Sphinx

There’s a very peculiar article in today’s Observer, picking up on the predictably gormless comments earlier this week from Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Education, about medieval history being fine for those who want to pay for such a luxury but undeserving of public support. To be precise, most of the article is great, as it’s based around eminently sensible comments from medieval historians like Miri Rubin and John Arnold, but the opening paragraphs are really odd.

Historians have been ridiculed since Herodotus, the “father of history”, was mocked by his Athenian contemporary, Thucydides, as a mere storyteller. So it was with some weariness that medieval historians took to their keyboards last week to respond to the latest slur against their discipline.

Robert Halfon, who chairs the Commons select committee on education, is no Thucydides, but he echoed complaints down the ages when he singled out medieval historians as undeserving of public funding.

Okay… This is obviously written by someone who knows a bit about the Greek historians in question – it’s a lot more than boilerplate evocation of the Thucydides Trap, instead focusing on a less well-known passage – but that actually makes it more peculiar. Yes, Thucydides does criticise Herodotus (without naming him; it’s simply that two errors he focuses on are both found in Herodotus, as was noted in antiquity) – but not for being “a mere storyteller” but for factual inaccuracy and failing to be critical enough. His comments a little later, criticising writers whose aim is to be entertaining rather than truthful, may refer to Herodotus (and that’s how they have often been interpreted), but there’s no indication of this in the text – and the fact that Thucydides passes over the Persian Wars quite briefly, effectively leaving that topic to Herodotus’ account, is a pretty clear indication that there were many aspects of his predecessor/rival’s work that he found perfectly acceptable.

But all of this is about Thucydides criticising Herodotus for his failure to match up to his, Thucydides’, idea of the proper way to write an account of the past. It’s fair to say that in Thucydides’ view any non-Thucydidean account is largely worthless (and this is an attitude echoed by his fervent admirers over the ages) – but that is still vastly removed from a critique of the idea of writing about the past at all – the implication that Thucydides was the first in a tradition of disparaging history (or at least medieval history) in general. “Historians have been arguing about the proper way to study the past since Herodotus and Thucydides”, fine. “Historians have been questioning popular, uncritical views of the past since Thucydides”, fine. “People have been attacking history since Thucydides”, not so much.

The best sense I can make of these two paragraphs is that this is someone who’s picked up on the tradition of seeing Thucydides as separate from his cultural context, not a historian in the conventional Greco-Roman tradition – either a modern critical historian as he was seen in the 19th century, or even more likely a political theorist of some kind, someone opposed to the ‘past as an end in itself’, non-analytical, historicising approach to history (rather as Leo Strauss tends to read him). Thucydides’ attack on Other Historians who lack his critical rigour and idiosyncratic conceptions – and his implicit rejection of the term istorie that Herodotus had adopted for his work – is interpreted as an attack on History by a social scientist. Possibly.