![]() ![]() To be meticulously rebuilt and understood to its greatest extent, the past must be relieved from any depth of feeling that envelops it, an essential task that only the external observer- chronologically and even psychologically detached from the facts they describe-can accomplish. ![]() ![]() ![]() The premise is quite simple: conceived as a rational operation of factual reconstruction and contextualized chronological description of past events, history implies a distance, a looking outward, which the impersonal narrative alone could assure. In fact, until relatively recent times, it has been assumed to be unquestionable. The transition from third- to first-person narration also served to authenticate the veracity of his account through his status as an eyewitness: “I lived through the whole of the war, studying it with mature perception and in the intellectual pursuit of an accurate understanding of events.” Hence, Thucydides’ successor chose a double narrative register to articulate both the historian’s impersonal narrative voice (Thucydides) and an eyewitness account written in the first person (Xenophon himself).įrom the birth of modern historiography as purported scientific discipline, toward the end of the eighteenth century, writing in the third person has been one of its cardinal rules. According to the classicist Luciano Canfora, it was the sudden introduction of an “I” in chapters 25 and 26 of book 6 that allowed Xenophon to identify himself as having completed Thucydides’ text. He thus asked the indulgence of readers who may have found “the lack of a romantic element in story” as rigorously and factually reconstructing the past demanded an impersonal narrative voice. His method was different because his account was grounded in “the clearest evidence available.” He carried out “the greatest possible rigor in pursuing every detail” for events that he had himself lived through just as he did for those of which he only had indirect knowledge. He also distanced himself from the “prose chroniclers”-his designation for those annalists of the sixth and fifth centuries BC-whose stories were “written more to please the ear than to serve the truth,” and who spoke of facts that were not verifiable and therefore could not make any claims to authenticity. And so, he pointed out, he did not write History of the Peloponnesian War as a poet, because he did not wish to embellish the events of that time. He wanted to write as a historian and reconstruct the conflict through objective description of the facts, an approach that required third-person narration. Historians began writing in the third person as early as antiquity, when there were no distinct boundaries between history, poetry, tragedy, and eloquence, these being, to borrow the words of Nicole Loraux, “institutions of speech anchored in the city-state.”ĭespite having participated in the Peloponnesian Wars, first as an Athenian general then as an exile, Thucydides did not wish to give his own testimony of the event. Used with permission of the publisher, Columbia University Press. Image credit: Adapted from Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography by Enzo Traverso. ![]()
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