In the ninth book of his Ἀτθίς the Athenian historian and religious expert Philochorus related an omen about which he had himself been consulted in the late fourth century b.c.e. (FGrHist 328 F 67).Footnote 1
When this year was done and the next was beginning, there occurred on the Acropolis the following prodigy: a female dog, having entered the temple of Athena Polias and made its way into the Pandroseion, got up on the altar of Zeus Herkeios, which is under the olive tree, and lay down. It is an ancestral custom among the Athenians that no dog go up on the Acropolis. Around the same time, a star was evident for a while even in the daytime sky, when the sun was out and the weather was clear. And when we were asked about what the portent and the phenomenon meant, we said that both predicted the return of the exiles and that this would happen not as a result of a political change but rather in the existing politeia. And this interpretation actually came to pass.Footnote 2
The passage is typical of our fragments of Greek local historiography:Footnote 3 the subject is local, foregrounding the landscape of a particular locality and the customs of the occupying community; the outlook decidedly parochial, featuring an episode of significance for the focal community itself but of little obvious relevance for the outside world. Yet, because Dionysius of Halicarnassus cites these lines verbatim in his essay on the orator Dinarchus (3), we are able to look beyond content and scope and learn something about Philochorus' narrative voice. By taking care to locate an altar on the Acropolis and to expound Athenian taboo, Philochorus ideates an audience unfamiliar with the city and its inhabitants. This packaging of local material for nonlocals is itself typical of Greek local historiography, as a survey of other verbatim fragments will reveal:Footnote 4 in the Classical and the Hellenistic periods, Greeks tended to write about individual communities for the apparent benefit of outsiders.
By implying an external audience, it is true, a local historian could insinuate that his subject was of significance to the greater Greek world.Footnote 5 Local narratives were sometimes even geared explicitly for outside consumption, particularly, as Katherine Clarke has emphasized, in the context of interstate diplomacy.Footnote 6 Yet, whatever the aspirations of its author, whatever its potential appeal to nonlocals, a local history was received in many cases by the members of the focal community themselves and was intended, at least in part, for them. And neither patriotism nor the exigencies of peer polity interaction can account for the striking exclusion of this intended local audience from the audience implied in the text.Footnote 7
This paper explores the tension in Greek local historiography between these audiences.Footnote 8 Part One considers a local historian's implication of a nonlocal audience; whether his subject was a foreign community or, as was more often the case, his own—whether, that is to say, we can classify the text as etic or emic—, he aimed his narrative outward. Part Two argues that despite his posture a local historian actually frequently intended the focal community, keenly interested as it was in reading about itself and its collective past, as a principal audience. And Part Three proposes a reason for the discrepancy. It was less chauvinism, I argue, that led Philochorus to explain to knowledgeable Athenians the Athenian injunction against dogs on the Acropolis than the influence of ethnography.Footnote 9 Early etic local histories, whose authors wrote about communities to which they did not belong for the benefit of other outsiders, provided a valuable model for Greeks setting out to write about their own communities: by distancing their intended audience and very frequently themselves from the focal locality, by reframing the esoteric as exoteric, native Greek local historians could meet the peculiar challenges involved in telling a community its own story.
I. THE IMPLIED AUDIENCE OF GREEK LOCAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
Greek local historiography of the Classical and the Hellenistic periods was by no means a unified phenomenon. No two communities conceived of the past in the same way; no two members of the same community recorded it alike.Footnote 10 Yet, whenever we have access, thanks to the assiduity of a later writer such as Dionysius, to the words of the historian himself (whether he wrote after Alexander or before, whether from the shores of the Ionian or the Black Sea), we hear a similar voice. Almost to a man, Greek local historians implied an uninformed and nonlocal audience.
Although they occasionally highlighted the native pronunciation of a particular toponym,Footnote 11 in the first place, Greek local historians generally avoided the local dialect, favouring as accessible an idiom as possible: initially Ionic and then, from the middle of the fourth century, the koinē.Footnote 12 When Philochorus situates the altar violated by the dog ὑπὸ τῇ ἐλαίᾳ, for example, he notably does not use the Attic word for olive tree, ἐλάα,Footnote 13 and elsewhere he eschews geminate tau (FGrHist 328 F 30).Footnote 14 By the same token, we find the Syracusan historian Philistus curbing his Doric tongue when he wrote his history of Sicily about a century earlier (FGrHist 556 F 5).Footnote 15 There are several exceptions to this linguistic ecumenism,Footnote 16 one of the most conspicuous being the Ἀργολικά of Dercylus (FGrHist 305), which features a curious farrago of Argive and Doric forms.Footnote 17 But Dercylus may have had other aims than expressly to localize his audience,Footnote 18 and by and large Greek local historians went out of their way to efface local markers.
So too did local historians, in their narrative voice at any rate, avoid using words such as ‘ancestors’, ‘forefathers’ and ‘fatherland’,Footnote 19 as well as first-person and second-person verbs and pronouns.Footnote 20 Indeed, there is only one fragment from a Greek local history that preserves a first-person plural pronoun explicitly with reference to the focal community. And this passage, from a history of Thespiae of debated authorship (FGrHist 386 F 1), is corrupt and likely quite late and so little affects the picture.Footnote 21 The excerpt from Philochorus’ Ἀτθίς with which we began, meanwhile, does preserve a first-person verb but in such a way as to confirm the rule. According to Philochorus, after the dog was observed on the Acropolis and the star in the daytime sky, ‘we were asked about what the portent and the phenomenon meant’, and ‘we said that both predicted the return of the exiles’. The ‘we’ here is exclusive and refers not to the Athenians en masse but rather to Philochorus himselfFootnote 22 or else to the select group of religious authorities to which he belonged.
Local historiography's treatment of local tradition is thus very different from that of early verse, which tends to integrate narrator and audience into the action of the narrative: a line from Mimnermus’ Nanno on the foundation of Smyrna, for example, uses the first-person plural to describe the eastward migration of the Pylians (FGrHist 578 F 3),Footnote 23 and Tyrtaeus adopts what seems to be an analogous stance in his Eunomia elegy (FGrHist 580 FF 2, 4, 6).Footnote 24 It is oratory, however, that offers (in the case of Athens, at any rate) the best benchmark. For, like the Atthidographers, the Attic orators related episodes from Athenian cultural memory, but they generally did so by incorporating themselves into the community as a whole and by establishing a clear link between their contemporary audience and the events of the past. They frequently articulated notions of patrilineage—Andocides mentions ‘your fathers’ who freed ‘the fatherland’ from the Peisistratids (1.106–7), Isocrates the attack of the Peloponnesians and Eurystheus against ‘our ancestors’ (12.194) and the demolition of the walls ‘of the fatherland’ at the end of the Peloponnesian War (15.319)—and availed themselves of the first and the second persons. About the Athenian capitulation to Sparta, in fact, Isocrates here remarks that ‘we saw the democracy twice overthrown and the walls of the πατρίς torn down’.Footnote 25 The orators used the first and the second persons also to recount events in which they and their audience certainly were not personally involved: peace negotiations with Sparta in the mid fifth century (Aeschin. 2.172),Footnote 26 the tyranny of the Peisistratids (Lyc. 1.61), even the parturition of the first Athenians (Isoc. 4.24). The Atthidographers, on the other hand, opted always for the third person: for Philochorus it is not ‘we’ but ‘the Athenians’ who ‘liberated the Oreitians’ (FGrHist 328 F 159)Footnote 27 and ‘made an alliance with the Olynthians’ (FGrHist 328 F 49),Footnote 28 ‘the dēmos’ who voted for war with Philip (FGrHist 328 F 55a).Footnote 29 And in this regard the Atthidographers behave similarily to other native Greek local historians. The Ephesian Creophylus records in his history of Ephesus how ‘the Ephesians’ founded the polis (FGrHist 417 F 1);Footnote 30 the Erythraean Hippias in his history of Erythrae how ‘the Erythraeans’ helped overthrow a tyrant during a ‘festival of the Erythraeans’ (FGrHist 421 F 1);Footnote 31 and the Delian Semos in his Δηλιάς how ‘the Delians’ once offered gifts to visiting Delphians (FGrHist 396 F 7).Footnote 32
A local historian implied a nonlocal audience not only by employing an unmarked dialect, by expunging terms such as ‘ancestors’ and ‘fatherland’, and by referring to his protagonists by way of the third person; he also chose to relate information ostensibly familiar to the focal community as if it was unknown. This is clearest in the case of topography. When Philochorus describes the itinerary of the trespassing dog, for example, he is careful to position the altar ‘under the olive tree’. This is not to differentiate it from other altars to Zeus Herkeios nearby; it is rather to locate the structure for the benefit of an audience unacquainted with the lie of the land. A passage from Cleidemus’ Ἀτθίς, composed several generations before that of Philochorus, reveals a similar concern (FGrHist 323 F 1). Here Cleidemus identifies the location of a shrine of Eileithyia, which he situates ‘in the direction of Agra’, and of an altar of Poseidon Heliconius, which he places atop a hill ‘now called Agra but formerly commonly known as Helicon’, and he does so in the first book, in what seems in fact to have been an introductory chorography designed to orient his readers.Footnote 33
Athenians could certainly write in such a way as to concede in their audience a general awareness of Athenian topography. The Attic orators, once again, provide a good point of comparison,Footnote 34 as in fact does Plato. The ninth-century lexicon that preserves Cleidemus’ survey of Agrae actually juxtaposes the Atthidographer's objective account to a passage in the Phaedrus (229c), where Socrates uses the Attic terrain to localize a specific event, explaining that the Athenian princess Oreithyia was snatched away alongside the Ilissus River near ‘where we cross to the [Temple of Artemis] Agra’.Footnote 35 Not every Athenian, it is true, would have known every altar in Attica—indeed, Plato's Phaedrus here confesses that he has never noticed an altar to Boreas at the spot where Oreithyia allegedly disappearedFootnote 36 —, but Plato and the orators nevertheless generally limn the city of Athens as a familiar landscape.
Not so the Atthidographers; and in their detached approach to local topography they typify Greek local historians at large. When Callias of Syracuse, a historian closely associated with the tyrant Agathocles, has recourse in his history of Sicily to mention the settlement Eryce, ‘formerly a polis of the Sicels’, he locates it as if for the benefit of foreign visitors: it is ‘about ninety stades from Gela’, he writes, ‘near the so-called Delli’. In defining the Delli as ‘two craters that the Siceliotae [Sicilian Greeks] consider to be brothers of the Palici’ (FGrHist 564 F 1), moreover, Callias distinguishes his readers and indeed himself from this local group (to which he at any rate categorically belonged).Footnote 37 We can note a similar gesture in a passage from the Ἀργολικά of the Argive Deinias,Footnote 38 quoted verbatim in a scholium to Euripides’ Orestes (872): ‘Having quickly overpowered Melanchrus and Cleometra,’ Deinias writes, ‘they killed them by pelting them with stones, and they show their grave still to this day atop the so-called Pron, a hill where the Argives have their court’ (FGrHist 306 F 3).Footnote 39 Here again, topography is directed at a foreign audience; like Callias in his description of the Delli, Deinias defines the promontory, no doubt an important landmark for the Argive community, as the ‘so-called’ Pron.Footnote 40
As with local topography, so with local praxis. For Deinias, Pron is not simply a hill but in fact also the place ‘where the Argives have their court’. How many Argive citizens did he think would not know this, would consult his work in order to find out just what it was that the Argives did on the Pron? How many Argives, for that matter, did Dercylus expect would turn to his Ἀργολικά in order to understand how exactly ‘the maidens who are called Heresides’ and ‘the maidens who are called Locheutriai’ honoured Hera at Argos (FGrHist 305 F 4)?Footnote 41 Some Argives, it is true, might not have had the opportunity to observe first-hand the portage of sacred water into the Heraion. But this was nevertheless knowledge assumed to be generally available to the Argive community. Like Deinias, Dercylus thus intentionally pitches his account of Argive activity to an audience of outsiders. The same can be said of Comarchus, who deigned to point out, when he wrote up the affairs of the Eleans, that the Olympic Games began at the new moon of the month ‘that is called Thosythias in Elis’ (FGrHist 410 F 1),Footnote 42 or of the Delian Semos, whose Δηλιάς brimmed with exegesis of Delian behaviour. Semos explains, for example, that, when worshipping the goddess Brizo, ‘Delian women bring her little bowls full of all sorts of good things except for fish’ (FGrHist 396 F 4),Footnote 43 and that on the nearby island of Hecate ‘the Delians sacrifice to Iris so-called βασυνίαι, viz. boiled wheat cakes made of flour with honey, and so-called κόκκωρα, which consist of a dried fig and three nuts’ (FGrHist 396 F 5).Footnote 44
Philochorus deals similarly with Athenian behaviour, as we have seen, following his account of the wayward dog with the comment ‘it is an ancestral custom of the Athenians that no dog go up on the Acropolis’. It is true that the injunction might not have been widely known among Athenians, that Philochorus is speaking here as a religious authority in possession of arcane knowledge about outdated Athenian superstition. Yet, he stipulates that the taboo is shared by, and thus known to, ‘the Athenians’ as a whole. Once again, it is worth contrasting his approach to that of the Attic orators, for whom the Areopagus, say, is not ‘a hill where the Athenians have their court’ but an institution ‘most venerable and peculiar to us’ (Dem. 23.65),Footnote 45 who boast of the Eleusinian mysteries that ‘we still today reveal them each year’ to new initiates (Isoc. 4.29),Footnote 46 who allege that ‘we are the only Greeks to hold ostracisms’ ([ps.-]Andoc. 4.6).Footnote 47 Even regarding little-known nomoi, the orators by and large attempt to affiliate their audience, involving them in the passing of decrees, no matter how obscure,Footnote 48 and conceding a general local awareness of local custom.Footnote 49
Alongside local topography and praxis, finally, local historians presented episodes from the focal community's cultural memory, even the most celebrated and renowned, as if they were unknown. They might report events as if they had learned them second-hand—‘It is said’, writes Philochorus about the aftermath of the famous Pylos campaign, ‘that when Cleon opposed the reconciliations the assembly fell into factions’ (FGrHist 328 F 128a).Footnote 50 Or they might simply fail to acknowledge their audience's likely familiarity with a particular episode. Regarding the notorious end of the Erechtheid dynasty, for example, the Atthidographer Demon (a younger contemporary of Philochorus) writes simply that ‘Apheidas, while king of Athens, was killed by his younger brother Thymoetes, who, although illegitimate, became king himself’ (FGrHist 327 F 1);Footnote 51 and, in his history of Heraclea, the Heracliote Nymphis introduces the tyrant Dionysius, whose rule at Heraclea had ended just about a generation before, by identifying him as ‘tyrant’ and the son of Clearchus, who was (as every Heracliote well knew!) ‘Heraclea's first tyrant’ (FGrHist 432 F 10).Footnote 52
Now, Greek local historians undoubtedly considered as part of their task the collation and evaluation of various accounts of the past, as well as the excavation of information forgotten or hitherto unknown. Antiochus began his history of Italy by emphasizing just this aspect of his work, alleging that he had culled what was most credible and clear from ‘the ancient logoi’ (FGrHist 555 F 2).Footnote 53 Historians of a given locality would not have hesitated to disagree with one another, sometimes openly, about matters of chronology and interpretation,Footnote 54 nor would readers of a local history necessarily already have been aware of every detail they encountered in the text, in particular since historians aiming for narrative continuity may well have invented episodes omitted from a community's cultural memory. Yet, local historians nevertheless framed the entire past as if it were unfamiliar, while other purveyors of local tradition, such as the Attic orators, went out of their way to recognize audience awareness of and even involvement in local events.Footnote 55
This contrast is made all the clearer when we are in the position to juxtapose an Atthidographer's treatment of a particular episode (preserved verbatim) with that of an orator. Both Philochorus and Demosthenes, for example, refer to the exile of Athenian ambassadors who had voted for peace with the Persian king in 392/391. Philochorus uses the third person and assumes in his audience no prior knowledge of the event: ‘The ambassadors who gave their assent in Lacedaemon were exiled on the motion of Callistratus; and Epicrates of Cephisia, Andocides of Cydathenaeum, Cratinus of Sphettus and Eubulides of Eleusis did not await the trial’ (FGrHist 328 F 149a).Footnote 56 Demosthenes, on the other hand, recalls nearly half a century after Callistratus’ decree that ‘you, men of Athens, condemned these ambassadors to death, among whom was Epicrates, a man who was, as I hear from our elders, most patriotic’ (19.277).Footnote 57 Or, to take another example, Demosthenes reminds his audience of recent friction between Athens and Megara, mentioning the decree that ‘you passed against the accursed Megarians when they appropriated the sacred Orgas between Athens and Megara’ (13.32).Footnote 58 Philochorus takes a different tack, explaining that, when Apollodorus was archon, ‘the Athenians entered into a dispute with the Megarians about the boundaries of the sacred Orgas and invaded Megara with Ephialtes as general’ (FGrHist 328 F 155).Footnote 59
Our survey of verbatim fragments confirms that Greek local historians very seldom made use of the local dialect; avoided referring to the focal locality as a fatherland, to the focal community by way of the first or the second persons, and to their protagonists as ancestors; and treated as if unknown matters of local topography and custom as well as episodes, however hackneyed, from the focal community's cultural memory. In so doing, they implied an external audience, with native local historians at the same time sometimes taking pains also to distinguish themselves from the focal community. Did local historians accordingly expect a predominately nonlocal readership? Did they overlook or undervalue the possibility of local readers? In the following section, I answer both questions in the negative. No matter how often Greeks had the opportunity or initiative to read histories of communities to which they did not belong, local histories were received first and foremost by the focal community itself; and it was primarily for this restricted audience that a local historian intended his work, whatever hopes he may have had that it would appeal to the greater Greek world.
II. THE INTENDED AUDIENCES OF GREEK LOCAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
No Greek who wrote a work of local history would have envisaged a completely homogeneous audience.Footnote 60 For one thing, local histories were read by other historians, local and nonlocal alike; and while Philochorus could not have foreseen that some two hundred years after his death his Ἀτθίς would be epitomized and translated into Latin (FGrHist 328 T 8), there is little doubt that he expected his work to appeal to his professional peers—he had himself carefully read the Ἀτθίδες of Androtion and Demon, after all—and that he thus intended it in part for them.Footnote 61 The same can be said, especially in the later Hellenistic period, of academics such as Didymus or highbrow poets such as Callimachus and Apollonius, whose industry led them to probe hidden corners of the Greek world and earned for them a reputation for the recondite.Footnote 62 But did a Greek local historian imagine that his work would appeal to nonlocals outside of the intellectual elite?
This is the supposition of one of our earliest commentators on Greek local historiography, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who maintained in the introduction of his wide-ranging essay on Thucydides that local historians generally endeavoured to bring epichoric traditions and texts ‘to the common knowledge of all’ (Thuc. 5).Footnote 63 And it is a hypothesis that has persisted, although in a modified form, to the present day, with local historiography often promoted as the preferred means through which individual communities asserted themselves before the wider Greek world. Through local history, Felix Jacoby succinctly put it, Greeks following in Herodotus’ wake could ‘secure for their native town a place in the Great History of the Greek people, both for the mythical time and for the recent national contest against Persia’.Footnote 64 But Dionysius’ claim must be taken with a grain of salt, since it reflects his idiosyncratic conception of the evolution of Roman historiographyFootnote 65 as well as his particular aims as a Greek writing a history of Rome for the benefit of other Greeks. Jacoby's reformulation, meanwhile, quite apart from its prioritization of Herodotus as a spur for the proliferation of Greek local historiography,Footnote 66 suffers from its reliance on a hypothetical Panhellenic past, an amalgamated national narrative to which various constituent communities fancied themselves contributing: a model perhaps better suited to the Europe of Jacoby's own day than to Classical or Hellenistic Greece.
An individual Greek community was certainly aware, as Clarke has written in her stimulating study Making Time for the Past: Local History and the Polis (2008), that its past ‘ran alongside and often in conjunction with that of other poleis’,Footnote 67 and individual local historians may well have tailored their histories to appeal to ‘wider, politically influential, audiences’.Footnote 68 But what is remarkable about our surviving fragments of Greek local historiography is that so few of them have anything to do with Greece in toto. What comes across is not a community's cosmopolitanism but its provincialism. Even major cities and cultural centres such as Athens and Argos produced decidedly introverted narratives, thick enough with local detail to discourage casual external reception. How many Sicyonians or Corinthians, after all, would be interested in the peculiar activity of the Argive maidens worshipping Hera that Dercylus so painstakingly describes? How many Megarians or Boeotians did Philochorus actually expect would want to read about an ornery Athenian dog and a noontime star? Present-day evidence is instructive, inasmuch as local histories seldom find their way today into the hands of nonlocals who are not themselves historians or academics;Footnote 69 indeed, in the nineteenth century, during the flowering of the local history industry in the United States, town histories were often printed through subscription or at any rate in proportion to the population of the focal locality.Footnote 70 In Greek local histories, it is true, nonlocal characters do on occasion crop up, but they have been pulled into very epichoric contextsFootnote 71 —those locals who have conversely been propelled into the ulterior world predominantly inhabit the foundational periodFootnote 72 —; and while some local histories had recourse to include events that took place beyond the bounds of the focal localityFootnote 73 as well as pan-local events such as the Persian Wars,Footnote 74 the focus always remains home. It is thus difficult to see why Greek communities would have chosen local historiography as the apposite medium for rectifying Herodotus’ record and for inserting themselves into a putative Panhellenic collective memory that they deemed deficient.Footnote 75 For historians wanting to reach a wide audience, other avenues were available. Both Duris of Samos and Nymphis of Heraclea, we should note, wrote general in addition to local histories, in some cases repackaging episodes from the local work for broader appeal.Footnote 76 And it was in his general history, not solely in his city panegyric, that Ephorus sought to vaunt his homeland, interweaving into that sprawling narrative (and with apparently risible frequency) references to his native Cyme (Strab. 13.3.6).Footnote 77
It is not my interest, however, to deny the possibility that Greeks read or heard recited histories of communities to which they did not belong, or indeed that a historian wrote about one community under the pretence that his text would appeal to members of another. My aim, rather, is to foreground the receptive role of the local community itself, the one group that is unequivocally excluded from local historiography's implied audience. To illuminate this local response, however, we must rely primarily on indirect evidence, since in the surviving fragments local historians seldom explicitly recognize their audiences, intended or actual.Footnote 78
Local reception is suggested, first of all, by the identities of the local historians themselves. For aside from those few historians who tackled multiple localities and those who focussed on non-Greek lands,Footnote 79 most Greek local historians identifiable beyond mere name not only wrote about the communities of which they were themselves members but also enjoyed in those communities positions of political or religious authority.Footnote 80 Philistus of Syracuse, who wrote a much-admired history of Sicily, was a military commander and close adviser to the Dionysii (FGrHist 556 TT 1–13); the Megarian Dieuchidas, who wrote Μεγαρικά (FGrHist 485), represented his community as Naopoios at Delphi in the decade leading up to the completion of the temple;Footnote 81 Duris of Samos, the author of Σαμίων Ὧροι, ruled his island as tyrant in the early third century b.c.e. (FGrHist 76 TT 2 and 4); the Heracliote historian Nymphis led a group of exiles back to his fatherland and went on to assume a significant role in Heraclea's struggle for autonomy in the first half of the third century b.c.e. (FGrHist 432 TT 1, 3–4); the Rhodian historians Zeno and Antisthenes, Polybius tells us, were deeply engaged in Rhodian affairs (16.14 = FGrHist 508 T 1 = FGrHist 523 T 3); and of the Atthidographers several were active in Athenian public life, an involvement that led to exile in the case of Androtion and to death in the case of Philochorus.Footnote 82
Such public participation is not in itself, of course, proof of intended audience. For writers of nonlocal history, such as Thucydides and Polybius, who explicitly intended their works for a general Greek audience, also sometimes played critical roles in their home communities.Footnote 83 Yet, for many Greeks, as Polybius suggests in his critique of Zeno and Antisthenes (16.14),Footnote 84 writing a local history went hand in hand with local politics. Local historiography allowed a Greek if not to influence the behaviour of his countrymen at any rate to authorize, like the memoirs and autobiographies to which Roman politicians would later be drawn,Footnote 85 an idiosyncratic version of the past through which he might reject elements of the politeia or validate the status quo, all the while justifying his own behaviour and confirming his membership in, and even leadership of, the community whose cultural memory he was purporting to inscribe. Athens offers an especially clear illustration of the interface between a politician's public agenda and his historiographical construction of the past,Footnote 86 as in fact does Sparta,Footnote 87 but the phenomenon is widespread. Duris, whose father had seized control of Samos not long after the dissolution of the Athenian cleruchy in 322/321, validated his own exalted position in the polis in part by echoing in his history of Samos the anti-Athenianism of his fellow repatriates (FGrHist 76 T 4 and FF 65–7, 96).Footnote 88 His contemporary Nymphis maintained his indispensability to Heraclea by inserting himself at least twice into his historical narrative—he mentioned his prominent role in the return of exiles after the death of Lysimachus in 281 (FGrHist 432 T 3), as well as in the peace he skillfully arranged with marauding Gauls a quarter of a century later (FGrHist 432 T 4)Footnote 89 —, and at the same time he used the past to substantiate particular policies toward neighbouring powers, grounding a distrust of Antiochus I, for example, in a deleterious portrait of his father, Seleucus (FGrHist 434 F 1.7.1).Footnote 90 In Sicily, meanwhile, Philistus seems to have had an even narrower audience in mind, hoping to effect his restoration to Syracuse by whitewashing the crimes of his onetime patron Dionysius I (FGrHist 556 T 13a). Would so many Greeks of high status have been drawn to write histories of their own communities had they not expected some degree of local readership?
A related indication that local historians intended the focal community as a primary audience is the frequency with which we find patronymics preserved for native historians, information of little consequence to nonlocals. We know, for example, that Philochorus’ father was Cycnus (FGrHist 328 T 1); that Nymphis was the son of Xenagoras (FGrHist 432 T 1); that the Alexandrian historian Nicanor was the son of Hermias (FGrHist 628 F 1); and that Dionysius, the author of a Rhodian history, was the son of Musonius (FGrHist 511 T 1).Footnote 91 While in the case of politically active historians such information was sometimes available in the preambles of decrees,Footnote 92 a likelier conduit through which it reached our citing sources is the incipits of the histories themselves. Indeed, our only fragment that records verbatim the opening words of a work of local history suggests that a historian might very well advertise his connection to the local community in just this way: ‘Antiochus, son of Xenophanes, wrote the following things about Italy’ (FGrHist 555 F 2).Footnote 93 Historians such as Hecataeus, Herodotus and Thucydides, who intended a more general audience, preferred geographical to genealogical markers,Footnote 94 as presumably did those historians who wrote about multiple localities.Footnote 95
By far the best confirmation of the focal community's response to local historiography, however, is the frequency with which local historians were honoured by the community about which they had written in acknowledgement of their historiography alone.Footnote 96 We are told, to name just a few examples, that in the mid fourth century b.c.e. the Athenians crowned Cleidemus after the publication of his Ἀτθίς (FGrHist 323 T 2); that in the early third century Tauric Chersonessus commended its native son Syriscus upon the recitation of his local history (FGrHist 807 T 1); and that the Samian dēmos dedicated at the Heraion a statue in honour of the Samian historian Leon (FGrHist 540 T 1).Footnote 97 There is in addition a secondary order of local reception. For communities could use previously published local histories as a means of self-assertion. One of the clearest illustrations of this process comes in the context of a long-standing territorial dispute between Samos and Priene, when in the early third century b.c.e. each party submitted for arbitration a series of local histories written over the past several centuries as evidence for the priority of its claims.Footnote 98 Another well-known example is the use of local histories by certain members of the Lindian community on Rhodes to construct a narrative that augmented, at the time of Roman domination (99 b.c.e.), the authority of the Temple of Athena Lindia.Footnote 99 Or we can think of the Parian history of the Parian Demeas (FGrHist 502), which served as the basis for the so-called Monumentum Archilochi in the mid first century b.c.e. (IG 12.5.445). Such preserved community reactions, in conjunction with the testimony afforded by the public careers of Greek local historians, their mode of self-identification and the parochialism of their projects, confirm the critical receptive role of the focal community and suggest that a local historian had this group very much in mind as he composed his text.
Communities are naturally compelled to enunciate their constitutive narratives, along the way highlighting idiosyncrasies of local topography and custom.Footnote 100 These narratives, autobiographical inasmuch as they are produced by a community about itself, function in some ways like personal autobiography: their aims may be therapeutic (helping process change, disturbance and disorder), testimonial (preserving memories in perceived danger of decay),Footnote 101 or indeed apologetic,Footnote 102 with self-glorification a constant objective, as critics from Georg Misch to Mikhail Bakhtin have emphasized in their respective treatments of personal autobiography;Footnote 103 all the while, like personal autobiography they work to formulate and articulate self-identity (which in the case of communities promotes social cohesion). It is not surprising that in literate communities we find versions of these communal autobiographies recorded, recited and circulated, with individuals exploiting such texts, as we have said, to authenticate their membership in the group and to legitimize their peculiar formulations of the past.
What is striking is not the popularity of local historiography among the Greeks but the tendency, as our verbatim fragments indicate, for local historians, even and particularly native ones, to exoticize the epichoric and to separate from the focal community all local readers, who made up a significant portion of their intended and actual audiences. While such a move no doubt enabled a community in receipt of a work of local history to imagine itself an object of interest and indeed serious study to the outside world, this cannot be the entire explanation, especially given the extent of the phenomenon in the Greek world and the fact that cultural memory could very well be packaged (through the media of oratory and poetry, as we have seen) expressly for local consumption.
It is possible that a local historian's impulse to preserve information about a community's territory, behaviour and collective past led him to postulate a future audience that was external not physically but temporally. Yet, because a local historian could very well distinguish past from present praxis,Footnote 104 would he not have used a past tense to account for customs not predicted to persist? Indeed, local historians actually preferred the present tense to describe local behaviour—Semos writes that the Delians ‘sacrifice’ (not ‘used to sacrifice’) βασυνίαι and κόκκωρα, Dercylus that the Heresides ‘carry’ water from the Heraion, Philochorus that it ‘is’ an Athenian custom to forbid dogs on the Acropolis—, and this suggests that they generally envisaged a contemporary audience, not to mention an overall stability to epichoric behaviour that would problematize a putative future iteration of the local community that behaved differently. To posit such an ignorant future audience, finally, does not on its own explain a local historian's flagrant alienation of his contemporary local readers. What, then, can explain the disjuncture between a local historian's implied and intended audiences?
III. SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY
We can arrive at an answer, I suggest, by considering the background against which emic local historiography developed in Greece, in particular the anteriority of etic paradigms. For among the first texts to make use of the technology of prose were geographical surveys: general Περιηγήσεις, such as those of Hecataeus (FGrHist 1) and Scylax of Caryanda (FGrHist 709),Footnote 105 as well as monographs on particular localities and kingdoms on the periphery of the Greek world, such as the Περσικά of Dionysius of Miletus (FGrHist 687)Footnote 106 and the Αἰγυπτιακά of Herodotus.Footnote 107 These narratives, it is important to note, entailed descriptions not only of foreign lands but also of the foreign peoples who resided there, their customs and their deeds.Footnote 108 They also actuated a divide between a knowledgeable author and his ignorant audience on the one hand and between a foreign author and his indigenous subject on the other. When prose established itself as an ideal medium for exploring localities and their occupants, Greeks began to use it to inscribe the constitutive narratives of Greek communities, frequently even their own. In so doing, they naturally availed themselves of the blueprints supplied by Περσικά, Αἰγυπτιακά and the like.Footnote 109 The innovation of the mid fifth century b.c.e., then, was not the invention of local historiography in and of itself (this had come earlier with the invention of prose) but the acceptance of the etic template as the standard mode for writing about all communities and localities.Footnote 110 Emic local historiography, whose authors presented themselves not simply (like most prose writers) as experts educating the ignorant but in fact also as outsiders enlightening other outsiders, accordingly found its first footing in Greece as self-ethnography.
It may be objected that the adoption of historical prose in and of itself explains local historiography's externalization of author and audience. For nonlocal historians also avoided local dialects and seldom admitted any correspondence between audience and protagonists. The fundamentally dissociative nature of historiographyFootnote 111 is especially clear in the context of Greek epigraphy, where we find as the subjects of civic decrees, intended though they were primarily for local consumption, the dēmos, the boulē, the local citizenry in the third person, seldom ‘we’ or ‘you’. The Athenian decree in honour of Callias of Sphettus (IG ii3 911),Footnote 112 to take just one example, recounts in 270/269 b.c.e. local events that occurred only about fifteen years before, and it does so without acknowledging that a good many potential readers of the text had participated in the action described: ‘Since’, it begins, ‘after the dēmos revolted against those who were occupying the polis and expelled the soldiers from the city … ’.Footnote 113 The Athenians did not of course speak about themselves in the third person in the midst of political debate; it was only when an event became prosified, historicized, that the narrative was depersonalized.
Yet, it is not simply that local historians implied, like Herodotus and the drafters of honorary decrees, a general Greek audience; they actually explicitly approached their own communities ethnographically. In addition to res gestae, they treated toponyms, aetiologies, cult and custom (and this despite the fact that some also wrote treatises devoted solely to such matters),Footnote 114 and they did so explicitly by striking the pose of outsiders, tourists, περιηγηταί. ‘They point out the grave of Melanchrus and Cleometra’, writes Deinias as if recounting an exchange with local guides, ‘still to this day (καὶ νῦν ἔτι) on top of the so-called Pron’ (FGrHist 306 F 3).Footnote 115 Like the participle καλούμενος,Footnote 116 this phrase, καὶ νῦν ἔτι, immediately flags ethnographic discourse.Footnote 117 The Megarian Dieuchidas uses it twice in his Μεγαρικά, for example, to describe the ἀγυιεύς, a pointed column that was originally a ‘dedication of the occupying Dorians’ (FGrHist 485 F 2b).Footnote 118 ‘Still today’, writes Philochorus about the members of the boulē, ‘they take their seats in accordance to the letter by which they were allotted’ (FGrHist 328 F 140).Footnote 119
Even when a nonlocal historian had recourse to record the customs of his own community, he followed the lead of local historians. In connection with the Spartan invasion of Attica in 431 b.c.e., for example, Thucydides introduces a potted history of Athens replete with topographical and cultic data (2.15), in the process switching registers so markedly that the passage has sometimes been suspected as an interpolation and accordingly excised.Footnote 120 It was Theseus, Thucydides writes, who first united Attica:
And from that time even up until now the Athenians have celebrated the Synoikia as a publicly financed festival for the goddess. Before this, what is now the Acropolis was a polis, as was that part beneath it, generally facing the south. The proof of this is that the temples of the other gods, too, are on the Acropolis itself, and those that are outside it are situated more towards this part of the polis: the temple of Olympian Zeus and the Pythion and the temples of Gē and of Dionysius in the Marshes, in whose honour the older Dionysia are celebrated in the month of Anthesterium just as the Ionian descendants of the Athenians are still to this day accustomed. Here, too, are other ancient temples and a spring now called Enneakrounos, after the way that the tyrants made it, but which formerly, when its waters were visible, was called Callirrhoe, and this they used for the most important purposes because of its proximity. And from ancient times even still to this day it is customary to use the water before marriages and for other ceremonies. And still to this day because of the ancient settlement there the Athenians call the Acropolis polis.Footnote 121
Here, Thucydides specifies the locations of prominent temples on the Acropolis, not, as we saw in the case of Cleidemus’ Ἀτθίς, obscure mountaintop altars on the outskirts of the ἄστυ, and here he explores Athenian praxis from without, peppering the passage with phrases such as ἔτι καὶ νῦν, καλουμένῃ, ὠνομασμένῃ. His etic approach to Athens is not simply a result of the fact that he geared his history, as he says in his preface, to ‘all those who wish to know clearly about the past’ (1.22.4); for we find such a concentration of ethnographic tags only in connection to Athens.Footnote 122 Rather, Thucydides goes out of his way when speaking about his own community to don the hat of a local historian—of a self-ethnographer—, severing his readers and indeed himself from the Athenian community that he so carefully describes.Footnote 123
While the influence of the earliest Greek prose narratives helps to clarify the distinctive pose of a Greek local historian, something else may also be at work. For local historians outside of ancient Greece, often without exposure to Greek models, also tend to approach their own communities ethnographically. John Stow, to take a ready example, although addressing A Survey of London (1603) to London's mayor and ‘to the Comminality, and Citizens of the same’, although framing his project as ‘a dutie, that I willingly owe to my native mother and Countrey, and an office that of right I holde my selfe bond in love to bestow upon the politike body & members of the same’,Footnote 124 nevertheless proceeds to distance himself and his implied audience from the local citizenry, outlining London topography and the behaviour and cultural memory of Londoners from the position of an interested visitor. He deals with the Tower of London as had Deinias with the Pron—‘This tower is a Citadell, to defend or command the Citie: a royall place for assemblies, and treaties. A Prison of estate, for the most dangerous offenders’Footnote 125 —, and he concludes a long passage on the ‘Sports and Pastimes’ of Londoners by noting that ‘Sliding upon the Ice is now but childrens play: but in hawking & hunting many grave Citizens at this present have great delight, and do rather want leisure than good will to follow it.’Footnote 126 The Vermonter Rev. Hosea Beckley, to take just one other example, dedicated his History of Vermont (1846) ‘to the youth of Vermont’, whose task it was to ‘become acquainted … with the history of their native State; the time and circumstances of its settlement; by whom, and the difficulties encountered and overcome in doing it’. But he, too, tackles Vermont's landscape, customs and history as an outsider.Footnote 127 ‘The scenery around Manchester is delightful’, he writes, ‘and, to a stranger, very impressive. Indeed, on visiting it for the first time, one is surprised that the inhabitants are apparently so unconscious of the unusual delineations of nature with which they are surrounded.’Footnote 128 He comments later that a ‘trait of character in the Vermonters, is frankness. In their deportment at home, and abroad; in their intercourse with one another, and with strangers, you generally find them open and explicit’.Footnote 129 And he notices that despite Vermont's fertile soil, ‘sometimes those of dwarfish dimensions are found among its inhabitants’.Footnote 130
It is perhaps the discomfiture inherent in the task of writing local history that inclined a native Greek local historian, like some more recent practitioners of the form, to separate himself and much of his intended audience from the focal community. I suggested earlier that thinking about emic local historiography as community autobiography helps to illuminate some of the motives behind the enterprise. Yet, the analogy also clarifies the peculiar position of the native local historian. For autobiography, as Bakhtin observed, confounds the relationship between author and subject;Footnote 131 nominally united with his hero, an autobiographer in fact remains perforce ‘outside the world he has represented in his work’,Footnote 132 obliged to rely on an externalized self, a ‘possible other’, to narrate the past.Footnote 133 The act of autobiography, Bakhtin concludes, requires that a life (of a community, we might say, as much as of an individual) be ‘constructed as a possible story that might be told about it by the other to still others’.Footnote 134 Local historiography differs from personal autobiography in several fundamental ways, of course. For one thing, it is never the community as a whole that writes its story but a particular community member, always with his own incentives and objectives; and this author is accordingly only a component of and not coextensive with his subject. More to the point, the autobiographer, who implies and intends an audience separate from himself and his subject, creates a ‘possible other’ only for himself. A good portion of a local historian's intended audience, however, is the community to which he himself belongs and whose own story he purports to tell: he thus constructs a ‘possible other’ not only for himself as author but also for these local readers, obliging them, too, to detach themselves from the narrative's subject.
Through this act of exteriorization, of implying a communal ‘other’, a local historian counters the solipsism required by the act of communicating a community's autobiography to itself. It is not simply an accidental consequence of its appropriation of prose or its adoption of early ethnographic models that local historiography manifested itself in Greece as self-ethnography. We might more accurately say that Greek local historians so readily latched on to prose and assumed the posture of ethnographers in order to address the tension implicit in their task: writing and reading the history of one's own locality demands dislocation.
