In this concise but stimulating book on history and Greek culture, Hans-Joachim Gehrke continues to refine his work on 'intentional history', which he defines as a history in the self-understanding of social groups and communities – connected to a corresponding understanding of the other – which is important, even essential, for the collective identity, social cohesion, political behaviour and the cultural orientation of such units. In a series of four chapters Gehrke illustrates how Greeks' histories were consciously employed to help shape political and social realities. In particular, he argues that poets were initially the masters of the past and that this dominance of the aesthetic in the view of the past led to an indissoluble amalgamation of myth and history and lasting tension between poetry and truth in the genre of historiography. The book reveals a more sophisticated picture of Greek historiography, its intellectual foundations, and its wider social-political contexts.

HANS-JOACHIM GEHRKE is Professor emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Freiburg (Breisgau). He was Professor and Visiting Scholar at several German and European Universities and President of the German Archaeological Institute. He is the editor of Making Civilisations (2020). Raymond Geuss is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of over a dozen books on political and critical theory, ethics and the history of philosophy, including The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1981), History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001), Changing the Subject (2017) and Who Needs a World View? (2020). Jonas Grethlein is Professor of Greek in the Seminar für Klassische Philologie at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. His publications include The Greeks and their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE (Cambridge, 2010), Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine (Cambridge, 2013), Aesthetic Experience and Classical Antiquity: The Significance of Form in Narratives and Pictures (Cambridge, 2017) and The Ancient Aesthetics of Deception: The Ethics of Enchantment from Gorgias to Heliodorus (Cambridge, 2021).