Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Attempts to understand the origins and development of Greek historiography are constantly thwarted by the paucity of information available to us. But if we turn to the development of one branch of Greek historiography, the war monograph, we seem to be in a slightly more fortunate position. We have in full the histories of both Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus' work covers a vast temporal and geographical spread, but it comes to a climax with a detailed narrative of the Persian expedition to Greece in 480–479 bce (Books 7–9). Fifty years after the successful resistance to Persia, the two Greek states that had played the leading role in that resistance, Athens and Sparta, found themselves at war, and the war on which they were engaged found its historian, Thucydides. Thucydides' History provides a detailed season-by-season narrative of the Peloponnesian War down to 411 bce (it was left incomplete, probably owing to the author's death). As we assess Thucydides' concentrated focus on a single Greek war against Herodotus' more diffuse interests, it is tempting to plot a development from the earlier to the later historian: a prominent modern critic of historiography has written that “the war monograph implicit in Herodotus emerged perfected at Thucydides' hands” (Fornara 1983: 32). That is to say, Thucydides realized that Herodotus' detailed account of Xerxes' expedition was a potential ... log in or subscribe to read full text