HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

It is fair to say that the study of ancient historiography is currently, and rightly, undergoing a phase of redefinition. 1 The appearance in English of H.-J. Gehrke's seminal Geschichte als Element antiker Kultur (as The Greeks and Their Histories [2023]) is one sign of a growing concern to situate history-writing within its wider cultural and societal dimensions.A parallel approach, no less necessary and no less productive, focuses instead on the literary dimension of historiographical works.This is hardly a recent development (to give an example, narratology and stylistic criticism have long formed part of the toolkit), but the two currents have not always run together, and it is perhaps when they converge that the most interesting work tends to be done.Work on the major ancient historians continues to flourish (on Thucydides see, most recently, D. Sutton, CR 76 [2026], 7-15) while the less frequented specimens of history-writing await comparable attention.The gap is not so much one of coverage, especially in terms of commentaries or general studiesas illustrated, for instance, by A. Meeus's recent commentary on Diodorus of Sicily Book 19 (2022), so important a source for early Hellenistic history.Rather, it lies in our understanding of the place such texts occupied within the wider historiographical tradition and of their characteristics both as accounts of the past (in other words, in terms of their historiographical method and approach) and as reservoirs of the aesthetic and narrative devices through which that method is realised.The three books under review (especially the first two) exemplify this convergence and take it further in three directions.Hau reopens the dossier on the historians conventionally labelled 'tragic', and in doing so asks what this category is actually for.Hähnel turns to a work, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' Antiquitates Romanae, whose literary dimension has never been in doubt (in fact, it has often been valued above its historiographical quality), but whose narrative technique has gone largely unexamined, and asks what that technique was made to do.The collection edited by Fedeli and Spelman moves the question one step