Table of Contents

Introduction Anton Powell 1 Historical explanation and what didn't happen: the virtues of virtual history Christopher Pelling 2 Herodotos and the avoidance of hindsight Emily Baragwanath 3 Athens' Sicilian expedition: contemporary scenarios of its outcome Roger Brock 4 The shadow of what might have been: sideshadowing in Thucydides and Xenophon Lisa Irene Hau 5 Spartan supremacy: a 'possession for ever'? Early-fourth-century expectations of enduring ascendancy Helen Roche 6 Confusing aim and result? Hindsight and the disintegration of Alexander the Great's empire Alexander Meeus 7 How to avoid being a backward-looking prophet - counterfactuals in Polybius Felix K. Maier 8 Anticipating Octavian's failure: from Tauromenium to the death of Cleopatra Anton Powell 9 Memoriae eximere: AD 41 and the survival of republicanism under the Principate Katherine Low

Promotional Information

One of the most fertile and fast-developing themes of recent historiography is treated by the 10 new papers in this volume. The history of the ancient world has traditionally been studied with a view to tracing the origins of those grand developments which eventually occurred.

About the Author

Anton Powell has published extensively on the history of Sparta, Athens – and the literature of the Roman Revolution. He was the author of an introduction to source-criticism in Greek history, Athens and Sparta (3rd edition 2016), the editor of Companion to Sparta (2 volumes, 2018), and co-editor (with Nicolas Richer) of Xenophon and Sparta (2020). His monograph Virgil the Partisan (2008) was awarded the prize of the American Vergilian Society for ‘the book that makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and appreciation of Vergil’. He has twice been Invited Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2006 for Greek history and in 2008 for Latin literature.