Let us consider the late fifth-century Athenian historian Thucydides. Long regarded as the father of “scientific” history, Thucydides is perhaps studied less by ancient historians today than he was a generation or two ago, though he is currently enjoying considerable popularity among more philologically-minded scholars, who have justly drawn attention to the highly accomplished literary qualities of his work. The account of the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 is a case in point. Apart from the fact that this particular episode is very deliberately emplotted as a tragedy, whose squalid outcome is poignantly coun-terposed to the pomp and optimism surrounding its inception, Thucydides’ account consciously employs echoes taken from his predecessor Herodotus’ description of the Persian invasion of Greece in 480. For example, Herodotus (7.44) tells how, upon reaching the Hellespont, the Persian king Xerxes presided over a race between the ships in his fleet; in Thucydides (6.32.2), the Athenian ships race each other as far as the island of Aegina. According to Herodotus (8.75), the Athenian general Themistocles forced the naval battle in the straits of Salamis by sending a secret message to the Persian command, advising them to attack before the Greeks abandoned their station. Thucydides (7.73) recounts how the Syracusan statesman Hermocrates prevented the defeated Athenians from escaping by having his men pretend to befriend them and warn them not to retreat immediately because the roads were being guarded. Even Thucydides’ description (7.70-71) of the naval battle in the Great Harbor of Syracuse echoes the chaotic and crowded conditions that characterize Herodotus’ portrayal of the Battle of Salamis (8.84-96). This is no act of plagiarism: by deliberately evoking the account of Herodotus - an account that would certainly have been familiar to his readership - Thucydides was in a sense comparing the imperialist designs of Athens with those of the Persian Empire earlier; and everybody knew how that campaign had ended.
Such literary devices are certainly not limited to the description of the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides crafts the speeches which he presents in such a way as to reveal the character of those who are made to utter them. Thus, the sober and cautious speech of the Spartan king Archidamus (1.80-85) is designed to reflect the dilatory - not to say sluggish - tendencies that the Athenians attributed to the Spartans, while the confession of the Spartan ephor Sthenelaidas that he could not understand “those long speeches of the Athenians” (1.86) illustrates the Spartans’ proverbial economy with words (the word “laconic” derives from the Greek word Lakon, meaning “Spartan”). Furthermore, certain events are anticipated, deferred, or juxtaposed outside their strict chronological occurrence for the purposes of providing a more contoured account of the war. Pericles, for example, is made to utter his final speech one year before his death from the plague in order to have him safely off the stage prior to the entrance of Cleon, the demagogic politician whom Thucydides compares unfavorably to Pericles. Yet does this recognition of Thucydides’ literary artistry provide sufficient grounds for denying that the events which Thucydides describes ever happened? When we are faced with divergences between Thucydides’ account and other testimony - be it the contemporary evidence of comic satirists such as Aristophanes, the public inscriptions that the Athenian democracy set up, or the later history of Diodorus of Sicily - are the criteria on which we make our ultimate judgment really only moral or aesthetic?
We cannot, of course, hope to recapitulate the past “in its totality”: the context against which we frame individual events is to a certain degree imagined. In this respect, however, the past is no different from the present - our perception of both is subjective and partial (in both senses of the word) - but these are not sufficient grounds for resigning ourselves to ignorance. In fact, White himself is not as averse to the idea of historical facts as are some of his acolytes. At a conference, held at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990, he acknowledged that outright acceptance of his view that the grounds for distinguishing between alternative historical accounts were moral and aesthetic rather than epistemological could feasibly lend credibility to revisionist histories that denied the reality of the Holocaust. He therefore conceded that in some - though not all - cases, the type of emplotment available to the historian might actually be limited by the “real” facts, though this concession obviously undermined the view that history is entirely reducible to its narrative representation. To be fair, despite his emphasis on the literary strategies through which historical accounts are crafted, White had never denied the reality of the historical traces that the historian discovers and has even suggested that “responsibility to the rules of evidence” can help the reader “distinguish between good and bad historiography” (Canary and Kozicki 1978: 59). That is clearly not the view of other postmodernist scholars such as Jenkins, who argues that “there is a range of methods without any agreed criteria for choosing” (2003: 15).
World History
