Things Keep Happening

Geoffrey Hawthorn

• BuyA History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century by John Burrow
  Allen Lane, 553 pp, £25.00, December 2007, ISBN 978 0 7139 9337 0
• BuyWhat Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe by Anthony Grafton
  Cambridge, 319 pp, £13.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 69714 9
• BuyThe Theft of History by Jack Goody
  Cambridge, 342 pp, £14.99, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 69105 5
• BuyThucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History by Darien Shanske
  Cambridge, 268 pp, £54.00, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 86411 4

A story, as John Burrow says of his own History of Histories, is selective. It looks forward ‘to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its criteria of relevance’. Hence a difficulty:

The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre. It would be a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The Iliad has a climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer’s epic that saw as its ‘point’ an explanation of Troy’s fall. The concept of a story is in essence a simple one, but that does not make all narrators either simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional.