Marshall Buchanan

Marshall Buchanan received a B.A. (ΦΒΚ) in Classics and a B.A. in Chinese from The Ohio State University.  He received his M.A. in Classics from The University of Britsh Columbia with a thesis, advised by Susanna Braund, on Roman depictions of fatherhood in imperial propaganda.

His recent research, advised by David Potter and Miranda Brown, focuses on the origin and development of narratives of decline, especially in Roman historiography, and on the novel reworking of these narratives in the writings of Tacitus.  One of his major arguments is that the textual history of the Historiae and Annales recommends reading these works as a single, thirty-book whole that develops a coherent thesis about the true nature of the decline from Republic to Principate.

Another major component of his research uses Pre-Qin and Han historiography—especially the Shangshu (Book of Documents), Chunqiu Zuozhuan (Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals), and Shiji  (The Historians’ Records)—to suggest the trajectory that pre-1st-cent. BC Roman historiography (now highly fragmentary) probably followed.  His hypothesis is that the pessimism now so casually ascribed to Roman and Chinese historiography is actually a later ancient development that was projected back upon largely neutral early sources.