V. Conclusion

Abstract

There are two parts to this conclusion, first a look forward, and second a look backwards. The look forward is towards the continuing history of prose. The major genres – history, rhetoric, philosophy, science – which begin in the classical city, develop and become more clearly demarcated as generic traditions. There are more strongly articulated markers of belonging to a tradition – rules of the genre, as it were – and writers self-consciously affiliate themselves to such traditions and play with them. So, for example, if we were to move on fully five hundred years we would find that an orator like Aelius Aristides, writing in the second century CE in the Greek East, composes speeches which self-consciously echo the style, content and form of Isocrates (among his other performances). Or if we were to go to the second century BCE we could read Polybius’ history of Rome’s conquest of Greece which knowingly works within a tradition headed by Thucydides.