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Reviewed by:
  • Ancient Historiography and its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A. J. Woodman. by Christina S. Kraus, John Marincola, and Christopher Pelling (eds.).
  • S. J. V. Malloch
Christina S. Kraus, John Marincola, and Christopher Pelling (eds.). Ancient Historiography and its Contexts: Studies in Honour of A. J. Woodman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii, 449. $135.00. ISBN 978-0-19-955868-1.

It is difficult to overestimate the influence that A. J. Woodman has had on the study of ancient historiography over the last forty years. Appropriately, papers on historians from Thucydides to Ammianus, but particularly on Tacitus, predominate among the twenty-one contributions to this Festschrift that will appeal to scholars and advanced students alike. Woodman’s extensive engagement with Latin poetry is also represented with discussions of Catullus and Horace (Feeney), Vergil (D. Nelis; J. Marincola), Ovid (D. West), and Juvenal (J. Powell). Other writers are discussed with insight along the way, and navigating the sea of authors is made easier by an index locorum and a general index. [End Page 696]

The editors have grouped contributions into sections that take their titles from Woodman’s books: author and audience, quality and pleasure, poetry and politics, and Tacitus reviewed. Woodman’s methodology of reading texts provides another unity that crosses section boundaries. The editors devote the first part of their introduction to summarizing that methodology, and the second to relating the contributions to the different strands of that methodology.

Close analysis of a work must start with its text. Woodman’s textual criticism has been a bold feature of his scholarship. Strangely, the editors do not offer any samples in their discussion of Woodman’s work, and it is left to Courtney to demonstrate the practice in seven passages of Tacitus (later Annals) and one of Manilius (2.898), and how difficult it can be. Characteristic of Woodman’s reading strategy is close attention to the use of language, structure, and intra-/intertextual elements. Many such examples could be cited from the contributions. Jonathan Powell argues that the targets of Juvenal’s second Satires are Romans (not Greeks), particularly prosecutors, and his discussion of delator in a variety of texts reminds us that it should mostly be translated “prosecutor,” not “informer.” He sketches the culture of prosecution in the early empire, and suggests that Juvenal could criticize threatening delatores through satire. Stephen Oakley demonstrates how our understanding of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ treatment of the triple combat of the Horatii and Curiatii and the trial of Horatius can be enriched by an intertextual reading as well as by comparison with Livy. Oakley ends with a plea that more attention be given to Dionysius.

Woodman’s insistence on rhetorical techniques as a defining feature of ancient historiography has been the most controversial and influential contribution of his scholarship. He is the greatest living scholar of Tacitus among a group of specialists that, thanks largely to him, is dominated by literary critics. Among the seven papers on Tacitus that offer close analysis of themes and episodes and intertextual readings, those by Elizabeth Keitel and Christopher Pelling (also a scholar of Greek literature and an historian) are especially stimulating. Keitel examines disaster narratives with insight into Tacitus’ use of the urbs capta topos, his unique attention to the sufferings of victims and their families and survivors, and his interest in preserving the memory of what was destroyed. (Note too that persons in Tacitus’ narrative use the urbs capta topos: see Annals 11.23–24.) Pelling’s analysis of Annals 4.37–38 and its context suggests that critics’ “misevaluation” of Tiberius offers readers an interpretation to avoid (and at the same time empathize with) and a sense of the complex atmosphere in which Tiberius sought a good reputation for posterity.

Literary analyses of Tacitus can enrich our understanding of his art and narrative. They can therefore provide a starting point for the historian—but that, for Woodman, is when the trouble starts. “Only when literary analysis has been carried out can we begin to use these texts as evidence for history; and by that time … such analysis will have revealed that there is precious little historical evidence left. The...

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