Metahistory and the visual in Herodotus and Thucydides

Abstract

An interest in the visual seems to be part of historiographic discourse in the Classical period (and beyond). Scenes of spectatorship and response, as well as a concern with the visibility of actions and the impact of their visibility on their interpretation, recur across a number of historical texts. Such scenes offer the possibility of reflection on the writing and reading of history. 1 As historical characters are depicted observing events, being affected by and interpreting what they see, we are shown a model for the task of the historian in action. We are also shown a model for the task of the reader: just like characters within the narrative, the reader too must observe, judge and respond to the events which the text presents. Such concerns play an important role in the work of both Herodotus and Thucydides, who use the visual in different (although overlapping) ways. In this chapter, I would like to indicate how visual scenes allow these texts to explore problems and concerns specific to each. However, there are also similarities. In both texts, the act of viewing is imagined as politically engaged, and as politically problematic. Previous writing on the use of the visual in Herodotus and Thucydides has stressed the metatextual or metahistorical function of these texts' depictions of responses to sights, but has tended to frame this as a device for bolstering the authority of the narratorial voice of the historian. We are shown spectators being deceived or manipulated by cleverly crafted displays, being overcome with emotion at spectacles, or otherwise being influenced in their response: we could read such acts of viewing as emblems of failure, as counter-models for the proper role of the historian and reader of history, who should reign in his or her emotions, not be misled, but stand back from events and come to a "clear view" of history. On this model, the historical narrator offers a way out of the problems that spectators within the text face, guiding the reader towards a correct reading. I would like to build on such interpretations, but in order to complicate such a reading. I will suggest that the reader, positioned as a viewer of the text's narrative, is implicated in the problems faced by viewers within the narrative. The problem of how to look at the sights of the text reveals and allows engagement with the politics of the reading process. In the context of this short chapter, the interpre