Literary Texts and the Greek Historian

Christopher Pelling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134906390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discussing how we should and should not try to exploit the texts. In some instances we can investigate 'what really happened', and the ways in which the texts manipulate, remould, or colour it according to their own rhetorical strategies; in others the most illuminating aspect may be those strategies themselves, and what they tell us about the culture - how it figured questions of sex and gender, politics, citizenship and the city, the law and the courts and how wars happen. Literary Texts and the Greek Historian concentrates on Athens in the second half of the fifth-century, when many of the principal genres came together, but includes some examples from earlier (Aeschylus ^Oresteia>) and later (including Aristotles poetics). Literary Texts and the Greek Historian examines the range of responses to these texts and suggests new ways in which literary criticism can illuminate the society from which these texts sprang.

Chapter 1

A culture of rhetoric

Audiences and genres

A statement in a literary text tells us what could be said, and what it made sense to say, to a particular audience and in a particular context, setting, and genre. It may or may not be true, or have some relation to the truth; we do what we can to discover how true it is. But true, false, or something in between, it is always a piece of rhetoric.

For ‘rhetoric’ is not limited to ‘oratory’, the literary genre of speech-making. Rhetoric is the craft of persuasion. Often an author tries to persuade the audience of a fact or facts—‘persuasion that’ something is or was the case. One instance is narrative, where an author selects and presents material in such a way as to persuade the audience that these were the facts, that they happened like this and in this sequence, and that this is the right way of looking at them: that Corcyra and Potidaea, in that order and with those details, were the important antecedents of the Peloponnesian War; that they are best viewed in a context of bad feeling between mother-city and colony, international suspicion between the major powers, fear of being outmanoeuvred unless pre-emptive steps are taken, and so on. But such ‘persuasion that’ is already blurring into ‘persuasion to’ feel something: to adopt a particular attitude to a state of affairs. Oratory, and often historiography too, regularly inspires a range of such responses: they may include something as simple as approval or disapproval of an individual or a city, or perhaps a more complex mode of empathy, admiration, shock, despair, or perplexity. And such persuasion can also generate persuasion not just to feel, but also to act. If I am persuaded that Athens is admirable, I may also be persuaded to go out and fight and die for that inspirational ideal.

Drama, it is clear, is also ‘rhetorical’ in this sense, not merely in the rhetoric with which figures within the plays address and influence one another, but also in the wider impact which a play has on its audience, stimulating feelings and reflection in particular directions. Any attempt to disentangle the intellectual and the emotional elements in such a response is likely to fail: persuasion that something is true—possibly that Pericles brought on the war, possibly that the Athenians had little choice; possibly that Jason swore oaths to Medea, possibly that Medea is terrifyingly non-human—inspires persuasion to feel about the issue in a certain way; just as important, different emotional responses generate alertness to different facts—if I loathe a particular politician or dramatic character, I will be quick to notice and remember his or her mistakes.

So rhetoric spans the genres; speeches, histories, tragedies, comedies—all seek to affect their audience in particular ways, and to affect them through performance: these texts are scripts. This is very much an oral culture. However literate a popular audience may have been, written material still excited suspicion, and the spoken word was the natural, open way of conducting much of one’s life.¹ Even historians will probably have had oral performance in mind as at least their primary mode of communication: they would very likely give readings themselves to a contemporary audience, and they might expect even posterity to hear their texts more often than read them silently.² It takes at least two to make a performance, a speaker and an audience, and performance is duly a two-way thing. That is true in several senses. First, audiences have ways of providing feedback. Speeches might be heckled or catcalled, and it is not clear that drama was treated with any more respect;³ and anyway any actor or playwright knows when even a restrained audience’s attention has been lost. Secondly, audiences as well as speakers bring something to the activity. Persuasion does not work in a vacuum: it works on an audience with certain knowledge, assumptions, and values, and interacts with these to produce a particular response. Much of our task as historians is to proceed from the literary text and infer what we can about the other ingredients in that performance, the presumptions which the author must have been making about the audience and the ways in which he must have hoped his persuasion would work.

Here, though, the differences among genres are as important as the similarities. Authors and audiences were peculiarly sensitive to genre. We shall even find substantial differences in audience expectation between tragedy and comedy, even though the plays were performed in the same festival to the same audience. We shall see, for instance, how in comedy references to political life were more specific and topical, whereas tragedy was ‘political’ in a more timeless, reflective sense (Chapters 7 – 10). Such generic expectations evidently affect the way a text illuminates its society and its time. We might well wish to tie a comedy like Knights closely to its immediate political setting, stressing for instance the bellicose optimism after Athens’ success at Pylos;⁴ if we find themes of contemporary relevance in Euripides’ Andromache (faithless Spartans) or Trojan Women (the sufferings of war) or Suppliant Women or Orestes (the strengths and frailties of democracy), we shall be more inclined to see these as a response to the underlying facts of wartime life, and not search for any immediate stimulus in specific recent events.

Generic expectation can go very deep. Let us take two examples — vast examples, which can only be introduced here in a simplified way—where we see a gulf between the expectations of oratory and those of drama, especially tragedy. First, the gods. Parker (1997) has stressed the fundamental difference between the gods of tragedy and those of oratory, gods ‘cruel’ and ‘kind’. In Attic oratory, speakers are obliged to count on the support of the gods through thick and thin: these gods will not allow their favourite state to be destroyed. We seem to be moving in a different world from tragedy, with those dark, unfathomable divine creatures whose goodwill is so precarious.

Secondly, the city itself and its democratic ideology. Much of the best recent work on Athenian ideology has begun from oratory, especially the books of Ober (1989) and Loraux (1986a); Loraux in particular brilliantly explores the Athenian Epitaphioi, the Funeral Speeches delivered in celebration of the war-dead. Such speeches say relatively little about the dead themselves; they praise Athens and its democracy, and everything is covered in a patriotic gleam which makes the suffering and death seem worthwhile. Tragedy is different. There too suffering is sometimes worthwhile; ‘learning through suffering’ is one watchword of the Oresteia (Agam. 177), which itself ends with an optimistic vision of Athens (Chapter 9). But the application of this watchword to the trilogy itself is anything but straightforward, and tragedy after tragedy leaves us dissatisfied with simple answers about war and death. Democracy too is sometimes idealised in tragedy, but often not; we shall find several plays where speakers say harsh words, and seem justified, about demagogues and the ease with which they take in an assembly (Chapter 9).

Comedy presents a different picture again; demagogues can be savaged, but there is a certain affection for old Demos itself, the People, put upon and exploited rather than incurably feckless. There is no real idealisation of democratic free speech, and there is much emphasis on Athenian mistakes—but still a more oratory-like confidence that, whatever Athens may do wrong, it will all come out right in the end: ‘For they say that blundering is the mark of this city, but the gods take your mistakes and make them turn out all right’ (Clouds 587–9).

Faced with such conflicting views, we should not be so crude as to ask ‘which did they really think?’, or ‘which is real life, and which is artistic licence?’ Collective views are not so simple: ‘they’ thought all these things, in different contexts and at different times, despite any apparent incompatibility. That is partly because different individuals must have thought in different ways, but even the same individuals regularly think and feel in ways which resist simple formulation. After all, these are complicated issues. If we ask ourselves ‘what we really think about democracy’, we would find it hard to say whether we think it is all a sham and that politicians are all sleazebags, or that it is still the only system we would feel comfortable with and that its deficiencies are only skin-deep. Probably we think both, and it depends on who we are talking to, or on the stage the evening has reached.

If we think of other examples—how we construct gender, for instance—we again say and think different things at different times. We have all heard apparently civilised men, and maybe even some apparently civilised women, crack jokes at the expense of the other sex, or laugh uproariously at comedies which do the same; and we have learned to be suspicious of the familiar claim that somehow those remarks don’t count, that it’s just good fun and why can’t these people take a joke. It is not that such humour falsifies what we ‘really’ think about gender; it is one aspect, but the same people would respond differently if they were talking in or listening to a late-night intellectual thought programme. If the Athenian male audience constructed females differently in the tragic theatre (disconcertingly rational despite their marginalised status, mistresses of words, threatening), the comic theatre (drunken, randy, rational but only intermittently), and the law-courts (sweet, homeloving put-upon things or appalling harridans), such variation may not be very different (Chapter 10). All this is what ‘they’ would think, even if they would not think it all at once.

So differences among texts and genres are not an irritation, something one has to penetrate to get at the real-life views and assumptions underneath. These are the real-life views and assumptions; this is what there is; this is how audiences would think, or could be brought to think, in particular settings. The more they were brought to think in those ways, the more those original generic expectations would be reinforced. And every one of those settings—law-court, assembly, tragic theatre, comic theatre, historiographic reading—is part of real life.

Rhetorical narrative

This broad sense of ‘rhetorical’ is valuable, reminding us of the features which all forms of verbal persuasion share. But it is understandable that ‘rhetoric’ should often be used in a narrower sense, limited to the literary genre of oratory: for oratory is rhetoric in its clearest form, in a sense its defining form. That is particularly true of this culture, for the more formal styles of speech were central to the Athenians’ view of their own civic identity. Xenophon’s Ischomachus (admittedly a caricature; see pp. 236–45) prepares for legal battles by rehearsing and role-playing the different oratorical genres, forensic, epideictic, and symbouleutic, with the help of his wife, slaves, and friends (Oec. 11.23–5); Aristophanes’ Strepsiades, when shown a world-map, cannot believe that what he sees is Athens because he cannot see any law-courts (Clouds 207–9, cf. Peace 505 as well as Wasps); Thucydides’ Cleon derides his audience for being ‘spectators of the sophists’, carried away by the flashiness of the display and ignoring the substance of the issues, all the while providing a flamboyant example of precisely the rhetorical virtuosity which he is warning against (Thuc. 3.37). Thucydides’ Athenian readers would find that a thought-provoking but familiar image of themselves, both as connoisseurs of oratory and as uneasily aware of its delusive power. To speak to Athenians was to communicate with an experienced and knowing audience, one which knew the rules of the listening game: or at least one which liked to think of itself as such, and it is the essence of rhetoric to accommodate one’s argument to an audience’s psychology and perception of themselves. This is indeed a culture of rhetoric.

This rhetorical culture has plusses and minuses for the historian. The plus comes when we wish to use literary texts as a way into collective perceptions and attitudes, in the ways we have already grazed. It is then a positive advantage that Athenian authors, especially the orators, are so skilled at gearing their work to what the audience will want to hear. We can presume that their arguments and strategies were unlikely, or less likely than any alternatives, to alienate audience sympathies; or at least we can presume that they presumed this, and they knew their audience better than we do. This is a theme to which we shall return in the final section of this chapter, and throughout the book.

The minus comes when we try to disentangle the history of events, what really happened. In such cases we are often dependent on narrative sources, typically in historiography but sometimes in oratory and even in drama (though the narrative there is filtered in particularly complex ways, as we shall see with Aristophanes’ Acharnians in Chapter 8). The art of narrative is a basic skill for a speaker: that is recognised in contemporary legal theory, where the subtlety with which lawyers frame their story-telling has become a hot scholarly topic.⁵ It is noticeable, for instance, how juries are readier to believe stories which fit patterns familiar from fiction, normally these days from LA Law-type television.⁶ That is worth remembering when we consider intertextual issues in narrative. If Thucydides presents his Sicilian narrative in ways which are reminiscent of Herodotus—a climactic sea-battle, where confined space enables a David to see off a Goliath; a military engagement which settles a war, even though there is a book or more to come — that may suggest a cyclic quality of history, an idea very important to Thucydides;⁷ but it also makes Thucydides’ narrative more persuasive to a receptive, knowledgeable audience. All this happened before, classically and paradigmatically: that makes it the more convincing, as well as thought-provoking, that it should be happening again now.

In real speech-narratives, ancient and modern, we also see how adeptly orators bend events to leave a particular impression of the characters involved, how they gloss over embarrassing details, how they distract attention from the weaker parts of their case and emphasise those where they come out best. When Athenian tragedy explores rhetoric itself—and it does, just as tragedy explores most features which are basic to Athenian identity—it is striking how often speakers, especially disingenuous ones, are given narratives.⁸ If you are going to be convincing, you need a story to tell. In Sophocles’ Electra Orestes’ tutor wins credibility with his elaborate narrative of Orestes’ death in a chariot race; the narrative also affects the listening Clytemnestra in the way he wants, as she hears of the death of the son she has never known, a death of which she could be proud. In Euripides’ Trojan Women Helen and Hecuba, with great rhetorical verve, give incompatible accounts of how Helen behaved, whether it was her fault, whether she tried to escape or not; just as nearly a century later Demosthenes and Aeschines give very different versions of what happened on an embassy which they shared. In each case we are left not knowing which of two internally consistent but incompatible pictures to believe.

In tragedy we can leave that as part of the play’s point, one way in which its exploration of rhetoric works. (And in the Trojan Women part of that point is that it does not matter even to the audience within the play, Menelaus and the Trojan women: right or wrong, and whatever Menelaus decides, Helen will live on.) With real life it matters differently: if we take history seriously, it is our job to get as close as possible to the ‘facts’ which the orator has been at such pains to mould. Of course we should not work with a picture of innocent, clear-as-day facts which exist independently of any such moulding. No fact is wholly interpretation-free. To claim that ‘the Athenians killed Socrates’ is to select that fact, from all the other things that happened on that day in 399 BC, and claim that this is one which mattered; and one could discuss whether ‘killed’ puts things too starkly, and so on. Put two facts together—‘Socrates was teacher of Critias and Alcibiades, and the Athenians put him to death’, or ‘Socrates asked awkward questions, and the Athenians put him to death’—and we have an embryonic narrative, one which carries an implicit interpretation. Still, that does not mean that every fact or every sequence is as interpretation-laden as every other; ‘did the Athenians put Socrates to death?’ can be given a much more yes-or-no, less hedged-around answer than ‘was Athenian society based on slave-labour?’ or ‘was Pericles’ power autocratic?’; ‘Socrates drank hemlock and died’ is much less tendentious in its causal implications than ‘the Athenians recalled Alcibiades and lost catastrophically in Sicily’. For it is a dereliction of historical duty to assume that every version is as true and every interpretation is as good as any other. In this book we shall look at several oratorical narratives, especially that of Andocides’ On the Mysteries in the next chapter, and see how far we can get at the ‘facts’, which methods work and which do not. An alertness to the speaker’s rhetorical subtleties is here indispensable, as it helps to guide our suspicions of the version he gives. These are cases where we do try to penetrate the rhetoric, and to get at a reality which it may conceal or distort.

What about Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, with their similar skill at narrative manipulation? Historians cast their narratives ‘rhetorically’, in both the broader and the narrower sense of the term. In the broader sense, they wished to persuade their audiences of the interest of their material and the validity of their emphases. They also learnt from oratory, or at least found oratory reinforcing lessons they had anyway learnt from the epic; and these lessons included the capacity to impose order on the recalcitrant messiness of facts, and to tell their story in such a way as to suggest particular interpretations or questi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 A culture of rhetoric
• 2 Rhetoric and history (415 BC)
• 3 How far would they go? Plutarch on Nicias and Alcibiades
• 4 Rhetoric and history II: Platnea (431–27 BC)
• 5 Explaining the war
• 6 Thucydides’ speeches
• 7 ‘You cannot be serious’: approaching Aristophanes
• 8 Aristophanes’ Acharnians (425 BC)
• 9 Tragedy and ideology
• 10 Lysistrata and others: constructing gender
• 11 Conclusions: texts, audiences, truth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• General index
• Index of authors and texts