History and Stories in Everyday Life

In the life of the educated and well-off citizens of the Hellenistic and Roman world, well told stories and well written history were part of the universe of letters, rhetoric and art. Notwithstanding the high methodological demands and thorough investigations of historiographers like Thukydides, Polybios or Tacitus, it is far from clear that the readers of their work appreciated high-standard historiography more than other genres of literature and technical writings. This paper addresses various methodological ways of approaches how to explore the esteem in which historiographical writing and history-telling was held outside the "inner circle" of historiography and its self-referential appreciation.