A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography

John Marincola, John Marincola

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444393828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This two-volume Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography reflects the new directions and interpretations that have arisen in the field of ancient historiography in the past few decades.

• Comprises a series of cutting edge articles written by recognised scholars
• Presents broad, chronological treatments of important issues in the writing of history and antiquity
• These are complemented by chapters on individual genres and sub-genres from the fifth century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E.
• Provides a series of interpretative readings on the individual historians
• Contains essays on the neighbouring genres of tragedy, biography, and epic, among others, and their relationship to history

Part I

Contexts

Chapter One

The Place of History in the Ancient World

Roberto Nicolai

1 Preliminary Considerations

According to a generally accepted opinion, the discovery of history in the western world is owed to the Greeks. One must admit, however, that history did not enjoy a privileged position within Greek culture; rather, its role was marginal whether we compare the study of history with other intellectual activities or try to examine its presence in education and in school (see Momigliano 1983; Nicolai 1992; below, §4). To begin, we must clear up several ambiguities. First, our concept of history – by which I mean the concept of history developed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a consequence of the integration of narrative history and the study of antiquity (Momigliano 1950) – is profoundly different from that of the Greeks and the Romans: both have a diegetic aspect, since history, both for us and the ancients, is a narrative of facts. The means, however, by which a story is conveyed and the aims of the historians are different. At least up until Herodotus there is no interest in chronology, either absolute or relative (see Finley 1975: 15, 17–18; for archaic Greece one can speak rather of an extreme interest in genealogical sequences), and it took centuries before chronological systems were established for general use; by contrast, modern historiography, the child of a culture obsessed with the measurement of time, cannot avoid placing facts into a chronological grid. Second, the account of an ancient historian tends to absorb – and therefore to make disappear, in varying degrees in various epochs – every trace of documentation used by the author, while the modern historian by contrast searches to bring forth the facts from the documents. (For the use of documents see Biraschi et al. 2003; below, Ch. 4; the modern idolatry of the document, however, has also rightly been questioned: see, most recently, Canfora 2003: 9). The rhetoric of the document is directly opposed to the rhetoric of ancient historians, which derives from epic poetry and constructs the character (ēthos) of the historian as the omniscient, or at least competent and authoritative, narrator (Marincola 1997). Third, the goal of an ancient historical account is never purely scientific and cognitive, but is always linked to creating paradigms, predominantly politico-militaristic or ethical ones (for the different goals that historians proposed for themselves from time to time see Finley 1975: 23). All of historiography's paradigms had a paideutic end and in some sense a political end: to form a governing class, offering it analytical instruments and behavioral models (as in Thucydides); to put forward great personalities, positive or negative, as exempla, so as to fix the parameters of moral evaluation (as with Theopompus, Tacitus, and the biographical tradition); or to construct memory and collective identity (as in local historiography and ktiseis [foundation narratives]). (For historiography's contribution to the construction of Greek identity see Cartledge 1997b.)

But ancient historiography is not a homogeneous whole, with a limited internal evolution. Under this label we in fact assemble authors and works that are extremely different (cf. the panorama of Latin historiography in Cizek 1985), sharing only the minimal common denominator of being a narration of events (Canfora 2003: 14). A further distinction must be made between history, understood as the whole of past events, and historiography, understood as a literary genre charged with the narration of events. Using this outline, one can say that the past (also including in this term the mythic past, brought in through the poetic tradition) has its own important place in Greek and Roman cultures, while the narration of the past, and above all the investigation into the past, occupy a much more modest place.

2 The Place of History and the Place of Historiography

Moses Finley (1975: 14) emphatically ruled out the possibility that epic poetry, whatever else it was, could be considered history. Greeks of any epoch would have expressed their perplexity at this statement or at least would have called for a debate. No Greek in fact ever held such an opinion. On the contrary, Thucydides, in the so-called “Archaeology” (1.2–19), sought to demonstrate the superiority of his argument and of his account with respect to the Iliad, and moreover, he compared the degree of reliability of Homer's testimony with the much more accurate investigations that he himself had conducted on a history even more ancient than Homer's (1.10, 1.21: see Nicolai 2001b). The fact that Thucydides dedicates one of the more demanding sections of his work to this confrontation with Homer and to the demonstration of the superior paradigmaticism of the Peloponnesian War vis-à-vis the Trojan War demonstrates that for Thucydides the most important touchstone in the Greek intellectual sphere was in fact Homer. And if it is true that in the light of modern historiography (and also several tendencies in ancient historiography) epic cannot be defined as history, it is just as true that for centuries epic represented the only reliable record of the past that the Greeks had at their disposal, and that even after the invention of historiography, when one wanted to take a look at more ancient history, one could not do more than go back to epic poetry (Nicolai 2003a).

I believe that it is not sufficient to search Homeric epic for historical information or for the elements that came to be considered characteristic of historical narration. Rather, it is appropriate to try to take another look at epic poetry, in order to see what a Greek found there in terms of an awareness of his own past and the construction of his own identity. A narration of past events that forms the identity of a people, whether at a collective level or at the level of a single city or single clan (genē), and that constitutes for that people the principle paradigmatic reference, cannot be ignored by those who seek to delineate the proper place of history and of historiography in the Greek and Roman world.

The first and most important indication of the strength of epic in Greek culture is the link that it created between the identity of the Greeks and “glorious deeds” (klea andrōn: Il. 9.189, 524; Od. 8.73) worthy of being saved from oblivion with song. In the Iliad Achilles, the hero par excellence, sings to Patroclus the glorious deeds of men (9.189), to show that Homeric heroes also had a past to sing and from which to take models. The paradigmatic value of klea andrōn is then continued by Phoenix (9.524), where he introduces an exemplary event. In the absence of political unity and also of a strong and unifying religion (such as, e.g., the monotheism of the Jews), the Greeks identified themselves in epic song, or, to be more precise, in their past, from which poetry had selected and transmitted the most memorable events. The Greeks also recognized that the poets had identified and in some ways founded their religion (Hdt. 2.53.2–3). That the Homeric poems are the book of Greek culture entails (and not as a secondary consequence) the utilization of a human past as a model and foundation of the present. The Iliad is not a sacred book like the Bible, and it does not recount the acts of a single hero, such as Gilgamesh, who searches for divine immortality, but recounts instead human events, with the gods as helpers or opponents.

For the public, epic recalled events distant in time: the bards knowingly archaized their works, both in language and in content, creating that inextricable mixture of past and present characteristic of every epic. One must strongly emphasize that this archaization, besides being a necessity of the genre and strengthening the exemplary force of an event, is a sign of the basic understanding of chronological distance from the events narrated. Furthermore, the stratified composition through the centuries introduced anachronisms and other blendings. To give a single example, the place names of the “Catalogue of Ships” (Il. 2.484–779, with Visser 1997, who provides an ample bibliography) are the result of the desire for amplification, accumulating names upon names, and assigning them formulaic epithets that dignify even lesser-known localities; and, in the desire to antiquate, choosing names of cities that contained a veiled memory, or in some cases inventing one for the occasion. The resulting picture is not a description of Greece in the Mycenaean age or the archaic age, but rather an indecipherable mixture upon which whole generations of ancient and modern philology have been based. Nonetheless, for the Greeks the presence or absence of a city in the Catalogue was a cause for pride or shame, and in certain cases the verses of the Catalogue were used to solve political and territorial controversies. Epic, in short, was an irreplaceable document, a type of historical archive, to be consulted and at times to be interpolated or falsified, but always to be interpreted (for the exegesis of epic poetry as a part of genealogy and historiography see Nicolai 2003a). One of the main supports for epic poetry was genealogy, which identified characters connected to each other through means of the simple patronymic and stabilized a series of relations with the heroes of preceding generations. The creation of genealogical epics by Hesiod at both the divine (Theogony) and human (Catalogue of Women) level indicates that the public had a specific interest in this kind of material.

It was precisely the immense awareness required by catalogue poetry that drove the poet who composed the prologue to the “Catalogue of Ships” (Il. 2.484–493) to confront the limited knowledge founded on kleos (reputation) with that of the omniscient Muses, who are present and aware. The Muse, daughter of Mnemosyne (Memory), is able to compensate for the limitations of the poet, who becomes the latest ring of collective memory. Thanks to the Muse (Od. 8.488–491), Demodocus can sing the sufferings of the Achaeans and the capture of Troy, events at which he had not been present, with such precision as to provoke the admiration and the tears of Odysseus, who was a protagonist of the story (Od. 8.521–531). Epic, therefore, is a product of the memory of a people, and at the same time an encyclopedia and cultural book of that people (Rossi 1978, esp. 87–92). Historiography, heir of epic poetry, will retain this goal of preserving memory (cf. Herodotus' preface) and also the goal of suggesting itself as a repertoire of dynamics and behaviors, in other words of paradigms (especially, with Thucydides, politico-military paradigms: see his famous formulation, 1.22.4).

The paradigmatic and educative aim on the one hand removes ancient historiography from its modern counterpart with its claim to be a science, while on the other hand links history to other genres that had among their goals the construction of a collective identity and the telling of paradigmatic events: I am referring particularly to tragedy, but also to oratory, both epideictic, as it can be seen in the funeral oration (see, above all, Loraux 1981), and deliberative. In the funeral oration Athens' past occupies a central position, but one searches in vain here for a serious reconstruction of the city's history; on the contrary, the history of this genre seems to reflect the precept of Tisias and Gorgias (ap. Plat. Phaedr. 267b1), picked up by Isocrates: “to go through ancient events in a new way and to speak in an old-fashioned manner of recent events” (Paneg. 8, with Marincola 1997: 276–277; Nicolai 2004: 75–76, 129–131). The clear intent is to render the recent past paradigmatically by placing it on the same level as that mythic past which time, distance, and the works of the poets (including tragedy) had made exemplary.

The importance of paradigms derived from past history continued, in different literary genres and various forms, the goals and in certain ways the criteria that presided over the narrative choices of epic song. But alongside the exemplary history of the tragedians and orators, other genres developed that had as their subject past events: genealogies, which continued and interpreted the epos and had the aim of consolidating and organizing the memories of aristocratic clans (genē); various forms of local historiography, either strictly local or regional; antiquarianism, necessary to create and reinforce identity and the sense of belonging to a community; and works on the customs of foreign peoples, which exhibited and explained the “other.” All of these genres constituted a type of galaxy (rather difficult for us to decipher because of the loss of so many works) that was linked to other galaxies, such as the various genres of geographic literature which also gave space to genealogical, historical, and ethnographic concerns. None of these early genres that handled historical material possessed the paradigmatic force of epic or the capacity to involve a Panhellenic public. Therefore, it was not Hecataeus, indissolubly linked to epic and limited to genealogical material, who created a new literary genre directed towards the conservation of the historical memory of the Greeks (see Nicolai 1997): rather, it was Herodotus and Thucydides who confronted epic poetry and tried to substitute new models for those offered by Homer; both men responded to the needs of an age that sought more extended and reliable knowledge (Herodotus especially), to be utilized in particular for the formation of a governing class (Thucydides especially). Historiography is one of the products of this period that is often known as an age of sophists, and there is no doubt that Herodotus and Thucydides were strongly influenced by sophistic ideas; it is possible that they even considered themselves sophists. Certainly the methods by which Herodotus published his work were not very different from the recitations of Lysias or Protagoras that we know from Plato's dialogues (Thomas 1993; Thomas 2000, esp. 258, 284). The historians shared with the sophists the goal of transmitting useful knowledge into political life, enough so that historiography was classified by Aristotle as a part of politics (Rhet. 1360a).

3 Historiography as a Literary Genre rather than a Science

It is commonly accepted that history was not included in the disciplines that moved towards exact knowledge, truth in the philosophical sense of the term, and that the results of historical research were part of doxa (opinion). This arrangement of history as foreign to philosophy was consolidated specifically in the great systematic philosophies of the fourth century and the Hellenistic age. The Greek and Roman philosophers did not dedicate themselves to historiography and did not elaborate historiographical theories (Finley 1975: 12). The sole exception is Posidonius, who also wrote history, but I would be very cautious before attributing to him (and by extension to Stoicism) a complete philosophy of history that incorporates the study of the past into a philosophical system (Pani 2001: 66 speaks of Posidonius' systematic conception of history, but cf. Nicolai 2003b: 689–691). It was only with Christianity that history became a part of a vision of the world and the destiny of man: on the one hand, the faith founds itself on the historical veracity of the coming of Christ, of his death and resurrection, while, on the other hand, history had for the first time a goal and an end, the second and definitive coming of Christ for the final judgment (from the enormous bibliography, Press 1982: 61–119 is useful for a terminological start). After Christianity imposed a theological conception onto history, many metaphysical and political philosophies elected history as their foundation and, as a consequence, many diverse philosophies of history were elaborated. But this perspective is completely foreign to Greco-Roman antiquity, just as the idea of history as a science is foreign. A view of history as a science is wrong in its assumptions because the historical event is not only in itself subject to doubt but above all not repeatable, according to the required principle of modern science, and it cannot be anachronistically projected onto classical antiquity in the search for a scientific method in historians such as Thucydides and Polybius: both in a way satisfy the standards of modern historiography for very different reasons. The only system which historiography was always part of was the literary system, and not only because historiography was labeled as literature. Herodotus and Thucydides, as we have been suggesting, were the first historians to confront epic and to introduce epic narrative techniques into their works (the most outstanding being the speeches given to various characters; below, Ch. 9).

If we investigate the history of historiography as the history of a literary genre we find at the outset the problem of deciding what should be included and what excluded. Traditionally, modern histories of historiography concentrate on the great authors and on the two main lines, one inaugurated by Herodotus, the other by Thucydides (Strasburger 1975; Momigliano 1990: 29–53). All the rest are either relegated to forerunners (as in the overvaluation of Hecataeus' alleged rationalism) or placed in the indistinct limbo of minor historiography (including, to hint at only a few kinds, local and regional historiography, antiquarianism, monography, and biography). This outlook is wrong in two aspects: what has survived is due to the tastes of the public in several crucial ages and to the fortuitous chances of destruction; the number of authors and works belonging to so-called minor historiography is an indication of their success with the public, in many cases limited in terms of time and place, but an indication nonetheless of a more complex and varied reality (Gabba 1981; Schepens forthcoming). And what is the border separating historiography from genealogy, from ktiseis, from antiquarian periēgēseis and even from the narrations to which we give the modern name of novels, such as the works under the names of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia from the Trojan saga, or those on the fortunes of Alexander the Great? One cannot deny that these narratives have some historiographic characteristics (Canfora 2003: 15; on the boundary between historiography and novel see Treu 1984; below, Ch. 56). The typical answer is that the difference lies in method, but this seems an ambiguous response leaving wide swaths of uncertainty. Another possible response could come from examining the expectations and reactions of the public, trying to understand what was considered au...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Contents Page
• Endorsements Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contributors Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Ancient Authors: Abbreviations
• Reference Works: Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Contexts
• Part II: Surveys
• Part III: Readings
• Part IV: Neighbors
• Part V: Transition
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index