It is fair to say that the study of ancient historiography is currently, and rightly, undergoing a phase of redefinition.Footnote ¹ The appearance in English of H.-J. Gehrke’s seminal Geschichte als Element antiker Kultur (as The Greeks and Their Histories [2023]) is one sign of a growing concern to situate history-writing within its wider cultural and societal dimensions. A parallel approach, no less necessary and no less productive, focuses instead on the literary dimension of historiographical works. This is hardly a recent development (to give an example, narratology and stylistic criticism have long formed part of the toolkit), but the two currents have not always run together, and it is perhaps when they converge that the most interesting work tends to be done.

Work on the major ancient historians continues to flourish (on Thucydides see, most recently, D. Sutton, CR 76 [2026], 7–15) while the less frequented specimens of history-writing await comparable attention. The gap is not so much one of coverage, especially in terms of commentaries or general studies – as illustrated, for instance, by A. Meeus’s recent commentary on Diodorus of Sicily Book 19 (2022), so important a source for early Hellenistic history. Rather, it lies in our understanding of the place such texts occupied within the wider historiographical tradition and of their characteristics both as accounts of the past (in other words, in terms of their historiographical method and approach) and as reservoirs of the aesthetic and narrative devices through which that method is realised.

The three books under review (especially the first two) exemplify this convergence and take it further in three directions. Hau reopens the dossier on the historians conventionally labelled ‘tragic’, and in doing so asks what this category is actually for. Hähnel turns to a work, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Antiquitates Romanae, whose literary dimension has never been in doubt (in fact, it has often been valued above its historiographical quality), but whose narrative technique has gone largely unexamined, and asks what that technique was made to do. The collection edited by Fedeli and Spelman moves the question one step further back, from history as literature to the history of literature as the ancients themselves wrote it. Running through all three and binding them together more tightly than their subjects might suggest is ancient literary criticism (cf., among the recent work, S. Brillante and I. Matijašić [edd.], Nuovi approcci alla critica letteraria antica. Tra storia e storiografia, Maia 75 [2023], 5–140): Hau’s historians are known to us largely through the critics who judged them; Dionysius is at once a literary critic (especially of oratory and historiography) and a historian; and the third volume takes criticism itself as its object.

Hau’s book, in the Edinburgh Studies in Hellenistic History and Culture series, meets a genuine desideratum in the study of ancient historiography: a re-evaluation of the traditional, and inherently problematic, category of ‘tragic’ historiography. As the brief but informative introduction makes clear, the book’s contribution is not merely lexical but conceptual. The habit of labelling historians such as Duris, Phylarchus and Agatharchides ‘tragic’ derives from Polybius’ attack on the second as one of those who ‘write like the tragedians’ (Polyb. 2.56 = FGrHist/BNJ 81 T 3). Hau takes issue both with the definition and with the ways it has permeated modern scholarship, not least because it originates with authors who openly disapproved of the style in question. Drawing on narratology and media studies, for instance the work of M.-L. Ryan (Narrative as Virtual Reality [2001]), Hau instead proposes the definition of ‘immersive’ – immersion understood as the mechanism by which readers are drawn into and absorbed by a narrative. As applied to ancient texts, the approach is not altogether new (as Hau notes, it has been fruitfully deployed for other genres, epic and tragedy above all), but it certainly supplies a compelling new lens through which to examine a relatively underexplored corpus of historiographical writing.Footnote ² The gain is, at first sight, more definitional than substantive. Even so, it is salutary to be rid of a problematic scholarly label, and the criteria Hau identifies for literary immersion are well chosen: the absence of a conspicuous authorial persona (not, as she acknowledges, peculiar to these historians); narration in chronological order; and, most decisively, ‘scene narration’ unfolding at a slow pace. She then distinguishes, in turn, the kinds of immersion these texts elicit as spatial, temporal and emotional (pp. 13–14).

The book is divided into two even parts. The first treats each historian in turn (Duris of Samos, Phylarchus, Agatharchides of Cnidus). The second, broader in range and perhaps the more thought-provoking, addresses the cultural background against which these writers worked: on the one hand the influences that may have shaped the genre, on the other the ways in which this (in many respects novel) type of history-writing left its mark on other forms of cultural production.

The first part proceeds according to a fixed pattern. Each chapter opens with a helpful review of the textual tradition of the fragments and works, followed by a survey of the sources in which they are quoted and, most importantly, an assessment of the extent to which the fragments of Duris, Phylarchus and Agatharchides are preserved as verbatim quotations, paraphrases or testimonia. Thanks not least to Hau’s wider expertise in ancient historiography, the book is alert to the methodological work of recent yearsFootnote ³ on the difficulties inherent in drawing conclusions about a lost prose work from its fragments, Athenaeus being a particular case in point as a source for fragmentary historians. Hau strikes a good balance between acknowledging those limitations and using the fragments judiciously to trace the development of this sub-genre.

Hau then identifies a series of macro-themes through which immersive narrative is generated: mythology; geography and ethnography; marvels (θώματα, of apparent Herodotean resonance); women and romantic scandals; violence and suffering; moralising; emotions (where full account is taken of A. Chaniotis’s key collections of essays, Unveiling Emotions [2012 and 2013]); and the role of Tyche in shaping human affairs. These thematic surveys are complemented by close and exhaustive analysis of particularly programmatic fragments, among which one may single out Duris F 1 (from Photius) on mimēsis and hēdonē and his criticism of Ephorus and Theopompus, as well as the already mentioned T 3 of Phylarchus, Polybius’ assault on Phylarchus’ historiographical and narrative technique.

Especially notable is Hau’s discussion of Agatharchides F 21 (pp. 137–43), on the rationale for writing about suffering and misfortune, which she insightfully reads as a kind of manifesto for immersive history at large, especially regarding how sufferings ought to be handled in a dignified fashion. This specific discussion will be valuable to scholars working on several adjacent topics: the destruction of cities, the subject of a recent collection of essays (S. Fachard and E.M. Harris [edd.], The Destruction of Cities in the Ancient Greek World [2021]), which Hau supplements with an analysis of how the phenomenon is treated in historiography; Hellenistic oratory, since Agatharchides takes issue with the style of Hermesianax and, above all, of Hegesias of Magnesia, an author of considerable importance for Asianic historiography and oratory; and, finally, ancient literary criticism and prose style, a trait d’union of the three books reviewed here, as Hau offers detailed discussion of the relevant technical vocabulary.

It must be conceded that it is not always entirely clear how far the macro-themes listed above actually contribute to producing an immersive narrative. Take Hau’s sensible treatment of Duris’ handling of mythography. We learn a good deal about Duris’ attitudes to myth and, so far as the fragmentary evidence allows, its place in the economy of the narrative, but rather less about how myth serves to immerse readers in the story. Despite this minor quibble, this first part offers an up-to-date, meticulous and methodologically informed account of these historians, to which scholars of historiography will need to pay close attention.

The second part successfully assembles an overall picture of immersive historiography. Its first chapter explores how far the mimēsis and enargeia of these authors were conceptualised by, or may be traced back to, ancient literary criticism from Aristotle to Longinus. The second and weightiest chapter asks to what extent these historians can be situated within a Peripatetic milieu, both in terms of their biographies and of the style of their works. Hau’s most important contribution here is her argument (pp. 194–6) that we cannot be confident that Duris was a pupil of Theophrastus, since the claim rests on an emendation to a passage of Athenaeus (4.128a). I remain persuaded that the emendation is sound and necessary (cf. N. Luraghi, ASNP n.s. 9 [2017], 196 n. 68), but Hau’s discussion certainly advances the ongoing debate about the potential Peripatetic background of early Hellenistic historiography. A final and entertaining chapter draws connections between these authors and contemporary developments in the plastic arts, above all Hellenistic sculpture, where enargeia likewise looms so large.

This overview can give only a partial sense of the many themes, and the many virtues, of a book that combines philological precision (indispensable when dealing with fragmentary evidence) with sustained attention to broader cultural currents and a sure sense of how to place these writers in their intellectual and political settings. The book therefore does more than exchange one label for another, ‘tragic’ for ‘immersive’: it is a successful instance of that combination of trends identified at the outset of this review, marrying attention to style and literary technique with a grasp of the culturally embedded tendencies of post-Classical ancient history-writing. Scholars will have to reckon with this study the next time they reach for the label ‘tragic historiography’.

Turning to the second volume under review, Hähnel’s monograph likewise fills a gap by offering a systematic examination of the narrative technique of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Antiquitates Romanae – a work which, as Hähnel observes, has attracted less scholarly attention than even Dionysius’ writings on rhetoric, oratory and literary composition. The Antiquitates lend themselves particularly well to such an investigation, since scholars have long paid attention to their literary and rhetorical features. It was these features that led some older scholarship to disparage Dionysius’ qualities as a historian, as though rhetorical craft and historiographical seriousness were mutually exclusive.

The short introduction offers a promising frame for the question of Dionysius’ narrative technique. Hähnel begins by briefly situating the Antiquitates within the Augustan cultural climate (cf. R. Hunter and C.C. de Jonge [edd.], Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome. Rhetoric, Criticism and Historiography [2019]), above all with respect to the creation of collective memories, for which historiography has been a privileged vehicle throughout the ages. It is refreshing to see that this is set as the guiding research question of the book’s otherwise predominantly stylistic discussions: namely, how Dionysius’ narrative choices can be understood as constructing a cultural history of the origins of Rome for a Greek readership (cf. N. Bruno [ed.], Archaeologies, Origins, Antiquities. Narrating Early Cultural History in Ancient Greece and Rome [2025]) – an endeavour bound up with the overarching thesis of the Antiquitates: that the history of Rome is part of that of the Greek world.

There follows a rather lengthy review of scholarship on Dionysius, running from the damning Realencyclopädie article by E. Schwartz in the early twentieth century, through the re-evaluation of E. Gabba, who broke new ground in denying any opposition between rhetoric and history-writing in Dionysius’ concept of his historical work, down to the more sophisticated and favourable analyses of C.C. de Jonge and N. Wiater. The following chapter, placed before the thematic macro-discussions that form the body of the book, investigates the socio-cultural context of the Antiquitates, and in this respect serves as a more effective introduction than the Einleitung proper. Its first section sketches the milieu of Greek-born intellectuals in Augustan Rome (Strabo, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes of Alexandria, Posidonius of Apamea), although, as Hähnel emphasises, the scarcity of biographical information on Dionysius prevents us from drawing firm connections beyond his relationship, attested by references and dedications in his books, with Q. Aelius Tubero.

The next section examines the distinctive features of Dionysius’ ‘classicising’ cultural programme. An interesting point raised by Hähnel is the primacy and long shadow of fourth-century Athenian culture, especially oratory – a major concern of recent scholarship, here understandably touched on only in passing. The chapter then reaches the core of the book’s subject matter by canvassing the programme and audience of the Antiquitates. Hähnel arrives at a twofold conclusion: the work is underpinned by the aim of imparting moral values through exempla drawn from the remote past, and its audience is at once Roman and Greek. The latter point brings us to the relationship between Dionysius and Polybius, whose works share the ultimate goal of justifying Rome’s rise to a Greek-speaking audience by assuming a ‘mediating role’ through history-writing (pp. 47–52). Hähnel locates a key difference in the fact that Polybius, unlike Dionysius, pursued his paideutic purposes through the history of his own time – an observation that might have invited broader reflection on ‘antiquarian’ vis-à-vis contemporary history-writing (cf. V. Fromentin [ed.], Écrire l’histoire de son temps [2022]).

The following three chapters constitute the bulk of the book, approaching the narrative techniques of the Antiquitates through thematic lenses: the use of enargeia; speeches; and episodes concerning women and their agency. The chapters consist largely of close discussion of passages from the Antiquitates, with the final chapter alone divided into six levels of sub-headings. The chapter on enargeia (grounded in ancient stylistic theory rather than in contemporary narratology) offers a useful complement to Hau’s discussion above, in that enargeia may be taken as a key component, if not an outright synonym, of ‘immersion’, achieved through sensory references, focalisation and the like.

For instance, Chapter 5 treads a well-frequented path in exploring the role of speeches in ancient historiography. Hähnel is certainly right to see speeches as a defining characteristic of ancient historiography as a whole; but how does this play out in Dionysius’ case? We are fortunate enough to have Dionysius’ own discussions of the subject in his literary treatises, both those on the Attic orators and that on Thucydides. Since these treatises expound the stylistic features of their subjects precisely with a view to imitation, it comes as no surprise that the most characteristic feature of the speeches in the Antiquitates is the deployment of tropes and stylistic markers drawn from the orators. Hähnel’s contribution here is to read the speeches as a strategy of cultural transfer – the application of the stylistic paradigms of Greek rhetoric to writing the history of Rome. To this end she surveys a series of speeches from the books covering the monarchic period; this will be helpful reading for future discussions of speeches in historiography, whether or not one shares Hähnel’s particular emphases.

The final chapter (rounded off by a brief conclusion) explores how Dionysius narratively frames female characters in the Antiquitates, an investigation that invites frequent parallels with Livy. Indeed, the rationale Hähnel sets out for the chapter is precisely to provide a counterpart to the extensive discussion of female characters in Livian scholarship, a theme so conspicuously neglected in the case of Dionysius.

Much of this book, and its main body in particular, will appeal primarily to a specialist audience. One might accordingly have welcomed a more sustained effort to broaden the scope of the analysis beyond specific episodes and features of the Antiquitates, with more comparanda drawn from other Greek and Roman authors, both contemporary and from other periods. This could have broadened the argument without sacrificing its precision and made the book’s insights more readily transferable to neighbouring debates. That said, Hähnel’s discussions will offer important insights to future commentators on and interpreters of the Antiquitates, and possibly to scholars of other historiographical works.

The last book under review rounds off the picture sketched above in an unexpected manner, as it explores not history as literature but the history of literature – and above all the history of literature as ancient authors themselves conceived it. Building on the approaches to writing the history of Graeco-Roman literature developed over the past few decades, the volume edited by Fedeli and Spelman ‘aims to combine and expand on these attempts to study the Greeks’ and Romans’ approaches to and perspectives on the literary past on their own terms and in connection with larger cultural contexts’ (p. 7). As the insightful afterword by S. Goldhill makes clear, the rationale of the whole enterprise may be taken as a rebuttal of the long-influential verdict of D.A. Russell, that ‘the historical study of literature in antiquity was very rudimentary by modern standards’ (Criticism in Antiquity [1981], p. 156), cited in many contributions to the volume.

The introduction is divided into two parts, the second of which frames and summarises each chapter. The first offers a thought-provoking overview of how the writing of literary histories has shifted away from linear, diachronic surveys of authors and genres towards works that give due weight to literary and historical theory, as well as to phenomenology and New Historicism. These brief but dense pages convey a clear sense of current research, and of the direction it seems likely to take. Given the editors’ flexible chronology, however, one might have wished the boundaries pushed further back. The rise and development of literary histories are, after all, products of specific cultural conditions – from Fabricius’ Bibliotheca Graeca and Bibliotheca Latina in the eighteenth century, through, for example, T. Bergk (1872–87), down to the two volumes of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1982–5), surprisingly never mentioned or referenced in the volume.

The thirteen contributions (not counting the epilogue and afterword) are distributed across three parts: ‘Between Literature and Scholarship’, ‘Lives and Afterlives’ and ‘Narratives of Change’. Spelman examines the beginnings of literary history before Aristotle, ranging across the development of writing, education and literary culture generally. Alongside familiar case studies (the ‘immanent’ poetic history of the Odyssey, or Aristophanes’ handling of the tragic playwrights in the Frogs), he offers enlightening discussion of less familiar texts such as Glaucus of Rhegium and the Mouseion of Alcidamas. É. Prioux moves to Hellenistic epigram, and in particular to the nexus between literature and the plastic arts (both invariably designated technai), traced through paired epigrams addressing each dimension in turn. The claim that works such as Callimachus’ Pinakes ‘probably shared many characteristics with treatises on visual art’ (p. 41) would perhaps have needed fuller substantiation than it receives; the chapter is nonetheless illuminating on the interplay between literary and artistic production in the period. Fedeli turns to the history of Roman satire, going to the heart of the volume’s concerns in demonstrating how alert Roman poets were to the genre and its development.

E. Romano’s chapter on Cicero as a historian of literature will perhaps attract the widest readership. Tracing the development of Cicero’s interest in diachronic literary history across De oratore, De legibus (on historiography) and above all Brutus, Romano observes that, although Cicero nowhere treats concepts such as genre systematically, Brutus may profitably be understood as staging, in van den Berg’s phrase, ‘the invention of literary history’.Footnote ⁴ Scholars of Greek oratory should attend closely to this study: Cicero’s rhetorical treatises remain among our most valuable witnesses to lost oratory, and Romano’s account of how he historicises the Attic tradition bears directly on how that evidence should be read. J. McAlhany then makes a case for the significance of Varro’s De poematis and De poetis, bringing out the subtlety, if not quite the theoretical sophistication, of an approach that, on his reading, draws on Neoptolemus of Parium’s view that the poet ‘does not stand outside the poem as its creator but exists in the poem’ (p. 113).

The second part of the volume opens with M. Lefkowitz on the role of comedy in literary history. She brings her long-standing expertise in biography and literary tradition to bear on a much-frequented theme, showing how the portrayal of the tragic playwrights (Euripides above all) was shaped by comedy and then filtered again through Hellenistic and later lenses. F. Stok investigates the afterlives of Virgil’s Life from the poet’s own age onwards, arguing that ‘the biography of Virgil was recurrently reworked and reformulated as the reception of his oeuvre changed through the ages’ (p. 165). The thesis is straightforward and persuasive; one also wonders whether frameworks drawn from reception studies (such as reception within antiquity and notably the notion of ‘receiving contexts’) could give it more analytical purchase. A. Rotstein examines doublets of poets and authors, namely those cases in which the ancient sources posit the existence of two writers of the same name, with case studies including Euenus of Paros, Xenophanes, Alcman, Sappho and Homer; the chapter provides useful insights into the ancient biographical tradition more broadly, not least on Demetrius of Magnesia’s On Homonyms. E. Greensmith closes the section with Philostratus as literary historian. Canvassing his relationship with the classical poets in the Lives of the Sophists and the Heroicus, she sheds further light on the Second Sophistic as a period of conscious engagement with, if not continuation of, the literary past, epitomised by the telling description, which captivatingly opens the paper, of Homer as the ‘voice of the sophists’ (VS 620).

The final part carries forward the question of how authors conceptualised their engagement with the literary tradition. C.C. de Jonge opens with Aristotle’s notion of ‘teleological growth’ in literary history, addressing some of the core texts of ancient literary criticism, including works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius (De elocutione) and Longinus. This is possibly the most authoritative chapter in the volume, and readers drawn to the book’s overarching themes would do well to read it first, immediately after the introduction. M. Citroni then supplies its Roman counterpart, treating progress and decline as conceived by Cicero, Varro, Horace, Quintilian and the elder Pliny, and showing how nuanced the Roman understanding of these concepts could be even where it was never elaborated in theoretical terms. M.R. Gale turns to the fifth book of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, singling out the underexplored role of written literature in his conceptualisation of cultural progress, in particular his presumed disregard for orally transmitted poetry, which suits his broader literary agenda. R. Hunter addresses Plutarch’s engagement with the history of Greek poetry, especially in On the Oracles at Delphi, where the movement of oracular utterance from verse to prose becomes an analysis of contemporary cultural trajectories. In the epilogue, S.M. Goldberg raises a momentous methodological question: how preservation and loss shape our grasp of a diachronic trajectory, particularly for Roman literature, in which ‘authors were also readers and made invocation of the literary past integral to their creation of the literary present’ (p. 323).

A volume of this kind is bound to range across disparate themes and, as is clear from this breathless survey, coherence is not among its virtues. The editors acknowledge as much, and indeed some diversity is inevitable, given the variety of sources from which ancient literary history must be reconstructed; at any rate, attentive readers will have little difficulty in drawing the necessary threads together. Such diversity also inevitably leaves gaps. A glance at the index shows that the most discussed author after Homer is Aristotle: rightly so, given the role of the Poetics in creating a teleological theory of literary history. Yet Hellenistic scholarship, whether or not from the Peripatetic milieu, perhaps deserved more weight: while R. Blum’s important treatment of the Pinakes is cited (Kallimachos [trans. 1991]), Callimachus is absent from the index altogether. Given the breadth of the volume, however, some desiderata are unavoidable, and the editors are to be congratulated for producing a collection of this scope on such an elusive subject.

Does the collection succeed in bringing more nuance to Russell’s statement about the rudimentary nature of the ancients’ self-awareness about their literary history? The answer is certainly yes. What many contributions show is that ancient authors could think with considerable subtlety about literary development without feeling the need to systematise that thought explicitly. The volume’s real achievement is to have brought that distinction into clear view. It will accordingly serve as a key point of departure for future work on ancient conceptions of literary history and ancient cultural history more broadly.

In conclusion, the books under review testify to the growing interest of classical scholarship in devising new approaches to two related subjects: history-writing in its cultural contexts and ancient literary criticism with its reception. Taken together, they mark a methodological advance in challenging long-standing distinctions between literary form and historical interpretation. In recognising that ancient authors worked within a closely integrated intellectual culture, in which literary and stylistic choices shaped the representation and interpretation of the past, scholars are arriving at a fuller understanding of Graeco-Roman history-writing: one that treats ancient prose texts not as inert repositories of tradition or mere displays of rhetorical technique, but as active agents in shaping how the classical past was understood, remembered and adapted.