The traditions of the eastern Greeks are far closer in form to the Delphic stories than to the aristocratic traditions of the mainland. For here too there is very little evidence of deformation due to particular political groups; yet even in quite recent history there are clear signs of recurrent patterns, folk motifs, and distortion for moral purposes. Thus the story of the tyranny of Polykrates of Samos as late as the second half of the sixth century could be transformed into a folk-tale, and the account of the Ionian revolt in the early fifth century contains many popular elements. At first sight this is surprising, for Herodotus was closer to events in the Greek east than on the mainland; he had for instance spent his youth on Samos only a generation after the death of Polykrates, and must have known many of those who fought in the great revolt; yet his east Greek history is in fact less reliable than his history of the mainland.
This curious characteristic of the east Greek tradition is related to the overall pattern of his work: it too is a moral story, of the pride of Persia, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks. Once more the gods punish those whose prosperity passes human limits; and the framework in which this happens is a framework designed to recall to the listener the steps by which the gods achieve their ends – the deeds of pride, the warnings disregarded, the dreams misinterpreted and false ones sent to deceive. This overall pattern has been imposed by Herodotus on his material, and its consonance with the pattern of east Greek stories suggests an interesting conclusion. Behind the preservation of the past in Ionia lies a moralizing tradition of story-telling found in mainland Greece only at Delphi, a tradition of which Herodotus is himself a representative: just as the Homeric poems are the culmination of the activity of generations of professional bards, so Herodotus the logos-writer has ‘collected together’ (to use Thucydides’ description) the results of an oral prose tradition, of folk stories told perhaps by professional or semi-professional ‘logos-makers’ in Delphi and the cities of Ionia. And he himself is the last and greatest of these logos-makers, weaving together the stories with all the skill of a traditional artist into a prose epic, whose form mirrors the form of its components. That this form is traditional and not of his own making is shown by its absence from the mainland Greek tradition: if he had been deliberately and consciously imposing a new pattern, he would surely have made this material conform to it; yet the comparative absence of moralizing folk-tale motifs in the stories of obvious mainland folk heroes like Kleomenes, Themistokles and others is remarkable.
Herodotus’ Athenian contemporaries scarcely understood the Ionian tradition within which he worked: they found his methods and his attitudes curiously old-fashioned. Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnions (lines 509–39) produced a brilliant and unfair parody of Herodotus’ conception of the causes of the Persian Wars; Thucydides’ whole methodology was based on a rejection of the techniques of Herodotus: he failed to see the nature of Herodotus’ achievement because he was writing a very different type of history – contemporary history.
Within the realm of observation Herodotus was faced with the same problem as modern ethnographers and anthropologists. We may describe alien cultures in terms of some model, whether it is a typological or ‘historical’ model, or a theory of the fundamental structure of all human societies; or we may less consciously describe a society in relation to our own. Herodotus attempted the latter, and his descriptions are often unbalanced by a search for comparisons and contrasts. He notices especially the similarities and the oppositions between Greeks and barbarians; he also (and here perhaps the entertainer is most apparent) has a keen eye for marvels and strange customs. Such an attitude can produce an unbalanced picture, as when he says ‘the Egyptians in most of their manners and customs exactly reverse the ordinary practices of mankind’ (Herodotus 2.35); but it is a less insidious fault than the imposition of a single conceptual scheme on the manifold variety of human societies. Herodotus remains not only the first practitioner of oral history, but also a model for a type of history whose importance is greater today than ever before.
Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, composed in Athens and in exile during and just after the war (432–04), contains a number of digressions on past history, which are mostly designed to correct or expose the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries; even when they show little sympathy for the problems of discovering about the past, they are written with care, using either rigorous argument or documentary evidence. In particular the first twenty-one chapters of book 1 are an attempt to demonstrate the type of historical generalization that can safely be made about the past; they represent a minimalist attitude to what can be known, and an implicit rejection of Herodotus’ attempt at more detailed history.
Thucydides pointed out many of the weaknesses of past history composed from oral tradition, but he failed to offer any serious alternative; it was his contemporaries who made the next major advance, by turning from general history to local history. A later critic described them:
These men made similar choices about the selection of their subjects, and their powers were not so very different from one another, some of them writing histories about the Greeks and some about the barbarians, and not linking all these to one another but dividing them according to peoples and cities, and writing about them separately, all keeping to one and the same aim: whatever oral traditions were preserved locally among peoples or cities, and whatever documents were stored in holy places or archives, to bring these to the common notice of everyone just as they were received, neither adding to them nor subtracting from them.
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides 5)
Whatever the aim of such writers, this is a somewhat favourable account of their actual achievement; still the discovery of local archives added a new dimension to the history of the past in at least one respect. The records surviving in local archives were primarily of chronological interest – lists of priests, victors at the games, and annual magistrates.
About the end of the fifth century the sophist and antiquarian lecturer Hippias of Elis published the Olympic victor list, which took chronology back to 776 in a four-year cycle: his system of Olympiad dating became standard for later historians. Another writer, Hellanikos of Lesbos, published a whole series of local histories in the late fifth century, whose character can be seen from two examples. The Priestesses of Hera at Argos was based on the records of the famous temple of Hera, which it apparently used to provide a general chronological framework for early Greek history: presumably the Argive records preserved not only the names of priestesses but also the length of office of each of them, and perhaps even some major historical events during their terms. Hellanikos’ other important work was a local history of Attica. It was almost certainly arranged round the list of annual magistrates going back to 683/2, of which a number of fragments on stone have been found in the Athenian agora. The fact that this complete list was publicly inscribed for the first time in the 420s, and not added to, suggests that it had probably been discovered by Hellanikos during his researches and brought by him to the attention of the Athenian people as an important historical document.
None of these works survive, but they were used by later authors, and in the case of Athens at least their characteristics are reasonably clear. They are marked by antiquarian interest in myth and origins, and by the importance they give to chronology; authors were often from priestly families (Kleidemos) or politicians (Androtion) or both (Philochoros). The influence of earlier local historians can be seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, a work which was discovered almost complete on a papyrus from Egypt in 1890. It is the only survivor of 158 constitutions of Greek states written