Historical Agency and Self-Awareness in Xenophon’s Hellenica and Anabasis
By Sarah Brown Ferrario
Abstract: Historical agency is difficult to define in the abstract, because any attempt to do so poses questions about the nature of history. If history is an objective reality, then the true agent or agents of any given event merely await analytical discovery; if history is essentially a product of constructed memory, then agency, at the extremes, is either endlessly debatable or the result of deliberate assignment by academic argument or popular will. Although none of the Greek historiographers offered an explicit philosophical treatment of this problem, a number of near contemporaries of Xenophon, most notably Herodotus, Thucydides, and the orators, addressed the ‘ownership’of specific historical actions, and they did so in a manner that suggests that history for the ancient Greeks was over time increasingly seen as a product of human design. Immanent in this phrase are not only a gradual departure from the divine causality so evident in the Homeric poems, but also the acknowledgement that historical meaning could be the result of human decision, an awareness of the inherent selectivity involved in the creation of memory through text, and the recognition, particularly in the course of the classical era, that individuals could deliberately ‘perform’ towards their own historical memorialization.
Chapter in Xenophon: Ethical Principles and Historical Enquiry, eds. Christopher Tuplin and Fiona Hobden, pp.341-376, Brill, 2012.