After Etudes sur l’aspect verbal chez Platon (Saint-Etienne, 2000), the international ‘Groupe de recherche sur l’aspect verbal en grec’ now presents a second volume on verbal aspect in (Ancient) Greek, which is devoted to the function(s) of the Historical Present in Thucydides. In nine chapters the authors approach this subject from a variety of angles, focusing inter alia on the HP of particular verbs and on its use in battle narratives, or investigate Thucydides’ use of the HP from a comparative perspective. They share one important assumption, viz. that the primary function of the HP is to mark events that were, according to Thucydides, of decisive importance for the development of the Peloponnesian War. By its rich and detailed analyses the book provides important new insights into Thucydides’ narrative technique.

Voice and Voices in Antiquity draws together 18 studies of the changing concept of voice and voices in the oral traditions and subsequent literate genres of the ancient world. Ranging from the poet's voice to those of characters as well as historically embodied communities, and from the interface between the Greek and Near Eastern worlds to the western reaches of the Roman Empire, the scholars assembled here offer a methodologically rich and diverse series of approaches to locating the power of voice as both poetic construct and communal memory. The results not only enrich our understanding of the strategies of epic, lyric, and dramatic voices but also illuminate the rhetorical claims given voice by historians, orators, philosophers, and novelists in the ancient world.

Tense is at its most interesting when it behaves badly. In this book Arjan Nijk investigates the variation between the past and present tenses to refer to past events in Classical Greek and beyond. Adopting a cognitive approach to the issue, he argues that the use of the present for preterite depends on the activation of implicit conceptual scenarios in which the gap between the past and the present is bridged. The book is distinguished from previous accounts by its precision in describing these conceptual scenarios, the combination of linguistic theorising with philological and statistical methods, the size of the corpus under investigation and the explicitly cross-linguistic scope. It provides a complete overview of the phenomenon of tense switching in Classical Greek, as well as new theoretical perspectives on deixis and viewpoint, and is important for classicists, narratologists and linguists of every stamp. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Drawing on cognitive approaches to literary studies, this volume pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative that transcends the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies, deploying concepts such as immersion and embodiment in order to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient Greek narrative and ancient reading habits.

A significant trend in the study of Greek and Roman historiographers is to accept that their works are to a degree both science and fiction. As scholarly interest broadens, in addition to evaluating ancient historians on the basis of the reliability of the information they record, and verifying the narratives against various elements of the material (inscriptions, excavations, numismatics), new studies are beginning to elaborate on the stylistic and narrative qualities of the texts themselves. The present volume offers a fine collection of essays that on the whole emphasize the literary dimensions of the ancient Greek and Roman historians. Offering narratological, linguistic, and theoretical approaches to historiography, the contributors of the book elaborate on the intersections between historiography and other literary genres, the literary manipulation of military events and the criteria of selectivity, the reception of ancient historical texts in other genres, time and space in historical narrative, and plenty of other relevant topics. The shared belief of the authors is that there is a close interrelation between the literary features and the scientific value of ancient Greek and Roman historiography.

Since antiquity, Book 8 of Thucydides’ History has been considered an unpolished draft which lacks revision. Even those who admit that the book has some elements of internal coherence believe that Thucydides, if death had not prevented him, would have improved many chapters or even the whole structure of the book. Consequently, while the first seven books of the History have been well examined through the last two centuries, the narrative plan of Book 8 remains an obscure subject, as we do not possess an extensive and detailed presentation of its whole narrative design. Vasileios Liotsakis tries to satisfy this central desideratum of the Thucydidean scholarship by offering a thorough description of the compositional plan, which, in his opinion, Thucydides put into effect in the last 109 chapters of his work. His study elaborates on the structural parts of the book, their details, and the various techniques through which Thucydides composed his narration in order to reach the internal cohesion of these chapters as well as their close connection to the rest of the History. Liotsakis offers us an original approach not only of Book 8 but also of the whole work, since his observations reshape our overall view of the History.