Caesar\'s Calendar. Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Sather Classical Lectures)

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M. A. Flower (1994, 34 – 35), showing that Theopompus claims to be signaling explic-
itly when he incorporates myth, unlike his predecessors.



  1. Marincola 1997, 118, part of a very valuable discussion; cf. Wardman 1960,
    411 – 12.

  2. On the generic interface between history and myth/epic, see Woodman 1988,
    index s.v. “historiography, ancient, and poetry”; Moles 1993a and b. As S. Hornblower
    (2001, 146) remarks, in advancing a strong claim for Pan’s role in Herodotus 6.105.1 –
    2: “Generic crossover can be a very arresting device.” For the analogous procedures in
    epic and elegiac poets, see, conveniently, Hinds 1987, esp. 115 – 17.

  3. A classic example of a process referred to by H. White (1987, 95): “The impli-
    cation is that historians constitutetheir subjects as possible objects of narrative repre-
    sentation by the very language they use to describethem” (original emphasis). Feldherr
    1998, 64 – 78, is an important discussion of Livy’s approach to these problems. In a
    forthcoming volume edited by Toni Bierl I treat in more detail the vexed issue
    (recently revisited by Wiseman 2002) of how to interpret the mythic or fantastic mate-
    rial mentioned in historical texts.

  4. To allude to the title of H. White 1987, The Content of the Form.

  5. Feeney 1991, 44, 255.

  6. Finley 1975, 15 – 18.

  7. Veyne 1988, 74.

  8. Sacks 1990, 65 – 66; Marincola 1997, 119 – 20. paravphgma, which I translate as
    “chronological system,” is a device like a cribbage board for tracking regular meteoro-
    logical phenomena, and Diodorus’s use here of this time device from another sphere is
    metaphorical, graphically conveying the lack of an ordered system for these mythic
    times; he uses the same word in the same context at 40.8.1.

  9. Finley 1975, 18.

  10. Sellar and Yeatman 1930, 5. Cf. Munz 1977, chap. 5, esp. 121 – 22; Atkinson 1978,
    22 (“It is the essence of history... that it should locate events in space and time”); B.
    Williams 2002, chap. 7, esp. 162 – 63: “There is an intimate relation between historical
    time and the idea of historical truth. To say that a statement about an event is histori-
    cally true is to imply that it is determinately located in the temporal structure; if it is
    not, historical time leaves it nowhere to go, except out of history altogether, into myth,
    or into mere error.”

  11. Cf. Asheri 1988, xxxviii, on how Herodotus already distinguishes himself in
    this regard from the genealogists and local historians of his day.

  12. Von Leyden 1949 – 50, 91; R. L. Fowler 2000, xxviii; Möller 2001, 251: “[Hel-
    lanicus] dealt primarily with mythical genealogies, which are autonomous in being
    unconnected to measured time. Measuring the past was in no way their purpose.” In
    this sense, then, it is not the case that “from the very beginning the mythic past was
    firmly situated in historical time” (Green 1997, 38).


notes to pages 78 – 80. 245

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