Ancient history
THOMAS BRAUN
The Ancient Historians Michael Grant (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 85s) The Historians of Greece and Rome Stephen Usher (Hamish Hamilton 42s) '1 am astonished', wrote the Jewish historian Josephus, 'that anyone should think that in ancient history the Greek writers alone de- serve attention. For in the Greek world everything will be found to be modem, dating as it were from yesterday or the day before . .. Unlike the oriental nations, who are least exposed to the ravages of climate and have scrupulously had public records kept by their sages, Greece has experienced countless catastrophes. Each time a new civilisation has been set up, people have assumed that the world began with them- selves. They learnt the alphabet late and with difficulty . . . And you can easily see from the historians themselves that they have no certain foundation for their knowledge, but rely on individual guesswork. They are always refuting one another, and do not shrink from giving the most contradictory accounts of the same events.. . The two basic reasons for their inconsistency are first, the Greeks' original neglect of keeping official records, and ... second, their rushing into the writing of history not so much to discover the truth (which they are ready enough to claim to be doing) but to show off their literary style, and to outshine their rivals. Their whole method is the reverse of historical. For the proof of historical ver- acity is universal agreement in the descrip- tion of the same events ... So for eloquence we orientals must yield the palm to the Greek historians, but not for truth.'
There was some justification for this attack. Compared with oriental palace records and the historical books of the Bible, Greek history was indeed a recent growth. The Greeks learnt the alphabet as late as the eighth century BC, when a new phase of their civilisation was beginning. The preceding age remained for them one of fascinating but confused myth. Only the scantiest of written records were kept before Herodotus, the first true Greek historian, wrote in the fifth cen- tury. His vast survey was compiled from interviews, as was Thucydides's account of the Great War of 431-404. Even when public records became more copious, not many his- torians knew how to use them.
Josephus's remarks about style, too, have their point. The Greeks and Romans were inordinately sensitive to points of style that leave us cold. Rhetoric soon came to colour nearly all they wrote. Elaborate and artificial speeches were put into the mouths of his- torical characters. It was indeed a part of ancient education to learn how to invent them. St. Augustine won a prize for such a declamation at school. Dionysius of Hali- camassus, telling the story of Coriolanus—a remote event that can hardly have had any original documentation—assigns no less than fifteen speeches to the protagonists.
But, at their best, speeches can be a dramatic means of unfolding calculations and political argument; and in Thucydides, Polybius and Tacitus, they may genuinely reflect what was said. Moreover, the striving after literary excellence often paid off. A student of Greek or Roman history today tends to grumble if he has to read a source that is not a literary masterpiece. A student of modern history is agreeably surprised when he finds one that is. And there is more than Josephus admits to the historians' re- iterated claim of truthfulness. 'History's first law', says Cicero, echoing many other Greek and Roman writers, 'is that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth. The second is that he must dare to tell the whole truth, with no suggestion of par- tiality or malice.' These were laws whose validity he admitted even when pleading that his exploits should be celebrated by a con- temporary historian to `more than strict truth would allow, in disregard of the Laws of History'—a request which the historian in question seems to have left unanswered.
Finally, Josephus's own criterion for his- torical truth gives his case away. Unanimity is very far from being an index of veracity. It should arouse suspicion that the record has been fudged. Assyrian palace chronicles attribute nothing but victories to their kings until the moment that Assyria is wiped off the map. Izvestia does not contradict Pravda. It is precisely the delight which Greek historians took in scoring off each other that enables us to approach the truth. Being Greeks, they were not so keen to acknowledge their debts. Nor did they culti- vate team spirit. True, Polybius hastened to write to Zeno of Rhodes to point out his lamentable topographical errors. 'When Zeno got my letter, he was mortified, as his work was now published and it was too late to introduce corrections; but he was good enough to take my action in a most friendly spirit.' That is perhaps the best one should expect from this race of individualists.
Stephen Usher and Michael Grant take us through the major Greek and Roman his- torians, one at a time. Their books are wel- come. The last comparable work in English is Bury's Ancient Greek Historians of 1908 (now available as a Dover paperback). Usher's is the more concise and interestingly written. Grant's covers a wider range. It has a foreword on oriental and Greek writing before Herodotus, and useful additional chapters on the biographers Plutarch and Suetonius and the church historian Eusebius. The work is sound and studded with telling extracts. But at times it flags, and a sprink- ling of misprinted dates should be elimin- ated at the next printing: it would be a pity to leave any reader thinking that Pilate re- turned to Rome before Passion Week, or that Montaigne died before the wars of reli- gion began.
Is there any line of development in ancient historiography? So much depended on individuals that it may be misleading to suggest one. There were good historians as well as bad ones in almost every generation, though no one ever again matched the com- bined insight, precision and literary power of Herodotus and Thucydides. But it may be that there was some improvement in humanity. Aristotle, himself a prodigious historical researcher, argued that slavery was a 'natural institution'. Three centuries later, we find that the second-rate historian Dio- dorus has absorbed the Stoic doctrine that slavery is unnatural.
In Plutarch, at the turn of the first century AD, the civilised humanity and love of virtue of the ancient world is seen at its best. For all his extraordinary range of learn- ing and interests, he was a modest man; he knew he did not begin to measure up to Thucydides. In any case, as he explains, his biographies are no histories. But he deserves, in Emerson's words, to be 'perpetually redis- covered from time to time as long as books last'. Perhaps Dr Grant has helped to hasten a rediscovery in our time.
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