Classical History between Epic and Rhetoric

Abstract

This chapter establishes the foundations on which the rest of the book is built since post-classical scholarship largely develops from classical models or is shaped by its reaction against those models. The chapter addresses a series of conceptual issues that have recurring relevance, including: differing conceptions of the nature of historical truth; the relationship between History and ethnography; the relationship between rhetoric and historianship; the relationship between philosophy, poetry, and History; and the relationship between ‘useful’ and ‘pleasurable’ Histories. In a more empirical vein the chapter discusses the relationship between Greek and Roman historianship and accounts for different tendencies in the development of historiography in each culture—tendencies like a greater or lesser interest in the outside world, and a greater or lesser interest in individuals as opposed to power structures or the study of society and culture. The question of the consciousness of qualitative historical change is also discussed in the case of a number of historians. In the 900 or so years of historianship covered in this chapter no rationale for History that is present at or near the outset was ruled out by the end, though of course many avenues of possibility were more fully explored. It is more than coincidence that the survey opens and closes with species of History as Identity, beginning with the most elementary type of that genre: genealogy.