Ancient & Medieval Literature
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The Greek Histories: The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece as Told by Its First Chroniclers: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch
From the leading scholars behind The Greek Plays, a collection of the best translations of the foremost Greek historians, presenting a sweeping history of ancient Greece as recorded by its first chroniclers
"Just the thing to remind us that human history, though lamentably a work in progress, is always something we can understand better."-Sarah Ruden, translator of The Gospels and author of The Face of Water
The historians of ancient Greece were pioneers of a new literary craft; their work stands among the world's most enduring and important legacies and forms the foundation of a major modern discipline. This highly readable edition includes new and newly revised translations of selections from Herodotus-often called the "father of history"-Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the four greatest Greek innovators of historical narrative. Here the reader will find their most important, and most widely taught, passages collected in a single volume. The excerpts chart the landmark events of ancient Greece and provide a comprehensive account of the entire classical Greek age.
From the start the Greek historians demonstrated how broad and varied historical writing could be and brought their craft beyond a mere chronicle of past events. This volume explores each author's interest in religion, leadership, character, and the lessons of war. How, for instance, should readers interpret Herodotus' inclusion of speeches and dialogues, dreams, and oracles as part of the "factual" record? What did Thucydides understand about human nature that (as he said) stays constant throughout time? How did Plutarch frame historical biography as a means of depicting the moral qualities of great men?
Complete with introductions to the works of each historian, footnotes providing context and explaining obscurities, maps, and an appendix on the Greek conduct of war, this volume is an invaluable resource for students and passionate readers of history alike.
"Just the thing to remind us that human history, though lamentably a work in progress, is always something we can understand better."-Sarah Ruden, translator of The Gospels and author of The Face of Water
The historians of ancient Greece were pioneers of a new literary craft; their work stands among the world's most enduring and important legacies and forms the foundation of a major modern discipline. This highly readable edition includes new and newly revised translations of selections from Herodotus-often called the "father of history"-Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the four greatest Greek innovators of historical narrative. Here the reader will find their most important, and most widely taught, passages collected in a single volume. The excerpts chart the landmark events of ancient Greece and provide a comprehensive account of the entire classical Greek age.
From the start the Greek historians demonstrated how broad and varied historical writing could be and brought their craft beyond a mere chronicle of past events. This volume explores each author's interest in religion, leadership, character, and the lessons of war. How, for instance, should readers interpret Herodotus' inclusion of speeches and dialogues, dreams, and oracles as part of the "factual" record? What did Thucydides understand about human nature that (as he said) stays constant throughout time? How did Plutarch frame historical biography as a means of depicting the moral qualities of great men?
Complete with introductions to the works of each historian, footnotes providing context and explaining obscurities, maps, and an appendix on the Greek conduct of war, this volume is an invaluable resource for students and passionate readers of history alike.
Editorial Reviews
"Greek prose history, arising from and evolving around questions of truth and fact, made a major contribution to efforts to see the world more objectively. This astute selection of texts, intelligently and accessibly interconnected and in highly readable translations, is just the thing to remind us that human history, though lamentably a work in progress, is always something we can understand better."-Sarah Ruden, translator of The Gospels and author of The Face of Water
"The tried and tested team of Lefkowitz and Romm have done it again. After their The Greek Plays comes this equally judicious selection, sparely but serviceably commented, from three of the major ancient Greek historians and the doyen of ancient historical biography. Translated by diverse hands and covering the three centuries from the sixth to the third BC, the readings informatively and entertainingly embrace some of the most momentous events of the ancient Hellenic world, from Cyrus of Persia to Alexander of Macedon, Greece-and Persia."-Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life
"The tried and tested team of Lefkowitz and Romm have done it again. After their The Greek Plays comes this equally judicious selection, sparely but serviceably commented, from three of the major ancient Greek historians and the doyen of ancient historical biography. Translated by diverse hands and covering the three centuries from the sixth to the third BC, the readings informatively and entertainingly embrace some of the most momentous events of the ancient Hellenic world, from Cyrus of Persia to Alexander of Macedon, Greece-and Persia."-Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life
Short Excerpt Teaser
Herodotus
(c. 485–c. 425 BC)
As Homer was to poetry, so Herodotus was to history: a writer of enormous scope and vision who, working from small, discrete stories largely circulated by word of mouth, created a monumental work unlike anything before it. And just as with Homer, Herodotus seemed, to later readers, to be a darling of the Muses: After his death the nine books into which his work was divided were given the names of the nine Muses, as though they had taken shape from divine inspiration.
For lack of any title or genre label to describe his creation, Herodotus introduced it to his audience with his declarative opening words: "This is the display of the historiē of Herodotus of Halicarnassus." The Greek word historiē meant "inquiry" at the time Herodotus deployed it, but because of its prominence in his opening sentence, it took on new layers of meaning. Within a century, Aristotle would use it to mean "a written account of the past." Thus was the word "history," in the sense we give it today, created, at the same moment as the genre itself.
Though he is today called a historian, Herodotus was much more than that. His work focuses on the wars between the Greek world and a vast Persian empire that stretched from the Aegean to what is now Pakistan and included Egypt as well. Those conflicts began in earnest in 499 bc, but Herodotus casts his eye further back in time, only reaching the start of hostilities at about the midpoint of his work. He has much else to discuss: the origins of great Asian monarchies and Greek tyrannies; the customs of various non-Greek peoples, especially the Egyptians, builders of an immensely old and complex civilization; the geography of the oikoumenē or "inhabited world," the span of the earth known from human report; and above all the influence of the divine on human life, whether through dreams, oracles, natural phenomena, or the strange freaks of chance that we might chalk up to blind luck but which the Greeks always linked to the gods.
The main story line of Herodotus' work, the Persian Wars as we call them, serves as a connecting thread on which many tales are hung, the units Herodotus calls logoi ("stories," "accounts," "discussions"). Some of these larger logoi contain smaller ones within them, as for example the logos of Croesus, king of Lydia, spanning the first half of book 1. To put this monarch in his proper historical context, Herodotus first describes how his great-great-grandfather Gyges established his dynasty by seizing the Lydian throne, and how each successive king expanded Lydian power. Then comes a dialogue between Croesus and Solon, an Athenian wise man, and, as a result of the arrogance Croesus there displayed, a family drama involving the king's ill-fated son. Only at this point, halfway into the Croesus logos, do we reach Lydia's attack on Persia, and the connection to our major theme-the rise and fall of the Persian Empire-begins to emerge.
This loose, digressive structure defies our expectations for linear narrative. We seem to be in a "web" of stories, hitting "hyperlinks" everywhere that take us in new directions. In book 2 we veer off the main path to explore Egypt, a land thick with marvels, in enormous depth. Yet the main thrust of the work is always discernible: Egypt matters because the Persians conquered it in the 520s bc, another stage in their relentless growth. The same imperial drive will take us later to India, Arabia, Scythia, Thrace, indeed nearly every part of the world known to the Greeks. For each new region that falls to the Persian advance, Herodotus tells us all he knows about the people and their customs and notes any "wonders" of which he has heard. His work is thus a compendium of geography and anthropology as much as a narrative history.
There are other ways in which Herodotus does not behave as a historian "should." He repeats stories that he himself disbelieves, simply because they are going around-"to tell what is told" is a goal he at one point claims for himself. He puts speeches and dialogues in the mouths of historical actors, even at points where he cannot possibly have known what was said. He attributes events of global importance-a massive invasion, say, of one nation by another-to the personal or whimsical motives of an individual, not to the broader geopolitical factors we might look for today. For this reason he often seems to be writing something closer to myth than history, employing the same kind of thinking by which the Trojan War was traced to one man's abduction of one woman-Helen, the wife of Menelaus.
Yet Herodotus also recognizes a boundary between myth and history, and in his opening paragraphs he places himself squarely on the historical side. He declines to discuss the Trojan War,...
(c. 485–c. 425 BC)
As Homer was to poetry, so Herodotus was to history: a writer of enormous scope and vision who, working from small, discrete stories largely circulated by word of mouth, created a monumental work unlike anything before it. And just as with Homer, Herodotus seemed, to later readers, to be a darling of the Muses: After his death the nine books into which his work was divided were given the names of the nine Muses, as though they had taken shape from divine inspiration.
For lack of any title or genre label to describe his creation, Herodotus introduced it to his audience with his declarative opening words: "This is the display of the historiē of Herodotus of Halicarnassus." The Greek word historiē meant "inquiry" at the time Herodotus deployed it, but because of its prominence in his opening sentence, it took on new layers of meaning. Within a century, Aristotle would use it to mean "a written account of the past." Thus was the word "history," in the sense we give it today, created, at the same moment as the genre itself.
Though he is today called a historian, Herodotus was much more than that. His work focuses on the wars between the Greek world and a vast Persian empire that stretched from the Aegean to what is now Pakistan and included Egypt as well. Those conflicts began in earnest in 499 bc, but Herodotus casts his eye further back in time, only reaching the start of hostilities at about the midpoint of his work. He has much else to discuss: the origins of great Asian monarchies and Greek tyrannies; the customs of various non-Greek peoples, especially the Egyptians, builders of an immensely old and complex civilization; the geography of the oikoumenē or "inhabited world," the span of the earth known from human report; and above all the influence of the divine on human life, whether through dreams, oracles, natural phenomena, or the strange freaks of chance that we might chalk up to blind luck but which the Greeks always linked to the gods.
The main story line of Herodotus' work, the Persian Wars as we call them, serves as a connecting thread on which many tales are hung, the units Herodotus calls logoi ("stories," "accounts," "discussions"). Some of these larger logoi contain smaller ones within them, as for example the logos of Croesus, king of Lydia, spanning the first half of book 1. To put this monarch in his proper historical context, Herodotus first describes how his great-great-grandfather Gyges established his dynasty by seizing the Lydian throne, and how each successive king expanded Lydian power. Then comes a dialogue between Croesus and Solon, an Athenian wise man, and, as a result of the arrogance Croesus there displayed, a family drama involving the king's ill-fated son. Only at this point, halfway into the Croesus logos, do we reach Lydia's attack on Persia, and the connection to our major theme-the rise and fall of the Persian Empire-begins to emerge.
This loose, digressive structure defies our expectations for linear narrative. We seem to be in a "web" of stories, hitting "hyperlinks" everywhere that take us in new directions. In book 2 we veer off the main path to explore Egypt, a land thick with marvels, in enormous depth. Yet the main thrust of the work is always discernible: Egypt matters because the Persians conquered it in the 520s bc, another stage in their relentless growth. The same imperial drive will take us later to India, Arabia, Scythia, Thrace, indeed nearly every part of the world known to the Greeks. For each new region that falls to the Persian advance, Herodotus tells us all he knows about the people and their customs and notes any "wonders" of which he has heard. His work is thus a compendium of geography and anthropology as much as a narrative history.
There are other ways in which Herodotus does not behave as a historian "should." He repeats stories that he himself disbelieves, simply because they are going around-"to tell what is told" is a goal he at one point claims for himself. He puts speeches and dialogues in the mouths of historical actors, even at points where he cannot possibly have known what was said. He attributes events of global importance-a massive invasion, say, of one nation by another-to the personal or whimsical motives of an individual, not to the broader geopolitical factors we might look for today. For this reason he often seems to be writing something closer to myth than history, employing the same kind of thinking by which the Trojan War was traced to one man's abduction of one woman-Helen, the wife of Menelaus.
Yet Herodotus also recognizes a boundary between myth and history, and in his opening paragraphs he places himself squarely on the historical side. He declines to discuss the Trojan War,...
