Allusion and Intertextuality in Classical Historiography

The last few decades in particular have seen a full flowering in the study of allusion and intertextuality in classical texts, especially so in Latin literature where the Romans, because of their generic self-consciousness, have provided excellent models of study. An interest in allusion was already much in evidence in antiquity, and ancient literary criticism is full of remarks comparing how later authors refer to and modify their predecessors. In place of the term ‘allusion’, some recent scholarship has championed the notion of ‘intertextuality’, which unlike the more ‘personal’ notion of allusion, considers echoes and traces of earlier texts as inevitable in any system of language and especially, we might say, in highly formal and stylized genres. Although studies of historical authors have for some time now taken these matters into account, scholars have only just begun to examine to what extent the uses of allusion and intertextuality, developed for and initially employed in non-historical and indeed non-prose texts, need to be modified or differently focused when examining historical texts (O’Gorman 2006, 2009; Damon 2010; Levene 2010, ch. 2). The proposed seminar seeks to take up this topic more fully by exploring some of the theoretical issues surrounding intertextuality and historiographical texts. The papers hope to stimulate discussion on whether and/or to what extent we need a different approach to the issues of allusion and intertextuality when we are considering texts that claim (or that we think claim) to have some relationship to the real world of history. Paper 1 begins by discussing the theoretical issues head on, building on recent work but seeking to broaden the discussion by considering to what extent historians were indeed able to shape the material they inherited from their predecessors, and suggesting instead that in historiographical texts at least, authors may not play the distinctive role that they have in other genres. Paper 2 takes up the broad issues of narrative patterning and believability in historiographical texts. The author argues that intertextuality is not merely a way of referring to a predecessor, but also carries interpretative weight as well, as the reader sees a familiar pattern unfolding. For the historian the use of intertextuality can give texture to a particular narrative (such that the reader recognizes that one event resembles another), while simultaneously raising questions about where and how the two events are similar. Paper 3 takes up the issue of the use of historical exempla, and how these function as intertextual markers in Xenophon’s Hellenica. The author argues that far from being clichés or fossilized reminiscences, historical exempla are sites of contestation over the meaning of history, and that the deployment of various incidents from the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars in the Hellenica dramatizes the quest for historical understanding and links Xenophon’s own history to the those of his predecessors. Paper 4 turns to Livy’s employment of historiographical citation, which is seen as having three important uses: in addition to the obvious one of acknowledging sources, the citations also play an important role in setting Livy’s history in its literary and cultural tradition, and, no less importantly, in constructing and negotiating Livy’s authority within that tradition. The papers, therefore, while addressing specific texts all address larger theoretical issues concerning the interpretation of intertextuality in classical historiography. The session’s commentator, who will also chair the discussion, is a well-known and eminent scholar, who has published widely on historical and historiographical matters, and on the interplay between the two.