From the Beginning to Plato

THE POLIS AND ITS CULTURE 31
with each other but also together with the invention of the category of metaphor
and the scientific and philosophical revolution which that entailed. 43 They also
went together with a new attitude towards stories detectable in both an and
literature: in art, where previously it had been the general story that had been
evoked, particular texts are now illustrated; in literature, explorations of the
dilemmas of myth characteristic of tragedy go out of fashion and in Hellenistic
poetry (very little poetry survives from between 390 and 330) myths are now told
in ways which draw attention to the art of the teller and play with a reader who is
assumed to be learned enough to detect and respond to copious allusions to
earlier literature.
The separation of ‘myth’ from ‘history’ and the insistence that ‘metaphor’ has
a distinct status can both be seen as part of a move to be more precise about the
status of comparisons by directing attention at the effect of context. The issues of
truth and falsehood, already explored in the Odyssey and enthusiastically taken
up by the sophists as part of their interest in rhetoric, are now relentlessly
pursued in the course of an attempt to find the undeceptive ‘truth’, and not
merely to be aware of the ever deceptive nature of words and images. But it is
tempting to see the creation of mythology as political, too.
Herodotus begins his work by stating that his aim is to ensure that past events
do not grow faint, to record the great achievements of Greek and barbarian, and
in particular to explain how they came to fight each other. Herodotus treats the
conflict between Greeks and Persians broadly, not concentrating simply on the
actual battles of 490 and 480–79 BC, but taking every opportunity to delve back
into the past history of the Greek cities. He ends his work, however, at the end of
the Persian invasion of the Greek mainland, at a point when armed conflict
between Greeks and Persians to remove the Persians from the Aegean and Asia
Minor had many years still to run, years during which he himself had been alive
and with whose story he must himself have been particularly familiar. By ending
in 479 BC Herodotus limited himself to that part of the conflict between Greece
and Persia when Greece could be presented as pursuing a broadly united course
of action; from the point at which he stops the Athenians took over the leadership
of the campaign, to increasingly divided reactions among other cities, and, within
relatively few years, turned the pan-Hellenic ‘crusade’ into what was, they
admitted, blatant imperial rule.
The Persian wars, and the imperialism which they brought in their wake,
changed history. This is most graphically illustrated by the contrasting role
which stories of the past play in Herodotus and Thucydides. Characters in
Herodotus do, from time to time at least, invoke examples from the past in order
to influence present action, but they do so in a way which is only in the broadest
sense political. So, Socles the Corinthian tries to discourage the Spartans from
restoring tyranny to Athens by telling of the increasingly terrifying rule of the
Cypselids at Corinth (Herodotus V.92): any story will do, it is the aptness of the
analogy that matters, not the particular example chosen. When characters in
Thucydides invoke the past it is in order to justify a present claim or excuse a