(historia), which means research or investigation, suggesting‘history’in
the second of these two senses. This is the word that is translated as
‘research’in the Herodotus sentence quoted at the start. Hence, when
students come to university to study‘history’, they are in fact studying
history in both of these senses. They are studying the past; but, perhaps
more importantly, they are studying the means and methods used by
historians to investigate and understand that past.
When philosophers speak of the‘philosophy of history’, they are using a
term that is also ambiguous, corresponding to the two different meanings of
‘history’. First, one might have philosophical claims to make about
human history, the chain of events or process of human development over
time. Philosophers like Hegel and Marx, for example, have philosophical
accounts of how and why humans have developed in the way that they
have. This kind of philosophy of history is sometimes known as‘spec-
ulative philosophy of history’. Second, philosophers also have views about the
practises and methods of historians: perhaps about how best to study the
past, how (if at all) one can know what happened, how best to make argu-
ments based on the evidence. This kind of philosophy is sometimes known
as‘analytic philosophy of history’. It can also be called ‘philosophy of
historiography’, to make it clear that its subject matter is what historians do
(historiography–literally, the writing down of history) and to distinguish it
from (speculative) philosophy about the nature of past events and their con-
nection. In summary, then, the object for study for speculative philosophy of
history is the events themselves; the subject matter of analytic philosophy of
history is the work of historians–their methods, their books, and so on.
These two different notions of history suggest two slightly different
questions about the relation between the performance ofJulius Caesarand
the events that took place in Rome:
1 The eyewitness question: Would it have looked (and sounded) like
that? (History as events)
2 The history book question: How does my understanding of the event,
having seen the play, compare with my understanding of the event if
I were to read a history book? (History as discipline)
What may seem like a relativelyfine distinction turns out to be sig-
nificant. Thinking back toThe Persians: should we compare Aeschylus’play
with the Battle of Salamis itself, or (say) with Herodotus’historical account
of the Battle of Salamis?^44 Is the audience member best understood as an
eyewitness or as a history-book reader?
Let’s take the eyewitness questionfirst. We should begin by reminding
ourselves that plays are not really very good at looking like the events that
they depict (or looking like thefictional events that they depict would
History in the making 87