- Greek Historians
(By Oswyn Murray)The Origins of History
Many societies possess professional remembrancers, priests or officials, whose duty it is to record those
traditions thought necessary for the continuity of social values; many societies also possess priestly or
official records, designed to help regulate and placate the worlds of gods and men, but capable of being
converted by modern scholars into history. Yet the actual writing of history as a distinct cultural activity
seems in origin independent of these natural social attitudes, and is a rare phenomenon: it has in fact
developed independently only in three very different societies: Judaea, Greece, and China. The
characteristics of history in each case are distinct: history is not a science, but an art form serving the
needs of society and therefore conditioned by its origin.
The Greek tradition of history writing is our tradition, and we can best see its peculiarities by comparing
it with that other tradition which has so strongly influenced us, the Jewish historical writings preserved
in the Old Testament. Greeks and Jews came to history independently, but at roughly the same time and
in response to the same pressures, the need to establish and sustain a national identity in the face of the
vast empires of the Middle East: just as the struggles with Assyria, the exile in Babylon, and the return
to the promised land created Jewish historical writing, so the sense of national identity resulting from the
defeat of Persia created Greek historical writing. But the presuppositions and the materials with which
the two historical traditions -worked are very different. For the Jews history was the record of God's
covenant with His chosen people, its successes and disasters conditioned by their willingness to obey
His commands.
History was therefore a single story, belonging to God: the different elements and individual authors are
moulded (not always successfully) into a continuous account. Greek history, while it could recognize a
moral pattern in human affairs, regarded these affairs as in the control of man: history was the record,
not of the mercy or wrath of God, but of the great deeds of men. Among those deeds was the writing of
history itself: so a Greek historian is an individual who 'signs' his work in its first sentence - 'Herodotus
of Halicarnassus, his researches ...', 'Thucydides of Athens wrote the history of the war ...' The great
exception to this rule serves to confirm it: those who, like Xenophon, sought to continue the unfinished
work of Thucydides, chose not to reveal their identity: Xenophon begins his work, 'Some days later ...',
and nowhere mentions his own name, although he is far freer than Thucydides with opinions delivered
in the first person. We do not even know the name of the author of another (and better) continuation of
Thucydides, partly preserved on papyrus, the 'Oxyrhynchus historian' (so called from the village in
Egypt where the copy of his text was found). Later Christian generations in fact tried to transform this
individualistic group of historical writings into a tradition of the Old Testament type, and succeeded
through instinct or economy of effort in selecting a 'chain of histories', so that only one historical
account now survives for each period, and these accounts give a relatively continuous narrative history