The introduction gives an overview of the book’s aim and the conceptual approach to its topic. The subject is the particular way in which the Greeks, in the context of their general project of understanding the world, have made sense of their past. That means it is about history as an element of Greek culture. The concept with which the subject is dealt with is that of intentional history, which is based on the theories of Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida and Jan Assmann on collective memory and social remembrance. With ‘intentional history’, I refer to that part of history that is relevant to the collective identity of social groups of all sizes. This concept allows statements to be made across cultures and epochs and thus makes it possible to draw a connection from antiquity to modernity.

Chapter 1 focuses on the social groups, the communicative constellations, and the media in which intentional history took shape. Texts in which the first-person plural, the collective ‘we’, was used, were particularly characteristic of this. In this way, they brought the historical events into a direct connection with the current audience. It is identical, as it were, with the past actors. These were his ancestors. The Greeks had countless poems and chants of this kind, which were found primarily in the epics of Homer and Hesiod. Especially among the elites who enjoyed such chants at their symposia, the idea prevailed that in this way their achievements would also be known in the future. As a result, the Greeks did not differentiate between mythical and (in our sense) historical events, and remembrance was also directed towards posterity. At the same time, the texts were firmly anchored in social and religious communication and thus part of life. This went so far that many citizens took part in performances of poetic works themselves (in choirs, for example), thus being themselves involved in the creation of intentional history.

Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to the influence of rhetoric on historiography. Here, too, the struggle for truth remains at the center, albeit in a dialectical relationship to the fictional, which Gorgias, the first great theoretician of rhetoric, was already aware of. Since the most important representatives of this new historiographical approach, Ephorus and Theopompus, have only survived in fragments, the first focus is on Isocrates, who was considered their teacher. His handling of history can be analyzed surprisingly clearly, and he shows a closeness to the rational-critical method, not least in his striving for truth and the awareness of the difficulties of searching for it. After a closer interpretation of the above-mentioned historians in this sense, the chapter treats another new tendency of historiography in the Hellenistic epoch. In the so-called tragic historiography, the representation of history again approaches the poetic. The striving for truth is now directed towards the most vivid representation of the real event, as if the recipient had been present at it.

Chapter 3 studies the beginnings of Greek historiography against the background of the intentional history described in the first two chapters. This clearly shows the innovative character of the new genre. The decisive factor for this was the influence of the new philosophical thinking that had initially developed in Ionia. The emphasis on rational procedures and the search for true knowledge was in the foreground, coupled with the curiosity of the researcher. The numerous stories of the Greeks were critically questioned by intellectuals of this provenance (e.g., Xenophanes, Hecataeus). Herodotus also felt obliged to the new rational-philosophical method, but at the same time he integrated many of the traditional stories into his new type of historical work. The critical direction then culminates in Thucydides, who in his own way and with the logic of power connects the present and the past. He was only too aware that he had strayed very far from traditional views of the past, and he himself underscored it very clearly.

In his ‘concluding perspectives’, the author first emphasises the differences between current and ancient ways of dealing with history in view of modern notions of history and the science of history. But he also draws attention to the fact – and cites respective remarks by a renowned historian (Angelos Chaniotis) on the director of the film Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone – that even in our times the elements of the true and the fictitious can be fruitfully combined when it comes to the adequate representation of history. Intentional or not – what brings history to life and keeps it alive is narration.

The main subject of Chapter 2 is the motifs and the content of the Greeks’ myth-historical tales and songs. The Greeks’ past was very clearly structured: the main axis was the battle for Troy with the generations before and after. The more distant past led back to the origin of the world, gods, and men. On the other hand, the stories have led to the present day. Concepts of kinship, mediated by genealogies, played an essential role. This was connected with stories of migrations, colonisation, expulsions, and re-migrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity, among the Greeks themselves and in relation to foreigners. We cannot see these stories of migration as evidence for older ‘historical’ events. But they reflect very clearly the dynamics of their time of origin, the time of the so-called Great Colonization. The identity-forming power of the Greek myth-history lay precisely in the fact that it re-located its own experiences into the past. What they had constructed themselves appeared to the Greeks as their past.