2. Greece. The classical Greeks began with a re-
markable handicap. They had behind them—behind
Homer—a brilliant civilization, the records of which
have recently become comprehensible to scholars. But
they knew scarcely anything about this earlier world
and could not have deciphered its texts; for after a
hiatus more complete than the Dark Ages in Europe,
they had learned a different art of writing which came
to them from a different source. Only a little oral
evidence, some of it difficult to disentangle from the
fictional material in Homer, had filtered down to them,
to give them a hint of that earlier age which we call
Mycenaean. And they, like the modern world, could
not even be sure that its language had been Greek,
though they were leaning to this view in the first
century A.D. For a long time they believed that only
a few centuries of history lay behind them, and in the
fifth century A.D. some of them were surprised when
the Egyptians produced the evidence that the past
went back for thousands of years. Even of their own
history as they emerged from their Dark Ages—indeed,
of the whole of Greek history since the Trojan war—
they knew hardly anything; for they did not have
monarchs who glorified themselves in annals, and they
were astonishingly late in producing documents at all.
It is difficult to see how the states that existed before
the fifth century can have been governed with so few
records. The earliest to appear were lists of officials
and priests. The Jewish writer, Josephus, in the first
century A.D. taunted the Greeks for these defects and
for the period before the fifth century B.C. it would
seem that even modern scholarship will never be able
to make good the loss. Athens appears to have been
particularly defective in this respect.
They had Homer, and the Iliad appears to have
taken shape in the Ionian region about the ninth cen-
tury B.C. There was an epic tradition in Ionia, and in
later centuries there were poets who filled in the nar-
rative of the Trojan war, and also carried the story
back to the supposed origins of the Greeks, and the
legends of warfare between the gods. They attempted
to deal with problems that Homer had failed to answer
and tried, for example, to straighten out the chronol-
ogies and genealogies, and to show what happened to
the heroes in later periods—perhaps to satisfy the needs
of families that wanted to clarify their connection with
such distinguished ancestors.
Ionia produced the earliest Greek prose, developed
what we should call philosophy and science, and saw
the beginnings of Greek historical writing. The stimulus
to this last would seem to have been given by great
events; and Hecataeus, overlapping the sixth century
and the fifth, like Herodotus later in the fifth century,
would seem to have been stirred by Greco-Persian
conflicts. Thucydides, later again in the century, was
moved by the Peloponnesian war. At the same time
the city-states of the Greeks had so developed that the
age was propitious for the awakening of the historical
consciousness in the effective general public. Down to
this time, and even much later still—even in the
twentieth century—war has been the most powerful
stimulus to the awakening of an interest in history;
Hecataeus and Herodotus were impelled to take a great
interest in neighboring peoples; and the situation of
Ionia was important partly because the interesting
Lydians, and later the Persians, were so near, partly
because it was almost the meeting-place of eastern
Mediterranean civilizations.
Greek historical writing developed to a considerable
degree out of the description of neighboring peoples
and the attempt to understand them. It emerged in
association with geography and ethnography; and this
in itself tended to give it a scientific bent, especially
as, before Herodotus, men had been writing about the
influence of climate and landscape on human nature.
In any case history emerged in Ionia at a time when
something of the scientific mentality had already been
developing there; and here (as in China) a civilization
distinguished by science also applied itself to history.
It is difficult to know how much the Greeks owed not
merely to the science but also to the historical writing
that had developed so greatly in Mesopotamia and
Asia; but it would appear that a genuine stimulus came
from Egypt; and to Egypt the Greeks went in the fifth
century B.C. to see if they could find answers to ques-
tions about the Trojan war.
In the absence of written sources, oral tradition
became particularly important in Greek historiography
from the start. Herodotus is dependent on it for the
history of the Persian war, which took place not long
before his time. Thucydides seems to have been skepti-
cal about the reconstruction of earlier Greek history,
though his opening pages contain inferences from what
we should call archaeology. It is easy to understand,
therefore, why the Greeks in general failed to feel
assured about the recovery of a remoter past, once that
past had been forgotten. Their great achievements
were in fields more nearly contemporary.
What they learned from Egypt, and the little they
knew about the Mycenaean age, seems to have given
them a powerful impression of history as involving
great progress up to a certain point and then decline
or collapse. They easily ran to the notion that there
had been a lot of these ups-and-downs, so that civili-
zation repeatedly had to start over again from almost
the beginning, without even the memory of former
achievements. We hear of the Egyptians taking special
pride in the advantages they had over the Greeks
through the continuity of their history and particularly
their immunity from damage by fire and flood, which
were sometimes regarded as the cause of the greatest
catastrophes. All this became part of the Greek way
of experiencing history—part of man's very feeling
for the time-process. And perhaps it was really for
this reason that Greek philosophy so easily ran to
cyclic views of history, contemplating on occasion the
notion of a cosmos and a world which—at colossal
intervals of time—go on forever repeating their history
in the minutest detail. Greek philosophy has been held
to be “antihistorical” therefore, and in a sense respon-
sible for the limitations of Greek historiography. Cer-
tainly the Greeks lacked the Jewish feeling that the
whole of creation is moving to some great end, as well
as the modern feeling that time itself is a generative
thing.
Yet our debt to the Greeks is immense; for they
opened the way to a deeper kind of history and to
a host of modern sciences by their determination to
subject historical data (once these were established) to
quasi-scientific procedures. They were not content, like
the Mesopotamians or the Chinese, to narrate history
as though everything were the result of acts of will
on the part of men or gods who could easily have willed
something else. They attempted to move to analysis,
and get behind the acts of volition, examining causes,
connections, and the operation of conditioning cir-
cumstance. They opened the way to a political science
which could examine the cause of the decline of a state
or the rise of a tyrant. And their cyclic views reinforced
their belief that, by the collation of instances, one could
arrive at maxims of statecraft, likely to be useful be-
cause history sufficiently repeats itself. All this entered
into the very texture of historical writing. The most
masterly example of this was Polybius (see below), a
Greek slave of the Romans, who set out to describe
the expansion of Rome in a book which was largely
a history of his own times. To the Greeks we owe the
view that history can be a political education.
It did not take them long to apply the canons of
rhetoric to the writing of history, and this was not so
indifferent a matter as we today might think. On the
Isocratean system the historian should interpret and
elucidate the story, discussing the plans of a leader,
describing the way in which he put them into effect
and explaining the results. But there is an alternative
method—simply to allow the reader to have the story
taking place before his eyes. It has been described as
“peripatetic” because it seemed to be connected with
Aristotle's theory of tragedy. The scenes are repro-
duced and one watches the action in the way that one
watches a play; and this is sufficient, without a discus-
sion of causes—the action itself producing the required
pity and terror. Attention may come to be concen-
trated too much on these issues of presentation as well
as on the style and the techniques which are appro-
priate to particular occasions. The result is liable to
be a decline in the quality of the history that has to
be presented—a decline evident at times in both
Greece and Rome.
The earliest of the great Greek historians whose
work has come down to us is Herodotus, who was born
in the 480's and seems to have died soon after 430
B.C. He wrote history partly in order that great deeds
(whether of Greeks or non-Greeks) should be placed
on record, and partly because he wished to lay out
the causes of the Greco-Persian War. He was interested
in the way in which things came to happen and would
look for rational explanations, showing the influence
of climate and geographical factors and presenting
excellent portrayals of character, though he was liable
to impute important events to trivial incidental causes,
the influence of women and purely personal factors.
At the same time he had a disturbing sense of super-
natural influences, showed the inadequacy of human
calculations, the retribution that Heaven would inflict
on great misdeeds, and introduced dreams, oracles,
visions, and divine warnings of approaching evil. He
seemed to make a point of repeating whatever versions
of a story had been reported and letting the reader
decide between them. He had a great admiration for
Athens which was connected with his love of demo-
cratic freedom and his feeling for the role of the city
in the Persian War.
Thucydides (who died early in the fourth century
B.C.) intended his history of the Peloponnesian War to
be useful to the future; for, since in his view human
nature and human behavior would be forever the same,
he held that similar situations and problems recurred,
so that the lessons of one period would be serviceable
in another period. He was influenced by the science
of the time and tried to apply the principles and
methods of Hippocratic medicine to politics, so that
everything could be covered by rational explanation.
He could separate the immediate occasion from the
deeper causes of an event, and was able to proceed
to general conclusions, as when he analyzed the rela-
tionship between wealth and power, or the remorseless
logic behind the development of Athenian imperialism.
He envisaged the characters of men as the result of
circumstances. He was compelled to leave a role for
chance, but his attitude to chance may not have been
very different from that of the twentieth century. He
saw that, with the resources and techniques then avail-
able, only something like “contemporary” history was
really feasible; and he made use of speeches to com-
municate what we should regard as the historian's
explanations of facts or situations, or of the motives
and ideas behind human actions.
Polybius (who was born in the decade or so after
198 B.C. and reached the age of 78) achieved a wide
form of general history in a work which examined the
rise of Rome and particularly its development to world-
empire within a period of less than fifty-three years
down to 167 B.C. He ostentatiously stresses the didactic
and pragmatic character of history, the fact that it
would be better if written by statesmen, and the im-
portance of the subject for people in public life; and
both in this and in his remarks about the critical treat-
ment of sources, he is in reaction against the “drama-
tizing” methods that had become popular amongst
historical writers. Though he traces causes and effects,
he fails to see the interconnections in the whole net-
work of events, or to discern general tendencies, and
he shows the operation of chance, the role of the
unexpected, as part of the very constitution of history.
He did not originate the idea of cyclic succession in
history or the predilection for a “mixed” form of gov-
ernment, but in the latter case it was his formulation
of the idea that influenced the modern world. He came
to the conclusion that even Rome would not escape
the tendency to fall into decline, a tendency which
he attributed to moral reasons.
