Ancient Expectations
Ancient Expectations
Lucian writes that good biographers avoid flattery that falsifies events12 and only bad historians invent data.13 By his criticism Lucian shows us two things: first, that some historians did fabricate data (or at least could be so accused by those who disagreed with them);14 and second, that most historians agreed that the practice was unacceptable, at least for events (rather than, say, details of conversations or reports of emotions).15
The boundaries of genres were not, however, always clearly defined. Many ancient readers questioned the veracity of particular historians, and some used the trappings of history to recount fanciful tales.16 Although most surviving histories are quite distinct from novels, we do have some novels about historical characters. Cicero reasonably opined that Xenophon’s story of Cyrus was meant to teach about proper government, not history about Cyrus.17 Most scholars allow that works such as Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Pseudo-Callisthenes’ account of Alexander are exceptions to the usual division (novels about historical personages, sometimes employing some known traditions).18 Such historical novelists were more interested in rhetorical effect and praising their protagonist, but as we noted in the previous chapter, this was hardly the desired norm for history.19 (It should also be noted that Pseudo-Callisthenes wrote somewhere between 460 and 760 years after Alexander’s death — i.e., likely over half a millennium later, a situation quite different from the Gospels.) Some other statements, however, suggest that even some true histories fell short of the ideal standard. Plutarch complains that some writers added details missing elsewhere, for example composing a proper tragic finale for Alexander’s life.20
This practice reflected a wider use of historical information in speeches; the influence of rhetoric pervaded Greco-Roman intellectual life.21 Rhetoricians were permitted to “adjust stories” to provide cohesiveness to their narrative; if Coriolanus died one way and a rhetorician was drawing a parallel between Coriolanus and Themistocles, the rhetorician could make use of a parallel account of the latter’s death already invented by others. One could do this, Cicero claimed, knowing full well that the parallel account was not solid history.22 Fornara complains that the view that Cicero here allows rhetors to “distort history” misreads his Latin; rather, he simply spoke of rhetors using historical illustrations in their speeches.23 The context, however, at least suggests that Cicero expected some speakers to select their accounts on utilitarian grounds, that is, for what worked best rhetorically in their speeches. At the same time, it is true that Cicero was speaking about speeches, not about Greek historiography. Even when historical works embellished their story in a manner that modern historians would consider fictional, they were bound by the prior story in a way that novelists were not.24
Claiming that historical writers used sources (as we shall argue in ch. 9) and were concerned about genuine historical information does not mean that they did not place their own “twist” on the material. To the contrary, it was customary for writers to do so, and the more rhetorically sophisticated the expected audience, the greater the expectations of such displays of rhetorical prowess.
Because time has naturally preserved mostly the rhetorically respected historians of the elite class (who also had the most leisure and resources to publish their histories), these histories are typically more rhetorical (and certainly usually include fuller speeches than) Luke-Acts;25 the other Gospel writers are not even comparable. Nevertheless, these observations reveal that ancient historiography was more reader- (better, hearer-) driven than its typical modern academic analogue, and we must take this factor into account when reading ancient works with historical content.