Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Athenian tyrant Hipparchos, and later commemorated the dead and the victors of the Persian Wars. Finally the greatest of the choral lyric poets, Pindar, in the fifth century, wrote for the Greek aristocrats and rulers who competed at the international games.

      Lyric poetry presents a complex and varied picture of the world of early Greece: though its purpose was never overtly historical (there is no tradition of historical epic or descriptive panegyric), the poet’s role was still central; and so satisfactory for public expression were the varied poetic forms that they may well have delayed the appearance of a prose literature. Men of course spoke in prose, but they composed in verse. Composition in prose is related to a new need, that of precise and critical analysis; and it is a product of the Ionian enlightenment. The effort to formulate a critical scientific theory of matter, which began in Miletus with Thales in the early sixth century, led to the first known Greek work in prose, Anaximandros’ book on nature of about 550. Anaximandros attempted to explain both the underlying structure of the physical world and its development down to the creation of man – it was the substitution of science for myth. He was also the first Greek geographer and astronomer: the work contained the earliest known maps of the earth and the heavens, which were accompanied by a ‘description of the earth’ and a discussion of the stars and their movements.

      Philosophers continued the scientific interests of Anaximandros; but it is another Milesian who carried his interest in human geography further, and so initiated the analysis of human societies. Hekataios, a prominent statesman around 500, also published a map and wrote a ‘description of the earth’, of which many short fragments survive in later authors. His concern was not with scientific theory, but with accurate geographical description. He himself had travelled at least in Asia and Egypt, and the detailed information given in the fragments suggests an ethnographic description of the Mediterranean world based on personal observation and the reports of other travellers. A second work by Hekataios discussed the heroic myths and the genealogies of those families who claimed descent from gods or heroes – as did Hekataios himself in the sixteenth generation. It seems to have been not merely a retelling of the hero myths, but a critical attempt to rationalize them and, if not produce history from them, at least make them portray a relatively normal human world. The critical approach of his book is emphasized in the first sentence:

      Hekataios the Milesian speaks thus: I write these things as they seem to me; for the stories of the Greeks are many and absurd in my opinion.

      (F.G.H. 1 frag, 1)

      Hekataios saw the importance of travel and personal observation for the understanding of the human world; he may also be responsible for removing the gods from history by his curious and misguided attempt to remove them from mythology. Other early writers of prose are more shadowy figures. There were men who compiled mythological books without Hekataios’ critical attitude. And since antiquity there has been controversy as to whether there were any true historians before Herodotus; the evidence is unreliable, and even if the four dim Ionians in question did write before Herodotus, they had no influence on him, for they compiled a type of local history very different from his broad conception.

      For the ancient world Herodotus was ‘the father of history’, and that judgement must stand. But he had also the reputation of being a liar, and the generally unfavourable opinion of his reliability lasted until the sixteenth century, when the accounts of travellers and missionaries from such areas as South America, Turkey and the far east revealed that tall stories about other cultures were not necessarily false. Since the nineteenth century accurate knowledge of the main civilizations about which Herodotus wrote, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia, has accumulated; and in the present age, when the difficulties in studying primitive societies and the problems of writing about their past are better appreciated, we can begin to understand the real achievement of Herodotus.

      He was born in 484, between the two Persian invasions, at Halicarnassus in southern Asia Minor; he lived through the establishment of Athenian imperial power and died some time after 430, during the first ten years of the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. His family was literary and aristocratic; he was brought up in exile on Samos; he travelled extensively in the Greek world, as far as Sicily and south Italy, north Africa, the Black Sea and south Russia; he visited Sardis in Lydia, and Phoenicia; he travelled up the Nile as far as Elephantinē and down the Euphrates as far as Babylon, and probably also went to the Persian capital of Susa. Well known as a literary figure in fifth century Athens, he finally became a citizen of the Athenian colony of Thurii in south Italy (founded in 444/3), where he died.

      The scope of Herodotus’ book is described in its first sentence:

      This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time and the great and marvellous works performed by both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, both other things and the reasons why they fought one another.

      (Herodotus 1. 1)

      The Greek word historiē translated by ‘investigation’ is the word which has entered the European languages as ‘history’; Herodotus uses it elsewhere to describe his enquiries, and it is connected with the Greek root ‘to know’, usually in the sense of knowing by personal observation, for instance as the witness in a lawsuit. Herodotus’ work is a series of descriptions of the various peoples of the Mediterranean and the near east arranged around the theme of the wars between Greeks and Persians: within this basic structure the digressions, or separate ‘accounts’ or ‘stories’ (which Herodotus calls logoi), are geographical, ethnographic and historical, ranging over the known world as far as its mysterious fringes and the encircling ocean. The modern word ‘historian’ scarcely covers all these activities; contemporaries used a vaguer term when they called him a ‘logos-maker’ or ‘logos-writer’. Thucydides was thinking of Herodotus when he claimed that his own readers should trust his conclusions, rather than ‘what the poets have composed about events in exaggeration, or what logos-writers have collected together, which is rather aimed at pleasing the ear than at the truth’. And he makes the proud statement:

      The lack of invention in this narrative may seem less pleasing to the ear, but it will be enough if it is useful to those who wish to grasp clearly the past and the future, which, given human nature, will see these or similar events happening sometime again. This work is designed as a possession for all time rather than a display piece for instant listening.

      (Thucydides 1. 21–2)

      In these criticisms, and particularly the last, Thucydides seems to agree with later evidence in seeing Herodotus as a professional lecturer, giving his ‘stories’ or logoi in public as ‘display pieces for instant listening’; the final collection of these ‘stories’ in the present structured narrative was almost certainly published by 425, when Herodotus’ account of the causes of the Persian War was parodied by the comic poet Aristophanes. Herodotus may well in fact have begun like other contemporary literary figures, by lecturing on his travels and researches, and have only later arranged these lectures around the theme of the Persian Wars; but it is possible that he may have had his general theme in mind from the start.

      Two literary influences on Herodotus are obvious. He owed much to Hekataios, whom he had certainly read, and whom he attacked both in his account of Egypt and as a map maker (Herodotus 2.143, 4.31): the early parts of the work must often cover the same ground in greater depth. Herodotus is also rightly described by a later Greek critic as ‘most Homeric’; Homer lies behind the conception of the whole enterprise as a war between Greeks and barbarians, and its declared intent to preserve ‘the great deeds of men’ (one of the acknowledged functions of epic poetry); the complex construction and digressive technique of Herodotus is similar to that of Homer, as are many of the more imaginative elements in the work.

      Very few of Herodotus’ sources of information were written: details of the provinces of the Persian СКАЧАТЬ