Contested Pasts

A Determinist History of Alexander the Great in the Roman Empire
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-472-13303-1
Verlag: University of Michigan Press

Buch, Englisch, 264 Seiten, Hardback

Taking as a key turning point the self-fashioning of the first Roman emperor Augustus, author Jennifer Finn revisits the idea of “universal history” in Polybius, Justin, and Diodorus, combined with the Stoic philosophy of determinism present in authors like Plutarch and Arrian. Finn endeavors to determine the ways in which Roman authors manipulated narratives about Alexander’s campaigns—and even other significant events in Mediterranean history—to artificially construct a past to which the Romans could attach themselves as a natural teleological culmination. In doing so, Contested Pasts uses five case studies to reexamine aspects of Alexander’s campaigns that have received much attention in modern scholarship, providing new interpretations of issues such as: his connections to the Trojan and Persian wars; the Great Weddings at Susa; the battle(s) of Thermopylae in 480 BCE and 191 BCE and Alexander's conflict at the Persian Gates; the context of his “Last Plans”;” the role of his memory in imagining the Roman Civil Wars; and his fictitious visit to the city of Jerusalem. While Finn demonstrates throughout the book that the influence for many of these narratives likely originated in the reign of Alexander or his Successors, nevertheless these retroactive authorial manipulations force us to confront the fact that we may have an even more opaque understanding of Alexander than has previously been acknowledged. Through the application of a mnemohistorical approach, the book seeks to provide a new understanding of the ways in which the Romans—and people in the purview of the Romans—conceptualized their own world with reference to Alexander the Great.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- List of Images
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Contested Pasts: Alexander the Great and Determinist History
- Great Man History and Determinism
- Alexander, the Romans, and Determinist History
- Alexander and Augustus
- Roman Historiography and Alexander the Great
- Chapter Contents
- Chapter 2 Trojan War Reprisals
- Alexander arrives at Susa: a Prelude
- Susa and the Greek World
- Alexander and Troy
- In the Ages of Heroes: Trojan War 2.0
- Thrice Reprised: The Romans and the Trojan War
- Chapter 3 Writing Rivalry: The Persian Wars and the Battle of Thermopylae
- Prelude
- The Romans at Thermopylae
- Thermopylae and the Succession of Empires
- Re-writing Thermopylae
- Subverting Spartan History
- Chapter 4 Imagining Imperial Power Figures
- The Context of the “Last Plans”
- The Campaigns Against the Carthaginians and the West
- The Road to the Pillars of Hercules
- The Synoecism of Peoples from Europe and Asia
- The Construction of Temples
- The Tomb of Philip
- Conclusion
- Chapter 5 Alexander in Civil War(s)
- Introduction
- Antony and Octavian
- Pompey’s Imitatio Alexandri and the Sertorian Wars
- History Rewritten: Two Alexanders
- Chapter 6 Con(text)s of Invention: Alexander the Great at Jerusalem
- Tyre
- Babylon
- Jerusalem
- Inventing History in the 1st century CE
- Alexandria
- Conclusion
- Contested Pasts: Conclusion
- Contested Pasts: Bibliography