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I. The Greeks and their Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

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Centuries before the first historian put pen to papyrus, Greek poets sang the great deeds of their ancestors. These songs have vanished and what we have is the result of a centuries-long tradition of oral poetry, two massive epics under the name of ‘Homer’, one the story of the events in the last year of the long conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, the other a tale of wanderings and adventure, with the eventual successful homecoming of one of those heroes. The narrator of the Iliad already has a sense of history, a sense that the deeds he narrates occurred long ago, and that those who accomplished them were vastly superior to ‘the men of today’, or ‘such mortals as now live on earth’. Within the epic itself we find a receding mirror effect, since its hero Achilleus sings to himself the renowned deeds of men (κλέα άνδρών), those of an even earlier generation that the Trojan War heroes saw as great. Celebration and remembrance of great action pervade the Iliad, establishing a standard against which the heroes can measure themselves and validating the sacrifice of their lives in exchange for imperishable fame (κλέος ἄϕθιтον).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 31: Greek Historians , 2001 , pp. 9 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2001

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References

1 Cf. e.g. Il. 5.302-4, where Diomedes hurls a stone ‘that two men of today could not lift’.

2 Il. 9.189. Similarly, the heroes urge one another to action by the use of exempla from the past: Rutherford (1994), 67 notes the story of Meleager that Phoenix recounts to Achilleus (9.526-98) or even that of Niobe recounted by Achilleus to Priam (24.602-17); one may add to this Achilleus’ recognition that Priam’s empire was once vast, 24.543-6.

3 On Homer and historiography see, above all, Strasburger, H. Homer und die Geschichtsschreibung in: id., Studien zur Alten Geschichte , ii (Hildesheim and New York, 1982), 1057-97 (orig. SHAW 1 (Heidelberg, 1972))Google Scholar; Fornara (1983), 62–3, 76–7; Woodman (1988), ch. I; Hornblower, S., ‘Introduction’, in Hornblower (1994), 7–10 Google Scholar; for the importance of the Odyssey see Murray, O., ‘Omero et l’etnografia’, Kokalos 34-5 (1988-9), 1–13 Google Scholar; Marincola (1997a).

4 Cf. Herodotus’ designation as Όμηρικώтαтος ([Long.] Subl. 13.3) or Thucydides’ as an emulator of Homer (Marc. Vit. Thuc. 35–7). On emulation in historians, Marincola (1997), 13–19.

5 Hdt. 7. 220; Thuc. 7.69; for Polybius, Marincola (1997a), at nn. 36ff.

6 Meister (1990), 14–15; cf. also the important article of Canfora, L., ‘Il ciclo storico’, in Canfora (1999), 61–91 Google Scholar (orig. Belfagor 26 (1971), 653–70).

7 For example, the Ehoiai of Hesiod: see West, M. L., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1981), 1–8 Google Scholar, for its intersection with history.

8 It was only later, with the introduction of the criticism of the pre-Socratics and the early historians, that the mythical era was seen as different in kind from the historical or ‘human’ generations: see von Leyden, W., ‘Spatium Historicum’, Durham University Journal 11 (1949-50), 89–104 Google Scholar; Hunter (1982), 50–115.

9 B. Schmid, Studien zur griechischen Ktisissagen (diss. Freiburg i.d. Schweiz, 1954); Lasserre (1976), esp. 121–42; Dougherty, C., ‘Archaic Greek Foundation Poetry: Questions of Genre and Occasion’, JHS 114 (1994), 35–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For the fragments of historical epic see Bernabé, A., Poetae Epici Graeci I (Teubner, 1988)Google Scholar and Davies, M., Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen, 1988)Google Scholar; the former edition has the larger collection of testimonia, as well as extensive general and individual bibliographies. For Eumelus, see 106–14 Bernabé, 95–101 Davies; for Semonides, see T3 West; for Mimnermus, see T1 West; on the latter see also Mazzarino (1966), i. 37–42.

11 See Bowie, E. L., ‘Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival’, JHS 106 (1986) 13–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For the former, Matthews, V. J., Panyassis of Halicarnassus (Leiden, 1974)Google Scholar; also 171–87 Bernabé, 113–28 Davies; for the latter, DK 21 A 1.

13 Bowra, C. M., Pindar (Oxford, 1964), 278–316 Google Scholar; Köhnken, A., Die Funktion des Mythos bei Pindar (Berlin, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cf. Rutherford (1994), 67: ‘Comparison with “historical” figures in the earlier stages of a family or a city, or with similar cases of great virtue or vice, offers the audience a chance to reflect on either the continuity of history or the inevitability of moral decline. Change, and the limitations of human fortune, are also common themes: we are not far from the reflections of Herodotus, looking at the vicissitudes of cities in a long perspective (1.5).’

15 Nagy, G., Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore and London, 1990), 314-38Google Scholar.

16 Lefkowitz, M., First Person Fictions: Pindar’s Poetic ‘I’ (Oxford, 1992), esp. 1–71 Google Scholar.

17 For connections between Herodotus and Pindar see Nagy (above, n. 15), 215–338; id., ‘Herodotus the Logios’ Arethusa 20 (1987), 175–84.

18 See FF 1–18 West.

19 They have also, predictably, produced a torrent of scholarly discussion and, barely a decade on, it is already well-nigh impossible to keep up with the bibliography. See now Boedeker, D. and Sider, D., The New Simonides (New York and Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, which has a text, translation, two dozen articles, and a full bibliography; earlier versions of many of the articles appeared in a special edition of Arethusa for Spring 1996.

20 D. Boedeker, ‘Heroic Historiography: Simonides and Herodotus on Plataea’, in Boedeker and Sider (above, n. 19); ead. ‘The New Simonides and Heroization at Plataea’, in Fisher, N. and van Wees, H., edd., Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London, 1998), 231-49Google Scholar. Herodotus differs from Simonides, not in linking the Trojan with the Persian wars, but in the manner of his doing it, and in the way he perceives causation.

21 von Fritz, K., ‘Der gemeinsame Ursprung der Geschichtsschreibung und der exakten Wissenschaft bei den Griechen’, in id., Schriften zur griechischen Logik (Stuttgart, 1978), i.23–49 Google Scholar (orig. Philosophia Naturalis 1 (1952), 200–23.

22 Von Fritz (1967), i. 25ff.; Pédech (1976), 17–39; Jacob, C., Géographie et éthnographie en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar.

23 On criticism of Homer, see the recent treatment of Most, G. W., ‘The Poetics of Early Greek Philosophy’, in Long, A. A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), 332-62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 A radical break with the past is characteristic neither of Greek civilization nor of Greek thought.

25 For the agonistic milieu, cf. Lloyd, G.E.R., The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1987), 83–108 Google Scholar; id., Adversaries and Authorities (Cambridge, 1996); on polemic in historians, Marincola (1997), 218–36.

26 See Lloyd, G. E. R., Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; see also below, p. 35.

27 On Hecataeus, Jacoby, F., ‘Hekataios (3) von Milet’, RE VII.2 (1912), 2667-750Google Scholar is fundamental; see also Pearson (1939), ch. 2; Tozzi, P., ‘Studi su Ecataeo di Mileto I-V’, Athenaeum 41 (1963), 39–50, 318–26Google Scholar; 42 (1964), 101–17; 44 (1966), 41–76; 45 (1967), 313–34; Pédech (1976), 39–48; Brown (1973) 7–12; Drews (1973), 11–19; West, S., ‘Herodotus’ Portrait of Hecataeus’, JHS 111 (1991), 144-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See Bickerman, E. J., ‘Origines Gentium’ in id., Religions and Politics in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, edd. Gabba, E. and Smith, M. (Como, 1985), 401–417 Google Scholar (orig. CP47 (1952) 65–81); Robert, L., Documents de l’Asie Mineure (Paris, 1987), 173-86Google Scholar; Hornblower, S., ‘Thucydides and συγγϵνϵία ’, in CT ii. 61–80 Google Scholar; Hall, J., Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997), esp. 40–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 On Hecataeus’ rationalizations, Fowler (1996), 71–2 is brief but incisive; he well notes that the rationalization of Hecataeus is hardly complete (‘It is one thing to develop a revolutionary new method; it is another to realize all its possibilities and to think instinctively of applying it at every opportunity’, ibid.), and he well compares Lloyd’s study (above, n. 26) of early scientific method, which similarly observed the sporadic application of old and new methods; cf. Fornara (1983) 5–6, but the approach there allows for little nuance.

30 Praise of his style, FGrHist 1 TT 18–20.

31 See below, p. 33.

32 Acusilaus of Argos (FGrHist 2) wrote Genealogies; on his work see Jacoby’s commentary adloc; Mazzarino (1966), i. 58–70; von Fritz (1967), i. 80ff. Pherecydes of Athens (FGrHist 3) wrote Histories; on his work see Jacoby, F., ‘The First Athenian Prose Writer’, in Jacoby (1956), 100-43Google Scholar (orig. Mnemosyne 13 (1947), 13–64); Uhl, A., Pherekydes von Athen (diss. Munich, 1963)Google Scholar; von Fritz (1967), i. 63ff.; Huxley, G. L., ‘The Date of Pherecydes of Athens’, GRBS 14 (1973), 137-43Google Scholar dates his floruit to about 470. For a new edition of these and the other mythographers see Fowler, R. L., Early Greek Mythography (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

33 On Xanthus see Herter, H., RE IX.A.2 (1967), 1354ff.Google Scholar; von Fritz (1967), i.88ff; Brown (1973), 12–14; Drews (1973), 100–3. His date is uncertain: D. Hal. Thuc. 5 considers him a contemporary of the Peloponnesian War; Fowler (1996), 64 accepts Herter’s view of Xanthus as ‘an older contemporary of Herodotus’; it cannot be determined whether he was used by Herodotus.

34 So Drews (1973), 100; Ephorus’ remark is at FGrHist 70 F 180.

35 The fragments are at FGrHist 687; for general treatments of Dionysius, see Pearson (1939), 139–51; von Fritz (1967), i. 103ff.; Drews (1973), 20–22. Both a Persica and a work entitled Affairs after Darius (in five books) are attributed to Dionysius but these may be alternate titles for the same work. Jacoby allowed that Dionysius was earlier than Herodotus, but he deprived him of importance for ‘history’ by assigning his Persica to the category of ethnography: for a different view, cf. Marincola, J., ‘Genre, Convention and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography’, in Kraus (1999), 281–324, at 295–8Google Scholar. The use of fragments to determine the nature of a lost work is haphazard at best: cf. now the stimulating article of Lenfant, D., ‘Peut-on se fier aux “fragments” d’historiens? L’exemple des citations d’Hérodote’, Métis 24 (1999), 103-21Google Scholar, who shows (inter alia) how skewed our notion of Herodotus’ work would be if we relied only on quotations in later authors.

36 Dionysius, FGrHist 687 F 1 ~ Hdt. 5. 58; F 2 ~ Hdt. 3. 61; F 4 ~ Hdt. 1.1.

37 Drews (1973), 159 n.45.

38 On Charon, see Pearson (1939), 139ff.; Jacoby, F., ‘Charon von Lampsakos’, in Jacoby (1956), 178–206 (orig. SIFC 15 (1938), 207–42Google Scholar; von Fritz (1967), i. 518–22; Drews (1973) 24–7; Fowler (1996), 67. Jacoby dated him to the end of the fifth century, but Plutarch notes that he is earlier than Herodotus, and his work may have been known to Herodotus.

39 On Hellanicus see Jacoby’s commentary on FGrHist 4 and 323a; id., RE VIII (1912), 104–53; id., Atthis (Oxford, 1949), passim; von Fritz (1967), i. 476–572; Drews (1973), 20–24, 97–100; Ambaglio, D., L’Opera Storiografica di Ellanico di Lesbo (Pisa, 1980)Google Scholar; Smart, J. D., ‘Thucydides and Hellanicus’, in Moxon, I. S., Smart, J. D., and Woodman, A. J., edd., Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing (Cambridge, 1986), 19–35 Google Scholar; Meister (1990), 41–2; Fowler (1994), 66–7.

40 There is considerable debate about who., if any, could be thought to be predecessors of Herodotus: Jacoby, notoriously, believed only Hecataeus could truly count; the view followed, above, however, is indebted to Fowler (1996), 62–9, which points out the uncertainties of the dates of these early writers, and assumes that much of their material would have been available to Herodotus. On the anachronistic notion of ‘publication dates’, see below, p. 24.