Herodotus does not intend his record of great and astounding things from the past to be read as a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. He makes this clear by the way he begins his narrative, straight-faced, with accounts of the abductions of four clearly mythic women (1.1). Persian logioi (knowledgeable men) had issued an account of the causes of Greco-barbarian hostility by retelling tongue-in-cheek the tit-for-tat exchanges of lo, Europa, Medea, and Helen - exchanges that, not entirely coincidentally, make Phoenicians and Greeks the principal causes of the ancient enmity. But Herodotus himself dismisses this whole line of thinking with a shrug, moving on ‘‘to the man I know (oida) first committed injustices against the Greeks’’ (1.5). This oida in some ways is the real beginning of history writing, since it signifies the idea of critical judgment underlying and structuring the choice of events to be memorialized. In each of our three historians, authorial judgment is exercised both about what to include in the text in the first place and about how to evaluate the actions of the individuals involved as the narrative unrolls.
In a sense, this feature of Greek historiography was from the beginning a necessary concomitant of the Panhellenic process mentioned just above, the glorification of great achievement in a far-flung and culturally cohesive but competitive aristocratic community. In the Iliad a histor is the judge at the finish line of a horse race (23.486), or an adjudicator among competing claims (18.501) - and part of the task of folding many different Greek communities’ stories into one story was the need for the memorialist to judge, if only tacitly, among conflicting stories about great past deeds. As a memorialist, whom does one glorify, and why?
Herodotus calls his work the ‘‘display of his historic’ or investigation (praef.). He structures the Histories so that the process of adjudicating among competing and sometimes exaggerated variant logoi (accounts) of past events is a prominent part of the narrative. Throughout, he often cites two or more variant versions of events, sometimes (but not always) noting when he judges one superior to the other: Lateiner (1989: 84-90) lists 150 instances of alternative accounts. Whether or not Herodotus chooses, however, it is clear that both versions cannot be true. The structure of the narrative itself indicates that we, the readers, must see this and also in consequence become part of the investigative process.
Herodotus overtly judges not just the stories themselves but also the behavior of various people within the stories. He records or at least speculates about instances where the gods punish impiety: Croesus’ son Atys died, possibly because Croesus overestimated his own happiness (1.34); Pheretime was eaten by worms, possibly for taking excessive vengeance (4.205). Sometimes irony suggests judgment that is not made explicit, as at the very end of the Histories, where the Athenians behave cruelly toward their Persian captives, whereas Pausanias, the Spartan victor at Plataea, has just recently refused to indulge in such behavior (9.120, 79). Herodotus also sometimes judges by deliberate exclusion, for instance, choosing not to record false Greek claims to have invented metempsychosis (2.123.3), or deliberately omitting the details of Polycrates’ horrible death (3.125).
On the surface Thucydides explicitly disdains the whole process of overt authorial judgment of this sort. There are few variant versions of events, because what he records is, as he emphasizes, his own best judgment about what happened. The whole History performs Thucydides’ continuous exercise of judgment, about what events and speeches to include, and what to say about them. The critique he makes of individual people emerges from the details of the narrative itself; in the Methodenkap-itel (1.20-22), and then again in the ‘‘second introduction’’ (5.26), he tells us just enough so that we may understand how seriously he has gone about his task: he is the final arbiter in all matters of record. When he says that he gives us the ‘‘necessary parts’’ (ta deonta, 1.22.1) of the speeches he has collected, he is tacitly assuring us that he has selected out the aspects from the hundreds of speeches given that he thought most valuable for understanding the war, aspects that allow his readers to judge the effectiveness of the various political and military decisions depicted in the narrative. Although Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, has largely shut us out of his historian’s workshop, he nonetheless assures us that he has conscientiously exercised an appropriate historical judgment, both about what to include and what meaning to assign it. Until very recently, that made him seem the most trustworthy of all ancient historians, even if some of the scholars of the ‘‘we are losing!’’ camp now regard him as little more than a brilliantly persuasive historical novelist.
With Xenophon, we again feel that we have entered a different world. Where Herodotus grids and judges as many logoi about the past as allow him to tell a comprehensive story of the Persian empire and its check in Greece, and where Thucydides assures us that he has gone to every effort to collect and assess the raw materials out of which he constructs a careful logos of the Peloponnesian War, Xenophon’s judgment takes place on a canvas simultaneously much broader and much more limited than those of his predecessors. Xenophon does not write a narrative that is conscientiously inclusive in its choice of events to report. Even if it is too harsh to call the Hellenica not history but ‘‘memoirs written for connoisseurs’’ (Cawkwell 1966: 28, 35, 45), Xenophon nevertheless often seems to be exercising little thoughtful selectivity about what to narrate and how to interpret what is narrated. We know from other histories of the period that he leaves out several crucial developments in the forty-odd years he recounts: the role of Sparta in imposing the Thirty on Athens in 403, for instance, or the establishment of the Second Athenian League, or the careers of the vitally important Thebans, Pelopidas and Epaminondas.
A current scholarly argument underway centers on whether Xenophon’s egregious omissions are themselves the sign of political bias, recognizable by the cognoscenti among his readers. But even if we look only at his depictions of the historical actors that play such a large role in his narrative, Xenophon’s account of his hero Agesilaus’ career is suspiciously spotty and differs in its details and even its judgments from his laudatory biography of the Spartan king. Xenophon’s judgments, as already mentioned, are most conspicuously military ones, seasoned with a strongly ethical overlay: Tissaphernes as an oathbreaker (3.4.6), or the disgraceful Spartan seizure of the Theban Cadmeia (5.2.26-36). Even one of his favorites, the Spartan Teleutias, is judged severely for his thoughtless anger and the disaster that it brings on for the men under his command (5.3.3-7).
Xenophon is sometimes compared to Herodotus in his privileging of the gods and their punishment of human misbehavior. But Herodotus almost always brings in the gods as part of the logos that he is retelling and professes authorial doubt both about their identities and their ultimate purposes - they are as mysterious as the shape of history itself as it unrolls; only afterward, as Solon says (Hdt. 1.32), can we look back and see what it was all about. Xenophon, on the other hand, leaves us in no doubt of his personal piety and belief that divinity truly controls human existence. Witness his final judgment on the frustratingly inconclusive battle of Mantinea (7.5.26-27):
But God so ordered things that both parties put up trophies... both sides claimed the victory, but it cannot be said that with regard to the accession of new territory, or cities, or power either side was any better off after the battle than before it. In fact, there was even more uncertainty and confusion in Greece after the battle than there had been previously.
In this way the narrative line of the Hellenica ends, and the only kind of judgment Xenophon thinks he can make, in the breakdown of his mid-fourth-century world, is that things are very confusing, and that the divine has willed it that way.
Thus although all three historians exercise judgment as a vital aspect of the task of memorialization, they do it quite differently. Herodotus overtly judges both his logoi and the people and events narrated in the logoi; Thucydides’ judgment of people is more oblique, since the whole of his logos stands as his continuous considered analysis and judgment on the course of the war, while Xenophon accounts for the meaning of the ongoing narrative and the behavior of the people within it by privileging a technical military sphere of attention that also contains personal, moral, and ideological value judgments within it.
World History
