Herodotus begins his history by emphasizing that its purpose is to preserve the memory of past greatness (praef. ):
This is the display of the investigation of Herodotus, so that the things that occurred from human beings (tagenomena ex anthropon) should not become worn away (exitela) through time, and so that great and wonderful deeds (erga megala te kai thomasta), some displayed by Greeks, others by barbarians not become unrenowned (aklea).
Herodotus’ definition of great past achievements is much broader than those of Thucydides and Xenophon, partly because, as the first historian, he must not only retell whatever great and wonderful things he thinks worthy of memorialization yet in danger of being forgotten but also reveal their significance by retelling them within a larger narrative backdrop that lets their remarkableness emerge.
What he gives us, therefore, is not just the ‘‘great and wonderful deeds’’ or even the ‘‘things that exist from human beings,’’ but a gigantic grid of the entire Aegean world, natural and cultural alike. His idea of what is worth memorializing is very heterogeneous. He loves firsts and bests - the first people to use gold and silver coins, the best law, the most outstanding warrior in a particular battle, etc. (e. g., 1.94; 1.194; 1.196; 7.117; 9.25). But overhanging all the individual achievements of this kind is the Panhellenic Greek achievement of 481-479, when the small and often disunited Greek force repulsed the massive attack of Xerxes and won the Persian Wars. This astonishing accomplishment fills the final three books of Herodotus’ history and is the heart of what he has endeavored to memorialize.
Thucydides writes within a generation of Herodotus and ostensibly rejects Herodotus’ notion of memorialization as recording the (literally) remarkable things from the past that people have told him; he emphasizes instead the usefulness of his much more focused narrative to future generations (cf. below, p. 100). But although he memorializes much less overtly and inclusively than Herodotus does, in some ways the task of recording past greatness is an even more important part of his focus as a narrator. Thucydides makes clear in his opening pages that he thinks the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War itself is worthy of record as the greatest war of all time, far greater than either the Trojan or Persian Wars. He occasionally notes people worthy of recognition for exceptional qualities or actions: Phrynichus, Antiphon, the 5,000 non-democratic leaders of the Athenian state after the coup of 411, even Nicias and Alcibiades (8.27; 8.48; 8.68; 8.97; 7.86; 8.86). Most strikingly of course, Pericles is framed as an almost-superhero, someone able to lead the state with extraordinary foresight, justice, and self-control (2.65). In Pericles’ mouth Thucydides puts sentiments that are almost Homeric in their privileging of glory (kleos): the task of the citizen is to become the lover of his city, dedicating himself to its fame so that it does not slip from the role it achieved in the days of the fathers (2.43); that even if Athens loses the war, her greatness in undertaking and waging it valiantly will assure her future renown (2.64). The way to memorialize has changed, but the purpose is still there - even more ferociously for Thucydides, perhaps, than for Herodotus, since it is in effect Thucydides himself as a writer who will complete the Periclean project and fulfill its promise. Indeed, it is because Thucydides wrote up the Peloponnesian War as he did that we continue to study it today as a twenty-seven-year war that began in 431 bce (Ste. Croix 1972: 3, 50-51). Thucydides’ text stands as a tribute to Athens’ grand, if ultimately unrealized, imperial ambitions.
Xenophon, seen through the lens of his two great predecessors, proves both an exception to and an instantiation of this first generalization about meaning-making in the early Greek historians. Where Herodotus and Thucydides define glory that needs memorialization (at least for Greeks) in terms of the achievement of the city-state and of individual Greek leaders within that context, Xenophon begins to articulate it in terms of personal military leadership and individual achievement, achievement he largely defines in technical, but also private, ethical terms. In the Hellenica he repeatedly singles out individual commanders - Hermocrates of Syracuse (1.1.27-31), the Spartans Teleutias (5.1.3, 13-24, 37-43) and especially Agesilaus (3.4.11, 21-24; 4.1.38-40; 4.3.19-21) - for their display of good military practices, fair-mindedness, and a personal integrity and thoughtfulness that are recognized by their troops and result in their being excellent leaders. Maintenance of disciplined order and decisive, intelligent alertness in the crucial moment are the qualities that define excellence in his featured commanders. Their loyalty to their cities is part of that excellence (cf. Teleutias’ exhortation to remember Sparta, 5.1.16), but the city itself as a vital political entity has largely vanished from Xenophon’s vision. Cawkwell (1966: 39) acutely notes Xenophon’s clear approval of Spartan dismemberment in 385 of Mantinea into its composite villages. Xenophon even says that the property owners of Mantinea were pleased to see the city walls come down, since this absolved them from the need to pay attention to democratic demagogues, liberating them to return to the good old days of aristocratic military dominance of the village (5.2.7).
So in Xenophon the scope of civic achievement and individual achievement within a civic focus, memorialized in Herodotus and Thucydides, has given way to a more individualistic focus of attention typical of the fourth century (we can think of the new genre of encomiastic biography, or changes undergone in fourth-century Attic comedy, for instance, in its emphasis on the private, domestic sphere). Pericles’ dictum (Thuc. 2.41, 60), that individual glory comes from belonging to a great and glorious city, no longer prevails; Xenophon expressly and uniquely singles out for praise the ethics of the small and insignificant city of Phlious, since the Phliasians remained faithful to Sparta even under extraordinary pressure - little cities need praise for excellence too, he says (7.2.1). Earlier he had approvingly quoted Theramenes’ witticisms as he was about to be killed by the Thirty, adding that he knows this is not the stuff of history (axiologa) but thinks it worth mentioning nonetheless, since Theramenes’ admirable ability to joke at the point of death revealed his good sense and wit under the ultimate pressure (2.3.56).
Sometimes Xenophon’s interest in Greek engagement in Asia Minor is assessed as closer in spirit to Herodotus than to Thucydides, since the Hellenica returns to a more Panhellenic and internationalist scope after Thucydides’ intensive focus on Athens and Athenian politics, but to emphasize this apparent similarity is to miss a crucial difference. As we have seen, Xenophon’s Panhellenism is not a matter of Greek civic politics, but rather takes place on a large and relatively atomistic canvas, on which a talented individual soldier with the right kind of leadership qualities can sometimes make his mark. At least in their larger ambitions, Greek states per se often seem somewhat adrift; Xenophon’s narrative begins with the decline of the Athenian empire, and ends with the moral and military diminishment of Sparta after Leuctra and Mantinea. While Herodotus glorifies the joint actions undertaken by Greek city-states confronting the autocracies of the expansionist east, Xenophon throughout the Hellenica writes of individual military commanders negotiating a world of unstable and shifting loyalties, in which the most pressing concern was often how to get the troops fed and paid. Properly read, his world points to and in part explains the coming of the Macedonians a scant generation later.
The three historians’ interest in recording great and memorable deeds was deeply rooted in earlier Greek culture; sociology and geography combined to produce in the classical era a common culture, whose Panhellenic values were male, competitive, and aristocratic. War was the medium in which these values most tellingly emerged; both communities and individuals owed their status in large part to the public recognition of past military and political achievement (one’s own or one’s ancestors’). This interlocking and far-flung culture, connected by trade, marriage, and a common cultural patrimony (e. g., the Homeric narratives), was also sharply divided politically, into small face-to-face communities separated from each other by sea and mountainous terrain. It was earlier the epic poet’s job, and then later the historian’s, to acknowledge and bind into a single story the multiple competing accounts generated by the various Greek communities, to make sure many different community voices were folded in. Herodotus first had to negotiate which events would be the most important, and which actors the most prominent within those events, which leads us to our next topic.
World History
