2 HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ANCIENT GREEK SELF-DEFINITION1 Paul Cartledge INVENTING HISTORY The issue of the ancient Greeks' self-definition comprises a multivariate cluster of complex and highly unstable problem~ne, central member of this cluster constitutes this chapter's topic - t.he ways in which the Greeks 4.efin~es a~~tbno cultural group through the medium of written historiography. from the ti~Her~!ls (fifth century BC/BCE) tQ.that of Pluta~ch (first-second century AD/CE).2 Our English word 'history', like French histoire, Italian storia and other such European equivalents, descends to us ultimately from the Greek via Latin, as does so much else of our cultural-intellectual baggage. But en route from Greece to Rome, and again, between the Renaissance and today, the word historia and its derivatives have changed crucially in their meaning - or rather meanings. From its original senses of judgement and enquiry (which latter we preserve in 'natural history', a discipline whose antecedents may be traced back through Aristotle to the Hippocratic doctors of the fifth century and ultimately the Asiatic Greek 'philosophers of nature' in the sixth) ~cient Greek histona came secondarilY I An earlier version of the first four sections of this chapter appeared as Cartledge 1995. I am grateful to the editor of BICS, Professor Richard Sorabji, for allowing me to draw here upon that article, where some further bibliographical references may be found. 2 Recent work in ancient Greek historiography is usefully surveyed in Hornblower 1994 (note esp. the editor's introduction, 1-72, and the consolidated bibliography, 249-69); for a much longer perspective, going back to the sixteenth century, see Ampolo 1996. Add now Thompson 1996 , a wide­ ranging and intelligent historiographical conspectus. The most recent monographic survey of ancient Greek history-writing known 10 me is Meister 1990; far more challenging is Desideri 1996. Both Ampolo and Desideri end with M. Bernal's Black Arhma project, which since its inauguration in 1987 has acquired a formidable bibliographical rradition of its own. For this, and a more ample and nuanced collocation of ancient Greek with modern Western modes of historiography, see my Introduction on pp.3-1O. 23 BEGINNINGS - EAST AND WEST to denote the results of such judgement and enquiry regarding human public political actions as related purely orally at first and then in written narrative prose. 3 That secondary usage is perhaps attested earliest in about 425 BCE, in the Histories of Herodotus (7.96), although for him the primary sense of enquiry remained paramount. His illustrious successor, and rival historiographer, Thucydides avoided the word altogether, surely deliberately, and preferred to describe h.is activity as 'writing up', using the impersonal language of documentary record. But J-fefo"itotus,-too, firmly maintained the link between enquiry and record throughout his work, and, again like Thucydides, was preoccupied with explanat!2!!, from his preface onwards: 'This is an exposition ""Or the research (historia) of Herodotus ... carried out .. , especially to record the reason why they [the Greeks and the Persians) fought one another.' However, by the time that historia had become domesticated at Rome as part of the cultural process whereby 'captive Greece' had in Horace's famous phrase 'captured her fierce conqueror', it had acquired a further, moralizing an~ jucstificatory, rather than documentary and explanatory, connotatiQn. The chief function of history for the Romans, as Tacitus colourfully but conventionally claimed (Annals 3.65), was respectively to excoriate and to praise paradigmati~ examples ofhuman vice and- virtue - the former usually, as in Tacitus' own case, f~r more assiduously t an t .e latte2' Of course, the polarity between Greek and Roman historiographical theory and practice should not be overdrawn. Even the fathers of Greek history - who were perhaps also the fathers of History as such - were as incapable as the res[QG!s...are of avoiding the historian's engrained tendency to be the obedient servant of her or his own point of view. 5 BeS1aes, the successors of Herodotus and-'Thucydides wer~ mostly neither immune from nor averse to the dramatically moralizing or sensationalist uses of historical narrative. 6 the comparison, rather, raises the issue of the striking ofa balance between objectivity ofrecorCl and explanatIOn, ontheone han , an conscIOus or unconscIous ideology, on t e ot er n what follows I shall be exploring principally these two, ideological question ow far, and in what ways, did the distinction and opposition of Greeks and non-Greek 'barbarians' influence or determine Greek historians' conceptions of their function? S~' 3 On the ancient meanings of historia, see Press 1982; Fornara 1983. On orality, see below, n. 7. 4 Tacitean historiography: Syme 1958 is classic; cf. Cook 1988: 73-96; longer perspectives are on offer in Woodman and Luce 1993; Cartledge 1989. 5 The (meta-)historiography of P. Geyl (e.g. Debates with Historians (1962 (1955)) and Encounters in History (1963 (1961))) and A. D. Momigliano (e.g. his multi-volume Contributi aI/a stona degli studi classici e del mondo antico or, selectively, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), Essays in Ancient and Modern Histln"iography (Oxford, 1977) and Studies on Modem Scholarship (Berkeley, 1994) is instinct with the injunction 'Study first the historian, not the history.' For other viewpoints on the 'objectivity question' compare and contrast Hartog 1988; and Novick 1988. 6 Post-classical so-called 'tragic' history is discussed in broad perspective, with special reference to Aristotle and Polybius, in Walbank 1985. C. W. Macleod's (1983) contention that Thucydides' history was already (in a different sense) tragic is provocative. 24 I I '..J..' • I HISTORIOGRAPHY AND GREEK SELF-DEFINITION from the standpoint of their target audiences of Greek or Hellenized addressees, how far and in what ways did the Greek historians contribute to the formation of usable notions of'Greekness'? MYTH AND HISTORY A deliberately challenging assertion by a historian of modern ideology provides a suitable starting-point: 'one of the uses of history has always been (in Western society at least) the creation of traditional mythologies attributing a historical sanctity to the present self-Images of groups, classes and societies' (Stedman Jones 1972: 112). Herodotus and Thucydides, the latter especially, would have rejected that claim with contumely. Both were scornful of myth, which they consigned to the province of the poets, and our dichotomy of 'myth' and 'history' is in fact owed ultimately to them. But they reached that position by importantly different routes. Herodotus, crucially, drew the distinction between the timelessly distant rule of the sea by legendary King Minos of Crete and the certifiably authentic thalassocracy of Polycrates of Samos within living memory, on the grounds that only the latter belonged to 'the age of humankind as it is called' (3.122). And he declared himself obliged to relate, but free to disbelieve, the multiplicity of orally transmitted 'tales' he heard on his peregrinations round the Mediterranean and Black Seas (7.152). Thucydides went much further. He dismissed what he called 'the mnhic' as no better than romance (1.21, 22), precisely because it was the product of unreliable and untested oral traditions. Whereas Herodotus was prepared to give credence ,to stories concerning events as much as two ~nerations fore his birth, Thucydides was from choice die contemporary historian ar excellence.:. One of his chief reasons for choosing as "hIs su Ject e great war between Athens and Sparta beginning in 431 was that it broke out in his own lifetime when he was already 'of an age to understand what was going on' (5.26) and could interrogate contemporaries, ideally I. event-making or eyewitness participants (l.22). His was a history written to be rea.d Ii and re-read. 7 The Thucydidean model set the pattern for all subsequent Greek historiography, I I[ in this following respect at least: original history ~s contemporary history, picking ~ up the narrative thread where one's predecessors had let it drop. For earlier periods I \'I than one's own the best one could normally hope for was to improve on the I predecessors' manner, not their content. Bur in other respects Thuc;ydides' I successors differed as much from each other and from Thucydides as Thucydides I had from Herodotus, whom he never once mentioned by name. Indeed, the only I' serious agreement Thucydides seems to have had with him was that a history should be about war. 8 Bur whereas Herodotus had chosen for his subject a Russian-style 7 Murray 1987, Thomas 1992; Steiner 1994. On contemporary Greek spectarorship and audiences, with special but by no means exclusive reference to the theatre, see Segal 1995; also very relevant to the performative aspect of early Greek historiography is Nagy 1996. 8 War in Greek historiography: Finley 1985: ch. 5 ('War and empire', 67-87). 25 IJI 1/ HISTORIOGRAPHY AND GREEK SELF-DEFINITION I' I from the standpoint of their target audiences of Greek or Hellenized addressees, how far and in what ways did the Greek historians contribute to the formation of usable notions of'Greekness'? MYTH AND HISTORY A deliberately challenging assertion by a historian of modern ideology provides a suitable starting-point: 'one of the uses of history has always been (in Western society at least) the creation of traditional mythologies attributing a historical sanct~~o~e present self-Images of groups, classes and societies' (Stedman Jones 1972: 112). Herodotus and Thucydides, the latter especially, would have rejected that claim with contumely. Both were scornful of myth, which they consigned to the province of the poets, and our dichotomy of 'myth' and 'history' is in fact owed ultimately to them.