Greek Historiography
Page 46
286
COnCludinG ObservatiOns On Greek HistOriCal WritinG
invasion and his defeat. Thucydides also previews his fundamental notions of causation in his opening “archaeology” in Book 1, showing how
security can lead to surplus wealth and then to big navies, which foster military power. In the war narrative proper, he describes how fear, honor, and pragmatic self‐interest combine with national character and individual leadership to give rise to conflict and to determine success (Th. 1.76).
Though incalculable chance looms large at times, human intelligence and swift action are required to turn it to one’s advantage (e.g., the Athenians at Pylos, or Brasidas in Thrace). Xenophon describes a looser causal chain of events that drift and require good leadership to bring matters to order and to act piously, in accordance with the divine order. For Polybius, the causation of later events is to be sought in their beginnings ( archai) and their earlier causes ( aitiai) (Plb. 3.6.1–7). He notes the deeper causes for Greeks opposing non‐Greeks, but he also sees the causal importance of
vengeance for Hannibal in the Second Punic War (Plb. 3.10). Dionysius
in the late republic sought the cause of Roman ascendancy, tracing
Rome’s kinship back to Greece: a neat political explanation for the subject Greek audience of his day, and one that conveniently used the term
arche ̄, which at once can mean “cause,” “beginning,” and “rule.” Certain Roman historians take advantage of the idea of divine causation to explain proscriptions (App. BC 4.16.61), and even the necessity that Rome rule the Jews (J. BJ 5.365–7); thus they evade logical rationales by recourse to causes beyond our cognition.
Leadership
The qualities of good and poor leaders are also a pervasive theme among the Greek historians – following from concern with daily life in the city-state, and also taking a cue from Homer and Greek legend. For each
historian there are outstanding models of leadership, all with some human faults, but each illustrating the values most prized by each author.
Herodotus proclaimed that the Ionian leaders among the Persians were
not generals but “slaves” to the king (Hdt. 7.96), and the lavish lifestyle of the Persian commander is displayed in the captured accommodations
of Mardonius (Hdt. 9.82). On the Greek side, Leonidas and Themistocles
receive preeminent treatment. In Thucydides, Archidamas, Nicias,
Brasidas, Cleon, and Alcibiades take their turn in the spotlight for their respective leadership abilities, but the author famously highlights the qualities of Pericles in contrast to those of his successors (intelligence, ability to communicate, patriotism and being above bribes: Th. 2.65).
COnCludinG ObservatiOns On Greek HistOriCal WritinG
287
Leadership is a prominent theme in Xenophon’s historical works, starting with his own personal call, via a divinely sent dream, to lead the Greeks from Persian territory (X. An. 3.1.11–14). He praises characters individually, for example the noble but flawed Cyrus; Clearchus, leader of the Ten Thousand (X. An. 2.6.8–10, 3.1); and the Spartan Agesilaus, a model leader for him (X. Hell. 4.3.19). In the Hellenica there are several other paradigmatic leaders: the Spartan Mnasippus, the Athenian Iphicrates,
Jason of Pherae, and the Theban Epaminondas. At Corcyra, Mnasippus
and Iphicrates represent two models of leadership (X. Hell. 6.2). Other leaders are less able or corrupt, for example Proxenus and Menon (both
at X. An. 2.6). Contrasting with Xenophon, the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia offers a sharp critique of Agesilaus in Asia (Fr. 24). But this historian does praise the Athenian Conon as a model of leadership. Theopompus seems
pessimistically to review a series of unsuccessful leaders; he had hoped for Philip to bring unity, only to be disappointed (Frs. 27 and 237a). A portrait of Alexander as leader, usually nuanced, is central to the Alexander historians of the Hellenistic period, but their works do not offer good comparative schemata of characteristics, since one figure dominates the scene. Leadership is a key feature for Polybius, as important in his work as it was in Xenophon’s. Polybius highlights models of leadership in
Philopoemen, Aristaenus, Q. Fabius Maximus, Flamininus, Scipio
Aemilianus, and others, including even a formidable foe like Hannibal.
The reign of Philip V is traced as becoming harsher as Philip grew older (Plb. 10.26.8). The Achaeans at one point suffered “since they could not produce a leader equal to their character” (Plb. 2.39.9–12). Under historians of the Roman imperial period, the perspective necessarily changes from an analysis of good individual generals to a closer focus on the
character of individual emperors, as historical narratives take the “bibliographic turn.” Josephus, for example, notes Claudius’ enlightened views about ruling an empire built on diversity (J. AJ 19.249, 280–91).
Josephus also offers his views on individual Jewish or local leaders in their dealings with the Romans, for example Agrippa I and Agrippa II (J. AJ
19–20). The books of Appian’s chronicle of Civil War in the republic fall quite naturally in order around the chief factional leaders: Marius versus Sulla (Book 1), Pompey versus Caesar (Book 2), Antony and Octavian
against the assassins (Book 3), then against each other (Books 4–5).
Although Arrian shifts to the almost legendary exploits of the very non-Roman Alexander, his narrative can be seen as the portrait of a huge
figure against which the emperors could be measured for good or ill.
Books 1–3 of his Anabasis build on the theme of a heroic general who extends his dominion; Julius Caesar is the obvious parallel, though Arrian
288
COnCludinG ObservatiOns On Greek HistOriCal WritinG
avoids allusions to him. We noted, generally regarding Roman‐era writers, that virtually all had contact with or observation of the leading figures of the day, if not with the emperors themselves; this enables each one of them to have some personal experience of leaders in operation (e.g.,
Josephus of Vespasian and Trajan, Appian of Hadrian and Antoninus
Pius, Arrian of Hadrian and Trajan, and Dio of Commodus, Pertinax, and
Septimius Severus).
Civilization and the “Barbarians”
For the Greeks, barbaros meant essentially “non‐Greek,” in our terms
“the other,” and hence it does not necessarily share the connotations of the corresponding modern word “barbarian” (Cartledge 1993;
Vlassopoulos 2013). Yet the Greek concept of “the barbarian” is not
monolithic and goes through nuanced transformations over centuries of
use by different authors. Hecataeus shows sympathy with the non‐Greek
in his account, but it is Herodotus who establishes a pattern of broadly including non‐Greeks as a means of comparing cultures in order to highlight ethnic differences and better understand “Greekness.” Herodotus
for instance shows the minimal hierarchy and the impressive physical
might of the Scythians; and he points up the differences between Greeks and Persians when the latter mutilate the corpse of Leonidas but the
former do not do the same with that of Masistius (Hdt. 7.22–5, 79). The Greek–barbarian antithesis is mostly absent in Thucydides, but it reappears as a crucial, unifying theme in Xenophon’s Anabasis. Among the forces with Cyrus and Xenophon, non‐Greeks outnumber Greeks ten to one.
A series of warlike non‐Greeks in the inland regions are unable to defeat the Ten Thousand in their clever strategies (X. An. 4.7). The motif is less prominent in Xenophon’s Hellenica, where the Persians play a crucial political role manipulating Greeks, but there is no focus on their role as a cultural “other.” In general Xenophon’s text lacks the extended, deeper descriptions of barbarians that Herodotus had offered. For him, they
mostly serve as a foil to the Greeks and as a litmus test of Greek values.
Ephorus is a
ble to admire virtue even in non‐Greeks like the Scythian
Anacharsis ( FGrHist 70 F 42), and is deliberately critical of Pericles, the chief spokesperson for Athenian civilization in Thucydides.
In the Roman era generally, universal history was the most important
new genre, made compelling by the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean.
The topic was opened up by Timaeus and developed by Polybius. For
Polybius, the category of “barbarian” is complicated, since the original
COnCludinG ObservatiOns On Greek HistOriCal WritinG
289
meaning “non‐Greek” is blurred when the Romans assume the role of
the powerful new promoters of their own brand of civilization. Against
the Romans, on the scale of virtues, are measured the Greeks. Yet others in Polybius’ world maintain the role of true “barbarians” in our sense of
“non‐civlized,” but with some nuances. For instance, the Illyrians and the Gauls are both lawless and aggressive, yet the Gauls are highly valorous and in that sense noble (Plb. 2.30). Stoicism and the power of the
common good lent a unifying theme: for example, Posidonius suggested
the civilizing benefit of Roman rule but also structured his narrative by nation rather than chronology. Later authors developed this during the
empire, but also acknowledged the worthy cultural identities of other
people under Rome: Diodorus presents Egypt at some length; the
Alexandrian Appian’s Roman History is organized ethnographically, most of his twenty four books treating each people separately; Josephus is of course concerned at length with the history of the people of Judea; and we should remember that, in addition to his Anabasis of Alexander, Arrian wrote separate works on India, Bithynia, Parthia, and the region of the Black Sea. Roman hegemony has in effect opened up historical writing in its inclusiveness in the spirit of Herodotus, but with a much broader and deeper agenda. This change was not, it seems, so much in the spirit of knowing the enemies of Rome as of systematically explaining the rich diversity of those in the empire, both to Romans in the West and to the Greek readers in the East.
Legacy
The utility of history ensures its continuing legacy. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus’ frequently quoted dictum that “history is philosophy
[teaching] by examples” (D.H. Rh. 11.2) refers to the passage where Thucydides is saying that readers who wish to see the clear truth of events will find his work useful (Th. 1.22.4). Dionysius is illustrating his point that “education is a discussion of customs” ( e ̄ thōn, sc. manners, character, disposition) and that history gives examples of lives that teach us “the avoidance of badness and the acquisition of virtue.” We can apply his view to ancient historians generally, with the caution that it is not always clear what constitutes virtue or badness, and that the very process of leading readers to determine values is arguably the primary value of historical writing. It should be fairly self‐evident that the questions probed by the ancient historians have had an ongoing relevance to later ages and to our own: power, human nature, metahuman forces, how reason and emotion
290
COnCludinG ObservatiOns On Greek HistOriCal WritinG
are understood and used productively, models of leadership, lines of
causation, and how the identity of a people is established or questioned.
There is a remarkable continuity in the fundamental form and subject
matter of Greek historical writing. Even into the early Christian era of the fourth century and following, there was a consistent reverence for (and reference to) classical predecessors in the genre, who offered a palate of options to serve the very different historical circumstances. The fixity of the genre – indeed into the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the age of reason up to the present – is, for better or worse, a major legacy of the Greek historians. An asset of this continuity has been the ongoing scrutiny of the elite and of the interplay between states in politics and war. Antiquity offered ready parallels and lessons. A concern might be the very focus on male elite citizens, while the history of the colonized, women, uneducated, and poorer classes was less of an object of attention. Of course history and social science of the last hundred or so years have addressed that imbalance of a Eurocentric elite male perspective, but the imbalance itself does not lessen the value of the earlier narratives, especially when we still use them to tease out the stories that were not in the ancients’ spotlight or to see the implicit criticisms of ancient historians, who themselves were usually on the fringes of power.
Bibliography
Cancik, H. and H. Schneider, eds. 2002. Brill’s New Pauly Encyclopedia of the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill (= New Pauly).
Cartledge, P. 1993. The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marincola, J. 1997. Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meister, K. 2005. “Historiography, II. Greece,” in New Pauly, vol. 6, 418–21.
Reinhold, M. 1988. From Republic to Principate: An Historical
Commentary on Cassius Dio’s Roman History Books 49–52 (36–29 bc).
Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.
Vlassopoulos, K. 2013. Greeks and Barbarians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wickersham, J. 1994. Hegemony and Greek Historians. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Further Reading
Electronic Editions
Greek texts and translations of most of the major extant authors, including those of the Roman period, are available online at the Perseus site:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:
collection:Greco‐Roman.
More specifically for the Roman period discussed in Chapter 8, translations of Polybius, Diodorus, Dionysius, Cassius Dio, and Plutarch are
available on the wonderful site LacusCurtius, managed by Bill Thayer
and based at the University of Chicago: http://penelope.uchicago.
edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/home.html.
LacusCurtius also makes available numerous Loeb Library translations,
for instance of Diodorus (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/
Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/home.html) and of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/
Dionysius_of_Halicarnassus).
http://attalus.org/translate/index.html offers translations of Josephus’
Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War and the fragments of Nicolaus of Damascus. All these sites were last accessed on January 15, 2015.
General Books on the Greek Historians
Alonso‐Núñez, J. M. 2002. The Idea of Universal History in Greece: From Herodotus to eh Age of Augustus. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben.
Bury, J. B. 1958 [1908]. The Ancient Greek Historians. New York: Dover.
Greek Historiography, First Edition. Thomas F. Scanlon.
© 2015 Thomas F. Scanlon. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
292
FuRtheR Reading
Feldherr, A., ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman
Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Finley, M. I., ed. 1960. The Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius. New York: Viking.
Fornara, C. 1983. The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grant, M. 1970. The Ancient Historians. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Luce, T. J. 1997. The Greek Historians. London: Routledge.
Marincola, J. 1997. Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marincola, J. 2001. Greek Historians. (Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics 31.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
; Marincola, J., ed. 2007. A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography.
Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Marincola, J., ed. 2011. Greek and Roman Historiography: Oxford
Readings in Classical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mehl, A. 2011 [2001]. Roman Historiography: An Introduction to Its Basic Aspects and Development, trans. H.‐F. Mueller. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Morley, N. 1999. Writing Ancient History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wickersham, J. M. 1994. Hegemony and Greek Historians. New York, Roman and Littlefield.
Woodman, A. J. 1988. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography. London: Areopagitica Press.
Chapter 1 Origins and Early Forms
Darbo‐Peschanski, C. 2007. “The Origin of Greek Historiography,” In J.
Marincola, ed., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography,
26–38. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Pearson, L. 1939. Early Ionian Historians. Oxford: Clarendon.
Chapter 2 Herodotus
translations
Greene, D., trans. 1987. Herodotus: The History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Macaulay, G. C., trans. 2004. Herodotus: The History, rev., comm., and introd. D. Lateiner. New York: Barnes & Noble.
FuRtheR Reading
293
Selincourt, A. de, trans. 1996. Herodotus: The Histories, comm.
J. Marincola. Baltimorem MD: Penguin.
Strassler, R., ed. 2007. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, trans.
A. L. Purvis, introd. R. Thomas. New York: Anchor Books.
Waterfield, R. trans. 1998. Herodotus: The Histories, comm. C. Dewald.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
general discussion
Bakker, E., I. J. de Jong, and H. van Wees, eds. 2002. Brill’s Companion to Herodotus. Leiden: Brill.
Boedeker, D. ed. 1987. Herodotus and the Invention of History. Special issue of Arethusa 20.
Derow, P. and Robert Parker. 2007. Herodotus and His World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.