Ancient Historiography and War & Empire, edited by Timothy Howe, Sabine Müller, and Richard Stoneman, published in 2017 by Oxbow Books, is a multifaceted work and as with many such works that began as papers delivered at a conference (“Historiography and History: Greece, the Aegean and the Near East, 600-31 BCE,” Athens, July 1–3, 2013) has a somewhat misleading title. If one takes the title too literally that person will be disappointed. These are not essays specifically on aspects of ancient warfare or studies of the connection between war and empire. While all seventeen essays do deal with historiography in some fashion, few directly deal with either war or empire in any but the most tangential way. Yet, this is not a collection to be dismissed. These are all fine studies written by well-qualified scholars on a wide range of topics. The variety begins with both an unusual Foreword, “Ancient historiography and ancient history,” and a non-traditional Introduction. In his foreword, Professor Howe presents what is primarily an endorsement for the view that “ancient historiography balanced reporting facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviors of the audiences” (p. xi). In short, one must become “both the historian and the literary critic” (pp. xi–xii). This emphasis to determine our sources’ intentions and their particular contexts as well as attempting to determine the origins of their information, is a helpful addition to unraveling the past. But, as Brian Bosworth1 proclaimed one must be careful not to treat our sources’ claims of truthfulness as some mostly ignored topos. While in these essays the authors often assert that our sources have adapted and modified their material to achieve certain goals and hidden agendas, I believe Brian would have been pleased with this collection.

Instead of the usual general introduction which unpacks the title, the editors defer to the first chapter, Mark Munn’s “Why History? On the emergence of historical writing.” Given the title of the volume and Professor Munn’s conclusions that Greek history began with Herodotus and Thucydides and that “the intensity of the competition for persuasive force in the deliberative bodies of democratic Athens made history possible” (p. 22), the chapter does then serve as an historical introduction to ancient historiography. For Munn, it was the desire to influence contemporary Athenian politics by supplying accurate analysis of the past that made the Athenian democracy the catalyst for History’s creation. The following two chapters, Eran Almagor, “The political and the divine in Achaemenid royal inscriptions,” and Josef Wiesehöfer, “Cyrus and the sacrifices for a dead king,” both suggest that the contemporary and common Greek view of the Persian king as divine was not entirely without merit, although the exact relationship was not clearly understood. There then follows a breathtaking variety of studies: a reexamination of Philistus’ views on tyranny (Frances Pownall, “The horse and the stag: Philistus’ view of tyrants”), a reassessment of the controversial passage claimed to be from Anaximenes and the assigning the creation of the pezehetairoi, the infantry companions of the Macedonian king, to Alexander the Great’s uncle and former king, Alexander II (William Greenwalt, “Alexander II of Macedon”), an argument that the many conspiracy theories that abound with respect to the murders of King Philip, his newest wife Cleopatra, and her guardian Attalus, should be jettisoned in favor of personal and limited motivations (Waldemar Heckel, Timothy Howe, Sabine Müller, “ ‘The giver of the bride, the bridegroom, and the bride’: a study of the murder of Philip II and its aftermath”), an examination of aristocratic Macedonian tomb culture (Franca Landucci Gattinoni, “Royal tombs and cult of the dead kings in Early Hellenistic Macedonia”), imperial financial administration under Alexander the Great (Maxim Kholod, “The financial administration of Asia Minor under Alexander the Great: an interpretation of two passages from Arrian’s Anabasis”), divination as manipulated by our surviving Alexander the Great sources (Hugh Bowden, “The Eagle has landed: divination in the Alexander historians”), the validity of the Macedonian casualty figures in our sources for Alexander the Great’s expedition (Jaced Rzepka, “The casualty figures of Alexander’s army”), a demonstration of how visual art can offer historical narrative (Olga Palagia, “Alexander’s battles against Persians in the art of the Successors”), the role of Megasthenes in ancient Western perceptions of India (Richard Stoneman, “How the hoopoe got his crest: reflections on Megasthenes’ stories of India”), how historical personages are appropriated, reinvented and reinterpreted (Aleksandra Klęczar, “Creating the king: the image of Alexander the Great in 1 Maccabees, 1–10”); two chapters examine how Plutarch manipulates his sources (Rebecca Frank, “The hero vs. the tyrant: legitimate and illegitimate rule in the Alexander-Caesar pairing,” and Elias Koulakiotis, “Plutarch’s Alexander and the metaphysics of power”), the topos of the artistic ruler as a stereotype for decadence in Second Sophistic writing (Sabine Müller, “The artistic king: reflections on a Topos in Second Sophistic Historiography”), and finally Roman intellectuals and the topos of flattery as a path for intellectuals to use the past to criticize those in the then Roman present of the Second Sophistic (Sulochana Asirvatham, “Flattery, history, and the Pepaideuménas”).

While I do not agree with all the conclusions reached in these various studies, these are all serious and provocative studies which should engender much discussion. With respect to my disagreements with conclusions drawn by these authors I will mention two. Professor Munn’s conclusion about the contemporary purpose of Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ histories to my mind would appear to fly in the face of both authors own proclamations of broader ambitions (Hdts. 1. 1. 0; Thuc. 1. 21–22) and Heckel’s, Howe’s, and Müller’s conclusion that with respect to the three murders they were the result of personal revenge with no broader political intrigue involved, which certainly given our sources could be the case, but can be questioned in that with respect to King Philip’s assassination it is clear that more individuals than the single assassin were involved. Just the indication of such participation would appear to me to open the door at least to the possibility of conspiracy in the case of Philip’s murder, and, as the authors demonstrate, the close connection between the three killings would open up such speculation not just with respect to the king’s assassination, but to the others as well. Nor in this study do I accept that Alexander the Great had any desire to marry his father’s young widow. The chapters on the divine and the Persian kings I found especially compelling and I was interested in learning that if a ruler was to play a musical instrument that a lyre was to be preferred to a flute.

Note:
1 A. B. Bosworth, “Plus ça change. . . . Ancient Historians and their Sources”, in: Classical Antiquity 22 (2003), pp. 167–198.