A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides

Christine Lee, Neville Morley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118980224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides offers an invaluable guide to the reception of Thucydides, with a strong emphasis on comparing and contrasting different traditions of reading and interpretation.

• Presents an in-depth, comprehensive overview of the reception of the Greek historian Thucydides

• Features personal reflections by eminent scholars on the significance and perennial importance of Thucydides' work

• Features an internationally renowned cast of contributors, including established academics as well as new voices in the field

Part I
Scholarship, Criticism, and Education

1
Thucydides' Ancient Reputation

Valérie Fromentin and Sophie Gotteland

All attempts at describing the reception of Thucydides in the ancient world and assessing his influence come up against two major difficulties.

The first lies in the documentation that is available to us. The destruction of the greater part of ancient literature, and the too often fragmentary state of those works that do survive, lead us to run the risk, which is often met with in this kind of investigation, of overinterpreting the sparse data which we have, and hence overvaluing what has survived of the Thucydidean heritage. This risk is all the greater as witnesses from antiquity are not overly communicative: most of the time authors of antiquity do not cite their sources or refer back to their models; they do not necessarily see themselves as part of an intellectual tradition, and so explicit references to Thucydides are less common than one might have expected. Studying the historian's reception often comes down to flushing out a “hidden presence.” The second major difficulty lies in the unique position which Thucydides has occupied for more than two centuries in the landscape of classical studies as a “monument” of Western thought and as constituting part of the famous “Greek miracle.” The reconstructed picture which we have of ancient literature and of its development and its genres, constitutes an inhibiting framework from which it is difficult to escape, especially in the case of Thucydides to whom the dominant tradition has attributed the merit of having “invented” rational, scientific, and objective history, or – to borrow the phrasing of title of a famous work by Arnaldo Momigliano – of having laid “the classical foundations of modern historiography.”

It is nonetheless the case that the presence of Thucydides, which at some times is diffuse, at others explicit, is apparent throughout antiquity. While we cannot pretend to give here an exhaustive inventory of borrowings from his work, nor a complete assessment of the influence which he exercised on Greco-Roman historiography and on other literary genres, the following presentation is deliberately organized around a number of key moments and focused on certain writers, who represent, for us, the main forms taken by Thucydides' survival in the ancient world.

For the purposes of this presentation, it is convenient from the outset to distinguish two points in Thucydides' reception which are not necessarily either successive or independent of one another. The moment which appears to come first chronologically is when posterity's interest in Thucydides focused chiefly on the historical content of The Peloponnesian War and on what we can already refer to as its “documentary value.” This interest is manifested by two kinds of historians.

There are first of all those who present themselves – or who were considered from the outset – as his followers. Xenophon has a unique position in this tradition, which he inaugurated. Thucydides having died (around 395 BCE?) before he was able to bring his narrative of the Peloponnesian War to its conclusion, Xenophon, whose Hellenica begins exactly where Thucydides stops (411 BCE), was seen in antiquity as having completed the work of Thucydides (perhaps using notes which he had left), before writing a sequel (up until 362 BCE). It seems moreover that the first two books of the Hellenica (covering the years 411–403) circulated under the names of both historians, and, in the era of Cicero at least, we have proof of the existence of supposedly “complete” editions of the work of Thucydides (i.e., including the beginning of the Hellenica), with a division into books different from that which has come down to us (Canfora 2006: 731–5). However, even if one may reasonably suppose that Xenophon (whose opinion on the matter is nowhere recorded) had in effect intended to finish and continue the work of Thucydides, he has never been considered by either ancients or moderns as an imitator of the historian, in that his historiographical choices, his methods and his style are clearly different. The same goes for all the historians of the fourth century BC whose works – regrettably preserved only in a fragmentary state – pass for or present themselves as sequels to The Peloponnesian War: Theopompus of Chios, for example, whose Hellenics “completed” Thucydides' history (Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheca Historica 14.84.7; Marcellinus, Vita Thucydidis 45), telling “the end of the Peloponnesian War” from the battle of Cynossema in 411 BCE up to the fall of Cnidus in 394 BCE (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Epistula Ad Pompeium Geminum c. 6.2), had a marked taste for fabulous anecdotes and digressions (Theon, Progymnasmata 4; Photios, Bibliotheca 176), making him less like Thucydides than like Herodotus, whose work he had taken over (perhaps at the beginning of his Philippica) and which he aspired to excel (Nicolai 2006: 706–7). These authors from the beginning of the Hellenistic era belong above all in the tradition of historia continua: each continues the work of another, avoiding overlapping, but continuation does not imply imitation. These successors are often very critical of their predecessors, like the mysterious Cratippos, a young contemporary of Thucydides whose work covered the period 411–393 BCE at least (Schepens 2001): he prepared a list of Thucydides' “omissions” in Book 8 to demonstrate not only the unfinished aspect of the history but also its inconsistency – the end of the work, in his view, did not issue from “the same literary choices, and not in the same vein of composition” as the beginning (Dion. Hal., Thucydides 16.2–4). At this date the “Thucydidean model” is clearly not yet formed: consideration of historiography, which is restricted in the sources we have to a few passages from Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle, is limited to defining history in terms of its content and not its methods, and to examining only superficially its relation to rhetoric – “historiography” appears as timid and embryonic (Nicolai 2006: 698).

The second class of historian is in theory made up of those who used The Peloponnesian War as a source. “In theory” because this category, artificially inflated in the nineteenth century by the works of Quellenforschung (source investigation) which erected hypothesis upon hypothesis to try to explain the origins of historiographical texts, tends nowadays to void itself of content and to become virtual. If it is in fact likely that several post-Thucydidean historians – especially authors of the vast syntheses called “universal histories” (koinai historiai) – exploited material in The Peloponnesian War, there are only a few among them who, like Diodorus of Sicily, actually mention Thucydides among the sources they have consulted. There are at least two reasons for this silence. The first, already mentioned, is that ancient writers were not accustomed to citing their sources. The second is historical and geopolitical: the conquests of Alexander the Great and then the rise of the Roman Empire shifted the classical world's center of gravity first eastwards and then westwards, and at the same time fixed the interest of historians on new subjects. In this new context, where history played itself out and was written on a global scale, the work of Thucydides, which relates to micro-history and tells of an inglorious episode in Athens' history, must have appeared to be merely a marginal witness to an era which had completely disappeared.

The second moment in the reception of Thucydides in antiquity is when his presence becomes an influence, when his history moved from being a work of reference to being a model worthy of imitation. Such a transformation was only possible because the work had ceased to be considered only in terms of its subject matter (which was open to being reused), and had become the object of critical analysis of the choices (methodological, ideological, and aesthetic) which governed its composition. This shift, which seems to have been initiated by “history practitioners” such as Polybius, was rapidly passed on and developed by those whom for convenience we shall call the “rhetors,” a generic term taking in professors of eloquence as well as theoreticians of literature and specialists in language and style: it resulted in the construction of a double “Thucydidean model,” historiographical and literary.

The role played by Thucydides in the development of ancient historiography was the subject of much debate during the twentieth century, largely dominated by the opinions of Eduard Schwartz, Felix Jacoby, and Arnaldo Momigliano (Schepens 2010). According to them, Thucydides succeeded in convincing the Greeks of the superiority of “Zeitsgeschichte” – that is to say, contemporary history focused on political and military events – over all other historiographical genres (universal history, regional history, genealogy, chronography, archaiologia, biography). More recently, this view has been countered by those who, like Guido Schepens, believe that the dominant position attributed to Thucydides in the development of antique historiography is based on an illusion deriving from the state of the documentation that we have. The fact that the only Greek histories which survived the destruction of ancient literature in any coherent (if not complete) form belong to “grand” political and military history (Polybius, Cassius Dionysius, Appian) has given rise to a belief in the notion of a “Thucydidean mainstream.” However, recent research on “fragmentary history” (i.e., on historiographical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Blackwell Handbooks to Classical Reception
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Thucydides: Introduction
• Part I: Scholarship, Criticism, and Education
• Part II: Thucydides the Historian
• Part III: Thucydides the Political Theorist
• Part IV: Thucydides the Strategist
• Part V: Thucydidean Themes
• Part VI: Thucydidean Reflections
• Part VII: Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement