American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization Book

In "Greek and Roman Historians" Michael Grant sets a difficult task for himself, to accept that classical histories are full of misinformation and deliberate distortions, try and identify what they are and why they occur and still find a method for reading them that allows them to be used as source material. In a way it is not unlike the approach one takes to any history; we realize that the material the author used, what was emphasized, what left out and what interpreted in light of the his political, economic and social interests doesn't invalidate the work. Often we discover something about the subject matter of the history even if it isn't what the author intended and just as often are able to learn what contemporaries of the historian felt about their world as illustrated by how they see events described by the historian.

One challenge is point of view of the writer and his attempt to show how important, resourceful or intelligent he was. The memoirs of Ulysses Grant and William Sherman from the American Civil War are different from each other in emphasis, detail and tone'and they were on the same side. Contemporaneous books from the South, "Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History" written in 1888 or " From Manassas to Appomattox" by General James Longstreet will be even more divergent.

But these are challenges faced by all analysts of written history. Missing from the ancient historians is the essential element of the historian'written sources so that we can consult the same material used by (for example) Herodotus or Thucydides. They weren't there for the Greeks, they weren't there for the Romans and the certainly aren't available to 21st century critics. Grant addresses this conundrum by going back to the time when the histories were written, when history was a literary art in the same category as epic poetry and tragedy. Herodotus saw himself as a creative heir of Homer and the Persian wars he chronicled as directly descended from the Trojan War. Thucydides claimed to reject the Homeric traditions but mainly cut out the most outlandish of the myths and obvious exaggerations but he named Minos and Agamemnon as real persons, creating the early history of Greece out of mythology. The Roman historians had their own foundation myth. Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch considered Theseus and Romulus as historical figures and used much of Homer (later Virgil) to frame the early history of Rome. And all of them were more interested in truth than accuracy.

Which is not to say that they can be ignored as sources for studying the ancient world since much of what these historians wrote is buttressed by evidence from non-literary sources such as temple inscriptions, coins and grave goods. Archeology in the Mediterranean and ancient history of Greece and Rome are often complementary.

People of my age, gender and religion were required to take two years, if not more, of Latin in high school and were encouraged to study Greek. One of the second year texts was "Commentaries on the Gallic Wars" by Julius Caesar, which we translated into English and then attempted to translate back to Latin. Even given the drudgery of brute force memorization of noun declensions and verb conjugations the power and (occasionally) beauty of Caesar's prose came through. It is their artistic merit as much as their historical accuracy that keeps these works alive.