On Writing Ancient History

In the opening dialogue of Cicero’s On the Laws, the author’s brother Quintus raises the question of whether different standards govern the composition of poetry and history (De legibus 1.5). Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, responds that poetry functions according to the principle of pleasure and history according to truth. Yet Cicero concedes that even the corpus of Herodotus (fifth century BCE), “the father of history,” includes a vast number of fictitious narratives (fabulae). The great Roman orator here acknowledges essential aspects of ancient historiographical works. These works include legends, unsubstantiated reports, manufactured speeches, and allusions to earlier epic poetry, which render such works vastly different from what contemporary scholars would consider legitimate historiography. Unfortunately, Greek works discussing history writing as method and practice have generally not survived, which leaves us only the narratives themselves to explore in our endeavor to understand the methods, standards, audiences, and intentions of ancient historiographers. Similarly, the Jewish historiographical sources used by Josephus (ca. 37–ca. 100 CE)—alongside Posidonius, Nicolaus of Damascus, Manetho, and Berossus—are only partially extant. Still, the writings of Herodotus, whose intellectual antecedents in Asia Minor continue to be shrouded in considerable uncertainty, represent a critical advance in the ancient Greek conception of the past. His historical method would inspire not only his successors but also ancient Near Eastern historiographers in the wake of Hellenism’s incursion into the Near East in the late fourth century BCE.

Israelite writers had already developed their own historical traditions in the biblical books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. With the dawn of the Hellenistic period—marked officially by the arrival of Alexander the Great in the global arena—Greek modes of inquiry into the past came to exist alongside traditional Jewish approaches steeped in biblical historical traditions. This placed Jewish historical writing in a complex relationship with classical Greek traditions, which it simultaneously assimilated and challenged.

Herodotus offers us the first large-scale example of ancient historiography from the Greek world. His primary subject matter is the period of conflict between Persia and Greece, from 500 to 479 BCE. Even as he wrote a half century after the events he records, his works are the only surviving sources from this era. Other historians, among them Hecataeus, Xanthus, and Hellanicus, wrote both before and after Herodotus, but, although later writers refer to or even quote these authors as sources, none of their works have survived. What distinguishes Herodotus is that he enunciated—explicitly—a principle of direct inquiry (Greek, historia) into the past; in other words, his works ascertained the truth through intellectual investigation, in areas such as philosophy, ethnography, geography, and medicine. He advocated a form of inquiry dependent on seeing and hearing that applied, in theory, to both direct and indirect evidence concerning the past. Applying “proper” judgment to such evidence would enable the historian to achieve greater accuracy in recounting past events. Herodotus himself traveled extensively in an effort to gather more firsthand testimonies and empirical evidence in support of his narratives. Jewish literary accounts of the past prior to the Hellenistic period offer no systematic model for inquiry based on primary evidence or eyewitness testimony. And while Herodotus nominally preserves the concept of divine activity and agency, many Jewish historical works are informed by the idea of divine causation from start to finish.

The successor to Herodotus’ historical enterprise, Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 BCE), continued to espouse oral accounts and eyewitness testimony as the two foundations for historical evidence. Indeed, he applied an even more rigorous standard of inquiry, claiming to limit his narratives to events either he himself had witnessed or about which he had heard through the careful interrogation of eyewitnesses. Yet Thucydides, like Herodotus, composed speeches for historical figures that he himself acknowledged sometimes only conveyed what the speaker ought to have said. And his general focus on events contemporary with his life seems to place undue emphasis on political and military matters.

Later works of Greek and Roman historiography, however, did not follow the same strict standards of investigation. In the fourth century BCE, a wide range of histories appeared, challenging any notion of a fixed standard of inquiry. Ephorus (ca. 400–330 BCE), for example, when composing a universal history, not only relied on what was seen and heard but also turned to written sources when inquiring into the more remote past. And Timaeus (ca. 350–ca. 260 BCE) prioritized written sources in his early histories of Italy and Sicily, as well as when compiling his lists of the kings of Sparta. In the second century BCE, Polybius, striving to account for the rise of Rome as the preeminent power of the Mediterranean world, testified to the broad range of historical methods that were available. He states that while several authors of his day focused on genealogy, or myth, or the establishment of city-states, he himself chose to write a “history of actions” confined to a limited temporal scope.

Historians from the fourth century BCE and into the Hellenistic period thus inherited a tradition of inquiry, relying on evidence seen or heard through eyewitness testimony. Inspired by the early historians, they also challenged the strict standards established by Thucydides. Similarly, Jewish historical narratives composed during the Hellenistic and Roman periods demonstrate a tension between the Greek modes that render history based on direct inquiry and written sources, on the one hand, and the traditional biblical style, which conflated the historical record with theological causality, on the other hand.

The history of ancient Israel rarely appears outside the biblical canon. Demetrius, writing in the third century BCE, developed a chronology of important dates in Israelite history, a work that unfortunately survived only in six fragments, written perhaps as an attempt to establish the antiquity of the Jewish people in comparison to that of the Greeks. In the second century, Eupolemus wrote a work on Judean kings that also sought to locate the origins of the Jews in remote antiquity. At times, Jewish historical writing remained solidly grounded in biblical traditions. In 1 Maccabees, for example, there is an account of the second-century Judean rebellion against the Greek Seleucids and the early years of the Hasmoneans that places great emphasis on faithfulness to and preservation of Jewish laws and ancestral traditions, much like the historical works included in the Hebrew Bible. Josephus wrote in the tradition of Greek historiography, but his project was to rewrite large portions of the Bible in order to defend Judaism as an honored, ancient tradition in the Greco-Roman world.

The ancient historical sources included in the Posen Library—from the early historians of Alexander to the Christian ecclesiastical historians of late antiquity and, later, Sasanian and Jewish sources—provide a window into these diverse historical narratives. Josephus writes as a historian; other accounts are far less historically oriented. Regardless of genre, however, they all attest to the prolonged encounter of Jewish life with the Greco-Roman and Iranian worlds and how those interactions were expressed in writing by both Jews and non-Jews.

Read more about: 

• The Hellenistic Period

• The Early Roman Period

• The Late Roman Period

• Parthian and Sasanian Iran 

• Ancient Rabbinic Constructions of the Past