Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- INTRODUCTION
- THEORISING WESTERN TIME: CONCEPTS AND MODELS
- ANCIENT HISTORY AND MODERN TEMPORALITIES
- 5 The making of a bourgeois antiquity: Wilhelm von Humboldt and Greek history
- 6 Modern histories of ancient Greece: Genealogies, contexts and eighteenth-century narrative historiography
- 7 Acquiring (a) historicity: Greek history, temporalities and Eurocentrism in the Sattelzeit (1750–1850)
- 8 Herodotus and Thucydides in the view of nineteenth-century German historians
- 9 Monumentality and the meaning of the past in ancient and modern historiography
- UNFOUNDING TIME IN AND THROUGH ANCIENT HISTORICAL THOUGHT
- AFTERWORD
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Modern histories of ancient Greece: Genealogies, contexts and eighteenth-century narrative historiography
from ANCIENT HISTORY AND MODERN TEMPORALITIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- INTRODUCTION
- THEORISING WESTERN TIME: CONCEPTS AND MODELS
- ANCIENT HISTORY AND MODERN TEMPORALITIES
- 5 The making of a bourgeois antiquity: Wilhelm von Humboldt and Greek history
- 6 Modern histories of ancient Greece: Genealogies, contexts and eighteenth-century narrative historiography
- 7 Acquiring (a) historicity: Greek history, temporalities and Eurocentrism in the Sattelzeit (1750–1850)
- 8 Herodotus and Thucydides in the view of nineteenth-century German historians
- 9 Monumentality and the meaning of the past in ancient and modern historiography
- UNFOUNDING TIME IN AND THROUGH ANCIENT HISTORICAL THOUGHT
- AFTERWORD
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When did modern historiography of ancient Greece start? The question is deceptively simple and betrays assumptions far more revealing than any straightforward answer. Its formulation implies distinguishing between ancient historians and modern ones. But this has long been a slippery endeavour, as Nicole Loraux's title Thucydides n'est pas un collègue of some years ago reminds us. Ironically, in telling the history of historical practice, historians' chronology has often been fraught with issues of value and haunted by presentism. In fact, when the origins of modern historiography of the ancient world are sought, the divide between ancients and moderns is repeatedly left behind in favour of privileging some moderns above others. George Grote, the nineteenth-century British banker and political figure turned famous author of the History of Ancient Greece (1846–56), is the most frequently cited founder. Many of these claims, moreover, besides highlighting Grote's differences from previous moderns, reinforce this historian's foundational status by attributing contemporary value to his work. It has been well argued that his ‘is the earliest history of Greece still consulted by scholars’ and that his work has remained influential to most important twentieth-century historians of ancient Greece, including de Ste Croix, Momigliano, Finley and Hansen. Such analyses have taught us a lot about the development of modern historiography of ancient Greece.
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- The Western Time of Ancient HistoryHistoriographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts, pp. 138 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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