Narrative Structures in Polybius' Histories

Abstract

This thesis builds upon recent scholarship that has analyzed Polybius' Histories as a literary work both to offer an interpretation of the narrative structures that define the text and to analyze the implications of these structures for our reading of the text as a historical source. It investigates the challenges of narrative that Polybius encountered as he wrote the Histories, how he coped with these obstacles, and what effects his solutions to these problems imposed on his presentation of the real world. The relationship between the didactic purpose of the Histories and Polybius' selection and presentation of historical content is also examined. The primary conclusions drawn by this thesis is that the Histories is a literary presentation of the real world, and that readers must always approach the text as a subjective interpretation of the past--not as an authoritative narrative of events. The purpose of this investigation is not to discover what actually happened around the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries B.C.E., but to better understand the literary representation of this world that Polybius created.