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This article revisits the theme of temporality in ancient Greek historiography through the lens of the Byzantine Histories of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, who fastened onto the device of the anachronic, proleptic future in Herodotus and Thucydides to license his apparently anachronistic device of writing in the language and persona of both, eighteen centuries after they wrote. In Laonikos' account, his narrative is part of the future of 'Greek' history anticipated by Herodotus and Thucydides. Laonikos' clever assimilation of Herodotus and Thucydides sheds new light on Thucydides' own reduplication of himself to project an authorial and textual future. This strong, anachronic move has made Thucydides' work assimilable by future readers and also opened up the work to the contingencies of reception, with its potential for anachronism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the role of anachronism in large scale narratives of speculative fiction. Mary Shelley's The Last Man and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men signal in their titles an ambition to deal with humankind totally and all inclusively. Both authors look to Hesiod as a model for their projects: the Greek poet's account of successive creations and destructions of humankind at the hands of the gods offers a way of narrating human being as both a local cosmic occurrence that has been and one day will be no longer, and as a life form that has persisted with distinctive orientations and commitments through its various local incarnations. The question of anachronism is thus given maximum scope. Rather than a question about accuracy in the representation of local historical details, anachronism emerges as an interrogation of what we recognize and acknowledge as ourselves in the horizon of deep time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics, from Athenaeus in the second century CE and Eduard Zeller in the nineteenth, to the present day, have been concerned with problems of authenticity and the dating of Plato's work, including the inconsistent internal dramatic dates of the dialogues and other anachronisms within them. This article examines the relationship between the imaginary time of the dialogues and Plato's own context, between the blurring of time and temporal relationships in the dialogues and the arguments that they contain, the construction of anachronistic communities and genealogies within them, through which Plato negotiates his own relationship with Socrates, and the deconstruction and re-negotiation of familial relationships, particularly those between fathers and sons. It uses insights from recent explorations of temporality in queer theory to generate a historicist reading that emphasizes the affective role of time within Plato's writing. It argues that Plato uses the temporal setting of dialogues to underscore themes of their arguments, and that these anachronic settings can be read as an artefact of Plato's own reception of Socrates' life and death, and its context in the turmoil of the Peloponnesian War and the loss and restoration of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented discussing several reports delivered at the conference "Anachronism and antiquity: Configuring temporalities in ancient literature and scholarship," which was held at the Florida State University in March 2018.

This essay examines, from a position within Classics, different angles on critiques of historicism and the turn to anachronism in History, Art History, Medieval Studies, and Queer Theory before proposing the idea of 'kairological history', on the model of the artist Paul Chan's 'kairological art'. On this analysis, 'kairological history' engages the critical and creative resources of anachronic thinking alongside tools of historicism (e.g. empiricism, successionism, periodization, alterity) in making choices about 'telling time'. These choices reflect a critical understanding of how temporality shapes the valuation of the past, particularly in relation to a 'classical' past; the negotiation of identity and difference between past and present; and the kinds of communities that history aims to support. The second half of the essay examines two instances of anachronism within the history of anatomy, one from Galen and one from the early twenty-first century. Both cases represent problems that historicism can correct. But the modality of correction, in itself, is anaemic and risks the very teleology that linear history is so often faulted for. The essay therefore explores what gets lost and what gets found when temporality is aligned with linearity, as well as non-linear modes of telling time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]