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Representations 74 (Spring 2001)
David Hume wrote,
“the first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real
history. All preceding narrations are so intermixed with fable, that
philosophers ought to abandon them, in a great measure, to the embellishment of
poets and orators.” It is a familiar judgment, but what exactly does it mean?
. . .
The style that
Thucydides self-consciously adopted differs markedly from that of, in
particular, Herodotus, and in more than one way it contributes to the effect
that he aimed to give, of simply telling the truth. It is widely agreed that
there was a significant shift in outlook between the two writers, and, further,
that it was connected with the fact that Thucydides was firmly located within
literate culture, while Herodotus was in “the situation that results when
literacy first becomes an important tool in a still essentially oral society.”
However, there is much less agreement, or clarity, about what this shift
involved or how it may be best described. I am going to suggest that underlying
these differences is a fundamental shift in outlook from what may be called a
“local” conception of the past to an “objective” conception of it, and that
this was, most basically, a shift in conceptions of what it is to tell the
truth about the past. My aim is not to add to the extensive literature about
the relations of orality to written history, but to offer an account of the
shift that we can detect in this particular case, an account that will link
time, truth, and causal explanation.
. . .
If it is said that
Minos was a legendary or mythical figure, then Thycydides will say that you may
of course tell a story about him, but you cannot tell that story in just the
same way you assert what happened yesterday; the story is a myth or legend, and
if you merely assert it, you assert something untrue. Thucydides, unlike
Herodotus, understood this perfectly well, and unless someone earlier than either
of them had the same thoughts, which is unlikely, we can say that in coming to
understand it Thucydides invented historical time.
Historical time
provides a rigid and determinate structure for the past. Of any two real events
in the past, it must be the case either that one of them happened before the
other or that they happened at the same time. This does not hold for the
mythical, or, more generally, for the fictional or the imagined. Just as there
is no answer to the question of how many children Lady Macbeth had (and yet it
is not correct, either, to say that she is a Shakespearean character with a
vicious temperament and an indeterminate number of children), so, of many
events in myth or legend, there is nothing to be said about when they are
supposed to have happened. For this reason, there is an intimate relation
between historical time and the idea of historical truth. To say that a
statement about an event is historically true is to imply that it is
determinately located in the temporal structure; if it is not, historical time
leaves it nowhere to go, except out of history altogether, into myth, or into
mere error.
When someone—I
think it was Thucydides—for the first time worked clear-headedly and
confidently within this outlook, it was not that he introduced a new definition
or theory of truth. In the first instance what he did, as I have already
suggested, was to insist that one should put just the same questions to stories
about the remoter past as people put in everyday life to stories about the immediate
past: Is it true? Is it just a story? Everybody everywhere already has a
concept of truth; indeed, in a certain sense, they all have the same concept of
truth. (The fact that they may have very different theories of truth just shows
how much people’s theories of truth misrepresent their grasp of the concept.)
However, they do not all have the same ways of applying the concept of truth to
the past, or at least to the remoter past: to the extent that they do not, we
may say that while everyone everywhere has some concept of the past, they do
not all have the same concept of the past. Thucydides imposed a new conception
of the past, by insisting that people should extend to the remoter past a
practice they already had in relation to the immediate past, of treating what
was said about it as, seriously, true or false.
I have called this
shift from a “local” to an “objective” view of the past. This is still a view of
the past: it is not a question of stepping outside the past-present-future
series altogether and thinking only in terms of one event’s being (timelessly)
before or after another. The point is that when we have the objective view, we
do not think only in terms of the past; we can think also of our
past, not in the sense of our own life, but in the sense of what is past
relative to us, or to now. We become conscious of our being, in temporal terms,
some people among others, and with this comes the idea that some of our past
was other people’s present, that our present was other people’s future, and so
on: in particular, that what for us, now, is the remote past, for past people
was the recent past or the present. Given this idea, that however long ago a
day of human life may have been, it must have been somebody else’s today, it
has to be recognized that one cannot implicitly treat the remoter past as a
peculiar area in which indeterminate happenings and people could exist. If one
can say only indeterminate things about them, then that is a matter of our
relation to them. Either there was no time at which they existed, so they did
not exist at all, and are mere stories; or they were real, and as determinate
in their time as similar things are in ours, and we simply do not know enough
about them.
This is the
metaphysical substance, so to speak, of the change from the local to the
objective view of the past. But of course it did not announce itself in those
terms, as a metaphysical discovery. It was expressed, rather, in a change in
people’s practice (indeed, unless it were expressed in that way, there would be
nothing to possess metaphysical substance.) So what was involved in this new
practice? Here it is essential that there is more to it than merely a change in
the way people talk. It is not just that they now use words translatable as
“true” and “false” of statements about the remoter past, including stories
about the gods. They did that before. What matters is the force of such words,
what turns on saying “true” rather than “false.” Moreover, it cannot merely be
that after this development there will be two styles of narration about the
past: that in some cases people just come out with stories about the past, as
they come out with other things that they intend to assert, but in other cases
they bracket their narration with some disclaiming formula suitable to myth,
such as that natural legacy from the Herodotean world, “once upon a time.” They
may well come to do this, but these distinctions among speech-acts are not
self-sufficient: both we and they need to know what turns on telling stories in
these different modes, how the social consequences differ. What
responsibilities does one take on by telling a tale in what, at this stage, we
may call the mode of truth rather than in the mode of myth?
Those
responsibilities are entirely clear to Thucydides. In the famous two chapters
near the beginning of his book in which he declares his methods (1.21–22, the
so-called preface), in Greek that is characteristically knotted and unlovely,
he uses the notion of the “mythical” (to muthôdes). He contrasts the
account he has already given of earlier times with those given by poets, and
also with those of the so-called logographers (who are often thought to include
Herodotus), “who, aiming more at attracting their audience than getting at the
truth, have put their accounts together from materials which cannot be checked
and which, in many cases, owing to the distance in time, command no belief and
are consigned to the status of myth” (21.1). What this implies comes out in the
next chapter (22.4), where he says of his own account that the fact that the
mythical is absent from it may make it seem less pleasant to a listener, but
that it will be good enough if it is of interest to people who want to have a
clear view of these events. And in the unforgettable words that have indeed
made themselves true: “It has been composed not as a competition piece for the
moment, but as a possession for ever.”
These sentences do
not just offer a comment on his style and a boast about his purposes. They help
us to understand what the mythical is. A myth, or at least a Greek myth, is,
among many other things, a good story, one that can entertain, warn, remind,
strike home. This does not mean that the subject matter of every myth is
pleasant, or that every true story is about something unpleasant: not even
Thucydides thought that. But it implies that in the mode of myth, the question
whether the story should be told is just the question whether the story is
appropriately directed to its audience, whether, as I put it before, it will
suit them. Truth, as I said earlier, is a different matter, and in the mode of
truth, there are always two questions possible about whether the story should
be told: in the practice of the logographers, Thucydides says, you could not
count on there being more than one.
Truth is not
audience-relative. In particular, the truth of a statement has nothing to do
with whether a given audience will be pleased to hear it. This is a special
case of something that everyone implicitly and pretheoretically understands
about truth (even if their behavior, quite often, does not make this very
obvious). Everywhere there are wishes, and among them unfulfilled wishes; it is
the pathos of the unfulfilled wish, in fact, that makes wishes obvious, and it
registers the gap between wishes and truth. Just because the gap can be so
painful, true belief has to be protected against subversion by the wish, and
this is why the virtues of truth typically include defences against the
pleasure principle, whether it is a matter of finding out the truth, and the
protection is against such things as laziness and self-deception, or one is
concerned, as we are at this point, with the announcement or rehearsal of the
truth, and the defences must be against such things as cowardice, ambition, and
the desire to be loved. The fact that Thucydides starts his history in such
terms represents one way in which he gave substance to the distinction between
the mode of myth and the mode of truth. It is entirely appropriate, too, that
he sees the virtues of truth as also political, and that later in his history
he condemns the leaders of the Athenian democracy because they, unlike
Pericles, spoke to please the crowd. There is a connection here, too, with the
uses of literacy. When the Athenian general Nicias needed to communicate his
situation to the Athenians, Thucydides says,
Because he was
afraid that the men he sent might not report the facts, either through lack of
ability in speaking, or bad memory, or because they might say something to
please the crowd, he wrote a letter, thinking that in this way the Athenians
would come to know his view without its being at all lost in the course of
transmission, and so would be able to deliberate about the truth of the matter.
There is a second
way in which Thucydides does not just announce, but enforces, a difference
between the mode of myth and the mode of truth, and in doing so makes clear the
kind of responsibility that the mode of truth brings with it. If someone is
going to be taken seriously, by himself as much as by others, as wanting to
tell the truth about the past, he has to have some reason to believe that a
certain thing happened rather than not. He will have such a reason only if it
makes sense, in terms of the evidence he has and the other things he believes about
the past, that it should have happened. But there is no way in which it can
make sense unless, at some level of generality, that sort of thing makes
sense. If we are to place events in the framework of the past, on the strength
of present evidence, then we must be able to relate them to each other and to
ourselves in terms that make them intelligible. Indeed, this is implicit to
some extent in the use of general terms over different times: if we say that
there was in past time a battle, or a king giving orders, or a fleet, then what
we believe to have happened to people then must resemble in relevant and
intelligible respects the way things are if such things exist among us. In
virtue of that, we can, often, explain them; and if we cannot explain them, then
at least we have to explain why certain evidence exists, and why it gives us
reason to think that this inexplicable thing happened. This general requirement
is interpreted in very different ways by various historians and in different
styles of history, but the fact that there is some such requirement follows
simply from two substantive demands on telling a story about the past in the
mode of truth. They are demands that are entirely transparent in themselves
and, yet again, they are familiar to everyone everywhere with regard to
statements about the recent past: you cannot just make the story up, and it is
not necessarily a good enough reason for telling it that someone else has told
it.
Thucydides himself
interprets the explanatory requirement in a very strong way. In the chapters
about the earliest times, he addresses the most famous of all Greek stories,
the Iliad, and makes some hardheaded military, economic, and
geopolitical assessments of what must have gone on in the Trojan War.
. . .
I have suggested
that in the transition from Herodotus to Thucydides, at a certain point in the
fifth century B.C., one can see a significant change take place: the invention
of historical time. In trying to give an account of that moment, I have helped
myself to a range of philosophical materials. But such a study shows, I hope,
that history can give something to philosophy. In particular, it may help one
to understand something that philosophers sometimes find it hard to believe,
that human beings can live without the idea of historical time. But, equally,
it may remind cultural relativists that there are reasons why such an idea
should emerge, and that when developments such as literacy have occurred, and
when a certain number of questions have been asked, it becomes inevitable that
human beings should, in this respect, come to see the world as Thucydides saw
it.
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