worth retaining for investigation. The mass of inherited material in the historio-
graphical tradition could be sliced up in various ways, but one of the razors you
could bring to it was a chronological one. The chronological razor could also be
used to slice up different degreesof historicity, as we shall see; we are very seldom
talking about a single line of demarcation.
STRATIFYING TIME:
HOMER, HESIOD, ATHENS
The general idea of demarcations within past time, and of a gulf between the pres-
ent and a past time of gods and heroes, is well established from the very first Greek
texts. In their different but related ways, Homer and Hesiod each clearly have an
intuition of different time dimensions in the past, with different strata going back,
discontinuously, from the present. In Homer, Troy is unbridgeably distant in time,
accessible only to the inspired poet (Il.2.485 – 86). Homer’s attitude to the past is
grounded in a powerful feeling that the heroic action of the poems is taking place
long ago, at a time from which the current audience, oi|oi nu'n brotoiv eijsin, “such
as mortals are now,” is irrevocably cut off, a time to which the audience has access
only when the past is revivified in the poet ’s song.^3 A sense of an estrangement
from an earlier, different time is palpable even in the Iliaditself. Both of the oldest
characters on each side, Nestor and Priam, can remember an earlier age when con-
ditions were markedly different: Priam remembers fighting against Amazons
(3.188 – 89), while Nestor remembers fighting against Centaurs, beside men far
greater than any alive today (1.261 – 72).^4 Hesiod, too, works with a cognate con-
ception of layers of time, moving from a primeval past of cosmogonic time toward
the time of the Olympian gods, and then via the age of the heroes toward the pres-
ent of the contemporary audience.^5 These layered time schemes are closely paral-
lel to those underpinning the Akkadian “cycle” of narratives, from the cosmogo-
nic Enuma elisto the heroic Gilgamesh,and beyond.^6
The subject matter of Attic tragedy is likewise clearly localized in some other
time, one that can have tangible links with contemporary time through aetiology
in a way that Homer’s epoch can never have, but a time that nevertheless is
removed and discrete, a self-contained category.^7 Hall has shown how the mythi-
cization of the Persian Wars depends precisely on an understood dialectic between
the far distant past and the very recent past, or near present, in the three tragedies
that treated the Persian Wars (two by Phrynicus, one by Aeschylus).^8 Since her
book appeared we have had the great good fortune to have discovered the “New
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City