SOURCE: An introduction to The Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, edited by M. I. Finley, The Viking Press, 1959, pp. 1-21.

[In the excerpt below, Finley explores the evolution of Greek historical thought, noting significant milestones in the shaping of the historians ' worldview, and concluding that "In the end, its intense political orientation, which was the great force behind the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, was the fatal flaw in Greek historical writing. "]

History in its root sense means inquiry. For a considerable time before it took on the specific, narrower meaning the word now has, and even long thereafter— we still say "natural history"—the stress was on the inquiry as such, regardless of subject matter, on the search for explanation and understanding. Man is a rational being: if he asks rational questions, he can, by the unaided efforts of his intellect, discover rational answers. But first he must discover that about himself. The Greeks did, in the seventh century B.C. (insofar as so abstract a notion can be dated at all), and thereby they established the greatest of their claims to immor-tality. Significantly, the inquiry was first directed to the most universal matters, the nature of being and the cosmos. Only later was it extended to man himself, his social relations and his past.

It was no accident that this profound intellectual revolution took place in the region the Greeks called Ionia (the west coast of Turkey). There they were in closest touch with the older cultures of the ancient Near East. Greek-speaking peoples first migrated into the lower Balkans by 2000 or 1900 B.C. and eventually spread eastward across the Aegean Sea (and later west to Sicily and southern Italy). Like all invaders, they adopted and adapted a variety of ideas and institutions from their new neighbours. How much they borrowed we are only beginning to appreciate, as one after another the lost languages of the area are recovered, most recently Mycenaean Greek itself. In the course of centuries religious ideas, gods, myths and rituals, scientific and technological information found their way from Babylonians, Hittites, Hurrites, and other peoples of the Near East and were embodied in Greek ways of life and thought on a scale undreamed of by historians fifty or a hundred years ago.

Paradoxically, the more we learn about this process of diffusion and adaptation, the more astonishing is the originality of the Greeks. One need only read their earliest poetry or look at their archaic statues and vases to catch some of the genius. Then one turns to the Ionian intellectual revolution for another side of it, the spirit of rational inquiry. Without Babylonian mathematics and astronomy and metallurgy there could have been no Thales or Anaximander. But it was the Ionian Greeks, not their Babylonian forerunners, who first asked the critical questions about the earth and the stars and metals and matter. And so, too, with man himself and his past. The older civilizations had their records and their chronicles, but the essential element of inquiry, of history, was lacking. The writers of these accounts, the late R. G. Collingwood pointed out [in The Idea of History, 1946], were "not writing history," they were "writing religion"; they were not inquiring, they were recording "known facts for the information of persons to whom they are not known, but who, as worshippers of the god in question, ought to know the deeds whereby he has made himself manifest." It was the Ionians, again, who first thought to ask questions in a systematic way about the supposedly known facts, in particular about their meaning in rational, human terms.

The magnitude and boldness of this innovation must not be underestimated. Today we too easily assume, without giving it much thought, that a concern with history is a natural human activity. All men have memories and "live in the past" to a greater or less extent. Is it not natural that they should be interested in their ancestors and the past of their community, people, nation? Yes, but such an interest is not necessarily the same thing as history. It can be satisfied entirely by myth, and, in fact, that is how most of mankind has customarily dealt with the past (and, in a very real sense, still does). Myth serves admirably to provide the necessary continuity of life, not only with the past but with nature and the gods as well. It is rich and vivid, it is concrete and yet full of symbolic meanings and associations, it explains institutions and rites and feelings, it is instructive—above all, it is real and true and immediately comprehensible. It served the early Greeks perfectly.

When myth was finally challenged, by the Ionian enlightenment, the attack was directed not to the events and the stories, such as the details of the Trojan War, but to the mythic view of life and the cosmos, to its theogony and divine interventions. "Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men: theft, adultery, and deceit." So runs the famous protest by Xenophanes of Colophon, who was born about 570 B.C. Such criticism helped bring about a new cosmology and a new ethics; it did not, of itself, lead to the study of history. The skeptics stripped the traditional accounts of irrational elements and contradictions, but they neither doubted the remaining hard core nor tried to extend it by research of their own. They historicized myth, they did not write history. A remarkable example will be found in the first fifteen chapters of Thucydides. Here is a rapid review of the evolution of Greek society in which not a single trace of the mythic conception survives: the gods have disappeared completely, and with them fate and fortune and every other extra-human agency. In their place Thucydides put commonsense human causes and impulses, and the result looks so much like history that many people today, even historians who should know better, praise it as a great piece of historical writing. In fact what Thucydides did was to take the common Greek traditions, divest them of what he considered to be their false trappings, and reformulate them in a brilliantly coherent picture by thinking hard about them, using as his sole tools what he knew about the world of his own day, its institutions and its psychology.

It takes more than skepticism about old traditions to produce historical investigation. A positive stimulus is needed, and again Ionia provided the starting point. That part of the Greek world was not only in closest contact with other peoples, eventually it was also subjected to them, first to the Lydians and then to the Persians. The Greeks thought it was important to know something about their overlords, and so they investigated the subject and wrote books putting together the geography, antiquities, customs, and bits of history of the nations with whom they were concerned. Significantly, this had never been done before: the prevailing view, as any reader of the Old Testament must realize, was totally ethnocentric. Nations other than one's own had no intrinsic interest. Significantly, too, the Greek innovation was for a long time a restricted one: they were not attracted to ethnography as such, or history as such, but to the manners and institutions of the two nations with whom their lives were now closely bound. The Greeks had no myths to account for the past of the Lydians and Persians. That is why their first steps toward historical writing—for these works were not histories in any proper sense—were about foreign nations, not about themselves.

None of this writing survives apart from scattered quotations. Its general character, however, is clear enough from the first half of Herodotus' book. Herodotus, born early in the fifth century B.C. in the city of Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, planned a periodos on an unprecedented scale. Stimulated no doubt by the Persian Wars, which demonstrated that thinking Greeks must widen their horizons, Herodotus decided to extend the inquiry to more peoples and places. He proposed to investigate as much as he could personally, to confront and cross-question a variety of expert witnesses, and to report faithfully and accurately what he learned, distinguishing for his audience between first-and second-hand information, between probable and improbable (or impossible) accounts, between what he believed to be true and what he disbelieved but repeated because it had significance nonetheless. Every reader can judge for himself how successfully Herodotus carried out his program. But, had he done no more, it is unlikely that we should now have this opportunity: in the end, his writings would have disappeared like those of Hecataeus and the others, and Herodotus would be just another name today, the author of a few surviving fragments of books called Lydiaca, Aegyptiaca, Scythica, and so on.

We know virtually nothing about the life of Herodotus, and therefore we can only infer when and why he made a radical shift in his program. It seems most likely that this happened in Athens, toward the middle of the century. There Herodotus began a new inquiry, one utterly unlike any which had been attempted before. He determined to reconstruct, by personal investigation, the generation of the Persian Wars. In the process, he assembled much material about still earlier generations of Greek history, and he tied his account to the mythical tradition, which he rationalized and historicized as well as he could. The final product is an amalgam, for Herodotus did not abandon his earlier work. The Aegyptiaca and Scythica appear as long digressions; the Lydians and Persians have their story woven in with Greek affairs, but they are also given space for customs and manners; and the Greeks themselves appear in semi-mythical form at times (with unmistakable influences from epic and tragedy). Yet the work as a whole is surely a history.

No twentieth-century reader can really visualize Herodotus at work, under conditions which make both his effort and the final result a miracle of human enterprise. Written records did not exist, for all practical purposes, and few men who had any direct knowledge of the Persian Wars (let alone the still earlier years) could have been alive when he began this part of his study. Everything—the politics and the battles and the ravaging of cities and the intrigues—had to be rescued from oral tradition, as it was preserved and transmitted among the great families of Athens or the priests of Delphi or the kings of Sparta. These traditions were fragmentary, unreliable, self-serving, and often contra-dictory. That he nevertheless undertook so difficult and unprecedented a task implies some overpowering impulse, and I have little doubt that it was a political one, in the broadest sense of that term. Democratic Athens, under Pericles, was asserting itself with more and more pressure in the Greek world, offering leadership and military security, but at the same time demanding, and if necessary compelling, tribute and a measure of dependence. Difficult problems were raised—political problems which were, as always, at heart moral questions. Discussion was lively and often heated; out of it the sophists, and later Socrates, created the new discipline of ethics and, as a subdivision, political theory. Herodotus was no philosopher, he was not even a systematic thinker; but he was no less sensitive than the sophists and the tragedians to the great moral issues, and he made a unique contribution to the discussion. He found a moral justification for Athenian dominance in the role she had played in the Persian Wars, and he sought to capture that story and fix it before its memory was lost.

Herodotus had a most subtle mind, and the story he told was complex, full of shadings and paradoxes and qualifications. In traditional religion, for example, he stood somewhere between outright skepticism and the murky piety of Aeschylus. His political vision was Athenian and democratic, but it lacked any trace of chauvinism. He was committed, but not for one moment did that release him from the high obligation of understanding. His great discovery was that one could uncover moral problems and moral truths in history, in the concrete data of experience, in a discourse which was neither freely imaginative like that of the poets nor abstract like that of the philosophers. That is what history meant to Herodotus; nothing could be more wrong-headed than the persistent and seemingly indestructible legend of Herodotus the charmingly naïve storyteller.

It did not follow as a self-evident and automatic consequence that the new discovery was at once welcomed or that histories and historians arose on all sides to advance the new discipline. The Athenians appreciated Herodotus, obviously, and yet a full generation was to elapse before anyone thought it a good idea to write a complete history of Athens, and even then the step was taken by a foreigner, Hellanicus of Lesbos, and he was an annalist, a chronicler, not a historian, and he continued to repeat the traditional myths alongside more recent, verifiable history. Other Greeks naturally resented the phil-Athenianism of Herodotus and his version of their role in the Persian Wars, but they did not rush to reply by writing their own histories. They objected and they challenged a detail here and there, and they eventually pinned the label "Father of Lies" to him, a late echo of which can still be read in Plutarch's essay On the Malice of Herodotus. The new discipline, in short, remained highly problematic. In all honesty men could doubt whether it was possible to know the past, and whether the effort to find out was worth the trouble.

One man who read Herodotus carefully and fully appreciated his achievement (and the inherent difficulties) was Thucydides. He was probably in his late twenties when the second decisive struggle in Greek history broke out in 431 B.C., the war between Athens and Sparta, and he decided immediately that he would be its historian. Apart from the acute prognostic sense which Thucydides revealed thereby, his decision was a critical one for the future of Greek historical writing in general. There could be no more complete turning of one's back on the past than this, the idea of writing a history of an event which lay in the future. The war lasted twenty-seven years and Thucydides survived it, possibly by five years. All through it he worked away at his book with a remarkable singleness of purpose, collecting evidence, sifting, checking and double-checking, writing and revising, and all the time thinking hard about the problems: about the war itself, its causes and issues, about Pericles, about the Athenian Empire, about politics and man's behaviour as a political animal.

The book was not finished: that is obvious at a glance, and the way it breaks off more than six years before the end of the war leaves us with something of a puzzle. Possibly Thucydides found himself in a bitter impasse, unable to resolve to his own satisfaction either the general problems of politics, which concerned him more and more as the war continued, or the more technical questions of how to present to the public what he thought and what he had learned. The book is filled with tension, not merely the external tensions inevitable in so long and difficult a war, but also the inner conflicts of the author, as he tried to fight through the mass of facts and the complex moral issues which became obsessive with him, to a basic understanding of politics and ethics. He certainly did not abandon his life work in the year in which the manuscript suddenly stops. There are things in the earliest portions which could not have been said until after the end of the war in 404 B.C. There are unmistakable evidences of re-thinking and rewriting. Very probably the Funeral Oration and Pericles' last speech were among the latest sections Thucydides wrote, and they (together with the so-called Melian Dialogue at the end of the fifth book) sum up the whole generation as Thucydides saw it at the end of his life.

From the standpoint of the history of historical writing, Thucydides' political ideas are perhaps not so interesting as his technique. To begin with, he set out consciously to overcome certain weaknesses in Herodotus: hence the insistence on careful checking of eyewitness testimony, on precise chronology, on the total elimination of "romance" from his work, on a rational analysis which has no patience with oracles and supernatural interventions and divine punishments. His account of the great plague in Athens, for example, is a model of reporting; Thucydides even equipped himself with the most advanced medical knowledge, and his technical language and accuracy on this subject are unparalleled among lay writers in the whole of antiquity. All this is so impressive and has such an aura of earnestness and sincerity that, even though we have no independent evidence for virtually anything Thucydides tells us, we believe him without hesitation. The same cannot be said of any other historian in the ancient world.

It is no underestimation of these remarkable qualities in Thucydides to say that none of this—whatever its worth sub specie aeternitatis—locates him in the development of Greek historiography. Our admiration, however warranted, tends to divert attention from the crucial fact that his subject was contemporary, that he was writing about things which were happening under his eyes, or in sight of others whom he could cross-examine, not about events of the literally dead past. Therefore in his very explicit statement of his working methods and principles there is not one word about research into documents or traditions; there are only the rules to be followed in eliciting accurate information from eyewitnesses. When Thucydides did make a brief excursion into earlier times, as in the first fifteen chapters or in the sketch of developments from the point at which Herodotus' history breaks off to the beginning of the account of the Peloponnesian War, his motives were either to justify his own work or to provide certain necessary background materials, nothing more. They were not history, either in Thucydides' sense or in ours; they were introductory to his proper subject. Only contemporary history could be really known and grasped; if one worked hard enough and with sufficient intelligence and honesty, one could know and write the history of one's own age: that, we may say, was Thucydides' answer to the doubters, to the men who challenged Herodotus and the validity of his enterprise.

But what about the past? If one is interested in it, then what? In a famous and unique disgression, Thucydides set out at some length to prove that, contrary to the common and official view, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who had assassinated Hipparchus near the end of the previous century, were not the liberators of Athens from tyranny, because it was Hippias who was the elder son of Pisistratus, and therefore he (and not his brother Hipparchus) was the reigning tyrant at that time. There has been much speculation about Thucydides' reasons for this digression, which adds nothing to his story, and the most likely explanation is that he inserted it, at a late date, in reply to something—perhaps the publication of Hellanicus' chronicle of Athens—which annoyed him. His proof, which is perfectly sound, rested on two dedicatory inscriptions. This is an astonishing performance precisely because of its irrelevance, for it is one of the very few instances in which he quoted a document of any kind. Nothing else in the work shows so decisively what a great historian of the past Thucydides could have been. Here, he seems to be saying in contemptuous anger, is the way to go about writing the history of the past, if you think it is worth the bother.

Thucydides himself emphatically did not think it was. He shared the firm conviction, general among Greek thinkers, that mere knowledge of facts for their own sake was pointless (and sometimes harmful). Curiosity, a desire to know, had to lead to understanding, virtue, action. Of course, it is impossible to guess just what the young Thucydides had in mind when he decided, in 431 B.C., to become the war's historian. Perhaps he had no clear idea himself. But the time came— and I believe very quickly—when he set himself the goal of uncovering, through the story of his own generation, the essentials of man's behaviour, his political behaviour. That would be the "possession for all time" he would give to the world. And that, I suggest, is why Thucydides abandoned the past for the present. Human nature and human behaviour were for him essentially fixed qualities, the same in one century as in another. The good and the bad, the rational and the passionate and irrational, the moral and the immoral, the attractions and excesses of power—these were always present and operative, in various combinations. Therefore they could best be brought to light, where they could be studied and known, in the contemporary world rather than in the bygone generations which one could never really know. For Thucydides the choice was made even simpler and more obvious by the Peloponnesian War, which, he took pains to demonstrate in his introduction, was the greatest power struggle in Greek history.

By moving from history, in its narrower sense of a narrative of the war, to the basic political questions, Thucydides set himself an unattainable goal. It was difficult enough for him to reach the depth of understanding he desired. There remained the equally difficult problem of finding ways to communicate to his readers what he had learned. Merely to write the history of the Peloponnesian War, no matter how accurately and completely, would not do: that would add up to nothing more than a succession of concrete events, and how could the general ideas emerge from this mass of facts, each a particular and unique datum? To be sure, there is no explicit statement by Thucydides to say that he thought in those terms; nevertheless, the book he wrote seems to me to suffer no other explanation.

To begin with, there is the question of his selection of materials. All historical writing, like any form of rational discourse, must choose the relevant and discard the rest, must group and organize data, establish connections and patterns. But very often Thucydides' exclusions transcend the limits of the permissible by any definition of history that the modern world would recognize. For example, he wrote a long analysis of the civil disturbance (stasis) in Corcyra and thereafter he ignored this major factor of fifth-century Greek history almost completely, to the extent of not mentioning a number of other occurrences at all, not even those which had a demonstrably important bearing on the war. The balance is equally lopsided with the men in the war: instead of the expected proportions, according to Thucydides' judgement of the significance of the various generals and politicians, the method tends to be all or nothing. Of the popular leaders in Athens after the death of Pericles, only Cleon is given a role; the others receive no attention and are sometimes not even named. This cannot be dismissed as carelessness. Thucydides was too intelligent and serious a writer; we must assume that a principle of selection was at work, and I find it in his search for general ideas. Having demonstrated the nature and meaning of stasis, or the character and function of the demagogue, he saw no necessity to report other instances of the same general phenomenon. One good example was sufficient for his purposes; the rest would be useless repetition.

It is to be noticed, further, how the ideal demagogue is portrayed, in the shape of Cleon. Although Cleon was the decisive personality in Athens for at least five years, among the most crucial in the war, he is allowed but three full-dress appearances, much like the character in a play. Thucydides required no more in order to fix the image of Cleon completely, and he left everything else out. We are not told anything about Cleon's rise to power, or about his financial measures, or about his program in any proper sense. And characteristically, one of the three appearances is in the Mitylene debate, in which Cleon was outvoted in the assembly. Speeches, often in antithetical pairs, were Thucydides' favorite device, and his most problematical one. Despite his explicit statement about his method with respect to speeches, they have preplexed and upset commentators from antiquity to our own day. It is simply undeniable that all the speeches are in the same style, Thucydides' own, and that some of the remarks could not have been made by the speakers in question. Worse still, in the Mitylene debate, whether Cleon and Diodotus are accurately reported in substance or not, the whole tone is false. From what Thucydides himself said in introducing the two speeches, his choice of these two out of the many which were actually delivered that day in the assembly distorted the actual issues, and distorted them badly. Thucydides was surely not unaware of the effect he was creating—that would be too stupid—and therefore we have still another instance of how his interest in general ideas prevailed over mere reporting, and, in that sense, over historical accuracy. When it comes, finally, to the Melian Dialogue, … history goes by the boards altogether. For whatever reason, Thucydides chose that point in his story to write a little sophistical piece, thinly disguised as a secret discussion between two groups of unnamed negotiators, in which he played with abstract ideas of justice and empire, right and might, freedom and slavery.

In the end we are confronted with two different, and almost unrelated, kinds of writing brought together under one cover as Thucydides' "history" of the Peloponnesian War. On the one hand there is the pains-taking, precise, almost impersonal reporting, filled with minor details arranged in strict chronology. And on the other hand there are the many attempts, varied in form and tone, to get beneath and behind the facts, to uncover and bring into clear focus the realities of politics, the psychology of political behaviour, the rights and wrongs of power. These are, by and large, much the more interesting and enduring sections of the work, and the most personal (though rarely in the naive dress of outright editorializing). They are the most dramatic, in form more than in content; they are the freest, in their portrayal of a few men and events and their exclusion of many others, in their accent, and even, I may say, in their preaching. They represent the Thucydides who restricted Cleon to three appearances; the other is the historian who solemnly put down the names and patronymics of endless obscure commanders and ship captains.

None of this is said in criticism of Thucydides. Few historians have goaded and whipped themselves so mercilessly for the better part of a lifetime to achieve complete accuracy and at the same time to discover and communicate those truths which would give value to, which would justify, their effort. I do not believe Thucydides ever came to the point of being satisfied that he had found the answers, either to the great questions of political life or to the more philosophical one of moving from the concrete and particular event to the general truth. Increasingly, however, he seemed to feel himself impelled away from narrow historical presentation. The paradox is that to give meaning to history he tended to abandon history. If the historian, by definition, concentrates on the concrete event, then Thucydides, for all his advance over his predecessor in techniques of investigation and checking, was a poorer historian, or at least less a historian, than Herodotus. It is plain that he could have been a greater one—I do not speak of charm and elegance of style—but he chose otherwise. And his reasons, which I have indicated, were beyond reproach.

No Greek again undertook a task so difficult and unrewarding. The surviving histories after Thucydides number less than a dozen, but we know the names of nearly a thousand writers of history, of one sort or another, and all the evidence leaves no doubt that not one of them approached Thucydides in intellectual rigour or insight. At least five men in the middle or second half of the fourth century wrote continuations of Thucydides' history. One work survives, Xenophon's Hellenica, and it is very unreliable, tendentious, dishonest, dreary to read, and rarely illuminating on broader issues. Such talents as Xenophon had lay elsewhere.…

Probably some, and perhaps all four, of the continuators of Thucydides were better historians than Xenophon. That is to say, they were more accurate, more penetrating in their analysis of events, and more skilful in combining and relating movements in various parts of the Greek world. But no more. We have no reason to believe that they appreciated the real problems of historiography which Thucydides saw, or that they really understood what troubled Thucydides and drove him to re-examine his ideas and his methods over and over again. Nor did the so-called Atthidographers, the six men more or less contemporary with them who wrote—compiled, rather—lengthy chronicles of Athens, year by year, in which the mythological age received the same attention, on the same level and in the same tone, as the historical era proper. Thucydides saw in the study of contemporary history a road to understanding. Those who came after generally lowered their sights to far lesser goals: local patriotism, object lessons for politicians, elementary moralizing, and, above all, entertainment, high or low. The quality of their work, even at its best, was no better than their purposes deserved.

From Xenophon in the middle of the fourth century B.C. to Polybius two hundred years later, nothing survives. Our knowledge of these two centuries has suffered much as a result, but it is hardly conceivable that the art (or science) of history has lost anything of value. It is perhaps curious that the career of Alexander the Great failed to stimulate anything better than it did, memoirs written by several men closely associated with him and a large and constantly growing body of legend. But then, neither did Napoleon; his campaigns produced great novels, not great histories. After the fifth century Greek politics lacked the epic element which nourished Herodotus and Thucydides, and it was Rome which in the end provided the stimulus for the only Greek historian who was in any sense a worthy successor. Polybius also obeyed an impulse which was political, in his case stated much more explicitly. How did Rome succeed in conquering and dominating the world in so short a time? To answer that he produced a huge work, nothing less than a history of the "world," that is to say, of both Greek and Roman affairs, from the middle of the third century on.

Polybius was a good historian in many ways. If he was not of the calibre of Thucydides, I attribute that as much to his time as to his personal capacities. His expressed intentions and methods of work were sound, but his performance is often slovenly and inaccurate, his political analysis is very shallow, he is flagrantly partisan, and he repeatedly descends to the rhetorical tricks and sensationalism which he does not hesitate to censure severely in his predecessors. Nevertheless, he belongs to the great tradition of Greek historians because he, too, insisted that history must be instructive and that politics is its proper and serious subject, with the stress on the contemporary (it is noteworthy that his excuse for going back several generations is essentially aesthetic: every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end); and because, within his limitations, he felt the danger of submerging the central problems and issues in the mass of concrete events. He editorialized all the time, so that no reader could possibly miss his points, and he digressed at length in one pivotal book, the sixth, in which he described the Roman constitution, explained and exemplified the theory of the cycle of governmental forms, and, with understandable caution, suggested that Rome would not escape this inevitable movement. Once again history failed a Greek historian. In order to demonstrate the cycles, which, if they are anything, are a historical phenomenon, Polybius made not the slightest attempt to write history. Instead, he gave a purely speculative account, of a kind long familiar to Greek philosophers from whom he borrowed it, into which he worked a number of comparative illustrations, inadequate, inconsistent, and all floating in the air, without historical context or concreteness.

Historians continued to write in Greek for centuries after Polybius. A few of them are not without interest—Diodorus, who used scissors and paste to compose a universal history; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who, at the end of the first century B.C, wrote a voluminous Roman Antiquities; Arrian; and Dio Cassius—but they belong essentially to Roman history, and, for all their effort and their knowledge of the past, they did not advance the art of history one bit. Nothing new will be learned from them about this subject. Only Plutarch was genuinely creative and original, and his kind of biographical writing brushes history very lightly. His interests were ethical and psychological. His selection of events, his organization of the material he chose, and his assessments—in short, his portraits— often came out of history (but often, too, from myth). They are live, real, profound, moral; but they remain abstractions from the past, not the history of a period or a career, not even biographies, in the historian's sense. There is a simple test: one need only try to recreate either fourth-century Athenian politics or Demosthenes' role in it from Plutarch's life of Demosthenes.

The second half of the fifth century B.C., has been called the Greek age of enlightenment. The parallel is tempting, not least in the view of history: there are the same dissatisfaction with the prevailing mythical accounts of the past, the same insistence on a strictly rational explanation of events, the same feeling that a proper study of history could be illuminating. But the eighteenth-century enlightenment was followed, at once, by the emergence of modern historiography, with its technical refinements, its demand for absolute accuracy, its unflagging search for more and more evidence, its vast scale of investigation and interests. History became a discipline and its study a profession. Not so in ancient Greece. In biology, mathematics, and astronomy, in grammar and rhetoric, great work of systematic investigation and classification still lay ahead of the Greeks when the fifth century came to an end. Herodotus and Thucydides, however, led nowhere.

What came after them was less systematic, less accurate, less serious, less professional. The fathers of history produced a stunted, sickly stock, weaker in each successive generation apart from a rare sport like Polybius.

It is not easy to explain the different outcomes of the two enlightments; it is altogether impossible until we rid ourselves of the assumption that the study of history is a natural, inherent, inevitable kind of human activity. That few Greeks, if any, took this for granted is immediately apparent from the regularity with which most historians opened their works by justifying themselves, their efforts, and the particular subjects they chose. Utility or pleasure: that was how they customarily posed the alternative. Those who aimed at the latter were defeated before they began. Poetry was too deeply entrenched in Greek life, and, when the highest forms were epic and tragedy, both "historical," there was no chance for history unless it could demonstrate its value in other than aesthetic terms. How could Xenophon or Ephorus or Phylarchus compete with Homer, from whom every literate Greek learned his ABCs? Many tried, by rhetoric and sensationalism, by writing "tragic history" as Polybius contemptuously called it, and they failed on all scores: they still gave less pleasure than the poets and in the process their history became pseudo-history.

As for utility, somehow the essential intellectual and social conditions were lacking, at least in sufficient strength. One obstacle was the Greek passion for general principles. History, Aristotle said in a famous passage dismissing the subject, tells us only "what Alcibiades did and what he suffered." And any Greek who was serious enough to inquire about such matters wanted to know not what happened, but why, and by what fixed principles, in human affairs as in the phenomena of nature. Not even Thucydides could find the solution in his historical work, and surely none of his successors, all lesser men. Poetry and philosophy gave the answers, and they valued the immutable and universal qualities far more than the individual and transient. There was no idea of progress—here the parallel with the modern enlightenment and its aftermath breaks down completely—and therefore there was no reason to look to the past for a process of continuing growth. What one found instead was either a cyclical movement, an endless coming-to-be and passing-away; or a decline from a golden age. Either way the objective was to discover the great absolute truths and then to seek their realization in life, through education and legislation. History, as the nineteenth century with its geneticism and its fact-mindedness understood the study, was obviously not the answer to the needs which the Greeks felt for themselves.

The presence or absence of the idea of progress (on a significant scale) is not just an intellectual phenomenon. It is not merely a matter of someone's having thought the idea up, and then of its being widely accepted (or not) simply because it appealed to aesthetic sensibilities or emotions or logic. In the nineteenth century such an idea seemed self-evident: material progress was visible everywhere. In ancient Greece, after the emergence of the classical civilization of the fifth century, it was not visible at all. Everyone knew, of course, that there had been an earlier stage in Greek society and that non-Greeks, barbarians, lived quite differently, some of them (such as the Thracians or Scythians) being what we would call more "primitive." This rudimentary conception fell short of the modern idea of progress in at least two respects, each fundamental and critical. In the first place, whatever advances were conceded were chiefly moral and institutional rather than material. Second, the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., were unanimous (insofar as any people can ever be) in thinking that the city-state was the only correct political structure, in rejecting territorial expansion and growth in the size of the political organism as a road to social and moral improvement, and in ignoring completely the possibility of further technological and material progress (or the notion that this could have anything to do with the good life or a better life).

The differences which were observed were explained partly by differences in the quality of the men—as between Greeks and barbarians above all; and partly by differences in institutions. The former obviously invites no significant historical investigation. The latter might, but to them it rarely did, thanks to their idée fixe that current political institutions could be explained sufficiently by the genius of an original "lawgiver" and the subsequent moral behaviour of the community. That is why so much writing about Sparta gravitated around the largely legendary Lycurgus; or of Athens around Solon, who was a real person to be sure, but who by the middle of the fifth century B.C. had been mythicized beyond recognition. This kind of writing may, at its best as in Plutarch, have the air of history, but in fact it is not much more historical than the Iliad or the Odyssey or Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. And at its worst, it became a wild farrago about divine ancestors, their feuds, philanderings, and settlements. The great national rivalries of the nineteenth century stimulated serious historical study; the sharp Greek intercity competition led to little more than a continual re-historicizing of myth to meet the shifting requirements of prestige and power. The one sought to explain and justify current politics by historical development, the other by a foundation myth and ethical claims.

In the end, its intense political orientation, which was the great force behind the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, was the fatal flaw in Greek historical writing. Politicians have always created the history they needed, and Greek politicians were no exception. Those Greek thinkers who were able to raise themselves above the immediate needs of their particular cities turned to philosophy for wisdom. And after Alexander the Great, Greek politics became too parochial and paltry to stimulate serious political thought of any kind. Then men turned entirely to nonpolitical questions, or they turned to Rome and Roman political problems, or they remained within the small compass that was left in the Greek city-state, its cult and legends and ancient glories. Of all the lines of inquiry which the Greek initiated, history was the most abortive. The wonder is not so much that it was, as that, in its short and fruitless life, its two best exponents still stand with the greatest the world has seen.