How to Satisfy Everyone

Diverse Readerly Expectations and Multiple Authorial Personae in Arrian’s Anabasis

Bibliographic Data

ID20050442
AuthorsVasileios Liotsakis (0000-0002-7469-9630, corresponding author)
Year2022
Pages193-222
Publication date2022-01-19
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueReading History in the Roman Empire (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110764062-011
OpenAlexW4206942626
ISBN9783110764062
LanguageEN
References cited12

In his ArsR hetorica,Aristotle warns the aspiringspeakers of his aget hat ar hetor is always invited to convince manyd ifferent categories of listeners through the same words.The philosopher refers to the differences between three kinds of audiencesthe young,the old, and the middle-aged -with regard to their character and mentality (Rh.1388b(Rh.-1390b)).Although Aristotle focuses in this passageonthe ageofthe listeners,t herea re of course several other criteria for differentiating an ancient audience, such as social and financial status, personal interests, sympathies or aversions, education, or even the place of residence.When Pericles exhorted the Athenians to relyontheir LongW alls and not to spare theirland about to be devastated by the Peloponnesians (Th.1.143.3-5; 2.60 -64), his advice must have sounded altogether more reasonable to an Athenian merchant than, say, to an Acharnian who based the prosperity of his oikos on this land itself.Aristotle'sthoughts are suggestiveofthe highimportance allocated to the heterogeneity of the audience in the eyes of ancient rhetors,and this far the ArsRhetorica is indeed useful for as tudent of ancient rhetoric.How relevant,t hough, can such speculations be to another literary genre of antiquity,c lassicalh istoriography?I s there anygain from asking whether an ancient historiographer took into consideration the diversity of his readership to the same degreea sapublic speaker did with his audience?Most importantly, did such speculations determine the historian's choices in content and style, at the level of both narrative arrangement and vocabulary?Inthis paper,byelaborating on Arrian and his Anabasis of Alexander,Iwill answer these questions in the affirmative,byarguingthat Arrian has aclose eyeonthe various preconceptions and expectations of ah eterogeneous audience.In trying to apprehend how readerlydiversity impacted upon Greek historiographyofthe Imperial Era, Flavius Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander can servefor us as a highlyi lluminatings tarting point.A rrian, just like all Greek authorso ft he Second Sophistic, was particularlyc oncerned about the impression his writingsw ould make for manydifferent kinds of readers.In his case, the Bithynian intellectual wished for his work to impress both his literate compatriots and his Romanr eaders( includingt he emperor himself), enablingh im to develop his political career in the Roman world.In this respect,t he Anabasis had to meet the stylistic, ideological, and political specifications of its intellectual environment and to present Arrian as ag ifted writera nd avid connoisseur of the Attic literature of the glorious Greek

Art · Literature · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · History

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