The Greek Historians

T. James Luce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134845354
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Greeks invented history as a literary genre in the fifth century B.C. The first historians owed much to Homer and adopted his vivid and direct style in narrating historical events. Yet, despite the influence of Homer the birth of history was basically a reaction against mythical accounts of the past. Homer wrote about war and travel in foreign lands, in the distant and mythical past. In contrast, the Greek historians of the fifth century wrote about contemporary or very recent events, where eye witnesses could be interviewed and facts checked.
The Greek Historians follows the development of history from Herodotus, via Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius, until the Hellenistic age. It introduces the individual writers and their topics, yet it also outlines their attitudes to historiography and their criticisms of each other. Such themes as the uses and value of truth and causation are traced, as well as the growing constraints on free speech under Hellenistic monarchs and the Romans. Written in an accessible and captivating manner, with suggestions for further reading, this book serves as a lucid introduction to Greek historians and writing of history.

1
BEFORE HISTORY

History owed its origin chiefly to Homer, although it was one of the latest genres of literature to be created by the Greeks. Herodotus, father of history, wrote ca. 450–425 BC, considerably after the appearance of epic, lyric poetry, philosophy, tragedy and comedy, and some four hundred years, according to his own reckoning (2.53), after Homer. Why did history develop so late?

The most significant reason was that Homer’s subject matter, the Trojan War and the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, was almost universally believed to concern events that really happened and persons who really existed. Homer, in short, was history: it did not need to be invented. What he said about events, men, the gods and most other matters was for a long time accepted as part of the traditional beliefs of the early Greeks, sometimes called the inherited conglomerate. Homer was the most important part of this inheritance, but it included Greek myths other than those he told, such as those concerning Jason, Oedipus and Minos, and poets other than Homer, such as Hesiod and the authors of the Cyclic Epics. It was only when the Greeks began to look upon their world and their cultural inheritance in a critical spirit, beginning roughly a century before Herodotus was born, that the way was open for the birth of history.

This birth, however, was difficult and long in coming because what was at issue was not the “historicity” of the broad picture in Homer—for that, as has been said, was accepted by nearly everyone—but the many improbable and miraculous elements of the Iliad and Odyssey and of other myths and sagas: the one-eyed monster Polyphemus, the battle between Achilles and the Scamander River, men who could lift ten times the weight that contemporaries could, the goddess Athena conversing with Odysseus and the like. Men began, especially under the stimulus of the early philosophers, to doubt such marvels.

A good many elements in Homer (and in the mythopoeic tradition generally) were thus called into question. But this was not to impugn Homer’s overall version of events or to stimulate immediately the appearance of the new genre of history. Instead, the truth of Homer’s accounts was salvaged by ignoring some improbabilities and glossing over others, while the chief method of dealing with the problem was rationalization. For example, King Priam of Troy would scarcely have allowed his many sons to be killed one after another over a ten-year period simply to satisfy the enjoyment of Helen by one of them, Alexander or Paris. Helen would have been handed back, and the reason she was not returned was that she was not in Troy and never had been. What is more, Homer knew this (so Herodotus 2.120). Or the reason the Greeks accompanied Agamemnon to Troy was more fear of the king’s great naval power than faithfulness to their oaths to Tyndareus, Helen’s father, to avenge her kidnapping (so Thucydides 1.9).

From one point of view such rationalizations may have delayed rather than accelerated the birth of history, since they were often aimed at preserving the essential integrity of Homer and the other poets. They could be (and were) applied over the entire range of the mythopoeic tradition. Only when men began to seek corroboration of the truth about men and events through the testimony of contemporaries (as well as through tangible evidence, such as monuments, documentation and the like) or through the memory of those who lived recently could a genre of writing emerge that was seen to be different from that of the early poets, standing on its own and with a character and premises special to it. Yet on this central point, which basically reduces to the difference between contemporary or nearcontemporary history on the one hand and traditions about the distant past on the other, historiography throughout classical antiquity never reached a consensus. On one side were those who were content to recount the mostly rationalized legends of bygone eras, passing them off as history, and on the other those who recounted the events of the recent past chiefly on the evidence of eyewitnesses and contemporaries. There were a few who wrote vast, synoptic histories that reached from far distant days to their own age.

But it is clear that what we today consider the greatest of the ancient historians, whether of Greece or of Rome, were the writers of contemporary or near-contemporary history: Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius in Greece; Sallust, Tacitus and Ammianus Marcellinus among the Romans (Livy, whom many would rank as a major historian, is the exception). But it is instructive to note that everyone was willing to call “history” the products of both approaches: the point of dispute was over which was better or preferable. The status of far distant events, especially those enshrined in myth and legend, was therefore never really settled. If the fabulous and the improbable were removed, some believed, the residuum was deemed probable and hence historical: verisimilitude was equivalent to veracity.

It seems paradoxical to assert both that the reaction against Homer was a major stimulus to the birth of history and that the classical historians took directly from Homer their basic subject matter and the form in which they presented it. But such was the case.

First, subject matter. In the Iliad the dominant theme is war. The first two historians took over this topic as their own: the Persian Wars for Herodotus and the Peloponnesian War for Thucydides. Both men implicitly and sometimes explicitly compare their works with the Iliad. They appear to feel themselves in some measure in competition with Homer: their wars are more momentous, on a grander scale, or more calamitous than the Trojan conflict. To the end of antiquity historians continued to feature war prominently: for many it was a theme that dominated all else. From the Odyssey came a second major topic, descriptions of foreign lands and peoples: the land of the Phaeacians, Sicily of the Cyclopes, Circe’s island, even the underworld. Such subject matter had its continuation in the historians: geography and landscape, flora and fauna, customs and institutions of the inhabitants. And, as in the Odyssey, the exotic and bizarre nature of these far-off places was particularly featured: such marvels made for entertaining reading, while the strangeness of remote lands gave the Greeks a sense of their own identity and special place in the world. Herodotus, Theopompus, historians of Alexander the Great and Polybius devoted sizable portions of their works to such descriptions. Even Thucydides, despite his intense and restricted focus, includes, for example, a section on the cities and peoples of Sicily (6.2–5).

Second, the form in which history was cast. Homer’s epics are essentially a narrative of events: accounts of what people did and what people said, often richly detailed and highly circumstantial. Speeches are a major element, usually presented in direct discourse and sometimes cast as sustained dialogue. The aim was to recreate before the reader’s (or listener’s) eyes a sense of vivid immediacy, a feeling of “you-are-there.” This technique was taken over by Herodotus and his successors; to the end of antiquity it remained the hallmark of historical writing. A modern reader, not expecting to find such writing in a history, may be startled in the first pages of Herodotus, for example, to find himself in the boudoir of a Lydian queen, peeking out from behind a door as she removes her clothing piece by piece in preparation for bed. Awaiting her in the bed is the king, and peering from behind the door is the captain of his bodyguard. The captain, we learn, is there under pain of death should he refuse to look upon the queen naked. And it is the king who has put him up to it! This sort of thing seems somehow “unhistorical” to the modern reader, but in antiquity it was the very stuff of history.

It is also important to realize what classical historiography essentially was not: not an account of abiding conditions and institutions, whether military, religious or political; not an analysis of social classes, economic factors or cultural achievements. Such topics did appear in histories, to be sure, but in the form of prefaces and digressions, often brief. The overall framework was a narrative of events, without which these other subjects, which most people today consider central to historical writing, could find no place. When an author wished to write an extended account of topics like the constitutions of states or military tactics he sometimes composed a separate monograph rather than making it a subordinate part of a larger history. A few historians, notably Theopompus and Polybius, did include sizable digressions in their histories, but both they and their readers were well aware of the intrusive and separable nature of what plainly were lengthy departures from the main business of history.

History was therefore a literary enterprise above all, the imaginative creation of its author. It was to be written in the language of its creator: quotation of documents and direct transcriptions had little place. Only rarely would a historian admit into his text the verbatim language of others. Moreover, just as Trojans, Polyphemus and other non- Greeks all speak beautiful (and metrical) Greek in Homer, so Persians, Lydians and other non-Greeks uniformly talk in the distinctive Ionic dialect of Herodotus. No one for a moment thought that such direct speech was what was actually said. The same principle holds for descriptions like that of the queen disrobing: the half-open door, the chair on which she placed her garments, the captain peering from behind the door and so forth. Clearly the scene is an imaginative recreation.

Why did the Greeks conceive of history in this way? Homer’s influence is an important reason, as has been said. But there is perhaps a more significant one which, though obvious, needs to be stressed: in antiquity there was virtually no way that words or actions could be exactly reproduced after the fact, even immediately after the fact. We in our world are so used to having available to us on-the-spot reports, verbatim transcriptions, photographs, tape and video recordings, and to having libraries and other repositories where such information may be consulted, that we sometimes fall into the trap of supposing that the ancients had the option of whether to base their writings on primary documents and that they rejected it for literary or other “anti-historical” reasons—or even out of ignorance as to the real worth of such resources. This, of course, was not the case. They did not think in such terms: the precise details and exact words they recorded did not represent what was literally done or said because they could not.

Nor, I think, would they have desired the option, even had it been available. History was the creation of the historian, not a mirror he held up to a subject that had an objective and independent existence apart from himself and which he might transfer faithfully to the page. There is, in fact, no real word in Greek for history in the sense of “the past” or “the subject matter of written accounts.” A word like historía, for example, meant either the written accounts themselves, or the process of inquiry that led to the creation of such accounts. In sum, history existed in men’s minds and on the written page: it was a mental construct that the historian put in permanent literary form.

The ancient historians seem to have been quite content with their inheritance from Homer. After the first historians had adopted the essential form which his epic poems took—a narrative of events, together with direct speeches—the proper mold for the genre of history was forever set. No one thereafter, at least no serious or substantial historian, deviated greatly from the format. Variations and elaborations on it were essayed, but the basic form abided. Thucydides, for example, the “severest” and seemingly most modern of the ancient historians, relied so completely on the narrative-speech format and admitted so few digressions that one critic in later antiquity complained of the lack of variety and pleasurable diversion in his work.

From what has been said it should be clear that the classical historians had a different conception of historical truth than we do today. Because every account of an event or speech was necessarily an imaginative reconstruction, there was from our modern viewpoint a great deal of “untruth” in ancient historiography. Moreover, as one moved backward in time from contemporary and near-contemporary history, the more one had to rely on the accounts of others and, correspondingly, the less opportunity the historian had to verify reports by seeking out eyewitnesses, participants and those who had access to them. Polybius, for example (4.2), declared that his history would be largely restricted to the lifetimes of himself and his father: to go further back would be to write a report based on the hearsay of others.

The history of times long past was particularly problematic: myths and legends frequently had variant versions and tended to attract bizarre and miraculous elements. When confronted with material of this sort, historians had a range of options. Some simply refused to deal with them, or dealt with them in a very limited way (Thucydides is an example, although he believed that a character like Minos was a real person who played a significant role in history: 1.8). Others, aware of the uncertainty of the subject matter, included such material, but with disclaimers: they were bound to report what people said, but not to believe it. Still others resorted to extensive rationalization: by eliminating the miraculous and improbable, they believed that they had come close to the truth. For example, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian of the Roman period, presents two versions of the tenth labor of Hercules (1.39–42). The first he labels the mythical one: namely, that the hero (soon to become a god) slew with his club the triple-headed monster Geryon in far-off Spain and stole his cattle. The second is “the truer version,” Dionysius tells us, one “which those adopt who have written up his deeds in historical form:” Heracles was really a highly successful general at the head of an army that roamed over the Mediterranean world deposing tyrants and doing other good deeds. He was in Spain to conquer it, not to steal cattle.

There was, then, no hard and fast line between truth and untruth, between what was reliable and what was not. Rather, a “sliding scale” obtained between the extremes. Some have declared that ancient historiography was more like a historical novel than a modern history. There is some truth to this. But at bottom there is a fundamental difference: the novelist freely creates characters and episodes as his story requires; the historian cannot be anywhere near so free—or at least he should not. He is bound to follow what his sources, both oral and written report: his “imaginative reconstruction” must be based on them and them alone. Yet, as has been said, the further back he goes in time, the less detailed, more conflicting and sometimes more improbable the information in these sources tends to become—and, correspondingly, the more his accounts resemble the historical novel, or sometimes a miraculous adventure tale.

In a famous passage in the Poetics (9) Aristotle discusses the difference between history and poetry (he is thinking chiefly of tragedy and epic). The distinction is not between prose and verse, he argues: if Herodotus’ work were in meter, it would still be a kind of history. The chief difference is that poetry concerns what a certain type of person would do in accordance with probability or necessity. Poetry expresses the universal: what may happen. History, on the other hand, concerns the particular—what Alcibiades did or suffered. Poetry is more philosophical and more valuable than history in Aristotle’s eyes because of this universalizing quality. Aristotle seems to be implying that in real life improbable, fortuitous and irrational things are apt to happen: the historian has no choice but to record them, whereas the poet is both selective and inventive in what he writes, doing so in accordance with what a particular type of person is likely to do, or must do.

Few have been satisfied with Aristotle’s definition of history here, chiefly because of what he fails to say. The greatest of the Greek historians, as will appear in what follows, were much concerned with “universals.” They looked not so much to individuals, however, as to groups: from the mass of particulars that constitute their subject they derived certain principles of cause and reaction which, they believed, possessed general and universal application. In this same chapter Aristotle says that since most characters in tragedy were real people, the audience will believe in them because “what has happened is clearly possible, for it would not have happened were it impossible.” And he adds: “If he chooses as his subject events that have happened, he is none the less a poet. For nothing prevents some things that have happened from being the sort of events that are likely and possible, and in this respect he is their poet” (poiêtês in Greek means both “poet” and “maker/creator”).

Another important influence on the birth of history, in addition to Homer, was philosophy. The first philosophers, known as the Pre-Socratics (Socrates died in 399 BC), most of whom are preserved in fragments quoted in later writers, began to look at the world in a new spirit, rejecting simple acceptance of traditional beliefs (the “inherited conglomerate”) in favor of critical inquiry and creative explanations. Most of these early philosophers came from Ionia: that is, the Greek cities situated on the littoral of the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the same area from which Herodotus came. Some of them rejected or modified the typical Greek view of the gods as directly influencing the workings of nature and the activities of man: for example, that the rainbow was the path by which the goddess Iris descended to earth, or that Poseidon caused earthquakes by striking the land with his trident or that a giant lay imprisoned beneath Mt Etna in Sicily, causing tremors and eruptions as he struggled to be free.

Instead, many of these early thinkers began to seek natural explanations by inquiring into the working of the phenomenal world and by formulating theories to explain what they saw. Some of their observations and deductions are quite startling. For example, Anaximander of Miletus in the sixth century noticed certain mammalian characteristics of a species of shark; from this and other observations he postulated that terrestial life originated in mud as seawater evaporated in the sun (DK 12A11, 30). Or Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived in the late sixth and early fifth centuries, observed the fossils of sea creatures and land plants embedded in rocks, from which he deduced that at one time these living things had been caught in sea mud, which then dried and became rock (DK 21A33). He also maintained that the rainbow was not the goddess Iris, but simply a colored cloud (DK 12F32).

Yet these men were not scientists. Their inquiries were sporadic and random, nor were they concerned to explain the particulars of nature in any systematic way. Rather, their aim was to discover the general principles that underlay the particulars of the phenomenal world. From relatively few observations they intuited these principles by an imaginative leap: what was important was the theory, not the individual observations or deductions.

Change was the phenomenon that most fascinated them. On the one hand, all things were in a state of flux: no stone was so hard that it did not eventually wear away; stars, sun and moon were ever on the move in the heavens above. On the other hand, the changes that regulated the larger workings of nature fol...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1. BEFORE HISTORY
• 2. HERODOTUS AND HISTORÍA
• 3. FATHER OF HISTORY
• 4. THUCYDIDES: SUBJECT AND METHODS
• 5. THUCYDIDES: SCIENCE AND TRAGEDY
• 6. FOURTH-CENTURY AND HELLENISTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
• 7. POLYBIUS
• EPILOGUE
• FURTHER READING