-to-Date
This paper explores the exploitation of autochthony topoi in Herodotus and Thucydides. Autochthony-thinking was so familiar to the historians' audiences that such allusions could be implicit, and the word itself is often not used. Both historians develop the themes thought-provokingly and paradoxically: for instance, in Thucydides' case in broadening the horizons so much that the land of Attica may be regarded as a dispensable "little garden," ye…
Ancient Historiography and its Contexts
This volume collects essays written by colleagues and friends as a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Latin at the University of Virginia. These essays, like Woodman's own work, cover topics in Latin poetry, oratory, and Greek and Roman historiography. Recurrent themes are the importance of rhetoric and rhetorical training, the skilful use of language and recurrent motifs in narrative, the use and adaptation of topoi, the importan…
Speech and action
When Mardonius sailed along the coast of Asia and arrived in Ionia, something happened that will seem very wondrous to those Greeks who find it impossible to accept that Otanes proposed to the seven Persians that Persia ought to have a democratic government: for Mardonius suppressed all the Ionian tyrannies and established democracies in the cities. (Herodotus 6.43.3)
New Worlds from Old Texts
Despite earlier expectations that globalization would eradicate the need for geographical space and distance, ‘maps matter’ today in ways that were unimaginable a mere two decades ago. In contrast to the traditional ‘topographic’ perspective, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is being increasingly conceived though a ‘topological’ lens, in which the nature and frequency of links among different sites matter more than the phys…
Thucydides‘ Archidamus and Herodotus’ Artabanus
Journal Article THUCYDIDES‘ ARCHIDAMUS AND HERODOTUS’ ARTABANUS Get access C. B. R. PELLING C. B. R. PELLING University College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 37, Issue Supplement_58, January 1991, Pages 120–142, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.1991.tb02208.x Published: 22 February 2011
Puppes Sinistrorsum Citae
Nisbet and Kraggerud make good cases for taking the ninth Epode as a dramatic recreation of the Actium campaign. Horace begins in fearful anticipation; then the crisis comes, first on land and then on sea; Antony turns to flight; and — even though some danger remains, and there is metus as well as joy at the end of the poem — the celebrations can finally begin. On this reading there remains the familiar problem of vv. 17–20: at huc frementes uert…
Herodotus' Persian Stories
Herodotus' Persian stories have a distinctive shape, well-rounded, often centring on the king and his court, with women prominent. This shaping has interpretative value, and so does the 'biographical' character of the Persian books: the stories are like that because the world is like that. Greek history is messier and less linear. How far does this explain Persian imperialism? Perhaps by explaining the difficulty of persuading the king to exercis…
Seeing through Caesar’s Eyes
The full-text of this book chapter is currently not available in ORA. Citation: Pelling, C. (2009) Seeing through Caesar's eyes: focalisation and interpretation. In: Grethlein, J. & Rengakos, A. (eds.) Narratology and interpretation: the content of narrative form in ancient literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 507-526
Plutarch, Alexander and Caesar
Niebuhr saw that several paragraphs had been lost from the beginning of the Caesar ; Ziegler suggested that the lacuna extended to the end of the Alexander . Both hypotheses are confirmed, if the identification of two new fragments is admitted. At 10. 11 p. 368, Zonaras is epitomizing the text of Caes .; he recounts the Story of Caes . 60. 3 , and continues: Editors leave the provenance of the passage unspecified: ‘addita sunt pauca de nomine Cae…
Plutarch, Alexander and Caesar
Niebuhr saw that several paragraphs had been lost from the beginning of the Caesar ; Ziegler suggested that the lacuna extended to the end of the Alexander . Both hypotheses are confirmed, if the identification of two new fragments is admitted. At 10. 11 p. 368, Zonaras is epitomizing the text of Caes .; he recounts the Story of Caes . 60. 3 , and continues: Editors leave the provenance of the passage unspecified: ‘addita sunt pauca de nomine Cae…
Puppes Sinistrorsum Citae
Nisbet and Kraggerud make good cases for taking the ninth Epode as a dramatic recreation of the Actium campaign. Horace begins in fearful anticipation; then the crisis comes, first on land and then on sea; Antony turns to flight; and — even though some danger remains, and there is metus as well as joy at the end of the poem — the celebrations can finally begin. On this reading there remains the familiar problem of vv. 17–20: at huc frementes uert…
Plutarch
Thucydides‘ Archidamus and Herodotus’ Artabanus
Journal Article THUCYDIDES‘ ARCHIDAMUS AND HERODOTUS’ ARTABANUS Get access C. B. R. PELLING C. B. R. PELLING University College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 37, Issue Supplement_58, January 1991, Pages 120–142, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.1991.tb02208.x Published: 22 February 2011
Tacitus and Germanicus
The full-text of this article is not available in ORA. Citation: Pelling, C. B. R. (1993) Tacitus and Germanicus. In: Luce, T. J. & Woodman, A. J. (eds), Tacitus and the Tacitean tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 59-85
Ethics and Rhetoric
Donald Russell, Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Oxford, has been a leading figure in several fields of classical scholarship over the last few decades. The present volume collects essays written in his honour by scholars who have all worked closely with him. They fall into three sections, corresponding to Donald Russell's main work: Latin literature, Greek imperial literature, and ancient literary criticism. They a…
The triumviral period
The triumviral period was to be one of the great men feeling their way, unclear how far a legion's loyalty could simply be bought, whether the propertied classes or the discontented poor of Rome and Italy could be harnessed as a genuine source of strength, how influential the old families and their patronage remained. Philippi is a very long way east, and the battles there were fought very late in the year. Even before Philippi, eighteen Italian …
The Cambridge Ancient History
The period described in Volume 10 of the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History begins in the year after the death of Julius Caesar and ends in the year after the fall of Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Its main theme is the transformation of the political configuration of the state and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Chapters 1-6 supply a political narrative history of the period. In chapters 7-12 the institutions …
The urine and the vine
Astyages, son of Cyaxares, now inherited the throne. A daughter was born to him, whom he called Mandane; and Astyages dreamed that she urinated so much that the urine filled his city, then went on to flood all of Asia. He consulted the dream-experts among the magi, and was alarmed by the details which he heard from them. Later, when this Mandane was already old enough for marriage, he did not give her as wife to any of the Medes who were worthy o…
Plutarch
Marcellus enjoyed all the better reputation with the common people, because he adorned the city with works of visual art which were delightful in their Hellenic grace and their truth to nature. On the other hand it was Fabius Maximus who earned the approval of the older people, because after he had captured Tarentum he did not disturb or remove anything of the kind: he carried off all the city’s money and other valuables, but allowed all the stat…
Greek tragedy and the historian
The tragic theatre was no mere diversion for a fifth-century Athenian: it was a focal part of the experience of being a citizen. Tragedy explores fundamental issues of religion, of ethics, of civic ideology, and we should expect it to be a central source for the reconstruction and analysis of the Athenian thought-world. Yet it is also a peculiarly delicate source to use, and the combination of tragic with other material often poses particular pro…
East is East and West is West - Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus
This paper started life on 23 February, 1995, given as one of an informal Oxford series on 'boundaries'. The purpose of the seminar was to stimulate discussion, and to give researchers an outline of developments in fields with which they might be unfamiliar. Those purposes suit Histos too, and so the paper is given here in its raw, unfootnoted, oral state, with only a few local pleasantries suppressed
The Limits of Historiography
This volume explores the intersection between historiography and related genres in antiquity. Papers cover the geographical range from China through the near east to the classical period in the Mediterranean. Topics addressed include the place in ancient Chinese historiography of philosophical argument; the nature and kind of historical text in the Hittite, Babylonian, Persian and biblical periods, including (for the first time) a full transliter…
Speech and action
When Mardonius sailed along the coast of Asia and arrived in Ionia, something happened that will seem very wondrous to those Greeks who find it impossible to accept that Otanes proposed to the seven Persians that Persia ought to have a democratic government: for Mardonius suppressed all the Ionian tyrannies and established democracies in the cities. (Herodotus 6.43.3)
Literary Texts and the Greek Historian
Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discuss…
Homer and Herodotus
Jean–Pierre Vernant suggested that the ‘tragic moment’, the combination of circumstances that made tragedy so dominant a genre in the fifth century, came at a time when the sense of a past heroic age and code of values coincided with a new sensibility for the community and the rule of law. That individualistic world needed to be distant, but not too distant, just as the role of interventionist gods needed to be distant, but not too distant, from …
The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus
Herodotus' Histories is the first major surviving prose work from antiquity. Its range of interests is immense, covering the whole of the known world and much beyond, and it culminates in a detailed account of the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC. Moreover, research has shown that Herodotus is a sophisticated and at times even ironic narrator, and a pioneer and serious practitioner of historical research at a time when the Greeks' tradi…
De Malignitate Plutarchi Plutarch, Herodotus, and the Persian Wars
This chapter explores the complexities evident in the presentation of the Persian Wars, mediated heavily through the text of Herodotus, to be found in the Lives of Plutarch. Plutarch's contribution to the development and later reception of the Persian Wars narratives is extraordinarily important, and yet has elicited very little specialist scholarly discussion. Plutarch's Persian Wars are uniquely complex, since their author was a Greek intellect…
The Greek Historians of Rome
Rome changed everything, including the way history would be written. For one thing, the story was breathtaking: as Polybius asks in his proem, who could fail to be gripped by the paradoxical shift of Fortune which allowed Rome “in less than fifty-three years to bring virtually all the world under one rule?” For another, it suggested a new relation of writer and theme. Greeks who wrote about Rome would write as outsiders: not as outside as all tha…
Sophocles’ Learning Curve
Two of the most influential mid-20th-century discussions of Sophocles' style operated by trying to fit the surviving plays to the threefold scheme; the most recent, and very thorough, discussion of The Language of Sophocles (Budelmann (2000) ), cites it in the third sentence of the first page. If authentic, it would be a rare case where we can see a great practitioner reflecting on his own technique, no less illuminating — perhaps even more illum…
Aristagoras (5.49–55, 97)
PUSHOVERS AND PUTTINGS-ACROSS: ARISTAGORAS AT ATHENS πολλοὺς γ⋯ρ οἶκε εἶναι εὐπετ⋯στερον διαβ⋯λλειν ἢ ἕνα, εἰ Κ λεομ⋯νεα μ⋯ν τ⋯ν Λακεδαιμ⋯νιον μο⋯νον οὐκ οἷ⋯ς τε ⋯γ⋯νετο διαβ⋯λλειν, τρεῖς δ⋯ μυρι⋯δας Ἀθηνα⋯ων ⋯ποι⋯σε το⋯το. (a) Apparently it is easier to impose upon a crowd than upon an individual, for Aristagoras, who had failed to impose upon Cleomenes, succeeded with thirty thousand Athenians. (b) It seems to be easier to fool a crowd than a s…
Parallel Narratives
Biography
This article points out that the genre of biography was also fundamentally concerned with Hellenic identity. As the discussion holds, ancient biographies do not just describe individuals, they tackle a range of issues, chief among which is that crucial question, what it might mean to be Greek. Biography is about individuals. That is what makes it interesting; it is also what leaves it vulnerable to critics who look for something more, for the big…
Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature
The Greeks discovered the individual, it is said, but in what sense is this true? Characters in Greek literature may often seem strangely different from their modern counterparts: less idiosyncratic, less real, and with less psychological depth or interest. Personality traits seems to cluster more predictably in the characters of Greek authors than of those today. Despite the wide-ranging scope of this aspect of Greek literature, most previous di…
Seeing through Caesar’s Eyes
The full-text of this book chapter is currently not available in ORA. Citation: Pelling, C. (2009) Seeing through Caesar's eyes: focalisation and interpretation. In: Grethlein, J. & Rengakos, A. (eds.) Narratology and interpretation: the content of narrative form in ancient literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 507-526
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