History and Memory in Ancient Greece

Richard W. Parker is an associate professor and chair of the Classics
Department at Brock University in St. Catharines.

In this book, an established authority on ancient Greek historical
writing investigates the nature of memory, especially communal memory,
and its role in the composition of histories in classical Greece. In
light of this investigation, he then evaluates the major classical
historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ephorus, and Theopompus.
The discussion includes extended forays into the processes of memory,
notions of scientific knowledge since the Enlightenment, and their
application to the study of history. This leads to a wide-ranging
exploration of the difference between contemporary notions of knowledge
and those of ancient writers working within a tradition of communal
memory.

Shrimpton argues that, for the ancient Greeks, memories of public
events were communal possessions. Individual communities generated and
controlled their respective historical memories. Local traditions had as
their purpose the celebration or commemoration of those communities and,
as such, made use of local documents and monuments. Writers of a
universal history attempted to gather relevant local traditions by means
of travel, to verify them, and to shape them into a celebration of
achievements of Pan-Hellenic interest. For this type of history, general
documents are favored over those with a local identity.

The book comprises an essay on “Rhetoric, Reason, Science and
Memory,” another on “Verification, Objectivity, and Interaction:
Appreciating the Gulf between Ancient and Contemporary Historical
Writing,” and substantial appendices on “Herodotus’ Source
Citations” and “Narrative Sub-divisions in Thucydides” (concerned
with composition for mnemonic ‘storage’). There are remarkably few
slips (I detected only two: for the Athenians and the Peloponnesians,
respectively, the Peloponnesian War “lasted exactly thirty-one
years” and “thirty-two years and six months” [143, compare 161];
(“Andromache” [207]).

For this reviewer, Shrimpton’s approach goes a long way toward
resolving several apparent methodological inconsistencies in Herodotus
and Thucydides, in explaining Xenophon’s quirkiness, and in setting
both the uniqueness and the cantankerousness of Theopompus into context.
Hard going early on, this study offers stimulating, even exciting
insights. This book will be essential reading for serious students of
ancient historical writing. Let them take note of Shrimpton’s dictum:
“Every historian of ancient Greece must be a historiographer.”