Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

INTRODUCTION: A PAST
WITHOUT HISTORIANS

The year 2009 marked an important anniversary, for it was exactly one hundred years earlier that Felix Jacoby, one of the greatest of twentieth-century classical scholars, published his fundamental article on the development and growth of the various forms of Greek historiography.1 The article, astonishing in its comprehensiveness and in the clarity of its conception and vision, had a two-fold purpose: first to explain how Jacoby saw the relationship between the various types of Greek historical writing; and, second and more pragmatically, as Jacoby’s explanation and justification for the arrangement of the collection of the fragments of the Greek historians that he was just beginning. This enterprise saw the publication of the first volume in 1923, and the final volume some thirty-five years later in 1958. By that time, exile and war had taken its toll on Jacoby, and the collection was left unfinished at his death, with about 60 per cent of the material collected and an even smaller percentage commented upon. Even so, the work measured out at fifteen volumes, some of enormous size and importance, and the collection, now itself a fragment, stands as one of the great monuments of twentieth-century scholarship.

Anyone who has tried to use Jacoby’s collection – and very often ‘tried’ is the key word – knows that the work is organised not on alphabetical, chronological or regional principles. Jacoby had considered these but rejected them, deciding instead that the most useful edition would be one in which the fragmentary authors were arranged according to their place in and within the historical development of Greek historiography (‘die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Prinzip’) – that is, as Jacoby himself understood that development. As I have elsewhere critiqued this arrangement and its consequences for our understanding of Graeco-Roman historiography,² I shall here merely summarise my main points.

Jacoby divided the historical writing of the Greeks into five subgenres, arranged according to the order in which he believed that they developed: mythography or genealogy; ethnography; chronography; contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte); and local history or horography. The third, contemporary history, was the most important, of course, but it could be seen to have predecessors in those who had previously tried to bring order to the complex genealogies of Greek myth and those who had studied the customs of non-Greeks – Hecataeus, for example, who had done both. In this discussion of the development of Greek historiography and even more in his Pauly–Wissowa article of 1913, Jacoby assigned a role of particular importance in the development of Greek historiography to Herodotus, who, Jacoby believed, had begun as a geographer in Hecataeus’ footsteps, had progressed thence to become an ethnographer, and, finally, under the influence especially of Athens and Pericles, came to compose an actual war narrative.3 For Jacoby, therefore, Herodotus’ individual ‘progress’ represented the development of an entire genre and, we might even say, an entire people’s historical consciousness.

This model, long influential, has come under fire recently on several fronts. First, the model has an unrealistic tidiness;⁴ second, its teleology is also problematic, since it suggests that history was all along trying to become the genre it ultimately became with Thucydides;⁵ third, Jacoby’s notions of ‘genre’ suggest that he sees it as fixed and prescriptive, whereas innovation and boundary-crossing are consistently present;⁶ and finally, it has been pointed out that it is inherently unlikely that the historical consciousness of an entire people can be laid at the door of one individual writer, no matter how gifted, insightful or brilliant he was.⁷

Jacoby’s schema stands in stark contrast to the one ancient testimonium we have of the origins of Greek historiography, which is contained in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Thucydides. This work, written in the late first century BCE or just possibly early in the first century CE, is one of the few ‘theoretical’ works on historiography to survive from antiquity. Modern scholars generally find it a disappointing performance, mainly because Dionysius deals mostly with issues of style and arrangement, and his criticisms of Thucydides do not strike us as particularly forceful or even, at times, germane. However that may be, we find at the beginning of this work a very different suggestion of how Greek historiography developed (Thuc. 5):

Before beginning my account of Thucydides I wish to say a few things both about the writers who preceded him and about his contemporaries, so that the plan of his work, in which he surpassed his predecessors, as well as his overall ability will become apparent. The old writers (ἀρχαῖοι συγγραφεῖς), then, were many and came from many places; among those living before the Peloponnesian War were Eugaion of Samos, Deiochos of Proconnesus, Eudemos of Paros, Demokles of Phygela, Hecataeus of Miletus, the Argive Acusilaus, the Lampsacene Charon, the Chalcedonian < . . . and the Athenian> Amelesagoras; born a little before the Peloponnesian War and living down to the time of Thucydides were Hellanicus of Lesbos, Damastes of Sigeion, Xenomedes of Keos, Xanthus the Lydian and many others.

These writers had a similar plan in respect of subject matter, and did not differ greatly from one another in ability. Some wrote about Greece, others about barbarians, not joining their inquiries together into a continuous whole, but separating them by nations and cities and bringing them out individually, with one and the same object in view, that of bringing to the attention of the public traditions preserved among the local people by nations and by cities <or> written records preserved in sacred or profane archives (ὅσαι διεσῴζοντο παρὰ τοῖς ἐπιχωρίοις μνῆμαι κατὰ ἔθνη τε καὶ κατὰ πόλεις ἢ εἲτ’ ἐν ἱεροῖς εἲτ’ ἐν βεβήλοις ἀποκείμεναι γραφαί), just as they received them, without adding or subtracting anything. Among these sources were to be found occasional myths, believed from time immemorial, and dramatic tales of upset fortunes, which seem quite foolish to people of our day. The style which they all employed was for the most part the same (at any rate among those who used the same dialect): clear, ordinary, unaffected, concise, suited to the subject and displaying none of the apparatus of professional skill; nonetheless a certain grace and charm attends their works, some more than others, and this has ensured their preservation. But Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who was born a little before the Persian Wars and lived down to the time of the Peloponnesian War, both raised the choice of subject to a more ambitious and impressive level . . . and added to his style those virtues which had been omitted by writers before him.

It is clear from this passage that Dionysius saw a great deal of historical activity before Herodotus, and there is also the suggestion that these works served in some sense as the basis for Herodotus’ own work. That view, at least in antiquity, was not unique, since the fourth-century historian Ephorus stated that Xanthus was older than Herodotus and that his work gave Herodotus his ἀφορμαί, either his starting point or his source material.8 Interestingly enough, what this seems to mean, among other things, is that the ancients saw no contradiction in believing that there were historians before Herodotus and that Herodotus was nonetheless the ‘father of history’. Jacoby, by contrast, argued that ‘there was no Herodotus before Herodotus’, and he rejected Dionysius’ picture of the development of Greek historiography, especially its suggestion that there could have been a local historiography before Herodotus. Jacoby’s argument that local history was the last of all the genres of history to develop is based both on the dates he assigned to the figures named by Dionysius in this passage (whom he dated, not always with good evidence, much later than did Dionysius) and on the absence in Herodotus’ work both of magistrate dates (which Jacoby saw as characteristic of local history) and more generally of explicit references to local sources by Herodotus: if these had existed, the argument goes, Herodotus would surely have used them.

I have argued elsewhere that I see Herodotus adopting a stance towards his material that is very similar to that taken by Homer. Andrew Ford has pointed out that although Homer’s heroes are presented as having existed a long time before the poet and his audience, Homer nonetheless portrays himself as an ‘immediate’ narrator of events, recognising no intermediaries in the handing on of the tradition.9 Herodotus, it is true, recognises previous treatments of some of the material he narrates, especially where he engages in polemic with predecessors. On the other hand, it must be admitted that despite this feature, Herodotus in most of his narrative has, like Homer, ‘erased’ any predecessors and for the most part presents himself as wrestling directly with the sources themselves – that is to say, for most of his work he portrays himself implicitly as the first to write up these events.¹⁰ Now it may well be that for much of his work Herodotus was the first and had no predecessors; but it is important to realise that this impression of priority might be the effect that Herodotus, imitating Homer, desired to create in the minds of his audience: a directly mediated account in the sense that the narrator, as he attempts to construct the history of the past, is engaged not with other chroniclers but with the logoi themselves.¹¹

To return to Dionysius: another argument raised against the reliability of this schema is that it is clearly based on style and perhaps goes back to Theophrastus, who in a lost work On Style (Περὶ Λέξεως) dealt with the development of Greek historiography. The thinking goes that because these historians wrote in a simple, clear style it was assumed by later critics that they must have been early. Yet not all of Dionysius’ arguments in this passage are in fact based on style. Moreover, where we can check the accuracy of his dating by comparing it with other sources, Dionysius comes out pretty well. Both Robert Fowler and David Toye have pointed out that Dionysius’ placing of these historians agrees with what other ancient sources say, and Fowler adds that although Dionysius may have stretched a date here or there to accommodate an author’s place in the history of style, such a move does not invalidate the entire passage.12

Some scholars have sought to reclaim some of Dionysius’ observations as valuable and as perhaps reflecting the actual state of affairs in early Greek historical writing. The most thorough treatment known to me is an article, now some forty years old, by Sandra Gozzoli.¹³ She begins by examining the passage of Dionysius and demonstrating that the early authors mentioned by Dionysius were known to him not from some pre-existing list or treatment – Theophrastus again! – but rather from his own reading and independent evaluation. She then tries to see whether there might be anything in Dionysius’ remark that these early authors brought to the attention of the public ‘written records preserved in sacred or profane archives’. There was no difficulty, of course, in establishing that such records and archives existed in the ancient Near East, as we have evidence for such amongst the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites and Egyptians. But the task becomes rather more difficult closer to home. Gozzoli displays a great deal of care and caution, but she does at least suggest, from literary and epigraphical evidence, that the notion of early records (perhaps quite bare and having only the most minor ‘historical’ notation) kept in archives and temples may have been known to the Greeks from early times, and that such record-keeping may owe something to the knowledge of ancient Near Eastern cultures. If we were to imagine that the Greeks did something of this sort, then we would be placing the historical impulse very far before the time of Herodotus himself – whose achievement might then have to be seen precisely in that role of ‘collector’ or ‘synthesiser’ that Dionysius gave him.

The main issue, it seems to me, is what exactly Dionysius might mean by μνῆμαι and γραφαί. As to the first, there seems little difficulty in assuming that Dionysius meant oral tradition, stories or accounts that were handed down and known by individuals, families or communities. But what did he mean by the second? We do not have very much evidence for early times that the Greeks maintained the kinds of archives that the kingdoms of the ancient Near East did. Toye suggests that they might be ‘epics and oracles ascribed to mythical bards’, but he seems hesitant to think that these were written down. Yet it is difficult to imagine that Dionysius could use the term γραφαί without thinking of written material. I wonder whether the γραφαί referred to here might be in fact collections of oracles or the like: Herodotus mentions that the Spartan king Cleomenes brought to Sparta oracles that had been left in the temple on the Athenian Acropolis by the Peisistratids when they fled Attica (5.90). These same Peisistratids figure later at the court of Persia, bringing with them the Athenian diviner (chresmologos) Onomacritus, who had been caught by Lasos of Hermione interpolating into the writings of Musaeus an oracle stating that the islands off Lemnos would vanish into the sea (Hdt. 7.6). Both passages suggest written texts, and in the one case they are housed within a temple.14

Another way around the issue of the priority of local historiography has been attempted by Leone Porciani,¹⁵ who, like Jacoby, dismisses the testimony of Dionysius as worthless, noting that Dionysius is alone among ancient writers in positing the existence of archives, and that in fact he is contradicted by Josephus in the Against Apion (1.6–13), who contrasts the paucity of Greek written records with the abundance of them in other Near Eastern societies. Porciani suggests that a local historiography may nevertheless have existed before Herodotus, although he believes that its form was oral, and that some of its nature can be glimpsed in the epitaphios, the funeral oration, where the deeds of the city are rehearsed on occasions of public remembrance. Porciani believes that individual aristocratic funeral orations were replaced in the isonomic city by a single epitaphios designed to highlight the past deeds of the entire state. Thus for Porciani there is local tradition before Herodotus (and obviously a tradition that Herodotus could exploit), but still no written local history.

It is certainly not the case that all modern scholars have followed Jacoby’s basic outline, and other ideas about the development of Greek historiography have been put forward. French scholars in particular have engaged with the concept of ἱστορίη and what that might entail. They have also been much more open to introducing a whole range of texts from the philosophers, medical writers, tragedians and orators in their search for what is distinctive about ἱστορίη. In some cases, such as in the work of François Chatelet and André Sauge, the main goal is to discover not history in the sense of the genre of history but rather the activity of ἱστορίη, as it might appear in any number of writers and genres, including tragedy, the medical writers and philosophy.16 Both in their books and in Catherine Darbo-Peschanski’s recent and comprehensive treatment of Greek historiographical beginnings, the notion of ἱστορίη as research based on autopsy has been greatly de-emphasised.¹⁷

I must not fail to mention here one of the most interesting forays into the origins of Greek historical thought, that made by Santo Mazzarino in his Il pensiero storico classico.¹⁸ At the outset, Mazzarino sets himself the goal of discovering the origins of Greek historical thought, and he finds it in an unusual place, namely, Orphism. Now this term he understands in an extended sense to mean not just the actual practitioners of Orphic religion, but all those influenced by its world-view. (I should add that Mazzarino throughout his work draws a close correspondence between economic life and intellectual life: so, for example, in the case of Orphism’s criticism of established religion, he sees at work a new class of men who made their wealth largely through trade and who then took on the aristocracy both politically and intellectually.) Mazzarino is aware that his choice of Orphism may seem paradoxical since Orphism is often portrayed as hostile to rationalism, but in Orphism, he argues, we see the first manifestation of the Greek critical spirit: here for the first time traditional Greek religious beliefs were questioned. So when we look, for example, at Herodotus’ criticisms of religion in Book II, we need to realise that this type of intellectual activity had begun centuries before. Even if we look earlier to Hecataeus and the famous opening of his Genealogies – ‘I write what follows as it seems to me to be true; for the stories of the Greeks are many, and, as is manifest to me, ridiculous’19 – and we ask, ‘When, for the first time, did the criticism of myth begin to be exercised?’, Mazzarino’s answer to this is at least a century before.

A figure of cardinal importance for Mazzarino is Epimenides of Crete. Epimenides is famous, of course, for his role at Athens in the aftermath of the Cylon affair. Cylon, an Olympic victor, tried c. 632 BCE to seize control of the Acropolis during a festival, and when this failed, he and his followers took refuge at Athena’s temple. Although it was promised that they would not be harmed, they were nonetheless cut down by the magistrates, led by Megacles of the Alcmaeonid clan. When pollution ensued, Epimenides was called to Athens and he purified the city. Mazzarino emphasises that the characteristic aspect of Epimenides’ purification was that in his effort to rid the city of its ills, he made an inquiry into the past, and examined Athens’ faults in earlier times, in this case the sacrilege of the Alcmaeonids. Mazzarino identifies this as a specifically historical activity, and concludes that this is what Aristotle meant when in the Rhetoric he says that ‘Epimenides gave his oracles not about the future, but on things in the past which were obscure.’ Mazzarino also connects this, by the way, with activity in the ancient near east, since in the Hittite world, he argues, plagues similarly gave rise to notions of the need for purification, and the demand for purification in turn led to an enquiry into the past in order to discover the cause of the plague. He adds that as Crete was an important place of cultural exchange between the Greeks and the Near East, it is not surprising to find there the figure of Epimenides.

Having begun in this way, Mazzarino then goes on to look everywhere for signs of historical consciousness and historical thought, including the visual arts. In fact, his very first example of historical thought is the early fifth-century vase portraying Croesus on his pyre, and he notes as well the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton made at Athens shortly after their assassination attempt in 514. He looks to early poetry, specifically that of Mimnermus and Callinus, and of course he examines Aeschylus’ Persians where he sees the tragedian transforming a contemporary event by making of it an image of myth. Only after some hundred and twenty pages do we finally come to Herodotus and his history.

Now even though one must take issue with quite a lot of what Mazzarino says, he nevertheless is to be praised for looking everywhere and at different manifestations of the Greek historical spirit. He also deserves credit for his on-going engagement with influence of the ancient near east on the Greeks’ historical thought, an influence that I have mentioned off and on. Such an interest may not sound particularly surprising in light of recent scholarship, but it is noteworthy that when, not long ago, Greek studies were very much concerned with the ‘orientalising revolution’ and were focusing on ‘the east face of Helicon’, the one area, so far as I can see, left out of consideration altogether was historiography.20 Now this may have been simply the result of the interests of those scholars studying the influence of the ancient Near East on Greek culture, who were far more focussed on religion, epic, myth and the like, or it may be that the development of Greek historiography was seen as occurring later, after the strong wave of Near East influence. But I wonder as well whether it might much more be a strongly ingrained cultural prejudice about the nature of western historiography. We need not go so far perhaps as Jack Goody in his recent book arguing that the west has stolen its ideas of history from the east;²¹ yet at the same time, one can hardly avoid the notion that classical scholars see a fundamental gap between, on the one hand, history as practised in the societies of Assyria, Persia, and Egypt, which magnified the achievements of kings and closely allied itself with state religion, and, on the other hand, the ‘secular’, ‘democratic’ and ‘rational’ historiography developed by the Greeks and bequeathed to the west. And there is certainly the sense in scholarship that when Greek historiography is ‘influenced’ by the east, the result is always bad, and produces someone such as Ctesias, with his emphasis on dissolute kings, harem politics and – God help us – women in charge.

Let me come back one last time to Herodotus’ ‘development’ as imagined by Jacoby. I mentioned above that this seems to put too much responsibility on the shoulders of Herodotus, but it also has the effect of isolating Herodotus from the background and interests of the age in which he lived. An important corrective to this was provided by Nino Luraghi’s volume, The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, published in 2001 and reflecting the proceedings of a conference held in 1997.22 Many of the contributors in this volume were explicitly reacting to the splendid isolation of Jacoby’s Herodotus, and they sought throughout to show Herodotus in the context of other inquirers into the past, as part of a larger group interested in collecting, sorting and analysing the past – in the editor’s words, the essays focused on aspects which make Herodotus ‘a typical product of his time’. It is an excellent volume with many strong contributions throughout, and should put to rest for good the idea that Herodotus is to be envisioned as a lone pilgrim on the road to historical method.

Yet at the same time, I think that there is a need for still more. I wonder whether the search for the origins of Greek historical thought can ever yield anything more than impressions and suggestions. Jacoby’s arrangement, whatever its faults, did at least give us both a fixed point for the origin of Greek historical thought (the proem of Hecataeus’ Genealogies) and a fixed point for the origin of Greek historiography (Herodotus’ Histories). But with an issue such as historical consciousness and historical thought, any beginning that we can imagine is likely to be a messy and complex affair.

Nor does a focus on historians or those engaged in what we might clearly identify as ‘historical activity’ necessarily help, since the Greeks did not always maintain the kinds of generic boundaries that one might expect. Here in particular the work of the French scholars mentioned above is of great value in reminding us that history and historical thought were hardly the preserve of historians, and much of what we might consider ‘historical’ activity was practised by any number of writers with different interests and emphases in a variety of forms.

III

And so I come, at last, to the theme of this volume. It is a truism often repeated that the academic discipline of history over the last generation or so has undergone a revolution – maybe multiple revolutions. On the one hand, there has been the attack (or attacks) on the subject matter of traditional history, particularly what was seen as its narrow concern with political and military events. One of the results of this has been the development of new types of history and of new and non-traditional interests shown by historians. On the other hand, there has been an ongoing debate about the epistemic claims of history, about what history really teaches or can claim to teach, and what kind of knowledge it can actually impart. As a result, the practice of history itself has ceased to be considered a self-evident activity with a clear and obvious methodology, and inquiries into the past are now seen as complexly conditioned by a whole host of factors on the individual, social and even disciplinary level.

Add to this that although historians have hardly abandoned their desire to know what actually happened and why, they have at the same time expanded their interests by looking more carefully at the structures and means with which individuals and societies deal with their pasts. The interest here is less in what actually happened and more in what people believed to have happened and how such beliefs affected their identity and the social environment – in short, how history was meaningful to them in their actual lives. Jan Assmann has coined the term ‘hot memory’ (heisse Erinnerung) for the type of history that creates an identity for a group or community: he equates it with myth and identifies it as ‘a story that one tells to orient oneself vis-à-vis oneself and the world, a truth of a higher order that is not merely right but also makes normative demands and possesses formative power’.23 Hans-Joachim Gehrke has coined the term ‘intentional history’ for those stories and sagas that were embraced by communities and were of considerable and at times decisive significance for real life and political behaviour – even though the modern historian would hardly characterise these as history.²⁴

Gehrke also emphasises the ubiquitous nature of the past: he writes, ‘one always had a story, even when one, according to our criteria, did not know one’s past at all. To put it differently, one knew one’s past very well. It was that which everywhere impinged upon one’s eyes and ears in the world of portraits and statues, in the milieu of poems and songs.’²⁵ Now you will notice that I have made a transition from speaking of history to speaking of the past, and that is not accidental. For it seems to me that an interest in how the Greeks saw their past rather than in how certain figures perceived history strictly speaking will enable us to construct a larger canvas, one that more fairly represents the vast variety of engagement with the past that is everywhere visible in Greek culture.

In making this examination, we shall, naturally, have recourse to texts, though again we will want the greatest variety of media. To state only the most obvious, it is almost certainly the case that the vast majority of Greeks did not get their sense of the past from Herodotus and Thucydides or any of the other historians. They understood it within the life of their city-state, in their rituals and celebrations, in the physical landscape around them, and in the man-made spaces of the polis, including the theatres and the law-courts. If the past was everywhere present for the Greeks, then we ought to be able to find it no matter where we look.

So in a sense this volume might represent a thought experiment: if the histories of the Greeks of the archaic and classical ages had not survived, what would we know or be able to infer about their relationship to the past? I hope that some answers to this question appear in the contributions that follow; imagining, if only for a short time, a world without historians can be an occasion for engagement and excitement.

1 F. Jacoby, ‘Über die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie und den Plan einer neuen Sammlung der griechischen Historikerfragmente’, Klio 9 (1909), pp. 80–123; repr. in Jacoby, Abhandlungen zur griechischen Geschichtsschreibung, ed. H. Bloch (Leiden: Brill, 1956), pp. 16–72. For the reception of this article and Jacoby’s other work, see A. L. Chávez Reino, ‘Felix Jacoby aux prises avec ses critiques: lettres, comptes rendus et scholia Jacobiana’, in F. Grebible and V. Krings (eds), S’écrire et écrire sur l’antiquité (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2008), pp. 281–300.

2 J. Marincola, ‘Genre, convention and innovation in Greco-Roman historiography’, in C. S. Kraus (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 281–324, esp. pp. 283–301.

3 F. Jacoby, ‘Herodotos’, RE Suppl. II (1913), pp. 205–520.

4 R. Fowler, ‘Herodotos and his contemporaries’, JHS 116 (1996), pp. 62–87, at p. 68.

5 Sally Humphreys has pointed out that Jacoby’s lack of sympathy with historians after Thucydides is a product of the nineteenth-century belief in evolutionism, of the assumption of ‘progress’ from myth to science, and of his own age’s imprisonment ‘in a contradictory amalgam of romanticism and positivism’: see S. Humphreys, ‘Fragments, fetishes, and philosophies: towards a history of Greek historiography after Thucydides’, in G. Most (ed.), Collecting Fragments/Fragmente sammeln (Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte 1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), pp. 207–24, at pp. 207–8, 211.

6 Marincola, ‘Genre, convention, and innovation’, pp. 281–324.

7 Good remarks on this in N. Luraghi, ‘Introduction’, in Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–15.

8 Ephorus, FGrHist 70 F 180: ‘Ephorus the historian makes mention of him [Xanthus] as being older than Herodotus and giving Herodotus his starting point (or source material).’ (Ἔφορος ὁ συγγραφεὺς μνημονεύει αὐτοῦ ὡς παλαιοτέρου ὄντος καὶ ᾙροδότωι τὰς ἀφορμὰς δεδωκότος.) On the meaning of ἀφορμαί see G. Parmeggiani, ‘I frammenti di Eforo nei Deipnosophistai di Ateneo’, in D. Lenfant (ed.), Athénée et les fragments d’historiens (Paris: De Boccard, 2007), pp. 117–37, at pp. 127–8; Parmeggiani, Eforo di Cuma: Studi di storiografia greca (Bologna: Pàtron, 2011), pp. 648–9.

9 A. Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 90–130.

10 In Book II, for example, Herodotus mentions the island of Chemmis and states that it is said ‘by the Egyptians’ to float and move about, a claim that Herodotus then strongly ridicules (2.156). We happen to know from a later source that it was Hecataeus who stated that the island moved (FGrHist 1 F 305), yet Herodotus does not mention Hecataeus here, and instead ascribes the belief to the Egyptians. As it is not likely that he did not know Hecataeus’ work, it must be the case that Herodotus has deliberately suppressed mention of his predecessor.

11 J. Marincola, ‘Herodotus and the poetry of the past’, in Marincola and C. J. Dewald (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–28.

12 Fowler, ‘Herodotos and his critics’; D. L. Toye, ‘Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the first Greek historians’, AJP 116 (1995), pp. 279–302.

13 S. Gozzoli, ‘Una teoria antica sull’origine della storiografia greca’, SCO 19–20 (1970–1), pp. 158–211.

14 I should also add – though I will not make anything of it here – that such collections, if they existed in the Greek world, would provide a link with certain practices of the ancient Near East, where the Mesopotamians, among others, kept collections of omens. One might think here of the importance that oracles play as a structuring device in Herodotus’ history.

15 L. Porciani, Prime forme della storiografia greca: Prospettiva locale e generale nella narrazione storica (Historia Einzelschriften 152; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001).

16 F. Chatelet, La naissance de l’histoire: La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962); A. Saugé, De l’epopée à l’histoire: Fondement de la notion de l’histoire (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992).

17 C. Darbo-Peschanski, L’historia: Commencements grecs (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

18 S. Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, 3 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1966–8). This astonishing work treats the entire classical historiographical tradition from its origins to the late empire. Its influence, however, at least so far as I can tell, has been rather limited and much dependent on the country involved: perhaps not surprisingly, it is very well known and often cited in Italy; it is rather less well known or cited in French scholarship; and in German and Anglo-American scholarship it seems to be largely ignored. It is indeed an unusual book in many ways, and its reputation was perhaps not helped by rather negative reviews by Edouard Will (RH 237 (1967), pp. 433–5, RH 246 (1971), p. 87) and, at much greater length, by Arnaldo Momigliano (RSI 79 (1967), pp. 206–19, repr. in Momigliano, Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1969), pp. 59–76).

19 Hecataeus, FGrHist 1 F 1a: Ἑκαταῖος Μιλήσιος ὧδε μυθεῖται· τάδε γράφω, ὥς μοιδοκεῖ ἀληθέα εἶναι· οἱ γὰρ Ἑλλήνων λόγοι πολλοί τε καὶ γελοῖοι, ὡς ἐμοὶ φαίνονται, εἰσίν.

20 W. Burkert, Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1984); Eng. tr. by W. Burkert and M. E. Pinder, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

21 J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

22 Above, n. 7.

23 J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992).

24 H.-J. Gehrke, ‘Mythos, Geschichte, Politik – antik und modern’, Saeculum 45 (1994), pp. 239–64; Eng. tr. by M. Beck in J. Marincola (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 40–71.

25 Gehrke, Saeculum 45 (1994), p. 251 = English translation, p. 55.

1		F. Jacoby, ‘Über die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie und den Plan einer neuen Sammlung der griechischen Historikerfragmente’, Klio 9 (1909), pp. 80–123; repr. in Jacoby, Abhandlungen zur griechischen Geschichtsschreibung, ed. H. Bloch (Leiden: Brill, 1956), pp. 16–72. For the reception of this article and Jacoby’s other work, see A. L. Chávez Reino, ‘Felix Jacoby aux prises avec ses critiques: lettres, comptes rendus et scholia Jacobiana’, in F. Grebible and V. Krings (eds), S’écrire et écrire sur l’antiquité (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 2008), pp. 281–300.
2		J. Marincola, ‘Genre, convention and innovation in Greco-Roman historiography’, in C. S. Kraus (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 281–324, esp. pp. 283–301.
3		F. Jacoby, ‘Herodotos’, RE Suppl. II (1913), pp. 205–520.
4		R. Fowler, ‘Herodotos and his contemporaries’, JHS 116 (1996), pp. 62–87, at p. 68.
5		Sally Humphreys has pointed out that Jacoby’s lack of sympathy with historians after Thucydides is a product of the nineteenth-century belief in evolutionism, of the assumption of ‘progress’ from myth to science, and of his own age’s imprisonment ‘in a contradictory amalgam of romanticism and positivism’: see S. Humphreys, ‘Fragments, fetishes, and philosophies: towards a history of Greek historiography after Thucydides’, in G. Most (ed.), Collecting Fragments/Fragmente sammeln (Aporemata: Kritische Studien zur Philologiegeschichte 1; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), pp. 207–24, at pp. 207–8, 211.
6		Marincola, ‘Genre, convention, and innovation’, pp. 281–324.
7		Good remarks on this in N. Luraghi, ‘Introduction’, in Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–15.
8		Ephorus, FGrHist 70 F 180: ‘Ephorus the historian makes mention of him [Xanthus] as being older than Herodotus and giving Herodotus his starting point (or source material).’ (Ἔφορος ὁ συγγραφεὺς μνημονεύει αὐτοῦ ὡς παλαιοτέρου ὄντος καὶ ᾙροδότωι τὰς ἀφορμὰς δεδωκότος.) On the meaning of ἀφορμαί see G. Parmeggiani, ‘I frammenti di Eforo nei Deipnosophistai di Ateneo’, in D. Lenfant (ed.), Athénée et les fragments d’historiens (Paris: De Boccard, 2007), pp. 117–37, at pp. 127–8; Parmeggiani, Eforo di Cuma: Studi di storiografia greca (Bologna: Pàtron, 2011), pp. 648–9.
9		A. Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 90–130.
10		In Book II, for example, Herodotus mentions the island of Chemmis and states that it is said ‘by the Egyptians’ to float and move about, a claim that Herodotus then strongly ridicules (2.156). We happen to know from a later source that it was Hecataeus who stated that the island moved (FGrHist 1 F 305), yet Herodotus does not mention Hecataeus here, and instead ascribes the belief to the Egyptians. As it is not likely that he did not know Hecataeus’ work, it must be the case that Herodotus has deliberately suppressed mention of his predecessor.
11		J. Marincola, ‘Herodotus and the poetry of the past’, in Marincola and C. J. Dewald (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 13–28.
12		Fowler, ‘Herodotos and his critics’; D. L. Toye, ‘Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the first Greek historians’, AJP 116 (1995), pp. 279–302.
13		S. Gozzoli, ‘Una teoria antica sull’origine della storiografia greca’, SCO 19–20 (1970–1), pp. 158–211.
14		I should also add – though I will not make anything of it here – that such collections, if they existed in the Greek world, would provide a link with certain practices of the ancient Near East, where the Mesopotamians, among others, kept collections of omens. One might think here of the importance that oracles play as a structuring device in Herodotus’ history.
15		L. Porciani, Prime forme della storiografia greca: Prospettiva locale e generale nella narrazione storica (Historia Einzelschriften 152; Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001).
16		F. Chatelet, La naissance de l’histoire: La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1962); A. Saugé, De l’epopée à l’histoire: Fondement de la notion de l’histoire (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992).
17		C. Darbo-Peschanski, L’historia: Commencements grecs (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
18		S. Mazzarino, Il pensiero storico classico, 3 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1966–8). This astonishing work treats the entire classical historiographical tradition from its origins to the late empire. Its influence, however, at least so far as I can tell, has been rather limited and much dependent on the country involved: perhaps not surprisingly, it is very well known and often cited in Italy; it is rather less well known or cited in French scholarship; and in German and Anglo-American scholarship it seems to be largely ignored. It is indeed an unusual book in many ways, and its reputation was perhaps not helped by rather negative reviews by Edouard Will (RH 237 (1967), pp. 433–5, RH 246 (1971), p. 87) and, at much greater length, by Arnaldo Momigliano (RSI 79 (1967), pp. 206–19, repr. in Momigliano, Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1969), pp. 59–76).
19		Hecataeus, FGrHist 1 F 1a: Ἑκαταῖος Μιλήσιος ὧδε μυθεῖται· τάδε γράφω, ὥς μοιδοκεῖ ἀληθέα εἶναι· οἱ γὰρ Ἑλλήνων λόγοι πολλοί τε καὶ γελοῖοι, ὡς ἐμοὶ φαίνονται, εἰσίν.
20		W. Burkert, Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1984); Eng. tr. by W. Burkert and M. E. Pinder, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
21		J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
22		Above, n. 7.
23		J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992).
24		H.-J. Gehrke, ‘Mythos, Geschichte, Politik – antik und modern’, Saeculum 45 (1994), pp. 239–64; Eng. tr. by M. Beck in J. Marincola (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 40–71.
25		Gehrke, Saeculum 45 (1994), p. 251 = English translation, p. 55.