Detecting and Retrieving Lost Historians

The general objective of this PhD project is to study ancient historians whose works are lost and preserved through quotations and paraphrases in later sources. Classical scholarship defines them as ‘fragmentary historians’, because it is possible to find traces of their work by extracting chunks of texts (fragments) from still extant sources. Our extant textual heritage shows that only 5% of all Greek historians has been preserved in full and that the picture we get of ancient historiography on this basis is very limited and uneven. Collections of fragmentary historians have been published in a printed format, but we still miss a deep analysis of these traces within their context of transmission. This PhD project will analyse the language used by extant authors to quote and paraphrase authors who are now lost.