In both the Greek and Roman tradition, we find developmental models proposed by the ancients that sought to explain the rise and development of historiography. On the Greek side, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his essay On Thucydides, believed that the origins of Greek historical writing lay with ‘‘local’’ historians, writers who, whether treating Greek or non-Greek history, wrote accounts of their own particular home town or country, with the general aim of making available the traditions of the past as found in local monuments and religious and secular records. They wrote, he says, without ornament and included much of ‘‘the mythical,’’ i. e., tall tales or marvelous stories that had been believed from ancient times. Herodotus, however, chose not to write about a particular time or place, but gathered together many events in Europe and Asia, and included in a single narrative all the important events of the Greek and non-Greek world. Thereafter, he continues, Thucydides wrote of a single war, considering the themes of the early writers too paltry and that of Herodotus too large a subject for the human mind to study. He therefore concentrated on a single war, basing his narrative on his own inquiry and autopsy, and rigorously excluding all ‘‘mythical’’ material (Thuc. 5). This developmental thesis probably goes back to Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus, who wrote a (lost) On History in which he may have discussed such issues. However that may be, it is clear that in Dionysius’ reconstruction Herodotus is a pivotal figure, subsuming and amalgamating what came before and pointing the way towards Thucydides. Nor is this surprising given the later belief that Herodotus and Thucydides were the two foundational and best historians.
Modern scholars have generally abandoned Dionysius’ schema and substituted different models, replacing it with one of their own. By far the most influential has been that of Felix Jacoby, the greatest modern scholar of Greek historiography. Before beginning his collection of the fragments of the Greek historians (FGrHist), he set out his understanding of the development of Greek historiography, an analysis that has in turn influenced scholars of Roman historiography.
Jacoby divided the historical writing of the Greeks into five sub-genres, arranged according to the order in which he believed they developed. He postulated as the earliest genre ‘‘mythography,’’ which sought to bring order and/or consistency to the variety of Greek traditions and to establish a record for mythical (i. e., earliest) times. The first mythographical work was the Genealogies of Hecataeus of Miletus, writing in the late sixth and early fifth century bce. This treatise tried to make sense of the conflicting genealogies of gods and heroes (and the humans who claimed descent from them), and it seems to have done so by a process of rationalization (however inconsistently applied). It is not known whether Hecataeus or any other ‘‘mythog-rapher’’ commented upon the quality of the tradition or sought to elaborate a methodology for solving the problems of conflicting and/or fabulous traditions.
The second genre to develop, according to Jacoby, was ethnography, a study of lands, peoples, their customs and marvels; again it was Hecataeus who established the seeds of this genre with his Circuit of the Earth (Periodos or Periegesis Ges), a work that progressed around the coastline of the Mediterranean and described the lands and the peoples therein. Jacoby postulated that the first full-scale ethnography was Dionysius of Miletus’ Persica, written in the early fifth century bce and arising from the lonians’ desire to know more about Persia, the power that had conquered and ruled them. In form, ethnography is a hybrid, containing both historical accounts (which could be lengthy) and descriptive accounts of the land and its people, such accounts being based on autopsy and oral inquiry.
The third sub-genre, chronography, began with Hellanicus of Lesbos’ Priestesses of Hera at Argos. Although chronography is usually linked to the development of local history (Jacoby’s fifth sub-genre), it is formally separate. Chronography shares with local history, however, a style of dating by annual magistrates, in Hellanicus’ case, the year of office of the chief priestess of Hera at Argos. Under this rubric, Hellanicus arranged the events of individual years, not only for Argos but also for all Greece. Thus despite its ‘‘local’’ dating system, the Priestesses is Panhellenic and embraces events throughout Greece.
The most important sub-genre of all for Jacoby was contemporary history {Zeitgeschichte), the writers of which he defined as ‘‘those authors who without local restriction narrated the general Greek history of their own time or up to their own time’’ {Jacoby 1909: 34). The distinguishing marks of Zeitgeschichte are: {1) a narrative mainly of the author’s own time, irrespective of where it begins; {2) a viewpoint from the Greek side; and {3) a Panhellenic treatment, i. e., embracing events of all the Greek city-states rather than a single locale. The sub-genre is first glimpsed in Books 7-9 of Herodotus, for in Herodotus the descriptive element {the hallmark of ethnography) becomes subsumed within historical thought and within the search for historical causation. In the next generation Thucydides’ work on the Peloponnesian War brings the sub-genre to full fruition. Jacoby thus saw a teleological line of development in historiography, namely Hecataeus-Herodotus-Thucydides.
After Thucydides, writers of Zeitgeschichte chose either to write up individual wars, or to continue the chronicling of contemporary history now focused not on a particular event but rather on a chosen segment of time, as Xenophon did in the Hellenica and as the many serial continuators in Greek {and later Roman) history attest. Histories centered on individuals - Theopompus’ Philippica, histories of Alexander or of his successors - also qualify, provided that they are not limited by a local focus. Thus contemporary history, itself a sub-genre, could have sub-categories of its own: war monographs, perpetual or continuous histories, and individual-centered histories.
The final sub-genre for Jacoby was horography or local history. Unlike Dionysius, who saw this as the earliest form of historical writing amongst the Greeks, Jacoby believed that local history was the last sub-genre to develop, and that it developed largely in response to Herodotus’ work. Horography had a fixed annalistic structure, concentrated on an individual city-state, and included not only political and military events but also religious, cultic, and ‘‘cultural’’ material.
These five sub-genres, then, form Jacoby’s view of the development of Greek historiography. As for Dionysius, so for Jacoby, Herodotus was the crucial figure, for Jacoby argued that the disparate material in Herodotus’ Histories contains the traces of his ‘‘development’’ from a geographer {Book 2) to ethnographer {Books 2 and 4, especially) to composer of war monograph {Books 7-9), and thus a historian. Jacoby in so doing located the development of an entire genre and an entire people’s historical consciousness in Herodotus’ own transformation. In the next generation, Thucydides took what he had learned from Herodotus and brought history to its full perfection, writing a work that was outstanding for the equilibrium it maintained between historical methodology and historical imagination.
Recently, however, doubts have been expressed about this model, though these can only be summarized here. First, Jacoby’s view is teleological: early writers are primitive, leading on to Herodotus, and finally Thucydides, who is represented as the pinnacle of Greek historiography. The ‘‘peak’’ of historical writing is thus put extremely early, and later historiography is seen largely as a decline from the greatness of Thucydides {Jacoby had little sympathy with Hellenistic and later Greek historiography). Second, Jacoby’s view of the development of Greek historiography relies largely on the development of a single individual, Herodotus, and only with Herodotus’ own development does Greek historiography come into being. Amongst other problems, such an individualization of historiography’s development limits the ability to see that historians were not the only ones engaged in the preservation, understanding, and establishment of the tradition of the past. Finally, Jacoby’s categories do not always map clearly onto ancient terminology, especially in the areas of ethnography and Zeitgeschichte (both of which lack ancient equivalents). This suggests that he may be imposing modern categories on ancient practices. And the view pays very little attention to the innovativeness of the classical historiographical tradition. For all that, Jacoby’s approach is hardly without merit, and clearly is right about some very important aspects of Greek historiography. In some of the chapters below, authors will continue the discussion of the ways in which such approaches help or hinder our understanding of the ancient historians.
Roman historiography, while not subject to the same type of developmental model, has nevertheless been influenced by Jacoby’s schema for Greek writers. We should mention, however, that the development of Roman historiography is particularly problematic, because all of its early practitioners are lost. In addition, there are some unusual features of early Roman historiography. To begin with, the first historian, Q. Fabius Pictor, wrote his history of Rome in Greek, as did his immediate followers. Only with Cato the Elder’s Origines almost a century later was Roman historiography in Latin born. Second, Roman historiography developed comparatively late: Fabius wrote in the mid-third century bce, by which time Roman history was more than four centuries old. (By contrast, Herodotus’ work was only a generation or so after most of the events it records.) Third, although the Romans maintained an annual priestly record which could on some level be considered historical, it is uncertain what relationship, if any, this chronicle has to the development and characteristic forms of Roman historiography.
That priestly chronicle looms large in the developmental model proposed for Roman historiography by Cicero (perhaps, like Dionysius, basing himself on Theophrastus). In Cicero’s account (as in Dionysius’), the early historians lack ornamentation in their writing, just like the priestly annals, and are concerned only to record traditions: Cicero even goes so far as to compare the early Latin historians with the Greek ‘‘local’’ historians (De Or. 2.53). The major difference in Cicero’s model is that no Herodotus, much less a Thucydides, has yet appeared amongst the Romans, and Cicero is at pains to delineate the qualities (mainly stylistic) that are necessary for such a one to arise. Yet there is very good evidence to show that Cicero’s characterization of the early Roman historians is nearly wholly false.
Nevertheless, his comparison with the Greek ‘‘local’’ historians may lie behind the beliefs of some scholars that the early Roman historians were simply that, and thus followed the conventions of local history (that is where Jacoby places Pictor and his Hellenophone followers). As a ‘‘local’’ historian, Pictor might very well have used the kinds of materials (including religious lore) that his earlier Greek counterparts did, but that is not what the description of his work suggests: Dionysius tells us (AR 1.6.2) that Pictor treated the foundation of Rome fully, then briefly touched on events between the foundation and the beginning of the First Punic War (264 bce), then wrote a full account of events following up to his own times. Even without this information, it is not at all clear either that all local historians wrote in a certain way or that Pictor would have felt himself bound to follow each and every convention that may have existed. Again, generic presuppositions may be misleading.
Some scholars have tried to differentiate Roman historians by distinguishing between ‘‘historians’’ proper and ‘‘annalists.’’ The former are seen as ‘‘serious’’ writers ofpolitical and military events, who emphasized contemporary history, either, like the Greek writers of Hellenica, in a perpetua historia, a continuous history (Sisenna, Sallust in the Histories, Asinius Pollio), or in bella, accounts of individual wars (Sempronius Asellio on the Second Punic War, Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha). Annalists, on the other hand, treated Roman history from its origins in a strict year-by-year manner dictated by the priestly chronicles (the Annales Maximi), and gave, it seems, far more generous treatment to the events that the earliest Roman writers had treated briefly, i. e., the four and a half centuries from around 700 bce to the First Punic War. The annalists are also presumed to have included much material designated as antiquarian, involving matters such as religion, cult, and culture, and, more seriously, to have filled out their histories with embellishments, fictions, and falsified traditions. Much of the discussion then centers around who should be considered a ‘‘historian’’ and who an ‘‘annalist.’’ Nonetheless, it remains questionable whether this approach too has any validity. First, such a distinction cannot be found in the ancient authors, where ‘‘scriptor annalium’’ or the like serve as a designation for all writers of history. Second, the Latin word annales means both history (in the aggregate and objective sense) and a particular history (the literary representation of events). Third, citations of Roman historians refer indiscriminately to annales and historia, which suggests not only that the writers themselves did not assign any such title as Annales to their works, but also that there cannot have been a recognized subgenre of annales.
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In sum, then, the variety of classical historiography cannot be easily reduced to formulas and linear progressions (or regressions, for that matter). The writing of history is always dependent on contemporary concerns, and the many historians of antiquity who created their accounts of the past were responding in some measure to the needs of their own times. Both Greece and Rome were traditional societies that looked to the past for understanding but also for inspiration and guidance, and our best hope for understanding what ancient historians were up to is to keep before ourselves constantly the many factors that went into the creation, appreciation, and (ultimately) survival of the works of the Greek and Roman historians.
FURTHER READING
For surveys and general treatments of Greek and Roman historiography see Strasburger 1966, Mazzarino 1965-1966, Usher 1969, Fornara 1983, Grant 1995, Marincola 1997, Pani 2001, Duff 2003, and (for late antiquity) Rohrbacher 2002 and Marasco 2003b. Overviews of Greek historiography can be found in Bury 1909 (still worth reading), von Fritz 1967, Brown 1973, Meister 1990, Lendle 1992, Hornblower 1994b, and Luce 1997. For surveys of Roman historiography see Laistner 1947, La Penna 1978, Kraus and Woodman 1997, Flach 1998, and Mehl 2001 (an English translation is forthcoming). Walter 2004, though not a survey, has much of importance on historical culture in Rome.
On the origins and development of Greek and Roman historiography see the fundamental article of Jacoby 1909. Different approaches to the issue can be found in Chatelet 1962, Mazzarino 1966: I.23-121, Starr 1968, Gozzoli 1970-1971 and Porciani 2001a; see also below, Chs. 2 and 3. Jacoby’s developmental schema has been discussed by Fowler 1996, Humphreys 1997, Schepens 1997, and Marincola 1999. The developmental model for Roman historiography has been well treated in Eigler et al. 2003: 1-38 (with many references); see also below, Chs. 5 and 21.
For cautions and important methodological approaches to dealing with fragments see Brunt 1980 and Schepens 1997. Finally, there is much of value about ancient historians and ancient historiography scattered throughout the collected papers of Ronald Syme, Arnaldo Momi-gliano, and Frank Walbank.
World History
