Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose

Chapter One. The Intellectual Context

chapter one The Intellectual Context
he beginning of the fourth century b.c. coincided with an era of T change in many aspects of the Greek world. The generation-long Peloponnesian War ended with the fall of Athens, but so weakened its belligerents that no single Greek city-state was able thereafter to claim hegemony for long. Autocrats seeking power beyond the borders of their home city-states began to play an increasing role in Greek politics, a fact that was naturally reflected in contemporary prose works. The rise of the sophists and the development of professional rhetoric by the end of the fifth century had a substantial effect upon the writing of prose but also led to various responses from Athenian intellectuals. Two of these were Socrates and Isocrates, whose reactions to the intellectual climate of their time consisted of the development and propagation of moral virtues in very different ways. As I shall argue, their influence in turn contributed to the use of the past to illustrate moral exempla in certain fourth-century prose works. Finally, the birth and flowering of historical writing during the fifth century made it a logical instrument, by the beginning of the fourth century , for the dissemination of the moral virtues considered important to its intended audience, the literate elite. Nevertheless, the infusion of a moral agenda into historical writing during the fourth century was not entirely without precedent in the fifth. 5 6 lessons from the past There are certainly some signs of moralizing in the two great fifth-century historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, although the moral paradigm was not the main focus of their histories. The stated purpose of Herodotus’s history, given in his opening sentence, is the commemoration of great and wondrous deeds of the past. He does include a didactic element in his Histories, but it is not a simplistic illustration that virtue is rewarded while vice is punished. For Herodotus, there exists a certain balance in the universe maintained by divine providence (3.108–9).1 The natural ebb and flow of human affairs is played out in Herodotus’s Histories by the cycle of the rise and fall of empires.2 On an individual level, those who are guilty of offenses against the gods (therefore upsetting the proper order of the universe), whether voluntarily or involuntarily, do not prosper, although Herodotus does not always lend authorial approval to the direct intervention of the divine in human affairs and often qualifies such reports with a parenthetical remark or the offering of several alternative explanations, or distances them from his narrative by attributing them to someone else (in either oratio recta or obliqua).3 Yet, to maintain balance the divine also sometimes brings misfortune even to those who have not necessarily committed a crime (although usually there is a concomitant offense) but who are facing the consequences of a choice made generations earlier (the most obvious example is Croesus, who must expiate the crime of his ancestor Gyges) or who are fated to fulfill their destined lot (as in, e.g., the case of Mycerinus at 2.133, whose personal virtue is contrary to the proper order of the universe).4 In spite of the element of destiny, however, the fates of the major historical personages in the Histories are as much due to their lack of understanding of the relevant 1. For the concept of balance in Herodotus, see Henry R. Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus, Philological Monographs, no. 23 (Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1966), 152 and n. 8, 172, and 312–13. 2. See F. Solmsen, Two Crucial Decisions in Herodotus (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974). On imperialism and its consequences in Herodotus, see J. A. S. Evans, “The Imperialist Impulse,” in Herodotus, Explorer of the Past: Three Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 9–40. 3. Juxtaposition of crime and punishment with no authorial endorsement: 2.111, 5.72.3–4, 5.102.1, 6.19.3, 6.138–40, 9.116–21. Authorial endorsement of divine action in human affairs: 1.119–20, 2.120, 6.91, 7.137.2, 8.129.3, 9.56.2, 9.100.2. Parenthetical remarks: 1.34.1, 8.37.2. Alternative explanations: 6.75–84. Attribution to another: 1.159.3, 3.30, 6.86α–δ, 6.134. For Herodotus’s caution in matters of divine action, see John Gould, “Herodotus and Religion,” in Greek Historiography, ed. Simon Hornblower (Oxford: Clarendon , 1994), 91–106. 4. On...