Ancient Historians · Part 13 · History as drama · B2–C1
Duris of Samos and Tragic History
Part 13 of Ancient Historians: after Alexander, some historians decided that history should move its readers like a tragedy: women tearing their hair, children crying, cities in flames. Duris of Samos, a historian who was also the ruler of his island, complained that earlier historians were boring and lacked “imitation and pleasure”. Polybius answered that a historian who writes to make you weep is not writing history at all. Emphasis and intensifiers (so… that, such… that, utterly, it was… that), the language of criticism (accuse of, criticise for, fail to), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight’s question is one you can ask about any news report today: should history try to make us feel, or only to make us know? After Alexander, some historians wrote like playwrights. Their battles were full of screaming mothers and burning babies; their kings were monsters or saints.
It was, Demetria, and that was exactly the problem. The most famous of these writers was Duris of Samos. Another historian, Polybius, attacked this whole way of writing. Tonight we practise the language of emphasis, which these writers loved, and the language of criticism, which their critics used.
And our own scriptures have both kinds: the plain chronicle and the lament. It will be interesting to compare.
Duris (about 340–260 BCE) came from the island of Samos, and was for a time its tyrant, its sole ruler. He wrote a history of Macedonia and the Greek world after Alexander, a history of Samos, and a life of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles. Only fragments survive. In one of them, he criticises two earlier historians, Ephorus and Theopompus, for falling short of the events: “they took no part in imitation or in pleasure in the telling, but cared only…
Or try our free games and lessons.