Intertextuality and Plural Truths in Xenophon’s Historical Narrative

Abstract

Historians like other ancient authors commonly bolstered their own authority through polemic against and references to authoritative forerunners. The construction of one’s historiographical persona and pedigree involved a constant negotiation between evoking tradition, and displaying the distinctive qualities of one’s own work and the special claim to memory of one’s subject matter.1 The historians’ negotiations with predecessors could be subtle-far subtler than the clumsy efforts to imitate Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon that Lucian humorously decries in his How to Write History. At the same time, allusions to predecessors could contribute to an author’s own historical interpretation: such references could swiftly summon up the stretch of history described in the earlier work, without the need for belaboured explicit comparison. They could serve as shorthand for an entire world: the world of Homer’s Troy, the world of Herodotus’ Persian Wars, the world of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. This is the sense in which intertextuality may generate truths, and indeed complex and plural truths, which rely upon readers’ broader literary imaginaire. My paper is concerned then with one more way of ‘getting at the truth’, or one more mode de connaissance du reel.2 The implicit mode of intertextuality presents a contrast to explicit claims about aletheia, accuracy, and so forth, which Xenophon in Hellenica eschews. It complements other implicit modes of getting at truth in historical texts: for example, the use of mythic symbolism3 or counterfactual analysis (or ‘sideshadowing’).4 The sort of truth it helps convey may be more philosophical and symbolic than factual.