Afterword

Abstract This chapter sums up the vision of Appian and his Roman History that previous chapters have established. Source criticism has been (and continues to be) useful in studying the Roman History, but it has its limitations. Insistence on what is known about elements of Appian’s biography in earlier scholarship has likewise been helpful in noting the significance of his attachment to Alexandria and his status as an Antonine Roman historian, but it has sometimes sought in Appian an addiction to administrative detail which the Roman History simply does not display. The present study has looked at narrative patterns across the Roman History as a whole (so far as extant), and shown that Appian’s portrayal of key individuals and historical trends is illuminated once one observes his practice of ‘repetition with variation’ across multiple books of his work. Reading Appian with an eye to the larger Greco-Roman historiographical tradition shows that Appian is both a historian in a mould largely recognizable from elsewhere in the ancient world and a writer with very particular interests (the weird and wonderful, rational optimism, notable instances of virtue) whose idiosyncratic narrative structures enable him to keep these interests to the fore.