Interpreting Roman world: Rhetoric of Otherness, Audience and Greek Culture in the Histories of Polybius

Abstract

Scholars have often undervalued the problem of cultural contact in the Histories of Polybius, reducing the scope of this kind of approach only to the description of Barbarian peoples. It has even been argued that the historian had some inability to inquire about Rome as an object of cultural reflection resulting from a process of acculturation experienced by him in that city during his stay there. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider these ideas through an exploration of certain discursive devices that reveal us a complex cultural operation aimed at bringing the narrated world into the world where it is narrated.