Part 4
If the importance of aristocratic tradition in Athens is clear, elsewhere it is less obvious. Spartan tradition, even in so far as it relates to the kings, seems to be unconnected with families, but rather to give an official polis view of the past which it would be easier to attribute to a group aware of the need for social cohesion. The presentation of the tradition about Corinthian tyranny in Herodotus is so oblique that it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about its direct or ultimate sources; for though the story of Cypselus is a genuine orientalizing myth of the exposure of the hero, of the type analyzed in G. Binder’s Die Aussetzung des Konigskindes,(1) it is very probable that Delphi is responsible for the main lines of this tradition. But at least again here there is no sign family tradition being important.
Thus alongside family tradition, the Greek mainland seems to offer a type of political tradition which lacks any family orientation, but sees the past as a succession of demonstrations of the rightness of present cultural values, in which the individual is subordinate to the ethos of the polis; these traditions belong to a society where the hoplite class is dominant. Though this type of memory is in some respects the anti-thesis of family tradition, both share the characteristics of being fundamentally rationalist and political in their orientation, and showing comparatively little interest in the moral patterns of history or the relation between history and the religious world order.
It seems that many of the traditions of mainland Greece were preserved in a political milieu by certain families or classes. This type of tradition can be regarded as the origin of our western style of history, with its rationalism, its emphasis on the action in politics and war, and its obsession with decision-making and human causation. But one of our problems with Herodotus as ‘father of history’ is that, though he uses such traditions, they do not seem to explain his conception of history: they provide only material, they are not central to the way he approaches his task. That is why we so often find ourselves dissatisfied with him, because we misunderstand his aims. The mainland political tradition is in fact more relevant to Thucydides than to Herodotus.
There is another group of mainland traditions, which appears closely related to the shrine of Delphi. These traditions can initially be recognized by their use of (and often dependence on) oracles, by their purpose in explaining monuments at Delphi, or their emphasis on Delphic intervention. The priests of Delphi were of course capable of ‘political’ deformation in so far as their shrine was involved in political affairs: only those oracles which turned out to be true may be permitted to be remembered, together with the explanations which validate them: we may expect some (but not too much) invention of oracles;(2) in particular, the priests had to explain the ambivalent attitude of the shrine towards Persia throughout the Persian wars, and the fact that Delphi was the only temple complex not burnt by the Persians-for Apollo ‘had spoken all truth for the Persians’: (3) naturally it was Apollo who intervened to drive the Persian invaders away from Delphi.
But beyond this the Delphic tradition is not so much political as moralizing and professional. Stories have heroes, figures of importance in the benefactions to the sanctuary like the kings of Lydia; they contain strong elements of folk-tale motifs, i. e. motifs suitable for use in different stories which (like the formulae of the Homeric bard) provide transitions between episodes, and which point to the skills of a group of professional or semi-professional story-tellers. But more importantly, the Delphic tradition seeks to impart a moral dimension to the past. Events are presented in a framework in which the hero moves from prosperity to over-confidence, and finally to a divinely sanctioned reversal of fortune. There is normally no question of sin and retribution involved, unlike some views of the nature of contemporary Attic tragedy; if a crime or an act of hybris is committed in the course of the rise to fortune, it is not usually emphasized as the reason for the fall. That rests in the nature of human affairs; cities and empires will rise and fall according to the whims of the gods: in the words of Artabanus, ‘You see how the god strikes with his thunderbolt the tall, and will not allow them to display themselves, while small beings do not vex him; you see how the lightning throws down always the greatest buildings and the finest trees’ (7. 10). Prosperity causes the envy of the gods, regardless of the hero’s moral status. Such an ethic is religious or moral, not aristocratic, and fits well with the priests of a shrine which proclaimed ‘know yourself’ and ‘nothing too much’. It relates of course in certain respects to the hoplite political ethic revealed by traditions elsewhere (e.g. at Sparta), notably in its emphasis on the dangers of excellence; but in origin and in effect it is quite different.
The important fact about this moral and aesthetic patterning is that it does not seem to be confined to accounts derived from Delphi: the whole historical tradition of East Greece as recorded in Herodotus shows similar characteristics. It seems as if there was no political tradition of the mainland type of Ionia: there are no signs of political deformation in the interests of particular groups. Instead even recent history shows heavy use of folk-tale motifs, recurrent patterns, and deformation for moral ends. It is perhaps for this reason that the account of Polycrates is so unhistorical and has such similarities with the stories of the Cypselid age, despite its relative closeness to the lifetime of Herodotus. Similarly, we may contrast the biography of Histiaeus in the Ionian revolt (the only Greek example of a biography in Herodotus)(4) with the way that the great contemporary figures of the mainland, Clisthenes, Cleomenes, or Themistocles, are only dimly and fragmentarily perceived.

If I am right in detecting such a fundamental difference between East Greek and mainland traditions, we are led to speculate on the causes of this difference. It might be possible to claim that the Ionian cities were socially different, more homogenous in respect of wealth, for instance. I doubt whether one factor often invoked is relevant, the alleged eastern influence on Ionian literary traditions; for such influences would certainly not seem confined to Ionia, and in fact appeared earlier and rather more strongly on the mainland, as can be seen, for instance, in the Cypselus legend or in the case of Hesiod; moreover, the notion of eastern influences obscures the very real differences apparent in the styles and themes of the various eastern traditions. Further (to anticipate), there are important differences between Herodotus’ eastern stories and the Greek moralizing tradition which concerns us here. I would, however, suggest that absence of political traditions might well be related to the destruction of political elites in the Persian period and the Ionian revolt.
But that is a negative point: on the positive side I suspect that ALy was right to claim, alongside the Homeric tradition, the existence of a tradition of prose storytelling in Ionia, absent from mainland Greece except Delphi.(5) For the moralizing concerns of so many Ionian logoi seem to Herodotus’ own conception of history and to his narrative techniques. The general pattern of his work indeed mirrors the pattern visible in many of the Delphic and East Greek traditions; it also uses many of the techniques of the professional storytellers. It is a moral story of Persian pride, symbolized in the arrogance of Xerxes and humbled by the Greeks: the gods punish those who pass beyond the limits of human propriety. The main story of the Persian wars abounds in devices like dreams, portents, forewarnings. Xerxes is deliberately drawn into the conflict by false dreams; the figure of the wise adviser disregarded (Demaratus, Arbatanus) is central to the creation of suspense and foreboding in such a type of storytelling where the pattern is already known.(6)
This overall pattern to the story of the Persian wars is Herodotus’ own creation. It does not derive from attitudes in mainland Greece to the meaning of the past; we can sometimes detect the tensions as the protagonists of the war, Corinth, Sparta, Athens, see it in narrower polis and political terms of city honor. This pattern did not, therefore, come to Herodotus from his material. But to one brought up in the traditions of storytelling in Ionia it was the obvious way to present the Great Event. It is in fact this moralizing East Greek tradition which created Herodotus as a  historian, and which molded his attitudes towards the patterns in history, the narrative techniques of his art, and the roles of creativity, accuracy, and invention. For we must recognize that ultimately truth in Herodotus is a question of aesthetics and morality, as much as of fact.
We may, if we wish, go further, and suggest that behind the preservation of the past in Ionia, and therefore behind the invention of history, there lies a moralizing tradition of storytelling such as we find in Delphi. Just as the Homeric epic is the creation of an oral tradition of professional Homeric bards revealed and transcended by the greatest of them all, and thereby preserved in writing only in its final stage (genius and the need to preserve it together destroying the oral tradition), so Herodotus too perhaps is heir to a tradition of local logopoioi, storytellers, who transcended his forerunners by molding into a unity the traditional tales of his art, and ensured its disappearance by collecting and writing them down in relation to a new and greater theme-the last and greatest of the logopoioi by virtue of being a logographos. The parallel with Homer is merely a restatement of Herodotus’ own perceptions; for Herodotus was well aware that in his Histories he was following the example of Homer, in recording a Great War and singing of a new generation of heroes.(7) Truth is subordinate to this aim of history.
 Twenty years ago Arnaldo Momigliano considered the impact of the Persian empire on Jewish and Greek historical writing in a famous paper which also offers the best starting-point for a discussion of the sources available to Herodotus for his account of Persian history.(8) Within the general framework of a heightened national self-consciousness among both Jews and Greeks as a result of their contacts with the Persian empire, he noted three main areas of possible eastern influence on Greek historiography: there were obvious signs of ‘elements of Eastern and particularly Persian storytelling’; oriental or Graeco-oriental biographical tales (like those of Zopyrus and Democedes) might have affected the development of a Greek tradition of writing  biographical accounts of politicians; finally, although Jewish historians were clearly influenced by Persian governmental practice in their use of documents, the possible extent and limitations of Greek use of such documents were still obscure. How far has the picture changed in the meantime, and in what directions is further research likely to prove fruitful?

To be continued…

1. Below, p. 38.,
2. J. Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle (Berkeley, 1978), takes a skeptical view of all oracles which serve as a basis for moralizing historical narratives; but that is often to invert the relationship between fixed text (oracle) and flexible reality: it is the event which is ‘quasi-historical’, not the oracle.
3. R. Meiggs and D. M. Lewis,, Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford, 1969), no. 10.

4. See my CAH chapter ‘The Ionian Revolt’ [n. 15]. The logos has been strangely neglected in the discussion on the origins of Greek biography from H. Homeyer, ‘Zu den Anfangen der griechischen Biographie’, Philologus, 106 (1962), 75-85, onwards.

5. See esp. Aly, Volksmarchen [p. 18], 208 ff.
6. H. Bischoff, Der Warner bei Herodot (diss. Marburg, 1932), partially reprinted in Marg (ed.) Herodot [n. 13], 302-19.

7. On Homer and Herodotus see esp. E. Norden, Antik Kuntsprosa, 2nd edn. (Leipzig, 1909), 40; Jacoby, ‘Herodotus’, RE suppl ii (1913), 205-520 at 502-4; Aly, Volksmarchen [p. 18], 263-77; L. Huber, ‘Herodotus Homerverstandnis’ in Synusia Festgabe W. Schadewaldt (Pfullingen, 1965), 29-52.
8. ‘Fattori oriental della storiografia ebraica post-esilica e della storiografia greca’ (1965), now in id., Terzo contributo (Rome, 1966), 807-18; English translation in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford, 1977), 25-35. See also Pierre Briant, ‘Sources grecques et histoire achemenide’, in id., Rois, tributs et paysans (Paris, 1982), 491-506, and Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ‘The Fifth Oriental Monarchy and Hellenocentrism’ in Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Kuhrt (eds.), Achaemenid History [p. 16 pref. note], ii. 117-31.



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