How the ancients wrote history is an important question, and the nature of that enterprise has been debated vigorously over the past thirty years or so (see Further Reading). Much of the debate revolves around the relationship between form and content, more specifically the extent to which rhetoric and rhetorical training affected the content of ancient histories. That ancient historiography was a rhetorical genre cannot be denied, although the consequences of this have been evaluated in very different ways. Some scholars believe that one can discount much of the rhetorical adornment found in ancient histories and recover a core of solid fact, while others counter that rhetoric is not like the icing one can slice off a cake (to use the image of Moles 1993: 114), but rather part of the very fabric of the work, and thus form and content cannot easily be separated.
The former view often requires the modern historian to engage in a process of rationalization not entirely different from that practiced by the ancients. It presupposes, to put it crudely, that there is no smoke without fire, and that traditions, however modified or adorned, are usually based on some factual content. That is a view with a respectable ancient pedigree (see e. g. Isoc. Panath. 149-50), but it presumes that traditions are reliable and nothing is ever invented out of whole cloth - possibly, very dangerous presumptions.
On the other hand, those who deny to the ancient historians a concern with fact argue that the “truth” they pursued was a rhetorical truth based on probability rather than actuality. Yet such a viewpoint must overlook both the distinction often made by the ancients between oratory and history (D. Potter 1999a: 137-38) and the great number of remarks made by historians and other ancient writers in which they seem quite concerned with finding out what really happened, rather than simply settling for a story that satisfied the demands of probability (Avenarius 1956: 76-79).
Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the Greek term heuresis and its Latin equivalent inventio, words that mean both “discovery” and “invention.” It has been argued that the rhetorical education of the ancients meant that they did not consciously see themselves as inventing material when they did not know it so much as discovering it, i. e. using the techniques that their rhetorical training had given them. It is not difficult to see that this must have been the case very often when historians inserted speeches into their histories, simply because exact recollection was impossible (Walbank 1965); but was it also operative in the realm of deeds and of characters’ motivations and goals? If so, the concept of “what they must have said” could easily bleed into “what they must have done.” Modern scholars who propose such a model thus rescue ancient historians from the charge of lying, but at the cost of calling all or much of the content of their work into question.
We are not close to any definitive answers on these topics, and scholars will continue to debate them. Rather than summarizing all of the issues at stake, therefore, I propose to look at one topic in particular - that of the ancient historians’ interest in and understanding of historical change.
World History
