How Did the Ancient Greeks Think about Their Place in History?

We are used to thinking about history in terms of written history, so, when people today hear about early civilizations, they often wonder, “Did people in ancient times have a sense of their own place in history? What did early civilizations think came before them? Did they think they were living at the beginning of history?” The answer is that ancient peoples did have a sense of living within a historical context and even the people living in the very earliest civilizations had an impression that there were many peoples who had come before them.

Unfortunately, ancient peoples often didn’t clearly distinguish history from legend. For instance, the ancient Greeks fully believed that the Trojan War was a historical event and that people like Herakles, Achilles, and Odysseus were real people. As I talk about in this article from March 2019, though, there is little evidence to support the view that anything like the Trojan War described in the Iliad really happened at all.

People in ancient times didn’t think of themselves as living in “ancient times”; they thought of themselves as modern in pretty much the same way that we do now. Nonetheless, the way they conceived of “modernity” was usually quite different from how we conceive of it.

How the ancient peoples thought about their place in history

Today, most people generally tend to think of “ancient times” as a time when people were living in poorer conditions than the ones we live in today. We tend to think of history as a sort of progression from an original primitive state to the modern, highly technologically advanced world we know today. Above all, we tend to imagine things as getting better. Most people imagine the future as a wonderful, peaceful place full of technological wonders the likes of which we can’t even imagine.

Ancient peoples generally tended to see things the opposite way; they tended to see things as getting progressively worse. The distant past was commonly imagined as a glorious Golden Age and the present was seen as an age of pitiful squalor in comparison. The future was often imagined as being even more wretched than the present.

The Homeric Epics and the lost Heroic Age

In the Iliad, an ancient Greek epic poem that was most likely composed in around the late eighth or early seventh century BC but describes events that supposedly happened in the twelfth century BC, the heroes are constantly described as nobler, mightier, and more amazing than anyone in the poet’s own era could ever hope to be.

As an example of this, the heroes are often described as easily lifting up massive boulders that the poet explicitly claims no man alive in his own time could ever hope to lift. For instance, in Book Five, lines 350–357 of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, the poet describes the hero Diomedes accomplishing just such a feat of strength:

“But Diomedes
bent for a stone and picked it up—a boulder
no two men now alive could lift, though he
could heft it easily. This mass he hurled
and struck Aineias in the hip, just where
the hipbone shifts in what they call the bone-cup,
crushing this joint with two adjacent tendons,
under the skin ripped off by the rough stone.”

Diomedes isn’t even one of the strongest warriors in the Iliad, but yet here he is portrayed as being many times stronger than even the strongest men alive in the poet’s own time—a reflection of just how much lesser the men of the poet’s own time were perceived as being compared to the great heroes of remote antiquity.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of a late fifth-century BC Greek sculpture of the hero Diomedes of Argos

Hesiodos on the degeneracy of his own generation and future generations

This view of the present as being more wretched than the past isn’t just found in the Homeric epics. The Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre, who lived in around the late eighth or early seventh century BC or thereabouts (around the same time the Homeric epics were composed), writes in his Works and Days, lines 170–201, as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White:

“Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation [i.e. the present generation], but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth.”

“The father will not agree with his children, nor the children with their father, nor guest with his host, nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to brother as aforetime. Men will dishonour their parents as they grow quickly old, and will carp at them, chiding them with bitter words, hard-hearted they, not knowing the fear of the gods. They will not repay their aged parents the cost their nurture, for might shall be their right: and one man will sack another’s city.”

“There will be no favour for the man who keeps his oath or for the just or for the good; but rather men will praise the evil-doer and his violent dealing. Strength will be right and reverence will cease to be; and the wicked will hurt the worthy man, speaking false words against him, and will swear an oath upon them. Envy, foul-mouthed, delighting in evil, with scowling face, will go along with wretched men one and all. And then Aidos and Nemesis, with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods: and bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.”

Hesiodos’s lamentation here about how his own generation is degenerate and how future generations will only be even more degenerate is reflective of how the ancient Greeks generally tended to think about their place in history.

You can compare Hesiodos’s views with the views of certain elderly folk in our own time who see the world as falling apart and who constantly complain about “kids these days.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Pseudo-Seneca, a bronze head from the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii once thought to represent Seneca but now thought to most likely be a fictional representation of Hesiodos

A view of history from the fifth century BC

The people of classical Athens saw themselves as but pale reflections of their great ancestors who supposedly fought in the Trojan War. The Athenians idolized legendary Athenian heroes like Kekrops, Erichthonios, Aigeus, Theseus, Aias, and Teukros. A central theme in Sophokles’s tragedy Aias, which was most likely originally performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in around 442 or 441 BC, is the contrast between the age of the Homeric heroes and the present age.

The tragedy is divided roughly into two parts. The first part centers around the living figure of Aias, who is portrayed as a larger-than-life heroic figure of the sort depicted in epic poems like the Iliad. He is portrayed as remarkably strong, but also surprisingly intelligent and he tries to live out the ethos of the Homeric warrior. This part of the play is full of the usual heroic language.

About halfway through the play, though, Aias commits suicide. The second part of the play deals with the world after Aias’s death—a world where the dialogue has devolved into petty, legalistic squabbling, representing the decline from the heroic age in which heroes like Aias were alive to the modern age in which heroes like Aias are all dead.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Etrurian red-figure kalyx-krater dated to between c. 400 and c. 350 BC depicting the suicide of the hero Aias, an event, which, in Sophokles’s tragedy Aias, marks the transition from the heroic age to the modern age

Herodotos and “modern” heroes of the Greco-Persian Wars

At the same time, though, there was the perception that heroic deeds could still be accomplished in the present. The Greek writer Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) is the earliest author who is known to have collected accounts from a wide range of different sources, analyzed them, assessed them for accuracy, and written them down in a work that has survived to the present day complete.

Although, as I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2019, Herodotos was certainly not the first person to write about past events, he has had a tremendous degree of influence on the development of the historical discipline and it is not without reason that he has been called “the Father of History.”

In around the late 430s and early 420s BC, Herodotos wrote a history of the Greco-Persian Wars in nine volumes titled The Histories. The book begins with the following introduction, which describes Herodotos’s mission. This introduction can give us something of an idea how Herodotos thought about the nature of history and the role of the historian:

“Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.”

Here is the passage in English, in my own translation:

“These are the researches of Herodotos the Halikarnassian, presented so that neither the doings of human beings nor the deeds great and marvelous, some produced by Hellenes and others by barbarians, will be forgotten by time and instead be kept alive, and especially the causes of why they went to war against each other.”

Notice that, as Herodotos frames it, the purpose of a historian is to record great and heroic deeds to ensure that they are not forgotten. Herodotos has inherited this idea of what a historian is supposed to be from the Homeric epics.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a second-century AD Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BC Greek bust of Herodotos, identified as him by the inscription

A persistent feeling of decadence

By the late fifth century BC, many Athenians saw themselves as not only inferior to the great heroes of the past, but also inferior to their more recent ancestors—their parents and grandparents who had defended Greece against the Persians during the first invasion of Greece under Darius I in 490 BC and during the second invasion of Greece by Xerxes I in 480 BC, the very generation about whom Herodotos wrote.

In his play The Clouds, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in spring of 423 BC, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) includes a debate between two characters: “Mr. Good Reason” (represented as an old, traditional man) and “Mr. Bad Reason” (represented as a young, clever man). Here is a brief excerpt from this debate, as translated by Paul Roche:

MR. GOOD REASON:

“Fine! Let me describe to you
how a boy was educated in the days of my prime
when I was promulgating what was right
and common decency was the norm.
Rule number one was:
not a murmur, not a syllable out of a boy;
then that the boys of each clan
should walk through the streets together
and in good order on their way
to the music master.
They walked without coats even if the snow
was coming down as thick as bran.
He’d make them get a song by heart:
a song like “Pallas, you city-sacker,”
or “I heard a cry from afar,” while making sure
they kept their thighs apart
from touching one another,
and that their voices followed the old uses
their fathers had handed down.

[…]

MR. BAD REASON:

“How archaic! How old-fashioned and out-of-date!
Like some antediluvian dithyrambic festival of Zeus
with its bovine massacres and grasshopper brooches!”

MR. GOOD REASON:

“Say what you like. It was along these lines
that the men of Marathon were bred,
whereas you, you teach our young men
to muffle up in greatcoats.
It sends me into a fury when I see one of them
dance Pallas Athena’s martial dance steps
screening his butt with a shield,
quite ignoring Athena.”

Although this dialogue comes from a comedy, it is almost certainly meant to parody a perspective that many Athenians actually had. The Athenians in the late fifth century BC thought of the generation that fought in the Greco-Persian Wars as a generation of war heroes in almost exactly the same way that people today think of the generation that fought in World War II as “the Greatest Generation.”

ABOVE: Photograph of a bust intended to represent the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes

Thoukydides: a remarkable exception to the overall trend

All this being said, there were a few writers in ancient Greece who completely rejected the conventional narrative about the present being a decline from a wonderful Golden Age that had existed in the distant past. One notable example of just such a writer is the Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BC), who argues at length in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War, Book One, that the Greeks of early times must have been exceedingly primitive compared to Greeks of his own time. For instance, in section 1.2, he makes the following argument, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“…it is evident that the country now called Hellas had in ancient times no settled population; on the contrary, migrations were of frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers. Without commerce, without freedom of communication either by land or sea, cultivating no more of their territory than the exigencies of life required, destitute of capital, never planting their land (for they could not tell when an invader might not come and take it all away, and when he did come they had no walls to stop him), thinking that the necessities of daily sustenance could be supplied at one place as well as another, they cared little for shifting their habitation, and consequently neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness.”

Thoukydides even argues that the Trojan War itself was not nearly as significant an undertaking as the poets had made it out to be. He argues that the Greek forces who went to Troy must have been small and ill-equipped compared to Greek military expeditions of his own time; otherwise the Greeks surely would have taken Troy much sooner. He writes in section 1.11:

“This was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years against them; the dispersion of the enemy making them always a match for the detachment left behind. If they had brought plenty of supplies with them, and had persevered in the war without scattering for piracy and agriculture, they would have easily defeated the Trojans in the field; since they could hold their own against them with the division on service. In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the capture of Troy would have cost them less time and less trouble. But as want of money proved the weakness of earlier expeditions, so from the same cause even the one in question, more famous than its predecessors, may be pronounced on the evidence of what it effected to have been inferior to its renown and to the current opinion about it formed under the tuition of the poets.”

Of course, the whole reason why Thoukydides spends so much time arguing that Greeks of his own time are superior to Greeks of previous eras is because most Greeks of his time believed precisely the opposite and he wanted to convince them that his opinion was correct. Thus, in a way, I guess you could argue that Thoukydides is the exception that proves the rule.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaster cast of a Roman-era copy of an early fourth-century BC Greek bust of the historian Thoukydides

Ploutarchos on the limitation of his own era

For later generations, the classical Athenians of the fifth century BC themselves became the ones who were revered as the greatest models to be emulated. Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD) was a Greek writer who lived in the region of Boiotia in central Greece during the time of the Roman Empire who is known for having written biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.

His biographies focus on the virtues and flaws of the great men of the past. They are not just biographies, but also philosophical meditations on what it is that truly makes a man great. The classical Athenians are a special focus for Ploutarchos because of their prestige and renown. Of the forty-eight surviving biographies of Ploutarchos, ten of them are about Athenians.

Like many others of his time, Ploutarchos saw his own era as less glorious than previous eras. In his essay Precepts of Statecraft, written to give advice to a young man named Menemachos, Ploutarchos laments that opportunities for a young man to display his talents are far more limited in his own era than they were in previous eras, writing:

“νῦν οὖν ὅτε τὰ πράγματα τῶν πόλεων οὐκ ἔχει πολέμων ἡγεμονίας οὐδὲ τυραννίδων καταλύσεις οὐδὲ συμμαχικὰς πράξεις, τίν᾿ ἄν τις ἀρχὴν ἐπιφανοῦς λάβοι καὶ λαμπρᾶς πολιτείας; αἱ δίκαι τε λείπονται αἱ δημόσιαι καὶ πρεσβεῖαι πρὸς αὐτοκράτορα…”

Here is the passage, as it is translated by Harold North Fowler for the Loeb Classical Library:

“Nowadays, then, when the affairs of the cities no longer include leadership in wars, nor the overthrowing of tyrannies, nor acts of alliances, what opening for a conspicuous and brilliant public career could a young man find? There remain the public lawsuits and embassies to the Emperor…”

Certainly, many other Greeks living under Roman rule would have expressed similar sentiments of dissatisfaction.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of a Greek philosopher named Ploutarchos from Delphi that was once thought represent Ploutarchos of Chaironeia, but is now thought to most likely represent someone else

The survival of an ancient trope

Of course, this idea that people in remote antiquity were so much better than people are today hasn’t entirely gone away. One only has to look at the shocking percentage of people who say they believe in Atlantis or the deep reverence that so many people in the United States have for the Founding Fathers to know that many people today are just as guilty of believing in a lost Golden Age as people in ancient Greece.

The truth is, there has never really been a “Golden Age” and there probably never will be one. There are both good and bad things in every era and we should not magnify the good things while glossing over the bad things, nor should we magnify the bad things while glossing over the good.

The ancients were neither god-like heroes nor filthy savages, but simply people—people who were really not very much unlike ourselves.

ABOVE: The Golden Age, painted in 1637 by the Italian Baroque painter Pietro da Cortona