Historians are often fond of distinguishing themselves from those they rather disparagingly call “antiquarians.” Antiquarians, it is argued, are interested in facts for their own sake while real historians are more concerned with interpreting those facts from a broader perspective that seeks to identify interconnections, causes, and consequences. As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, facts are not “out there,” waiting to be discovered by the historian; rather, they too are established through a process of interpretation. Those interpretations that command near universal acceptance - for instance, that the Greeks defeated the Persians near the Boeotian city of Plataea in the spring of 479 - are easily accorded the status of a fact. By contrast, other so-called facts - for example, that tyrants came to power in Greek cities with the support of citizen militias - are not nearly as incontrovertible. The standard, or benchmark, by which factual status is judged is the degree to which an interpretative reconstruction of a past event can claim authority from the available evidence. Such evidence exists in a wide variety of forms but pride of place has traditionally been given to written accounts or sources.
Conventionally a distinction is drawn between primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources typically designate written materials that are contemporary to the events that they describe - normally with little in the way of interpretation or commentary. Secondary sources, instead, indicate “second hand” works of synthesis based on primary sources and normally compiled at
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
A later date. The cardinal sin in historical practice is to confuse the two and to cite a secondary source as an authority for an argument. So, for example, an essay on the Persian War of 480-479 that cited as its only reference A. R. Burn’s Persia and the Greeks - magisterial though it may be - would not be graded very highly. Burn’s book provides an excellent introduction to the topic and presents some original hypotheses that should certainly be taken into account, but ultimately the student of history must construct a narrative on the basis of his or her interpretation of ancient accounts such as Diodorus, Plutarch, and especially Herodotus. The same is obviously true of this book. The historical conclusions that are found in the pages that follow should not be accepted uncritically but should instead be examined to see whether they provide a satisfactory interpretation of the available evidence. To repeat, the primary aim of this book is not so much to explain “what actually happened” in the Archaic Greek world but rather to illustrate how we go about writing a history of this period. This inevitably involves us in engaging with the primary sources in order to gauge the relative plausibility of the various interpretations they have generated.
This distinction between primary and secondary sources is useful - but only up to a certain point. The common tendency to regard ancient authors as primary sources is not entirely accurate. Herodotus was not an eyewitness to the great war between Greece and Persia that constitutes the central theme of his work. The Histories were written around the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431, almost fifty years after the Persian War, so it is clear that Herodotus’ account - which actually includes plenty of commentary and interpretation - is reliant on the reports of others, and these technically count as Herodotus’ primary sources. Strictly speaking, then, the Histories are a secondary source and, by extension, a book such as Burn’s, which seeks to provide a narrative of the war on the basis of the testimony of Herodotus and other authors, is more properly to be regarded as a tertiary source. But perhaps the employment of the term “source” to describe Burns’ book is not entirely appropriate either. The word “source” implies a starting-point or origin whereas it is quite clear that Burns’ work of synthesis constitutes more of an end product. It is, then, probably preferable to reserve the use of the word “source” for those written materials that represent our most proximate entry-point into the ancient world.
Another problem with the primary-secondary source distinction is that it can sometimes endow ancient sources with an aura of infallibility that they do not always deserve. Historians generally regard Herodotus’ account of the Persian War as more reliable than the narratives of Diodorus or Plutarch but that is not to say that Herodotus’ credibility has never been called into question. Few believe that the invading Persian forces totalled 1,700,000 as Herodotus (7.60) claims, and it is generally supposed that this figure is based on a mixture of unreliable witnesses, faulty calculation, and a desire to exaggerate further the Greek achievement. It is important, then, to remember that the quality and reliability of sources may vary widely, thus necessitating what German scholars call Quellenkritik, or “source criticism.” Sometimes it is a matter of gauging the relative merits of two or more sources that provide different or even contradictory information. More often than not, however (and especially for the Archaic period), all we have is a single, solitary source. In such cases, the best tactic is to steer a middle course between an excessive credulity, which holds that every piece of information furnished by an ancient author should be accepted on trust so long as no contradictory evidence is available, and a paralyzing hypercriticism that would admit no evidence at all.
There is no foolproof method for establishing the reliability of a source. If there were, historians would have little to occupy their time. There is, however, a set of tools or tests that at least make explicit the presuppositions one entertains when employing a particular source. The first test is that of temporal proximity. Was our informant an eyewitness to the events he (very rarely she) describes or was he at least contemporary to them so that he may have been able to glean information from others who were present? If not, how long after the events that are described did he write? It is an often noted - though seldom resolved - fact that most narrative histories of the Archaic Greek world are heavily dependent upon isolated notices provided by authors writing many centuries later. To take an example, in the eighth chapter of her Archaic Greece: The City-States c. 700-500 BC, published in 1976, Lilian Jeffery discusses the history of Sparta in the seventh and sixth centuries. Of 112 literary sources cited, only two date to the Archaic period - namely, Tyrtaeus’ claim (fr. 5) that the conquest of Messenia lasted twenty years and a reference by the Corinthian poet Eumelus (fr. 11) to the fact that Apollo was originally worshipped in the form of a column. Almost 43 percent of the cited sources date to the fifth century - the vast majority deriving from Herodotus - but well over one third date to the late first century CE or later. This is less a criticism of Jeffery - who, it should be said, supplemented literary evidence with epigraphic testimony and material evidence - as it is a characterization of the difficulties that face the historian of Archaic Greece with respect to sources.
It should be stressed that there need not be any direct correlation between a source’s reliability and its temporal proximity to the events it relates. A writer might, for any number of reasons, decide willfully to misrepresent a situation. But, even in the absence of deliberate duplicity, no two eyewitnesses will normally perceive - let alone remember - the same event in identical ways. Thucydides (1.22.3) famously observed that it was no simple matter to verify the truth of eyewitness reports of the Peloponnesian War “because those who were present at the various events did not say the same things about them, whether out of goodwill to one side or the other or else as a result of faulty memory.” On the other hand, later authors were not always as creative or inventive as modern scholars would have us believe. Writers such as Strabo, Plutarch, and Pausanias often consulted earlier works and in some cases it is possible to hunt down those earlier authorities - a practice that is known in German scholarship as Quellenforschung, or “the search for sources.” For example, our principal source for the constitution of Sparta in the Archaic period is Plutarch (Lyc. 6), writing in the late first and early second centuries ce, who cites a document that has come to be known as the “Great Rhetra.” Since, however, Plutarch cites the fourth-century philosopher Aristotle in explaining some of the more arcane provisions of the Rhetra and since we know that Aristotle - or rather one of his pupils - wrote a now lost Constitution of the Spartans, it is not an unreasonable inference that Plutarch’s information derives from an earlier work of at least the fourth century. Whether or not the Aristotelian work was itself based on earlier information is a more difficult question to answer (see further pp. 208-11). In fact, it is generally difficult to trace back beyond the fourth or fifth centuries the sources employed by writers living under the Roman Empire without resorting to conjectural lines of transmission between shadowy authors who are little more than names to us. And more often than not, the search for the sources on which Roman imperial writers drew carries us back only as far as the Hellenistic period of the third and second centuries. The test of temporal proximity comes with no guarantees as to reliability but it remains the case that the employment of a late source demands a greater burden of proof in establishing its authoritative credentials.
The second test is that of contextual fit. How well does the source fit against the general context or background of what we think we know about either the period in which the described events occurred or else the period in which the author was writing? Alternatively, how does a specific piece of information relate to other writings by the same author? If, for example, we are confronted by an author whom we know to have been a committed anti-Athenian or a staunch supporter of aristocratic rule, then we will probably not be misled into assuming that such information is necessarily representative of wider opinion. “Contex-tualist” approaches have recently come under fire from postmodernist scholars, who argue that since a historical context is itself constructed out of numerous individual sources, it is fallacious to regard it as a more “objective” or “real” set of circumstances against which the authenticity of any individual source can be measured. Yet the issue of objectivity is a red herring: since historical practice is by nature interpretative, it is necessarily subjective (which is not to say that it bears no relation to underlying historical realities). It is perfectly legitimate to interpret an individual source in light of the broader understanding we have gained from the study of other sources just as our cognitive faculties process new information on the basis of earlier (subjective) sensory perceptions. When we come across a source that cannot be accommodated within what we imagine to be the broader historical context, we should certainly be prepared to entertain the possibility that the context we have constructed is unsatisfactory. But more often than not, the most common reason why a source cannot be accommodated within a broader context is because it never belonged to that context in the first place.
Let us consider a couple of concrete examples. As we saw in chapter 1, Plutarch (Mor. 760e-761b) relates how the Thessalian cavalry commander Kleo-makhos was killed while aiding the Chalcidians in the Lelantine War and adds that he was granted the honor of burial in the agora at Chalcis, where his tomb was marked by a tall column. This piece of information clearly scores poorly in the test of temporal proximity, but what about that of contextual fit? Let us assume for the sake of argument that the Lelantine War was a real event that occurred around or shortly after 700. Would Thessalians have aided Chalcidians in the early seventh century? Would warriors be granted elaborate burial rites in the agora at this date? And did tall columns typically serve as grave markers in this period? Given their geographical proximity, the idea of Thessalian military support for a Euboean city is not, in principle, unthinkable, though we know next to nothing about interstate relations in this period. That warriors might be granted elaborate, even “heroizing” burials finds confirmation in the West Gate cemetery at Eretria (p. 2), but there is no evidence at this date that distinguished luminaries were buried in the heart of the city or even that the agora was a common feature of early cities (pp. 82-4). As for grave monuments, certitude is impossible but tall columns are unlikely to have served as tomb markers until the sixth century at the earliest.
The principle of contextual fit does not always need to operate negatively. A first-century geographical account in iambic meter, once attributed to Scymnus of Chios (589), relates how a hero named Physkos was the son of Aetolos. The notice might, at first sight, appear trivial but genealogical expressions such as this were the standard mode through which the ancient Greeks conceived of relationships between peoples and settlements. Physkeis was, in the Classical period, the principal federal sanctuary for the Western Locrians so the genealogy implies some sort of derivative or subordinate relationship of the Western Locri-ans vis-a-vis the Aetolians. Around two centuries later, Plutarch (Mor. 294e) claimed that Physkos was the son not of Aetolos but of Amphiktyon. The test of temporal proximity might lend more credence to the account attributed to Scymnus but the test of contextual fit suggests that it was Plutarch who was following the more ancient tradition. A number of ancient authors, from at least the fifth century onwards, regarded Amphiktyon as the original founder of the Pylaian Amphictyony, a league of predominantly central Greek states - including West Locris - that administered Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi (see Figure 4.3; p. 92). A genealogical tradition that makes Physkos the son of Amphiktyon almost certainly symbolizes the role that the Locrians played within the early development of this league, prior to Thessalian dominance in the later seventh and sixth centuries, and this provides the best positive contextual fit for the genealogical tradition furnished by Plutarch. The notice attributed to Scymnus, on the other hand, fits most plausibly within a third-century context, after the Aetolians had seized control of Delphi and annexed Locris.
The third test is that of intentionality. What is it that our source deliberately wants to communicate and what prior knowledge or presuppositions are casually assumed? Both Herodotus (5.62-65; 6.123) and Thucydides (1.20; 6.5359) go to great lengths to argue that the tyranny at Athens was ended not by Harmodius’ and Aristogiton’s assassination of Pisistratus’ younger son Hipparchus in 514 but by the Spartan expulsion of Hipparchus’ older brother Hippias in 510. The Spartan intervention, we are told, was prompted by the Delphic oracle, which had been bribed by the Athenian aristocratic family of the Alcmaeonidae (see pp. 235-7). The fact that both authors are so insistent could suggest one - or perhaps even both - of two things. Either the two historians had invested considerable time and energies in ascertaining the truth of the matter and were frustrated by what they regarded as widespread popular ignorance in this regard or else they had a personal or political agenda to promote, be it their own or that of their informants. There are good grounds for believing that Thucydides - and perhaps also Herodotus - had close relations with members of the Alcmaeonid family which might lead one to suspect the latter option, though the former is not necessarily thereby excluded. In either case, the intentionality behind this information - which is not entirely germane to the general narrative of either author - reveals that a large part of the Athenian public thought otherwise and that also is a fact that deserves further historical interpretation.
On the other hand, there is much information in these passages that is not so marked by intentionality. When Thucydides (6.54.6) talks about the Pisis-tratus, son of Hippias, “who dedicated the altar of the Twelve Gods in the agora and that of Apollo in the Pythion,” we can presume that the location of these altars was common knowledge to his readership (unless Thucydides was prone to careless or imprecise lapses, which the test of contextual fit would seem to rule out). The attribution of the altars to Pisistratus is more intentionally marked than their location, though far less so than the identity of those who put an end to the tyranny and, in fact, the inscription from the Pythion that Thucydides cites verbatim (“Pisistratus, son of Hippias, dedicated this memorial of his magistracy in the precinct of Pythian Apollo”) was discovered near the Ilissos river in 1877 and is now in the Epigraphic Museum of Athens (ML 11 = Fornara 37). As we shall see, much of the contemporary literary evidence available for the Archaic period tends to fall within the unintentional category.
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