To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

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The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater now than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studies in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, A. D. 50-250

For the Greeks and Romans, the Earth's furthest perimeter was a realm radically different from what they perceived as central and human. The alien qualities of these "edges of the Earth" became the basis of a literary tradition that endured throughout antiquity and into the Renaissance, despite the growing challenges of emerging scientific perspectives. This survey reveals that the Greeks, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Romans, saw geography not as a branch of physical science but as an important literary genre. The tradition described by Romm emerged in Homer and Hestiod, whose imaginative geography defined the Earth by giving it boundaries - the river Ocean, the Pillars of Heracles, and other mythical forms of circumscription. Other Greek authors developed exotic literary landscapes by filling these "limits" with idealized human societies and bizarre or monstrous animal life, while the Romans adapted the concept of perimeters to goals of imperial conquest. As Hellenistic and Roman voyages of exploration failed to confirm the fancied landscapes, the tradition came to be seen as one in which invented narratives had masqueraded as truths. As a result, some of late antiquity's most daring innovations seized on geography as a theme for prose fiction, and the explorer's log became an important antecedent of the early modern novel.

"The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography, Exploration and Fiction", James S. Romm, New Jersey 1992 : [recenzja] / Izabela Żbikowska.

Les protectores diuini lateris Augusti, soldats de haut rang attestes dans l’armee romaine entre le IIIe siecle et le VIe siecle, ont ete consideres tour a tour par les historiens comme des gardes du corps imperiaux, des officiers d’etat-major, ou les successeurs des centurions. Mais ces interpretations soulevent bien des contradictions que cette etude d’histoire militaire et sociale, appuyee sur un corpus prosopographique, vise a resoudre. Les evolutions du recrutement, des carrieres et des fonctions des protectores sont revelatrices des recompositions du commandement de l’armee romaine tardive. L’analyse ouvre egalement une fenetre sur l’environnement social et culturel de ces soldats privilegies, amenes a frequenter tant les champs de bataille que la cour imperiale. Enfin, en placant au centre de la reflexion la relation de ces soldats avec l’empereur, a la fois chef de l’armee et garant de l’ordre social et symbolique du monde de l’Antiquite tardive, on comprend comment les protectores s’inscrivaient, aux yeux des Romains, au sein d’un ordre terrestre des dignites refletant la hierarchie celeste.

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01740232/document

Des soldats de l'armée romaine tardive : les protectores (IIIe-VIe siècles ap. J.-C.)

In the Roman social hierarchy, the equestrian order stood second only to the senatorial aristocracy in status and prestige. Throughout more than a thousand years of Roman history, equestrians played prominent roles in the Roman government, army, and society as cavalrymen, officers, businessmen, tax collectors, jurors, administrators, and writers. This book offers the first comprehensive history of the equestrian order, covering the period from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD. It examines how Rome's cavalry became the equestrian order during the Republican period, before analysing how imperial rule transformed the role of equestrians in government. Using literary and documentary evidence, the book demonstrates the vital social function which the equestrian order filled in the Roman world, and how this was shaped by the transformation of the Roman state itself.

A History of the Roman Equestrian Order

"The political instability of the Severan Period (AD 193-235) destroyed the High Imperial consensus about the Roman past and caused both rulers and subjects constantly to re-imagine and re-narrate both recent events and the larger shape of Greco-Roman history and cultural identity. This book examines the narratives put out by the new dynasty, and how the literary elite responded with divergent visions of their own. It focuses on four long Greek narrative texts from the period (by Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian), each of which constructs its own version of the empire, each defined by different Greek and Roman elements and each differently affected by dynastic change, especially that from Antonine to Severan. Innovative theories of narrative are used to produce new readings of these works that bring political, literary and cultural perspectives together in a unified presentation of the Severan era as a distinctive historical moment"--

Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian

Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic

Starting with the question of why critical contemporary history is almost entirely absent in the century between Tacitus and Cassius Dio, this article examines Lucian's and Fronto's writings on the historiography of the Parthian war of the mid-160s. I argue that these authors demonstrate a particularly Antonine form of historical consciousness, in which the present is detached from any grand narrative, and the historian is seen as a narrator of events alien to his own life-experience. Elements of this view are also traced in the writings of Appian, Florus, and other contemporary authors.

Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines

Two contemporary texts in different languages, Plutarch’s Precepts and Tacitus’ Agricola , display remarkable commonalities in how they present elite political activity. Specifically, both texts idealize figures who do work for their communities that is useful but apparently lacks glory and requires subordination to superiors in the imperial hierarchy. The authors attempt to reconcile these activities with the traditional aristocratic ethic, while at the same time characterizing overt resistance to the hierarchy as useless display. This article will trace this rhetoric through both texts and place it in its immediate historical setting (alongside contemporary authors including Dio Chrysostom) and in the larger context of Roman imperial discourse.

Adam M. Kemezis

Papers

Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian

Greek Ethnicity and the Second Sophistic

Lucian, Fronto, and the Absence of Contemporary Historiography under the Antonines

Inglorius labor?: The Rhetoric of Glory and Utility in Plutarch's Precepts and Tacitus' Agricola

Introduction: The Empire's Second Language?