There are few arguments of longer standing in the scholarship on Thucydides than the one concerning the speeches in his History, and none is more important for understanding it and its author. The main question is: did Thucydides try to reproduce the arguments put forward by the speakers on each occasion as accurately as he could, or did he feel free to invent arguments and even whole speeches? In spite of the long debate there is little agreement, yet we cannot understand Thucydides' ideas and purposes or the events he describes without answering that question. It is remarkable, therefore, that students of Thucydides and his History have found it possible to take up a position on the question without considering closely the arguments surrounding the interpretation of 1. 22 or even to take no clear position on the matter at all. Examples are legion, but two will suffice to make the point. A recent study of the funeral oration of Pericles coolly asserts that Thucydides' role in the speeches can go so far as ‘the invention of whole speeches or the concentration of several speeches into one’. The author makes no defense of that assertion, resting content with a reference to the work of Eduard Schwartz, among others. He takes no note of an article by A. W. Gomme, quite famous and over thirty years old, which confronts the arguments of Schwartz and those holding similar views and annihilates them.

Introduction

Three recent articles, published in Historia, have raised again the difficult problems of historiography and history surrounding the events in the year 379/8. The two major continuous accounts of Xenophon and Diodorus are in many instances contradictory. Plutarch also supplies information concerning this period, but he has been regarded with suspicion as a later writer who is not an exacting historian. The tendency of most modern scholars has been to prefer the evidence of the contemporary witness, Xenophon, to the clumsy and suspicious accounts in Diodorus or Plutarch. This attitude should now be altered.

The recent work by I. A. F. Bruce on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia has, in my judgment, provided real reason to believe that Diodorus may very well have had access, through his main source Ephorus, to accounts of the history of Greece after Thucydides which are no less reliable, if not superior to, the information contained in Xenophon's Hellenica. It is clear enough that Xenophon is a contemporary witness to much of what he reports, but he is subject to bias in favor of the Spartans, and, more specifically, to bias in favor of his friend, benefactor and hero – Agesilaus. Attempts to establish the relative superiority of one or another of the accounts through methods of Quellenforschung have not yielded very suitable results, nor do they focus on the events themselves.

The late adam parry, whom this volume commemorates, was a perceptive reader of Thucydides. The subsequent influence of the great historian of the Peloponnesian War was well known to Parry, and it may therefore be appropriate to dedicate to his memory the following inquiry. In the middle of the third century a.d. Herodian set for himself Thucydides' lofty aims of sound judgment and of accuracy, and he expressed them in Thucydidean language. Modern assessments of Herodian's success have varied, but at the present time there is almost a consensus in the condemnation of this historian. It is not merely that he failed to reach the standard of his classical predecessor: most believe that he did not even make the effort. Frank Kolb, the latest scholar to publish a work on Herodian, labels the history a Geschichtsroman. In the same vein Geza Alföldy declares that it is ‘mehr eine Art historischen Romans als ein Geschichtswerk’. T. D. Barnes refers to Herodian's ‘ubiquitous distaste for facts’, and Sir Ronald Syme calls him ‘fluent and superficial’. The denigration has acquired the strength and majesty of a chorus, and it has encouraged scholars to dismiss the testimony of Herodian with minimal reflection. Kolb's dissertation has even reached the conclusion that Herodian simply added dramatic and rhetorical embellishment to the narrative of Cassius Dio. Yet Herodian, though falling far short of Thucydides' goals (so did Thucydides) and obviously a creature of his own sophistic age, states that he is writing of events which he saw and heard (εἶδόν τε καὶ ἤκουσα).

Adam Parry was born in Paris forty-three years ago and although he was to spend most of his life in the United States it is fair to say that his personal style always had in it a faint flavour of France and French culture. His father at that time was attending the Sorbonne where he published the thesis, heralding a new era in Homeric scholarship, to which his son, forty years later, was to pay signal tribute. The elder Parry, himself, was a graduate of Berkeley, but on his appointment to the Harvard faculty in the department of Classics the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their travels were not ended. It was with the aid of a grant from the university that Adam's father was enabled to pursue those studies in the oral poetry of Southern Yugoslavia which were to confirm the thesis that the Homeric poems were orally composed. He took his family to Yugoslavia with him. One of Adam's earliest memories was a recollection of the great blue pot of goat's milk simmering on the stove. There at an impressionable age he encountered hardy men and strenuous conditions of living, while his eyes rested on the rugged mountains of the Balkan peninsula, a Homeric landscape haunted by memories of latter-day heroes. Soon after their return to the United States the father's life by tragic accident was ended before it had scarcely begun, and Adam's mother took the family with her back to California. It was at Berkeley that Adam, like his father, achieved his initial mastery over the Greek tongue.

Ever since the publication of Kenyon's editio princeps of Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia in 1891, students of Athenian history have been forced to reckon with its contents. There is some measure of agreement that the latter portion of this document (i.e. chapters 42–69) is of greater historical value in that Aristotle is presenting a more detailed and contemporary account of the fourth-century Athenian government and constitution. The credibility of the earlier chapters, on the other hand, has suffered from the censor's knife. Some criticisms, to be sure, are justifiable, but to dismiss in a casual manner the entire narrative of chapters 1–41, principally on the grounds of error and distortion in Aristotle's sources, is a serious mistake. This is especially true where Aristotle furnishes information not found in other extant sources. An example is his relatively detailed history of the period between 413 and 403 b.c. (chapters 29–41), which, as Sandys correctly noted, held ‘the writer's evident interest’. Here Aristotle describes the activities of the commission of thirty syngrapheis, presents the tantalizing constitutional documents of the 400 and the 5000, and introduces other material (particularly post-Thucydidean) which is neglected by, or contradicts, the testimonies of Xenophon, Diodorus, Lysias, Plutarch and others. One of the most interesting and controversial developments treated within these chapters is the establishment of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 b.c. Since no one source relates the whole story, it is necessary to reconstruct the situation piecemeal.

The main thesis of this paper and much of the argument has already been glanced at in my Emergence of Greek Democracy, but at the cost of some repetition I think it may be useful to state it again rather more bluntly and baldly. It is, I think, important – it may even be true. The paper was first given at Yale in the autumn of 1968 to an audience which included both Adam Parry and Christopher Dawson. It seems proper, therefore, to print it in a volume which is a memorial to both; proper too to offer it in the casual form in which it was delivered without much more than a passing bow to that demand for scholarly paraphernalia which both of them knew so well how to keep in its place. The only alterations I have made to the text are due to the shrewd and friendly criticism that they gave at the time or afterwards; they and others, colleagues and students in New Haven and elsewhere.

Of colleagues I shall not speak, but it is well known that students are revolting. In some places they have been more revolting than in others, but overall the pattern has been roughly the same; for some reason or other they no longer want to sit back and be coddled in the cosy comfort of capitalist prosperity, or for that matter communist prosperity.

The megarian degree, with its context of associated events, the violation of the hiera orgas, Anthemocritus' embassy and the decree of Charinus, has prompted considerable discussion in recent years. The possibility of reconciling the evidence of our three main witnesses, Thucydides, Aristophanes and Plutarch, would be difficult even if it were not compounded by difficulties in the interpretation of each of them. Thus the mere determination of the date of the central decree – that banning the Megarians from the Athenian agora and the harbors of the allied cities – cannot be disentangled from the literary and philosophical problem of judging Thucydides' version of the causes or occasions of the Peloponnesian War. Brunt could argue, for example, that Thucydides' failure to inform us when or why the Megarian decree was passed is presumptive evidence that it was not a preliminary of the War and that it therefore must have been voted substantially before 433 or 432. Ignoring for the present the possibility that Thucydides did not know that he did not tell us its date, Brunt's judgment is clearly based upon his general assessment of Thucydides' mode of operation. Working from a different assessment, Meiggs could as reasonably conclude that the reason Thucydides makes so little of the decree is that others had made so much of it. He did not tell us simply because he refused to count it among the αἰτίαι and διαϕοραί and, as Jacoby would say, was being stiff-necked about the whole matter.

In the speech which Thucydides put into the mouth of Pericles at the end of Book 1, successfully urging the Athenians not to submit to the Spartan demands, Pericles asserted his confidence that Athens could survive in war (1. 144. 1), and when Thucydides summed up Pericles' life he declared that this military estimate was sound. ‘When the war began, he appears in this matter too to have realized in advance the power of the city…and after his death his foresight with regard to the war was recognized still further’ (2. 65. 5f.). But was Thucydides right? Was Pericles' strategic estimate so justified by the war?

There is no real question of what Pericles' strategy was. Pericles himself set it out clearly enough (1. 143. 3–144. 1), and Thucydides reiterated it in the summing up (2. 65. 7). Nor has it ever been shown that it was plainly inept. Yet doubts remain. It was tried for so short a time that it cannot be thought to have been properly tested, and to commend it one is forced in some degree, like Thucydides, to argue the ineptitude of what replaced it. But perhaps all possible Athenian strategies might in the long run have failed. In any case it is hard to believe that so great a war could have been satisfactorily fought to a conclusion on a purely defensive strategy. Frustration is more likely to prompt invention and resource than to compel submission.

The plan for this volume was conceived by Christopher M. Dawson, who took the first steps in soliciting contributions to it. His death on 27 April 1972 left the task of completing the undertaking to the present editor. The subject seems a fitting memorial to Adam Parry, for his most important and original work was on Thucydides, and he was always fascinated by the relationship between history and literature. The present volume tries to present an unusually broad panorama of the varieties of Greek historical writing. Chronologically, the historians treated range from the father of history in the fifth century b.c. to Herodian, who lived into the third century of the Christian era, and almost every century in between is represented. Geographically, they came from as far west as Sicily and as far east as Syria. They had in common the Greek language and the tradition of historical writing which is a distinguishing feature of Greek culture.

Not all the authors treated are historians, strictly speaking. Plutarch is a biographer, the ‘Old Oligarch’ wrote a political treatise, Aristophanes is a comedian and Aristotle a philosopher. But all are important historical sources. Plutarch, moreover, is at least a quasi-historian while Aristotle's treatise on the Athenian Constitution is in part an attempt at history. They all deserve discussion in a volume on the Greek historians.

Finally, the contributors to this volume examine their subjects from different points of view. Some consider their value as historical sources.

Thucydides gives only a very brief account of early Sicilian history, so that we remain uncertain how accurate and well-founded his chronological details are and how much more he could have told us if he had wished to do so. Without any doubt he could have told some interesting things about Hiero and his contemporaries, if he had thought it relevant to his theme. But could he have added much to his summary account of the colonial settlements or given any substantial history of the development of these colonies in the seventh and sixth centuries? If he had made inquiries, in the Herodotean manner, in Syracuse or Gela or Acragas, or in Taras or Posidonia (it seems anachronistic to use the Latin names), would people have been able to provide him with the same generous measure of local history and myth and τὸμυθῶδες that he could have collected in Thebes or Argos, Miletus or Samos? It might be easier to answer the question if we had some of the text of Antiochus of Syracuse or Hippys of Rhegium, or more substantial portions of the poetry of Stesichorus. But as things are, we can only wonder if Greeks in Italy and Sicily knew much more about their early history than we do.

It has always been convenient to suppose that Thucydides had read the history of Antiochus.

Polybius was not the first historian who claimed to write ‘universal’ history, as he admits; but the only one of his predecessors whose claim he concedes is Ephorus, and Ephorus in fact did not produce a history of the whole world, but merely combined a number of separate accounts of the Greek states in a single work. Polybius' Histories were universal in a different sense, for they dealt with a period in which (he tells us) events themselves had begun to interlock; and in his discussion of that process a great part is played by the concept of συμπλοκή. It is this concept and its relevance to Polybius' idea of universal history that I want to examine here. I do so in the hope that the subject may seem not inappropriate as a tribute to Adam Parry, whose keen interest in problems of literary composition was well known, and who had recently turned his attention to the field of Greek history.

Clearly Polybius attached great importance to the idea of συμπλοκή. ‘It is only from the interconnection of all the events one with another and from their comparison (συμπλοκῆς καὶ παραθέσεως), and from their resemblances and differences, that a man can obtain his object and, thanks to a clear view of these matters, can derive both profit and pleasure from history.’ This συμπλοκή, this linking together of events throughout the inhabited world, is not something available to all historians at will.