Chapter Title: Greek Historiography

Chapter Author(s): Thomas Harrison Book Title: The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome

Book Editor(s): Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrison and Brian A. Sparkes

Published by: Edinburgh University Press

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The story of Greek historiography is easily told as a succession of ‘great historians’: Herodotus, the historian of the Greek–Persian Wars and their background, dubbed the ‘father of history’; Thucydides, the first great ‘scientific’ historian, whose topic was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies; and finally Polybius, the archetypal soldier-historian representing (ambivalently) Roman conquest to his fellow Greeks. Such a narrative has something to be said for it. These three figures stand out, not only for the scale and magnificence of their sur- viving works, but also for their self-conscious reflection – most explicit in the case of Polybius – on the nature of ‘history-writing’ itself. Undoubtedly also, as Thucydides responded to (and tacitly corrected) the work of Herodotus, Polybius saw himself as the inheritor of a tradition of serious history-writing.

Writing the history of historiography

Inevitably, however, the development of Greek history-writing is a much more complex story. First, there are difficulties – especially at the start of the story – in distinguishing any clear genre of historiography. Herodotus recorded his historiae, literally his ‘inquiries’. Though the term is suggestive of a critical attitude essential to history-writing, Herodotus’ canvas includes much material – mythical traditions, for example, or accounts of the customs of foreign peoples recorded as if in a timeless present – that is not evidently historical to a modern audience. Though subsequent historians develop an increasingly self-conscious attitude to their tasks,

the boundaries of history remain permeable: are we to classify the moralising biographies of Plutarch as history, to take just one example? Any attempt to trace the history of Greek historiog- raphy is bedevilled, then, by the problem of defining what we are looking at: whether to focus on the major works of military-political history, the so-called tradition of ‘great historiography’ (Marincola, Authority and Tradition), or to take a more catholic approach that also embraces biogra- phy, ethnography, and local history (the approach of Felix Jacoby).

Second, and as a consequence of this lack of any clear disciplinary borderline, ancient historians were influenced by and reacted against a great number of writers, not all historians. (A full story of Greek historiography, then, would need to take in much, much more.) Herodotus did not create history in a vacuum, but was influenced by and reacted to not only previous ethnographic or geo- graphical work, but Homeric epic, or other poetic sources such as Simonides’ narrative elegy on the battle of Plataea (see also chapter 41). Thucydides’ famous description of his own work as a ‘possession for all time’ rather than a ‘compe- tition piece for the immediate moment’ fails to mention Herodotus by name, and surely refers to a broader number of writers; modern scholarship has emphasised his familiarity (and indeed Herodotus’) with Hippocratic medical writings, and (more recently) with the poet Pindar (S. Hornblower, Thucydides and Pindar, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). By the time that we reach Polybius (200–118), the number of models for emulation and rejection – local histori- ans, ethnographers, ‘universal historians’ – has

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49. Greek Historiography

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multiplied. Though we can meaningfully distin- guish strands in ancient historiography – often by tracing the influence of particular earlier histori- ans, so distinguishing the relative influence of Thucydidean and Herodotean models of history – and though some generalisations are possible (such as that war is the subject par excellence of ancient historians), no clear story, either of progress or of decline, can be imposed on this mass of writers.

A third complication is that many of these historians, indeed the vast majority, exist only in ‘fragments’, i.e. in quotations from others’ works (for how to access these historians, see Further Reading below). Since predecessors were usually quoted only for scathing criticism, it is very hard to get an accurate sense of these historians’ own agendas. What we can deduce, however, from the lengths to which their successors went – for exam- ple, from Polybius’ devotion of a whole book to the faults of the historian of Sicily, Timaeus of Tauromenium (condemned as an armchair histo- rian) – is that they were sufficiently sizeable figures to require such treatment, and that our picture of the development of Greek history is consequently a skewed one.

Another consequence of these facts of survival – this time for the use of sources as his- torical evidence, rather than for our tracing its development – is worth outlining at the start. A second-century  writer, Arrian of Nicomedia, might be thought a poor source for the history of (the late fourth century ) Alexander the Great – except for the fact that he relies in large part on the accounts of two contemporaries of Alexander, Ptolemy (later ruler of Egypt) and Aristobulus. In this case we are lucky that Arrian declares his policy of relying on these two sources upfront. In most other such cases, such reliance is not so openly revealed, with the result that the historian needs to assess the (non-extant) sources of our surviving source before judging its worth as his- torical evidence.

This technique of ‘source criticism’ is not an exact science (see also chapter 50). If an early writer is mentioned in passing by a later one, it is a jump to presume that his entire account depends on that earlier writer (though it is cer- tainly evidence of some familiarity, and that jump

may – tentatively – be a reasonable guess). We can compare an account without a named source with another that does name one or more earlier writ- ers – but again it is a jump to presume an even reliance on that earlier writer throughout a work (given that the points of overlap may be fairly brief). Later writers also shape their material to varying extents and in varying ways. The first- century  ‘universal historian’ (see below) Diodorus Siculus is thought to have relied, predominantly at least, on single historians in turn: so, for example, his account of the fifth century  relies on the fourth-century  Ephorus of Cyme, while his version of the early period of the successors to Alexander derives from the (highly rated) lost work of Hieronymus of Cardia. (Still, one cannot simply speak of his account as if it were Ephorus’ or Hieronymus’ account unmediated.) Plutarch’s biographies, by contrast, contain quotations from a large number of earlier writers, embedded within his own moralising framework (his Parallel Lives make comparisons, for example, explicit and implicit, between one Roman and one Greek life). The anecdotes preserved in Plutarch’s lives can con- stitute historical gems for the historian, but it is important to recognise that they are selected for inclusion by criteria very different to our own.

Herodotus and the origins of history

It was once fashionable to look for a ‘Herodotus before Herodotus’, a key figure whose work explained how Herodotus could have written the work he did. Herodotus’ clearest precursor is Hecataeus of Miletus, whose ethnographic and genealogical work (the Periodos gēs, or ‘Journey Around the World’, and Genealogies) clearly underlie some aspects of Herodotus’ later account, in particular of Egypt. Deflecting the question of how history was invented from Herodotus, whose text survives intact, to a fairly shadowy figure who survives only in fragments now looks a fairly curious strategy, however – as do old attempts to trace Herodotus’ evolution, for example from ethnographer to historian, by look- ing for the awkward joins in his text. Recent work by contrast, has tended to assume the integrity of the Histories (i.e. that they reflect a unified

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purpose) and to look at the structuring motifs of the work as a whole. By isolating Herodotus’ crit- ical vocabulary and comparing it to the fragments of his contemporaries and predecessors (for example, Hecataeus, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Xanthus of Lydia or Hippias of Elis), this work has also shown how Herodotus formed part of a movement of other ‘proto-historians’, all striving unevenly towards a critical attitude to the past or to telling the story of other cultures (Fowler, ‘Herodotus and his contemporaries’).

What is clear is that Herodotus combined the geographical and ethnographic focus of Hecataeus within an overarching narrative framework, that of the growth of Persia’s power and its clash with Greece. His canvas, as a conse- quence, is a vast one – and Herodotus’ value as a historical source is consequently enormous. Not only is he the main literary source (supplemented by fragments of poetry, later literary traditions, and most importantly material remains) for the archaic period of Greek history, but he is also a key source in the reconstruction of many of the foreign cultures he describes – not least, those of Persia or Egypt. It is wise not to take his stories at face value, however. Leaving aside his own, often ironical, shaping of his material, the oral traditions that he relays have already undergone a long period of ‘deformation’ (see O. Murray, ‘Herodotus and Oral History’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 16–44) and come, as it were, ready packaged with the biases of those that have trans- mitted them. Herodotus’ claims to autopsy (i.e. to have seen things with his own eyes) have also been contested hotly – not least his claim of travel in Egypt. More recently, however, modern atten- tion has focused on other themes: his intellectual context, in particular his affinities with medical and scientific writers, the narrative patterns of his work and Herodotus’ own narration, and the value of the Histories as evidence of cultural pre- suppositions, for example concerning the gods or foreign peoples. Herodotus is now also, in gen- eral, seen within a late fifth-century context: writing under the shadow of the conflict between Athens and Sparta and, far from being dazzled by the bright lights of Periclean Athens (as in previ-

ous scholarship), offering a cynical angle on the origins of Athens’ imperial power (e.g. Fornara, Herodotus).

Thucydides

Thucydides’ work in many ways appears to mark a reaction against Herodotus. His work is con- temporary history – that of the Peloponnesian War, which he lived through, and indeed par- ticipated in. Though he picked up (at least in his preamble in book 1) from the point at which Herodotus left off, the end of the Persian Wars, and though some of the themes of his work echo Herodotus’ (the importance of control of the sea, for example), his work also appears more austere in style, his narrative is more linear (following the seasons of campaigning with occasional pauses in the action for deliberative speeches or set-piece descriptions, for example of the Athenian Plague or the Corcyraean revolution), and two classes of characters are largely missing from his work (whether this is the result of a deliberate decision, or simply a reflection of his different subject matter): women and the gods.

The story of scholarship on Thucydides in some ways also reverses that of Herodotus: as Herodotus has gone from (being presented as) a raconteur devoid of serious purpose, Thucydides has made the reverse journey: from austere fact- grubber to, if not a frivolous storyteller, at least a much more self-consciously literary figure. In addition to the continuing studies of the value of his work as evidence for Athenian imperialism, there has been a new stress on his subtlety as a nar- rator (T. Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), on literary intertexts, for example with Herodotus, or on the ‘tragic structure’ of his work. (Why did he give such a disproportionate emphasis to the Athenian expedition to Sicily, books 6–7, unless he wanted to tell a story of the fall of Athens? See Kallet, Money and the Corrosion of Power; Rood, ‘Thucydides’ Persian Wars’.) Thucydides’ some- times seemingly unvarnished style is now seen as intentionally so.

Hand in hand with this greater stress on Thucydides’ artfulness as a narrator is a greater wariness not only of his historical judgements,

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but even of our ability to deduce what those judgements are. Crucially, the long speech sections included in his work can never be taken as standing for the views of their author, but need to be seen in complex relationship with one another and with the surrounding narrative. So, for example, Thucydides’ view of the origins of the Peloponnesian War cannot be reduced to simple judgement of who started it on the basis of a single passage (the late revelation, for example, that the Spartans felt responsible for breaking the truce between themselves and the Athenians: 7.18). Rather, we should look at the sum total of his presentation of the causes of war: the reason why he gives us so many positions together is to show precisely how the responsibility for war cannot be simply allocated, to reveal (almost in slow motion) how war becomes inevitable. Perhaps the greatest problem in approaching Thucydides, however, is our almost exclusive reliance on him: with rare exceptions (Herodotus’ more cynical account of the beginnings of Athenian imperialism, Athens’ imperial decrees recorded on inscriptions, the few relevant chap- ters of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, or the evidence of contemporary Greek drama), we are largely forced to try to correct or nuance Thucydides’ account from the evidence that he himself provides.

The fourth century

Any expectation that history after Thucydides simply continued in the same vein, rejecting myth and the gods in favour of steely scientific history, will be largely disappointed. There were continu- ators of Thucydides: most prominently, the Hellenica (lit. ‘Greek affairs’) of Xenophon or Theopompus, which took Thucydides’ narrative on from the moment that it ceased in mid- sentence (in 411/10) to 362 and 394 respectively, or the anonymous (and, like Theompompus, frag- mentary) Oxyrhynchus historian, so called because his text was found on papyrus in the Egyptian town of that name. But as the careers of both Theompompus and Xenophon reveal, nei- ther Herodotus nor Thucydides had stamped any clear hierarchy on the types of historical writing that were possible. In addition to his Hellenica,

Theopompus also wrote an epitome of Herodotus and the Philippica (see below). Xenophon’s other more or less historical works include his bio- graphical account of the Spartan Agesilaus, his memoir of the Anabasis (or ‘Journey Up-Country’ into the Persian Empire of the 10,000 Greek mer- cenaries in the service of Cyrus the Younger), and his fantastic reconstruction of the life of the elder Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire (onto whom he projects all the characteristics of the ideal monarch) in the Cyropaedia.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish a number of strands in the historical work of the fourth century. In addition to Hellenica, there continued to be local histories, notably the histories of Attica (or Atthides, singular: Atthis) of the Atthidographers (most famously, Androtion and the third-century Philochorus). Ctesias, Dinon and Heracleides continued the concerns of fifth- century writers by undertaking Persica, or histo- ries of Persia (variously credible: Ctesias, a doctor in the court of the Persian king, has often been valued poorly because of his salacious anecdotes and, for example, confusing the order of the bat- tles of the Persian Wars). But at the same time, there were newer developments. Ephorus of Cyme’s universal history, the first of its kind, took the history of the Greek world from the mythical return of the sons of Heracles down to 340 ; he was subsequently a prime source for the universal history of Diodorus. A word should be said for Aristotle as a historian – though his works scarcely constitute history by his own definition in the Poetics (‘what Alcibiades did and suffered’) – his comparative analysis of constitutions in the Politics or the schematic account (first narrative, then a description) of the Constitution of Athens (probably by one of his pupils) might be counted as history by modern standards. Finally, another work of Theopompus, the Philippica, foreshadows one aspect of the historians of the Hellenistic age, in particular the chief historians of Alexander, in its focus on a single individual: the Macedonian king, and father of Alexander, Philip II.

The Hellenistic world and beyond

The changed landscape of the Hellenistic world with its dominant monarchs did not, however,

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bring uniformity to the writing of history. The histories of Alexander, for example, range from the apparently sober (and admiring) accounts of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, the so-called ‘official’ tradition (preserved by Arrian), to the more romantic ‘Vulgate’ tradition, the main figure in which is Clitarchus (a key source for Diodorus, and the son of Dinon), apparently more popular in its approach and more cynical towards its pro- tagonist. The expansion of Greek influence also gave a renewed impetus to ethnographic writing (e.g. Megasthenes, Hecataeus of Abdera; see chapter 51), and hence to the popularity of Herodotus, as well as giving rise to the recording of local traditions in Greek by non-Greeks: most prominently, the Egyptian Manetho, the Babylonian Berossus, or the Roman Fabius Pictor (see also chapter 50). In terms of our ability to reconstruct a narrative of Hellenistic history, however, with the end of Diodorus’ continuous account in 302  we are – except for some pas- sages of Plutarch’s lives derived from Duris of Samos, Phylarchus and others – largely in the dark until the account of Polybius begins in earnest in 220 .

Polybius of Megalopolis (200–118) is the out- standing figure of the historiography of the Hellenistic age – even though, of the forty books of his history, only the first five survive in full. Like Herodotus before him, integrating the his- tory of the Greek world with that of its neigh- bours, Polybius’ breadth of scope is crucial to his achievement. He set out to show ‘how and by what sort of government in less than fifty-three years the Romans came to conquer and rule almost the whole inhabited world’. Rome’s conquests did not only give him a story to tell, however, but by their unification of the whole ‘inhabited world’ (or oikoumenē) also gave him his own vision of history: previous history, as he says, had consisted of so many disparate episodes, but from 220 (the begin- ning of the fifty-three years) onwards, history is an ‘organic whole’; the expansion of Roman power is at the same time incremental and ratio- nally explicable and guided by providence (or tychē, fortune). In keeping with the grandeur of his theme, Polybius is dismissive of the limited focus (Timaeus) as well as the rhetorical effects (Phylarchus) of his predecessors (though he is

himself capable of the latter) and fond of laying out his procedure in elaborate detail. So, for exam- ple, a change of mind leads him to continue his story from the completion of Rome’s conquests in 168/7 in order to reveal ‘how they exercised their worldwide supremacy, and . . . the impressions and judgements which the rest formed concern- ing their rulers’.

The most fascinating aspect of Polybius’ work (and the most discussed in modern scholarship) is the mixture of attitudes he reveals to Roman expansion. Here his personal biography cannot be kept separate, as he was himself a participant in the events that he describes. His father Lycortas had held the chief magistracy of the Achaean League; after the League’s defeat, he was one of a thousand hostages transported to Italy as a guar- antee of good behaviour. His friendship with the young P. Scipio Aemilianus (later, the destroyer of Carthage in 146) leads, however, to a curious ambivalence towards Rome: at times, nostalgic for a free Greek past, at times almost a proponent of Roman mores. This can be seen, especially, in his lengthy – and somewhat schematic – account of the Roman constitution in book 6. Developing the Greek idea of the mixed constitution, he finds that Rome’s supposed balance of aristocratic, demo- cratic and monarchic elements makes it immune to the decline that affects other constitutions.

The position of the Greek world under Roman rule is crucial to much of the historiographical work that follows: not least to the Parallel Lives (and other historical essays, contained within his Moralia) of Plutarch with their merging of Roman and Greek virtues, or the Geography and lost History of Strabo (first century  to first century ) or the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century  to first century ), both seeking in different ways to reconcile the Greeks with Rome. The Egyptian Appian of Alexandria (second century ) took the history of different regions down to the point of integration within Rome, while the Jewish Josephus wrote both Jewish Antiquities (on the model of Dionysius of Halicarnassus) and an account of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66–70), in which he himself changed to the Roman side. Other historians themselves held high Roman office: the historian of Alexander, the Greek Arrian, was governor

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of Nicomedia, while the half-Greek Cassius Dio (second to third century ), author of a Roman history in eighty books written in Attic Greek, was a senator.

Dio’s ‘atticising’, characteristic of the broader literary and cultural movement known as the Second Sophistic, is also representative of a strand in Greek historiography that continues into late antiquity and beyond. Just as the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus (himself a Greek from Antioch) saw his Res Gestae as sum- ming up the whole of Graeco-Roman historiog- raphy, so a number of historians in Greek (often termed ‘classicising’) returned to earlier models. This number includes both fragmentary figures such as Priscus, Malchus, Eunapius of Sardis, or Olympiodorus (see Blockley, Fragmentary Classicising Historians) as well as Procopius’ accounts of the Persian, Vandalic and Gothic wars of the sixth-century emperor Justinian.

At the same time, however, Christian historiog- raphy, by foregrounding the story of the triumph of Christianity over all others, marked a significant departure. The effective founder of Christian historiography was Eusebius (third to fourth century ), bishop of Caesarea, apologist of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, and author of (among other works) a Life of Constantine, a chronicle, and a Church History. But there were other models of Christian ‘historical’ writing. Hagiography (i.e. the writing of saints’ lives) was initiated by Athanasius’ life of the pioneer of Egyptian monasticism, St Anthony (c.  360). A more eccentric model of historical writing, finally, is the Panarion (or ‘medicine chest’) of Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis on Cyprus: a history of eighty heresies (for the eighty concubines of the Song of Solomon), ‘exposing their unlawful deeds like poisons and toxic sub- stances, matching the antidotes with them at the same time’.

Further reading

Texts

Texts and translations of all the major surviving Greek historians are widely available (Herodotus in good Penguin, World’s Classics and University

of Chicago translations, Thucydides in a good Penguin translation); the only full translation of Polybius into English is that of the Loeb Classical Library. Excellent commentaries on Thucydides (by A. W. Gomme and others, and more recently by Simon Hornblower) and on Polybius (by F. W. Walbank) exist. Herodotus is less well served in English: Cambridge University Press have begun a series of commentaries (Flower and Marincola on book IX is already published), and a translation of the Italian Lorenzo Valla commen- taries is in progress for publication by Oxford University Press.

Fragments

The fragmentary Greek historians are collected in the monumental Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (1923–), initiated by Felix Jacoby. The organisation of this work is complex. Historians (a category interpreted broadly) are classed by genres. Jacoby’s original plan envisaged six parts, of which he completed the first three (in seventeen volumes of texts, commentaries and notes): (1) genealogy and mythography, (2) military polit- ical history (or Zeitgeschichte) and (3) horography (i.e. local histories) and ethnography. An individual writer is given a number (or, in some cases more than one: there are 856 in all). Then we are given their testimonia (i.e. ancient biographical details excerpted from other texts) and their fragments (in practice it is hard to ascertain where a fragment begins and ends: Jacoby’s text indicates his esti- mate by marking the ‘quotation’ with a more spaced typeface). Testimonia and fragments are given in numbered sequence as T1, F1 and so on, so that a reference to the first testimonium or frag- ment of Hecataeus would look as follows: FGrHist 1 T 1, or FGrHist 1 F 1.

Like the Forth Bridge, Jacoby’s work is being revised before it has even been finished. While part IV, ‘Biography and Antiquarian Literature’, is still in the course of publication, new versions of parts I–III are now being prepared, as Brill’s New Jacoby, with a facing translation and new com- mentary (under the general editorship of Ian Worthington). Jacoby’s original work is now also available electronically, with a three-volume index by Pierre Bonnechère. For an account of Jacoby’s

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