The Origins of History by Herbert Butterfield J H Adam Watson

Author:Herbert Butterfield, J H Adam Watson [Herbert Butterfield, J H Adam Watson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317284376
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

4 ‘Scientific’ History in Athens and Ionia

The Greeks, who had so lost contact with their Mycenean predecessors, surprise us still further by their failure to remember their history for four or five hundred years after the Trojan war. Josephus's complaint that they had failed to keep records becomes relevant at this point in the story, for even today we lack the materials for an adequate treatment of these centuries. Nor is the deficiency likely ever to be made good. We are without the records that would enable us to fill even the fifth-century gap between the Persian wars described by Herodotus from oral tradition and the Peloponnesian war described by Thucydides from something more like experience. Josephus appears also to have been not entirely off the mark when he directed his taunts against Athens in particular.

That city appears to have been unlucky from the start, for it has little place in the Iliad or the Odyssey. The few mentions of it are generally interpolations, but it was late in interesting itself in the Trojan story, and, by that time, the form of the epic was too well-established to permit of serious change. It has little place in the other so-called 'Homeric' writings, or in an epic like the Thebaid. All this literature had been concerned with Pan-hellenic activities, while the Athenian heroes had no great part to play outside their own city. Perhaps this was why they were unable to make so much out of even their own mythical material as was achieved in the case of some other cities. Their narratives of Theseus contain too little of real tradition, and this is submerged under a mass of wild mythologising. The great tragedians dealt with Pan-hellenic heroes and only at moments succeeded in connecting them with Athens. Some other places fared better at the beginning of the story, and, since there were no records here for a long time, the earliest historians of the city had to fabricate what they could out of unreliable material.

Even when kings ruled in the cities of the Greeks, they did not put their achievements on record in the way that the oriental monarchs had done. They produced nothing equivalent to the annals, which, as we have seen, appear to have been a product of successful imperialism. There is a great dearth of early inscriptions, and if the art of writing was introduced before the eighth century B.C., it does not seem to have been used for state documents or public records till much later. One or two facts may have been handed down along with many fictions, but 'there is no well-established Greek date before the seventh century', while for the seventh century itself, or even for the sixth, there are still only a few – they come with a certain continuity only after the middle of the fifth century. Oral tradition provided the main material for the historian, therefore, and, once again, this was even more true of Athens than of certain other cities.

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