Francis M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus
Preface
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PREFACE
The title of this book needs a word of explanation, if not of apology;
for to any one who is accustomed to think of Thucydides as typically prosaic,
and nothing if not purely historical, the epithet Mythistoricus may seem
to carry a note of challenge, or even of paradox. But the sense in which the
expression has here been used is quite consistent with the historian's
much-talked-of `trustworthiness', and, indeed, with the literal truth of every
statement of fact in the whole of his work. It is possible, however, even for
a writer of history, to be something much better than trustworthy. Xenophon, I
suppose, is honest; but his honesty makes it none the easier to read him. To
read Thucydides is, although certainly not easy, at any rate pleasant,
because--trustworthiness and all--he is a great artist. It is the object of
this essay to bring out an essentially artistic aspect of his work, which has
escaped notice, partly because the history is so long that it is hard to take
it in as a whole, and partly because the execution of the effect is imperfect,
having been hindered by the good intentions with which Thucydides set out.
The history, as it stands, is the product of two hardly compatible designs. It
was originally planned as a textbook of strategy and politics in the form of a
journal; and it is commonly taken to be actually nothing more. But the work, in
tbe course of its progress, began to grow, as it were of itself, out of this
pedestrian plan into a shape with another contour, which, however, is broken by
the rigid lines of the old plan, and discontinuous; much as a set of volcanic
islands might heave themselves out of the sea, at such angles and distances
that only to the eye of a bird, and not to the sailor cruising among them,
would they appear as the summits
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of one and the same submerged mountain-chain. The present essay is
mainly an attempt to chart these islands, leaving uncoloured blanks where the
sea lies flat between them, and infringing none of the fishing-rights of the
professed historian.It is the intrusion of this artistic
tendency--for a thing so unpremeditated can hardly be called a design--that
justifies the epithet Mythistoricus. By Mythistoria I mean history cast
in a mould of conception, whether artistic or philosophic, which, long before
the work was even contemplated, was already inwrought into the very structure
of the author's mind. In every age the common interpretation of the world of
things is controlled by some scheme of unchallenged and unsuspected
presupposition; and the mind of any individual, however little he may think
himself to be in sympathy with his contemporaries, is not an insulated
compartment, but more like a pool in one continuous medium--the circumambient
atmosphere of his place and time. This element of thought is always, of
course, most difficult to detect and analyse, just because it is a constant
factor which underlies all the differential characters of many minds. It was
impossible for Dante to know that his scheme of redemption would appear
improbable when astronomy should cease to be geocentric. It is impossible for
us to tell how pervasively our own view of the world is coloured by Darwinian
biology and by the categories of mechanical and physical science. And so it
was with Thucydides. He chose a task which promised to lie wholly within the
sphere of positively ascertainable fact; and, to make assurance double sure, he
set himself limits which further restricted this sphere, till it seemed that no
bias, no preconception, no art except the art of methodical inquiry, could
possibly intrude. But he had not reckoned with the truth that you cannot
collect facts, like so many pebbles, without your own personality and the
common mind of your age and country having something to say to the choice and
arrangement of the collection. He had forgotten that he was an Athenian, born
before Aeschylus was dead; and it did not occur to him
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that he must have a standpoint and outlook from which the world, having
a long way to travel in a thousand or two thousand years, would drift far
indeed. Thus it came about that even his vigilant precaution allowed a certain
traditional mode of thought, characteristic of the Athenian mind, to shape the
mass of facts which was to have been shapeless, so that the work of science
came to be a work of art. And, since this mode of thought had, as we shall
see, grown without a break out of a mythological conception of the world of
human acts and passions, which is the world of history, I have given him the
epithet Mythistoricus.
This essay, although its argument (of which a summary will be found in
the Table of Contents) is continuous, has been divided into two parts which in a way reflect the twofold design of Thucydides' history. Having occasion to look into the question, how the Peloponnesian War arose, I felt, vaguely but strongly, that Thucydides' account of its origin is remarkably inadequate; and I came to form a very different theory of the real causes of the war. This theory I have stated in the first four chapters, because, although the subject seems to me to be of no great importance in itself, it led me to inquire further, why Thucydides has told us about this matter--and told us at considerable length--so exceedingly little that appears to us relevant. The rest of the book is an answer to this question. I found that the reason lay, not in the author's famous reticence--he thought he had recorded all we should want to know--but in the fact that he did not, as is commonly asserted, take a scientific view of human history. Rather he took the view of one who, having an admirably scientific temper, lacked the indispensable aid of accumulated and systematic knowledge, and of the apparatus of scientific conceptions, which the labour of subsequent centuries has refined, elaborated, and distinguished. Instead of this furniture of thought, to the inheritance of which every modern student is born, Thucydides possessed, in common with his contemporaries at Athens, the cast of mind induced by an early education consisting almost
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exclusively in the study of the poets. No amount of hard, rational
thinking--an exercise which Thucydides never intermitted--could suffice to
break up this mould, in an age when science had as yet provided no alternative
system of conception. The bent of his poetical and artistic nurture comes out
in the mythistorical portions of the work, which in the later chapters I have
singled out and put together. The principle which informs and connects them is
the tragic theory of human nature--a traditional psychology which Thucydides
seems to me to have learnt from Aeschylus. I have tried to show at some length
how the form of thc Aeschylean drama is built upon this psychology; and,
finally, I have traced the theory of the tragic passions back into that dim
past of mythological belief out of which it came into the hands of the Athenian
dramatists. So my original question finds its answer. Thucydides never
understood the origin of the war, because his mind was filled with
preconceptions which shaped the events he witnessed into a certain form; and
this form chanced to be such that it snapped the causal links between
incidents, in the connexion of which the secret lies.
The Greek historians can be interpreted only by reference to the poets; and to understand the poets, we must know something of the mythological stage of thought, the fund of glowing chaos out of which every part of that beautiful, articulate
world was slowly fashioned by the Hellenic intellect. There is, on the
literary side, no branch of classical study which is not still suffering from
the neglect of mythology. The poets are still treated as if, like an
eighteenth-century essayist, they had a tiresome trick of making `allusions'
which have to be looked up in a dictionary. The history of philosophy is
written as if Thales had suddenly dropped from the sky, and, as he bumped the
earth, ejaculated, 'Everything must be made of water!' The historians are
examined on the point of 'trustworthiness'--a question which it is the
inveterate tendency of Englishmen to treat as a moral question; and, the
certificate of honesty once awarded, their evidence is accepted as if they had
written yesterday. The
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fallacy which I have designated 'The Modernist Fallacy' was never,
perhaps, so rife as it is now; and, but that I have no wish to be contentious,
this essay might be taken as a polemic against it, in so far as I have argued
that the thought of a most prosaic and rational writer of antiquity moved in an
atmosphere which we should recognize to be poetic and mythical.
Since I make no claim to have added to the stock of detailed historical
information, but only to have given a new setting to established facts, I have
not thought it necessary to acknowledge the source of every statement. The
material of the first four chapters is taken largely from Dr. Busolt's
monumental Griechische Geschichte, or from well-known sources which Dr.
Busolt's learning and industry have made easily accessible to any student. I
have also found Beloch's work useful and suggestive. If I have, for the
convenience of exposition, here and there expressed disagreement with a phrase
from Professor Bury's History of Greece, I would not be thought
insensible of the services rendered to scholarship by a student whose vast
erudition has not blunted the delicate feeling for poetry revealed in his
editions of Pindar.
My thanks are due to the Publishers for their unvarying courtesy and
consideration. My friend, Mr. A E. Bernays, of Trinity College, has kindly
read the proofs and suggested corrections. I should like also to recognize with
gratitude the wonderful promptitude and efficiency of the readers and staff of
the Clarendon Press.
There remain two other debts of a more personal kind.
One, which I am glad to acknowledge in this place, is somewhat indefinite, but
still profound. It is to Dr. Verrall, who, at a time when classical poetry in
this country either served as an engine of moral discipline in the teaching of
grammar or added an elegance of profane scholarship to the cultured leisure of
a deanery, was among the first to show that a modern intellect could achieve a
real and burning
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contact with the living minds of Greece. From his books and lectures
many of my generation first learnt that the Greeks were not blind children,
with a singular turn for the commonplace, crying for the light of Christian
revelation; and I am conscious, moreover, that in this present attempt to
understand, not the syntax, but the mind, of Thucydides, I am following, for
part of the way, a path which first opened before me when, in the breathless
silence of his lecture-room, I began to understand how literary art could be
the passion of a life.
The other obligation is to Miss Jane Harrison, to whom this book is dedicated in token that, but for the sympathy and encouragement she has given at every stage of its growth, this dream would have followed others up the chimney with the smoke. Any element of value there may be in the mythological chapters is due, directly or indirectly, to her; and, grateful as I am for the learning which she has put unreservedly at my disposal, I am much more grateful for the swift and faultless insight which,
again and again, has taken me straight to a point which my slower apprehension
had fumbled for in vain.
F. M. C.
TRINITY COLLEGE,
January, 1907.