Cultural Politics in Polybius’s <i>Histories</i>

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University of California Press, 23 août 2004 - 343 pages
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Polybius was a Greek statesman and political prisoner of Rome in the second century b.c.e. His Histories provide the earliest continuous narrative of the rise of the Roman Empire. In this original study informed by recent work in cultural studies and on ethnicity, Craige Champion demonstrates that Polybius's work performs a literary and political balancing act of heretofore unappreciated subtlety and interest.

Champion shows how Polybius contrived to tailor his historiography for multiple audiences, comprising his fellow Greeks, whose freedom Rome had usurped in his own generation, and the Roman conquerors. Champion focuses primarily on the ideological presuppositions and predispositions of Polybius's different audiences in order to interpret the apparent contradictions and incongruities in his text. In this way he develops a "politics of cultural indeterminacy" in which Polybius's collective representations of political and ethnic groups have different meanings for different audiences in different contexts. Situating these representations in the ideological, political, and historical contexts from which they arose, his book affords new and penetrating insights into a work whose subtlety and complexity have gone largely unrecognized.
 

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Table des matières

I
1
II
13
III
15
IV
30
V
65
VI
67
VII
100
VIII
144
XI
204
XII
235
XIII
241
XIV
245
XV
255
XVI
261
XVII
283
XVIII
305

IX
171
X
173

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Page 185 - For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion's share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule.
Page 185 - ... and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion's share for themselves. When this happens, the state will...
Page 27 - It should cause no surprise if at times we use the proper name in speaking of ourselves, and elsewhere use general expressions such as 'after I had said this' or again, 'when we agreed to this'.
Page 19 - For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans in less than fifty-three years have succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government — a thing unique in history?
Page 78 - Now the lonians of Asia, who meet at the Panionium, have built their cities in a region where the air and climate are the most beautiful in the whole world; for no other region is equally blessed with Ionia, neither above it nor below it, nor east nor west of it. For in other countries either the climate is over cold and damp, or else the heat and drought are sorely oppressive.
Page 22 - Kpíveiv eyesight is wholly incapacitated, so if History is stripped of her truth all that is left is but an idle tale. We should therefore not shrink from accusing our friends or praising our enemies ; nor need we be shy of sometimes praising and sometimes blaming the same people, since it is neither possible that men in the actual business of life should always be in the right, nor is it probable that they should be always mistaken. We must therefore disregard the actors in our narrative and apply...
Page 38 - Globalization is in danger of becoming, if it has not already become, the cliche of our times: the big idea which encompasses everything from global financial markets to the Internet but which delivers little substantive insight into the contemporary human condition.
Page 267 - Greekness and Uniqueness: The Cult of the Senate in the Greek East'.

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À propos de l'auteur (2004)

Craige B. Champion is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Informations bibliographiques