After 479 b. c., when the immediate Persian threat ended, the Greek world became a relatively self-contained system of city-states, dominated by the Athenian empire and its Spartan counterweight. When seventy-five years later Athenian power was shattered, Sparta and then Thebes tried to build systems of domination, succeeded temporarily, exhausted their slim resources in doing so, and suffered defeat. Athens participated in the struggle off and on. Other city-states never aspired to great-power status but they, too, were often drawn into wars. By 350 B. c. a general weariness had spread through the world of the Greek city-states. Memories of past glory, delight in a relatively stable and prosperous period, and social tensions marked Greek life until in 338 b. c., at Chaeronea, the Greeks paid the price for their failure to create a political structure beyond the polis. When King Philip of Macedonia brouglit the era of independent city-states to an end, the polis remained as the unit of life but the center of power had shifted to the Macedonian court.
Political history without drama. How did the Greeks of that period see their past? They had available Homer’s epics, Herodotus’s ///stones, and Thucydides’ work. Modern historians, convinced of the cumulative and advancing nature of knowledge, would proceed immediately to combine the three accounts into a composite whole, but the Greeks of the fourth century let the three stories of the past stand separately, each as an authority in its own right. This was possible because the subjects of the accounts did not really overlap much. It also was inevitable because the Greek historians lacked a concept for unifying the accounts beyond the, in this case, useless sense of cultural unity of all Hellenes and because the sources they employed left them no other choice. The more distant the past the less possible it was to rewrite the account. Contemporay history, a combination of the more immediate past and the present, appealed to Greek historians because the sources for it were available and fit better their use of sources. In addition they not only failed to re-search the past but they lacked expectations for a different future. The years to come would bring merely new variations of the old human drama whose script was written by a timeless human nature. Even those who looked to Panhellenism, the only broad Greek vision of the future, were convinced that it would not supersede the polis as the basic unit of life.
The writing of contemporary history encountered its own peculiar problems. Thucydides had been able to shape the multitude of past events into a unitary account because his narration and his analysis focused on one great war. But now historians had to describe the many events between 400 and 338 B. C., all of them lacking grandeur, long-lasting influences, and above all any clear unity. In the parts of his work on the non-Greek world Herodotus had offered descriptive cultural history as a possible approach to the past, but such a history found little acceptance because of the strong admiration for Thucydides’ political and contemporary history. What came now was a series of Greek contemporary histories each referred to as Hellenica (Histories of Greece) and each in a sense continuing Thucydides’ account—Cratippus to 394, Theo-pompus to 394 or 387, and Xenophon to 362. They dealt largely with a period in which the crisis of the polis was still approaching and the world of Greek city-states seemed secure enough to go on forever.
Without the drama of a great struggle, Xenophon was left to describe the steady flow of routine human life, sometimes turbulent, sometimes quiet. Instead of Thucydidean reflections on the dynamics of politics, his Hellenica taught simpler, more conventional lessons: that the cultivation of tradition, with its gods, rules, and values, was a good thing; that the gods were helping those who had self-discipline, exerted themselves, and brought sacrifices; and that loyalty was praiseworthy.
A muted Panhellenic manifesto. In their days of glory the Greek city-states had brought forth citizens of a magnificent willingness to devote their lives to public affairs. Yet the same devotion to one’s own polis had also rigidly separated city-state from city-state. Hegemonies by some powerful city-states had brought about some entities larger than the polis but they were built on force and did not last. All along there had been, however, a keen awareness of the cultural unity among Hellenes. Could that spirit of commonality not also be infused into Greek political life, thereby endowing that life with a sense of develop-merit toward Greek integration? The famous fourth-century rhetorician Isocrates realized that at one time the fight against Persia had given a sense of commonality and continuity to Greek political life, and he favored a new Greek war on Persia as a means to achieve political panhellenism. Two historians who probably had some direct connections with Isocrates wrote works which reflected the contemporary concerns: Ephorus of Cyme and Theopompus of Chios.
The fragments remaining of Ephorus’s Histories tell us that he wrote Greek history in the broad Herodotean manner, reaching out beyond the limits of the Greek world and dealing with “barbarians” whose past he considered venerable and important. Nevertheless, Ephorus concerned himself above all with the Greek world, which he consistently treated as a v/hole. Yet Ephorus’s Panhellenism seems to have been without a political connotation. Without a dynamic, unifying concept, he seems to have painted a portrait of human, although primarily Greek, life. Characteristically, his dedication to the wider Greek world did not diminish his intense dedication to his native polis, demonstrated in his history of Cyme.
When modern scholars ask how original Ephorus’s Histories were, they put a question Greek historians would not have understood. Ephorus had, like most ancient historians, no taste for making his own inquiries into so distant a past. He merely wished to demonstrate a different viewpoint, write in a better style, or teach a new lesson rather than unearth new material.
Calls for a conservative Greece. In the fourth century a rich body of literature dealt with the ideal form of government. Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War lay as a heavy burden on democracy, and the instability of the Greek world of states spurred talk of panehellenism. The historian Theopompus of Chios suggested a solution to both problems in his Philippica, a history in quasi-biographical form of which only fragments are left. It demonstrated the political importance of Philip II of Macedonia (359-336 b. c.) whom Theopompus considered the greatest man of the age. From a panhellenism under Macedonian leadership, he hoped, would come a conservative reconstruction of Greek society. Theopompus, twice an exile from democratic Chios, mustered little enthusiasm for democracy.
Yet Theopompus had no weakness for uncritical adulation. Contemporaries called him quarrelsome, and he loved to expose the weaknesses of the famous, deny their achievements, and attribute shady motives to them. Theopompus promptly criticized Philip for his drinking parties, sexual debauchery, and lack of self-restraint. Such weaknesses destroyed a potentially great leader of Greeks —a cost too high for forgiveness.
But, like Ephorus, Theopompus spurned 'Ihucydides’ single-mindedness. He loved digressions. They prove that the broad curiosity about the world which had inspired the old loTOpia had never ceased to exist side by side with the
Thucydidean type of history. Still, on the whole, the Philippica stuck to its main purpose—to tell about and even celebrate the monarch whose soldiers, in 338 B. C., destroyed the Greek city-state system.
Macedonian rule ushered in a panhellenism condemned to be superficial because few Greeks were willing to bridge the gap between the Macedonians, perceived forever as barbarians, and themselves. Despite a general fading of civic consciousness, the city-states remained the immediate life-context of individual Greeks. Even those whose lives now centered on their individual pleasures felt some pride and sense of belonging as members of the polis. The distinctive traditions of each city were cultivated, and in that endeavor state, local, and regional histories proved to be pillars of support.
Local history had been one of the earliest results of the Greek’s search for their past, as Hellanicus’s Attic History shows so well. Ever since, pride in one’s polis and availability of sources had fostered that type of history. Now another motive entered.
When the tugs of rationalism and of a strong individualism began to pull the web of tradition apart, the cities experienced the growth of a conscious traditionalism as a counterforce. Local histories were used to reenforce those features of the contemporary collective life which linked the present to a past now perceived as having been sound and pure. The so-called attidographers, an awkward name for Attic historians who wrote in the manner of Hellanicus’s Attic History, were such traditionalists. In their works they inquired after the exact histories of local festivals, temples, and rites, putting to work the contemporary passion for accuracy, which actually was a part of the corrosive rationalism, in the cause of traditionalism. Thus, traditionalist historians busied themselves, for example, with finding the version of the Theseus legend most acceptable to a rationalist age, thereby hoping to safeguard tradition from radical doubts.
The traditionalists represent the first antiquarians who unearthed and preserved much valuable information in their search for new insights into the distant past. Tedious as their works may be, they actually manifested a greater determination to go beyond the generally accepted knowledge of the past than did the works of contemporary historians. Their goal also forced them to abandon the typical preoccupation of ancient historians with the motives and actions of individuals and the timeless lessons gained from those sources for present and future individuals. Instead they dealt with features of the anonymous collective life. But the traditionalist historians failed in their primary aim of strengthening the collective spirit by preserving tradition. By their passionate search for the accurate corroboration of communal traditions, the attidographers made these traditions slightly more acceptable to people who were already tinged by skepticism; but they did so at the cost of introducing scholarly controversies into tradition which needed simple acceptance more than accuracy. History, used as a buttress for tradition, did not blunt the thrust of skepticism but forced traditionalists to accept at least partially the method of systematic doubt.
History writing without a clear public purpose. Far from the subject matter of other Greek historical works, Xenophon’s Anabasis (The march up-country) traced not the fate of states or heroes but that of a group of mere mercenaries and their leaders, among them Xenophon. They had been hired by the Persian prince Cyrus to help him overthrow his ruling brother, Artaxerxes. The motives of the Greek mercenaries really amounted to the search for adventure, booty, and glory, Cyrus’s defeat at Cunaxa in 401 b. c. dashed these hopes, and the arduous struggle to leave Persia began, the struggle which is described in the Anabasis.
The antagonists in the stmggle were the Greeks on the one hand and the elements, the barren land, the wild tribes, and the Persian satrap Tissaphernes on the other. When Tissaphernes trapped and murdered the Greek generals, Xenophon, seemingly an experienced soldier, led the Greeks past many a danger. All of it was accomplished not for the glory of any state or cause but for a simpler reason; “Now for it, men, think that the race is for Hellas—now or never-to find your boys, your wives.”''’ Fulfillment did not come with winning a decisive battle but with the shouts from the advance guard; “Thalassa! Tha-lassa!” (“The sea! The seal”). They had survived. It all had been a magnificent adventure but no more than a historical sideshow.
In both, Xenophon did not identify himself as the author of either the Anabasis or the Hellenica, despite the highly individualistic tenor of his work. In it individuals make history as they rise to power and prominence by their actions and excellence and then fail through accidental circumstances or the machinations of conspiring opponents. Xenophon never searched for or understood those relentless forces which, according to Thucydides, shaped the fate of social and political institutions. Hence it was fitting that Xenophon became one of the early writers of Greek biography.
Biography as an account of the past. Homer’s Iliad had been unabashedly individualistic. However, its figures were not those one could meet in the public square; they were exemplary figures of a glorious and distant age, whose conduct could inspire human beings to transcend their ordinary lives. Scholars who have searched for the early traces of biography as the life stories of famous mortals have spoken vaguely of a biography of the tyrant Heraclides of Mylasa, written in all likelihood by Scylax of Caryanda, the explorer. Some indications point to biographical works by Xanthus the Lydian and Ion of Chios. Since all of these authors lived in Asia Minor or areas close to it, scholars have suspected an oriental impulse to biographical writing. That may well be, with Near Eastern biography an established fact and, one must add, with significantly different interests prevailing for a long time on the Greek mainland.
In fifth-century Greece interest focused on the state, on power, and on hegemony. But the histories of Herodotus narrated stories about individuals whose lives could teach a lesson, and Thucydides acknowledged the important role of individuals when he spoke of statesmen and demagogues. Then, in the fourth century, the gradual loosening of communal ties and the corresponding increase in the weight given to individuals favored the growth of biography. Xenophon’s Anabasis could be seen as a collective biography of people whose fate made no difference to the course of history. The same venture provided the incentive for Xenophon’s Cyropaedia that told the story of Cyrus the Great. With its emphasis on the moral and political growth of the king, it represented the peculiar “education of...” genre within biography, quite favored in the ancient period and revived in the Renaissance. That the term “biography” itself was not used until centuries later, and that the Greeks for a long time simply used the term bios (life), is merely an issue of terminology.
Later, in his encomium for the Spartan king Agesilaus, Xenophon moved biographical writing away from the historical genre in the direction of the philosophical contemplation of life. The encomium had been a poem of praise, particularly for the winners of athletic games, when the orators of the fourth century discovered it for their purposes and Isocrates set a standard with his encomium for Evagoras of Cyprus, wherein he praised the king and used Eva-goras’s life as an example of a wise ruler. Xenophon retained some historical elements in his encomium to Agesilaus, the Spartan king whom he had served, when he dealt with the actual events of Agesilaus’s life, but he gave most attention to Agesilaus’s virtues: piety, justice, self-control, courage, wisdom, rationality, and urbanity.
World History
