Ancient historiography is important not only for its own sake, but also because it has furnished an enduring model, both in form and subject matter, for the western literary tradition. Anthologies of historical writing as well as handbooks on the writing of history begin not infrequently with Herodotus and Thucydides, the latter of whom is still considered by some to be the greatest historian of all time.
Even so, the modern study of ancient historical works has evolved a great deal over the last decades. Earlier scholars, basing themselves on nineteenth-century views of history and historical writing, approached the ancient historians most often with a view to determining how reliable they were, in terms of both factual accuracy and impartiality. These investigations were concerned, above all, with what sources the historians used, what methods they had employed in putting together their works, and how well they understood the concerns and demands of pragmatic political history. Many of those who studied these histories were primarily interested in using the information contained in them to reconstruct the Realien of ancient history, for it happens to be the case that despite the important contributions of archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics, most of what we know about Greek and Roman history comes from the texts of ancient historians.
It seems fair to say that the last thirty years have seen a somewhat different approach in the way historical texts are analyzed and evaluated, and the old questions, while not completely disappearing, have begun to be seen as more complicated. The discipline of history itself has been undergoing a fairly thorough reevaluation, and both philosophers and practicing historians have begun to question the value and epistemic claims of traditional narrative history. There is today a greater realization that no history can be complete (since selection of what the historian considers important is essential to his presentation), nor can it be free from some (often culturally predetermined) viewpoint. The status of history has also been questioned from a different direction, namely its literary form, and scholars now emphasize the affinities of narrative history with fiction and other forms of discursive prose, calling attention to the many characteristics that both ‘‘factual’’ and ‘‘fictional’’ discourse share.
This reevaluation of history in general has naturally influenced the approach taken by scholars of the ancient world, whose inquiries now tend to look away from the traditional questions of reliability and sources, and focus instead on the examination of ancient histories as literary artefacts, as the products of individual artistry with their own structure, themes, and concerns. This new generation of studies often seeks to uncover the rhetorical workings that underlie the text, most especially the way that meaning and explanation are constructed at the level of language. General studies of individual historians tend to emphasize the ‘‘construction’’ that the historian engages in while narrating his version of the past rather than on the past reality that the history is supposed to represent: in other words, Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is studied for what it tells us of the author’s own view of the conflict, and of the preconceptions shared by him and his audience, rather than for what it tells us of the actual historical circumstances of the years 431 to 411: his text is a Peloponnesian War rather than the Peloponnesian War. Or, to take a different example, it is no longer assumed that if Livy does not write history in the way that we would, it is because he did not understand how to go about compiling a reliable record of the past. The belief that Livy would have been more like us, if only he had known, pays far fewer dividends than the more worthwhile approach that looks at what Livy (and, by implication, his audience) did consider important, and how Livy managed to construct a history of Rome that his contemporaries and later generations considered authoritative and permanent.
Predictably, more ‘‘literary’’ studies have been greeted with suspicion by traditional historians, since in not a few cases these newer works have called into question the very possibility of reconstructing ancient history from the ancient historians. Faced with an ‘‘overly’’ literary approach, traditional scholars have emphasized that ancient historians considered research an important component of their work: nearly every historian from Herodotus to Ammianus makes some claim to have practiced inquiry. These scholars have also reacted by averring the reliability of the literary record when it is tested against non-literary evidence, especially archaeology and epigraphy. Indeed, there is merit to this case, and it would be overly simplistic to assume that the writing of history is no different from the writing of any other narrative, factual or fictive. Clearly the ancients thought that history was an area with its own subject matter and method, and the very real debates in the pages of the historians over the accuracy of their predecessors and whether something happened in this or that way shows that they had some sense that their task was not simply to present a plausible narrative; they must have thought there was some underlying and preexisting reality that they were trying to recapture and represent. This Companion to ancient historiography, therefore, tries to represent both approaches to the Greek and Roman historians. Such a twofold approach should lead to a better appreciation of what the ancients were doing when they attempted to create a record of what had happened (or what they thought had happened). As historians are analyzed and appreciated on their own terms, we can, of course, decide that this or that historian executed his task with greater or lesser accuracy or fidelity, but it is no longer necessary to have a teleological view of history writing, in which the first chroniclers of the past are seen as well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual, soon to be replaced by practitioners with a more ‘‘scientific’’ (i. e., nineteenth-century) viewpoint. In fact, as studies both in classics and in history in general have shown, the use of the past is always intimately connected with the present, and often (though not always) with structures of power and authority. Moreover, a ‘‘singular’’ view of what constitutes history and how it should be written overlooks (or minimizes) the vast array of different approaches to the past taken by the ancient historians. In the end, ancient historians become more interesting for their complex construction of the past - i. e., their re-visioning of the past in light of the present - than they would be if considered mere repositories of fact.
World History
