science and philosophy could be copied over verbatim for history. He highlights
the importance to the new scientific discourses of “the habit of scrutiny, and... the
expectation of justification — of giving an account — and the premium set on
rational methods of doing so”;^42 “the questions once posed, the answers given
were sometimes not just schematic, but contained... elements of pure bluff. Yet
while the Greeks’ confidence in the rightness of their methods often outran their
actual scientific performance... those methodological ideals not only permitted,
but positively promoted the further growth of the enquiry.”^43 Modern parallels
readily suggest themselves — psychoanalysis, most obviously. The following fea-
tures of Greek medical and scientific writings that Lloyd picks out as particularly
distinctive are also directly transferable to Herodotus and Thucydides and their
descendants: “the prominence of the authorial ego, the prizing of innovation both
theoretical and practical, the possibility of engaging in explicit criticism of earlier
authorities, even in the wholesale rejection (at times) of custom and tradition.”^44
The implications for Herodotus and Thucydides are obvious. What Herodotus
begins is a project of carving out a new kind of discourse about the past that has
powerful affinities in rhetorical method and authorial self-presentation with the
new kinds of discourse about medicine and nature. His new discourse will enable
him to compete not only with the body of inherited mythic story, but also, even
more importantly, with the other discourses that had already evolved to compete
with myth, above all the rationalizing and cataloguing of Hecataeus and the other
mythographers. A crucial part of this new project is the ability to stake out credi-
ble and authoritative knowledge claims; and a crucial part of that ability is the
claim — however arbitrarily grounded — to be able to demarcate what can be
known in this techne-and what cannot be known.^45
DIVIDING UP THE PAST
Where the time dimensions of the past are concerned, the issue of knowledge con-
tinues to carry a lot of weight in the later tradition. The chronographic tradition’s
most explicit surviving example of the historical stratification of time is predicated
on the degrees of knowledge that it is possible to reach concerning the different
strata of time. We return shortly to Censorinus’s important report of Varro’s divi-
sions of the past, but for now we may note that, even from the introduction to this
passage, it is clear that the divisions of time are fundamentally divisions of knowl-
edge: “If the origin of the world had come into humans’ range of knowledge,” says
Censorinus, explaining why his divisions do not go back farther than the mythical
Dividing Up the Past. 77