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Om det förflutna i antik grekisk historieskrivning

Abstract

This article challenges and problematizes ancient Greek historiography as history. The first part presents the discussions of the last decades on the guiding principles of the writing of history in Classical antiquity. It focuses particularly on the view that ancient historiography has more in common with Classical literature and rhetoric than with history, as we understand it today. The second part argues that the analysis of the subjective starting points of Greek historiography should be complemented by studies of what ancient historia fixates as its object(s). Our preliminary analysis of the interrelations of past and present during antiquity leads us to a critique of the disciplinary perspectives and conceptual obscurities that seem to have become inherent to modern scholarship. We go on to propose an alternative approach to ancient historiography, based on ancient (world) views of uniformity and typological thinking. In antiquity, the general tendency was to consider the human world as virtually invariable, consisting of unchanging types of individuals, states and even courses of events. Change was interpreted as degrees of perfection or degeneration within the frameworks provided by these natural types. To the ancients, historians and otherwise, the past was not a “foreign country”, but rather a familiar one, similar indeed to the one which they themselves inhabited.