Polis Histories, Collective Memories and the Greek World by Rosalind Thomas (review)

With this volume, Rosalind Thomas introduces us to a massive set of ancient Greek writers who are almost entirely unknown to modern students and scholars: local Greek historians, "poorly understood or recognized" now, but forming a brand of writing that was "once popular and widely read" (386)—a type of historiography we should want to know more about. Thanks to Thomas's efforts, we are given a rare and precious glimpse into what was, for want of a better term, popular history in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods. The book is a triumph and will be required reading for those interested in ancient historical writing, and Hellenistic history and culture.

Thomas begins with a crucial distinction: her focus will not be local history, but polis history (16–17). She very rightly wonders what "local" means, since most of these histories are of city-states and their regions, or they are island-or ethnos-histories; "local" history and historians (typically ἐπι-/ἐγχώριος: e.g., D.H. Th. 5, Paus. 1.1.4; cf. Hdt. 7.197.1, Thuc. 1.20.1) were really only called that by others, since "local history" is not really local for the people concerned; it is an understanding of the history of their world, one that happens to be defined by their locality. Another reorientation that she makes is temporal. Thomas observes that while these historians can be found in the early days of Greek historiography, they really flourished in the fourth and third centuries BC. Superficially, this finding puts Thomas in line with Jacoby, but only superficially: unlike Jacoby, who argued that local history was a late development and one in reaction to Herodotus, Thomas sees local history as written in ways that were animated by the same concerns Herodotus had; she often sees the more generous ("baggier," 19), Herodotean scope of the work of the epichorioi than the supposed predominance of a Thucydidean view of the past, one that "included customs, geography, early traditions and more recent political history" (21).

The bulk of Thomas' volume consists of surveys of the different aspects or topics of polis- and island histories. Thomas does well to note how different city-states and regions developed distinct proclivities in how they understood their pasts: some histories were overtly political, others were focused on the cultural and religious; one set might tell the same story of the expulsion of a tyrant over and over again ("accumulative historiography") through a succession of writers, while another might acknowledge past stasis but ultimately emphasize the solidarity of a notional and almost timeless demos. Above all, Thomas wishes to stress that "the writing of local history . . . and particularly polis history . . . is almost always an activity that . . . is a reflection of something else in addition to a simple interest in place" (390). Forcefully rejecting the "antiquarian/ism" (e.g., 20, 143–149, 324, 340, 388 and n.3) promoted by Momigliano as the essential orientation of these histories, Thomas holds that polis-history always has a hidden (or not so hidden) agendum: "we have a right to this land," or "we originated this cult," or simply "we are still important" in an age when the people concerned were not, or some combination of these orientations and others.

Of course, one could take issue regarding some of the matters raised in the book. I am not sure if Thomas has succeeded completely in explaining a figure like Hellanicus and the problems of periodization that he poses (a contemporary of Herodotus and Thucydides, he sets the table for the later writers of Attic local history); and I wish she had more to say about Rome. But these are quibbles.

Thomas ends her book with an enormously important discussion of the "big picture" relating to local history. As regions and localities, real places but also places of the "imagination," they asserted both their uniqueness and importance through what they thought their past was. At the...