Historical Agency and the “Great Man” in Classical Greece by Sarah Brown Ferrario (review)

This book is the successful transformation of the dissertation that Sarah Ferrario submitted as a graduate student to the Department of Classics at Princeton University as part of her doctoral degree requirements in 2006, and as such is more suited for an audience of specialists than it is for undergraduates or the general reader. That said, the book, in spite of a title that seems to assure severity in subject matter, presents a lively and readable narrative. The clear prose of the text, structured in nine chapters and then into various sections, has been carefully prepared verbatim ac literatim. And since the notes have been placed at the bottom of each page, the reader, saved thereby from fanning the pages to and fro in order to follow the lines of subordinated arguments, can focus more easily upon major points of the author’s thought.

The narrative, beginning with the time of the Tyrannicides and moving to the Hellenistic era, has been shaped for one purpose, namely to show the reader how victories at places such as Marathon or Salamis, traditionally deemed to have been won by the collective effort of a demos or other unified group such as the Marathonomachoi, came to be seen as the singular achievements of outstanding individual persons such as Miltiades, Callimachus, or Themistocles. Ferrario wants us to think with her through the problem of “who ultimately create[d] the history of Athens, the group or the individual,” and to see what can be said about the “perception of historical agency” in Athens (2).

To do this, the author has drawn upon a wide range of literary, historical, and epigraphical materials, including a study of the patrios nomos, epitaphs from private graves, lekythoi, stelae and the like, as well as inscriptions on public monuments and from the designs of coins. With this evidence Ferrario traces forward the “development of the eminent individual in Greek thought” over time up to the “remarkable reception of Alexander” which was “deeply rooted in well over a century of ancient Greek experience and imagination” (4–5). The author wants us to understand that “Alexander’s self-presentation and reception” were “the culmination of evolving individual centered theories of history,” and that “the long gestation of these ideas” helped “to account for the unique vitality” of his “impact and legacy,” as well as his “polyvalence,” which “surpassed all known predecessors” (17; 354).

With the passing of centuries, self-reflective “history making decrees” (such as the so-called Themistocles decree) “might actually be retrojected (at least verbally if not physically) for politically motivated redeployment.” Thus acknowledging the development of this “important feedback loop,” we, following Ferrario’s argument, may conclude that “as history begets inscriptions (and monuments), so may such memorials beget history” (348). The culmination of the “great man” concept in this period was Alexander. Social and political elites from later times followed his example, and they have left us well familiar with, and deeply entangled in, a seemingly endless diachronic loop of the same sort of rhetorically self-reflective and self-commemorative actions that Ferrario has found in the history of classical Greece.