Books by Ivan Matijasic
The issue includes a series of article exploring the place of literary criticism in Greek and Lat... more The issue includes a series of article exploring the place of literary criticism in Greek and Latin historiography
https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
The essays collected in this volu... more https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
The essays collected in this volume explore over a century of readings of Thucydides, from the years immediately preceding the First World War up to the present day. Our purpose is to reflect on some underexplored areas of Thucydidean reception within different academic traditions and political contexts, as well as reconsidering the more recent and controversial developments in the Fortleben of the Athenian historian in the fields of Strategic Studies and International Relations. The interaction between politics and academic practice is the thread that connects our collective efforts. We seek to adopt an approach that is less confined to the reuse of an ancient text in a merely political vein, but opens up to investigate wider issues concerning the history of classical scholarship and the process of consolidation of the social sciences in the academic systems.
Full volume available at https://histos.org/SV14MatijašićHerodotusTheMostHomericHistorian.html
Introduction, Edition of the fragments with English translation and commentary.
Articles by Ivan Matijasic
This paper discusses three unpublished letters from Felix Jacoby (1876-1959) to J. Enoch Powell (... more This paper discusses three unpublished letters from Felix Jacoby (1876-1959) to J. Enoch Powell (1912-98). They met in Germany in December 1938 and corresponded in 1939. Jacoby took offence at the way Powell treated him in his book The History of Herodotus. The conversation veered quickly from scholarship to antisemitism. In the third letter Jacoby questioned Powell on his 'strong antisemitic bias' and declared himself 'no friend of the Jews on the whole', which raises questions about his own self-identification as a non-Jewish baptised German and his nationalistic views. It also allows to reconsider the long-standing issue of his alleged support of Nazism in a lecture in spring 1933 reported by Georg Picht in a controversial article published in 1977. Finally, Jacoby's personal tragedies and political opinions come out in his discussion of Pericles' citizenship law in the commentary on the fragments of Philochorus published in English in 1954.
This chapter explores Arnaldo Momigliano’s interest in ancient Rhodes during the 1930s, when he p... more This chapter explores Arnaldo Momigliano’s interest in ancient Rhodes during the 1930s, when he published some entries on the history of the island in the Enciclopedia Italiana and an important article in the Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica, edited at the time by his teachers Gaetano De Sanctis and Augusto Rostagni. The chapter also more broadly considers his collaboration with the Enciclopedia Italiana, directed by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and his relationship with Fascism and the Fascist regime. Through a detailed analysis of Momigliano’s published works on ancient Rhodes, it is argued that there was no intellectual surrender to Fascist ideol- ogy on his part.
The whole volume is available in open access: https://sites.unimi.it/antichisti_1938/outcomes/
At the annual general Meeting of the Classical Association in 1936, the young classical scholar a... more At the annual general Meeting of the Classical Association in 1936, the young classical scholar and future politician John Enoch Poell (1912–1998) read a paper titled ‘The War and its Aftermath in their Infuence upon Thucydidean Studies’. A typewritten version of the paper is preserved at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. It is now published for the first time in the appendix to this chapter, which discusses Powell’s paper and sets it within the wider intellectual and historical context of the 1930s. Powell makes some insightful analogies between the present political situation and the composition of Thucydides’ history, inspired by Schwartz’ Das Geschichtswerk des Thukydides (1919), but also by his awareness of the situation in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. He also considers the moral interpretations of some important Thucydidean passages (esp. the Melian Dialogue: Thuc. 5.84–114) and shows a ‘realist’ approach to Thucydides. Powell’s paper displays his interest in contemporary politics, a strong historical diachronic perspective, and an analysis of scholarly works on Thucydides through the lenses of twentieth-century ideologies.
Open access: https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
The article discusses the book Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome. Rhetoric, criticism ... more The article discusses the book Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome. Rhetoric, criticism and historiography, edited by Richard Hunter and Casper C. de Jonge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
The British politician and classical scholar J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) met the French philologi... more The British politician and classical scholar J. Enoch Powell (1912-1998) met the French philologist Bertrand Hemmerdinger (1921-2017) in 1948: they shared a common interest in Herodotus and the manuscripts tradition of his Histories. In the present article 11 unpublished letters from Hemmerdinger to Powell (and one letter from Powell to Adams, Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge) are discussed. These letters – published in the Appendix – shed some new light on Powell’s biography in the years following the end of the Second World War and on his role in shaping Hem- merdinger’s opinion on the textual history of Herodotus (and, in part, Thucydides), but also on Hemmerdinger’s early academic career and the prehistory of his book Les manuscrits d’Hérodote et la critique verbale (1981).
This article has two interrelated aims : 1. to reconsider and refute the hypothesis that Aristotl... more This article has two interrelated aims : 1. to reconsider and refute the hypothesis that Aristotle’s instructions on town-planning in Politics Book 7 influenced Alexander’s foundation of Alexandria in Egypt ; 2. to propose an alternative path for the interpretation of Alexander’s attested interests for town-planning, engineering endeavours and geometry, namely his association with the geometer Menaechmus attested in Stobaeus and in the earliest Greek version of the Alexander Romance. Geometry provided the overall theoretical as well as practical frame for founding a settlement : considering Alexander’s role in the foundation of Alexandria and his interest in geometrical and mathematical issues, my conclusion is that the ancient tradition on the personal relationship between Alexander and the geometer Menaechmus might preserve a core of historical truth.
Among J. Enoch Powell’s (1912-1998) unpublished classical papers preserved at the Churchill Archi... more Among J. Enoch Powell’s (1912-1998) unpublished classical papers preserved at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, there is a short piece titled The Solon Speech in Herodotus written in 1931: Powell claimed that there was a close relationship between the representation of Solon in Herodotus and Solon’s own poetry. The main purpose of this article is to offer a transcription of Powell’s unpublished paper: its fate will be considered, and its content will be discussed against later scholars’ works on Solon in Herodotus. Moreover, this paper will be set in the context of Powell’s early years in Cambridge together with his published works on Herodotus, his approach to textual criticism and his personal relationship with Paul Maas.
Cicero's correspondence is a primary source for the intellectual life of the late Roman Republic,... more Cicero's correspondence is a primary source for the intellectual life of the late Roman Republic, to quote the title of the classic book by Elisabeth Rawson 1 . Nearly 950 letters survive, divided into 36 books: one book and part of a second book of letters to Marcus Brutus, three books to Quintus, sixteen to Atticus, and sixteen to various persons collected under the generic title Epistulae ad familiares 2 . This rich set of sources offers a unique perspective on the Roman cultural and intellectual world of the first century BC. It also yields a considerable amount of information on libraries and books, their production, circulation, and availability.
Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2019
This article discusses a passage in Athenaeus (14.620d) that refers to the performance of Herodot... more This article discusses a passage in Athenaeus (14.620d) that refers to the performance of Herodotus’ work in a theatre in Hellenistic Alexandria. In his edition of Athenaeus, highly valued and still influential, August Meineke replaces Herodotus’ name (unanimously transmitted in Athenaeus’ manuscripts) with Hesiod’s. In this article I set out to overturn a widespread tendency to accept Meineke’s emendation of Athenaeus 14.620d, reconsidering the possibility that Athenaeus did in fact name Herodotus in the light of (a) the difficulty of explaining the origin of the alleged mistake in Athenaeus’ manuscript tradition and (b) the ancients’ tendency to draw parallels between Herodotus’ style and language and Homeric poetry. The fact that Athenaeus refers to theatrical performances of both Herodotus’ work and the Homeric poems will be shown to be very much in line with the ancient rhetorical, historiographical and biographical tradition which regarded Herodotus as the most Homeric of all prose writers.
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Books by Ivan Matijasic
The essays collected in this volume explore over a century of readings of Thucydides, from the years immediately preceding the First World War up to the present day. Our purpose is to reflect on some underexplored areas of Thucydidean reception within different academic traditions and political contexts, as well as reconsidering the more recent and controversial developments in the Fortleben of the Athenian historian in the fields of Strategic Studies and International Relations. The interaction between politics and academic practice is the thread that connects our collective efforts. We seek to adopt an approach that is less confined to the reuse of an ancient text in a merely political vein, but opens up to investigate wider issues concerning the history of classical scholarship and the process of consolidation of the social sciences in the academic systems.
Articles by Ivan Matijasic
The whole volume is available in open access: https://sites.unimi.it/antichisti_1938/outcomes/
Open access: https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
The essays collected in this volume explore over a century of readings of Thucydides, from the years immediately preceding the First World War up to the present day. Our purpose is to reflect on some underexplored areas of Thucydidean reception within different academic traditions and political contexts, as well as reconsidering the more recent and controversial developments in the Fortleben of the Athenian historian in the fields of Strategic Studies and International Relations. The interaction between politics and academic practice is the thread that connects our collective efforts. We seek to adopt an approach that is less confined to the reuse of an ancient text in a merely political vein, but opens up to investigate wider issues concerning the history of classical scholarship and the process of consolidation of the social sciences in the academic systems.
The whole volume is available in open access: https://sites.unimi.it/antichisti_1938/outcomes/
Open access: https://www.hcsjournal.org/ojs/index.php/hcs/article/view/SV05
(in the thirties of the fifth century BC), testifies to the foundation of the colony (apoikia) in Brea. The decree contains practical provisions for the foundation: the appointment of an oikist and a few apoikistai, ten geonomoi for the distribution of land, an episkopos to inspect that the Athenian money is properly employed. Symbolic and religious connection to the motherland is ensured by the obligation to send tributes for the Great Panathenaia and Dionysia. Thucydides (following Bergk’s emendation), Cratinus (sometimes corrected in Craterus) and Theopompus testify to the existence of Brea and concur to the localisation of this Athenian colony in the Chalkidike peninsula, north of Potidaea, on the east coast of the Thermaic Gulf.
September 2017 – aims at creating an open access Digital Library of
epigraphic squeezes. The first step is the 3D digitization of the paper
squeezes of Greek inscriptions preserved at the Greek Epigraphy
Laboratory, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
(http://www.unive.it/pag/27275/): the creation of a Digital Library and
the collaboration with the E-Stampages Project will allow a free,
expandable, and inter-operative online collection of squeezes. The final
cultural goal is to contribute to the international recognition,
enhancement, and safeguarding of archives of squeezes in Italy and
abroad.
https://webmagazine.unitn.it/evento/lettere/71388/5-treffen-des-netzwerks-historiai-antike-geschichtsschreibung-und
Newcastle University,
University of Parma
30th October (YouTube Channel) + 4th December (Webinar) 2020