From Herodotus to H-Net
Jeremy D. Popkin
Historiography from Herodotus to the Twentieth Century
Chapter 1: What is Historiography?
We can define historiography as the critical assessment of the ways in which historians try
to reconstruct the past events as distinguished from the statements they make about the
past.
§ The Concerns of Historiography
Historiography deals with the various methods historians use in gathering data, analysing
it, and communicating it. The term “historiography” also refers to the history of history itself:
understanding how historians of the past conceived of their projects and the methods they
used is one of the most important ways we can gain perspective on the challenges facing
historians today.
In this book, Popkin will be concerned with historiography in the more general sense – that
is, with the common issues that confront historians, regardless of what era or aspect of the
past they may be interested in.
There is not a simple relationship between “the past” and the way it is written down and
remembered. Historiography is a “meta-discourse”, a “narrative about narratives”, whose
subject matter is other works of history, rather than historical events themselves.
Major historiographical debates, such as the one about the responsibility for the
Holocaust, involve fundamental questions about human nature and human existence: do
human beings have free will, or are their actions essentially determined by external
forces? Are there universal laws governing human behaviour, or have societies at
different times in the past exhibited different patterns of conduct and held different values?
Does knowledge of the past provide us with guidance about the future, and, if not, what is
the value of history?
The readings assigned in courses on historiography often include selections from the works
of authors who were not themselves historians, but who raised issues that stimulated
historical research, such as the sociologist Max Weber, the philosopher Michel Foucault,
and the literary critic Edward Said. The study of historiography is thus partly a way of
answering the questions of what makes history a distinctive branch of knowledge and
why it is worth pursuing. To study historiography also involves learning about the institutions
that hold the historical community together.
For several decades now, historians have been disputing the implications for our discipline
of the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy and social theory. By arguing that all our
knowledge is mediated through language and that there is no necessary connection
between language and the phenomena it claims to describe, historians who have adopted
this perspective, such as Hayden White, have raised disturbing questions about whether we
can have any access to the reality of the past. Whereas some historians see the
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,multiplicity of viewpoints as a sign of the discipline’s vitality, others lament that this
diversity has made it impossible to construct generally acceptable narratives of the past.
Alongside the debates triggered by the linguistic turn and attempts to write a more inclusive
history, the discipline is also being reshaped by changes in the ways historians access their
sources and communicate their findings. Instead of relying primarily on written documents,
especially those kept in official archives, and published materials found in libraries,
historians are increasingly turning to visual and oral materials, often accessed via the
Internet.
§ Justifying the Study of the Past
History is often referred to as a collective equivalent to individual memory, but the value of
remembering the collective past accurately is not necessarily as obvious as the practical
importance for individuals of remembering where they parked their car or stored their winter
clothes. For many centuries, knowledge of the past was considered vital for those involved
in public affairs because it would teach them rules about human behaviour that could
guide their own conduct. Although few historians today would argue that the study of the
past can provide us with clear rules to guide the making of public policy, most would still
agree that knowledge of the past can help us understand the range of possibilities we
face in dealing with contemporary problems.
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons from the study of history is the importance of
unintended consequences. Experts in the social sciences, such as economics and political
science, often make confident predictions about the consequences of adopting certain
policies; historians provide sobering, if often unwelcome, reminders that such predictions
have frequently been wrong in the past. Present-day historians are more likely to emphasize
the value of history in producing a collective sense of identity than its use in terms of
providing practical guidance. Historians are also likely to stress the importance of truthful
history as a way of demolishing emotionally charged myths about the past that may have
dangerous consequences in the present.
Whereas amnesties may prevent legal prosecution of perpetrators, they cannot prevent
historians from investigating the past. Historians can thus contribute to respect for human
rights. Like literature, philosophy and psychology, history is one of the disciplines that can
help us understand human behaviour, including, potentially, our own.
§ A Short Field Guide to the Varieties of History
Political history and its close cousins, diplomatic history, or, the history of foreign
relations, and military history, remain among the most vital varieties of history. Political
history and diplomatic history are sometimes criticized on the grounds that they concentrate
too narrowly on “great men”. However, political, diplomatic and military history remain major
historical fields, because scholars recognize that they deal with important aspects of
human experience. Even if one tries resolutely to concentrate on the everyday lives of
ordinary people in the past, one finds that they were affected by the laws of the
governments they lived under, that they paid taxes, and that their lives were often
drastically altered by wars and diplomatic settlements.
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,Political, diplomatic and military historians can usually draw on well-organized bodies of
sources that often allow them to imagine that they can achieve a degree of certainty that is
harder for other varieties of history to achieve. Documents concerning these subjects have
traditionally been carefully preserved in governmental archives, and many centuries of
historical practice have given scholars well-established procedures for using them.
However, political, diplomatic and military history have often been seen as limited because
they have usually given rulers and especially nation-states a central role in their
narratives. “Scientific” history developed as part of the growth of nationalism in the 19 th c.,
and national archives usually dwarf all other document collections in terms of size and
breadth of their holdings.
Social history is another of the major fields in history, often closely associated with
economic history and defined as “the history of the people with the politics left out,” social
history emphasizes the different ways human beings have been connected with one another
in different periods, as members of families, communities, and social sciences. Economic
history highlights especially the significance of the ways in which people have made a living,
the technology they have used, and the effects of flows of wealth. Whereas political
historians tend to concentrate on governing elites, social and economic historians often
emphasized the importance of the lower classes who have made up the overwhelming
majority of the population in most times and places.
Scholarship defines as “microhistory” and “the history of everyday life” often explore
domains that clearly belong to the field of social history. Social and economic historians
often depend on data that can be transformed into numbers and analysed statistically:
census reports, tax rolls, figures for imports and exports of goods, and records of wages
and prices.
Cultural history, the species of historical scholarship that multiplied fastest in the last
decades of the 20th c., is another important variety of history. Whereas social history is
connected to the “hard” social sciences, cultural history has closer ties with anthropology
and with other humanities disciplines, such as literary studies and art history. Cultural
historians study the various ways in which human groups have created meanings for
themselves over the course of history. And whereas social history has traditionally been
identified with the history of the “masses”, cultural history may deal with elite culture,
popular culture and everything in between. Many cultural historians do work with printed
sources and written archival materials, but others find their materials in museums and
among the possessions of private individuals.
The study of ideas and of intellectuals remains a significant aspect of the discipline, and
indeed the perspectives associated with the “linguistic turn” in the humanities. Whereas
cultural historians see expressions of meaning in a wide variety of human activities,
intellectual historians tend to focus on formally structured texts works of philosophy,
political theory, literature, and, indeed, history; historiography forms a subspecies of
intellectual history.
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,Chapter 2: History in Ancient and Medieval Times
§ Herodotus and Thucydides
Works devoted to historiography still give a privileged position to two authors who lived in the
Greek city-state of Athens during the 5th c. BC, Herodotus and Thucydides. They
inherited a tradition of concern about the preservation of the memory of the past. The
lifespans of Herodotus and Thucydides overlapped with those of the philosophers Socrates
and Plato, who raised questions about the nature of knowledge in general.
Herodotus’ Histories tells of the Greek defeat of a Persian invasion that took place when
the historian was a young child, and Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, recounts the
disastrous failure of Athens’ attempt to impose its power on the other Greek city-states,
an attempt in which Thucydides himself had participated.
Herodotus and Thucydides were certainly not the first people to record information about
historical events or to construct stories about the past. Although the two Greek authors did
not know it, members of other civilizations had also constructed historical narratives. In
another part of the eastern Mediterranean, the Jews had preserved the story of their own
origins and the deeds of their rulers, which would eventually be written down and
incorporated into the Bible. At the other end of the Asian continent, in China, the
philosopher and religious sage Confucius has insisted on the importance of remembering
past events to draw lessons from them that would guide appropriate conduct in the
present.
What made the works of Herodotus and Thucydides different from previous records and
stories about the past, was their attempt to define history as a distinct method of telling
the story of the past, unique above all because of its devotion to discovering and
transmitting the truth about bygone events.
Although Herodotus recorded the myths and legends of the Egyptians and Persians and
noted that Greek beliefs in oracles often influenced their actions, both he and Thucydides
defined history as the story of the thoughts and deeds of human beings; unlike Homer,
they eliminated the gods from their explanation of events.
The Greek word “istoria” that Herodotus used for his work can be translated as “inquiry,”
and Herodotus devoted a good part of his writing to recounting the travels he had
undertaken to collect information about the various peoples involved in the Persian wars.
Thucydides, a generation younger than Herodotus, was even more single-minded in his
devotion to reconstructing a true story about the past. Thucydides limited himself to
writing about things that had taken place during his own day, asserting that these were the
only events about which certain knowledge could be obtained.
Thucydides limited the scope of his narrative more narrowly than Herodotus; with few
exceptions, he wrote only about war and politics, thus excluding women from his story. His
prose style was clear and precise, without rhetorical flourishes, and it continues to serve
as a model for serious history writing even today. On the other hand, however, he included
in his narrative a number of speeches given by leading actors in his story, although he
conceded that he had rarely been able to capture the actual words they had spoken.
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,The speeches are among the most powerful passages in the Peloponnesian War and
Thucydides example inspired many subsequent historians in the ancient Greek and Roman
world and for their successors ever since. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the
books of Herodotus and Thucydides were rediscovered during the European Renaissance
and have been recognized since as the foundations of the Western historiographical
tradition. Along with their definition of the nature of history, the most important
contribution the two men made to history was the fact that they put their narratives in
writing. The preservation of their words on permanent materials – parchment or
papyrus – meant that those words survived to influence readers long after their authors’
deaths.
§ History-Writing in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
A half-century after Thucydides’ death, the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle offered one
of the first and most influential characterizations of the nature of history and its relationship
to other forms of thought. “The distinction between historian and poet is…that the one
describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry
is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of
the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars,” Aristotle wrote.
The later Greek historians had much to write about, including the conquests of Alexander
the Great in the 4th c. BC and the breakup of his empire after his death. Although the
Romans took pride in their military superiority over the Greeks, they admired Greek
cultural achievements, including their sophisticated tradition of historical writing. The
first important work on the history of Rome, that of Polybius, was written in the middle of the
2nd c. BC by a Greek who had been deported to Rome because of his family’s opposition to
Roman authority and who wrote about the Roman past in his own language.
Polybius and his successors, of whom the most important, Livy and Tacitus, wrote in
Latin, inherited the models of history forged by Herodotus and Thucydides, but they faced
some new challenges of their own. To explain Rome’s rise to greatness over a period of
several centuries, they had to collect and evaluate sources from the distant past. They
were able to draw on some documents, such as the texts of laws from earlier periods, but
they all recognized the difficulty of separating truth from legend. Herodotus and
Thucydides had dealt with the history of one small city-state; the historians of Rome had to
widen their scope to the whole known world (oikumene).
In our world, accustomed to calculating dates according to the now almost universally
accepted calendar based on the birth of Jesus (BC and AD, or BCE and CE), it is hard to
imagine how difficult it was for earlier historians to match up dates originally handed down in
different systems.
Polybius’ history, although it emphasized the rise of Rome, strove to cover the whole of
the known world of his day. From Polybius onward, historians of Rome were drawn to the
question of the causes of that state’s extraordinary success, and then, especially after
the Roman Republic was replaced by the one-man rule of emperors, beginning with
Augustus in 27 BC, to the reasons for its decline. Polybius wrote, making an argument for
the usefulness of history that continues to be advanced today.
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,A century after Polybius, Livy’s massive history of Rome, which was completed during the
troubled years leading to the collapse of the Republic in the first century BC, which drew a
contrast between the simplicity, patriotism and honesty of the early Romans and what he
saw as the corruption of his own day. Livy was acutely aware of the problem of writing the
history of events such as the founding of Rome that had taken place centuries before his
own lifetime, a challenge quite different from what Herodotus and Thucydides had done.
Livy’s lifetime overlapped with that of Julius Caesar, whose Gallic Wars recounted his
conquest of a vast new territory of Rome.
Tacitus’ terse style, expressing complex thoughts in just a few words, as in his
description of the effects of Roman conquests – “they make a desert and call it peace” – was
to inspire many imitators over the centuries. The contrast he drew between the decadent
Romans of the empire and the simple lives of the freedom-loving Germans who defeated
Augustine’s legions in 9 AD would later serve to shape historical depictions of the
“barbarians” who eventually overran Rome. An important contemporary of Tacitus was
Plutarch, often considered the inventor of the genre biography.
The fact that educated Europeans, from the time of the Romans onward, were more likely to
read Latin than Greek meant that for centuries, Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch were better
known and more influential as historical models than Herodotus or Thucydides.
The Greek and Roman historians were not modern rationalists: they lived in a world that
believed in various supernatural powers and took omens seriously. They also wrote for a
limited audience. Although the written word allowed their works to be reproduced and to
survive their authors, manuscripts were expensive, and their circulation was far more
limited than that of historical works written after the invention of printing would be.
§ The Origins of Chinese Historiography
Another distinctive historical tradition took shape in China. The name of the great Confucius
is associated with the Chunqiu or Spring and Autumn Annals, a chronicle of several
centuries of events in one Chinese kingdom. In the 2 nd c. BC when history-writing was
flourishing in the Roman world, Sima Qian (c. 145-86 BC) compiled the most influential work
of early Chinese history. Just as the Roman historians had been inspired by that state’s
success in imposing its rule on the whole of the world they knew, Sima Qian’s Shiji was a
response to the unification of China under the Han dynasty after 206 BC. Much longer than
the works of Herodotus or Thucydides, Sima Qian’s Shiji was more like an encyclopaedia
than a coherent historical narrative.
§ History, Judaism, and Christianity
In the Western world, the tradition of historical writing created by the Greeks and Romans
faced a new challenge with the rise of the new faith of Christianity. Once Christianity
became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, following the conversion of the
Emperor Constantine in 312 AD, historians developed a new vision of the past, closely
linked to Christian teachings about the world’s future.
According to the Bible, God had created the world at a specific moment in time, and the
events in human history were all part of a divine plan that would lead, according to the
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,Jews, to the coming of the messiah or, as Christians reinterpreted the divine message, to
the second coming of Jesus. In either case, history in this framework had a clear plotline,
beginning with Adam, the first man, and leading, after various catastrophes caused by
human resistance to God’s will, to redemption and the end of the world. Having
incorporated this linear vision of history and the account of their first centuries of
existence into their holy books, Jewish thinkers largely lost interest in further
developments in history.
Christian authors developed an important historical tradition that grew to dominate the
European world for more than a millennium. Christians began to confront the problem of
integrating their own history into the larger historical framework they had inherited from
the Bible and from the Greeks and Romans.
Eusebius, who lived at the time of Constantine, shaped the pattern of Christian history for
centuries afterward. For Eusebius, and for all the Christian historians who followed him,
the purpose of history was to show the working out of God’s plan for humanity.
Whereas the historians of ancient Greece and Rome had explained events in terms of
human actions or the structures of governments, Eusebius attributed them to divine
providence. Eusebius devoted considerable attention to chronology, attempting to show
that the Jewish tradition was older and therefore more reliable than that of the Greeks.
The sack of the city of Rome by the Goths in 410 AD raised serious questions about the
notion that God would protect the empire until the end of the world. The great theologian
Saint Augustine, in his masterwork The City of God, provided a theoretical response to
this problem: he argued that the world exists on two levels, a “city of man” in which evil,
caused by sinful human beings, may appear to triumph and a “city of God,” in which
divine justice prevails. History, in the Augustinian schema, takes place on a human level,
although God determines its course, and its catastrophes do not invalidate the promise of
eventual salvation for the faithful. Indeed, the sufferings of human history serve a higher
purpose by preparing humanity for its eventual redemption. Augustine’s teaching implied
that earthly history is ultimately not as important as events in the city of God.
Augustine did not write any historical works himself, but he did help invent another important
form of writing about the past. His Confessions, in which he related the story of his own
life, is usually considered the first example of autobiography. As Augustine’s work showed,
an auto biographer, unlike a biographer, could give a history of his inner thoughts and
feelings as well as the things he had done.
§ History in the Middle Ages
From the time of the Renaissance in the 1400s until recently, the kinds of history written in
Europe during the Middle Ages were usually regarded as an unfortunate detour on the path
leading from the works of the Greek and Roman historians to the more critical history of
modern times. More recent scholars of historiography have shown more understanding of
the motives of medieval history writers. They adapted history to a new framework,
dominated by religious belief, but they still saw themselves as serving the cause of truth.
Their purpose, however, was to present truths that would convince their readers of
appropriate moral and religious lessons.
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, Among the consequences of the disintegration of the western Roman empire was a
decline in the number of those who received the kind of education that would allow them to
become historians. Without knowledge of the Greek language, it was impossible to read
the works of authors such as Herodotus or Thucydides, and almost the only people still
capable of reading and writing in Latin were the members of the clergy.
Medieval historians often began their works with a summary of world history, drawn from
the Bible and Roman sources, and they often tried to connect their countrymen to this
universal past by claiming that they were descended either from offspring of the Biblical
Noah or from figures from antiquity. In this way, medieval historians linked their local
histories of their own region and of the “barbarian” peoples who had supplanted the Romans
to the broader picture of the past they had inherited from the culture of antiquity. The most
important of these early medieval national histories, written around 735 AD, was Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which founded the tradition of British history.
Bede was unusual among medieval historians in his scrupulous concern for accuracy and
his acknowledgement of his sources. He was the first historian to adopt the practice of
dating events from the time of the birth of Jesus, creating the division of time into BC and
AD.
After Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish ruler Charlemagne as emperor in Rome in 800
AD, historians in the West, ignoring the claims of the Byzantine Empire, argued that the
legacy of the Roman Empire had been passed or “translated” to him and his successors
and that the world was still in the age of the 4th empire predicted in the Biblical prophecy of
Daniel.
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was a well-thought-out-narrative leading to a clear ending
point. The form of history-writing most associated with the Middle Ages, however, were
annals and chronicles, in which events were recorded in the sequence in which they
happened, without any attempt to connect them to each other.
Such accounts were often compiled, sometimes over the course of several centuries, by the
monks of particular monasteries, meaning that they had multiple authors rather than
reflecting the thoughts of a single writer, as Bede’s history did. Their laconic entries were not
necessarily unbiased: chronicles kept in a particular monastery often reflected the
influence of local rulers who protected the institution. Annals and chronicles often
recorded valuable historical information, and modern historians regularly use them as
sources, but unlike the historical works of antiquity, they had few literary qualities and
made no attempt to explain the causes of the events they described, leaving it to readers
to make sense of them.
§ History in the Chinese and Islamic Worlds
Whereas history-writing in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages was mostly confined to
monasteries and usually seemed to have lost the sophistication it had achieved in the
ancient world, the narrating of the past flourished in other parts of the world. The 11 th c.
authors Ouyang Xiu and Sima Guang argued for the importance of evidence from
archaeology and inscriptions as a way of verifying claims made in written sources and
for the superiority of older sources, written closer to the time of past events, over more
recent compilations.
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