Literary Texts and the Greek Historian provides a comprehensive and well documented survey of the ways in which non-historical texts, as well as historical ones, can be used to construct Greek history.

Christopher Pelling is Fellow in Classics at University College, Oxford. He has written extensively on Greek biography and historiography and edited Greek Tragedy and the Historian (1997).

Chapter 1 A culture of rhetoric; Chapter 2 Rhetoric and history (415 BC); Chapter 3 How far would they go? Plutarch on Nicias and Alcibiades; Chapter 4 Rhetoric and history II; Chapter 5 Explaining the war; Chapter 6 Thucydides' speeches; Chapter 7 'You cannot be serious'; Chapter 8 Aristophanes' Acharnians (425 BC); Chapter 9 Tragedy and ideology; Chapter 10 Lysistrata and others; Chapter 11 Conclusions;