Memories of the Ancient World

Thucydides 

Herodotus

          Both Thucydides and Herodotus are active agents in the writing of their histories. Even if they had the intention to present the past exactly as it was, they are recording their memories of the past appended with the collected memories of others. What is remembered and what is forgotten in their histories is directly tied to who they are and how they understood events.

          The style of narratives and the overall form of their works differed because of the two authors' goals, and the temporal distance from themselves and the objects of their study. Both are working with memories—their own, and those of others. Herodotus sets out to record the events of the Persian War explicitly as a memory project, to stop the natural tendency where oral histories are forgotten in time.¹ Thucydides, having started his work convinced that the Peloponnesian War would be the most important conflict in history (up to his own time), began recording his understanding of the events as soon as it began.²

          Although they were contemporaries, they studied two different times, Herodotus looking to the generation before his own and Thucydides recording the events of his own era, which only changes their object of study and not their methods. Herodotus states that his goal in writing is to transmit his own research about the superlative deeds of those involved in the Persian War.³ This suggests two important things, he already knew the stories he intended to relate, and from that, he had already assigned meaning to the memories. Thucydides, on the other hand, was writing while the events were happening. Perhaps some time had passed between the actual events, and his final text, as even in his opening he writes of the beginning of the war as if it were long enough behind him that he could properly judge the scope as being greater than any known by the Hellenes.⁴ He calls his own work “conclusions” he drew from his own experiences and accounts from other people that he tested “by the most severe and detailed” methods.⁵ This suggests that by the time of his writing, there were at least two degrees of separation between the events and the work: by the selection of events remembered by the collectives (including himself), and by his active analysis. The two step process of either witnessing events first-hand or hearing a report of a memory, and then analyzing the report to draw conclusions causes him to attach meanings to the memories.

          One major difference between the two writers is how they handle discourse in their narratives. Thucydides admits that, due to the difficulties of remembering exact wording, he invented speeches, which seemed to him to be necessary given events.⁶ Because of this, discourse in his work has to be viewed as a literary device that he uses to explain decisions, but not as faithful representations of the past. Herodotus records spoken words as if they were part of the narratives that he learned. In specific types of speech, the level of detail and the nature of the communication makes it seem more likely to be true, like when he records the oracular message to Croesus, which was given in hexameter.⁷ If Thucydides is correct that it is “in all cases difficult to carry them [speeches] word for word in one's memory,” then direct quotations in Herodotus are suspect except that they had become part of the stories that he records.⁸ One telling point where discourse drives Herodotus' narrative, but could not have been known to him except that it became part of the story other people (the Persians, in their own account) told to him was the instructions Xerxes (and later Artabanus) was given by a vision in a dream.⁹

          Events that happen in dreams don't leave the types of evidence that battles do, but they are similar to speeches that are difficult to remember. When the events seem to have an important meaning to the collectives that receive them, they gain a meaning and can leave traces. Herodotus recorded them because they provided a justification for Xerxes' actions; Thucydides invented speeches of the Greeks for the same reason. The words of the speeches do not seem to be as important as the meaning the people gave to them.¹⁰

          The meanings attached to a particular set of events shape how both authors present the narratives, and the very structure of their accounts. When the Athenians captured Mytilene, after they had revolted with Spartan help, Athenians vote to execute all the Mytilenian men.¹¹ Before the sentence can be carried out, the Athenians reopen the debate, and decide to spare the town from their rash decision.¹² Immediately after that account, Thucydides describes a similar situation where Sparta receives the surrender of Plataea. Instead of a scene of high drama with two ships racing to a condemned town, one bearing the order to execute and the other the order to spare, he states that the Spartans sent five judges to hold a kangaroo court where the long-standing enemies of Plataea, the Thebans, were allowed to make denouncements against them, and, on that alone, the Spartans killed at least 200 men, enslaved the women, and destroyed the city.¹³ The proximity in the narratives and the similarity of the accounts indicate that Thucydides intended them to be read together, that they showed a contrast between Sparta and Athens. The emotive nature of the Mytilenian affair makes the Athenians seem enlightened, but the Plataean affair makes the Spartans seem underhanded. Four years later when Mende revolted against Athens, Thucydides recounts no long debates about their fate, but merely states that the Mendaens opened their gates under no terms, the town was sacked, the generals were unable to prevent a massacre, those that lived were granted their civil rights, and instructed to “themselves judge the supposed authors of the revolt”.¹⁴ No other revolt seems to get Thucydides' attention as the two former, suggesting that the Mytilenian / Plataean contrast was meaningful because of the Athenian / Spartan contrast.

          The collective memories that Herodotus found meaningful were anchored at specific sites of memory. Plataea also appears in Herodotus' account as the site of a conversation between Lampon of Aegina and Pausanias of Sparta following the Greek victory there.¹⁵ Lampon urges Pausanias to desecrate the body of Mardonios as revenge for the desecration of Leonidas' body, but Pausanias scorns him for the suggestion, and orders the spoils to be collected and portions sent to Delphi and Olympia.¹⁶ Delphi is Herodotus' main site of memory, having a large collection of relics donated as offerings to the gods. The underlying thread of his account almost always runs through Delphi. His narrative of Croesus contains many references to such donations at many temples, but Delphi Herodotus personally visited.¹⁷ Even Xerxes knew about the donations of Croesus at Delphi, according to what Herodotus had heard in relation to a group of Persians sent to plunder the temple.¹⁸ This account shows that a collective that Herodotus engages with structured their stories around Delphi, even explaining Xerxes interest in the temple in part by Croesus' donations. The physical space and items located there are as much characters for Herodotus as the people.¹⁹

1 Herodotus, Proem.
2 Thucydides, 1.1.

3 Herodotus, Proem.

4 Thucydides, 1.1.

5 Thucydides, 1.21-2.

6 Thucydides, 1.22.

7 Herodotus, 1.65.

8 Thucydides, 1.22.

9 Herodotus, 7.13-8.

10 In Herodotus it was the people telling their stories to him, in Thucydides it was his own understanding of a meaning that seemed necessary.

11 Thucydides, 3.36.

12 Thucydides, 3.36-49.

13 Thucydides, 3.51-68

14 Thucydides, 4.123-130.

15 Herodotus, 9.78-79.

16 Herodotus, 9.80-1.

17 Herodotus, 1.92.

18 Herodotus, 8.35.

19 Herodotus, 8.37.

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photograph of the bust of Thucydides taken by Wikimedia Commons user Captmondo, and published in the Public Domain.
Photograph of the bust of Herodotos taken by Marie-Lan Nguyen, and published under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Photograph of the black-body ceramic depicting a Greek and Persian duel uploaded by Wikimedia Commons user Alexikoua, and published in the Public Domain.
Depiction of Xerxes uploaded by Wikimedia Commons user Hannah, and published under the Public Domain.
Greece location map base maintained by Wikimedia Commons users Lencer and Pitichnaccio, and published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, with the names and approximate locations of the cities added by me for illustrative purposes only.