Ancient Historiography on War and Empire

By Timothy Howe and Richard Stoneman

In the ancient Greek-speaking world, writing about the past meant balancing the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of the present. Ancient Historiography on War and Empire shows the ways in which the literary genre of writing history developed to guide empires through their wars. Taking key events from the Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’, the 17 essays collected here analyse the way events and the accounts of those events interact.  Subjects include: how Greek historians assign nearly divine honours to the Persian King; the role of the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder in historical narratives of conquest and empire from Herodotus to the Alexander historians; warfare and financial innovation in the age of Philip II and his son, Alexander the Great; the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos; Alexander the Great’s combat use of eagle symbolism and divination; Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing as a commentary on political legitimacy and military prowess, and Roman Imperial historians using historical examples of good and bad rule to make meaningful challenges to current Roman authority. In some cases, the balance shifts more towards the ‘literary’ and in others more towards the ‘historical’, but what all of the essays have in common is both a critical attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world and its focus on war and empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785703003

Book preview

Foreword: Ancient historiography and ancient history

It is a tradition of sorts for introductory chapters in edited collections to begin by unpacking the title of the book. Here I have decided to do something different. I have deliberately avoided using the word ‘introduction’ in the title of this short paper because Mark Munn’s work more than serves to introduce and explain the title by showing the ways in which the literary genre of historiography developed to guide empires through their wars. Instead, I have chosen to use this space to frame the issues and identify the weave of ancient historiography and ancient history that our readers will find in the chapters that follow.

As the chapters in this book will show, ancient historiography balanced the reporting of facts with shaping and guiding the political interests and behaviours of its audience. Each author, in his day, responded to an ever evolving contemporary need to see the past in light of present circumstances. Over time, historians became ever more conscious of the fact that they wrote to show contemporaries what past events justified the present status of this or that place; what heroic or semi-divine lineage gave legitimacy to this or that noble family; and what actions led to a great men’s (and great empire’s) triumphs and tragedies. As Thucydides argues, historiographers created history to serve as an aid to judgement (ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν), so that contemporaries could develop the ability to make informed decisions regarding imminent events based on an authoritative understanding of the past (1.22.4; Munn, this volume). And this trend of using the past to shape and inform the present and future only increased over time – by the time of Alexander, the Diodochoi and the Roman Emperors, historical writing was capable of playing a significant role in the formation of reputations, and was therefore an integral part of the rhetorical currency of politics, even in a world now dominated by monarchs and autocrats. Thus, the various Histories provided salutary lessons on how to reckon the boundaries of empire and anticipate the effects of policies, and even on what might happen if one failed to recognize the great danger that lay in testing the boundaries of greatness. The underlying current that impelled all of this was war and its uncompromizing consequences. Certainly by the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, historiographers were actively and intimately involved in the historical process as they sought to shape current decisions by creating and curating history. And yet, because we moderns are not contemporary with these ancient authors, and are thus not their intended audiences, we can often miss important historiographic contexts. Hence, the need for both the historian and the literary critic. The challenge confronting modern scholars, then, is how to situate the historical context about which the Histories were written, but at the same time, attend to clues that link texts to contemporary concerns.

This book, which began as a 2013 conference in Athens focused on Greek language historiography and history, attempts to root out those historical contexts and clues. The essays offered here take Greek historiography and ground it in specific cultural settings, all the while emphasizing the importance of literary and cultural context. The book, then, is about both ancient Mediterranean historiography AND history (hence the title of this ‘Foreward’). These papers sift through historical literature from the Achaemenid, Athenian, Macedonian and Roman ‘empires’ to tease out context, identify elements of cultural meaning, and deconstruct traditional literary topoi and later interpolation in order to gnaw at the historical kernels underlying them and thereby make sense of the way events and the accounts of those events interact. In some cases, the balance shifts more towards the ‘literary’ and in others more towards the ‘historical’, but what all of the essays have in common is an attention to the genre and context of history-writing in the ancient world. The book has been divided into five parts: an Introduction, where Mark Munn asks the question ‘Why History?’; a section on Achaemenid Persia and Classical Greece; a section on Macedon; a section on Alexander and the Diadochoi; and a final section on Second Sophistic Rome. These categories were chosen less out of a desire to create some sort of geographic coverage than as an attempt to follow the evidence and focus of extant Greek language historiography.¹ Thus, Darius, Philip II and Alexander figure prominently; so too do war, politics and the nature of empire itself.

‘Achaemenid Persia and Greece’ begins with Eran Almagor’s source-rich essay on the textual relationships between the Achaemenid king and personal divinity. Here, Almagor analyzes both Persian royal inscriptions and Greek historiography to explain how and why Greek authors came to assign the Great King seemingly divine honours that he himself never explicitly claimed. Next, Josef Wiesehöfer’s paper probes a similar dynamic – the interplay between Greek historiography and Persian traditions relating to the tomb cult of Cyrus the Founder, in order to identify the role sacrificial rites performed at the Tomb played in historical narratives from Achaemenid times down through the Age of Alexander. Continuing the theme of traditions, historiography and royal (self-) presentation, Frances Pownall investigates the received characterizations of Philistus as ‘the most tyrant-loving’ of all historians. By investigating Philistus’ role in the factional politics at the court of the Dionysii in Syracuse, her study offers insight into both an ancient historian’s political influence and the consequences thereof.

‘Macedon’ opens with William Greenwalt’s study of the poorly-understood Alexander II. Here, Greenwalt considers the presentation of Macedonian royal power. Of particular interest are the ways in which discussions of royal military authority are centred round Philip II and his son, Alexander III, thus overshadowing earlier rulers such as Philip’s older brother Alexander II. In the next essay, Waldemar Heckel, Sabine Müller and I examine the historiographic context surrounding the murders of Philip II, his last and seventh wife, Kleopatra, and her guardian, Attalos. By taking these murders in tandem, as the ancient historiographers do, rather than treating them piecemeal, as individual murder-mysteries, we underscore the importance of context and, in so doing, offer a different way of seeing. Franca Landucci Gattinoni closes the theme of Macedonian royal power by analysing the political elements embedded in Macedonian funeral ceremonies and the cult of the dead – especially those sponsored by Cassander, son of Antipater in 317 BCE – as reported in the historiography of Diodorus and now seen among archaeological remains of the Great Tumulus at Vergina.

Maxim Kholod initiates discussion of Alexander the Great’s empire by investigating the Macedonian financial administration of Asia Minor. As Kholod demonstrates, the words σύνταξις and φόρος had a long life before the time of Alexander, in both the Achaemenid and Athenian empires, and this historiographic complexity makes for an interesting, often intertextual, study about taxes and their collection in Alexander’s empire. Next, Hugh Bowden considers eagle symbolism as a vehicle for understanding how stories of mantic activity facilitated the didactic, ideological and narrative purposes of the Alexander historians. As with taxation, prophesy had a rich life in Greek literature and culture before the Macedonian conqueror, and Bowden offers a richly learned study of how prognostication might function for both Alexander and Alexander historians. Jacek Rzepka continues the themes of narrative and intertextuality by examining casualty figures among the Alexander historiographers. His observations about the first-generation authors’ level of access to official or contemporary casualty reports do much to deepen our understanding of the ways in which historiographers might employ and contextualise battle statistics. The next essay offers a change in focus: Olga Palagia takes the conversation in a profitable new direction by investigating the artistic evidence concerning the military actions of Alexander against Darius. Her study thus illustrates how artists, in much the same way as writers of ‘histories’, deployed symbols (in this case a ‘visual historiography’ of artistic symbols) to report and curate Alexander’s deeds for posterity. With the next paper, we move in another direction entirely, to the worlds that Alexander’s empire opened to Greek intellectual discourse. Here, Richard Stoneman explores ‘fantastic’ India, and what Greek historiography might ‘know’ about the real India, by asking ‘Where did Aelian derive his story of the Indian hoopoe?’ For Stoneman, the hoopoe is a way to understand the historiographical aims of Megasthenes, a man ‘who loved to wander and talk to educated Indians’. In the last essay of this section, Aleksandra Klęczar returns to the subject of Alexander to consider Hellenistic Jewish culture’s adoption of the great man’s mythos. In her essay, she uses the literary ‘Alexander’ as a case study for how historical characters were appropriated and historiographically reinvented and reinterpreted by Jewish intellectuals to assist Jewish culture as it navigated the dangerous world of the Seleukid and Ptolemaic empires.

The last part of the book explores the final great movement of ancient Greek historiography, the so-called Second Sophistic. The section opens with a paper by Rebecca Frank, who analyses Plutarch’s juxtaposition of character in the Alexander-Caesar pairing to show how Plutarch crafted his Alexander in such a way that it could offer commentary on the political legitimacy of Julius Caesar (and perhaps all Caesars to come). Continuing the theme of royal legitimacy and improper use of power, Elias Koulakiotis reflects on images of royal character and charisma in Plutarch’s Alexander. Here, he uses Plutarch’s portrayal of Alexander and Dionysus to illustrate Plutarch’s own thoughts on the metaphysics of power and monarchic ideology. These metaphysics of power also interest Sabine Müller, who traces the development of the ‘artistic king’ topos across time. In her view, Second Sophistic authors played with traditional conceptions of appropriate and inappropriate ways to enjoy the arts so that their audiences might better understand their own Imperial Rome. By linking inappropriate enjoyment of the arts with historical examples of tyranny, these authors both deflected criticism from contemporary rulers and gave their audiences much food for thought regarding proper uses of leisure time. The final essay of the collection, by Sulochana Asirvatham, continues to follow royal power and its criticism. By analyzing royal flattery in Plutarch, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Arrian and Herodian, Asirvatham identifies the ways in which Second Sophistic authors used historiography to uphold their status as Greek intellectuals (πεπαιδευμένοι) within a Roman power structure that simultaneously supported and subordinated them. Here, Asirvatham demonstrates that for the authors of the Second Sophistic the only meaningful challenges to Roman authority were those that happened in the realm of intellectual discourse, and so, like the other periods under discussion, where powerful rulers controlled politics, the lessons of the past were used to teach both rulers and ruled how to behave.

In the end, Asirvatham’s analysis of historiography’s participation in conversations about status draws together many of the strands of the book and reiterates Munn’s seminal point that ancient historiographers aimed to shape history and not simply to report it. All here agree that Greek writers used historical data to create not just an interpretation of the past for their audiences but also to establish and curate their own authorial personae. Consequently, a common theme that runs through these studies is that readers analyze and interpret historical content and literary context in parallel, as the authors originally intended, and not read historiography simply as reports of ‘what happened’.

At this point, it is necessary to say a word about editorial choices. Richard, Sabine and I decided to include bibliographies with each chapter, rather than synthesize them into a common list at the end. While this did allow for a (small) amount of duplication, we felt this was outweighed by the fact that each chapter could stand as a complete article, with the references close to hand. Following this theme, we also chose not to impose a ‘house’ style for Latinizing (or not) ancient names, and so there is some variation throughout. While these variations have resulted in a lighter editorial footprint than some might have wished, we hope that readers will, in general, approve.

Timothy Howe

Northfield, Minnesota

January 2016

¹ All of the historiographic works analysed here are in the Greek language, with the notable exceptions being the Alexander histories of Quintus Curtius Rufus and Justin-Trogus.

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1

Why history? On the emergence of historical writing

Mark Munn

One of Arnaldo Momigliano’s reflections on the nature of historiography focuses on the centrality of war, its origins, course, and outcome as a dominant theme of Greek and later historical writings. The legacy of Herodotus to European historiography, Momigliano states, was the organization of a ‘vast enquiry about a war and its causes’. And Thucydides, he goes on, ‘contributed more than anybody else to making it an essential ingredient of European thought’ (Momigliano 1966, 116). In pursuit of an answer to the question posed by this essay – why history? – I want to underscore Momigliano’s observation, and reformulate it as a point of departure: war was the impetus for Greek historical writing, and it was the genius of Herodotus and Thucydides that made it so. Whatever influences may have come to them from antecedent prose writers, such as Hecataeus, Pherecydes, and Acusilaus, or from intellectual contemporaries among the sophists or the Hippocratic writers, none of them set war at the centre of their intellectual endeavour as Herodotus and Thucydides did. And however else Greek historiography developed after Herodotus and Thucydides, the theme of war, and the makers of war, remained central to the genre.¹

But it is not enough to observe that war motivated the writing of history. As Momigliano and many others have remarked, war motivated Homer, and was likewise the impetus for much of lyric, elegiac, and tragic poetry. So while there can be no doubt that the example of Homer’s opening of the Iliad influenced the setting of war as a theme for Herodotus and Thucydides, there remains the question, why did they treat this theme in such a radically new manner? Why them? Why then?

The particular war in the midst of which both Herodotus and Thucydides were writing provides a significant indicator of the circumstances that prompted history. This was the Peloponnesian war, during which both Herodotus and Thucydides composed their histories (Herodotus to complete his work, by my estimation, in the mid-410s and Thucydides in the mid-390s).² Something about the intellectual atmosphere and more particularly, I will argue, the political culture specifically of Athens during the last third of the fifth century BCE prompted these new and different literary treatments of war, which, once they found a reception, inspired replication and continuation in variegated forms ever afterward.

So far, I trust, these premises are unobjectionable (though some may take issue with my certainty about the dating of their productions): the works of the first historians were products of the times in which they wrote, and war, and the social and political deformations caused by war, were strong, sometimes overwhelming features of those times. Some may be content to consider the question, why history, sufficiently answered at this point: it was one manifestation of an era of intellectual ferment that produced many singular and more-or-less enduring examinations of the nature of human existence (look to the sophists, and to the birth of rhetoric; look to Euripides and the transformation of tragedy, or the biting wit of old comedy; look to the medical writers; look to the emergence of political philosophy among the Socratics and their contemporaries).³ This I would characterize as the wide-angle, soft-focus answer to the question. Within this wide focus, examination of the relationships between the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides and contemporary prose and poetry reveals themes and shared modes of thought that were au courant. But none of this explains the singularity of historical writing. To get at the particular impetus for historical writing we need to sharpen the focus, and at the same time recognize that our perspective on the cultural and intellectual context of the late fifth century has been heavily filtered by posterity. The fact that Protagoras, Democritus, Gorgias, and others among the sophists come to us only in fragments, often as quoted or paraphrased by their detractors, is warning enough that our view of the era in which Herodotus and Thucydides wrote is highly selective. There are elements of that era that we only dimly perceive, as it were, in our peripheral vision, but which stood much more sharply defined and present in the view of their contemporaries. My endeavour here is to bring into focus the particular context in which, and against which (because their works are hortatory and protreptic), Herodotus and Thucydides wrote. This entails, to extend the optical imagery, the enhancement of certain features of their works that responded to elements of their contemporary environment, recognizing those elements as attested outside of their works, and suggesting how those elements may have motivated the effort to produce an exhaustive argumentation about cause, event, and outcome that became historical narrative, what we often call historiography.

The context

We must begin by asking: before what audience did Herodotus and Thucydides expect their works to win recognition? Against what predecessors or contemporaries might Herodotus or Thucydides have expected their writing to be judged? Both give indications and offer occasional explicit statements of how they expected their authority to be judged in comparison to others, and we must follow these indications closely if we are to arrive at an answer to the central question of this essay: how did Greek historical writing begin?

The first and broadest category of competing authority against which Herodotus and Thucydides wrote was popular opinion, notably, popular opinion at Athens. Both authors reveal this concern, though it is most evident in several of Thucydides’ few comments in his authorial voice. At 1.20.2 he observes that:

People are inclined to accept and pass along all stories of past events in an uncritical way – even when these stories concern their own native countries. Most people at Athens, for instance, are under the impression that Hipparchus, who was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, was tyrant at the time, not realizing that it was Hippias who was the eldest and the chief of the sons of Peisistratus …⁴

οἱ γὰρ ἄνθρωποι τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, καὶ ἢν ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν ᾖ, ὁμοίως ἀβασανίστως παρ’ ἀλλήλων δέχονται. Ἀθηναίων γοῦν τὸ πλῆθος Ἵππαρχον οἴονται ὑφ’ Ἁρμοδίου καὶ Ἀριστογείτονος τύραννον ὄντα ἀποθανεῖν, καὶ οὐκ ἴσασιν ὅτι Ἱππίας μὲν πρεσβύτατος ὢν ἦρχε τῶν Πεισιστράτου υἱέων …

Thucydides goes on to illustrate the sort of errant beliefs that ‘the rest of the Hellenes’ are wont to hold, but it is clear that he is most determined to contradict Athenian popular opinion on the matter of the liberation from tyranny, as he famously returns to the subject for a lengthy digression in book six (6.53–59). Whether he has the Athenian masses or Greeks in general in mind, he is stridently dismissive of the habits of ‘most people’ (οἱ πολλοί) who ‘take no trouble to ascertain the truth but rather accept what they are fed’ (οὕτως ἀταλαίπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται). According to Thucydides, these pleasant but unwholesome confections are served up by poets and by λογογράφοι, the latter of whom compose works more designed for persuasion than truth (1.21.1). These logographers I am convinced are speech writers, the rhetoricians whose main stage in Thucydides’ day was Athens.⁵ Thucydides’ language and tone in this passage is redolent with the dismissive tone with which he several times refers to the ignorance⁶ or to the emotional or fickle judgment of the majority of Athenians.⁷ By contrast with the erratic δῆμος, Thucydides praises the ability of the singularly capable leader to guide the Athenians: Themistocles (1.138.3), most famously Pericles (2.65.8–9), and also, in due measure, Alcibiades (8.86.5).⁸ Thucydides wrote to impart the lessons of history to those few who could take the time to appreciate his efforts; such men, as past examples had shown, could prevail upon the Athenian crowd to guide them wisely through the straits of war.

Herodotus too, wrote to benefit the patient listener, formulating judgments through a tactful display of reason and evidence, but occasionally speaking in a more assertive tone to correct a popular folly that he perceived. The strongest such assertions address or concern the Athenians. Like Thucydides, Herodotus is at pains to correct the common misperception among Athenians that they were liberated from tyranny by Harmodius and Aristogeiton (6.123.2). Herodotus makes this point most forcefully in the context of a long digression to correct another Athenian folly, the slanderous rumour that the Alcmaeonidae were willing to betray Athens to the Persians (6.121–31). On the one hand Herodotus features the wisdom of Solon, lawgiver to the Athenians (1.29–33), but to the Athenians themselves he gives mixed praise for their collective cleverness (1.60.3) and derides their surprising gullibility (5.97.2). Often enough, Herodotus criticizes and corrects what ‘Hellenes’ say about foreign lands and customs,⁹ and he often enough presents competing and conflicting accounts attributed to different Greek states, yet he nowhere asserts his own opinion in the face of contrary views about the affairs of a particular Greek state as forcefully as he does in the case of Athens (7.139). Quite apart from the prominence of Athens and the Athenians in the course of events covered in his narrative, these digressions and asides indicate that Herodotus was particularly concerned with popular opinion at Athens, about Athens, and about certain Athenians.

Popular opinion at Athens was the currency of political power, as modulated over the last third of the fifth century by Pericles and after him, as Thucydides notes, by orators of less integrity and ability than Pericles, trying by every means to sway and gratify the masses (2.65.10–12). This, the radical democracy of imperial Athens at the height of its struggle for supremacy and survival, provided the conditions necessary for the birth of historical writing. Controlling public perceptions was the key to political power in the state which, as Thucydides says, was at the very peak of power as it went to war with the Spartans and their allies (1.18.3–19). I argue here that the stakes were sufficiently high in this political arena, when Herodotus wrote during the war, and again, when Thucydides wrote on the eve of the Corinthian war, to justify the labours these authors devoted to countering and modulating public perceptions of the past. It may seem a bit far-fetched to imagine that an accurate understanding of the role of Harmodius and Aristogeiton in the liberation of the Athenians from tyranny (to take a concern of significance to both authors) was a politically potent issue at the end of the fifth or beginning of the fourth century, but that is what I am arguing. To make this argument more plausible we must now turn to another question: what authorities over the past did Herodotus and Thucydides have to contend with at a time when the writing of history itself was in its infancy?

Other interpreters of the past

Both Herodotus and Thucydides name predecessors whose account of one or another facet of the Athenian past they choose to weigh in on, and thereby to supersede. Herodotus names Hecataeus as a source for one version of a story, a version unflattering to the Athenians, of how the Pelasgians came to be expelled from Attica to Lemnos, and he contrasts Hecataeus’ version with what ‘the Athenians themselves say’ (ὡς δὲ αὐτοὶ Ἀθηναῖοι λέγουσι) to justify this act of their distant past. This episode is an example of Herodotus showing himself to be an impartial reporter of the testimonies available to him. The testimony of Hecataeus is not to be ignored, evidently, although, as Herodotus relates the two versions, the Athenians have the last say, and Herodotus goes on in his own account to condemn the Pelasgians for their later vile ‘Lemnian deeds’. The impression, in the end, is that whichever version of the origin of their mutual hostility might be true, the Pelasgians deserved the fate that eventually befell them – their island was conquered by the Athenians led by Miltiades, in fulfillment of a Delphic oracle as it happens (6.137–40).

Thucydides refers, without naming them, to predecessors who had written about Hellenic affairs before the Persian wars or about the Persian wars themselves (referring, in the last instance, presumably to Herodotus in particular). He goes on to name Hellanicus, the author of an Ἀττικὴ Συγγραφή, as (presumable the only) one who had written on events after the Persian wars, in an account that was comparatively brief and chronologically inaccurate, justifying his own retelling of Hellenic affairs after the Persian wars down to the Peloponnesian war (1.97.2).¹⁰ As with Herodotus, then, Thucydides wrote for an audience that would know of such συγγραφαί (prose compositions) about their past as existed, and it was important for him to establish his own authority in relation to them. A little later in his work, Thucydides adopts a polemic tone against unnamed authorities when he reports Athenian relations with the Thracian king, Sitalces son of Teres. After noting the great extent of the Odrysian kingdom established by Sitalces’ father, Thucydides remarks: ‘This Teres is in no way related to the Tereus who married Procne, the daughter of Pandion, from Athens; nor did they come from the same part of Thrace …’ (Τηρεῖ δὲ τῷ Πρόκνην τὴν Πανδίονος ἀπ’ Ἀθηνῶν σχόντι γυναῖκα προσήκει ὁ Τήρης οὗτος οὐδέν, οὐδὲ τῆς αὐτῆς Θρᾴκης ἐγένοντο …) and goes on to devote the equivalent of nine lines of Oxford text to explaining why the supposed relation of Teres to Tereus is implausible.¹¹ The marriage of Procne and Tereus, a subject depicted in tragedy, comedy, and even sculptural art in Thucydides’ day, lay in the realm of legend, and Thucydides gives no explicit reason for this aside.¹² Why would Thucydides in his narrative voice, and not Nymphodorus or any other participant in the events he describes, draw attention to the putative kinship of Teres and Tereus just to refute it? Was this a suitable occasion to display once again, as he did in the opening chapters of book one, his astute handling of a fiction propagated by poets (or possible by Hellanicus)? This seems too extraneous to the narrative at this point to be believable, yet we must grant Thucydides the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had an unspoken justification for pointing this out to his readers. I suspect that here Thucydides is implicitly doing battle with other interpreters of the past whose opinions actually carried weight in the policy debate over the relationship between Athens and Sitalces at the time, and most likely also with Hellanicus’ successors years later when Thucydides was writing.¹³

Speechwriters, the λογογράφοι he derides in 1.21.1, were the sort of competition that would be inclined to perpetuate beliefs about the legendary past that were ‘more concerned with persuading the listener than with the truth’, and whose material in any event had become enshrined in myth and was beyond the reach of fact-checkers. When it came to asserting the significance of arcane events of the distant or even recent past, speechwriters, or orators in general, could invoke experts in another class of evidence that regularly influenced public opinion in the context of deliberative or forensic debates. We glimpse the invocation of such expertise occasionally in Thucydides, much more prominently in Herodotus, and we find it in other contemporary sources, including public decrees, tragedy, comedy, and rhetoric. This was the expertise of seers and prophets, the interpreters of oracles and omens, and also their bookish kin, the collectors of oracles, the χρησμολόγοι. A signal testament to the weight of such evidence comes from one of the most influential speechwriters of his day, Antiphon, in his speech, On the Murder of Herodes (5.81):

You have now heard all that the evidence and testimony of human affairs can provide; but you must cast your votes no less mindful of the signs that the gods provide in such matters. For you trust especially in them when you see to the safe conduct of affairs of state, whether it be in times of crisis or not.

Ὅσα μὲν οὖν ἐκ τῶν ἀνθρωπίνων τεκμηρίων καὶ μαρτυριῶν οἷά τε ἦν ἀποδειχθῆναι, ἀκηκόατε· χρὴ δὲ καὶ τοῖς ἀπὸ τῶν θεῶν σημείοις εἰς τὰ τοιαῦτα οὐχ ἥκιστα τεκμηραμένους ψηφίζεσθαι. Καὶ γὰρ τὰ τῆς πόλεως κοινὰ τούτοις μάλιστα πιστεύοντες ἀσφαλῶς διαπράσσεσθε, τοῦτο μὲν τὰ εἰς τοὺς κινδύνους ἥκοντα, τοῦτο δὲ [εἰς] τὰ ἔξω τῶν κινδύνων.

Virtually all public matters of any consequence were conducted under the auspices of the gods by the formalities of prayer and invocation. The more serious and controversial the matters were, the more likely that divine guidance would be actively consulted, and that μάντεις, θεοπρόποι, or χρησμολόγοι would be called upon to testify.¹⁴ Thucydides relates the consultation of oracles by various parties on at least twenty-two different occasions, at least seven of them by the Athenians in the course of the war.¹⁵ Ominous natural events, like earthquakes, eclipses, and volcanic eruptions were also taken as divine signs that influenced political and military decision-making. Thucydides reports at least thirteen such occurrences, noting at least six that influenced public decisions.¹⁶ Just as significant, Thucydides draws attention to the occurrence of such phenomena on four occasions without mentioning any associated public reaction. In his estimation, and that of his readers, the occurrence of these events in the course of the war was as noteworthy as the launch of a military expedition or a political coup. Thucydides admits their significance to his subject at the beginning of his work when he notes that the course of the war saw widespread earthquakes, frequent eclipses, droughts, famine, and plague, all to such an extent that ‘old stories of past prodigies which had not found confirmation in recent occurrences now became credible’ (τά τε πρότερον ἀκοῇ μὲν λεγόμενα, ἔργῳ δὲ σπανιώτερον βεβαιούμενα οὐκ ἄπιστα κατέστη).¹⁷

Herodotus wrote at the very time Thucydides speaks of, when plagues, earthquakes, and eclipses were adding to the anxieties of war. It is no accident that we have no better place to look for examples of omens and oracles consulted or fulfilled in the course of historical events than Herodotus’ Histories.¹⁸ We should avoid, however, the tendency to view this as an archaizing feature of Herodotus’ style. The recording and interpreting of omens and oracles was serious business, deadly serious, in the affairs of state and the conduct of war in his day. This is illustrated most graphically in Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian expedition, when he mentions how influential χρησμολόγοι and μάντεις were in persuading the Athenians to undertake the expedition (8.1.1), and how the omen of a lunar eclipse ultimately persuaded the Athenians at Syracuse to delay their withdrawal, with fatal consequences (7.50.4).¹⁹ Thucydides draws attention to the susceptibility of their commander, Nicias, to divination on this occasion,²⁰ but he also says that the majority of Athenians, alarmed by this omen, urged postponement of their plans. Herodotus, who was writing in the lifetime of Nicias, was clearly among those who would not doubt that the Athenian commanders had to somehow take account of the eclipse in the execution of their duties. There was no boundary, no spatium historicum, separating the divine role in cause and effect of the Persian war era from that of the Peloponnesian war. Herodotus makes this explicit when he asserts that dramatic events of his own day were foreshadowed by ominous events of the Persian war era, evidently striking a tone that would resonate with his audience.²¹

The most contentious yet also politically influential form of prognostication in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ day came from the selection and recitation of prophetic verses by χρησμολόγοι, whose authority derived from the reputed source of the oracles in their collections and from their ability to suggest significant relationships between those ancient verses and contemporary events. Both Herodotus and Thucydides attest to the validity of such prophetic utterances while also revealing how controversial they were, and how their meanings might be realized in unexpected ways. Thucydides illustrates this in his accounts of the debates among the Athenians over the Delphic verse that enjoined the Athenians to leave the Pelargic land alone (2.17.1–2), the ancient warning that plague or famine would accompany a ‘Doric war’ (2.54.2–3), and the prophecy that the war would last thrice nine years (5.26.3–4). Herodotus, in describing the events leading to the battle of Salamis, interjects verses of Bacis that portended what was about to happen, saying: ‘I cannot deny that there is truth in prophecies … When the prophecy of Bacis speaks so clearly, I do not dare doubt it, nor do I admit doubt from others’ (Χρησμοῖσι δὲ οὐκ ἔχω ἀντιλέγειν ὡς οὐκ εἰσὶ ἀληθέες … [Ἐς] τοιαῦτα μὲν καὶ οὕτω ἐναργέως λέγοντι Βάκιδι ἀντιλογίας χρησμῶν πέρι οὔτε αὐτὸς λέγειν τολμέω οὔτε παρ’ ἄλλων ἐνδέκομαι).²² Following the action, he returns to the subject of how prophecies uttered in times past had now come true:

And so in this way the fulfillment came about that not only of the prophecies of Bacis and Musaeus about this battle as well as the wreckage washed ashore, but also of another prophecy which had been uttered many years previously by an Athenian χρησμολόγος named Lysistratus, the meaning of which had escaped all the Hellenes; the words of this one were: ‘The Colian women shall cook their food with oars.’²³

ὥστε ἀποπεπλῆσθαι τὸν χρησμὸν τόν τε ἄλλον πάντα τὸν περὶ τῆς ναυμαχίης ταύτης εἰρημένον Βάκιδι καὶ Μουσαίῳ καὶ δὴ καὶ κατὰ τὰ ναυήγια τὰ ταύτῃ ἐξενειχθέντα τὸ εἰρημένον πολλοῖσι ἔτεσι πρότερον τούτων ἐν χρησμῷ Λυσιστράτῳ Ἀθηναίῳ ἀνδρὶ χρησμολόγῳ, τὸ ἐλελήθεε πάντας τοὺς Ἕλληνας· ‘Κωλιάδες δὲ γυναῖκες ἐρετμοῖσι φρύξουσι.’

A little later, in describing the preliminaries to the battle of Plataea, Herodotus recounts the attention paid to oracles by the Persian commander, Mardonius, who displayed his familiarity with Greek oracles to his Greek commanders, in an effort to secure their confidence in his leadership. But he was mistaken, Herodotus says:

I happen to know that the oracle, which Mardonius applied to the Persians, actually referred to the Illyrians and the army of the Encheles; there are, however, some verses of Bacis which did, in fact, refer to this battle … [He quotes them.] These oracles, and other similar ones of Musaeus, I know referred to the Persians.²⁴

Τοῦτον δ’ ἔγωγε τὸν χρησμόν, τὸν Μαρδόνιος εἶπε ἐς Πέρσας ἔχειν, ἐς Ἰλλυριούς τε καὶ τὸν Ἐγχελέων στρατὸν οἶδα πεποιημένον, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐς Πέρσας. Ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν Βάκιδι ἐς ταύτην τὴν μάχην ἐστὶ πεποιημένα … ταῦτα μὲν καὶ παραπλήσια τούτοισι ἄλλα Μουσαίου ἔχοντα οἶδα ἐς Πέρσας.

Herodotus speaks in this passage almost as a χρησμολόγος himself. And this, in essence, is what I believe prompted him to write: Herodotus’ Histories were composed to present the most comprehensive understanding of the true import of omens, portents, and oracles for a people, the Athenian δῆμος, deliberating over war and the nature of empire. The χρησμολόγοι who expounded before the Athenian δῆμος were evoking the past as a guide to the future. Herodotus was providing as clear a view of the past as possible, with ample accounts of how omens and oracles of the past were actually realized, as a check on any fanciful accounts of the past or overly confident predictions about the future that might be propagated by speakers who, as Thucydides complained, liked to speak with more care to persuade their listeners than for the truth.

Councilors, statesmen, and oracle mongers were close companions on the speakers’ platform at Athens, playing roles that were often enough filled by one and the same person.²⁵ Aristophanes repeatedly bears witness to the prominence of oracles and their interpreters in public debate by his parodies of their pomposity. In his Knights, the two contenders for the affection of Demos, the gutter-bred Sausage-Seller and the blustering Paphlagonian/Cleon, compete in a duel of oracles²⁶; in both the Peace and in the Birds, just as the protagonist is achieving his goal, a χρησμολόγος intrudes and attempts to assert his authority over the proceedings.²⁷ Like famous politicians, some of these oracle mongers are named individuals: Diopeithes, Lampon, and Hierocles, whose reputations are known and attested elsewhere, including as speakers in surviving Athenian decrees.²⁸

We can tell by the fun that Aristophanes makes of these men that their authority in public affairs was considerable. The course of events over the generation of the Peloponnesian War brought them frequently before the assembled Athenians, and frequently enough the course of events revealed their expertise to be fallible. The gap between authority and reliability that opened under the feet of these men into a yawning chasm, reverberating with the tearful laughter of Aristophanes’ audiences, is precisely the gap, I believe, that Herodotus sought to bridge. Without offending the gods or demeaning the value of their utterances, he revealed the fallible human link in the chain of understanding represented by those who remembered and recounted the lore of the past, and he propounded a new standard for judging the knowable past, and therefore more accurately recognizing the links (asserted links that is, since these are always open to interpretation) between cause and effect.

Is this a plausible account of the motive for Herodotus’ Histories? What about his ethnographies of distant lands and all of their arcane details? What do they have to do with interpreting oracles in a political assembly? I would answer this by saying that the scope of Herodotus’ work, which describes the rise and fall of empires, and which embeds within that account a description of the human and natural diversity that these empires embrace, matches the scope of oracular utterance, which from a god’s point of view embraces all the earth, and all the effects of human intentions worked out on the earth. Athenian ambitions, judging from Thucydides’ account, and by Aristophanes’ parodies, matched that scope.

So Thucydides remembers the words of Pericles: ‘The magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbor, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own’ (ἐπεσέρχεται δὲ διὰ μέγεθος τῆς πόλεως ἐκ πάσης γῆς τὰ πάντα, καὶ ξυμβαίνει ἡμῖν μηδὲν οἰκειοτέρᾳ τῇ ἀπολαύσει τὰ αὐτοῦ ἀγαθὰ γιγνόμενα καρποῦσθαι ἢ καὶ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων) (2.38.2); and again:

You perhaps think that your empire extends only over your allies; I will declare to you the truth. The visible field of action has two parts, land and sea. In the whole of one of these you are completely supreme, not merely as far as you use it at present, but also to what further extent you may think fit: in fine, your naval resources are such that your vessels may go where they please, without the King or any other nation on earth being able to stop them.²⁹

οἴεσθε μὲν γὰρ τῶν ξυμμάχων μόνων ἄρχειν, ἐγὼ δὲ ἀποφαίνω δύο μερῶν τῶν ἐς χρῆσιν φανερῶν, γῆς καὶ θαλάσσης, τοῦ ἑτέρου ὑμᾶς παντὸς κυριωτάτους ὄντας, ἐφ’ ὅσον τε νῦν νέμεσθε καὶ ἢν ἐπὶ πλέον βουληθῆτε· καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ὅστις τῇ ὑπαρχούσῃ παρασκευῇ τοῦ ναυτικοῦ πλέοντας ὑμᾶς οὔτε βασιλεὺς οὔτε ἄλλο οὐδὲν ἔθνος τῶν ἐν τῷ παρόντι κωλύσει.

Aristophanes parodies the vision of world dominion on several occasions; in his Knights (168–78) he has Demosthenes tell the lowly Sausage-Seller to cast his eyes to the right, to Caria, and to the left, to Carthage, and tells him that the oracle affirms that all that he sees will be his. A similar passage in the Wasps (700–02, 707–11) has Bdelycleon show Philocleon how politicians promise that he will be lord not just of the islands, but all cities from the Black Sea to Sardinia. The Birds (175–86) takes this sort of fancy to its absurd extreme, and has the protagonist declare his ambition to rule all domains on earth and heaven. Here again, Aristophanes was providing a comic exaggeration of an Athenian mindset that was not far behind his parodies. Referring to events in 424, the year in which Aristophanes’ Knights was produced, Thucydides describes the attitude manifest in Athenian deliberative assemblies at the time:

So thoroughly had the present prosperity persuaded the Athenians that nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was possible and what was impractical alike, with means ample or inadequate it mattered not. The reason for this was their general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strength with their hopes.³⁰

οὕτω τῇ [τε] παρούσῃ εὐτυχίᾳ χρώμενοι ἠξίουν σφίσι μηδὲν ἐναντιοῦσθαι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ ἐν ἴσῳ καὶ τὰ ἀπορώτερα μεγάλῃ τε ὁμοίως καὶ ἐνδεεστέρᾳ παρασκευῇ κατεργάζεσθαι. αἰτία δ’ ἦν ἡ παρὰ λόγον τῶν πλεόνων εὐπραγία αὐτοῖς ὑποτιθεῖσα ἰσχὺν τῆς ἐλπίδος.

I believe that Herodotus wrote in light of these dangerously unrealistic ambitions of the Athenians, encouraged, as I have suggested, by interpreters of oracles, lore, and prophecy, and that he wrote principally in the years after 424 and likely concluded close to the time of the most disastrous manifestation of Athenian ambition, the Sicilian expedition of 415–413.³¹

The readers of Herodotus

For whom were the first histories written? I have described Herodotus’ Histories as a project to instruct the Athenians collectively, but it is unimaginable that Herodotus’ massive work was ever read by more than a select few in his generation,³² or that Herodotus ever recited any part of his work before the assembled δῆμος.³³ The public at large would have had little interest in, or patience for, such a monologue. Select groups of educated men, however, could find the Histories to be both enlightening and entertaining, especially where Herodotus adopts a polemic tone toward what others have said (and written).³⁴ The entertaining aspects of his work served, I would argue, to make his work more persuasive (indulging here in a feature common to persuasive speeches that the more austere Thucydides would denounce). Whatever may be μυθῶδες or τερπέστερον about his work, I suggest, was designed to make it compatible to these features as they appeared in forensic or deliberative rhetoric, and thereby to enable Herodotus’ critical judgment and guise of impartial authority to emerge as superior and better founded when the truth and meaning of the past mattered. The group before whom such things mattered was the politically engaged. As Roberto Nicolai has written, Herodotus (and Thucydides) ‘responded to the needs of an age that sought more extended and reliable knowledge …, to be utilized in particular for the formation of a governing class’.³⁵ I believe this to be correct, although I would add that the needs of the age were more specifically the desires of certain individuals to gain a competitive edge in the arena of Athenian politics. Herodotus wrote to instruct the wise so that they might be better able to lead the δῆμος.

We can go further and suggest, for the sake of example if not as a reasonable probability, some of the men who may have patronized such a work as Herodotus produced. Callias the son of Hipponicus was an Athenian who was both politically ambitious and proud especially of his authority over matters of religion.³⁶ He also had great wealth and a reputation for gathering with his friends and associates in the company of sophists.³⁷ Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, says of Callias that he was the man who had spent more than anyone else on sophists.³⁸ He would have had both the motive and the means to support the compilation of Herodotus’ Histories, and Herodotus in turn would have had a motive for including his laudatory digression on the patriotism of Callias’ ancestors.³⁹ And