Term Paper on "Greek Historiography"

Term Paper 4 pages (1651 words) Sources: 5 Style: Turabian

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Greek Historiography

History as a discipline begins with the Greeks, notably with Horodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus is known as the father of history, changing what had previously been largely an interest in myths and legends into an interest in the causes and consequences of actual events. Herodotus wrote the first history that could be analyzed as history and not as merely writing down what others had said.

What passed for history before Herodotus was myth as embodied in accounts such as the Iliad, a record of the Trojan War. Ernst Breisach finds that there was a historical foundation for the Iliad, but still the poem cannot be considered a history. For one thing, there were no dates in the poem, no clear sense of when the story took place, and so no sense of continuity as history would require. Breisach finds the same idea expressed by Glaucus.

He notes that Homer's epic was created perhaps four to five centuries after the era of the real Trojan War, while the epic itself was not written down until two centuries after composition. The Homeric epics did have an effect, however, creating an appreciation of the past that would lead to actual history being written. The form and content "all enhanced the reverence in which listeners held the epics ads the records of the distant past and the respect they gave the bards as the teachers about the past."

In the Greek world into which Herodotus was born, prose writing was becoming more and more common for technical works on such subjects as philosophy, law and politics, and science and technology. The Greeks were interested in their past, but what passed for history was really a stock of myths and legends which were thought to be true. The interest was not historical in the sense we use the term, as an inquiry into the facts of such events as the Trojan War or any other occurrence or period. It was something quite different from that, a form of Hellenic or regional consciousness and pride and a search for community solidarity. The past could reinforce these social elements, and the old tales could in fact be revised when needed by new historical developments or political and social changes. This task was in fact made simpler by the great range and quantity of the available myths and by the imprecision that was inevitable I oral transmission. At the end of the sixth century, the Greeks were subjected to the overlordship of the barbarian kingdoms first of Lydia and then Persia. They naturally became curious about these people, and the Greek myths did not satisfy this curiosity. As a result, books were written to provide the desired information (though it was often misinformation), including geographical data, descriptions of social and religious customs, and in a fragmentary way some historical data. The writers of this new type of work were known as logographers:

Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, neither among the Greeks nor among the other nations they knew, first in the breach of ethnocentrism and then in the destructive backlash of their own traditions.

The ahistorical if not anti-historical bent of the Greeks was also noted by Oswald Spengler, and for Spengler the history produced by human beings is always related to their level of development and their relationship to nature:

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.

Spengler agrees that for the Greeks, history was not a process and was as static as the myths that history would come to replace:

For Herodotus and Sophocles... The past is subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in its structure -- in the last analysis, of such stuff as mouths are made of -- whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries of millennia.

The work of Herodotus is described by M.I. Finley as a great leap forward. Herodotus, says Finley, extended the scope of the logography to take in a much wider area, including the Egyptians and the Scythians along with the Lydians and the Persians. He also had the idea of trying to control the mass of accumulated data through personal investigations on the spot by making a series of quick visits to all the places, by a rational analysis of the information assembled, and by using the royal annals of Assyria, Persia, and Egypt to attempt to establish an exact chronology covering at least the previous 100 to 150 years. Herodotus then went further and decided that he would write the history of the Persian Wars:

The daring of this undertaking is astonishing. Nearly a generation had gone by since the wars had ended. Scarcely any documentation was available in writing. Yet Herodotus set about reconstructing the story in all its detail, by drawing on the memory of survivors and of men in the next generation who remembered the tales they had been told.

From the beginning, though, Herodotus experienced both praise and criticism for his undertaking, and he has been cited as "Father of Histories -- Father of Lies" through the ages as a result. Finley states that to this day, "Herodotus is often badly misjudged as if he were no more than a mere story-teller with a charming style and boundless credulity."

Herodotus and Thucydides are often linked because the two taken together show the development of history as a discipline. Thucydides imitated Herodotus to a degree but also differed with Herodotus in a number of ways. Herodotus thought he was writing for his contemporaries, whie Thucydides believed he was writing for the ages. Thucydides lived c.460?c.400 BC and was an Athenian. He is considered by many to be the greatest of the ancient Greek historians, and his work had a profound influence on the development of historical writing. Although he was a relative of the great soldier and statesman Cimon, Thucydides was also an admirer of Cimon's political opponent, Pericles. He served as a general in 424 but was banished from Athens in that same year for his failure to protect Amphipolis from the Spartans. He returned from exile after the war ended in 404. Thucydides began writing his History of the Peloponnesian War in 431 when the great war broke out. In some ways, he was as much a journalist as a historian. He believed that the war would prove epochal and that his account would possess permanent value because such significant conflicts were bound to occur in future epochs "so long as human nature remained the same," and he was clearly correct in these assessments. The speeches he inserted into his history, brilliantly conceived and written, probe deeply into human motivation and explain the policy of states in terms of human psychology. Thucydides was the first Greek to write contemporary history but was deeply indebted to Herodotus for his conception of the fundamental importance of historical writing. Unlike Herodotus, however, who considered it his duty to repeat what people said without necessarily subscribing to it, Thucydides made every effort to authenticate the facts he reported, and he shows unusual sophistication in his awareness of the way that witnesses often misremember what they have seen. Generally, his History is remarkable for its objectivity, although his treatment of Sparta and Athens shows that he greatly admired the qualities attributed to the… READ MORE

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