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Credulity and Historical Causation Where Does History Begin? To restate a fundamentally important principle: the Greeks regarded stories about their heroes as tantamount to early history. This principle has found general acceptance in modern scholarship.1 But an important implication of this premise warrants further investigation in the context of this study: the use of “history.” Its manipulation is recognizable to us today; in every election season, history seems to get rewritten. This state of affairs is even more pronounced when early history arises from myth, and myth for the Greeks was largely handed down in the form of tradition. Only a minority of Greeks subjected it to any sort of rational scrutiny. As a consequence, it was possible to make political use of myth not merely in terms of attaining prestige but in real, practical, and strategic terms. For example, a state like Phygela in Asia Minor might enhance its reputation by giving its local charter myth a Homeric context ; thus, the Phygelans claimed to be descended from Achaeans left behind by Agamemnon. From this accrued the more practical benefit of exchanging polity with Miletus around 300 Bce, a venture probably justified by a putative affiliation through Hellen, ancestor of Miletus’ founder and of Achaeus.2 Some measure of belief in the reality of mythological claims was required for diplomacy involving kinship myth to work. Given that necessity, for us there arises a difficulty in gauging (1) whether we are talking about the belief of analytical writers chronicling the diplomatic episode, the belief of the leadership of the states employing such diplomacy, or the belief of the general citizenry of those states and (2) the scope of the material deemed authentic: putting aside any more practical or material causes that may have been in play, did the diplomacy succeed because an entire tradition was accepted, or some local variation, oronlycertain elements, such as the less fantastical elements of the story of a famous founder like Heracles? Let us begin by hazarding a general premise, which we will qualify accordtwo 23 credULity and historicaL caUsation ingly in the course of this chapter. Carlo Brillante summarizes the situation that prevailed in the Greek world: [The Greeks] imagined their heroes as men who had actually lived, inhabiting the same cities and regions in which they themselves, several centuries later, continued to reside. Thus it is possible to affirm that the heroic world corresponded approximately in its geographical limits to the world of men. Nor was the temporal dimension in which the heroes acted verydifferent from that of humans. . . . According to the Greeks this was the most ancient “historical” period of the various ethne and of the single poleis.3 Such is the general impression we get from our written sources, especially the historians, philosophers, geographers, and biographers. Throughout the ancient corpus, we get a sense of a perceived continuity from the world of heroes to that of later (and lesser) humans, especially in such chronographical accounts as that of Eratosthenes (FGrH 241 F. 1a), who unabashedly linked the legendary with the historical: From the fall of Troy [c. 1180 Bce] to the return of the Heraclids, 80 years; from here to the colonization of the Ionians, 60 years; afterwards until the guardianship of Lycurgus, 159 years; to the first year of the Olympiads, 108 years; from this first Olympiad to the coming of Xerxes, 297 years; from here to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, 48 years; and to the end of the war and the Athenian defeat, 27 years; and to the battle of Leuctra, 34 years; from this time to the death of Philip, 35 years; and after this until the passing of Alexander, 12 years.4 Also significant is the Marmor Parium (FGrH 239), an inscription set up on Paros after 264 Bce, which begins with the ascension of Cecrops in Athens in 1581 Bce, gives the date of the capture of Troy as 1208, and continues on to 264. Even Hesiod’s “Five Ages of Man” maintains this continuityas the Heroic Age, the fourth in the list, leads directly to the Iron Age, the unhappy period of Hesiod and his contemporaries.5 Finally, there is the use of mythical deeds as a precedent for actions in the present. One notable example involved the arguments made by two contingents on the eve of the battle of Plataea in 479, who were asserting their right to be placed at one of the wings of the coalition army, the Spartans having...

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