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Article contents
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
Extract
The modern portrait of the development of Greek historiography is quite different from that of the ancient one. Admittedly, the latter must be pieced together from various writers, but the outlines are clear. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his On Thucydides envisioned a process that began with writers of local histories and chronicles, in which authors wrote down in a plain style with little adornment material preserved in temples, archives, and so forth. The next step was to take that raw material and apply to it literary skill and polish: that role in Dionysius is reserved for Herodotus, who incorporated these local histories and wove them together into a comprehensive and, one might say, universal account. Thucydides, though influenced by Herodotus, moved off in another direction, treating not the deeds of Greeks and barbarians, but a single war through which he himself had lived. All later historians could be seen as variations or offshoots of the two founders and best practitioners of the genre.
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References
1 D. Hal. Thuc. 25; on this schema see Gozzoli, S., ‘Una teoria antica sull’origine della storiografia greca’, SCO 19-20 (1970-71), 158–211 Google Scholar; Toye, D. L., ‘Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the First Greek Historians’, AJP 116 (1995), 279–302 Google Scholar.
2 Jacoby, F., ‘Über die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie und den Plan einer neuen Sammlung der griechischen Historikerfragmente’, in Jacoby (1956), 16–72 (orig. Klio 9 (1909), 80–123)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other important treatments of the origins and development of Greek historiography: Starr, C., The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Chatelet, F., La naissance de l’histoire. La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce (Paris, 1962)Google Scholar; Mazzarino (1966), i. 23–52; Nenci, G., ‘La storiografia preerodotea’, Critica Storica 6 (1967), 1ff.Google Scholar; Saugé, A., De l’epopée à l’histoire: Fondement de la notion de l’histoire (Frankfurt, 1992)Google Scholar.
3 See, for example, the exposition of Fornara (1983), 1–46, which follows Jacoby in all essentials.
4 For reservations about this taxonomy see Fowler (1996), 62–9; Humphreys, S., ‘Fragments, Fetishes, and Philosophies: Towards a History of Greek Historiography after Thucydides,’ in Most, G., ed., Collecting Fragments / Fragmente Sammeln (Göttingen, 1997), 207-24Google Scholar; Marincola, J., ‘Genre, Convention, and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography’, in Kraus (1999), 281–324 Google Scholar; Joyce, C., ‘Was Hellanikos the First Chronicler of Athens?’, Histos 3 (1999)Google Scholar.
5 This is clearest in Fornara (1983), where certain historians are routinely dismissed for not understanding the ‘proper’ nature of history; cf. Marincola (1997), 2–3.
6 Momigliano (1990); see also his ‘The Place of Ancient Historiography in Modern Historiography’, in Momigliano (1955-92), vii. 13–36 (orig. in Les Etudes Classiques aux XIXe et XXesiècles (Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1980), 127–57).
7 See, above all, White, H., Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973)Google Scholar; id., The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore and London, 1987).
8 Momigliano, A., ‘The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes’, in Momigliano (1955-92), vii.49–59 Google Scholar (orig. Comparative Criticism. A Year Book vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1981), 259–68).
9 Woodman (1988); id., ‘Reading the Ancient Historians’, Omnibus 5 (1983), 24–7; Wiseman (1979) and (1993).
10 Wiseman (1979), 41–53.
11 For a brief but balanced overview see Kraus, C. S. and Woodman, A. J., Latin Historians (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics, no. 27, Oxford, 1997), 1–9 Google Scholar.
12 Moles (1993), 90. Cf. Shrimpton (1997), 16, who also uses the metaphor of the cake, but differently: for Shrimpton, the icing is the historian’s written text. ‘We do not find what supports or shapes the text without slicing the cake. Once that is done, we see two layers distinct from each other except that the line of demarcation between them is very blurred. The bottom layer is made up of facts, the top, of general, defining concepts. These concepts determine the relevance of the facts. For, once a defining generality is admitted into the upper layer, it attracts into the lower any facts that relate to it and repels those that do not.’ Shrimpton here seems to be more concerned with history’s movement between specific and general, the same concern of Aristotle (below, n. 18).
13 Moles (1993), 114.
14 Works On History’ are ascribed to Theophrastus (Cicero Orat. 39), Praxiphanes (F 18 Wehrli), and Varro.
15 For this work see the edition (translation and notes, no Greek text) of W. K. Pritchett (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975).
16 Bowen, A. J., Plutarch: On the Malice of Herodotus (Warminster, 1992): Greek text, facing translation and notesGoogle Scholar.
17 Macleod, M. D., Lucian: Selected Works (Warminster, 1989)Google Scholar has the Greek text, facing translation, and notes. See also the edition of Homeyer, H., Lukian: wie man Geschichte schreiben soll (Munich, 1965)Google Scholar, and the commentary of Avenarius, G., Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung (Meisenheim am Glan, 1956)Google Scholar.
18 Yet even here caution is necessary. Book XII of Polybius is an extremely important analysis of the writing of history, and it cares little for style or language, focusing instead of inquiry and experience (see below, pp. 133–40). Nor is style the main concern of Aristotle in the Poetics, in his famous contrast of poetry with history: ‘the difference lies in the fact that the one [the historian] speaks of events which have occurred, the other [the poet] of the sort of events which could occur. It is for this reason that poetry is both more philosophical and more serious (φίλοσοφώτερον каі σπονδαιтϵρον) than history, since poetry speaks more of universals (τά κα’ όλου), history of particulars (τά καθ’ εκαστον). A ‘universal’ comprises the kind of speech or action which belong by probability or necessity to a certain kind of character – something which poetry aims at despite its addition of particular names. A ‘particular’, by contrast, is (for example) what Alicibiades did or experienced.’ (9, 1451a36–b11, Halliwell, tr.) While it is true that this should not be taken as Aristotle’s final or fully considered judgement on history (the passage comes, after all, in a discussion of writing plays), Aristotle has put his finger on an aspect of history that is troubling, i.e., its status as simply an aggregate of individual facts. The ancient historians themselves, at least the ones treated in this survey, were, I believe, aware of this situation, and that is one reason why they have underlying patterns in their works, by which they give universality to the specifics of their narrative. I am not suggesting that their works can be reduced merely to simplistic rules; on the contrary, what marks out each of the historians examined here is a perceptible tension between individual (and, at times, unique) actions on the one hand, and on the other hand larger patterns within which the events take place. The larger patterns do not prescribe how or when certain results follow from certain actions; rather, the ways in which the pattern can be fulfilled seem to be limitless, and it is on these contingent specifics that the historian (as opposed to the philosopher or poet or scientist) focuses. The way in which the specific set of circumstances fulfills the pattern then provides another proof of its validity. It is in this way that ancient historians strive to make their work a ‘possession for all time’: history then fulfills the function of both commemoration and instruction. On this aspect of the historians, see below, pp. 48–58, 85–91, and 140–8. On the Aristotle passage see further de Ste. Croix, G. E. M., ‘Aristotle on History and Poetry (Poetics 9, 1451a36–b11)’, in Levick, B., ed., The Ancient Historian and his Materials: Essays . . . C.E. Stevens (London, 1975), 45–58 Google Scholar; Walbank (1972), 34–40.
19 For the latter see Marincola (1997), 95–117.