History and Historiography

A

Greek Historiography

In the 5th century bc Herodotus, who has been called the father of history, wrote his famous account of the Persian Wars. Shortly afterward, Thucydides wrote his classic study of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. These men recorded contemporary or near-contemporary events in prose narratives of striking style, depending as much as possible on eyewitness or other reliable testimony for evidence. They concentrated on war, constitutional history, and the character of political leaders to create pictures of human societies in times of crisis or change. The recognition by contemporaries of the extraordinary accomplishment of both historians gave their works an authority that influenced succeeding historians. They too would prefer recent events, consider visual and oral evidence superior to written (used only in ancillary ways), and assume that the most significant human expression was the state and political life. Antiquarian research into religion, customs, names, and art, based on documentary sources, was also part of Greek and Roman culture but was allied chiefly to philosophy, biography, and areas of specialized learning and was excluded from the main traditions of political history. No specialized training was considered necessary for historiography. The historian's education was that of any cultivated man: careful reading of general literature, followed by the study of rhetoric, the art of fluent and persuasive use of language that dominated ancient higher education. The ideal historian would combine rigorous truthfulness and freedom from bias with the gift of developed expression.

In the 4th century bc Xenophon, Theopompus of Chios (born about 378bc), and Ephorus continued the main traditions of Greek historiography in the Hellenistic period and extended its scope. Polybius, in the 2nd century bc, explained Roman history, political life, and military successes to his fellow Greeks, a subject also taken up by Strabo the geographer and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the following century. The history of the Jews was placed in its Hellenistic and Roman context by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat of Greek culture, who also defended and explained Jewish religion and customs. In the same period Plutarch wrote his biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, emphasizing dramatic, anecdotal materials in his depiction of exemplary character—individual lives regarded as illustrations of moral choices—and its effect on public life.

B

Roman Historiography

The prestige of Greek as a language of art and learning was so great that the first Roman historiography, even by Romans, was written in Greek. Cato the Elder was the first to write Roman history in Latin, and his example inspired others. Sallust, impressed by the work of Thucydides, developed a brilliant Latin style that combined ethical reflections with acute psychological insight. His political analysis, based on human motivation, was to have a long and pervasive influence on historical writing. At the same time, Cicero, although not himself a historian, defined the prevailing ideals of historiography in terms of stylistic elegance and traditional moral standards applied to the events of public life. Latin historical writing continued in this mode with Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius.

C

The Early Christians

The writers mentioned thus far (with the exception of Josephus) were all pagan, and their works were entirely secular in subject and point of view. Educated pagans considered speculation on human destiny and moral questions beyond those directly applicable to political life the proper work of philosophers, not historians. During the 4th century, however, with the conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great, Christianity attained legal status and increasing influence in the Roman Empire and introduced new subjects and approaches to history. Eusebius of Caesarea wrote an ecclesiastical history (circa 324), tracing the growth of the church from its origins, through generations of persecution and martyrdom, to the triumphs of his own day. This radically new kind of history ignored the traditional classical restrictions of subject and style. Eusebius described religious life, books, and ideas, and people of no political importance; he included a great deal of documentary evidence and considered the major questions of human existence. Such mingling of secular and religious history with moral interpretation on the largest scale had its only precedent in the Old Testament, where the relation between God and humankind was seen in historical terms as a covenant between Yahweh and Israel worked out over centuries of national history of the Jews. Built on this foundation, Christianity too was a religion with significant implications for the interpretation of human history. In the 5th century, Paulus Orosius reinterpreted Roman history from a polemical Christian point of view, and St. Augustine, in his City of God (413-26), conceived of far more complex and subtle relations between Christian and secular history.

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D

The Middle Ages

With the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century ad, the traditions of classical education and literary culture, of which historiography was part, were disrupted and attenuated. Literacy became one of the professional skills of the clergy, which carried on the task of preserving and expanding a learned, religious culture. Many monasteries kept chronicles or annals, often the anonymous work of generations of monks, which simply recorded whatever the author knew of events, year by year, without any attempt at artistic or intellectual elaboration (see Anglo/Saxon Chronicle). The achievements of past historians, however, preserved in monastic libraries, kept alive the idea of a more ambitious standard, and early medieval writers, such as Gregory of Tours, struggled to meet it. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) by Bede the Venerable, an English monk, achieved the integration of secular and ecclesiastical history, natural and supernatural events, in a forceful and intelligent narrative.

The revived vigor of intellectual and literary life in the High Middle Ages is reflected in the historical works of the English monk William of Malmesbury, the German Otto of Freising, and the Norman Orderic Vitalis. Although most of the later medieval historians were clerics and wrote in Latin, the traditions of secular historiography were also revived by chroniclers who wrote in the vernacular languages. Jean de Joinville recorded the deeds of his king, Louis IX of France, on Crusade; Jean Froissart wrote of the exploits of French and English chivalry during the Hundred Years' War.

E

The Renaissance

The intensified study of Greek and Roman literature and the renewal of rhetorical education that characterized intellectual life in 15th-century Italy had an effect on historical study; it encouraged a secular and realistic approach to political history, both ancient and modern. Leonardo Bruni, a student of the newly recovered works of Tacitus, reconsidered the history of Republican and imperial Rome and of his native Florence in the light of Roman experience. In the 16th century Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini wrote works that again set political history in a world bounded by human laws and human ambitions. This separation of ecclesiastical from secular materials of history is evident wherever Renaissance learning had influence in Europe.

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