| This project contends that the 'great man' paradigm which is such a central component of Greek historiography (and particularly of Alexander historiography) in the Hellenistic age and beyond is actually the product of evolving currents of thought which emerged in response to complex historical and political developments in the latest archaic and classical periods. By employing both literary (primarily historiographic) and material (primarily funerary and epigraphical) evidence, the central argument demonstrates that questions about individual and group historical agency were being energetically posed at Athens from the earliest days of the democracy onwards, and that throughout this time both intellectual and popular discourse were engaged in the creation and evaluation of claims to historical relevance and historical meaning. The increasing public cultural prioritization of the contributions of the eminent individual over those of the citizen group in the course of the 5th and 4th centuries BC was particularly reflected not only in the work of the historiographers, but also in the diverging attitudes of public and private commemorative discourse.; The project as a whole is organized as a ring-composition: following a brief introduction (chapter 1.1) which summarizes the main argument, chapter 1.2 characterizes Alexander as the fully-developed model of the 'great man' and suggests that his reception as a historical and historiographic phenomenon was due in significant part to the fact that his culture was primed by long discussion and experience to understand him in the way that it did. Chapter 2 returns to the latest 6th century BC to analyze discernible debates in progress as early as the 'Athenian Revolution' about the respective roles of individuals and groups in the movement of history; the discussion of continuous historiography then commences in chapter 3, where these same themes and questions are analyzed in the work of Herodotus. Chapters 4 and 5 center, respectively, around Thucydides and the material culture of the later 5th century, and Xenophon and that of the earlier 4th century; chapter 6, finally, closes the temporal circle by treating Philip II of Macedon, the Father of Alexander 'the Great,' and offering prospects for future research and inquiry. |
