HISTORIA MAGISTRA VITAE,INTERRUPTING: THUCYDIDES AND THE AGONISTIC TEMPORALITY OF ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY

In this essay I discuss Koselleck's thesis on the dissolution of historia magistra vitae in modernity with a view to exploring how the modern historiographical engagement with Thucydides entails qualifications of this argument. Focusing on Barthold Georg Niebuhr's contextualization of Thucydides in a new temporality of “ancient and modern history,” I examine how modernity is caught between conflicting notions of its own prehistory, and that this conflict suggests that the forward‐leaping qualities of Neuzeit were co‐articulated with other temporal notions, and particularly an idea of historical exemplarity associated with historia magistra vitae. This plurality of times highlights an agonistic temporality linking antiquity and modernity: a model of conflicting times inscribed in a dialogue through which modern historiography interrupted the “useful” history of antiquity, while simultaneously being itself interrupted by it. By following this dialogue, I seek to test two interrelated hypotheses: a) that modernity produced a multitemporal scheme in which the ideas of differential time and the future were intertwined with a notion of historia magistra vitae as meaningful and sense‐bearing time; and b) that contradictions in this scheme arising from the modern confrontation with Thucydides's poetics challenges the opposition between historia magistra vitae and modern historical sense and configures a temporality that is self‐agonistic in the sense that it confronts historical actors before and beyond the terms through which they may be able to give it meaning. Formulated as a poetics of the possible, this notion is approached as a corrective alternative to the modern consideration of the future as distanced from the space of experience, but nonetheless as grounded in actuality and therefore largely mastered by human knowledge and action.     

The prescription as literature

In the medical writings of antiquity the recipe, a basic form of scientific writing, was considered a literary genre with conventions of its own. In texttype-linguistics, however, the recipe plays only a minor role; in studies on the history of literary short texts it is hardly ever mentioned and, furthermore, it has come to the conclusion that the recipe's function has lain solely in the curing of the sick. The present study focuses on its multifunctional character. A collection of widely scattered and hardly accessible recipes shows that the recipe adopted functions beyond giving technical directives. Its multifunctionality in the German literature of early modern times is manifest in medical and cooking jocular recipes, cooking recipes in minnesang, mock recipes aimed at physicians and astrologers, recipes of spiritual-religious content, recipes containing art and literary criticism as well as recipes in a moral-satirical or a political-agitative vein.