Clio's Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature

"Clio is Muse of History, her 'cosmetics' the adornments of rhetoric. Peter Wiseman's influential book, first published in 1979 and now for the first time in paperback, concerns the writing of history during the first century B.C.E., when Rome was in process of becoming the centre of the Greek, as much as her own, literary world. Historians, trained, like all their literary contemporaries, in the schools of rhetoric, often prized elegant plausibility above the empirical objectivity we nowadays expect of them. Legend and history intermingled; history and poetry overlapped." Wiseman's book represents a significant contribution towards an appreciation of ancient historiography in the interface between Greek and Roman culture. History is viewed here as rhetoric, as myth-making, and as poetry.