History vs His Story

(Originally posted on Tuesday June 5th 2007)

Reading a combination of modern historical texts and accounts of past ages written in ages closer to the present is often a strange experience. Almost instantly the reader is struck by the fact that these are two very different ways of looking back at the past and recording the lives of our distant ancestors.

Pick up and read any of the ancient texts that have survived from Roman times and you have what was defined as history in its day, and at the same time something that to the modern reader seems more like a work of romantic fiction than an account of the past.

When no record existed of a great speech made by a barbarian king before a decisive battle - regardless in reality of his having made a speech at all - the historian was expected to compose one for him. The audience took from the speech the cues as to how the speaker was being presented by the history.

Compare that to the percieved duty of a modern historian, who is expected to scrutinise his sources and filter them through his academic training in order to arrive at an account that strives to be as accurate and unbiased as possible. The modern historian is more an analytical collector of facts and weigher of evidence than a teller of a grand tale.

Things become interesting when the lines begin to blur and one spills over into the other. Take for example the story of the discovery of Troy, which had been supposed an invention of Homer for so long. A passionate individual found the city that fitted Ilium very well, and no more than a few months ago another announced the discovery of the kingdom of Ithaca.On the other hand there are clear cases of modern historians who are less than dilligent in gathering their facts and screening their sources. Washington Irving needed an antagonist for Columbus in his somewhat fictionalised biography, so he inserted a backwards church that claimed the Earth was flat and sailors who feared to sail off the edge. Many people still believe that the same delusion was widely held in past ages, despite the numerous texts from the ancient world that theorised of a spherical Earth.

Another more recent account in a modern text amused me when a writer commented that he had been stunned to find a mass grave in the English countryside that was filled with headless bodies. All sorts of wild theories sprang forth from him, but never once did he look into the religious practices of the ancient Britons and and note that head-taking was a great honour amongst the warrior elite.

Again a modern historian writing about the period of history in which Herodotus penned his own infamous Histories was more than a little scathing of this ancient colleague's style (at the moment it seems to be in fashion to bash Herodotus...perhaps The English Patient is to blame?). Strange when you consider that the widely travelled Herodotous made a point of collecting accounts from both the Greeks and the Persians about the invasion of Greece and the famous confrontations between the great empire and the bold citystates. Telling both sides of the story would hardly land a modern historian accusations of bias.

Sometimes the reality of an ancient time and place is preserved only in the form of legends and tall tales that come down through the years and it takes a combination of both intelligence and not a little heart to rediscover them.

At the same time even events within living memory are clouded by rumour and fanciful retellings of so-called witnesses.

Modern historians would do well to think long and hard before discounting out of hand the legends and stories embroidered with magic and wonder as they have been handed down the ages. And anyone who thinks that he can tell a story without adding even a little spin of his own into the narrative is a fool.