History Homework

Early Evolution of Greek Historiography

Cilia Joseph

4085948

HIST501 HE#1

March 23, 2016

The modern conception of history and historiography owes a great deal to Ancient Greece. From its roots in oral epics to the written accounts of life in the mighty poleis, Greek historiography saw its roots in Homeric poetry and evolved into the grand histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, all of which laid the foundations of what history is today. Greek history was rudimentary, at best, sometimes lacking precise chronology and a clear cohesive narrative, but it was the birthplace of modern historiography in the Western world. Herodotus’s Histories, written in 440 BC, was the first known thorough analysis of the past. [awkward] Because of this, he is known as the father of history. [what is the thesis of this essay? I know the essay is about Greek historiography, but that is the topic of the essay – the thesis tells your reader what the essay will demonstrate, and because there is no thesis, your reader wonders what the essay is really about. The thesis answers the question: “so what?” so what does it all mean? According to your last sentence, the essay is about Herodotus, right?]

At the root of Greek historiography is oral tradition. The epic poems that were told by bards throughout taverns and social gatherings were grandiose stories of the past that involved heroes, monsters, gods, and dramatic battles. These stories intended to entertain through oral performance, being passed down over time and across the lands, and were tailored to the audience. Though they are certainly fictitious, they still gave a glimpse into the world of Mycenaean Greece between the late Bronze Age and the rise of the polis. In the 8th century BC the bard Homer, whom many argue was actually a group of bards, gathered these epic poems about the Trojan War and wrote composed lines of verse which were eventually written down as the Iliad and the Odyssey.[footnoteRef:1] [1: Martin West, “The Homeric Question Today,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155, no. 4 (December 2011): 383. Accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208780.]

Though the stories were rich with mythology, there was plenty of physical evidence to suggest some truth behind the places, people, and battles behind the poems. From this, the Greeks could use the poems as views into their people’s past [awkward], and reflect on them as a heroic time before the Dark Ages. In Why Homer Matters, Adam Nicolson explains that Homer’s poems “are the myths of the origin of Greek consciousness, not as a perfect but as a complex, uneasy thing; as a civilization, what emerged in Greece was distinct from both the northern steppe lands of the Bronze Age and the autocratic bureaucracies of the Near East, and fused qualities of both.”[footnoteRef:2] Despite this, Homer and the bards of Mycenaean Greece were not historians since this form of “heroic history” did not offer any critical thinking or analysis of the past; its main goal was still entertainment. [of course, Homer was not “doing” history. His aristocratic audience already knew the stories and so Homer “used” history as a backdrop against which he could “sing” about the virtues associated with a warrior elite, and for Homer, as for all Greeks, virtue was everything] [2: Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters (New York: Henry Colt & Company, 2014), 2.]

With the rise of the polis after 800 BC, the Greek world began to grow a greater sense of rational organization [awkward], and with it, a sense of time. A need for continuity developed.

Hesiod wrote the Theogony in the early 700’s BC as a genealogy for the gods, as well as a way to explain how the cosmos were was formed from chaos. In it, he created His five ages of human history. This, like the Homeric poems, was still not a form of actual history, but rather an example of critical Greek inquiry into the past slowly emerging and evolving. Hesiod’s work, like Homer’s, still did not have dates, but unlike Homer’s poems it [it = what?] did show an effort to make reference to a time frame or continuity. It wasn’t until roughly 500 BC that the Greeks began to form a concept of time, most likely because, unlike their predecessors of the heroic age, life in the polis “relied on the continuity of institutions, rules, laws, contracts, and expectations.”[footnoteRef:3] Basic attempts to rationally tie the past to the present were made by Hecataeus of Miletus, the Lydian Xanthus, and Hellanicus of Lesbos; all three wrote chronological accounts of the past through genealogy records or sequences of events related to natural events that would be remembered. City-states and communities were still entirely too fragmented and separated to follow a similar time-scale. [awkward] Because of this, a chronological system is an important foundation of true historiography. [3: Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10.]

Herodotus of Halicarnassus approached this in an entirely different way. Around 425 BC he wrote his Histories, a series of nine books that covers a vast amount of material. He traveled the known world with inquiries into the past, writing about cultures, traditions, politics, and many other aspects of other cultures. Where past writers focused more on geography or family lineage, Herodotus focused on the human experience. Though his books he discussed the events behind many different cultures and places, it [it = what?] was all tied together by his coverage of the Great Persian War. Whereas the Greek gods played a role in the epic poems and genealogies, Herodotus analyzed decisions and events based on human choice, rather than the previously written influence and intervention of the gods.

What sets Herodotus even further apart from his contemporaries and predecessors is that he brought critical thinking into his work, and an objective analysis of the past. This, in essence, was the birth of true historiography. In fact, his Histories opens with Herodotus proclaiming it “the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.”[footnoteRef:4] While he was not the first to write a narrative of the past nor the first to write the accounts of travels and other cultures, he was the first to bring it together so well with a strong framework. This inspired other Greeks to write about historical events. [4: Herodotus, 1.1.0.]

The next important step in Greek historiography came from Thucydides [dates?]. His eight-part History of the Peloponnesian War covered most of the long war between Sparta and Athens which was from 431-404 BC. At the onset of the war, he felt the need to chronicle it, and felt that the Spartans would be driven to fight over their fear of Athens growing too powerful.[footnoteRef:5] [awkward] Where Herodotus covered the Persian War with lots of detours about customs and cultures, Thucydides’ work focused on the decisions, consequences, and battles between Sparta, Athens, and their allies. Herodotus contributed to a cultural history, and Thucydides was more political. Herodotus wrote about the grand triumph of a united Greece fighting off the overwhelming Persian forces, but the Peloponnesian War was about the exact opposite: a divided Greece that nearly destroyed itself. [5: Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War, (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 45.]

Though Herodotus and Hellanicus used inscriptions and documents to support their work, but in his History 4.118 Thucydides quotes an actual verbatim quotation of a Greek alliance. [awkward] Though he does not use many, the close citation at 4.118 is indeed an innovation not just for Thucydides but in all surviving Greek historiography.[footnoteRef:6] [6: Robin Lane Fox, “Thucydides and Documentary History,” Classical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2010): 13. Accessed March 22, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0009838809990413]

Thucydides also relied on speeches in his work, some thirty-forty of them. The speeches he included in the book were a mixture of “what was said, could have been said, or should have been said.”[footnoteRef:7] Though his coverage of the Peloponnesian War is the only detailed account left, Thucydides died seven years before the war’s end. As an Athenian general, he added his own testimonies alongside other eyewitness accounts. This was yet another way he contributed greatly to what modern historiography is today. [7: Breisach, 17.]

With the Persian and Peloponnesian wars over, there were no epic battles for Greek historians to focus on. For quite some time, they had the opportunity of writing about the day-to-day life of citizens in the poleis, and the workings of democracy. Cratippus, Theopompus, Xenophon, and Ephorus all sought to emulate Thucydides in writing contemporary histories based on politics and tying it all together to a grand epic clash. The 4th century BCE, however, offered them no such opportunity, and they disregarded the opportunity to write about social, economic, and cultural issues like Herodotus. These histories do, however, give plenty of insight and details in the workings of Athens as a city-state. This is fortunate for Athenian history, but does little to shed light on what life was like in any other polis. When Alexander of Macedonia came to Greece, historians once again found contemporary events to make write about.

Greek historiography continued through the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and well into the rise of the Roman Republic. Roman historians, influenced by their Greek predecessors, would go on to write about the infamous Roman conquests and wars. Where the Greeks failed in method, the Romans perfected it. The Greeks created the model of history, as it is known today; they turned a general inquiry about the world into inquiry about past events, and built it into the story of the human world.[footnoteRef:8] The works of early Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, which drew upon the legacy of oral tradition and Homeric epic poetry, laid the groundwork for historiography and the critical analysis of human history. [8: Breisach, Ibid., 38.]

Bibliography

Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Fox, R.L. “Thucydides and Documentary History.” Classical Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2011): 11-29.

Accessed March 22, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0009838809990413.

Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), Perseus Digital Library.

Accessed March 19, 2016. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126.

Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

Nicolson, Adam. Why Homer Matters. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2014.

West, Martin. “The Homeric Question Today.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155, no. 4. (December 2011): 383-393.

Accessed March 19, 2016. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208780

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