The Ancient Greek Historians

by John Bagnell Bury

This well known, easily read work covers the entire field of classical historians from the early writers to Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, through Poseidonius and such Romans as Tacitus, Cato, Caesar, Livy. Scores of writers are studied biographically, in style, sources, accuracy, structure, historical concepts, and influences. Recent discoveries such as the Oxyrhinchus papyri are referrred to, as well as such great scholars as Nissen, Gomperz, Cornford, etc.

Genres: History, Ancient History, Classics

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

John Bagnell Bury (often published as J.B. Bury) was a classical scholar, historian, and philologist. He held the chair in Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin, for nine years, and also was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University.

Reviews

[Ed]

“The Ancient Greek Historians” is John Bagnell Bury at his most informative, interesting and entertaining. It is a great place to start for an understanding of the development of the historical literature of Greek antiquity and how the views of history itself developed from the sixth century BCE. Bury, at the very beginning of this work, states, “As a Hellenist, I shall be happy if I succeed in illustrating the fact that, as in poetry and letters generally, as in art, as in philosophy, and in mathematics, so too in history, our debt to the Greeks transcends calculation.” The Greeks”, he says, “were not the first to chronicle human events, but they were the first to apply criticism. And that means, they originated history.” So the study of Greek historiography is not confined in importance to only the realm of Greek historians, but rather defines the purpose and correct philosophy of history in general—it is essential not only for the study of Greek history of the philosophy and function of history itself.

There was no real history available to the ancient Greeks although Homer’s epics, he says, were a “valid witness” to the struggle over the control of land. This can be surprising to the contemporary reader since the Greeks’ national identity was so well defined by the fourth century—their political maturity belies their ignorance of how they got to where they were. They had a highly developed sense of the role of the state and the duties of its citizens and created political philosophy as we know and study it today. However their history consisted of their mythic religion plus the “Iliad”, the “Odyssey” and the works of a few other all but unknown now poets. He considers both epics to be historical sources—particularly since they caused Greeks to want to know more about their past—but no history itself.

Bury sees Hecataeus of Miletus (550 BCE) as the founder of historical inquiry history by being the first to assess critically in accounts of geographies, genealogies, and past events reported by contemporaries. His work was used by Herodotus—in some cases adopted wholesale and acknowledged it only when he found occasion to complain. Herodotus and Thucydides, of course, are still written about, attacked and defended and are the subject of many learned tomes by many learned people. Anyone interested in history of the Greeks will have read both authors, probably in translation and possibly only excepts. Bury remains as valid a starting point for either enjoying or analyzing—or both—the Big Two of the world of ancient history.

Since the book is made up of eight lectures given at Harvard the style is less discursive than in much of Bury’s other work. He was able to assume that all his listeners had studied Greek and had read all of the authors Bury cited so there is more discussion of what specific Greek terms meant at the time they were written than in his books on the histories of the Greek and Roman empires. Even if some of the arguments in the text seem truncated (they do), the printed work is accompanied by a lot of excellent footnotes that the Harvard kids (and Bury himself) had access to.

Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in ancient Greece and how its history came to be written.

[Alberto]

Great insights into the work of Herodotus and Thucydides (which I've read) and Polybius (which is on my to-do list). The book is heavy going at times, as it assumes a classical education that the modern reader is not likely to have had. He drops a lot of untranslated Greek phrases (and some Latin too). He also mentions a lot of classical authors of whom I've never heard. Neverthess, worth getting through as it will deepen your appreciation of the classical historians you have read. (If you've never read any of them, you should skip this book as it has no independent value.)

[Meg]

My copy of this is a Barnes and Noble printing, with a byline on the cover that suggests this is "essential reading." To be clear... it isn't. If you are a historian, I might suggest reading and forming an opinion on the last of Bury's eight lectures. If you are a historian specifically of the Classical period, this should be counted as essential "eventual" reading, but perhaps not unless you aim for a PhD.

Personally, I am a folklorist first, historian second, and a classicist only occasionally, so this really wasn't in my wheelhouse. I enjoyed the latter half of the lectures. Polybius was a favorite of mine in undergrad, though I'm shamefully not as familiar with Thucydides as I ought to have been. He's on my shelf TBR.

The lecture transitioning between Greek and Roman historians, as well as the last lecture synthesizing ancient writers with the modern era were interesting and are good to be familiar with, but arguably they are products of their era. Is Bury wrong in his assessments of the historians he talks about? An expert would have to tell you that. I'm merely a hobbyist, but my gut says "probably." Bury's notes suggest a tendency towards popular methods of his day. This is fine, it just needs to be noted and considered in contrast to other schools of thought and theory.

[Eric]

This book deserves to be more widely known. I'll never see Herodotus or Thucydides, whom I love, the same again.
The quotations alone make this book a gold mine. Bury uses a few German or French terms at times, but those are easy to Google.

[Stephen Bedard]

A good introduction to Greco-Roman historians. It was good right up to the final chapter when he starts to make predictions about the future of Christianity.

[Christopher (Donut)]

Did I ever review this? I think I posted my highlights from a now defunct Kindle edition, but said edition deserved to die, as it was riddled (riddled, I say!) with scanning errors.

On top of which, the book itself was not very good. Bury loved to speculate on the characteristics of Greek historians whose writings have not survived. It was cheap and easy "scholarship" based on less than nothing by way of substantiation.

Here is a fine example from early in my highlights (which I can still access on read.kindle):

... There is no doubt that it contained, besides descriptions of countries and places, a great deal of ethnography and history, and especially it introduced the Greeks to oriental history and sketched for the first time the successive monarchies of Assyria, Media, and Persia. The writer almost certainly touched upon the Ionian history of his own day, in which he himself played a part. Herodotus, you may remember, mentions advice tendered by Hecataeus to the lonians on more than one occasion, advice which they did not follow. The most likely person to record advice which has not been followed is the adviser; and we may pretty confidently assume that the source of Herodotus was Hecataeus himself.

Here he is again, speculating like the wind:

... As we do not know the precise dates of the life of Hegesias, we cannot say whether he and Timaeus were independent of each other. The literary parentage of this new style is to be sought in the prose of the elder sophists, like Gorgias and Alci-damas ; but it outdid anything that Gorgias in his most frigid moments had been tempted to essay. It produces the impression of a bacchic revel of rhythms and verbal effects. This Asianic movement triumphed ; the general public lost the power of appreciating Attic measure and Attic sanity; and the new style was predominant for two hundred years. Nor did it disappear when the reaction came and Attic models again came into fashion.

Once more. This is just breathtaking. The less knowledge he has, the more confidently he can say something about a guy:

... On the whole, I think we may say that while Poseidonius exercised a wide and deep influence on the intellectual life of his day, and occupies a considerable place in the history of ancient learning, and while his historical work was the chief source of the records of his time, and its loss is deplorable, he cannot be said to have advanced the study of history by new principles or methods, and in some respects he represented a retrogression from Polybius. His fragments show that general Culturgeschichte was a conspicuous feature of his work; and he seems to have aimed at suggesting a contrast between the rude but fresh manners of barbarians like the Gauls and Parthians, and the decadent civilisation of Egypt and Syria. We cannot form any definite idea of his general treatment, but we may say with probability that Poseidonius had qualities which entitled him to be reckoned among those historians to whose works men go, not for rhetoric or sentiment, but for the illumination of the past by reasonable thought.

[Rob]

Series of eight lectures tracing the development of historical writing through the lenses and works of the major Greek authors. The piece is not for the feint of heart, meaning it benefits greatly from a deeper knowledge and intimacy with the corresponding works discussed. Non-specialists may find Bury tedious if not unapproachable. For me the true wealth of the series lay in the final two lectures which ultimately serve as a state-of-the-field analysis, call to purpose, and warning of relativity.

[Erik Graff]

Primarily focused on Herodotus and Thucydides, Bury's lectures are fact-filled and accessible.