The Portable Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius (Portable Library)
Page 1
Table of Contents
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
HERODOTUS
From BOOK I - Lydia
From BOOK II
From BOOK VII - The Persian War after Marathon
BOOK VIII - The Persian War after Marathon (Continued)
THUCYDIDES
From BOOK I - The Beginnings
From BOOK II
From BOOK III
From BOOK VI - The War in Sicily
From BOOK VII - The Sicilian Disaster (413 B.C.)
XENOPHON
From BOOK I
From BOOK II
From BOOK III
From BOOK IV
POLYBIUS
From BOOK I - Introduction
From BOOK II - Aratus of Sicyon and the Achaean League
From BOOK VI - The Roman Constitution
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
Greek Historians
M.I. Finley was born in New York City and attended Syracuse and Columbia universities. He taught at New York’s City College and at Rutgers University, and since 1955 resided in England, where he was Professor of Ancient History and Master of Darwin College at Cambridge University. In 1971 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and in 1974 he received the Wolfson Literary Award for History. His other books include The Ancient Greeks, Aspects of Antiquity, The Ancient Economy, Democracy: Ancient and Modern; his Ancient Sicily is part of a three-volume History of Sicily, written with Denis Mack Smith. He edited many important volumes in ancient history, as well as the Ancient Culture and Society series. His most recent books included The Use and Abuse of History, The Olympic Games: The First Thousand Years, written with H. W Pleket, and Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. He died in 1986.
Each volume in The Viking Portable Library either presents a representative selection from the works of a single outstanding writer or offers a comprehensive anthology on a special subject. Averaging 700 pages in length and designed for compactness and readability, these books fill a need not met by other compilations. All are edited by distinguished authorities, who have written introductory essays and included much other helpful material.
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First published in the United States of America by
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First published in Great Britain by
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Reprinted 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966 (twice),
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Finley, Moses I. ed.
The portable Greek historians.
Bibliography: p. 22.
1. Greece—History—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title.
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INTRODUCTION
History in its root sense means inquiry. For a considerable time before it took on the specific, narrower meaning the word now has, and even long thereafter—we still say “natural history”—the stress was on the inquiry as such, regardless of subject matter, on the search for explanation and understanding. Man is a rational being: if he asks rational questions, he can, by the unaided efforts of his intellect, discover rational answers. But first he must discover that about himself. The Greeks did, in the seventh century B.C. (insofar as so abstract a notion can be dated at all), and thereby they established the greatest of their claims to immortality. Significantly, the inquiry was first directed to the most universal matters, the nature of being and the cosmos. Only later was if extended to man himself, his social relations and his past.
It was no accident that this profound intellectual revolution took place in the region the Greeks called Ionia (the west coast of Turkey). There they were in closest touch with the older cultures of the ancient Near East. Greek-speaking peoples first migrated into the lower Balkans by 2000 or 1900 B.C. and eventually spread eastward across the Aegean Sea (and later west to Sicily and southern Italy). Like all invaders, they adopted and adapted a variety of ideas and institutions from their new neighbours. How much they borrowed we are only beginning to. appreciate, as one after another the lost languages of the area are recovered, most recently Mycenaean Greek itself. In the course of centuries religious ideas, gods, myths and rituals, scientific and technological information found their way from Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrites, and other peoples of the Near East and were embodied in Greek ways of life and thought on a scale undreamed of by historians fifty or a hundred years ago.
Paradoxically, the more we learn about this process of diffusion and adaptation, the more astonishing is the originality of the Greeks. One need only read their earliest poetry or look at their archaic statues and vases to catch some of the genius. Then one turns to the Ionian intellectual revolution for another side of it, the spirit of rational inquiry. Without Babylonian mathematics and astronomy and metallurgy there could have been no Thales or Anaximander. But it was the Ionian Greeks, not their Babylonian forerunners, who first asked the critical questions about the earth and the stars and metals and matter. And so, too, with man himself and his, past. The older civilizations had their records and their chronicles, but the essential element of inquiry, of history, was lacking. The writers of these accounts, the late R. G. Collingwood pointed out, were “not writing history,” they were “writing religion”; they were not inquiring, they were recording “known facts for the information of persons to whom they are not known, but who, as worshippers of the god in question, ought to know the deeds whereby he has made himself manifest”1 It was the Ionians, again, who f
irst thought to ask questions in a systematic way about the supposedly known facts, in particular about their meaning in rational, human terms.
The magnitude and boldness of this innovation must not be underestimated. Today we too easily assume, without giving it much thought, that a concern with history is a natural human activity. All men have memories and “live in the past” to a greater or less extent. Is it not natural that they should be interested in their ancestors and the past of their community, people, nation? Yes, but such an interest is not necessarily the same thing as history. It can be satisfied entirely by myth, and, in fact, that is how most of mankind has customarily dealt with the past (and, in a very real sense, still does). Myth serves admirably to provide the necessary continuity of life, not only with the past but with nature and the gods as well. It is rich and vivid, it is concrete and yet full of symbolic meanings and associations, it explains institutions and rites and feelings, it is instructive—above all, it is real and true and immediately comprehensible. It served the early Greeks perfectly.
When myth was finally challenged, by the Ionian enlightenment, the attack was directed not to the events and the stories, such as the details of the Trojan War, but to the mythic view of life and the cosmos, to its theogony and divine interventions. “Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men: theft, adultery, and deceit.” So runs the famous protest by Xenophanes of Colophon, who was born about 570 B.C. Such criticism helped bring about a new cosmology and a new ethics; it did not, of itself, lead to the study of history. The skeptics stripped the traditional accounts of irrational elements and contradictions, but they neither doubted the remaining hard core nor tried to extend it by research of their own. They historicized myth, they did not write history. A remarkable example will be found in the first fifteen chapters of Thucydides. Here is a rapid review of the evolution of Greek society in which not a single trace of the mythic conception survives: the gods have disappeared completely, and with them fate and fortune and every other extra-human agency. In their place Thucydides put common-sense human causes and impulses, and the result looks so much like history that many people today, even historians who should know better, praise it as a great piece of historical writing. In fact what Thucydides did was to take the common Greek traditions, divest them of what he con sidered to be their false trappings, and reformulate them in a brilliantly coherent picture by thinking hard about them, using as his sole tools what he knew about the world of his own day, its institutions and its psychology.
It takes more than skepticism about old traditions to produce historical investigation. A positive stimulus is needed, and again Ionia provided the starting point. That part of the Greek world was not only in closest contact with other peoples, eventually it was also subjected to them, first to the Lydians and then to the Persians. The Greeks thought it was important to know something about their overlords, and so they investigated the subject and wrote books putting together the geography, antiquities, customs, and bits of history of the nations with whom they were concerned. Sigoificantly, this had never been done before: the prevailing view, as any reader of the Old Testament must realize, was totally ethnocentric. Nations other than one’s own had no intrinsic interest. Significantly, too, the Greek innovation was for a long time a restricted one: they were not attracted to ethnography as such, or history as such, but to the manners and institutions of the two nations with whom their lives were now closely bound. The Greeks had no myths to account for the past of the Lydians and Persians. That is why their first steps toward historical writing—for these works were not histories in any proper sense—were about foreign nations, not about themselves.
None of this writing survives apart from scattered quotations. Its general character, however, is clear enough from the first half of Herodotus’ book. Herodotus, born early in the fifth century B.C. in the city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, planned a periodos on an unprecedented scale. Stimulated no doubt by the Persian Wars, which demonstrated that thinking Greeks must widen their horizons, Herodotus decided to extend the inquiry to more peoples and places. He proposed to investigate as much as he could personally, to confront and cross-question a variety of expert witnesses, and to report faithfully and accurately what he learned, distinguishing for his audience between first- and second-hand information, between probable and improbable (or impossible) accounts, between what he believed to be true and what he disbelieved but repeated because it had significance nonetheless. Every reader can judge for himself how successfully Herodotus carried out his program. But, had he done no more, it is unlikely that we should now have this opportunity: in the end, his writings would have disappeared like those of Hecataeus and the others, and Herodotus would be just another name today, the author of a few surviving fragments of books called Lydiaca, Aegypturca, Scythica, and so on.
We know virtually nothing about the life of Herodotus, and therefore we can only infer when and why he made a radical shift in his program. It seems most likely that this happened in Athens, toward the middle of the century. There Herodotus began a new inquiry, one utterly unlike any which had been attempted before. He determined to reconstruct, by personal investigation, the generation of the Persian Wars. In the process, he assembled much material about still earlier generations of Greek history, and he tied his account to the mythical tradition, which he rationalized and historicized as well as he could. The final product is an amalgam, for Herodotus did not abandon his earlier work. The Aegyptiaca and Scythica appear as long digressions; the Lydians and Persians have their story woven in with Greek affairs, but they are also given space for customs and manners; and the Greeks themselves appear in semi-mythical form at times (with unmistakable influences from epic and tragedy). Yet the work as a whole is surely a history.
No twentieth-century reader can really visualize Herodotus at work, under conditions which make both his effort and the final result a miracle of human enterprise. Written records did not exist, for all practical purposes, and few men who had any direct knowledge of the Persian Wars (let alone the still earlier years) could have been alive when he began this part of his study. Everything—the politics and the battles and the ravaging of cities and the intrigues—had to be rescued from oral tradition, as it was preserved and transmitted among the great families of Athens or the priests of Delphi or the kings of Sparta. These traditions were fragmentary, unreliable, self-serving, and often contradictory. That he nevertheless undertook so difficult and unprecedented a task implies some overpowering impulse, and I have little doubt that it was a political one, in the broadest sense of that term. Democratic Athens, under Pericles, was asserting itself with more and more pressure in the Greek world, offering leadership and military security, but at the same time demanding, and if necessary compelling, tribute and a measure of dependence. Difficult problems were raised—political problems which were, as always, at heart moral questions. Discussion was lively and often heated; out of it the sophists, and later Socrates, created the new discipline of ethics and, as a subdivision, political theory. Herodotus was no philosopher, he was not even a systematic thinker; but he was no less sensitive than the sophists and the tragedians to the great moral issues, and he made a unique contribution to the discussion. He found a moral justification for Athenian dominance in the role she had played in the Persian Wars, and he sought to capture that story and fix it before its memory was lost.
Herodotus had a most subtle mind, and the story he told was complex, full of shadings and paradoxes and qualifications. In traditional religion, for example, he stood somewhere between outright skepticism and the murky piety of Aeschylus. His political vision was Athenian and democratic, but it lacked any trace of chauvinism. He was committed, but not for one moment did that release him from the high obligation of understanding. His great discovery was that one could uncover moral problems and moral truths in history, in the concrete data of experience, in a discourse which was neither freely imaginative like
that of the poets nor abstract like that of the philosophers. That is what history meant to Herodotus; nothing could be more wrong-headed than the persistent and seemingly indestructible legend of Herodotus the charmingly naïve storyteller.
It did not follow as a self-evident and automatic consequence that the new discovery was at once welcomed or that histories and historians arose on all sides to advance the new discipline. The Athenians appreciated Herodotus, obviously, and yet a full generation was to elapse before anyone thought it a good idea to write a complete history of Athens, and even then the step was taken by a foreigner, Hellanicus of Lesbos, and he was an annalist, a chronicler, not a historian, and he continued to repeat the traditional myths alongside more recent, verifiable history. Other Greeks naturally resented the phil-Athenianism of Herodotus and his version of their role in the Persian Wars, but they did not rush to reply by writing their own histories. They objected and they challenged a detail here and there, and they eventually pinned the label “Father of Lies” to him, a late echo of which can still be read in Plutarch’s essay On the Malice of Herodotus. The new discipline, in short, remained highly problematic. In all honesty men could doubt whether it was possible to know the past, and whether the effort to find out was worth the trouble.
One man who read Herodotus carefully and fully appreciated his achievement (and the inherent difficulties) was Thucydides. He was probably in his late twenties when the second decisive struggle in Greek history broke out in 431 B.C., the war between Athens and Sparta, and he decided immediately that he would be its historian. Apart from the acute prognostic sense which Thucydides revealed thereby, his decision was a critical one for the future of Greek historical writing in general. There could be no more complete turning of one’s back on the past than this, the idea of writing a history of an event which lay in the future. The war lasted twenty-seven years and Thucydides survived it, possibly by five years. All through it he worked away at his book with a remarkable singleness of purpose, collecting evidence, sifting, checking and double-checking, writing and revising, and all the time thinking hard about the problems: about the war itself, its causes and issues, about Pericles, about the Athenian Empire, about politics and man’s behaviour as a political animal.