The discussion of the role of rhetoric in Greek Historiography must begin by confronting the question of the modern categorisation of academic disciplines. It was in Athens, with the rise of different philosophical schools during the fourth century, that rhetoric began to be treated as an academic discipline in its own right, and it acquired, with Aristotle’s Rhetoric (late fourth century), a distinct identity that continued to generate theoretical texts throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods (see W. W. Fortenbaugh, Chapter 9). The disciplinary identity of history, however, was much less well defined; there are very few theoretical works that deal directly with historical writing, and these are comparatively late in date.1 So while rhetoric has a clear identity as a subject that can be taught as part of a wider educational curriculum in a form that is recognisable from the fourth century down more or less to the present day, history only gained a similar disciplinary identity in the nineteenth century, becoming part of university curricula towards the end of that century. Thus, the main problem for discussing rhetoric’s relationship with history is that we have much firmer ideas than the ancients about what history is, and those ideas have a more complicated connection with their ancient antecedents than our ideas about rhetoric; and while we may be interested in looking at how rhetoric and history intersected in Greek thought, those two terms refer differently to their Greek equivalents.
Ancient readers would indeed be puzzled by the existence of a chapter such as this one, since to a large extent the tension between rhetoric and history is the product of the institutionalisation of history as an academic discipline. Recapturing the harmony between rhetoric and history, which was taken for granted in antiquity, places considerable demands on modern critical faculties, since we will often encounter an unfamiliar world-view which leaves us searching for a stable foothold for criticism. For most of the twentieth century, critics dealt with this unfamiliarity by stressing the defectiveness of most ancient historians’ attitudes to rhetoric; the situation has recently improved, but the modern prejudice against rhetoric in history continues to cause difficulties in understanding the ancient view of this area.
Rhetoric clearly did play an important part in ancient historical writing, most obviously since set speeches demonstrating their author’s rhetorical skills were a characteristic of all Greek historical writing. Wars and political debates make up a substantial proportion of all historical texts; public speech-making can, along with battles, be seen as the main political event in classical antiquity. For that reason, historians reserved their greatest stylistic resources for the effective treatment of these two subjects. Ancient historiography is at its most obviously rhetorical where it makes direct speech itself into a tool for animating a particular historical event: the direct speech in history presupposes an audience that enjoys public oratory, and is attuned to appreciate the vivid persuasive qualities which speeches can produce. Battle narratives, too, clearly express the rhetorical training of their authors: narrative was an important part of most law-court speeches, and bringing historical events to life required much the same vividness, organisational skill, and appeal to the emotions as narrative in a legal setting. If ancient historiography can fairly be described as particularly rhetorical, it is because in the dominance of these two kinds of writing, political speeches and narrative (particularly perhaps battle narrative), the overlap between the position of rhetoric in ancient political culture, and the record of that culture in historical writing, is at its most evident.
At the same time, there are indications of an unease concerning the role of rhetoric in historical writing from Thucydides (c. 460-400) onwards; the modern sense that rhetoric is something that diverts historians and their readers from the real task of history does have an equivalent in Greek thought. It is essential therefore to find a way of negotiating the enormous difference in perspective between modern and ancient conceptions of historical writing, and of describing both the general integration of rhetoric within historiography, and those moments where a tension between them becomes apparent. This tension may be seen to have contributed to the later separation of historiography from rhetoric that characterises most modern thinking on the subject.
The modern prejudice against rhetoric rests on the idea that rhetoric encourages readers and writers to concentrate more on the form of words than on their actual meaning, and that historical truth is something that ought to exist in a place beyond the reach of rhetoric. Many modern philosophers of history have challenged this view, and it is not one which can be found in antiquity; for example, the mistrust ofrhetoric associated with Plato (c. 428-349) does not appear to have had a significant effect on historians. Nevertheless, the manner in which Greek thinkers accommodated rhetoric within historical writing did vary, and if we focus on this variation, we gain considerable insight into the way Greek writers thought about their own past, and about the best way of writing about it.
For the vast majority of ancient historians and their readers, the interplay between rhetoric and history was unproblematic; on a theoretical level, it appears that there was felt to be no particular need to distinguish historiography as a separate branch of prose writing, which required different rules or conventions from those which governed the composition of other kinds of prose. The Roman orator and politician Cicero (106-43) is the first to suggest that Greek rhetorical theory had neglected history. In de Oratore 2, which was, of course, written with a Roman readership in mind, he explores the idea that historical writing might benefit from being treated as a special case when it came to stylistic theory. Only one author, Lucian (second century AD; his highly idiosyncratic treatise How to Write History is discussed below) really thought that rhetoric exceeded its normal bounds when it took too dominant a part in historical writing. Rhetorical theory tended at first to ignore history, or later to treat it as simply another kind of writing capable of the same kind of stylistic analysis as speeches or philosophy. From another perspective, there was therefore no reason why the rules of literary composition that constituted the realm of rhetoric would not be perfectly appropriate as training for anyone writing history. So rhetoric forms as much a part of the background to the work of historical writers as their attitude to their sources or their relationship to predecessors: all provide useful angles from which to understand the writing itself.
World History
