A third aspect of meaning in the early Greek historians is less easy to point to in the text than are memorialization and judgment, partly because it is so pervasive. Both our interest as readers in the remarkable things narrated and our trust in the judgments expressed in their texts rest, in fact, on a third element of meaning - the creation of a narrator-persona whose voice in the text conveys the ongoing narrative, and who seems to us both interesting and trustworthy as a narrator. Although they differ in memorialization and judgment, in this one area - the task of establishing the distinctive persona that claims to deliver the narrative - Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon use the same kinds of techniques in conveying the very different flavors of their authorial temperaments. I list some of the more important of them here:
1 The overt narrator, acting sometimes like Homer, who has privileged access to the thoughts and emotions of the actors inside the narrative. This is the voice de Jong (1987) calls external, omnipotent, and omnipresent - the stage-manager who has outfitted the unrolling narrative in all its distinctive colors.
2 The organizer-narrator, explicitly managing the direction of the text, controlling where it will begin or end, interrupting with something new, explaining something, or engaging in more complicated movements like analepsis or prolepsis in order to render in meaningful linear form events that have happened simultaneously in different locations.
3 The knowledgeable and helpful narrator, sometimes importing, either in the first person or in neutral third-person description, supplementary background information necessary in his judgment if we are to understand the ongoing narrative.
4 The modest or hesitant narrator, stressing the human limitations of his knowledge. Herodotus is especially good at this, but even Thucydides in the later books occasionally signals such doubts (7.44, 8.87; Hornblower 1994a: 156). Xenophon has an affect of soldierly modesty in his deceptively straightforward prose and refusal of embellishment (cf. the extreme simplicity of the Hellenica's beginning and end). He has not constructed a narrator who presents himself as straining to find things out or think deeply and critically about them (cf. Agesi-laus' comment at 4.3.2), but rather implies that he has simply written down what he knows and left the rest aside.
5 More impressionistically still, perhaps, the narrator-as-genial-host, inviting in selected secondary and reported embedded narrators to have their say - Herodotus is famous for this, but Thucydides and Xenophon also do it. Thucydides includes speeches, but also a variety of letters: Themistocles' to Artaxerxes (1.137), the Persian king's intercepted letter to the Spartans (4.50), Nicias' to the Athenian assembly (7.11-15). While Herodotus is a master of depicting conversation among the actors in his text, one also thinks of the constitutional debate (3.80-83) or the council scene that opens Book 7 (7.8-11). Xenophon too likes to make room for his commanders' speeches, though it has to be said that many of them sound more like Nicias just before the battle of the great harbor in Syracuse than like Pericles or even the Cleon of the Mytilenean Debate (Thuc. 7.69; 3.37-40). Each time the historian lets the actors inside the narrative express themselves, he is tacitly telling us information about his own take on the world and his idea of the people in it, but he is also dialogically reminding us that the decisions and actions of the individuals within the narrative create the unfolding of events.
All three of our narrators convey their persona as historian by giving us, throughout their texts, some hint of their own lively ongoing engagement in its management. Of the three, Xenophon is the least vividly present as an expressive persona; Gray (below, Ch. 30) shows that this is an active, deliberate reticence, chosen because the narrative itself conveys so much of his own moral judgment in little quasi asides. Occasionally, however, even Xenophon exhibits flashes of personal narrative affect as when he dryly remarks that in defeat, the Mantineans at least learned not to let the river run straight through their walls (5.2.7), or when without comment he transmits the vivid Laconic cry for help sent to Sparta by a beleaguered commander (1.1.23): ‘‘Ships gone, Mindarus dead, men starving, what to do?’’
The persona of the author-as-narrator conveys an important aspect of the meaning of the text, because it is in large part the quality of this voice that makes us believe that what we are reading is likely to matter to us. Each of the three authors speaks to us as someone who has put considerable effort and thought into the narrative. Their personas are different: Herodotus is genial and vividly discursive, Thucydides severely analytical, and Xenophon earnest and direct in the apparent transparency of his narrative. But in each case, it is the thoughtful management of the authorial voice that will make us, as readers, want to attend to this particular record of the past, and the judgments expressed about it, because we trust the author-as-narrator.
World History
