We could, perhaps, draw a contrast between the approaches of Thucydides and Herodotus with a statement like; if Thucydides was our first historian, Herodotus was our last mythographer. Along the lines of such a statement, we could tabulate and emphasize the differences between Thucididean and Herodotean techniques and/or styles, compiling these differences as a proxy for our notion of a discontinuity, or rupture, in the evolution of rational thought. This would perhaps accord with Thucydides' own presentation of his work as a factual account: "Anyone . . . will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events" (27 / p.12); his complex, analytic style (very difficult to translate, we heard from Mary Beard in her review of Kagan and Hornblower) furnishes a project which, in many ways, seems to take its stance in direct opposition to the work of Herodotus.
As for Herodotus, he seems to take a kind of delight in conflating what we would today identify as historical and mythical elements. His account in many ways hinges on the appearances of omens -portents of fate, or of divine int(erv)entions- and their interpretation. See for example the account of the omens that appear to Xerxes in the form of dreams before the war (12-18 / p.421-424) and strange births directly prior to the invasion (57 / p.438), or the extended account of the Priestess Aristonice's prophecy beginning at 140 / p.460-461. The gods are very much present in Herodotus' history, if indirectly, through the agency of the human agents who believe in them, or fail to take their messages, in the form of omens, into account.
But as much as Herodotus appeals to fate and divinity, Thucydides works as hard to dispel myth and replace it with rational explanation. Interestingly, given the course of our reading so far, Thucydides' own conception of his efforts seem to parallel Plato's in this regard, particularly in his emphatic criticism of the oral poetic tradition: "All men show the same uncritical acceptance of the oral traditions handed on to them, even about the history of their own country." (20 / p.11); "...anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of truth, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance" (21 / p.12); "It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear..." (22 / p.12).
So while there is much, particularly in Thucydides' work itself, to support our notion of a rupture in the development of rational thought, I think that on the other hand, there are a slew of fascinating continuities between these works; similarities that would tend to be obscured by a Thucydidean emphasis on the differences. First, with regard to method, it is clear that the works share many important features. Indeed, when Thucydides describes how he derived the contents of the speeches on which his prose so heavily relies, he appeals to his "laborious research" (22), and to the relative recency of the events described as proxies for the accuracy of his admittedly inexact account. His methods here do not seem to differ all that greatly from those employed by Herodotus, who also -though, interestingly, dealing with less recent events- collects various accounts and relies on his own judgement and experience to compile them (see for example his account of the Persians' discovery of the secret cart-track which led to the defeat of the Spartans at Thermopolae; 214 / p.490-491).
But Herodotus spins his tale like a true storyteller; he follows the development of Xerxes' thinking, and we identify with him despite his tyrannical outbursts. The Persians come to Greece as an "incalculably great" force (147 / p.465); and Xerxes is no straw man: "There was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power" (197 / p.481). This makes it all the more astounding when the fragile Greek alliance is eventually able to triumph. Herodotus' tale is spell-binding; despite the fact that it is written, it reproduces the characteristics of the oral tradition as Havelock describes it; the audience is drawn into the story, and is thereby compelled to accept it uncritically. This is presumably what makes Thucydides, like Plato, so scornful. But doesn't Thucydides' own account reproduce these same dramatic structures? Don't Plato's dialogues, for that matter, draw us in as entrancingly as Herodotus' histories? If there is a rupture between these modes, it seems to be drawn more from the accounts of the revolutionaries themselves than from a clear reckoning with the materials themselves. Perhaps, with this in mind, another, more tacit reason for this rupture can be found in the question of religion.
Following our line of thinking about Greek drama, whereby the gods are taken to represent the passionate, unconscious, and/or chaotic forces motivating human behavior while remaining beyond the scope of rational control, we could read Herodotus' omenological account of the Persian war almost as a proto-psychoanalytical study. How can history be objective if its agents -Xerxes, Leonidas, Artabanus, Demaratus- are not only inspired by rational considerations, but also by dreams and ideals; of revenge, conquest, glory, fate, and wealth? Are the unconscious realm of human passions not worthy of the attentions of historians? The answer of Thucydides, as it turns out, may not itself have been motivated by the clear light of reason alone; doesn't it seem obvious that his and Plato's emphasis on the novelty of their approaches, and rejection of the oral and religious tradition, were political maneuvers, motivated, in all likelihood -at least in part- by the same unconscious drives and forces that Herodotus so aptly -if not exactly objectively- describes? I am not trying to argue that the development embodied by the texts of Herodotus and Thucydides do not represent an increment of progress in the evolution of reason. Perhaps they do; the truth emerges from them as that which can be verified independently, presaging the emergence of our modern scientific method; certainly these are very important developments. I am only attempting to suggest that this rupture, this increment, is skin deep; it lies on the intelligible surface of what is in fact a seething, chaotic mess of historical causes and effects, influences and sympathies. I think that our academic quest to identify particular movements in this symphony is wonderful, so long as we don't lose sight of the relative triviality of our abstractions vis a vis the immeasurable vastness of the totality from which they are derived.
It's strikes me that while the kind of reasoning contained within the texts might represent a tiny "increment of progress in the evolution of reason," the fact of these works composition is much more than that. Insofar as the Greek dramatists, historians and philosophers were all self-consciously, individually authoring their works for particular purposes (as opposed to carrying on the oral epic tradition, which at least Havelock described as a kind of composition/regurgitation/perpetuation of existing stories for the entertainment of others without a lot of contemplation about WHY one was doing it) this strikes me as a pretty major leap. In the cases of Herodotus and Thucydides, the decision to write down these stories for posterity had to have been a very self-consciously motivated one, seeing as how it hadn't really been done before. Just the ability to think of yourself as a preserver and transmitter of information, and all the choices about what is worth transmitting that go along with that, requires a significant change in man's thinking about himself qua thinker, no?
ReplyDeleteI think that's an interesting question Ruthie. Does the fact of these works' composition indicate a major shift in the subjectivity of humankind? Are people with oral history so different than people with written history? I agree that Havelock's work -and Parry's, and Ong's, and especially McLuhan's, etc.- is/are brilliant; this is a very interesting object of study. I guess we'll get even deeper into this when we look at the printing press stuff, with Eisenstein... I wonder though, if we aren't making a kind of error here; what I've been trying to argue for is that while the means, the mechanisms, whereby culture is transmitted might change, and while we might identify a series of major epochal shifts in our historiography of these changes, this doesn't necessarily mean that what is being transmitted has changed as much as it might appear. In other words, while the means and modes of transmission have indeed undergone a series of stochastic mutations, and while this series of formal ruptures has undoubtedly had profound effects on human history, I still think that it is quite possible -and indeed, I think it is probable- that the meanings of these messages, the substance of human culture itself, its semantic content, has not in fact undergone a similar series of discontinuities, but has actually evolved much more continuously than our research would lead us to believe. I think that Latour's work supports this view, for example; I guess we're getting there...
ReplyDeleteTo take another tack: when we identify these discontinuities in the technical sphere, we impute their structure onto lived experience itself, thereby seemingly to demonstrate that lived culture is not as continuous as we seem to believe, on the basis of our personal experience. So we are using history to demonstrate a level of discontinuity beneath the supposedly smooth surface level of our lived experience. This approach has perhaps emerged and constituted itself as a necessary corrective to the whiggish classical historiography of the post-enlightenment period, in which where all evidence was gathered in to the eurolinear scheme of progressive evolution...
But doesn't this approach, by taking this eurocentric, hegelian continuity of whig history its enemy, so to speak -the object of its motivating anxiety- actually privilege the very assumption of lived continuity that it purports to problematize? In effect, by saying, "look, history is not as continuous as the present!" do we not thereby fall for the 'trick' assumption precisely of the continuity of the present?!
So identifying these ruptures in history, in a way, only strengthens the basic illusion that it is intended to dispel: namely, that the present moment is immediately present to consciousness, and that on the basis of the information available to us 'here and now', we might approximately (with a reasonable, computable margin of uncertainty) make judgements about the truth of states of affairs inhering elsewhere, on whose interference our own identities must depend, and vice versa. In short, do we not have to raise this, not only as an epistemological issue, but as an ontological one as well? What are the natures of occurrence and determinacy? These questions are far from settled, especially in the realms -like physics- where they are studied in a rigorously scientific fashion...