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Herodotus and Oral History 2
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Part 1
The fact that the Greek oral traditions on which Herodotus drew seem to operate within the same chronological limits as the traditions of other societies may already require some explanation in relation to the existence of a strong oral epic tradition in early Greece, which is certainly earlier in its origins than the late Dark Age. It might be thought that this should create special conditions which would make early Greece a special case. This question is I think linked to another general characteristic of the traditions recorded in Herodotus which also needs to be discussed: that is, that in many important respects Herodotus’ information about the earlier part of his period is only quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from his information about the later part. It might be assumed that, as he approached his own day, his information would naturally get better; but though it gets more detailed, it is not really true to say that it gets better. Thus Herodotus had spent much of his youth on Samos only some sixty years after the death of Polycrates, and must have spoken to many who had known him; yet his account of the career of Polycrates is not intrinsically more or less historical than the story of Cypselus and Periander, at the limit of his knowledge.(1) And many of the characteristics of earlier parts of his history recur in his narrative of, for instance, the Ionian revolt and even the Persian wars themselves.(2)
It is usually claimed that the basic explanation for the comparative homogeneity of Herodotus’ narrative lies in his literary personality;(3) this is partly true, though I shall argue later that his literary personality in turn is a product of the Greek oral tradition. But it is important to realize that such homogeneity is in itself a characteristic of oral traditions. As Vansina somewhat schematically presents it, oral tradition consists of a ‘chain of testimonies’, whose reliability is primarily affected, not by the length of the chain, but by the mode of transmission: ‘with regard to reliability, there is no doubt that the method of transmission is of far greater importance than the length of time a tradition has lasted’ (p. 53). And the same mode of transmission affects the character of a story in the same way, whether it has been preserved for fifty or one hundred and fifty years.
It is this emphasis on the method of transmission in Vansina and elsewhere which seems to me most interesting in its consequences for the study of early Greek history and of Herodotus. The phrase of course refers to two separate but related areas: first the literary and linguistic forms in which traditions may be preserved, and second the social setting in which that preservation takes place.
One theoretical distinction employed by Vansina (and presupposed by Ruth Finnegan in her discussion) concerns us only because it clarifies certain absences in early Greece. It is obvious that the characteristics of verbally fixed traditions will be different from free traditions, where the exact wording varies from telling to telling; in the category of fixed texts Vansina includes poetry, other metrical texts, religious, legal, and other formulae, lists, genealogies, and so on. The Greeks possessed a form of linguistically fixed tradition in the heroic epic (though a tradition that was as much creative as repetitive); but this tradition was non-historical in the sense that for the early Greeks it was not located in time. The Homeric cycle concentrated on one generation with only oblique reference to its immediate forerunners and successors, and did not apparently locate them in a larger historical framework-in marked contrast, for instance, to Jewish tradition or most northern European heroic epic. The creators and preservers of this poetry seem indeed to have been unaware of their own chronological relationship with the age of heroes, except as a world earlier and wholly separated from their own ‘age of iron’; it was not until the time of Hecataeus that such links began to be forged. There was no true historical epic in Greece, and no praise poetry concerned with the contemporary world or the immediate past of the type so common in Africa; the society which invented the epinikion for athletes had nothing similar for political figures before the fourth century.(4) And, in contrast to the Romans, for instance, other formulaically-fixed traditions in religious ritual or law were non-existent or unimportant. The loss of Hecataeus’ Genealogies makes it difficult for us to judge how many people could equal his own tour de force, or how far any class in Greece shared the genealogical interests of cultures such as Israel and Rome.(5) But there is little sign that Herodotus could draw on such information except in the special instance of kings (Sparta, 7. 204, 8. 131; Macedon, 8. 139, and the eastern monarchies).(6) This comparative absence of genealogies is one of the characteristics of Greek tradition which is obviously relevant to the question of aristocratic traditions. Of other lists, the few that survived in city archives (such as the Athenian archon list) and temple shrines (the Olympic victor list, the priestesses of Hera at Argos, or the shrine of Apollo Archagetas at Sicilian Naxos from which I believe Thucydides’ Sicilian foundation dates ultimately derive) all post-date the introduction of writing, and were anyway not widely disseminated until the generation after Herodotus.(7)
Herodotus’ oral tradition belongs firmly in the category of free not fixed texts: except for oracles and a very few references to poetry, it shows no sign of being constructed around memorized or fixed verbal formulae. There are a few possible examples of aetiological stories attached to proverbs (for instance, most explicitly ‘Hippoclides does not care’, 6. 127-9); and the use of proverbial sayings as part of the narrative technique of Herodotus is rightly emphasized by Mabel Lang.(8) But in general the traditions used by Herodotus do not seem to have included those based on the proverb or collection of sayings, although these are known to have existed.(9) Here we might contrast, for instance, the oral traditions behind the Gospels.(10) The attention of Herodotus was perhaps focused away from such popular story types towards what he regarded as more authoritative traditions.
Both Vansina and Ruth Finnegan argued that it is useful to sub-divide this category of free (i.e. essentially prose) texts only in so far as the society itself does so: to attempt to impose such distinctions as those between true and false stories, or between myth, legend’ and historical narratives, is misleading, whether we want to investigate the reliability of oral traditions or their literary character. Our perception of the type of tradition can only impeded understanding of the forces molding it, which are the type to which it is held to belong by the society concerned, and the social purpose which its preservation and performance fulfil. Thus Vansina discusses all prose narratives under the general non-committal heading of ‘tales’ and treats them as basically subject to the same tendencies, while Ruth Finnegan points out that unless we know the context and spirit in which a story is told, we cannot know whether it functions in that society in ways analogous to our categories of myth, history, or legend. Many societies have no obvious distinction between various types of tale; others distinguish in some way between ‘heavy’ material (perhaps religious myth and quasi-historical accounts) and ‘light’ (narrative for entertainment). There are more complex distinctions, as that of the Dogon, between ‘true’, ‘impossible true’, and ‘impossible false’: the same story can be regarded as falling under different categories according to the occasion on which it is told. The Kimbundu classify stories as roughly fictions, didactic, and historical narratives: the last are state secrets transmitted through headmen and elders.(11) Clearly accounts which are considered particularly important to a society or a group within that society, regardless of whether they are true, are more likely to be preserved accurately. In other words the objective truth or falsehood of a tradition is of no importance in judging the accuracy of its transmission, compared with the particular category to which the story is believed to belong and such factors as the relationship between artistic principles, accuracy of preservation, the seriousness with which it is regarded, and the mode and purpose of its preservation.
What type of categories did the Greeks possess? Despite the learned discussion that has centered on the question of the move ‘vom Mythos zum Logos’ and the attempts made to distinguish these two concepts in early Greek thought,(12) it seems to me that the scepticism engendered by these comparative examples is still in place. Herodotus himself makes no explicit contrast between logos, histoire, and mythos; though the words clearly have different connotations for him’ he was not aware of our problems. His own interest is centered on the activity of recording logoi, for the results of which the (new?) word histoire, implying a degree of system, is also appropriate. He uses the word logos to refer to the whole (1. 5, 95, etc.) or larger or smaller parts of his work (2. 38; 5. 36), and to individual stories within it. It is hard to resist the conclusion that he would have described himself as a logopoioi, like Hecataeus (2. 143; 5. 36, 125) and Aesop (2. 134). From these two examples it seems likely that the connotations of logos can cover both fiction and factual narrative. Nor it is easy to see any very clear distinction between Herodotus’ use of logos and his use of other concepts. Mythos is used only twice, and in both cases designates logoi which Herodotus believes to be ridiculous as well as false (2. 23, 45); but this is a category which he usually seems to have ignored. It seems that the oral traditions which Herodotus reflects did not in fact make any rigid distinction between different accounts, whether of the gods, or historical events, or the world around them. This does not of course imply that Herodotus and his informants had no interest in the historical truth or falsehood of these accounts. Herodotus’ own claims, the preface of Hecataeus’ work, and the condemnation of Thucydides 1. 21 all make it clear that accuracy in representing the tradition and the question of its truth were both considered to be important characteristics relevant to the new activity of describing the past. But Herodotus’ own selection of logoi can perhaps best be understood in relation to a distinction between serious and authoritative logoi and frivolous ones, rather than logoi which he thinks to be true or which concern particular categories of event.
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. This problem is not considered in B. M. Mitchell, ‘Herodotus and Samos’, JHS 95 (1975), 75-91. For an analysis of Herodotus’ Samian information as three separate logoi see H. R. Immerwahr, ‘The Samian Stories of Herodotus’, CJ 52 (1957), 312-22.
2. For the Ionian revolt see O. Murray, ‘The Ionian Revolt’, CAH IV2 (1988), 461-90.
3. This is the assumption behind most of the works cited in n. 4.
4. [The first part of this statement still seems true; but the discovery of new fragments of Simenides’ poem on Platae suggests that some form of ‘praise poetry’ did evolve in 5th-cent. Greece, at least in relation to the Persian wars. See the contribution of Ewen Bowie in this volume, and my discussion below, pp 321-2.]
5. The widespread use by the Greeks of a generation counting in order to measure time does not of course imply the existence of a genealogical interest.
6. On the eastern monarchies see below, p. 40. The second Spartan king list is of course a partial exception-how partial depends on whether one follows the manuscript text of Herodotus or emends it to reconcile it with Paus. 3. 7. 2.
7. See D.H. Thuc. 5; I shall argue for the Naxian source of Thucydides’ Sicilian dates in a forthcoming article “Thucydides and Local History’.
8. Herodotean Narrative and Discourse [n. 4], 58-67.
9. The most striking as preserving directly historical information is the proverb ‘the cavalry are away’: Suda s.v. Χωрìs ìππєîs, X 444 Adler. The aphoristic tradition is of course well represented in Pre-socratic philosophy, and the existence of collections of aphorisms can be traced back as far as the legend of the Seven Wise Men. On oracle-based traditions see below, pp. 31-2.
10. See especially the work of the form critics, notably H. Dibelius and R. Butlmann: a brief exposition in English is in R. Bultmann and K. Kundsin, Form Criticism (Oxford, 1934), 39-63.
11. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford, 1970), 363-4.
12. From W. Nestle’s book of this title (1940) to the modern discussion of the consequences of literacy in early Greece. Excellent remarks in F. Hampl, ‘“Mythos”—“Sage”—Marchen”’, in id., Geschichte als kristische Wissenschaft, ii. (Darmstadt, 1975), 1-50.
Oswyn Murray
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