Bristol Phoenix Press Ignibus Paperbacks – serie

Clio is Muse of history, her 'cosmetics' the adornments of rhetoric. Peter Wiseman's influential book, first published in 1979 and now for the first time in paperback, concerns the writing of history during the first century BCE, when Rome was in process of becoming the centre of the Greek, as much as her own, literary world. Historians, trained in the schools of rhetoric, prized elegant plausibility above the empirical objectivity we expect of them today. Legend and history intermingled; history and poetry overlapped.This study divides into three distinct parts. The first treats the problems that arise from reading first century history as if it were written by modern, non-rhetorical standards. The second examines the pseudo-history of the gens Claudia, fabricated during the first century and transmitted to us by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The third discusses Catullus' dedication of his poetry to the historian Cornelius Nepos against the background of the two authors' common intellectual heritage. The book represents a significant contribution towards an appreciation of ancient historiography and Roman culture. History is viewed here as rhetoric, as myth-making, and as poetry.

This book's first appearance (1969) was a full response to the publication (in 1952) of a papyrus fragment from Oxyrhynchus which indicated a late production date (in the 460s BC) for Aeschylus' Supplices, thus upsetting the previous scholarly consensus that it was an early work - indeed the earliest Greek tragedy to survive. There was, the book argued, no longer good reason to suppose that the play belonged to an early stage in its author's development. A final chapter also examined the evidence for reconstruction of the other, lost plays of the trilogy.The present (and first paperback) edition remains essentially unchanged, though a new preface has been added to take account of scholarship since 1969. Few would now argue, as they used to, that Supplices belongs to the 490s but some still have the feeling that it looks like an early play; they attempt to put it back into the 470s. Stylistic and structural evidence, itself often subjective, is not strong enough to place the play in one decade or exclude it from the previous one; but Garvie remains convinced that, even without the additional testimony of the papyrus, all the internal evidence points to the 460s.While the view that Supplices is very early may now have died, some of the salutary lessons of P.Oxy 2256 fgt. 3 have still to be learnt and it is timely for this re-issue to be presented to a new generation of Aeschylean students and scholars.

Scarcely more than a generation before Octavian (later Augustus) set out to encounter Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium, confidently relying on the firm support of 'all Italy', the Italians were in revolt, with the avowed aim of destroying Rome. The impressive unity displayed in 31 BC was the hard-won product of fifty years of earlier struggle; and that struggle forms the subject of this book. From the second century BC the subject peoples of Italy were motivated by a desire for equality with their powerful sister, Rome. Their reasons were diverse, but once their aspirations intruded on Rome's private life, they were to have a profound effect on her politics. At first it was hoped that equality could be achieved through citizenship but, when the Romans proved obdurate, the Italians sought complete independence. Detailed reconstruction of the consequent 'Social War' is the central feature of the book. The war ended with Rome granting its citizenship to the Italians, though that grant was so hedged about with qualifications that further interventions proved necessary - these on so marked a scale that by the end of the 80s BC Italy and Rome had basically achieved the unity which Octavian was later able to exploit. Arthur Keaveney seeks here to delineate the factors which led to the Italian desire first for citizenship, then for independence; he describes the conflict and he assesses its outcomes. He maintains that Rome's 'Italian question' has to be treated as an essentially political issue.