So, this week in the ancient history class I tutor, we’re studying Herodotus and Thucydides, the two first true historians in the Western world, which means looking at the origins and purpose of history as both a literary genre and a field of study. The lecturer for the course has told me and the other two tutors (including Jim, whom you know from my Black 2/White 2 playthrough journals) that we have his permission to spend the entire week’s classes screwing with our students’ heads. I’m going to practice on you, okay?
So. What is history?
Some of you, no doubt, are thinking something along the lines of “the study of past events,” which is close but needs to be more specific, because there are lots of past events that clearly don’t fall under history. The formation of mountains, oceans, and valleys, for instance, is the object of geology, while evolution and extinction come under the purview of palaeontology, and what I ate for dinner last night is of no special interest to anyone (but, just in case you’re wondering, it was a sort of Hungarian fried bread called langos, served with a herb paste and jalapenos). Narrowing it to “the study of past events involving humans” doesn’t really get it either because that encompasses significant chunks of anthropology and archaeology as well as history (I mean, granted, there’s overlap, but they’re still distinct disciplines). Strictly speaking, history is the study of past events for which a contemporary or near-contemporary (relatively speaking) written record exists – and that sounds like an awfully specific, restrictive definition but it’s really not, because history touches aspects of politics, war, economics, architecture, drama, sociology, mythology, philosophy, art and poetry. A lot of the time, particularly when dealing with the distant past as I do (well, distant in terms of human civilisation, anyway), we have to rely on texts that weren’t written with ‘history’ in mind at all, but instead are more closely related to one of these spheres of human existence Almost everything we know about the Mycenaean civilisation of the Greek Bronze Age, for instance, comes to us from the preserved clay tablets used by their capital sites to record all incoming and outgoing trade goods – basically, we have the last two months of their bank statements, and this, amazingly, is able to tell us all kinds of things about their political structure, society, diet, industry, infrastructure, and even religion, if you know how to look. These tablets were reusable – they weren’t intended to provide long-term records, and they certainly weren’t meant for us, more than three thousand years later, but sometimes, if an archive room was destroyed by fire, the tablets would be baked hard and become permanent, so something that was never meant to be ‘historical’ in any sense of the word has become our primary source of historical information for an entire civilisation, which when you think about it is so absurd it’s wonderful, and vice versa.
So now that we’re agreed on all that, what is the past?
No, seriously; I’m asking. What is the past?
Do you even know?
We often talk and think about the distant past as though it’s a place, like a foreign country where people speak a funny language and everyone does things a little bit differently and no-one has an iPhone. We all ‘came from’ this foreign place, but none of us can ever ‘go back’ there, and we can’t see it or touch it. It can only be observed by studying its effects on the present. I can’t see or otherwise observe my last night’s dinner. It’s gone. I only know about it because I can remember it – because its image has been imprinted on my brain somehow. You can’t observe it either. You only know about it because I’ve told you. But why did I tell you? Was it just because I wanted you to know, or because I wanted to make a point about the nature of the past? Is making that point important enough to me that I could have just made something up?
What is time?
If everything in the universe just… stopped… if all the molecules stopped reacting, and all the atoms stopped vibrating, and all the electrons froze in their orbitals, just for, say, ten seconds, how would we ever know about it? Our thoughts would be frozen with everything else. We wouldn’t need to breathe, because our cells wouldn’t be using up oxygen in respiration. Our hearts would stop beating, but none of our organs would be doing anything that needed blood. How would we know? What if, maybe, there was one clock, one wristwatch or something, somewhere, that kept ticking, kept using energy, for those ten seconds? Would that wristwatch be the only thing in the universe that kept time ‘properly’? Yes? But we use clocks and watches to keep track of the earth’s movement around the sun. If the earth and sun stop moving, along with everything else, and the watch keeps ticking, isn’t it doing something wrong?
We perceive time – we can only perceive time – through change. Maybe that’s all time is.
When we study history and archaeology, we attempt to make observations and deductions about the past. We do this by examining the present and extrapolating. If there is a building, it must have been built. If there is a pot, it must have been fired. If there is a book, it must have been written. But who wrote it? It’s certainly a copy. The number of original texts surviving from antiquity is minuscule. In most cases, the version we have will have been copied by a mediaeval ascetic hunched over a desk in a dingy monastery in Scotland. His version will have been copied out by a clergyman in France a few decades earlier. Sometimes the monk will sneeze, or his pen will slip, or he’ll spill his water on the page he’s reading. You see the difficulty here? Eventually there would have been an original manuscript penned by the author (now lost, of course). But why did he write it (in the cultures I study, it almost always is a ‘he,’ normally a rich, educated ‘he,’ which of course creates a whole slew of its own problems)? Does it represent how he saw the world? Or how he wanted others to see it? Do either of those things resemble the way the world actually was?
Herodotus was the first person in the Western world ever to write history for the sake of history. Or was he? The ancient Greeks, his audience, don’t seem to have drawn much of a distinction between ‘history’ and mythology – both are stories about the past that explain the present. Both Herodotus and Thucydides refer to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, along with other lesser-known poems, as though they represent fairly authoritative records of past events. The Iliad is the story of a great war, the war against Troy – and so are Herodotus’ Histories, which tell the story of the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Achaemenid Empire, roughly a generation before Herodotus’ time. We see them as different, because we think of the Persian Wars as something fixed, something that really happened, and the Trojan War as something vague and insubstantial, something that might have happened, but probably not exactly as Homer tells it. But did Herodotus? He definitely seems to recognise he’s doing something different – if he didn’t, surely he would have written an epic poem, rather than prose. The only other major prose genre of this era, incidentally, is philosophy, which seems like it might say something interesting about what Herodotus thought he was doing. He calls his work ἱστοριαι (historiai) – ‘inquiries’ or ‘researches’ – this is where our word ‘history’ comes from. He says more than once that he writes down everything he hears, whether he believes it or not, allowing his readers to make up their own minds – he just inquires, and writes down his findings. For heaven’s sake, at one point he tells a story about the giant ants that live in India building their nests out of golden sand. So where does that leave us? Clearly someone told him about the giant ants and, having never been to India, he didn’t know whether it was true or not, so he wrote it down for us to decide. Was he doing something similar when he wrote about the Persian Wars, which we now treat as historical fact? If so, it seems to have worked – archaeology has repeatedly backed him up on many important details. The closer he is to Athens, the more accurate he seems to be – but what do we do when he’s using second- third- or fourth-hand information about something that happened two hundred years earlier, like the tyranny of the Cypselids at Corinth (for which he is also our major source)?
Then there’s Herodotus’ successor, Thucydides, who wrote about the war between Athens and Sparta at the end of the fifth century BC. People think Thucydides is a ‘better’ historian than Herodotus, because he’s critical of his evidence; he weighs up the facts available to them, and he judges which interpretation is more likely to be correct, while Herodotus just uncritically writes down everything. The trouble is that Thucydides is also very interested in causes and patterns in history. He tells us that Athens lost the war (or rather, couldn’t win the war – he died before it actually ended) because, when their visionary statesman Pericles died in a plague, no-one stepped forward to replace him as the strong ‘guiding hand’ of the democracy (or at least, no-one half as good as Pericles was), leading to an indecisive mob rule that crippled the city’s ability to plan long-term strategies. They could fight the war, but they couldn’t end it. Because Thucydides tells us these things, this is the ‘standard’ interpretation of the Peloponnesian War, which is taught to first-year students. But what if Thucydides wasn’t as impartial a writer as many believe? What if, by choosing to emphasise certain factors and downplay others, he’s trying to persuade his readers to accept his own political views? Let us not forget that Thucydides himself was an Athenian general, exiled for his failure to defend the city of Amphipolis from a Spartan attack (in no small part because the Assembly refused to send him reinforcements). Could he maybe have an axe to grind?
People think history is about memorising facts, names, and dates, and it’s not. It’s really not. It’s about realising that there are no facts anymore. There is only the book. It was written. Events occurred that caused it to be written.
That’s what history is.
