1.9 The prose

The production prose was essentially of a technical nature: philosophy, Law and policy, science and technology. Only history has a special place as later oratory. For a long time, the interest of the Greeks towards the past was satisfied from the repertoire of myths and legends in the authenticity of which was believed; even a skeptic like the philosopher Xenophanes, which refuted the morality taught by the myths and their supernatural content, never doubted the existence of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, or Oedipus of Thebes, Greeks like them who had lived in a vague bygone era, which had reigned, fought and procreated. The interest was not historical in the sense that there be an investigation into the events of the Trojan or other events or periods. The consciousness and pride Greek or regional, the penalty imposed power, the meaning of the ritual practices, communal solidarity: here's what we tried to ensure comfort or resorting to the past, and for these purposes they served well the stories of tradition, possibly revised when it was required by new historical developments, by political and social changes; and it was also facilitated by the inevitable imprecision in the oral transmission.

Towards the end of the sixth century, in Asia Minore, the Greeks were subject to the sovereignty of the barbarian monarchies, before the Lydia and then Persia, and of course these people nurtured in them a curiosity that could not be satisfied by the Greek myths. To satisfy this curiosity, appeared in the writings of numerous writers, the so-called Lomographers, which provided all sorts of information, and as often happens, even disinformation, Details of geographical, descriptions of social and religious customs and even, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, historical. Nothing like this had ever happened before, neither the Greeks nor known among the nations they, breaking thus making a complaint ethnocentrism and destructive of their own traditions. Hecataeus of Miletus, who had a part in the revolt of Ionia directive against Persia, wrote:"I write these things as it seems to me to be true. In fact, the speeches that tell the Greeks are many and in my opinion ridiculous ". Here Hecataeus talked about the history of the Greeks, not that of the barbarians, and these statements represent the first attempt to move from myth to historical research.

Then it was taken a big step forward with Herodotus of Halicarnassus, native of Asia Minor, that broadened the horizons of logography, to include the Scythians and the Egyptians, as well as the Lydians and Persians, trying to control the mass of accumulated news, some of which were in written texts, making personal inquiries on the spot, visititando places considered, it analyzes information collected rational, using the records of the Assyrian kings, Persians and Egyptians to get to establish a precise chronology, at least for the last centocinquat'anni. It was the beginning of the scientific method in historical research. But Herodotus went even further. Political exile from Halicarnassus, Samo and saw the poi ade Atene. It was then that, under the influence of Periclean Athens in its heyday, he made the decision to write the history of the Persian Wars. The audacity of this enterprise is really amazing. He had already spent a generation after the end of the war and there was no written documentation. Yet Herodotus set out to reconstruct the story in all its details, drawing on the memories of the survivors and the next generation of men who remembered the stories he had heard in his time. Herodotus wrote that the book was somewhat complicated, and in the first half kept much of the original character logographic, although everything was held together by the great central theme of the struggle between the Greeks and Persians. He had, no doubt, deserved the title of "father of history", well as being a great artist. Yet Herodotus, was mixed welcome from the outset. Father of history, father of lies: this accusation never ceased in antiquity, and even today Heredotus is defined by someone, a torto, a storyteller with a charming style and with an unlimited credulity.

It was the Athenian Thucydides, Herodotus to really understand where she was going: to discover the basic reasons of human conduct by exposure of the causes and trends of a great war, did not like the poets with the freedom of their imagination, nor like the philosophers with their abstract discourses about man and society, ma concretely, with accuracy and adherence to the facts, and with due care for the links and chains. And he thought he could do better, focusing on the accuracy of the facts, eliminating absolute severity with the romance of the facts from the story, restricting attention to the war and politics, looking more carefully the causes, escludendovi the supernatural, and reserving the whole scene to its unique subject, l’uomo. Thucydides wrote the history of the war of the Peloponnese, which had participated in the early stages, and devoted his life to this work with admirable determination. The parts of the book that are of a more general and, in a way, more philosophical, are stylistically brilliant. The narrative itself is unequally; touches the high points in the story of the Sicilian expedition, but often gets lost in a dreary succession of particular importance and interest-free. The style is sometimes rugged, yet the reading of Thucydides is always a memorable experience, for he is not content to describe and narrate but is constantly looking for what there is of permanent and universal in humans and politics, convinced that human nature is immutable.

After Herodotus and Thucydides, historiography had a steady decline and became a pedestrian or a finding of fact or a vehicle for political propaganda or appeals to sentimental. The success of a writer depended on rhetoric and pathos, from its entertainment value, rather than its truthfulness and understanding of the facts.

A special mention deserves Diodorus, who compiled a universal story of the beginnings up to the Caesar's Gallic Wars, of which he was younger contemporary.

Meanwhile, in Greek culture back to the fifth century, historiography had given way to oratory that had established itself as an art in its own right. Education, Isocrates had triumphed on Plato, and the rhetoric was elevated above philosophy in the curriculum of higher education that became characteristic of the Hellenistic and Roman Greece. The way in which an idea was expressed became more important than the idea itself.