The Portable Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius (Portable Library)
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The book was not finished: that is obvious at a glance, and the way it breaks off more than six years before the end of the war leaves us with something of a puzzle. Possibly Thucydides found himself in a bitter impasse, unable to resolve to his own satisfaction either the general problems of politics, which concerned him more and more as the war continued, or the more technical questions of how to present to the public what he thought and what he had learned. The book is filled with tension, not merely the external tensions inevitable in so long and difficult a war, but also the inner conflicts of the author, as he tried to fight through the mass of facts and the complex moral issues which became obsessive with him, to a basic understanding of politics and ethics. He certainly did not abandon his life work in the year in which the manuscript suddenly stops. There are things in the earliest portions which could not have been said until after the end of the war in 404 B.C. There are unmistakable evidences of rethinking and rewriting. Very probably the Funeral Oration and Pericles’ last speech were among the latest sections Thucydides wrote, and they (together with the so-called Melian Dialogue at the end of the fifth book) sum up the whole generation as Thucydides saw it at the end of his life.
From the standpoint of the history of historical writing, Thucydides’ political ideas are perhaps not so interesting as his technique. To begin with, he set out consciously to overcome certain weaknesses in Herodotus: hence the insistence on careful checking of eyewitness testimony, on precise chronology, on the total elimination of “romance” from his work, on a rational analysis which has no patience with oracles and supernatural interventions and divine punishments. His account of the great plague in Athens, for example, is a model of reporting; Thucydides even equipped himself with the most advanced medical knowledge, and his technical language and accuracy on this subject are unparalleled among lay writers in the whole of antiquity. All this is so impressive and has such an aura of earnestness and sincerity that, even though we have no independent evidence for virtually anything Thucydides tells us, we believe him without hesitation. The same cannot be said of any other historian in the ancient world.
It is no underestimation of these remarkable qualities in Thucydides to say that none of this—whatever its worth sub specie aeternitatis—locates him in the development of Greek historiography. Our admiration, however warranted, tends to divert attention from the crucial fact that his subject was contemporary, that he was writing about things which were happening under his eyes, or in sight of others whom he could cross-examine, not about events of the literally dead past. Therefore in his very explicit statement of his working methods and principles there is not one word about research into documents or traditions; there are only the rules to be followed in eliciting accurate information from eyewitnesses. When Thucydides did make a brief excursion into earlier times, as in the first fifteen chapters or in the sketch of developments from the point at which Herodotus’ history breaks off to the beginning of the account of the Peloponnesian War, his motives were either to justify his own work or to provide certain necessary background materials, nothing more. They were not history, either in Thucydides’ sense or in ours; they were introductory to his proper subject. Only contemporary history could be really known and grasped; if one worked hard enough and with sufficient intelligence and honesty, one could know and write the history of one’s own age: that, we may say, was Thucydides’ answer to the doubters, to the men who challenged Herodotus and the validity of his enterprise.
But what about the past? If one is interested in it, then what? In a famous and unique digression, Thucydides set out at some length to prove that, contrary to the common and official view, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had assassinated Hipparchus near the end of the previous century, were not the liberators of Athens from tyranny, because it was Hippias who was the elder son of Pisistratus, and therefore he (and not his brother Hipparchus) was the reigning tyrant at that time. There has been much speculation about Thucydides’ reasons for this digression, which adds nothing to his story, and the most likely explanation is that he inserted it, at a late date, in reply to something—perhaps the publication of Hellanicus’ chronicle of Athens—which annoyed him. His proof, which is perfectly sound, rested on two dedicatory inscriptions. This is an astonishing performance precisely because of its irrelevance, for it is one of the very few instances in which he quoted a document of any kind. Nothing else in the work shows so decisively what a great historian of the past Thucydides could have been. Here, he seems to be saying in contemptuous anger, is the way to go about writing the history of the past, if you think it is worth the bother.
Thucydides himself emphatically did not think it was. He shared the firm conviction, general among Greek thinkers, that mere knowledge of facts for their own sake was pointless (and sometimes harmful). Curiosity, a desire to know, had to lead to understanding, virtue, action. Of course, it is impossible to guess just what the young Thucydides had in mind when he decided, in 431 B.C., to become the war’s historian. Perhaps he had no clear idea himself. But the time came—and I believe very quickly—when he set himself the goal of uncovering, through the story of his own generation, the essentials of man’s behaviour, his political behaviour. That would be the “possession for all time” he would give to the world. And that, I suggest, is why Thucydides abandoned the past for the present. Human nature and human behaviour were for him essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as in another. The good and the bad, the rational and the passionate and irrational, the moral and the immoral, the attractions and excesses of power—these were always present and operative, in various combinations. Therefore they could best be brought to light, where they could be studied and known, in the contemporary world rather than in the bygone generations which one could never really know. For Thucydides the choice was made even simpler and more obvious by the Peloponnesian War, which, he took pains to demonstrate in his introduction, was the greatest power struggle in Greek history.
By moving from history, in its narrower sense of a narrative of the war, to the basic political questions, Thucydides set himself an unattainable goal. It was difficult enough for him to reach the depth of understanding he desired. There remained the equally difficult problem of finding ways to communicate to his readers what he had learned. Merely to write the history of the Peloponnesian War, no matter how accurately and completely, would not do: that would add up to nothing more than a succession of concrete events, and how could the general ideas emerge from this mass of facts, each a particular and unique datum? To be sure, there is no explicit statement by Thucydides to say that he thought in those terms; nevertheless, the book he wrote seems to me to suffer no other explanation.
To begin with, there is the question of his selection of materials. All historical writing, like any form of rational discourse, must choose the relevant and discard the rest, must group and organize data, establish connections and patterns. But very often Thucydides’ exclusions transcend the limits of the permissible by any definition of history that the modern world would recognize. For example, he wrote a long analysis of the civil disturbance (stasis) in Corcyra and thereafter he ignored this major factor of fifth-century Greek history almost completely, to the extent of not mentioning a number of other occurrences at all, not even those which had a demonstrably important bearing on the war. The balance is equally lopsided with the men in the war: instead of the expected proportions, according to Thucydides’ judgement of the significance of the various generals and politicians, the method tends to be all or nothing. Of the popular leaders in Athens after the death of Pericles, only Cleon is given a role; the others receive no attention and are sometimes not even named. This cannot be dismissed as carelessness. Thucydides was too intelligent and serious a writer; we must assume that a principle of selection was at work, and I find it in his search for general ideas. Having demonstrated the nature and meaning of stasis, or the character and function of the demagogue, he saw no necessity to report other instances of th
e same general phenomenon. One good example was sufficient for his purposes; the rest would be useless repetition.
It is to be noticed, further, how the ideal demagogue is portrayed, in the shape of Cleon. Although Cleon was the decisive personality in Athens for at least five years, among the most crucial in the war, he is allowed but three full-dress appearances, much like the character in a play. Thucydides required no more in order to fix the image of Cleon completely, and he left everything else out. We are not told anything about Cleon’s rise to power, or about his financial measures, or about his program in any proper sense. And characteristically, one of the three appearances is in the Mitylene debate, in which Cleon was outvoted in the assembly. Speeches, often in antithetical pairs, were Thucydides’ favorite device, and his most problematical one. Despite his explicit statement about his method with respect to speeches, they have preplexed and upset commentators from antiquity to our own day. It is simply undeniable that all the speeches are in the same style, Thucydides’ own, and that some of the remarks could not have been made by the speakers in question. Worse still, in the Mitylene debate, whether Cleon and Diodotus are accurately reported in substance or not, the whole tone is false. From what Thucydides himself said in introducing the two speeches, his choice of these two out of the many which were actually delivered that day in the assembly distorted the actual issues, and distorted them badly. Thucydides was surely not unaware of the effect he was creating—that would be too stupid—and therefore we have still another instance of how his interest in general ideas prevailed over mere reporting, and, in that sense, over historical accuracy. When it comes, finally, to the Melian Dialogue (which I have not included among the selections), history goes by the boards altogether. For whatever reason, Thucydides chose that point in his story to write a little sophistical piece, thinly disguised as a secret discussion between two groups of unnamed negotiators, in which he played with abstract ideas of justice and empire, right and might, freedom and slavery.
In the end we are confronted with two different, and almost unrelated, kinds of writing brought together under one cover as Thucydides’ “history” of the Peloponnesian War. On the one hand there is the painstaking, precise, almost impersonal reporting, filled with minor details arranged in strict chronology. And on the other hand there are the many attempts, varied in form and tone, to get beneath and behind the facts, to uncover and bring into clear focus the realities of politics, the psychology of political behaviour, the rights and wrongs of power. These are, by and large, much the more interesting and enduring sections of the work, and the most personal (though rarely in the naive dress of outright editorializing). They are the most dramatic, in form more than in content; they are the freest, in their portrayal of a few men and events and their exclusion of many others, in their accent, and even, I may say, in their preaching. They represent the Thucydides who restricted Cleon to three appearances; the other is the historian who solemnly put down the names and patronymics of endless obscure commanders and ship captains.
None of this is said in criticism of Thucydides. Few historians have goaded and whipped themselves so merci lessly for the better part of a lifetime to achieve complete accuracy and at the same time to discover and communicate those truths which would give value to, which would justify, their effort. I do not believe Thucydides ever came to the point of being satisfied that he had found the answers, either to the great questions of political life or to the more philosophical one of moving from the concrete and particular event to the general truth. Increasingly, however, he seemed to feel himself impelled away from narrow historical presentation. The paradox is that to give meaning to history he tended to abandon history. If the historian, by definition, concentrates on the concrete event, then Thucydides, for all his advance over his predecessor in techniques of investigation and checking, was a poorer historian, or at least less a historian, than Herodotus. It is plain that he could have been a greater one—I do not speak of charm and elegance of style —but he chose otherwise. And his reasons, which I have indicated, were beyond reproach.
No Greek again undertook a task so difficult and unrewarding. The surviving histories after Thucydides number less than a dozen, but we know the names of nearly a thousand writers of history, of one sort or another, and all the evidence leaves no doubt that not one of them approached Thucydides in intellectual rigour or insight. At least five men in the middle or second half of the fourth century wrote continuations of Thucydides’ history. One work survives, Xenophon’s Hellenica, and it is very unreliable, tendentious, dishonest, dreary to read, and rarely illuminating on broader issues. Such talents as Xenophon had lay elsewhere, and that is why in this volume he is represented not by the Hellenica but by the Anabasis, the long story of the expedition of some ten thousand Greek mercenaries into the interior of the Persian Empire in support of an unsuccessful palace revolt, and of their difficult and exciting retreat. Xenophon was an officer on this march, and his account is superb. That kind of contemporary history he could master, but not the broader canvas.
Probably some, and perhaps all four, of the continuators of Thucydides were better historians than Xenophon. That is to say, they were more accurate, more penetrating in their analysis of events, and more skilful in combining and relat ing movements in various parts of the Greek world. But no more. We have no reason to believe that they appreciated the real problems of historiography which Thucydides saw, or that they really understood what troubled Thucydides and drove him to re-examine his ideas and his methods over and over again. Nor did the so-called Atthidographers, the six men more or less contemporary with them who wrote—compiled, rather—lengthy chronicles of Athens, year by year, in which the mythological age received the same attention, on the same level and in the same tone, as the historical era proper. Thucydides saw in the study of contemporary history a road to understanding. Those who came after generally lowered their sights to far lesser goals: local patriotism, object lessons for politicians, elementary moralizing, and, above all, entertainment, high or low. The quality of their work, even at its best, was no better than their purposes deserved.
From Xenophon in the middle of the fourth century B.C. to Polybius two hundred years later, nothing survives. Our knowledge of these two centuries has suffered much as a result, but it is hardly conceivable that the art (or science) of history has lost anything of value. It is perhaps curious that the career of Alexander the Great failed to stimulate anything better than it did, memoirs written by several men closely associated with him and a large and constantly growing body of legend.2 But then, neither did Napoleon; his campaigns produced great novels, not great histories. After the fifth century Greek politics lacked the epic element which nourished Herodotus and Thucydides, and it was Rome which in the end provided the stimulus for the only Greek historian who was in any sense a worthy successor. Polybius also obeyed an impulse which was political, in his case stated much more explicitly. How did Rome succeed in conquering and dominating the world in so short a time? To answer that he produced a huge work, nothing less than a history of the “world,” that is to say, of both Greek and Roman affairs, from the middle of the third century on.
Polybius was a good historian in many ways. If he was not of the calibre of Thucydides, I attribute that as much to his time as to his personal capacities. His expressed intentions and methods of work were sound, but his performance is often slovenly and inaccurate, his political analysis is very shallow, he is flagrantly partisan, and he repeatedly descends to the rhetorical tricks and sensationalism which he does not hesitate to censure severely in his predecessors. Nevertheless, he belongs to the great tradition of Greek historians because he, too, insisted that history must be instructive and that politics is its proper and serious subject, with the stress on the contemporary (it is noteworthy that his excuse for going back several generations is essentially aesthetic: every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end); and because, within his limitations, he felt the danger of submergin
g the central problems and issues in the mass of concrete events. He editorialized all the time, so that no reader could possibly miss his points, and he digressed at length in one pivotal book, the sixth, in which he described the Roman constitution, explained and exemplified the theory of the cycle of governmental forms, and, with understandable caution, suggested that Rome would not escape this inevitable movement. Once again history failed a Greek historian. In order to demonstrate the cycles, which, if they are anything, are a historical phenomenon, Polybius made not the slightest attempt to write history. Instead, he gave a purely speculative account, of a kind long familiar to Greek philosophers from whom he borrowed it, into which he worked a number of comparative illustrations, inadequate, inconsistent, and all floating in the air, without historical context or concreteness.
Historians continued to write in Greek for centuries after Polybius. A few of them are not without interest—Diodorus, who used scissors and paste to compose a universal history; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who, at the end of the first century B.C., wrote a voluminous Roman Antiquities; Arrian; and Dio. Cassius—but they belong essentially to Roman history, and, for all their effort and their knowledge of the past, they did not advance the art of history one bit. Nothing new will be learned from them about this subject. Only Plutarch was genuinely creative and original, and his kind of biographical writing brushes history very lightly. His interests were ethical and psychological. His selection of events, his organization of the material he chose, and his assessments—in short, his portraits—often came out of history (but often, too, from myth). They are live, real, profound, moral; but they remain abstractions from the past, not the history of a period or a career, not even biographies, in the historian’s sense. There is a simple test: one need only try to re-create either fourth-century Athenian politics or Demosthenes’ role in it from Plutarch’s life of Demosthenes. 3