Hoge pieken, diepe dalen Verteltechniek in Livius’ Hannibal-boeken

This article takes the brief paragraph on Livy’s style in the syllabus Central Examination Latin Language and Culture 2024 as a starting point for a discussion of Livy’s art of writing that is based on linguistic and narratological analysis. The first part discusses a combined linguistic-narratological tool that can help in a better understanding of the style and composition of Greek and Latin narrative texts at the meso and macro levels. In the second part, this tool is applied to Livy's Book 21, especially the Alpine passage, in order to show how this method of analysis (which is in fact also a close reading method) can reveal tension arcs at different levels of the text, including at the sentence level. It is demonstrated, among other things, how such analysis can help identify which emphases the narrator is placing in his narrative, thus contributing to the process of interpreting the content and giving meaning to the text.