These two collected editions introduce Graeco-Roman historiography from two different perspectives. Each is part of a wider series which frames the approach taken. The Oxford History of Historical Writing, volume 1, presents newly commissioned writing by leading authors in the field. It offers broad chronological coverage of the Graeco-Roman world, from archaic Greece down to the late Roman empire, set in the context of chapters on the historical writing of other ancient cultures. The volume allows its readers to reflect on the nature of historical representation as such: its cross-cultural perspective invites consideration of what is specific to the Graeco-Roman tradition. The Oxford Readings volume, on the other hand, is concerned with exploring scholarly debates in the field. The series aims to collect the most influential articles published in recent years, making accessible important work which might have become difficult to get hold of. There is no aim at chronological coverage or inclusiveness. Rather the essays lay out the key areas of concern and contention for those working in the discipline, inviting the reader to consider and participate in a range of methodological debates. I will say more about the former volume than the latter, since the essays in the Oxford History of Historical Writing are being published for the first time and the remit of this series will be less familiar to readers.
The Oxford History of Historical Writing, volume 1, is the first part of an ambitious five-volume study exploring historical writing across the world from its earliest beginnings down to the present day. The series is organised chronologically (vol. 2: 400–1400; vol. 3: 1400–1800; vol. 4: 1800–1945; vol. 5: Historical writing since 1945), each volume covering a wide geographical range. Volume 1 covers from the third millennium b.c. to ‘late antiquity’ in the West and the eve of the Tang dynasty in the East. The 24 chapters are organised by region, examining the Ancient Near East & Egypt, the Graeco-Roman world, Ancient China and Ancient India, with the chapters on each region arranged chronologically. There is also an editors' introduction and an epilogue by G.E.R. Lloyd, which identifies some patterns across the historical traditions discussed in the volume and considers the different reasons why peoples of different cultures felt the need to remember the past.
The volume challenges traditional models of the history of historical thought as the preserve of the West. From a Classics perspective it is immediately striking, and salutary, to find that although Graeco-Roman historiography does occupy a significant portion of the volume (Chapters 5–14), there was plainly a great deal of comparable material produced elsewhere both before our period and concurrently. For students used to hearing that Herodotus is the ‘Father of History’, this will be a welcome reminder.
The volume offers an accessible introduction to cultures and periods which might be unfamiliar to readers. Selective bibliographies are given at the end of each chapter, as well as a list of key sources for the relevant period and in many cases a timeline. The index provides birth and death dates for significant names. However, the volume is much more than a survey. Importantly, it is not organised around a series of ‘great historians’, or as the foreword has it, a ‘parade of stars’ (p. xi). This is especially significant for the cross-cultural approach of the volume. As the foreword makes clear, the organisation of the series by chronology rather than region aims to allow comparison between traditions flourishing at similar times. Yet, although it becomes apparent that exchange between historical traditions did take place (e.g. between India and China), in most cases writers in the different regions remained unaware of each other. The volume promotes the possibility of finding connections between different regions by replacing a focus on individual writers with a more materialist understanding of the development of history writing. The essays focus on the cultural and political contexts in which historical representation is produced, such as the impact of empire on how history was written (see M. Liverani on Mesopotamia, E. O'Gorman on Rome and M.E. Lewis on China).
The discovery of connections is of course not the only thing to be gained from cross-cultural comparison: it is also valuable to be made aware of diversity. The essays indicate the multiplicity of ways in which it is possible to represent the past, beyond ‘the familiar convention of a single authorial voice reporting and reflecting on traditional accounts’ (introduction, p. 2). This breaks down the traditional teleological model of the ‘development’ of historical thought, leading to the ideal of the modern rational, objective historian: by studying different traditions ‘… we will see many examples of ancient histories that illustrate paths not taken, or abandoned, or left undeveloped. It is not at all clear that there is a natural or inevitable way to use the past to make sense of the world’ (introduction, p. 2). This corrective is especially important when approaching ancient history writing from the perspective of the discipline of Classics. The exalted position of Graeco-Roman texts at the birth of the Western tradition can lead to a mistaken sense of familiarity, so that certain modes of textual presentation risk being taken for granted.
The chapters on Graeco-Roman historical thought provide an easy and readable introduction, and in many cases also frame their discussions in new and exciting ways. As someone interested in Greek writing, I will say most about the initial three chapters on Archaic and Classical Greece, which offer stimulating takes on central bodies of material.
R. Osborne's chapter argues that Greek inscriptions need to be read as history writing, i.e. considered as self-conscious texts with a purpose, and an effect. Focusing on two Hellenistic public inscriptions as case studies, he suggests that rather than mining inscriptions for ‘facts’ about diplomatic or economics affairs, we need to consider how they construct the narrative of their cities – how they imagine their city's present, but also how they situate that present in relation to the past and the future. He suggests that different inscriptional forms, such as the decree or the list, create different templates for the historical imaginary.
D. Boedeker considers how early Greek poetry represents the past, and the interaction between poetic accounts and the prose narratives of Herodotus and Thucydides. After showing how a variety of poetic forms from different performance contexts were concerned with ‘historical’ content – from epic to elegy, lyric and tragedy – she shows that while both Herodotus and Thucydides framed their projects via a rejection of their poetic rivals, nevertheless they shared many of their concerns. Their expectations of how narratives of the past might work are closely informed by poetic forms, leading to a competitive relationship which is also complex.
J. Grethlein considers Herodotus and Thucydides in the intellectual context of the development of prose writing. After showing how the language of evidence and proof can be associated with early scientific and sophistic texts and law-court rhetoric, he examines the self-conscious interaction of Herodotus and Thucydides with rhetoric, through an examination of their use of speeches. Through a reading of Pericles' funeral oration for Thucydides, and the debate between the Athenians and Tegeans at Plataea for Herodotus, he shows how both authors use speeches as a meta-historical device, as a way of defining the historiographic genre by allowing reflection on different modes of representing the past. The chapter concludes with a comparison to Plato, who similarly incorporates rhetorical genres as a way of defining the project of philosophy. All three writers combine critical reflection on rhetoric with an open, polyphonous text where the reader is invited to judge for him- or herself, suggesting a complex engagement with democratic discourse.
Other chapters are similarly engaging, although some are more survey-like than others. J. Dillery places Hellenistic historiography in literary and political context, looking at the various directions taken by Hellenistic writing and considering how we can understand them in relation to previous writing and to contemporary contexts. J. Price discusses Josephus as simultaneously a Greek historian of the Roman empire, a Jewish historian and a Roman historian writing from the provinces. He considers how Josephus negotiates these different traditions and how his text might have been read differently by Greek, Jewish and Roman audiences. A. Cooley considers the writing of inscriptions as part of the development of historical consciousness at Rome. Ranging from the earliest inscriptions to Late Antiquity, she shows how inscriptions were involved in the construction of the past, operating differently at different periods. U. Walter discusses the development of Roman historical writing from its beginnings, examining the relationship with Greek predecessors and Roman attitudes to their ancestors, and considering different literary forms, such as annals, and how they frame the past. E. O'Gorman's interesting discussion of Roman writing on the life and times of the emperors shows how the interrelationship between the genres of history and biography offered different political models for narrating the Roman imperial period, suggesting the inseparability of literary form and political content. D. Potter examines how Greek historians dealt with the history of imperial Rome from the end of the Republic to the fourth and fifth centuries a.d, examining how Greek responses to Roman history changed over time. M. Whitby examines early Christian ideas about the past, considering how Christian thought intersected with or differed from the Graeco-Roman and Jewish traditions.
Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Greek and Roman Historiography presents key contributions on Graeco-Roman history writing from the 1960s to the present, translating into English for the first time work in French, Italian and German. Most articles are accompanied by short addenda by the authors reflecting on how the field has moved on since the publication of the article in question, and recommending more recent bibliography. Interestingly, as with the Oxford History of Historical Writing, the selected articles do not focus on individual historians, since other volumes in the Oxford Readings series cover this, but instead address, from a variety of perspectives, the problem of how history was written in the Graeco-Roman world. The volume is divided into three sections which consider: (1) how the past is constructed: 7 chapters; (2) how far ancient history writing is concerned with historical truth: 5 chapters; and (3) the relationship between history writing and other genres: 3 chapters. A helpful introduction by M. situates these questions within the history of modern responses to Graeco-Roman history writing, as well as highlighting where there are divergences of opinion among the articles concerned with each topic, indicating the status of recent debates.
The process of selecting what is crucial to a field is clearly a fraught one and, inevitably, some readers may disagree with the inclusions (and exclusions) made. For me, some of the essays included appear slightly dated, at least in their underlying attitudes if not in their overall arguments. P.A. Brunt's essay, for example, which argues that Cicero's views of history were not ‘corrupted’ (p. 240) by the influence of rhetoric, criticises much ancient writing for being ‘negligent’, ‘careless’, ‘credulous’ and ‘given to sheer inventions’ (pp. 238–9). Such language suggests a concern with value judgements of ancient writing, instead of asking how it might have functioned in its own time. Similarly, T.J. Luce's essay on ancient views of bias does not question whether authorial ‘bias’ is an appropriate category through which to read texts: such a concept ties a text to the personal inclinations of its writer, ignoring the ideological formation of texts. It must be pointed out, though, that the volume does not necessarily endorse the positions of the articles included. The P.A. Brunt chapter, for example, is directly answered by a chapter by A.J. Woodman (see below), which takes the same passages of Cicero and interprets them in an entirely different way. The volume deliberately takes no explicit position, allowing the reader to make his or her own judgement between the different approaches represented.
The majority of essays in the volume do not suffer in this way. On the contrary, there is much exciting material here. N. Loraux's ‘Thucydides is not a Colleague’ addresses the foundational question ‘what is a text?’, pointing out that ‘there is no such thing as a writing which is purely documentary; nothing is written which is not presented as marked by discourse’ (p. 25). H.-J. Gehrke makes the similarly foundational point that both ancient and modern history writing is fundamentally politically embedded, and engaged in the construction of identities. R. Thomas offers an interesting discussion of the place of Greek legendary genealogy in the history of historical thought. G. Schepens examines Greek ideas about sources, showing how the ancient Greeks' key concern was with the processes by which information was gathered (e.g. via eye witnesses or oral reports). A.J. Woodman's essay on Cicero argues for the fundamentally rhetorical nature of history writing, showing how such writing can only be understood within its literary and intellectual context. F.W. Walbank's essay, originally from 1960 and the oldest work in the volume, offers a rebuttal of ‘tragic history’ as a term to describe a subset of ancient history writing, arguing for history's inextricable link with tragedy from its inception.
These two volumes offer different contexts for thinking about Graeco-Roman history writing: one, through its interest in cross-cultural comparison, addresses the basic question of what history writing is for, and invites reflection on the different ways in which it might be written; the other considers the different questions we moderns might pose to Graeco-Roman history writing, and explores a range of methodological approaches. Both are extremely valuable. I particularly enjoyed the materialist approach of the Oxford History of Historical Writing volume, which eschews the value judgements and teleological thinking of an older style of scholarship for a focus on the history of ideas. Although there are one or two places where the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Greek and Roman Historiography reintroduces this older style, it also gives access to some exciting and foundational work and will be a great resource.
