According to a generally accepted opinion, the discovery of history in the western world is owed to the Greeks. One must admit, however, that history did not enjoy a privileged position within Greek culture; rather, its role was marginal whether we compare the study of history with other intellectual activities or try to examine its presence in education and in school (see Momigliano 1983; Nicolai 1992; below, §4). To begin, we must clear up several ambiguities. First, our concept of history - by which I mean the concept of history developed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a consequence of the integration of narrative history and the study of antiquity (Momigliano 1950) - is profoundly different from that of the Greeks and the Romans: both have a diegetic aspect, since history, both for us and the ancients, is a narrative of facts. The means, however, by which a story is conveyed and the aims of the historians are different. At least up until Herodotus there is no interest in chronology, either absolute or relative (see Finley 1975: 15, 17-18; for archaic Greece one can speak rather of an extreme interest in genealogical sequences), and it took centuries before chronological systems were established for general use; by contrast, modern historiography, the child of a culture obsessed with the measurement of time, cannot avoid placing facts into a chronological grid. Second, the account of an ancient historian tends to absorb - and therefore to make disappear, in varying degrees in various epochs - every trace of documentation used by the author, while the modern historian by contrast searches to bring forth the facts from the documents. (For the use of documents see Biraschi et al. 2003; below, Ch. 4; the
Translated by Ginevra Adamoli and Kyle M. Hall.
Modern idolatry of the document, however, has also rightly been questioned: see, most recently, Canfora 2003: 9). The rhetoric of the document is directly opposed to the rhetoric of ancient historians, which derives from epic poetry and constructs the character (ethos) of the historian as the omniscient, or at least competent and authoritative, narrator (Marincola 1997). Third, the goal of an ancient historical account is never purely scientific and cognitive, but is always linked to creating paradigms, predominantly politico-militaristic or ethical ones (for the different goals that historians proposed for themselves from time to time see Finley 1975: 23). All of historiography’s paradigms had a paideutic end and in some sense a political end: to form a governing class, offering it analytical instruments and behavioral models (as in Thucydides); to put forward great personalities, positive or negative, as exempla, so as to fix the parameters of moral evaluation (as with Theopompus, Tacitus, and the biographical tradition); or to construct memory and collective identity (as in local historiography and ktiseis [foundation narratives]). (For historiography’s contribution to the construction of Greek identity see Cartledge 1997b.)
But ancient historiography is not a homogeneous whole, with a limited internal evolution. Under this label we in fact assemble authors and works that are extremely different (cf. the panorama of Latin historiography in Cizek 1985), sharing only the minimal common denominator of being a narration of events (Canfora 2003: 14). A further distinction must be made between history, understood as the whole ofpast events, and historiography, understood as a literary genre charged with the narration of events. Using this outline, one can say that the past (also including in this term the mythic past, brought in through the poetic tradition) has its own important place in Greek and Roman cultures, while the narration of the past, and above all the investigation into the past, occupy a much more modest place.
World History
