Historically Speaking January/February 2006 Narrative, Periodization, and the Study of History Theodore K. Rabb Almost as soon as serious historical analysis began, its writers had to face the problem of beginnings and endings. It was all very well for the earliest Greek historians to assert that they were seeking truths about the past diat would be more solidly based than the myths and legends of the poets. But it was quite anodier thing to figure out how their stories should be told. At least the Iliad or the Odyssey had appropriate starts and finishes. From the rage of Achilles to the fall of Troy was a straightforwardly unfolding ten years; and Odysseus's twenty-year ordeal ran from the time he left Troy to his resumption of power in Ithaca. Without such a clear-cut narrative structure, what was the historian to do? For the founding fathers of this mode of inquiry , the solution was to focus on, at most, a small set of clearly demarcated events. The essential question Herodotus asked was: how did the Greeks manage to win two well-known wars against the might of Persia? To find an answer he roamed widely across both geography and time, recounting the fascinating information he had heard about the many peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. But die only real narrative he offered was of the two wars, which by their very nature had bodi a clear start and a clear conclusion. The same was true of his younger contemporary, Thucydides, whose great work was an account of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. For Thucydides , however, it seemed essential to create a precise chronology if he was to explain what happened as the war unfolded. The result was an innovation of profound importance. Since the Greeks had no common calendar, Thucydides organized his account by counting years since the beginning of die war. Thus was born the notion of the distinct period of die past as constructed by the historian . In the Roman world the basic way to identify a year was to name the consuls then in office—not a particularly effective way of tracing developments over time. The process improved somewhat when Caesar established the solar year, divided into mondis, but under the emperors, when reigns became the landmarks, even so astute a historian as Tacitus was unable to break free of the limitations imposed by individual lives as units of analysis. The next major effort to restructure human history came with Christianity, which divided the past into the periods before and after Jesus' sacrifice. One idea, picked up by he most famous historian of the 8di century, the English monk Bede, was to count years since the birth of Christ. A fellow Englishman , Alcuin, followed suit, and made diat way of reckoning the standard at die most influential cultural center of the next generation, the court of Charlemagne. From then on, the division of history between BC and AD swept dirough the West. Not until the work of Petrarch in the 14th century , however, did the notion arise of distinct periods other than those before and after the life of Jesus. Petrarch's remarkable innovation was the result of his disgust widi the morality of his times and his admiration for the principles he found in die writings of antiquity. Those great ideals, he felt, had been debased in the "Middle Ages" between the fall of Rome and his own age. Much later, the centuries that followed were to be dubbed die Renaissance , a time of rebirth of the ancient world. For our purposes, though, what was especially noteworthy was that the idea of different periods, with different characteristics, even within the Christian millennium, took hold. The art of those "Middle Ages," for instance, seemed barbaric for having rejected ancient aesthetics, and could be disdained as "Gothic." That attempt to define distinct ages is die heritage on which all subsequent historians have built. But how have we used our inheritance? When the modern study of the subject began, in the 19th century, the best way to structure the past seemed obvious. The natural organizing principle seemed to be die one bequeadied by...
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May 12, 2022
Jonathan H Jiang + 7
Open Access
