It is due in large part, no doubt, to this complete absence of non-mythic narrative sources for the pre-classical period, that other ancient historians have taken a more inclusive “Herodotean” approach and welcomed myth within the scope of historical analysis, recognizing the fundamental similarities between the two kinds of narratives. Both, after all, enact a dialogue between the past and the present. Each is fundamentally concerned not just with representing what happened in the past, but also with asking “Why.?”
For the historian interested in learning about the origins of Athens or the causes of the Trojan War, then, the poems of Homer and the plays of Euripides offer a wealth of tempting stories full of nuggets of historical truth amid their fanciful plots and mythical characters. But, as Herodotus already knew, the historian needs a critical apparatus to evaluate the credibility or historicity of these mythic sources. His term historia (from which we get our word history) comes from the verb historein (to make an inquiry or investigation, to adjudicate disputes), and Herodotus brings this investigative focus to, among other things, the stories that he collects from around the world in his history of the Persian War. While myth and history certainly do overlap, their narrative goals and discursive strategies, as will be seen below, are not completely identical, and to read myth literally, as if it were history, can lead the historian seriously astray. The Homeric poems tell a story that is quite compatible with what the archaeological and linguistic evidence can tell us about a conflict between Greeks and
Trojans at the end of the second millennium bc, but that doesn’t mean that a Trojan named Paris really made off with Menelaos’s wife. It is the willingness to read myth as if it were telling us “what really happened,” to take just one example, that is at the heart of much of the shortcomings (on both sides) between classicists and Afrocentrists over the Black Athena issue.
World History
