COMMENTARY
I
All societies tell or write versions of the past. Any such version of the past could have a claim to be called history. The subtitle History without Historians, however, invites us to consider an opposition between the history told by historians and the history told by other writers or tellers of stories of the past (and that is how the authors of this volume take it). This opposition is integrally and significantly implicated with the self-definition of history by historians (and by historians I mean for the moment the self-defining set of historiographers starting for most of us, as for most ancient Greeks and Romans, with Herodotus and Thucydides). There are multiple models of how the past is conceived not just within the historiographical tradition but also within a single author as multi-layered as Herodotus.1 Nonetheless, there are some assumptions without which it would be hard for any writer to affiliate himself to the historiographical tradition: history needs to be critical, critical of other versions of the past, of how the past is to be understood and what its implications for today are; history needs to postulate a coherent and explanatory narrative; history is committed to telling a story of the past which is true (though we could leave open how such truth is determined, for all that accurate representation of the past is likely to be involved).
If we take such an account of historiography and of the subtitle of the collection, it seems to me that the consequences are likely to be as follows: we will find multiple versions of the past extant in the ancient world from before and after the invention of historiographers’ history; these will include Homer, the Stoa Poikile’s images, Greek tragedy, plenty of oratory including the funeral orations, Plato’s accounts of Socrates, and many other prose and verse texts from throughout the Graeco-Roman world. In each case, especially those I have cited by name, it would be easy to show that they are not history by the historiographer’s self-defining categories (though each has in contemporary scholarship become part of the arsenal of those writing ancient history today). We could thereby dismiss them as bad history (a naive move few would explicitly adopt); or we could postulate a different type of writing about time, the past and its relation to the present – against which Herodotus and Thucydides set themselves – which also makes historiography the yardstick but is a far more subtle version of the easy dismissal. We could even see these other versions of the past as eventually competitive with historiography (as some would claim Plato in Laws 3 is). But it seems to me that one danger of taking this approach is that we may be committing ourselves to a Whiggish narrative of the development of the writing of history (triumphing in the nineteenth century’s familiar lauding of Thucydides as the paradigm and founder of the critical history which is a dominant genre of the nineteenth century and its so-called ‘historical self-consciousness’). Such a definition of the canon of the genre of historiography (with the usual games about marginal inclusion and exclusion) distorts what might be at stake in postulating a historical self-awareness in ancient culture. At its most extreme, such an approach threatens to conclude that although there are multiple views of the past circulating in ancient culture, there is no ‘real history’ except that written by historians: history is the product of a self-defining club, then and now. There is no history without historians, without what historians say is to count as history. Myth, entertainment, poetry, art, records, inscriptions . . . but no history.
A counter-case would start with Homer. Homer provides Greek culture with a view of the past; it knows it is a view of the past (‘Ten men of today . . .’); and it knows that epic itself is constructing a memorial of the past for the present and discusses such construction within its performance.2 You can visit Homer’s Troy with Alexander or with Caesar or with Lucan. Pindar’s myths link present and past in a significant and causal manner, and offer correctives to impious versions of the past, and although his poetry may have been written for a sung celebration of victory, you can read Pindar inscribed on a temple; tragedy is a machine for rewriting the myths of the past as stories for the modern polis, and the texts are kept, we are told, as state archives; the funeral orations offer the more recent past as exemplary and normative models; so too do the monumentalising art and epigraphic habits of the fifth-century culture of the polis, which has its own political agendas and strategies of representation. Cities need to construct genealogical arguments as part of the diplomacy of interaction at the political level. From Isocrates through to Lucian (‘How to write history’), from the Second Sophistic’s well-known obsession with a classical past to oratory’s skills in telling a past narrative, there are self-conscious techniques for telling the past, self-aware constructions of different narratives of the past. Every budding orator – which means pretty well every educated Greek – was encouraged to imagine himself into the role of figures from the past, and to declaim accordingly.
This view would remind us that historians in the sense of self-defined historiographers are a particular and peculiar breed. Aristotle, whose every step can be defined as historia, whether it is an inquiry into the nature of animals, the development of the Athenian constitution or the history of the genre of tragedy, demonstrates the fluidity of the categories of intellectual inquiry marked out by historia. Following this line of argument, every text or object that purports to represent the past is history, and the historiographers are only one rather extreme position in a broad range of accounts of the past. Indeed, one could argue that the historiographers were not only extreme but even rather marginal to the discursive authority of ancient culture in the fifth century and far beyond. The category of ‘history’ as a genre, unlike rhetoric or philosophy or medicine or tragedy, is rather late in achieving anything like firm lineaments. (What is the Greek for historian, after all? Sungrapheus has nothing like the purchase of rhetor, philosophos, sophistes, iatros, tragodopoios; historikos is rare until later periods.) This approach concludes that all versions of the past, written, oral, visual, are history, and that therefore the idea of ‘history without historians’ has little explanatory purchase: most history is not written, painted, inscribed or told by self-defining historians, and although the later canon will make Herodotus and Thucydides the fathers of history, this retrospective narrative has little value for how the past is conceived or narrated in ancient Greek culture. At its most extreme: any representation of the past is a history, anyone who produces a history is a historian: there can be no history without historians.
These two approaches towards disambiguating the subtitle ‘History without Historians leave us therefore in two dead ends, for all that the travelling towards them can be revelatory: either history is really only what historians write, or every representation of the past is really a history (and some small section gets formed as a self-serving but scarcely determinative canon of historiography).
I would like therefore to re-pose the question of how a historical self-consciousness in the ancient world might be conceptualised: what is historical discourse in the classical polis?
The nineteenth century provides a model it is hard to escape from, but which I think is deeply distorting for the ancient world. For the nineteenth century (to oversimplify grotesquely), critical history is a master discourse, not only providing best-sellers for the swelling reading classes, but also developing a world-view of nationhood, the individual self and the placement of the self within time.3 It also provides a dominant paradigm of scholarship at one level, and an expectation of popular culture at the other – from George Grote to Walter Scott, as it were. We are its heirs, not just in our commitment to the so-called good old days of Merrie England, but also in our conceptualisations of progress, of the burden of the past, of our duty to the past in heritage, our notions of modernity as a way of thinking about the here and now. This Romantic sense of history is, I would claim, barely visible in the ancient world, and perhaps nowhere in the classical city. (The best case for similarity, I would suggest, might be Pausanias, whose narrative is imbued with a sense of a lost past, a decaying landscape, scarred by the development of empire, and a material world of the past whose stories speak in fragments to the contemporary world – and, perhaps above all, with the sense that the pepaideumenos, the subject of the periegesis, needs this sense of history to find himself within the landscape of Greece.) It is customary to describe the fifth-century BCE in particular as an age of rapid cultural transformation, and, with that, one might expect there to have developed a strong sense of historical self-consciousness, a strong recognition of change and hence an awareness of the difference between the past and present as a question to be explained. As if – to continue the misleading nineteenth-century parallel – the Persian Wars were the French Revolution of the Greek world, the event which changes everyone’s sense of time and historical self-awareness. This turns out to be only partly the case. So if we ask how a sense of history defines a sense of self, what parameters can we give for the classical polis? Let us begin with some propositions that I hope are uncontentious.
Genealogy matters for individuals and for cities. Quality is defined in part by descent and it brings normative expectations.
Memorialisation of the past for the future is central to social ambition, political commitment, private and civic celebration. It marks the discourse and landscape of the city.
So the exempla of the past become the models for the present: the Persian Wars can be recognised and dismissed as an encouragement to virtue and manliness by Plutarch because of their long and continuing tradition of use. Homer’s heroes speak to the classical polis.
Corollary to this is the recognition of distance: the past can be nobler or more backward, more glorious or more squalid, than today; a model to be lived up to or a model to be spurned.
There is some recognition, therefore, with whatever ironies – in Aristophanes, say, or Plato – that the good old days have disappeared in modern manners and attitudes. There is, in other words, some limited awareness of ‘the age in which we live’. As the age of heroes has passed, so the age of noble simplicity that our forefathers knew has passed. New music exists.
But these propositions need a further framework. The structures for ancient education remain poetry, rhetoric and philosophy. Each of these technai is in an important sense anti-historical. As Aristotle’s no doubt tendentious argument has it, poetry is more philosophical than history because of its commitment to to eikos – generalisation, likelihood – rather than history’s interest in the mere sequence of events. ‘Wie es eigentlich gewesen’ is explicitly dismissed as a valid basis for argument in the rhetorical handbooks: to eikos is the key to to pithanon. Exempla also have a timeless quality. The orator who imagines himself into the role of Alexander is not exploring the past as a foreign country, nor is he open to correction in historiographical terms: there is no issue of sources or accuracy, but of plausibility. Self-definition – again, to speak in the very broadest of terms – is organised around polarities that do not include modernity as a framework: Socrates is pleased to have been born a Greek, a male, a human; someone else might have added Athenian, educated, rich, handsome, healthy and so forth. Would ‘in this age’ have ever have been a crucial term? By the Roman imperial period, it was possible, even necessary, for at least most elite Romans to distinguish between the Republic and the empire, and then between dynasties. But even in the empire there is little equivalent in Greek writing of the same period (as even Aelius Aristides’ Roman Orations or Plutarch’s attempt to explain the fortune of the Romans shows). Similarly, despite Thucydides’ Archaeology, which postulates progress from the past to what now obtains, and despite Protagoras’ myth of the coming of dike in Plato’s Protagoras, a sense of progress stretching into the future is not generally part of the self-definition of Athenian technology or politics (unlike the politics and technology of the nineteenth century).4 How the world might change has a very limited range of expectation. Although a story of the past can explain how things are as they are, man’s continuing and present placement in time is not a pressing question.
So if we read through Hellenistic literature from the New Comedy of Menander, through Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius, we find little sense of an acute sense of placement within time – a sense of a fundamental self-definition through history as constructed by historiographers, although there are flashes of influence of historiographical texts in Apollonius in particular. Contrast this with Virgil, whose intertextual reconstruction of Theocritus in the Eclogues is distinguished precisely by its introduction of a political history, just as the Aeneid, although it takes Apollonius as a model for Book IV in particular, is quite different from Homer or Apollonius in its sense of epic as a foundation of historical self-awareness. Aeneid VI’s vision of the Underworld contrasts tellingly with Odyssey XI exactly in its historical consciousness.
What strikes me as particularly interesting (especially in contrast to the Victorian paradigm) is that while the historia of Herodotus and Thucydides can and should be seen as part of the contest of discourses that make up the fifth-century polis, and while a tradition of historiography subsequently develops as a genre, nonetheless there is precious little influence of historiography in what we have been calling historical consciousness outside the more narrowly circumscribed historiographical tradition in Greek writing (until Pausanias and perhaps some other writing of the Second Sophistic: texts, that is, from deep within the Roman Empire). There are, of course, exceptional and contentious cases, such as Plato’s Laws 3 or Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates. Rather, it is rhetoric (and in some circles philosophy) that has a far more insidious and powerful effect. It is the tradition and training of rhetoric that continue to dominate the elite representation of the past in Greek culture. So however we construct history without historians, we can’t have history without rhetoric.
Simon Goldhill
II
One hundred years after the fundamental article of Felix Jacoby on the development and growth of Greek historiography, the Leventis conference organised by John Marincola in 2009 aimed at indirectly illuminating its status by looking at ‘the vast variety of engagement with the past that is everywhere visible in Greek culture’ (Marincola, p. 13) and confronting that with the founding fathers of history, Herodotus and Thucydides. The various chapters in this volume focus on ‘hot’ (Assmann) or ‘intentional’ (Gehrke) ‘memory’ embedded in various literary genres: archaic epic (Grethlein on Homer and Currie on Hesiod, early lyric (Boedeker and Bowie), Pindar (Pavlou), tragedy (Scodel and Romano), Old Comedy (Henderson), orators (Hesk) and Plato (Morgan), visual arts of the fifth (Shapiro) and fourth (Llewellyn-Jones) centuries, inscriptions of the fourth (Lambert) and third (Shear) centuries BCE. There are also two attempts to deal with more unusual sites of memory: Kearns focus on the modalities of sacrifices which ‘are taken to give information about ancient diets’ (p. 305) and Foxhall uses the marked loom weights found in the chora of Metaponto to show us ‘Greek pasts below the radar of conventional historical texts’ (p. 183) and reconstruct a female past founded largely on familial relationships. One is much tempted to ask for more and to regret the absence of chapters devoted to later texts.
Such a collection invites us not only, after Strasburger and Bowie, to enlarge our view of the ancestors of Greek historiography and better contextualise historiography as a genre. It may also help us to reconsider our conception of historical method (or methods), question the opposition between the most ancient past – what we usually call myth – and the recent one, and partly blur the boundaries between historiography and other literary genres by pointing out the poetry of Herodotus’ histories, the Herodotean co-existence of various logoi on the past in Hesiod’s Works and Days (Currie) or the use of familiar historical tropes in Plato’s discourse on the past (Morgan). Last but not least, this juxtaposition of various chapters often leads to suggestive and unexpected connections. I would like here to focus on the chapters devoted to literary texts and attempt to evaluate their contribution to these questions.
Without questioning Homer’s status as the first ἱστορικός (Plutarch, Essay on the life and poetry of Homer 74) because of his topic (the Iliad purports to be a true narrative guaranteed by divine eyewitnesses) and his mimetic presentation of events and characters (including the use of direct speeches), as well demonstrated by Strasburger, Grethlein focuses on the Homeric (mostly Iliadic) view of the past, a past inhabited by heroes whose superiority to the men of today (οἷοι νῦν βροτοί είσ’: 4×) is taken for granted and separated from the present of the poet and his audience by an unbridgeable gulf (all the allusions to ‘men of the future’ or ‘posterity’ are never found in the narrative but only in speeches). Besides this past, there is also a ‘plupast’ (Grethlein), that is, the previous past embedded in the narratives of the wrath of Achilles and the return of Odysseus. This past is relatively recent. It usually stretches back only one or two generations, excepting some genealogies which extend to eight (Aeneas), six (Glaucos) or four (Diomedes and Theoclymenes) generations. But it is always portrayed as a faraway time (the wrath of Meleager is ‘an action of old and not a new thing’, Il. 9.527–8) and its men are usually ‘far better’ (Il. 1.260) than the heroes of the poem: only Nestor, who belongs to former generations, is able to lift his cup and no Achaean, with the exception of Achilles, can wield the spear of Peleus. This superiority, which is only contested twice in the Iliad (4.404–6 and 15.641–3), ‘provides exempla with special authority’ (p. 19). As opposed to the epic past, which left no trace whatsoever in the present of the audience (the wall built by the Achaeans was totally erased by Apollon and Poseidon in Il. 12.13–33), this plupast, mostly known through speeches echoing the tradition, has left some material traces in the epic present: objects (in the Iliad the sceptre of Agamemnon, the club of Ereuthalion, the helmet of Merion, the corselet of Meges, the bowl of silver which is the prize of the foot race, or in the Odyssey the bow of Odysseus), walls and unidentified stones. Graves are also the visible sign of the kleos of the warrior or his victorious adversary.
The Hesiodic past of the Works and Days is in some ways identical with the Homeric one: its reality is guaranteed by the Muses and it is cut from and contrasted to the present in the myth of Prometheus and Pandora, as well as in the myth of the races, which portrays five discrete and successive races – a complex text subtly read by Currie. On the other hand, the confrontation between Herodotus’ Histories and the Works and Days also enables us to perceive some similarities in purpose and method. In purpose, with the construction of a past that illuminates the present from an ethical standpoint. In method, with the implicit criticism of other accounts of the past (since the Muses are not only able to tell the truth if they wish, but also to tell lies similar to the truth), the concern to establish some coherence between the discrepant Greek and Near Eastern accounts in the myth of the races, and the inclusion of incompatible accounts of the past, such as the myth and Prometheus and Pandora and the myth of the races, even if one may be reluctant to push further the analogy and explain their agreement on certain key points as a way of highlighting what is meant to stand as historical fact and a prefiguration of Herodotus’ method, as did Currie.
As opposed to Homeric poems, in archaic lyric the present and the poet come to the fore and one may point out some similarities with Herodotus. Boedeker reminds us that Stesichorus, in his Palinode, exposed, before Herodotus’ new version of the Helen story and Thucydides’ Archaeology, the lack of reliability of the Homeric song, and Ibycus (fr. 151 PMGF) openly criticised the accuracy of the Homeric Catalogue of Ships and chooses to celebrate the beauty of three young heroes neglected or ignored by Homer in order to praise the contemporary Polycrates better. Alcaeus, before Herodotus, explicitly echoed ‘what is said’ (ὠς λόγος, fr. 42 V v.1) and ‘does not take responsibility for the tale’s veracity’ (p. 70). With Sappho, ‘the present illuminates the past as much as the past does the present’ (p. 76). In a sequel to his influential papers demonstrating how several elegiac poets, who narrated at some length both the early and the more recent past of their cities, were ‘ancestors of Herodotus’, Bowie turns to the accounts of the most ancient past (that is, ‘myth’) given by two melic poets originating from western Greece, Stesichorus of Himera and Ibycus of Rhegium, and opposes their various ways of reconstructing it. In order to emphasise his own Greekness, Stesichorus often chose to tell some traditional Greek myths as well as stories set in mainland Greece that bear no relation to the main body of mythology. But he also told myths located in his native city (Daphnis), whereas Ibycus relocated in Sicily well-known myths such as the abduction of Ganymede or probably referred to the foundation of his own city.
Pindar’s Epinicians are mostly concentrated on the present and the praise of contemporary victorious athletes. But, as pointed out by Pavlou, they give much place to a past which spans from myth to contemporary history. In contrast to Homer and Hesiod, Pindar replaced the Muses with tradition as the main source of information and did not hesitate to criticise former accounts of the past openly. He also broke with the linearity of the epic narrative and its presentation of a ‘past . . . “walled off” or cast as superior to the present’, for his ‘primary concern was . . . to draw analogies between past and present’ (pp. 105, 101) and to stress the continuity of the family, from its mythical ancestors to the victor.
The two papers on tragedy (Scodel and Romano) both emphasise in their own way the complexity of the tragic past where anachronism is not the exception but the rule, to quote B. Knox. Scodel points out obvious discrepancies in the portrait of the past by different characters according to their self-interest in the Troades (Helen and Hecuba) and in Sophocles’ Electra (Clytemnestra and Electra). She establishes a convincing parallel between these tragic characters and Herodotean figures who present versions of the past that make their own nations appear guiltless. In the Troades, she draws attention to a rational rewriting of Helen’s story by Hecuba, who treats Aphrodite as a metaphor for Helen’s attraction to Paris, as did Gorgias in his Helen, without denying, as the sophist did, Helen’s responsibility. In the Orestes, Scodel also interprets Tyndareus’ claims that Orestes should have followed a law established by the ancestors long ago by prosecuting his mother and throwing her out of his house (494–5, 500–3, 512–15) as ‘a deliberate transfer of a contemporary kind of argument about the past to a remote past’, specially appealing at a time when ‘democrats and oligarchs both claimed ancestral support’ (pp. 119–20). On the other hand Romano, who questions any interpretation of Euripidean aetiologies of the prophetic form as a direct exchange between playwright and audience, chooses to locate his human seers (Polymestor in Hecuba and Eurystheus in the Heraclidae) in the contemporary Athenian landscape of divination. In Iphigeneia in Tauris he dismisses Orestes’ report of the foundation of Athenian Choes as a kind of historical explanation and interprets it as a self-serving argument. He refuses any authoritative value to the predictions of divine speakers such as Artemis, Thetis and Apollo, since they only reflect their character. Yet his conclusion suggest a convincing parallel between these biased and subjective aetiologies and the historical discourse about foundations, which was also self-serving.
The chapters of Henderson on Old Comedy and Hesk on fourth-century oratory provide us a glimpse of a ‘popular’ or, better, ‘civic’ past that contrasts with the allegedly scientific historiography. Henderson attempts to define the Aristophanic past and its sources by looking at four plays, Acharnians, Peace, Knights and Lysistrata, performed between 425 and 411. Obviously this past, known only by hearsay (Trygaeus in the Peace and Lysistrata) or personal memories (the chorus of old men in Lysistrata), has nothing to do with the one reconstructed by the historians. Accordingly, Henderson excludes any influence of Herodotus’ prologue on Ach. 523–9, which traces the origin of the Peloponnesian War to reciprocal abduction of women. His comparison between Thucydides’ explanation and the comic presentation of the causes of the war by Dicaeopolis in Acharnians and Hermes in Peace, both contrasting a trivial beginning with its disastrous consequences, only allows us to measure the gap between a critical historian, who looks for ‘the true though unavowed’ cause of the war and minimises the importance of the Megarian decree and ‘some other grounds of complaint’ (1.67.4) put forward by the Megarians, and a comic poet relying on the popular view privileging Pericles and the Megarian decree. Aristophanes also exposes a tendentious reading of the mythical or historical past: in Clouds (1075–92) he criticises the use of mythological precedents by the Euripidean characters, and condemns in Frogs (1049–55) the negative examples he set by staging women committing adultery. Elsewhere his target is the tendentious use of the Athenian past by orators. In Knights the appeal to the great figures of Athenian past by contemporary politicians, such as Creon’s self-comparison with Themistocles, is deemed totally inapt. In Lysistrata he exposes the official depiction of Athenian civic historical myths, such as that of the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogiton, by the chorus of old men, as well as the carefully edited version of the good old days where Athens and Sparta were helping each other given by Lysistrata, and in Ecclesiazusae he makes fun of the opposition between an idealised fifth-century past, the time of Myronides, imbued with a deep commitment to the city, and a present characterised by individual selfishness. The chapter by Hesk on ‘Common Knowledge and the Contestation of History in Some Fourth-Century Athenian Trials’ also looks at the uses of a popular and civic past and strongly criticises Ober’s recent contention that ‘a shared repertoire of common knowledge along with a commitment to democratic values meant that . . . jurors would often align in more or less predictable ways’.5 Hesk convincingly demonstrates that Athenian decision-making was informed by a much more sceptical attitude. Through a reading of the few cases where we happen to have the arguments used by both sides (Aeschines’ Against Timarchus and its criticism later on by Demosthenes, On the Embassy; Aeschines’ and Demosthenes’ speeches On the Embassy; Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes’ On the Crown) and a reconstruction from one speech (Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates) of the historical arguments used by the other, he points out passages that question the relevance and applicability of some historical exempla, appeal to another set of historical precedents, reinterpret in an opposite way the same item of history and debunk a rosy portrait of Athenian past. He also demonstrates the influence of contemporary critical historiography on Demosthenes, who in 19.251 questions ‘bogus historical evidence’ (Solon’s statue supposedly portraying Solon’s oratorical demeanour is merely fifty years old) and ‘realigns the exemplarity of Solon in his own favour’ by relying on a good historical evidence, Solon’s Salamis elegy (pp. 223, 224).
Morgan’s chapter on the late dialogues of Plato (Statesman, Timaeus, Critias and Laws 3) invites us not only to confront the historical and philosophical views of the past but also to look at the influence of historiography on Plato’s ‘history’. In the Statesman Plato starts from existing myths, the ancient stories, known from tradition and hearsay about Atreus and Thyestes, the rule of Cronus, the men born from the earth and the fall of Phaethon. But he is not content to adapt them to his demonstration, as he does for the Prometheus myth in the Protagoras or the Gorgias; he makes use of familiar historiographical tropes such as the fading of memory with time and the search beyond the mythical form for the ‘truth’, that is, the unique underlying cause that explains all these scattered phenomena, a rationalisation of myth which is, I think, closer to Thucydides than to Hecataeus and Acusilaus, the two mythographers cited by Morgan. Indeed, this search for the most ancient past is not for Plato, as it is for the historian, an end in itself, but a fitting contribution towards his goal: the exposition of the king. After reading the chapter by Currie, one is also struck by some similarities: like Hesiod’s myth of the races, it is not a simple story of decline. It is ‘a heuristic device for untangling a complex synchronic reality’ (p. 234) which has, to echo Currie, a ‘fundamental ethical dimension’ (p. 64). In the Timaeus/Critias Plato’s historicisation of the myth goes even further. Plato’s narrative of the struggle between ancient Athens and Atlantis is a grandiose rewriting of the Persian Wars, presenting the ideal city of the Republic in the guise of the ancient Athens and substituting for the Persians a hubristic empire mirroring both the insolence of Xerxes and the greed of imperial Athens).6 And the history of its transmission from the Egyptian priest who told it to Solon to its actual narrator, Critias, obviously echoes both Herodotus’ introduction of the true story of Helen (2.116) and his narrative of his own visit to Egypt (2.142–3). In Laws 3, the survey of the respective pasts of the Dorian kingdoms of the Peloponnese, of Athens and of Persia, which begins with the most ancient past, but truly starts with the return of the Heraclidae and the foundation of Lacedaemon (the termination of Hellanicus’ mythographical works and the beginning of Ephorus’ Universal History), is also a piece of ‘moralising history’ (p. 245): the interpretation of the events is governed by a priori assumption (governments fall through their own faults) in order to demonstrate ‘the congruence between history and theory’ (p. 249).
So even if one contests, as does Simon Goldhill, the primacy unduly given to critical historiography, one has to acknowledge the interest of its confrontation with other views of the past.
Suzanne Saïd
III
The past mattered. It mattered already to Homer’s heroes, harking back to those earlier days when mortals were better and stronger (Grethlein); it mattered to Homer’s hearers and then his readers, dwelling on that world when gods mingled more readily and visibly on earth. It may have mattered to Epimenides, with his purification of Athens (Marincola). It mattered to Pindar’s athletes, linked poetically with their ancestors (Pavlou). It mattered to Sappho as she mused first on Helen and then on Anactoria, and the two musings meshed (Boedeker). It certainly matters in the plots of tragedy, where events from the back-story hang heavily over play after play. It was how it mattered that was difficult to track, and needed to be contested rhetorically. Enough was at stake for it to be worthwhile for tragic characters to have their own heavily charged narratives of earlier happenings, especially of their personal pasts (Scodel); for a ‘memory politics’ to develop (Shear); and for fourth-century orators to produce their own slanted version of how they, or their domestic or foreign enemies, fitted into the long narrative of Athenian history (Hesk), where warfare may have changed but the required resilience and commitment had not. Importance, contestation, rhetoric: the three go together. And, whatever view we form of the debt of other genres to historiography or the differences between them, those three are constants in historiography too. Herodotus’ programmatic homing-in on the aitiē of the great war (proem) becomes, at least initially, a discussion of who was to blame, ‘the Persian word-experts say that Phoenicians were aitioi for the rift’ (1.1.1): historiographic techniques of attaching or deflecting blame, and crafting the narrative story to suit, have something in common with the rhetorical deftness so clear in Antiphon’s Tetralogies, even if the infrastructure of the argument is not usually laid so bare as it is by Polybius in his attack on Fabius Pictor (3.8) – eikos arguments, ad hominem questioning and so on. And, in historians as in orators, silences can be as telling as words. Xenophon’s reader is not allowed to know about the Second Athenian Confederacy, and we can trace skilfully combative silences in Thucydides too: this was not Pericles’ war, not a matter of Megarian decrees; you needed to look further back, to the 470s and to the first forty rather than the last ten of those crucial fifty years. And all this was worth doing because a lot was at stake. Understanding what was important about the present meant delving into the past, and in ways where it could be anticipated that people would disagree. Cases needed to be made.
So in one way no ‘bridge between past and present’ (Romano, p. 130) needed building; it was already there, and it was the sort of bridge, and where it led, that needed to be argued. Awareness of the links did not, of course, mean blindness to the ways in which the past had changed, whether in decline – not necessarily simple or linear decline, as Hesiod (Currie) and Plato (Morgan) show – or in technical progress or power structures or moral values. It is true, too, that the aetiological explanations of tragedy are often counterintuitive or problematic, and that some of tragedy’s prophecies imply future narratives that are themselves contestable (Romano again), just as the characters’ own past narratives are sometimes incompatible with one another. But need it follow that talk of that ‘bridge between past and present’ is inappropriate for such aetiological passages? One could equally argue that the emotional engagement of particular speakers with such partisan narratives, well brought out by Romano, implies an even closer bridge: the present mattered to the past, just as the past still matters to the present. If some of the aetiological suggestions seem rum or off-key, then that is no surprise. They can seem rum or off-key to characters in the play as well, morally if not factually, as they do to Electra, Orestes, and the chorus at Eur. El. 1292ff; one suspects too that Hippolytus might have found cold comfort in Artemis’ promise of a marital hair-cutting custom at Hipp. 1423–30, marking the moment when girls give up the virginity that was his pride. Relating the mythical past to the present may be as unstraightforward for the tragic audience as relating their own pasts to the dramatic present is for the characters within the plays themselves; the aetiological passages may well be selective as well as partisan, with their unsettling elements and their half-truths; but the relation can still be there, and the texture of explanation can be right even if one knows that the particular details may not be. It points to the right place to look.
But surely – one might say – incompatible versions of the past cannot all be true? Surely historiography has more of a commitment to truth, to ironing out inconsistencies in one’s conceptual scheme of how the past came about? This raises the point addressed by Currie, as he reflects on the various versions of the past in Works and Days and the complications in putting them altogether into a coherent scheme: how far does this imply ‘a discourse with truth-values’ (p. 57)? That recalls the fundamental question posed by Paul Veyne – not so much as it is put in his book’s title, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?,7 but rather, did they believe in their myths in a different way from the way they believed in the truth or falsity of more everyday matters? It is doubtless right to think that, say, the ‘myth’ of the origin of justice in Plato’s Protagoras or the ‘social contract’ theory set out in Republic 2 are not to be taken as a literally accurate reconstruction of past events. Morgan shows in this volume how ‘diachronic presentation in Plato can sometimes be a heuristic device for untangling a complex synchronic reality’ (p. 234, citing Frutiger). Cynthia Farrar also had good things to say about this in her Origins of Democratic Thinking, particularly (again) in connection with Plato’s Protagoras.8 Something similar may be true of Hesiod’s myth of the ages (Currie), though there we will be dealing not so much with ‘a complex synchronic reality’ as with a simplified model of diachronic development, one which produces a fable-version which reflects but drastically reduces the complexities of real history. Such a picture may indicate the deep structure embedded in the messiness of historical reality, it may be what that historical progress amounted to; it acknowledges that a sophisticated cultural feature is a consequence of development over time and helps you to understand that development, and it is historical in that it shows a sense of the importance of history; but it does not imply that everything really happened in quite so toy-town a way. It may capture a truth, but does so in an idiom that invites belief in a different way, more symbolic than literal.
Still, we run a risk of being too simple about historiography if we simply contrast that ‘mythical’ mindset with that of the historians, or indeed if we think about that historiographic ‘commitment to truth’ as if it always presents itself in exactly the same register. On the Roman side, David Levene has argued that Livy similarly combines in his own narrative versions which not merely are incompatible but were recognised by the author, and would be recognised by his readers, as such; as Levene notes, analogies can be found in Plutarch’s Lives, though those cases are possibly less extreme.9 There would be attractions as well as difficulties in reading that approach back into classical Greek, and sidestepping rather than confronting such old chestnuts as the reconcilability of Herodotus’ two Spartan king lists, for instance, or the disentangling of various problems of pre-Marathon chronology. But whether or not we follow Levene and his implications, stories such as Herodotus’ version of Deioces (1.96–101) should give us pause. Deioces was the Median king who made it clear that the society needed him to impose just solutions, and then entrenched his position by cultivating a mysterious and charismatic inaccessibility. Is it unreasonable to take that as a similar fable to those of Hesiod or Plato, one that captures an element of truth but one that the reader should not interpret literally? And dealing in ‘truth’ in this emblematic register at some points need not preclude a shaping of truth-questions in a sharper, yes-or-no fashion at others: was it the Alcmaeonids who held up the shield in 490 (6.121–4)? Did the Corinthians fight well or badly at Salamis (8.94)? Or, to go much earlier, did or did not Helen go to Troy (2.120)? The Constitutions Debate at 3.80–2 may combine both registers. Herodotus insists that this really took place, and does so on two different occasions (3.80.1, 6.43.2). That is a claim that we should not wave away, as he himself stresses its paradoxical quality – Persians considering democracy, and doing so in open debate: this is quite enough to make it understandable why a Greek audience should have found speeches (logoi) of that sort incredible (apistoi) (3.80.1). But need it follow that the debate happened quite like this, with the arguments formulated in the terms that Herodotus gives? Readers whose expectations were shaped by epic may have been more sophisticated than that, and been content to explore the world of what-might-havebeen, what-was-really-at-stake, as well as that of what-really-was.
That may bring some aspects – not by any means all – of historio-graphic ‘truth’ closer to ideas we might normally associate with myth; but, like other genres, historiography can also borrow from myth in subtler ways. Henderson’s contrast of Herodotus and Aristophanes’ Acharnians is here thought-provoking. When Dicaeopolis gives his tongue-in-cheek version of the outbreak of the war, many have thought that Aristophanes is ‘parodying’ Herodotus’ opening chapters in the sense of making fun of them; Henderson and I agree that this is not the right way of looking at it, and that it is better to see Aristophanes as adapting a traditional pattern, one also reflected in Euripides’ Telephus, to accommodate recent events – ‘recycling’ rather than parody, as Henderson puts it, and viewing through a mythical ‘lens’ (p. 151).10 But is Aristophanes here totally different from Herodotus? Both authors can be seen as ‘building on’ that sort of mythical pattern, Aristophanes for comic purposes and Herodotus to deepen the level of historical interpretation: if Aristophanes’ Dicaeopolis thought that ‘such motivations really had been determinative factors in bringing about the present war’ (Henderson, p. 150), perhaps Herodotus would not have disagreed too strongly when it came to explaining his own war, even if he would want to interpret ‘such motivations’ in a way that went beyond sexual abductions. For at least that narrative pattern of ‘and then . . . and then . . .’, with each side retaliating and responding to the other, does capture something important about the reciprocal way in which Herodotus sees recent history as playing out: that was brought out clearly by John Gould.11 Still, in Herodotus’ narrative this is soon overlaid and complicated by other ways of explaining it as well, in particular a drive to expansion and imperialism; indeed, already in 1.1–4 it is more than a matter of retaliation, as Paris’ abduction of Helen is driven not by a quest for revenge but by a conviction that he is likely to get away with it.12 Elsewhere too we may see historians not rejecting mythical patterns, but rather exploring how real-world events have mapped on to those patterns and furnished updated counterparts: Cleisthenes of Sicyon’s banquet (Hdt. 6.126–31) can be seen as a recent version of the suitor-contests of the Odyssey and, more especially, Pelops’ wooing of Hippodameia, with Cleisthenes’ clash with Hippocleides a less murderous equivalent of prospective father-in-law and son-inlaw; Thucydides’ version of the Sicilian adventure may be a complex and godless and unsettling version of the traditional nexus atē–hubris– nemesis;13 the Liberation of the Cadmeia in 378 reruns the Seven Against Thebes in contemporary terms (Xen. Hell. 5.4.1–12).14 None of those counterparts is exact or one-to-one, but in each case historians borrow and ‘build on’ a mythical model, and reflection on that model can help their readers to reflect on both the continuities and the differences of history.
So historiography is a capacious way of writing. There are moods and contexts in which historians can distinguish what they do from ‘the mythical’, as Thucydides does in waving τὸ μυθῶδες away from his own writing (1.22.4), or indeed as Herodotus does in doubting the presence of Helen at Troy. There are also moods and contexts where historians approximate much more closely to the ways in which other writers and genres handle traditional material. In historiography too we see the combination of generalisation and homing-in on particular moments (Llewellyn-Jones), as particular case studies are made to support a broader patterning that in its turns adds credibility to the inflection given to the case studies (Kearns); the alertness to partisan bias (Romano) in weighing variant versions, and the likelihood that evaluation of a character will guide our readiness to believe his or her story (Scodel); the importance of family traditions in moulding and preserving memory (Foxhall); an awareness of the fragility of historical knowledge (Morgan), so that there are times when one accepts that knowledge may have disappeared, ‘wiped out through the passing of time’ (Hdt. proem), so that the distant past may only be recovered ‘sufficiently, given how long ago it happened’ (Thuc. 1.21.1, cf. 1.1.3 and Morgan, p. 232); an acknowledgement of particular variations which may reflect local manipulation for ideological reasons (Shapiro), but may also point to the multifaceted quality of human experience itself, just as – to take the most extreme case – Helen herself remains as ambiguous and variegated as she ever was, and as capable of inspiring differing responses (Boedeker). The past may rhyme with the present but not in ways that correspond exactly (Shear), and that is why inspirational lessons may be learned (Lambert) but with some freedom of choice and the present ‘not entirely in its grip’ (Pavlou, p. 104). Learning the right lessons could require a timely silence too: if historians’ audiences needed to be steered away from thinking of the Second Athenian Confederacy or from blaming Pericles, so also the Athenian public needed to be protected from memories of civic strife (Shear). Any lieu de mémoire is also a lieu d’oubli, as memorials selectively prescribe what still matters and bury what does not. So, if – and it is a big ‘if’ – it is legitimate to think of a ‘genre’ of historiography before the fourth century, there is interchange and overlap with other genres as well as divergence. Differences of course remain, but the way Aristotle puts it is very precise: poetry deals more with the general and what-might-happen, history more with the specific and what-Alcibiades-did-and-suffered (1451a26–b11) – but it is not a complete contrast, but a matter of degree.
If, then, the mythical past offers a matrix for thought experiment (Scodel), that is partly because it allows moral issues to be addressed with a smaller encumbrance of circumstantial detail than they carry in real life, then encourages the reapplication of that thinking to make sense of the more confusing everyday world. Once again, historiography is not dissimilar, even though its distinctive feature is that it does engage with that mass of real-life circumstance. The historians themselves are also extrapolating and suggesting recurrent patterns to make sense of what-Alcibiades-did-and-suffered, and helping readers to disentangle the telling facts from the purely contingent to see how this might be a case study for broader truths about, say, Athens or democracy or individualism or rhetorical flair. And Thucydides at least could hope that the historical text itself could point readers in the same direction, suggesting that they – we – use the shape of past events to distinguish the recurrent patterns in our contemporary experience, those things that ‘happened and will happen again in the same or similar form, the human condition being what it is’ (1.22.4). The writers do part of the thought-experimental work; in some genres and authors they do more and in some they do less. But the rest is up to the audiences, both the immediate and the long-term, both them and us.
Christopher Pelling
See esp. R. Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); also D. Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989); J. Gould, Herodotus (London, 1989); J. Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This short piece could be very heavily annotated, but that would not be in the spirit of the invitation to write it. |
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See esp. A. Ford, Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); J. Grethlein, The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory, History in the Fifth Century BC (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). |
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See esp. R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics for Historical Time, tr. K. Tribe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr. T. Pressner et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) – with whom my argument here is most pertinently in dialogue; also J. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); P. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and Their Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); B. Mellman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). I have had my go at this in S. Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). |
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Classic accounts in J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan, 1920), and E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); see also S. Blundell, The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought (London and Dover, NH: Croom Helm, 1986); T. Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1967; repr. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), and esp. G. Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987). |
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J. Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 191. |
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P. Vidal-Naquet, The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007). |
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P. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); tr. by P. Wissing of French original, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Essai sur l’imagination constituante (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1983). |
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C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. p. 88: ‘Protagoras’ story is not a naturalistic account of the rise of human society. Protagoras was interested not in how the world came to be, but in how it was’ – and his speech in Plato’s dialogue too is to be seen similarly as expressing ‘insights into man’s present condition, not his origins’. |
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D. S. Levene, Livy on the Hannibalic War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 317–92, e.g. pp. 382, 385: ‘Part of Livy’s anomalous presentation of causation . . . concerns not merely connections that would appear loose or indeed counterintuitive to the modern reader, but things which he himself indicates do not represent reality . . . [I]n Livy we have an historian who presents narrative sequences which are avowedly impossible in the terms in which he sets them up . . . simply because that allows him to create a narrative which makes sense of his wider moral and political themes.’ Levene goes on to point out the Plutarch analogy at pp. 385–6. |
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Henderson assumes there was some genuine recent ‘episode involving fights over whores between young Athenians and Megarians’: that is the point where we part company (C. B. R. Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 153–4). |
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Gould, Herodotus. |
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T. Rood, ‘Herodotus’ proem: Space, time, and the origin of international relations’, Ἀριάδνη 16 (2010), pp. 43–74, at pp. 56–8. |
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F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: Arnold, 1907), pp. 201–20, esp. p. 220: ‘What need of further comment? Tychê, Elpis, Apatê, Eros, Phthonos, Nemesis, Atê – all these have crossed the stage, and the play is done.’ |
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U. Schmitzer, ‘Sieben Thebaner gegen Thebes: Bemerkungen zur Darstellungsform in Xenophon, Hell. 5.4.1–12’, WJa 22 (1998), pp. 123–39. |