Local Knowledge and Authority in Polybius? Histories

MORENO LEONI, ÁLVARO MATÍAS

San Pablo

Congreso; Autoria e autoridade na historiografía: modelos antigos, dilemas modernos; 2019

Universidade de Sao Paulo - Newcastle University

Given the importance attributed to Polybius in recent years as a ?precursor? of global sociology, it would be interesting to address the issue of the construction of a historical discourse ?universal?, or ?global?, but without setting aside its contact with multiple ?local? pieces of knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, I seek to explore some passages of the Histories of Polybius in which there are some explicit references to this type of knowledge as well as an authorial assessment of the value of their provided information. Secondly, I am not interested in these passages per se, but in order to put them in relation to the self-fashioning of Polybius as a ?cultural mediator? with authority to understand them better. From a ?translocal? or cosmopolitan perspective, these mediators, who in the modern world are best exemplified by the ethnographers, Polybius would have been seeking to make sense of the information collected on a local scale for a broader and more diverse Mediterranean audience. Thus, I will need here to pay attention to the operations of juxtaposition, according to a procedure of analogical inference of information coming from diverse pieces of local knowledge with other supralocal phenomena.