Modern histories of ancient Greece: genealogies, contexts and eighteenth-century narrative historiography
Giovanna Ceserani
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: February (2008)
Abstract
This essay is a response to Aleka Lianeri’s call to reflect on how encounters with antiquity were foundational to modern categories of historiography, by exploring both the idea of the historical and the discipline’s concepts and practices. In taking up such questions I chose to focus on the earliest modern narrative histories of ancient Greece, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century. I examine these works’ wider contexts and singular features as well as their reception in the discipline. I argue for the formative role of this moment for modern historiography. Although they were often dismissed as simple narratives, these early modern works provided later historians with a sense of their own modernity. These texts prefigured modern narrative historiography’s relationship of simultaneous dependence and independence from its ancient models.
When did modern historiography of ancient Greece start? The question is deceptively simple and betrays assumptions far more revealing than any straightforward answer. Its formulation implies distinguishing between ancient historians and modern ones. But this has long been a slippery endeavor, as Nicole Loraux’s title Thucydides n’est pas un colleague of some years ago reminds us.1 Ironically, in telling the history of historical practice, historians’ chronology has often been fraught with issues of value and haunted by presentism. In fact, when the origins of modern historiography of the ancient world are sought, the divide between ancients and moderns is repeatedly left behind in favor of privileging some moderns above others. George Grote, the nineteenth-century British banker and political figure turned famous author of the History of ancient Greece (1846- 1856), is the most frequently cited founder. Many of these claims, moreover, besides highlighting Grote’s differences from previous moderns, reinforce this historian’s foundational status by attributing contemporary value to his work. It has been well argued that his ‘is the earliest history of Greece still consulted by scholars’ and that his work has remained influential to most important twentieth-century historians of ancient Greece, including de Ste Croix, Momigliano, Finley and Hansen.2 Such analyses have taught us a lot about the development of modern historiography of ancient Greece. But what else is lost by assimilating Grote’s work to that of today’s historians and by leaving out authors who preceded him?
Giovanna Ceserani
Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: February (2008)
Abstract
This essay is a response to Aleka Lianeri’s call to reflect on how encounters with antiquity were foundational to modern categories of historiography, by exploring both the idea of the historical and the discipline’s concepts and practices. In taking up such questions I chose to focus on the earliest modern narrative histories of ancient Greece, written at the beginning of the eighteenth century. I examine these works’ wider contexts and singular features as well as their reception in the discipline. I argue for the formative role of this moment for modern historiography. Although they were often dismissed as simple narratives, these early modern works provided later historians with a sense of their own modernity. These texts prefigured modern narrative historiography’s relationship of simultaneous dependence and independence from its ancient models.
When did modern historiography of ancient Greece start? The question is deceptively simple and betrays assumptions far more revealing than any straightforward answer. Its formulation implies distinguishing between ancient historians and modern ones. But this has long been a slippery endeavor, as Nicole Loraux’s title Thucydides n’est pas un colleague of some years ago reminds us.1 Ironically, in telling the history of historical practice, historians’ chronology has often been fraught with issues of value and haunted by presentism. In fact, when the origins of modern historiography of the ancient world are sought, the divide between ancients and moderns is repeatedly left behind in favor of privileging some moderns above others. George Grote, the nineteenth-century British banker and political figure turned famous author of the History of ancient Greece (1846- 1856), is the most frequently cited founder. Many of these claims, moreover, besides highlighting Grote’s differences from previous moderns, reinforce this historian’s foundational status by attributing contemporary value to his work. It has been well argued that his ‘is the earliest history of Greece still consulted by scholars’ and that his work has remained influential to most important twentieth-century historians of ancient Greece, including de Ste Croix, Momigliano, Finley and Hansen.2 Such analyses have taught us a lot about the development of modern historiography of ancient Greece. But what else is lost by assimilating Grote’s work to that of today’s historians and by leaving out authors who preceded him?
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