The Role of Genre in the Depiction of Leadership in Antiquity
A Leader of Many Genres
The Role of Genre in the Depiction of Leadership in Antiquity
A Leader of Many Genres
Description
What makes a good leader? Greek and Roman writers asked that question constantly and answered it in strikingly different ways depending on when they were writing and what kind of text they were writing. This volume examines how leadership was imagined across classical literature, from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Historians, poets and philosophers all drew on one another as they built their portraits of kings, generals and statesmen, borrowing and adapting the models they inherited – and often arguing with them. The historian Polybius pushed back against the fashion for writing history as the story of great men, insisting that leaders be understood inside a wider and far less predictable world. The poet Lucan drew on Lucretius' portrait of the philosopher Epicurus to shape his own disquieting Julius Caesar.
Read together, these texts show that the qualities expected of a leader – mercy, eloquence, memory, self-command – were shaped as much by literary form as by political circumstance. What emerges is not a single idea of leadership but a set of competing and sometimes contradictory ones. Ranging from Athenian tragedy to Augustan poetry, imperial biography and Greek oratory under Rome, the volume sets these ancient arguments alongside modern thinking about what leadership is and how it is learned.
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Table of Contents
Part 1: Leadership Within and Between Genres
1. Agamemnon and Menelaus as Generals in Sophocles and Euripides: Epic Characters and Contemporary Concerns, Theodore Hill
2. The clementia of Augustus in Horace and Ovid: The role of genre and intertextuality in the representation of a leadership value, Bénédicte Delignon
3. Recontextualizing Leadership: History & Biography in Polybius' Histories, Emma Nicholson
4. Dio of Prusa, Plutarch and the Paradigmatic Value of Epaminondas as a Flexible Model of Leadership, Thierry Openeer
Part 2: Philosophical Models of Leadership
5. Following Diogenes: Cynic Leadership in Plutarch, Inger Kuin
6. Caesar as light-bringer: Exploring Lucan's use of Lucretius' philosophical leader, Liam Preston
7. The Leader as Doctor: Healing the city in Dio's Oration 32, Raphaëla Dubreuil
Part 3: Performing Leadership
8. Superior memory as an attribute of the ideal leader, Joe Grimwade
9. Leadership values and the Studia of the Suetonian Caesars: the princeps bonus dicendi peritus, Jacqueline Klooster
10. The Other Leader: Reading Values of Female Leadership through Monuments in Vergil and Ovid, Anna-Sofia Alitalo
Product details
| Published | 07 Jan 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 232 |
| ISBN | 9781350359536 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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