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Herodotus and Oral History (I)
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It is generally agreed that Herodotus gathered most of his information from oral traditions. Even those who doubt this, accept that he sought to represent his sources as oral, whether he was inventing them(1) or describing them as oral when in fact they were written: “throughout the Histories Herodotus maintains the fiction that his work is an oral account, even where we know or surmise it to be based on written sources”.(2) Since it seems to me that a generalized view that Herodotus sought to misrepresent the nature of his sources raises more difficult problems than it solves,(3) I propose to ignore such approaches, and confine myself to investigating the consequences of the generally-accepted version of Herodotus’ sources. One consequence of this consensus has been to direct research on Herodotus away from source criticism in general, and towards questions centered on Herodotus as an author, his conception of history, his aims, and his literary techniques.(4) Neglect of the general problems of Herodotus’ sources was perhaps a virtue so long as the principles of Quellenforschung, suitable only to certain literary historians, were liable to be applied. But it appears somewhat odd in the present age, when the problems of oral history and the characteristics, general and individual, of oral traditions are so widely debated, among both contemporary local historians and various other groups for ‘radical history’,(5) and even more among anthropologists. Not surprisingly, such historians and anthropologists have felt the need to evaluate the reliability of one of their main sources of information. For outsiders, until recently the difficulty has been that the insights gained were scattered in the specialist literature, and often not easily detachable from their precise context. But two works of synthesis have made much easier the task I want to approach in this paper, that of comparing Herodotus’ treatment of Greek oral traditions with the characteristics of other oral traditions, in the hope of being able to clarify both the nature of Greek oral traditions and the contribution of Herodotus himself. Before confronting the problems of Herodotus’ accounts of non-Greek cultures, it seems to me important first to establish principles in the less uncertain area of Greek tradition; but the second part of my paper attempts to show how my results are directly relevant to Herodotus’ means of acquiring information on such cultures, by taking as an example his account of Persia.
The two modern works from which my investigation begins both stem from experience of African oral tradition, but it does not seem to me that this limitation has affected their relevance to early Greece; in fact one recompense for the extensive use I have made of them and their sources may be in confirming that their modes of approach are indeed more generally valid. The first and most obviously relevant of these works does itself claim to offer universal rules, although its author’s experience as an oral historian was at that time limited to the Congo; this is Jan Vansina’s Oral Tradition.(6) It offers a highly theoretical account of the various types of oral tradition and the problems of writing history from them; perhaps it is a sufficient indication of both its strengths and its weaknesses to say that it bears much the same relationship to the actual problems of oral history as Paul Maas’s Textual Criticism does to the problems of editing a real text. The second book may be compared with Pasquali’s response to Mass: it is Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa (1970), a critical survey of the characteristics and types of African oral literature in general, and the problems related to the understanding of this literature.(7) It is perhaps important to the historian that both these books are empirical in their method, and based on the work of field anthropologists: they neither demand interpretation within nor offer obvious support for more abstract anthropological theories. Of course, as with most firmly-based empirical studies, much of what they say leads to conclusions which may already seem obvious from study of the Greek evidence; but I hope that even the obvious and well-known facts of early Greek tradition will appear different in this wider context.
The last systematic attempt to confront this aspect of Herodotus with anthropology was W. Aly’s Volksmarchen, Sage und Novelle bei Herodot und seinen Zeitgenossen (1921; repr. With appendix Gottingen, 1969). As is natural in a work of that date, Aly was primarily concerned with the methods and compilations of the folklorists; and many of his conclusions are so extreme that (despite Ludwig Huber’s claims for its central position in modern Herodotus research)(8) the work has in fact been generally rejected, or passed over as of specialist interest only: in Kurt von Fritz’s Griechische Geschichtsschreibung (1967), for instance, it is referred to only in the notes and then only for folk motifs. Some of the conclusions of this paper in fact bear a considerable resemblance to ideas of Aly-for instance, his distinction between histoire and logos is related to the two types of tradition I have postulated; and he too laid emphasis on the artistic continuity between Herodotus’ source material and his own methods.
With some obvious exceptions (notably Arnaldo Momigliano in his various papers), more recent writers on classical historiography have been less than sympathetic to oral tradition. Moses Finley takes a truly Thucydidean stance, both in the generalities of his Early Greece (1970; 2nd edn. 1981) and in his paper on ‘Myth, Memory and History’, where he states:
“Wherever tradition can be studied among living people, the evidence is not only that it does not exist apart from a connection with a practice or a belief, but also that other kinds of memory, irrelevant memories, so to speak, are short-lived, going back to the third generation, to the grandfather’s generation, and, with the rarest of exceptions, no further. That is true even of genealogies, unless they are recorder in writing.”(9)
At this point Finley cites the problems Homeric heroes have in remembering beyond their grandfathers; it might be more relevant to cite real, not literary, examples such as Hecataeus’ sixteen generations to a god, or Heropythus of Chios’ fourteen ancestors,(10) both of whom take us back into the tenth century.
Vansina’s conclusions are rather different: talking of work since 1961, he says: ‘The last decade has shown that oral traditions have been empirically very fruitful for all history since 1750 or 1800 … Trustworthy traditions earlier than 1750 are uncommon and almost entirely limited to states, at least in Africa.’(11) Thus the experience of anthropologists suggests a limit to oral tradition twice as long as Finley’s. Undoubtedly too the emergent poleis of early Greece qualify as ‘states’ in Vansina’s sense, and their traditions might therefore extend even further; but in fact it is clear that his suggested time-span of 150-200 years is well supported by the example of Herodotus. Herodotus’ information reaches back in reasonable form from 450 BC to the mid seventh century, the colonization of Cyrene, the Cimmerian invasions, and the Corinthian tyranny. The period before 650 BC is virtually unknown, a realm of conjecture and isolated stories which do not in fact correspond well to the realities of the late Dark Age. The worlds of Homer and Hesiod, and (more surprisingly0 the first age of western colonization are as shadowy to Herodotus as they were to Thucydides, who had no conception of the existence of a Dark Age, and failed even to distinguish clearly the migrations of that period from the western colonization. The time-span of up to two centuries emerges from both modern and ancient evidence as an empirical fact, in sharp contrast to the theories both of those who attribute to oral cultures exceptional powers or recall and of those who imagine that primitive memories are as short as modern American ones. If we wish to seek a special explanation of this phenomenon in the Greek world apart from its general consonance with evidence from elsewhere, we should not invoke the introduction of the art of writing. This after all occurred about a hundred years before the date in question, and shows its influence on historiography only in the generation after Herodotus, with the use of local archives and dating systems. Herodotus is effectively unaware of such systems and of their usefulness for writing more general history, as demonstrated, for instance, in Thucydides’ account of the colonization of Sicily.(12) The oral tradition logoi, to which Herodotus claims to belong, does not present the types of information which writing could have helped to preserve. It is more plausible perhaps to suggest that the information span revealed by Herodotus reflects the development of the polis as an institution in the period from 750 BC to 650 BC; but that would require a whole other investigation. In classical scholarship this dividing-line is already referred to in the idea of a transition from spatium mythicum to spatium historicum; but these are concepts which possess more resonance than explanatory power.(13)
Notes:
[This paper was originally published in H. Sancisi-Weerdenburg and A. Kuhrt (eds.), Achamenid History, ii. The Greek Sources (Leiden, 1987), 93-115, and is reprinted with kind permission of the Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Additions to the original version are put in square brackets.] The first draft of section I of this paper was written for a seminar given by myself and Professor Arnaldo Momigliano in Oxford in Hilary Term 1977; it was later discussed with anthropologists and classical scholars on a number of occasions, before being presented at the Groningen workshop. As it represents the theoretical underpinning of my Early Greece (Brighton, 1980) (see briefly pp. 27-32=22-8 of the 2nd edn., 1993), it was perhaps time it was published. Section II was written in the light of the Groningen discussions. Thanks are due to my colleagues there, and to David Asheri and Heleen Sancici-Weedenburg, who made valuable comments on the paper in its later stages.
1-D. Fehling. Herodotus and his ‘Sources’: Citation, Invention and Narrative Art (Leeds, 1989), esp. 152 ff.
2-H.R. Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus (Cleveland, 1966), 6.
3-See n. 28.
4-The neglect of oral history is well revealed by the (admittedly impressionistic) survey of Guy Lachenaud, ‘Les etudes herodoteenes de l’avant-guerre a nos jours’, Storia della storiografia, 7 (1985), 6-27. I have found especially valuable in the present context Immerwahr, Form and Thought in Herodotus [n. 2]; Simon Pembroke, ‘Women in Charge’, fWCI 30 (1967), 1-35; Francois Hartog, Le Miroir d’Herodote (Paris, 1980); Mabel L. Lang, Herodotean Narrative and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). I have not seen J.A.S Evans, “Oral Tradition in Herodotus’, Canadian Oral History Association Journal, 4 (1980); but there are some excellent brief remarks in his Herodotus (Boston, 1982), ch. 10.
5-A useful introduction to this is in Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford, 1978); see also David Henige, Oral Historiography (London, 1982).
6-Firsat published as De la tradition orale (Tervuren, 1961), English trans. Harmondsworth, 1965; I have used the Penguin edition of 1973, with important new observations in the preface.
7-See also her Oral Poetry (Cambridge, 1977).
8-In Aly (1969 reprint), 317-28.
9-‘Myth, Memory and History’, in The Use and Abuse of History (London, 1975), 11-33 at 27.
10-For Hecataeus see below, p. 22; for Heropythus, H. T. Wade-Gery, The Poet of ths Lliad (Cambridge, 1952), 8-9.
11-Vansina (1973 edn.) xiv.
12-Below, p. 23.
13-See W. M. von Leyden, ‘Spatium Historicum’, Durham University Journal, 11 (1949-50), 89-104; partially reprinted in German translation in W. Marg (ed.), Herodot (Darmstadt, 1965), 169-81.
Oswyn Murray
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