Introduction

Attempts to understand the origins and development of Greek historiography are constantly thwarted by the paucity of information available to us. But if we turn to the development of one branch of Greek historiography, the war monograph, we seem to be in a slightly more fortunate position. We have in full the histories of both Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus’ work covers a vast temporal and geographical spread, but it comes to a climax with a detailed narrative of the Persian expedition to Greece in 480-479 bce (Books 7-9). Fifty years after the successful resistance to Persia, the two Greek states that had played the leading role in that resistance, Athens and Sparta, found themselves at war, and the war on which they were engaged found its historian, Thucydides. Thucydides’ History provides a detailed season-by-season narrative of the Peloponnesian War down to 411 bce (it was left incomplete, probably owing to the author’s death). As we assess Thucydides’ concentrated focus on a single Greek war against Herodotus’ more diffuse interests, it is tempting to plot a development from the earlier to the later historian: a prominent modern critic of historiography has written that ‘‘the war monograph implicit in Herodotus emerged perfected at Thucydides’ hands’’ (Fornara 1983: 32). That is to say, Thucydides realized that Herodotus’ detailed account of Xerxes’ expedition was a potential model for a work devoted to a single war.

Fornara’s account of the development of the war monograph rests heavily on Jacoby’s view of the development of Greek historiography (above, p. 5). Jacoby argued (1956: 37-39) that as Herodotus’ understanding of the significance of the Persian Wars developed, his increased understanding led him to expand on the mythographic and ethnographic interests of his predecessor Hecataeus and to develop a form of historical writing that would enable him to present his investigations into the great clash between Greece and Persia.

There are various problems with Jacoby’s view of the development of Greek historiography, and these problems complicate the view of the development of the war monograph that Jacoby posited. Jacoby operates with a seemingly static notion of the different genres; his view is excessively focused on individuals and suspiciously teleological as it plots a development from Hecataeus to Herodotus and then from Herodotus to Thucydides (Marincola 1999); and he does not set the changes he outlines in relation to changing philosophical notions of the cosmos or to conceptions of temporality or space (Humphreys 1997).

In this chapter we shall focus not so much on the broader intellectual context in which the monograph developed as on the main problem posed by the form of the monograph - the temporal and spatial demarcation of its subject. But first we have to address a further difficulty in Jacoby’s model - the relation of his categories to ancient terminology.

The problem of terminology is particularly acute when we have to deal with the war monograph. Fornara, as we have seen, was prepared to speak of the war monograph implicit in Herodotus. Alonso-Niinez, by contrast, claimed that both Herodotus and Thucydides did in fact produce ‘‘historical monographs’’: ‘‘the war between the Persians and the Greeks was the subject of the former, the struggle between Athens and Sparta the theme of the latter’’ (1990: 174). The main problem in using the term ‘‘monograph,’’ however, is not the differences that may arise in the scholarly community, but the fact that the term itself is modern and misleading. The Greek word monographos is found on Hellenistic papyri, but it means ‘‘a notary.’’ Our term ‘‘monograph,’’ by contrast, dates from the eighteenth century, when it was used to describe a separate treatise on a single species of plant or animal, and it still suggests a specialized and technical work; in modern English at any rate the phrase ‘‘war monograph’’ has an odd ring to it.

How then did writers in antiquity conceive the task of composing a work on a single war? In FGrHist, Jacoby defined war monographs more precisely by glossing them with the Greek term kata meros suntaxeis - a term taken from Polybius, the Greek historian of the second century bce. That Greek term, however, does not really correspond to our term ‘‘war monograph.’’ To understand its implications, we have to look at how Polybius uses it in polemical contexts as a means of bringing out the advantages of his own (universal or general) history: we can then weigh the sort of war narratives about which we do have sufficient information against the principles laid down by Polybius.