The Earliest States of Eastern Europe
DG-2013, 168-202

“In the first circle”: The emergence of the most ancient pieces of European historiography (Greece, the sixth–fifth centuries B.C.)

I. E. Surikov

 

Historical consciousness of Ancient Greeks was characterized by cyclism – the view of history’s movement “by cycle”, of “eternal return”. Surely, this thesis is not absolute: a cyclist understanding of the society’s development was coped and interconnected with a linear one, which manifested itself in progressist or (more often) regressist conceptions. To be strict, historiography as such emerges in Hellas in some sense at the joint of cyclist and linear views.

The article deals with the Archaic Ionian historiographical tradition that included the group of historians usually labeled in modern scholarly literature as “logographers” as well as Herodotus. Besides, it is time to give up the custom of calling the most ancient (pre-Herodotean) Hellenic historians “logographers”, as is it inadequate and unfounded.

Herodotus and his predecessors still belong to the “pre-rhetorical” historiography. But the Greek historian immediately following them, Thucydides, was already under strong influence of rhetoric.

Already at the very dawn of Ancient Greek historiography one meets diversity of its genres and styles. We see both rather dried-up lists (as a rule, of genealogical character) and early-emerged large-scale narratives (from Hecataeus on), even with excurses of quite a novelistic character. But all such texts have a manifest imprint of research, investigation.

For the first time in the Greek world history becomes a subject of intelligent reflection. Historiography appears among the Greeks from the beginning as an investigation rather than trivial description of events. And, of course, because of the very same reason Hellenic historiography immediately after its birth reaches colossal heights. As to the development of reflection among the Greeks, which we have noted and which conditioned emergence of historical thought (as well as philosophical, scientific, aesthetical thought, etc.), it was conditioned, in its turn, among other factors, by political evolution and by the emergence of the polis phenomenon. Greek poleis were – there small size notwithstanding – political units strikingly developed and complicated, by the standards of the Ancient World.

Keywords:
historiography, classical antiquity, Archaic and Early Classical Greece, polis, “logographers”, Herodotus, Thucydides
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