Greek Historiography
Page 5
high point around 500 bc we come to a cluster of historians, all from the general Ionian region and all prominent around the time of Herodotus
(c. 485–424 bc), men who witnessed the turbulent fifth century. Of the
many works attached to Charon of Lampsacus, only two are securely by
him: Chronicles of Lampsacus (four books) and Persica (two books). The fragments of the Persica show a less detailed treatment of events than Herodotus’ work, but a similar interest in anecdote, legends, and local traditions; they illustrate, for example, the Persian rise to power with Astyages’ prophetic dream ( FGrHist 687b F 4; cf. Hdt. 1.107–8; Meister 1996a; von Fritz 1967: 518–21; Pearson 1939: 139–51). In Chronicles of Lampsacus he narrates an amusing tale of how the Cardians were defeated by the commander Naris, who cleverly used flute players to disrupt the
enemy cavalry ( FGrHist 262 F 1 = Ath. 12.520D–F; Fränkel 1973: 348).
The Lydiaca by Xanthus of Lydia in four books is a history of the Lydian people, possibly to the capture of Sardis by Cyrus. It blended legend
sometimes with empirical observation, such as in his provident hypothesis
OriGins and Early FOrms OF GrEEk HistOriOGrapHy
21
about marine fossils as evidence of sea‐level change ( FGrHist 765 F 14; von Fritz 1967: 88–9; Pearson 1939: 123). Xanthus’ main contribution
to advancing historiography beyond Hecataeus and in the direction of
Herodotus is, to judge from the fragments, a desire to support mythical narrative with genealogical, linguistic, rationalistic, and scientific arguments (Meister 1996b; Pearson 1939: 109–38; von Fritz 1967: 88–91).
The last historian here from Ionia, Hellanicus of Lesbos (c. 480–395
bc) is said to have written numerous works, groupable as mythographic,
ethnographic, and chronographic (or horographic) (Pearson 1939: 152–
235; Fornara 1983: 21). Among the third group are two chronological
sketches based on archival lists; the Priestesses of Hera at Argos, which Thucydides used (Th. 2.2.1; 4.133.2), and the Carneian Victors
( Karneionikai). His most famous chronographic work is Atthis, an outline of Attica’s history from early times to 404 bc in two books – a work criticized by Thucydides as being done “sketchily and with chronological imprecision” (Th. 1.97.2) on account of its treatment of the pente ̄ kontaetia (fifty‐year period) between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War.
Recent scholarship has even asserted that the Atthis was not a chronicle but a collection of random local tales and genealogy and that the Athenian Androtion (c. 410–340 bc) authored the first Atthis genuinely identifiable as a chronicle (Joyce 1999; Harding 1994). One fragment naming Erichthonius as the founder of the Panathenaia and another asserting the Athenian native occupation of Attica both validate civic prestige ( FGrHist F 39 and F 161). Many of Hellanicus’ attested ethnographic titles may
actually be reduced to two, one on Foundations of Peoples and Cities ( Ktiseis ethno ̄ n kai poleo ̄ n) and one on Foreign Customs ( Barbarika nomima) that included treatment of the Greeks in Asia Minor and of the tribes around them (Pearson 1939: 194–9). He seems also to have written separate works on the Egyptians, the natives of Lesbos, and the Persians, the last covering mythic times to the battle of Salamis. His
political stance on Persia cannot be discerned from the fragments, and his methodological sophistication in general in his chronological works is to be doubted. He seems to have written much, but not very well.
Conclusions
The journey from Homer to Hellanicus is not a straight line but an
evolution of genres competing and complementing one another, all at the service of audience and authorial interest. In over a century from
Hecataeus to Hellanicus, the historical writing of the logographers shows
22
OriGins and Early FOrms OF GrEEk HistOriOGrapHy
a swift turn away from the enchanted poetic performance of myth to the
rationalizing and organizing principles of a new genre. Challenged by
Ionian scientific and philosophical ideas and applying the skepticism
and new rationalism of Xenophanes and others to traditional legends,
the logographers reworked myths, genealogies, and travelers’ tales. But in their obsession with the ever popular topics of myth, logographers
gave short shrift to the most fruitful area for prose narrative, namely the events of recent generations, where testimonial evidence and archive
promised a richer and more reliable account. The logographers also
seemed shy of speeches, as if they were foreign to prose accounts.
Herodotus was the first to take on the recent past in full detail. He also first incorporated rhetoric amply into his narrative, clearly drawing upon the traditions of Homeric epic, Athenian drama, and live oratory itself.
Logographers seemed still to live under the primacy of a mythical canon and could not quite emerge from it. Hellanicus sought chronological
anchors in timelines of priestesses and victors. Like his near contemporary Herodotus, Charon was an artful storyteller of dreams, battles, and the like and employs narrative to describe political movements. Many of these earliest prose historians were prolific in producing smaller, monograph‐like studies and they aspired to rationalizing and organizing bodies of legend; but none approached the scale and scope of Herodotus’
revolutionary project.
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2
Herodotus and the Limits of Happiness:
Beyond Epic, Lyric, and Logography
Life and Times
A chief achievement of Herodotus was the latitude of his writing, as he went beyond local history, in contrast to predecessors, in the view of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote four hundred years after him and
made a point still valid today:
In contrast with these men [his predecessors], Herodotus of Halicarnassus, being a little before the Persian Wars and extending down to the
Peloponnesian War, expanded and rendered more splendid the scope of the subject matter. Not deigning to write the history of a single city or a single nation, but forming the design of comprising within a single treatise many varying deeds of people of Europe and Asia, he started with the Lydian
empire and brought his history down to the Persian Wars and narrated in a single work the history of the intervening period of two hundred and
twenty years, and he invested his style with qualities that his predecessors had failed to acquire. (D.H. Th. 5, Pritchett 1975: 3–4)
Though we are not certain about Herodotus’ birth and death dates, there is general agreement that he was probably born in the midst of the Persian Wars, in the 480s bc, and died sometime after the start of the Peloponnesian War, in the 420s bc, or possibly as late as 414 bc. Herodotus was reportedly fifty‐three in 431 bc ( FGrHist 244 Apollod. F 7) and hence born about 484 bc, possibly of Carian ancestry, and definitely had an uncle, Panyassis, who was a famous epic poet. As a young adult, then, Herodotus will have been saturated with tales of the glorious Greek victory over the Greek Historiography, First Edition. Thomas F. Scanlon.
© 2015 Thomas F. Scanlon. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
HErodotus and tHE Limits of HappinEss: BEyond Epic, Lyric, and LogograpHy 27
barbarians. As a native of Halicarnassus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor (modern Bodrum, Turkey), he will have also been exposed from child
hood
to local legends of Ionian bravery and to many tales from regional travelers passing through a crucial crossroads between West Asia and Europe.
After the failed coup on the local tyrant, Lygdamis, Herodotus fled to
Samos, then returned for the final overthrow of Lygdamis in 454 bc (on
the biography in general, see Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella 2007: 1–7).
Herodotus traveled to Egypt at least once, for four months, in
460/59 bc (Hdt. 3.12), and likely also to Scythia, the Black Sea, Thrace, Macedonia, and the Near East, including to Babylon, Tyre, and the
Euphrates at some point. We may presume that Herodotus visited
sites crucial to the war in mainland Greece and in Greek colonies in
Asia Minor, Southern Italy, and Sicily. He knew only Greek and was at
the mercy of his guides in non‐Greek lands, as the account of Egypt
makes clear.
Two ancient sources report that the historian visited Athens around
446 bc and received an enormous cash prize of ten talents for his public reading (Plu. Mal. Herod. 26; Jer. Chron., under the year 446). These ancient reports, written centuries later, must of course be assessed with caution, since details might well have been invented to explain perceived biases of the narrative. Though we cannot be certain whether Herodotus
met Sophocles and Pericles on his Athenian sojourn, as some ancient
sources maintain, his work reflects an engaged interest in tragedy and in the aggressive imperialism of Periclean Athens (Chiasson 2003; Tracy
2002; Raaflaub 2002). The author at times writes with an eye to an
Athenian audience, for example comparing Scythian geography to Attica’s (4.99.4) and mentioning the chains of Boeotian captives displayed on the Acropolis even in his own day (5.77.4). Some speculate that Herodotus
was made an “honorary citizen” from evidence of his tone of apology for Athens. But a careful reading reveals mixed praise for both Athenians and Spartans. In the Acharnians (lines 523ff.; cf. Hdt. 1.4), of 424 bc, Aristophanes evidently parodied Herodotus’ introduction, which suggests that the work was publicly available, in whole or part, at this time.
Herodotus’ latest internal reference mentions an incident of 430 bc (Hdt.