Böcker av Nikos Miltsios

The issue of leadership is crucial to Polybius' desire to explain the rise of Rome over almost the entire known world and provide benefit and utility to readers who may have to assume positions of responsibility. This book focuses on descriptions of leadership behaviors in the Histories, aiming to identify regularly recurring patterns, motifs, and themes in the relevant passages, which could, precisely because of their persistence, heighten our sensitivity to the subtleties of Polybius' treatment of the subject. Given that the interest in leadership permeates Polybius' work and engages with his main thematic concerns, this study brings the reader face-to-face with questions of power and control, identity and nationality, the role of fortune, narrative strategies, thereby providing a basis for reading the Histories more generally. At the same time, a major concern throughout the book is with the ways Polybius' representation of leadership seems to have been influenced by literary depictions of the conquests of Alexander the Great. Polybius' interplay with his literary context and tradition deepens our understanding of what he is trying to accomplish in the narrative and how he is interacting with the expectations of his audiences.

The narrative artistry of Polybius has received relatively little scholarly attention. Critics have tended to discuss his reflections on the various issues presented in his work or to use him as a source of valuable information about the historical period that he records. This volume, which draws on narratology's analytical tools, focuses instead on the narrative of the Histories, exploring the sophisticated narrative techniques that have gone into shaping it. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the ways the formal aspects of the text contribute to promoting Polybius' thematic concerns. Its aim is not only to present the Histories as the work of an author who has taken pains to provide us with a carefully structured story, but also to illustrate how interpretations of this story can be enriched by a sensitivity to factors such as chronological displacements and variations of focalization.