Appian

AIM AND SCOPE: Brill’s Historiography of Rome and Its Empire Series aims to gather innovative and outstanding contributions in order to identify debates and trends, and in order to help provide a better understanding of ancient historiography, as well as how to approach Roman history and historiography. We would particularly welcome proposals that look at both Roman and Greek writers, but are also happy to look at ones which focus on individual writers, or individuals in the same tradition. It is timely and valuable to bring these trends and historical sources together by founding the Series, focusing mainly on the Republican period and the principate, as well as the Later Roman Empire.

Historical writing about Rome in both Latin and Greek forms an integrated topic. There are two strands in ancient writing about the Romans and their empire: (a) the Romans’ own tradition of histories of the deeds of the Roman people at home and at war, and (b) Greek historical responses, some developing their own models (Polybius, Josephus) and the others building on what both the Roman historians and earlier Greeks had written (Dionysius, Appian, Cassius Dio). Whereas older scholarship tended to privilege a small group of ‘great historians’ (the likes of Sallust, Livy, Tacitus), recent work has rightly brought out the diversity of the traditions and recognized that even ‘minor’ writers are worth exploring not just as sources, but for their own concerns and reinterpretation of their material (such as The Fragments of the Roman Historians (2013), and the collected volumes on Velleius Paterculus (Cowan 2011) and Appian (Welch 2015)). The study of these historiographical traditions is essential as a counterbalance to the traditional use of ancient authors as a handy resource, with scholars looking at isolated sections of their structure. This fragmentary use of the ancient evidence makes us forget to reflect on their work in its textual and contextual entirety.

The papers of this volume explore suspense in ancient Greek literature. The reader is provided with meticulous analyses of the narrative techniques that triggered the expectations of ancient audiences about the development of a story. For the first time in modern scholarship, suspenseful discourse is examined in a plethora of ancient literary genres (epic, drama, historiography, oratory, novel, and works of literary criticism).

The use of suspense in ancient literature attracts increasing attention in modern scholarship, but hitherto there has been no comprehensive work analysing the techniques of suspense through the various genres of the Classical literary canon. This volume aspires to fill such a gap, exploring the phenomenon of suspense in the earliest narrative writings of the western world, the literature of the ancient Greeks. The individual chapters focus on a wide range of poetic and prose genres (epic, drama, historiography, oratory, novel, and works of literary criticism) and examine the means by which ancient authors elicited emotions of tense expectation and fearful anticipation for the outcome of the story, the development of the plot, or the characters' fate. A variety of theoretical tools, from narratology and performance studies to psychological and cognitive approaches, are exploited to study the operation of suspense in the works under discussion. Suspenseful effects are analysed in a double perspective, both in terms of the artifices employed by authors and with regard to the responses and experiences of the audience. The volume will be useful to classical scholars, narratologists, and literary historians and theorists.

The table of contents and a short summary of the chapters of the volume are uploaded here.