by M. I. Finley
The second half of the fifth century B.C. has been called the Greek age of enlightenment. The parallel is tempting, not least in the view of history: there are the same dissatisfaction with the prevailing mythical accounts of the past, the same insistence on a strictly rational explanation of events, the same feeling that a proper study of history could be illuminating. But the eighteenth-century enlightenment was followed, at once, by the emergence of modem historiography, with its technical refinements, its demand for absolute accuracy, its unflagging search for more and more evidence, its vast scale of investigation and interests. History became a discipline and its study a profession. Not so in ancient Greece. In biology, mathematics, and astronomy, in grammar and rhetoric, great work of systematic investigation and classification still lay ahead of the Greeks when the fifth century came to an end. Herodotus and Thucydides, however, led nowhere. What came after them was less systematic, less accurate, less serious, less professional. The fathers of history produced a stunted, sickly stock, weaker in each successive generation apart from a rare sport like Polybius.
It is not easy to explain the different outcomes of the two enlightenments; it is altogether impossible until we rid ourselves of the assumption that the study of history is a natural, inherent, inevitable kind of human activity. That few Greeks, if any, took this for granted is immediately apparent from the regularity with which most historians opened their works by justifying themselves, their efforts, and the particular subjects they chose. Utility or pleasure: that was how they customarily posed the alternative. Those who aimed at the latter were defeated before they began. Poetry was too deeply entrenched in Greek life, and, when the highest forms were epic and tragedy, both “historical,” there was no chance for history unless it could demonstrate its value in other than aesthetic terms. How could Xenophon or Ephorus or Phylarchus compete with Homer, from whom every literate Greek learned his ABCs? Many tried, by rhetoric and sensationalism, by writing “tragic history” as Polybius contemptuously called it, and they failed on all scores: they still gave less pleasure than the poets and in the process their history became pseudo-history.
As for utility, somehow the essential intellectual and social conditions were lacking, at least in sufficient strength. One obstacle was the Greek passion for general principles. History, Aristotle said in a famous passage dismissing the subject, tells us only “what Alcibiades did and what he suffered.” 4 And any Greek who was serious enough to inquire about such matters wanted to know not what happened, but why, and by what fixed principles, in human affairs as in the phenomena of nature. Not even Thucydides could find the solution in his historical work, and surely none of his successors, all lesser men. Poetry and philosophy gave the answers, and they valued the immutable and universal qualities far more than the individual and transient. There was no idea of progress—here the parallel with the modem enlightenment and its aftermath breaks down completely—and therefore there was no reason to look to the past for a process of continuing growth. What one found instead was either a cyclical movement, an endless coming-to-be and passing-away; or a decline from a golden age. Either way the objective was to discover the great absolute truths and then to seek their realization in life, through education and legislation. History, as the nineteenth century with its geneticism and its fact-mindedness understood the study, was obviously not the answer to the needs which the Greeks felt for themselves.
The presence or absence of the idea of progress (on a significant scale) is not just an intellectual phenomenon. It is not merely a matter of someone’s having thought the idea up, and then of its being widely accepted (or not) simply because it appealed to aesthetic sensibilities or emotions or logic. In the nineteenth century such an idea seemed self-evident : material progress was visible everywhere. In ancient Greece, after the emergence of the classical civilization of the fifth century, it was not visible at all. Everyone knew, of course, that there had been an earlier stage in Greek society and that non-Greeks, barbarians, lived quite differently, some of them (such as the Thracians or Scythians) being what we would call more “primitive.” This rudimentary conception fell short of the modem idea of progress in at least two respects, each fundamental and critical. In the first place, whatever advances were conceded were chiefly moral and institutional rather than material. Second, the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. were unanimous (insofar as any people can ever be) in thinking that the city-state was the only correct political structure, in rejecting territorial expansion and growth in the size of the political organism as a road to social and moral improvement, and in ignoring completely the possibility of further technological and material progress (or the notion that this could have anything to do with the good life or a better life).
The differences which were observed were explained partly by differences in the quality of the men—as between Greeks and barbarians above all; and partly by differences in institutions. The former obviously invites no significant historical investigation. The latter might, but to them it rarely did, thanks to their idée fixe that current political institutions could be explained sufficiently by the genius of an original “lawgiver” and the subsequent moral behaviour of the community. That is why so much writing about Sparta gravitated around the largely legendary Lycurgus; or of Athens around Solon, who was a real person to be sure, but who by the middle of the fifth century B.C. had been mythicized beyond recognition. This kind of writing may, at its best as in Plutarch, have the air of history, but in fact it is not much more historical than the Iliad or the Odyssey or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. And at its worst, it became a wild farrago about divine ancestors, their feuds, philanderings, and settlements. The great national rivalries of the nineteenth century stimulated serious historical study; the sharp Greek inter-city competition led to little more than a continual re-historicizing of myth to meet the shifting requirements of prestige and power. The one sought to explain and justify current politics by historical development, the other by a foundation myth and ethical claims.
In the end, its intense political orientation, which was the great force behind the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, was the fatal flaw in Greek historical writing. Politicians have always created the history they needed, and Greek politicians were no exception. Those Greek thinkers who were able to raise themselves above the immediate needs of their particular cities turned to philosophy for wisdom. And after Alexander the Great, Greek politics became too parochial and paltry to stimulate serious political thought of any kind. Then men turned entirely to nonpolitical questions, or they turned to Rome and Roman political problems, or they remained within the small compass that was left in the Greek city-state, its cult and legends and ancient glories. Of all the lines of inquiry which the Greek initiated, history was the most abortive. The wonder is not so much that it was, as that, in its short and fruitless life, its two best exponents still stand with the greatest the world has seen.
A Note on the Selections and Translations
The principles of selection have been, first, to offer at least one long, continuous narrative from each of the four works; second, to choose other portions which would exemplify (always at some length) the various techniques, conceptions, and objectives of each of the historians; and third, to illustrate; insofar as is possible without going outside the major historians, Greek ideas and knowledge, both about themselves and about the world they knew. Because the emphasis is wholly Greek, by design, I have given some of Polybius’ account of the wars in his homeland rather than the more famous story of the Hannibalic War, of course adding his chapters on the Roman constitution and the theory of cycles. Each section has been reproduced completely or nearly so. The deletions will be recognized from the conventional divisions of the works (dating from Hellenistic and even Renaissance times) into numbered books, chapters, and sections.
The translations were all made in the nineteenth century: Herodotus by George Rawlinson (1858-1860), Thucydides by Richard Crawley (1874), Xenophon by J. S.
Watson (1854), and Polybius by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (1889). I have checked them against the Greek original and I have made changes where I thought strict accuracy demanded it or when the translator followed an unacceptable convention, notably Rawlinson’s regular transcription of the names of Greek gods into their Roman counterparts (such as Jupiter for Zeus). I have not sought consistency of style (not even of geographical terms) nor a scholarly apparatus. The few footnotes are all mine, as is the occasional explanatory insertion of a date or identification, placed in square brackets in the text itself.
A Brief Reading List
Bury, J. B. The Ancient Greek Historians. London: Macmillan
, 1909.
Cochrane, C.N. Thucydides and the Science of History.
Oxford University Press, 1929.
Cornford, F. M. Thucydides Mythistoricus. London: Arnold,
1907.
Finley, John H., Jr. Thucydides. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1942.
Fritz, Kurt von. The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in
Antiquity: Critical Analysis of Polybius’ Political Ideas.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1954.
Gomme, A. W. The Greek Attitude to Poetry and History.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1954.
Grene, David. Man in His Pride: A Study in the Political
Philosophy of Thucydides and Plato. Chicago: University,
of Chicago Press, 1950.
Grundy, G. B. Thucydides and the History of His Age. 2nd
ed., 2 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948.
Lovejoy, A. O., and Boas, George. Primitivism and Related
Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935.
Pearson, Lionel. Early Ionian Historians. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1939.
Powell, J.E. The History of Herodotus. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1939.
Myres, J. L. Herodotus, Father of History. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1953.
Spiegelberg, W. The Credibility of Herodotus’ Account of
Egypt, translated by A. M. Blackman. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1927.
THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
HERODOTUS
HALICARNASSUS in Asia Minor, where Herodotus was born and reared, was a Greek settlement ruled by a Carian dynasty under the higher suzerainty of the Persian king. Its population was much intermingled, and the name of one of Herodotus’ kinsmen, the poet Panyassis, indicates that his family, too, though Greek in its culture and aristocratic in status, had a Carian strain. Herodotus’ partiality for the Carian queen Artemisia is familiar to every reader of the History; she is presented as the most sensible and most effective of Xerxes’ advisers in Greece.
Herodotus was born in the 480s B.C., too late to have any significant personal memories of the Persian Wars. When he was a young man his family was forced to leave Halicarnassus for political reasons and they settled on the island of Samos, which became his second home. By the time he was forty he had completed much of the research for the book he originally planned, a geographic and ethnographic survey of a large part of the “barbarian” world. Not only had he travelled fairly widely in Asia Minor and the Aegean islands, but he had visited Egypt, the coasts of Syria and Phoenicia, Thrace, the edge of the Scythian territory north of the Black Sea, and eastern regions as far as Babylon (but not Persia proper). He travelled for information, not to explore, and therefore he concentrated on main centers such as Memphis and Babylon, and he seems to have moved quickly. His stay in Egypt, for example, can be fixed at a maximum of four months by his personal observations of the Nile flood.
By the mid-440s Herodotus had moved to the Greek mainland, where he gave public readings from his work. In Athens, at least (and no doubt in other cities), he was acclaimed officially, though whether by some purely honorific gesture or by a more material reward is unknown. There, too, where he became acquainted with the Periclean circle and made a friend of Sophocles, he was inspired to transform his book into a history of the Persian Wars. And again he began to travel in search of material, inspecting battle sites and routes, visiting Sparta, Thebes, Delphi, and other key Greek centers, and going as far north as Macedonia. How long he was occupied in this way is not known, nor is the date when (or the reason why) he migrated to Thurii on the Gulf of Tarentum in southern Italy, a Panhellenic settlement founded in 443 under the sponsorship of Pericles.
Presumably he spent the final years of his life in the west, writing his book and occasionally making short trips in Italy and Sicily and once to Cyrene in North Africa. The exact date of his death is also unknown, but it is demonstrable that, just as his life began in the final years of the Persian Wars, it closed early in the Peloponnesian War, which broke out in 431. There is no reference in the History to anything that occurred after 430 and there are things which he could hardly have said (or failed to say) after 424. The probability is that his death occurred nearer 430 than 424. His book was published in the 420s, soon after his death, most likely. All the details regarding the publication are unknown, and that is the final uncertainty in this short list of probabilities and possibilities which constitutes everything we know about the life of Herodotus.
—M. I. F.
From BOOK I
Lydia
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicamassus, which he publishes in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.
1. According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Erythraean Sea,5 having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, and among the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all the states included now under the common name of Hellas. Here they exposed their merchandise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; at the end of which time, when almost everything was sold, there came down to the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king, who was, they say, agreeing in this with the Greeks, Io, the child of Inachus. The women were standing by the stem of the ship intent upon their purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed upon them. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized and carried off. Io herself was among the captives. The Phoenicians put the women on board their vessel, and set sail for Egypt.
2. Thus did Io pass into Egypt, according to the Persian story, which differs widely from the Greek: and thus commenced, according to their authors, the series of outrages. At a later period, certain Greeks, with whose name they [the Persian sources] are unacquainted, but who may have been Cretans, made a landing at Tyre, on the Phoenician coast, and bore off the king’s daughter, Europa. In this they only retaliated; but afterwards the Greeks, they say, were guilty of a second violence. They manned a ship of war, and sailed to Aea, a city of Colchis, on the river Phasis; from whence, after despatching the rest of the business On which they had come,6 they carried off Medea, the daughter of the king of the land. The monarch sent a herald into Greece to demand reparation of the wrong, and the restitution of his child; but the Greeks made answer that, having received no reparation of the wrong done them in the seizure of Io the Argive, they should give none in this instance.
3. In the next generation afterwards, according to the same authorities, Alexander7 the son of Priam [king of Troy], bearing these events in mind, resolved to procure himself a wife out of Greece by violence, fully persuaded that, as the Greeks had not given satisfaction for their outrages, so neither would he be forced to make any for his. Accordingly
he made prize of Helen; upon which the Greeks decided that, before resorting to other measures, they would send envoys to reclaim the princess and require reparation of the wrong. Their demands were met by a reference to the violence which had been offered to Medea, and they were asked with what face they could now require satisfaction, when they had formerly rejected all demands for either reparation or restitution addressed to them.
4. Hitherto the injuries on either side had been mere kidnappings; but in what followed the Persians consider that the Greeks were greatly to blame, since before any attack had been made on Europe, they led an army into Asia. Now as for the carrying off of women, it is the deed, they say, of a rogue; but to make a stir about such as are carried off, argues a man a fool. Men of sense care nothing for such women, since it is plain that without their own consent they would never be forced away. The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam. Henceforth they ever looked upon the Greeks as their open enemies. For Asia, with all the various tribes of barbarians that inhabit it, is regarded by the Persians as their own; but Europe and the Greek race they look on as distinct and separate.