Stefan Schorn
24Rhetorik und Historiographie
Abstract: This paper deals with the claim in recent literature that historiography was in antiquity a subgenre of rhetoric and that it therefore allowed, or even demanded, the extensive presence of fictional elements. The main representatives of such a view are today P. T. Wiseman and A. J. Woodman. Here I delineate and discuss Woodman’s arguments and those of his critics, concluding that there is no evidence in historiographical theory that the historian was permitted to invent facts to the extent assumed by this scholar. The questions of why and on what scale elements that we today regard as ‘rhetorical’ fiction were admissible in ancient historiography are discussed briefly at the end of this contribution. ...
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