From Homer to Thucydides: Epic and the Origins of Historiography

From Homer to Thucydides: Epic and the Origins of Historiography

Kunal Chattopadhyay

Professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University

No historian has left so deep an imprint on the way the events he has described, as has Thucydides, son of Olorus. In the opening pages of his History of the Peloponnesian War, he lays down his research methodology, and makes the claim that his is the first authentic history, sweeping aside all those who had written about the past prior to him. In doing so, he presents us with a number of brief examples. For example, he says that Athenians believed Hipparchos was the tyrant of Athens while in reality the tyrant was Hippias, the eldest son of the tyrant Peisistratos. Such examples serve to establish his point, that a historian must be very careful in determining factual accuracy. Subsequently, he argued that though there had been certain openly expressed aitiai (causes), the alethestate prophasis (the truest explanation) was that the Spartans were alared at the growing power of Athens. It is not my intention in the present paper to discuss whether he was right in this particular claim. G.E. M de Ste Croix and Anton Powell among others accept his claim and Ste Croix’s entire book is a defence of Thucydides’ explanation, while Donald Kagan is more critical, as is Simon Hornblower, the most important commentator on Thucydides since Gomme. What is crucial for our understanding of Thucydides as a historian is that with this, he is held to have made a clear statement about the need to discuss causality in historiography, in which he is seen as someone who differs from his predecessors.

And this brings us directly to the core of the present paper. Thucydides is very conscious in presenting his work as something absolutely novel. The following comments from Book I illustrate my point clearly:

“So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand. On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity.”

“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”

It is my argument that in the foregoing comments, he was aiming not merely at Herodotos of Halicarnassus, his great predecessor whose work he surely knew about, though never mentioning him by name, but also Homer, who is repeatedly mentioned.

At the same time, Homer continued to exercise a great influence on him, and historiography in Greece, and consequently in the Western world, which followed the Greek model, should be seen as a literary genre that developed owing to the transformation of the epic.

For the average historian, history is basically a type of knowledge associated either with science or with a type of realist narrative or realistic novel. But in order to be classified under the generic label of history, a text has to have three functions – description and explanation, evocation and expression. Ancient historians tried to rely on the witness, as does Thucydides in the famous 1.22.4., to produce authentic description, from which alone can come explanation. As in part a sort of recollection of what is absent, history also consists in a process of evocation. But it is not a collective reproduction of society’s memory. Historical writing is rather a discourse that the historian imposes more or less successfully on events. Citing documents or witnesses of the past, they think that that to which they refer will also be present.nAll the preliminary work of research leads to a phase of synthesis or exposition, where reconstruction is done by systemization and subordination of the information to what Lyotard calls a metanarrative. This creates an effect of the real, which in the hands of romantic historians, for example, involves a major effort at evocation. Finally, history as expression involves the power, the standpoint of the historian. So, for example, the idea that history is the politics of the past is not an absolute truth but the key with which Ranke unlocked the plot to make sense of the documents of history. In writing history, the historian expresses one’s own values and feelings.

At the moment I do not want to go further with this discussion. My argument is that through the foregoing, historians typically make of themselves an epic image – knights in search of truth. But their discourse is a hybrid discourse, where the three elements are all present. If one element was chosen to the exclusion of the rest, if say expression was favoured to the point of suppressing the others, the historian could become a poet. The genre history comes closest to is epic poetry, which also contains descriptions and explanations, expression and evocation. This is not to say that epic and history are one and the same. But epic provides the template.

And this is what makes Thucydides’ attempt to break with epic so interesting. My argument is that he has made an attempt to distinguish his writing separate from Homer. But he is indebted to Homer in many ways.

The great impact of Thucydides was that his work would become the template for subsequent historians, who would study history and follow the notion that history provides evidence for the universality of human behavior. But for Thucydides, history is not the narrative content of events which conforms to evidence but rather it is his methodology, or form of his writing, which provides evidence enabling these events to be preserved with some credibility for posterity. Thus, history is not a storytelling of events but is an investigation and interpretation (or an analytical rewriting) of the events. Hence his initial discussion of historical facts and how to ascertain them – the so-called “archaeology’, consisting of Thuc. I.1 to I.21, and the oft discussed methodological comments in I.22. This introduces the reader to istoria – research or investigation, though one should point out that in his equal attempt to distinguish himself from Herodotos, he does not use the word istoria even once. This also introduces the reader to Thucydides' writing style of antithesis and opposition. So clearly, history is a methodology of analysis and interpretation which Thucydides stringently applies to his History , by applying the briefly to the Trojan War, and then elaborately to the events of the Peloponnesian War. His conscious contrast between the Homeric story and his own narrative shows him aware of the effects of his writing in both style, to persuade the reader of the authenticity of his History , and content, to ake the reader aware of the magnitude of the Peloponnesian War. His statement about the license granted to poets bespeaks the impact of his own age, the age of the sophists and of Euripides, both of whose writing styles have been compared with his own. He s not willing to grant Homer the high pedestal granted by previous ages. Herodotos, for example, though setting forth the concept of istoria, was clearly writing in a partially Homeric mode. Partially, because already, it is no longer the Muse who guarantees the authenticity of the narrative, but Herodotus of Halicarnassos and his research. But in recounting history of a specific period, rather than from the beginning, he is following Homer, as also in the story telling mode that he adopts.

Thucydides takes pains to go beyond this. Consider the difference.

Odysseus's journey is almost over. His companions are dead, he is a guest of honor at the court of the Phaeacians. During the feast given by their king, Odysseus asks the bard Demodocus to sing the famous episode of the wooden horse. In this scene in which the hero is placed in front of the bard who sings of his own adventure, Hannah Arendt saw the beginning, within epics, of history. "What had been sheer occurrences now became history," she wrote. Indeed, we witness the first telling of the event (which constitutes it as such): the first making of history. With this peculiarity: the very presence of Odysseus proves that "it" really took place. This is an unprecedented configuration, or even an anomaly, since in the epic the truth of the bard's words depended completely and only on the authority of the Muse. Arendt went further to claim that this scene was paradigmatic for history and poetry, because the reconciliation with reality came about through the tears of remembrance, and stressing that the catharsis, which for Aristotle was the essence of tragedy, was for Hegel the ultimate purpose of history. Are we witness to the "first" Greek historical narrative? Not by the standards of Thucydides. He would want to know who the informant of Demodocus was. Who was, indeed, the informant of Homer? The problem cannot be avoided either by falling back on the inspiration provided by the use, for then it is no history, nor by looking at the hero as witness. By sending the choice piece of meat to Demodocus, he seems to be honouring the bard and his position. Thucydides is not interested in the honour given by immediate audiences. In fact, his writing style is such that it is clearly not meant to be a narrative to be read aloud to large gatherings, but to be read by readers. For at least a couple of centuries, scholars looking at his text have also debated when he wrote which comment. This conscious revision, along with his systematically hostile attitude to prophesies, omens, his rejection of the narrative style which looks at individual heroes in battle, are all elements that can be put forward as evidence of his desire to distinguish his craft from that of the poet, and to reject, as it were, in advance, the assertion of Aristotle, for whom poetry spoke general truth and was therefore superior to history.

For Thucydides, the poet, even if it was Homer, was one who greatly romanticized and embellished the story for the sake of the pleasure of the listeners, while he was going to make no compromise with reader demands. He was going to present the ultimate truth, and he expected it to have a general value, so that politicians and generals of the future could draw necessary lessons from it.

If this was the image he wanted to present, he has been singularly successful. Few historians have been able to impose their views so forcefully on future ages, for such a long time, as has Thucydides. History, Leopold von Ranke said, wants only to show what actually happened. For this admirer of Thucydides, the claim was based partly on the claims ade by Thucydides for his work, already quoted at the beginning.

But in fact Thucydides is indebted to Homer in a number of ways. The first is the choice of the subject of history and the manner of its presentation. Greek historiography, in the hands of its founders, though not all later writers, was the history of particular war or wars. The privileging of political and military history, and not religious, economic, social or any other variant of history, is the legacy of Homer. So much is this the case that to use the term history, without qualifications, is taken to mean political and military history. Morevoer, just as Homer does not give us a narrative covering the whole of history from the founding of the Achaean states down to the end of the Trojan War, but launches into the war, and indeed on one particular phase of it, so does Thucydides. It is his choice that takes the three wars – the Archidamian War, the Sicilian Expedition, and the revival of war in the East (the Dekeleian War and the Ionian War) as one unit we now call The Peloponnesian War. After the researches of the past half a century, it is clear that it was his choice that led to the exclusion of what had been called the First Peloponnesian War, the war between 461 and 446/5, from this narrative, for we know that the Thirty Years Peace that was broken by the Spartans and the Thebans in 431 can be understood only by looking at the earlier war.

The impact of Homer is also spread all over his style f resentation and his selection, even though tempered by his stress on the standards of truth and his desire not to present a romantic story. I have commented at length on his speeches elsewhere. Here let e mention only that the speeches are similar, in a number of ways, with speeches in Homer. A letter from Nikias campaigning in Sicily, has been compared with the speech of Agamemnon to the Achaeans.

Thucydides has Nicias to complain to the Athenians in his letter from Sicily (7.12.3):

While our ships are by now soaked,' having been at sea for such a long time already, and the crews have diminished.

To this the scholiast comments

(p. 378 Hude): 'Soaked: rotten. So Homer (1. 2.135): The shipwood is rotten, and the ropes have loosened.

A.V. Zadorojnyi, building on this ancient commentary, provides a detailed analysis of the letter and its similarity with the speech of Agamemnon. Yet, as Zadorojnyi remarks, there is a twist at the end, for Thucydides seems to be suggesting to his readers that Nikias’s strategy will fail because it is too Homeric.

Thucydides is keen to show that his subject exceeded in scale both the Trojan and the Persian Wars. To prove this, he draws a frightening list of the components of kinesis (1.23.1-3): duration and intensity of violence, cities devastated, emigration and holocaust, sedition, earthquakes, storms, eclipses, famine (and cannibalism: 2.70.1), plague. The contents of the History offers many a parallel with the Iliad: plague (2.47.3-2.54), sieges involving construction of walls (2.75-8; 3.18.4; 4.69.1-2; 4.90; 6.99-6.101.3; 7.4.1-3; 7.5.1), battle over the wall (3.22-3: cf. esp. 3.23.1 and 11. 12.397-9) and over the ships (7.53), night battle (7.44.1-2), and carnage in a river (7.84.3-85.1: cf. 11. 21.7-11, 17-21, 25-6, 233-6).' Monstrous Cyclopes and Laestrygones are hardly mentioned by accident in the Sicilian Geography (6.2.1). The most conspicuous compositional elements of Homer (and Herodotus) feature prominently in Thucydides-that is: 'catalogues' (2.9; 2.96-7; 6.2-5; 7.57-9) and speeches, notably military exhortations.

At a different level, the narrative style and selection of events creates a curious gap. We are today well aware that the boule or Council of 500, and its Executive Committee or Prytaneis, played a very important role in the Athenian democracy. But the accounts of how Athens functioned, as presented by Thucydides, ignores or minimizes its role, and focuses solely on the Assembly, with the counterposing of faceless collectives and heroic individuals.

In books 6 and 7, when Thucydides deals with the Sicilian Expedition, he begins with references to Homeric themes, as he does in the archaeology in Book I. Thucydides, by referring to Cyclopes and Laestrygones, is setting the folly of the Athenian expedition in the wider context of the mythic world, in which Odysseus also found himself defeated. The Athenians, the setting tells readers, departed in ignorance of the present and in defiance of the lessons of history. At the same time, right at the beginning, Thucydides tells us that the Athenians were embarking on a second war hardly smaller than the one with the Peloponnesians. This has serious implications for the future of the wars and the eventual destruction of Athenian power. But Thucydides then digresses to talk about Homeric themes. By going out on a journey without a clear sense of what they are doing, or what they may expect, the Athenians embark on a quest of 'heroic' proportions. In Homeric terms they confront the darkness of the unknown, and Thucydides is keen to stress the point at the outset. And the route taken by the Athenians is almost precisely the reverse of the route of Odysseus – first to Corcyra, then Rhegium, then the Straits of Messina and finally to Syracuse. This is the reverse of Odysseus’s journey – Cyclopes, Laestrygones, the Straits (connected to Scylla and Charybdis), and then Scheria, which is identified with Corcyra, from where he is able to go to the Phaeacians. The Athenians in their folly, Thucydides seems to be telling us, went into the very jaws of death from which Odysseus had escaped. And in his narrative, the destruction of the Athenian fleet at the harbor, the confinement of the Athenians to the Syracusan mines, and their hunger and begging for food through Sicily, all bear evidence of intertextuality with the Odyssey. Certainly, Homeric epics represented a world long gone, and was seen by Thucydides as an unreliable source for the hard facts of history. But the human desire for fame and glory, and the actions, often dangerous, that they undertake out of that desire, were what he was narrating in Books VI and VII, and he therefore seems to have felt it appropriate to use heroic poetry as the basis from which to construct his own story.

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Paper presented at Comparative Literature Association of India Conference, Gandhinagar, 2011