Some preliminaries

Logistics:

• Final exam: inclusion of the "primary" myths: I will create a list (later)
• Change of paper due date
• Electronic reserve: None: instead we'll use handouts
• No more key terms lists: you must digest the information for yourself

Where we are, where we're going

The "Rise of Rationalism"

• True in one sense, false in another:
• development of logos DOES NOT preclude mythos
• myth remains parallel, and ancillary, to developments in "rationalism" (logic, science)
• myth CONTINUES in many ways to inform much of what we consider un-mythic
• but the relationship between the mythic and the rational is often, fascinatingly, obvious in early rationalistic developments

Myth and History: who was Herodotus, what did he write?

• Herodotus: the Father of History, approx. 485-425 B.C.
• This first "history" comes, as it seems, out of nowhere
• Large scale: larger than Iliad, a Big Book in a time when Big Books didn't exist
• Scope of the history: the Persian Wars (480-479 B.C.): 6 of 9 books are "background": Croesus, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes

What is the nature of Herodotean narrative? What is he trying to accomplish? What are his methods? Let's look at some examples

• Proem: Io, Europa, Medea, Helen: so say the Persians, so say the Phoenicians (quite different from what the Greeks say!)
• Introduction of Croesus: "the first WITHIN MY OWN KNOWLEDGE" to inflict injury on the Greeks
• Story of Gyges: tisis, blood curse [Gyges a HISTORICAL king of the 7th c.; his sin will set off a chain of events that ends in disaster in the "fifth generation" after Gyges, as predicted by the Oracle]
• Other tales:
• Arion
• Atys and Adrastus (Adr. the instrument of the divine and overwhelmed by the divine; powerlessness of man in the face of a capricious divinity)
• Solon
• A great empire will fall: small to large, good fortune, hybris, tisis, blood curse, rejection of wise advisor, etc.

What is different about H's history? What is alike?

Discomfiting interest in myth, folktales, and the like; in oracles, dreams, the miraculous, divine causations; morals to draw

Fundamental interest in bringing understanding into the chaos of events by identifying the underlying, meaningful patterns

"Over-determined": Croesus falls because:

(1) military and strategic errors [physical]

(2) 5th generation from Gyges, the tisis (divine revenge) for the unjust deed [metaphysical #1]

(3) pattern of history repeated: small rises to great, good fortune leads to hybris, wise advisor is rejected, oracles are misinterpreted (a great kingdom will fall), reversal & overthrow of the great man [metaphysical #2]

Note: the physical causation is COMPLEMENTARY, not in conflict with, the metaphysical explanations (cf. myth as e.g. in Homer: a hero succeeds both because he is physically superior AND because a god helps him AND because it is fated to be)

Patterns of history part. significant: as Croesus, so the next eastern potentates: so Cyrus, then Darius, finally Xerxes. The unsuccessful attack of the "soft" Persians, with their king tainted by hybris, rejecting advice, misled by the oracles, against the "hard" Greeks becomes then simply the latest and greatest exemplication of the sort of overall causation that informs the historical

History not of particulars, but of universals.

Fundamental to history is the attempt to extract meaning from a series of events. For modern researchers, the meaning will often mean causation, that is, physical or psychological causation. But here too, though often not made explicit, there remains underneath history an attempt to understand the past in terms of the present.

To find history repeating itself, to seek these patterns, and to find MEANING in the fact of a repeated pattern, is very Herodotean. This is what gives history the aura of significant understanding that lends it validity as an intellectual pursuit.

Thucydides, the first "scientific" historian

• Thucydides lived roughly 455-400 B.C.
• Account of the Peloponnesian War, a great war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 B.C.)
• A contemporary account: Thucydides was a general in the war (later exiled), and could draw on many first hand accounts of recent events

In what ways is Thucydides' history different from that of Herodotus? In what sense a more "scientific" history?

Th. insists on different "scientific" standards, but the focus of his research is also the only area in which his standards could be met, for direct inquiry and systematic criticism were made possible by the fact that such recent events were involved.

His organization was extremely influential for subsequent history: an organization which differs from Her. in several essential respects

• chronology determines the basic sequence of events: use of dates
• a coherent structure (something to tie the events together) achieved by strong abstract conceptual framework (not by a sequence of stories!)
• contemporary history
• causation primarily physical and --especially!-- psychological (not metaphysical: no divine causation here)
• use of third person narrative: let the "facts" speak for themselves; the author disappears behind the objective flow of the narrative
• much left out: no oracles or legends (mythos); no descriptions that do not serve an explanatory purpose; no portraits of individuals. Nothing on domestic politics at Athens, nothing on the rifts between individuals or groups; nothing on social conditions. Bare circumstantial narrative: just the facts m'am: a scientific history
• use of speeches to inject "life" into the narrative, much as modern historians, mutatis mutandis (direct quotation, character sketches, and like rhetorical measures)

History: Universals from particulars

• Herodotus: tries to tie together the many stories by means of overarching patterns
• Thucydides: selecting events and writing up the debates so as to highlight the themes of the growth and corruption of Athenian power
• If history gives only particulars (events, facts) and no universals (=meaning, the story), is it history?