Reconciling Ancient and Modern Philosophies of History

Aaron Turner

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110627466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The distinction between ancient and modern modes of historical thought is characterized by the growing complexity of the discipline of history in modernity. Consequently, the epistemological and methodological standard of ancient historiography is typically held as inferior against the modern ideal. This book serves to address this apparent deficit. Its scope is three-fold. Firstly, it aims at encountering ancient modes of historical and historiographical thought within the province of their own horizon. Secondly, this book considers the possibility of a dialogue between ancient and modern philosophies of history concerning the influence of ancient historical thought on the development of modern philosophy of history and the utility of modern philosophy of history in the interpretation of ancient historiography. Thirdly, this book explores the continuities and discontinuities in historical method and thought from antiquity to modernity. Ultimately, this volume demonstrates the necessity of re-evaluating our assumptions about the relation of ancient and modern historical thought and lays the groundwork for a more fruitful dialogue in the future.

Part I: Awakening Ancient Historical Consciousness

The Territory of the Historian in Antiquity

François Hartog

In which sites did history take up residence and what places did ancient historians claim for themselves? To repeat a once well-known expression: what has been the historian’s territory?¹ Did history manage in the beginning to carve a space for itself? Can we say, seven centuries last, during the Imperial era, that it “secured” its domain, as a craft or as a discipline? I will limit my remarks to a few highlights, lingering at the sites where the framing device had far-reaching implications for the status of history and the figure of the historian: beyond the ancient world, as it was the case with the intervention of Aristotle in the Poetics.² These sites had firstly proper names.

1 The Initiators

Our first foray places us during the gradual, inaugural upheaval occurring between Homer and Herodotus, on which I have dwelt on several occasions. On the one hand, we must contend with the disappearance of a forum for speech and narrative form orientated towards the elevated accomplishments of heroes: the epic. On the other hand, we can observe the emergence of a form of story-telling addressing above all ‘what men have done’. At the core of the mechanism of epic narration was the dynamic which it presupposed between the muse and bard as her interpreter. It is the undermining of this mechanism, the loss of faith in this inspired speech, which cleared the space in which the discourse of Herodotus establishes itself, allowing for the emergence of its characteristic form and lexicon.

Everything is present from the very first phrase, thereafter the subject of tireless scrutiny and commentary: a name, which is also a declaration of method – historiê; a proper name (his own); an objective, which is to counteract the forgetfulness which menaces all with erasure by recounting the great deeds of Greeks and barbarians; a subject: the war they had waged and, ‘withal’, why they entered into war (in terms of reasons and causes to be identified and responsibility to be apportioned). By thus taking the floor in his own proper name, Herodotus addresses several questions of contemporary concern: ‘What must be accomplished before authorizing oneself to say ‘I’? ‘Where must the one who leads this enquiry (historei) stake out his position’? No longer having access to the omniscience of the muse, he can only have recourse to historiê and undertake a procedure of enquiry, the first stage of the historiographical operation. Yet serving initially as a substitute, historiê ultimately enters into a relationship of affinity with the muse, who for her part knew everything because she was present in everything. Acting as his own source of authority, the narrator-historian aspires to ‘drive forward his narrative by calling to memory in equal measure (homoiôs) the great and the small among the cities of men’.

If historiê both calls to mind the knowledge of the bard and breaks with it, there is another gesture of commencement which brings the figure of the diviner to the fore and invokes the field of divination. Herodotus historei, yet he sêmainei also: he names, reveals, signifies. Right from the prologue, at the very same moment when for the first time he takes the floor by saying ‘I’, he sêmainei. He reveals, names, for example, the one who first engaged in offensive acts against the Greeks, which is to say Croesus the king of Lydia. Through this seeking and assigning of responsibility, Herodotus does not present himself as or seek to play the role of seer, although he does appeal anew, on the basis of the self-assurance of his own knowledge, to a style of authority of the oracular type. Thus invested, historein and sêmainein mark the crossroads at which ancient and contemporary knowledge meet and intersect. They constitute two operators for ‘seeing clearly’ and further into the distance, beyond the visible in space and time; two gestures which give the practice of the first historian its particular character and intimate its possible territory: neither bard nor seer, yet between bard and seer.³

Writing some decades later, what is Thucydides’ own understanding of what he does? Carefully avoiding historiê, historein, yet also semainein, he determines the nature of his intervention by employing a verb of action of an almost technical character: sungraphei.⁴ ‘Thucydides of Athènes has consigned to writing the war … how they waged war’ (sungraphei ton polemos, hôs epolemesan). Sungraphein and sungrapheus will subsequently become standard terms for designating the writing of history and the historian. From this moment onwards, two paths open for history: one for the historian understood as investigator, the other for the historian understood as author. Historia (in Greek and in Latin) was accordingly subject to generalization across the following centuries, even though the former understanding waned in prominence while the latter waxed.

Unlike historein, which indicates a method and posture (and which can be traced back to the Archaic and Homeric histôr), sungraphein, which only relates to the later stages of the historiographical operation, the mise en forme, says nothing about method. It is in these terms that Thucydides frames it in subsequent chapters, not directly through any exposé, rather through an extraordinary demonstration of his method in action. In effect, while searching for certainty in the past of Greece, he traces the limits of historical knowledge: to be precise, the touchstone for the acquisition of such knowledge is autopsy; yet this is an autopsy which, to be valid, requires a rigorous critique of witnesses. This demand has the consequence of limiting the truth of history to the confines of the present. For past times we must undertake to ‘find’ the facts. How? By collecting the semeia (signs) and the tekmeria (evidence); all so many clues which require sifting through with a view to attaining a knowledge which does not exceed the order of pistis. The end result is a form of knowledge with affinities to that of the judge, who by the end of the trial has forged for himself a steadfast conviction.

Leaving the figures of narrator and diviner far behind, the historian of Thucydides locates his system, with all its demands, between the gaze of the doctor (autopsy) and the practice of the judge (pistis). He aspires thus to definitively break with all those who he designates and denigrates as logographoi, ‘storytellers’, starting with Herodotus (who is not named). The latter, by aiming to seduce those who listen to them, live in the pleasure of the instant and bask in their own ostentation, whereas Thucydides aims for that which alone has real value. While indeed he signs this ‘sungraphie’ with his own proper name, he is economical with the ‘I’ of the first person.

Nevertheless, Thucydides recognizes along with Herodotus the requirement of embracing both sides of the conflict: the Greeks and the Barbarians; the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians. This imperative is inherited directly from Homer and the epic. From high on Mt Olympus Zeus sees simultaneously the Achaeans and the Trojans. How are we to maintain this demand when we can no longer assume the position of an all-seeing divinity? To recount all that which is great among the accomplishments of the Greeks and Barbarians, Herodotus makes use of inquiry, which is to say concretely of his voyages: of the exile which he experienced; of his life, not apolis certainly but divided between two cites (Halicarnassus and Thourioi, in Greater Greece). Thucydides declares expressly that it is his exile of twenty years which has enabled him to ‘see things from both sides’ (Thuc. 5.26).

These are the positions which have been staked out by the end of the fifth century. Xenophon, who follows immediately after, does not further our understanding of the activity of the historian. On the contrary, his intervention is rather indicative of a loss of bearings for such activity and a clouding over of its horizon. I remarked that the Hellenica, the history which follows on from Thucydides, opens and closes with a formula of extreme laconism: ‘after that ... (meta de tauta). Its first appearance serves to create a link to the closing phrases of the Peloponnesian War, whereas the second invites a future successor. Between the two, a man who left Athens after 403, commits all the confusion of his era to writing. There is nothing in the way of a preface, conclusion, or exposé of method; no proper name to delineate a project, to delimit an ambition or clarify expectations. Must we infer that that the reader of the book knew, from the very first words, what was to be made of it? That Xenophon could take for granted that the genre was sufficiently recognizable? Or that it sufficed merely to follow in the footsteps of Thucydides, who himself had followed Herodotus? For his part, Xenophon in the Anabasis is insistent in his use the third person to speak of his own actions, and goes as far indeed as to attribute the work to a certain Themistogenes of Syracuse. Why this recourse to a pseudonym? To praise himself thereby all the more effectively, if we are to believe Plutarch! Through this remark, Plutarch testifies to the emergence of an issue which will subsequently take on much importance: that, namely, of the relation between eulogy and history. Polybius will later wrestle with it, although when Xenophon is writing, the discourse of eulogy, the creation of which Isocra...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Reconciling Ancient and Modern Philosophies of History
• Part I: Awakening Ancient Historical Consciousness
• Part II: Transcending Representation and Reality
• Part III: Antiquating Modernity
• List of Contributors
• Index