Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ Persian invasion force, may ultimately come from official Persian documents; and there are passing references to poetry and literature. But in general Herodotus was excluded from knowledge of the extensive literary and documentary evidence of the near east by his ignorance of foreign languages. As he himself makes clear, his work was based primarily on two types of evidence – what he had seen and what he had heard; it is a systematic and serious attempt to record oral traditions about the past. His practice was in each place to seek out ‘the men with knowledge’, usually priests or officials, and record their account with the minimum of comment. Only occasionally will he give variant traditions, and these have usually in fact been gathered by chance from different places; when he does this, he seldom declares which version he believes to be correct.

      It is obvious that such a method left Herodotus largely at the mercy of his informants, who might be frivolous, ill-informed or biased. From Thucydides onwards Herodotus has been attacked as unscientific; but modern oral historians in fact hold that each tradition should be recorded separately: the contamination of two or more traditions produces an account which it is impossible to check or interpret, and which is an artificial invention of the modern anthropologist, not a true oral tradition.

      All oral tradition consists of a chain of testimonies; in general the effective range for resonably detailed knowledge of the past is about two hundred years: it is very noticeable that Herodotus’ information is both qualitatively and quantitatively better for the period from the mid seventh century onwards. The historical worth of oral tradition is also related, not so much to the number of steps in the chain of testimonies, as to the purpose behind the recording of the tradition, the milieu in which it was remembered, and the cultural influences which may have affected its literary structure. The past is remembered not so much for its own sake as for its relevance to the present interests of a particular group; and each group imposes its characteristic deformation on the oral tradition.

      In mainland Greece much of Herodotus’ information came from the great aristocratic families in each city: aristocratic tradition is of course especially liable to political distortion. For instance the Spartan aristocratic account played down the reforms of the age of Tyrtaios, and later the importance of their greatest king, Kleomenes; the Corinthian aristocracy travestied the history of their tyranny; the Athenian aristocratic family of the Alkmeonidai protested overmuch their anti-Persian stance and claimed the credit for the overthrow of the tyranny, minimizing the role of other families and popular support; Macedonian royal sources claimed that they had been secretly pro-Greek during the Persian Wars. There are many other examples.

      Another group of traditions is very different. Here the great religious shrine of Delphi is of central importance: the Delphic tradition is not usually political; it is rather popular and moralizing. Often the stories are clearly related to particular monuments or offerings at the shrine (which is how we can detect their origin); and they centre round particular benefactors like Croesus king of Lydia. The obvious presence of folk-tale motifs might suggest the professional story-teller; but the clearest tendency is to impart a moral dimension to the past. Events are preserved in a framework in which the hero moves from prosperity to over-confidence and a divinely sanctioned reversal of fortune. This is no aristocratic ethic; it belongs to the priests of a shrine closely identified with a cooperative ethic, who engraved over the doors of their temple the two mottoes, ‘Know yourself, and ‘Nothing too much’.

      The traditions of the eastern Greeks are far closer in form to the Delphic stories than to the aristocratic traditions of the mainland. For here too there is very little evidence of deformation due to particular political groups; yet even in quite recent history there are clear signs of recurrent patterns, folk motifs, and distortion for moral purposes. Thus the story of the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos as late as the second half of the sixth century could be transformed into a folk-tale, and the account of the Ionian revolt in the early fifth century contains many popular elements. At first sight this is surprising, for Herodotus was closer to events in the Greek east than on the mainland; he had for instance spent his youth on Samos only a generation after the death of Polykrates, and must have known many of those who fought in the great revolt; yet his east Greek history is in fact less reliable than his history of the mainland.

      This curious characteristic of the east Greek tradition is related to the overall pattern of his work: it too is a moral story, of the pride of Persia, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks. Once more the gods punish those whose prosperity passes human limits; and the framework in which this happens is a framework designed to recall to the listener the steps by which the gods achieve their ends – the deeds of pride, the warnings disregarded, the dreams misinterpreted and false ones sent to deceive. This overall pattern has been imposed by Herodotus on his material, and its consonance with the pattern of east Greek stories suggests an interesting conclusion. Behind the preservation of the past in Ionia lies a moralizing tradition of story-telling found in mainland Greece only at Delphi, a tradition of which Herodotus is himself a representative: just as the Homeric poems are the culmination of the activity of generations of professional bards, so Herodotus the logos-writer has ‘collected together’ (to use Thucydides’ description) the results of an oral prose tradition, of folk stories told perhaps by professional or semi-professional ‘logos-makers’ in Delphi and the cities of Ionia. And he himself is the last and greatest of these logos-makers, weaving together the stories with all the skill of a traditional artist into a prose epic, whose form mirrors the form of its components. That this form is traditional and not of his own making is shown by its absence from the mainland Greek tradition: if he had been deliberately and consciously imposing a new pattern, he would surely have made this material conform to it; yet the comparative absence of moralizing folk-tale motifs in the stories of obvious mainland folk heroes like Kleomenes, Themistokles and others is remarkable.

      Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.

      Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.

      Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.

      Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; СКАЧАТЬ