Lehi left Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC. The earliest classical (Greco-Roman) historiography dates from more than a century later, so there is no possibility of its having had any influence on Mormon. Yet it is still worth considering the nature of the historiography produced by the earliest Greek historians (Herodotus and Thucydides) and also by, more briefly, a few of their successors, including Roman historians. The main goal of this section is to provide a broad context to assist the reader in judging how well Mormon’s history fits into the patterns or paradigms of ancient historiography.

As already discussed, it has been common among modern historians to assume that the ancient Greeks, especially Thucydides, wrote historiography that can properly be considered “objective” and “scientific” rather than “sacral” or “theological” history. My primary goal is to show that while Greek historical writings are quite different in many ways from those found in the Hebrew Bible, they are not, in fact, so different as is commonly supposed. There are sacral elements in Herodotus, including notions of divine causation as well as considerable moralizing. In the case of Thucydides, overt mention of the gods is absent, but a strong element of history as moral edification remains. This is true for other writers for many centuries thereafter, throughout the ancient period, the Middle Ages, and even into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[1] One of the most common moral themes in historiography is the rise and fall of civilizations. Edward Gibbon’s renowned historical treatment of the decline and fall of Rome concludes that excessive prosperity in the empire led to decay, which in turn led to what he calls “immoderate greatness,” and the inevitable decline and fall.[2] Such a thesis has deep roots in ancient classical thought about the fate of nations and empires. The idea of pride leading to a great fall—so prominent in Mormon’s history—was a well-worn theme in the classical world. Strikingly, both Herodotus and Thucydides emphasized the effects of such human sins as love of power, greed, and pride (Gr. hubris) on human society, particularly in the context of war. As we will see, it turns out that Mormon, in depicting questions of morality as lying at the root of the fall of the Nephite people, was in good company.

The famous Roman orator Cicero once dubbed the Greek writer Herodotus the “father of history,” and the description has stuck with him.[3] Herodotus lived in the middle part of the fifth century and was famous for writing a single work, which became known in Greek as the historiai (historiae in Latin), a term that is best translated not as “histories” but as “inquiries” or “researches.” Herodotus was the first person, so far as we know, to engage in extensive investigation about events of the past and align those events into a more or less unified narrative—I say more or less because Herodotus’s lengthy work is loaded with “excurses” in which he makes extensive digressions from his principal theme, which was to explain the causes of the great wars between the Greek city states and the Persian Empire between the years 499 and 449 BC. Much of the content of those digressions is what today we would call anthropological rather than historical in intent—for example, exploring at length the cultures of the Egyptians, the Scythians, and the Persians, even though most of that discussion is tangential at best to his overarching narrative. At the end of book 1, for example, he relates that Persia under Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, invaded Egypt. Book 2 then digresses to describe the geography, history and ethnography of Egypt, little of which has anything to do with Persia. But the broad thrust of his work is clearly historical, and the primary question implicit throughout is, How did it come about that Persia attempted to conquer Greece, and what enabled the Greek cities to defend themselves against this massive invasion from the East?

Numerous aspects of Herodotus’s work set it apart from the historical books of the Bible. There was no series of Greek “court histories,” such as the Deuteronomist had access to, on which to base his account. Instead, he had to obtain the facts for himself. He may well have used some written sources, but the majority of his sources were probably oral. He traveled extensively around the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, spoke with countless individuals attempting to sort out what was true from what was mere legend or hearsay. Herodotus states, “I shall write this account [of Cyrus] using as my sources certain Persians who do not intend to magnify the deeds of Cyrus but rather to tell what really happened, although I know of three other ways in which the story of Cyrus is told.”[4] Some of the stories he tells may have been more entertaining than true; nevertheless, many of his observations that once were viewed by scholars as rather fantastic have more recently been shown to be based on solid fact.[5]

Did Herodotus Write Sacral History?

If asked whether Herodotus’s Histories should be considered sacral history, many modern scholars would say absolutely not, that Herodotus is widely regarded as the founder of “true” history—that is, historiography that excludes such things as fulfillment of prophecy and divine intervention in human affairs. Legitimate history, from this perspective, focuses on the doings of men and women, and causative elements in a historical account should be limited to political and social developments in human states and societies.

Many commenters on Herodotus have felt the need to defend his reputation as a true historian against accusations of allowing his religious views to infiltrate his history. Kenneth Waters, for example, declares that the purpose of his study is to determine whether Herodotus used the stories of the fall of kings and tyrants “in the manner befitting a historian, or whether he has used them for the purposes of moralizing and to preach a particular worldview; that is, in a non-scientific, anti-historical way.”[6] In other words, for Waters it is utterly inappropriate for a historian to engage in “moralizing and preaching a particular worldview,” and any such content is the antithesis of proper “scientific” history. This attitude is surprisingly common among modern scholars, who seem oblivious to the fact that this definition of “correct” historiography excludes virtually all historical writing prior to, say, 1860, and even much writing since that time. Moreover, it also ignores the modern consensus of philosophers of history that, as we will see, there is no such thing as truly “scientific” history. On the other hand, it has been recognized that

the Old Testament ought also to be compared with Herodotus on the basis of thematic unity. . . . Like Herodotus, the Old Testament exhibits a dominant concern with the issue of divine retribution for unlawful acts as a fundamental principle of historical causality. Human responsibility and divine justice are frequently stated themes. The law, as the divinely mediated rule for Israel itself, has a decisive role in the explication of what is just and unjust, so that foreign nations are thereby assumed to be in the wrong.[7]

Nonetheless, there are clear examples scattered throughout Herodotus’s work of most of our criteria for sacral history: divine intervention, especially in war; dreams revealing the will of the gods; oracles fulfilled; dual causation; and, above all, moral lessons taught. Because these elements are so closely integrated in Herodotus, it will be more convenient to deal with them together rather than consider each one individually.[8]

Causation

Herodotus lived and wrote in an era in Greece that has been described as a period of “Enlightenment.”[9] Many of the old traditions and mythic ways of thought were being questioned or even discarded in favor of more naturalistic and rationalistic ideas. This was the age of the Sophists, when men like Protagoras and Gorgias insisted that there was no way to be sure if the gods existed or not and that “man is the measure of all things.” Certainly many people were questioning the traditions about the nature of the gods and traditions in general. The Sophists were professional teachers who traveled from city to city, teaching the children of the wealthy how to succeed in politics, specifically through the art of rhetoric and persuasion. By definition such men were not grounded in the political and social traditions of any one place. It was also the age of the medical school of Hippocrates, who attempted to ground the practice and theory of medicine in empiricism.[10]

There is no doubt that Herodotus was influenced to some extent by these rationalist intellectual trends. It is certainly true that, compared with the poems of Homer, for example, the gods make very few overt appearances in Herodotus. In telling his story, the overwhelming emphasis is on men and their personal motives. And yet we should not conclude too hastily that there is no divine intervention in Herodotus.

To begin with, he states outright that “there are indeed many clear proofs that the divine is present in what happens.”[11] For example, Herodotus freely gives the Athenians most of the credit for the Greeks’ victory over the Persians. He states that it was Athens that “proved to be the saviors of Hellas,” who roused the other Greek cities (those that had not already submitted to Persian overlordship) to the need to preserve their freedom and “had the courage to confront the invader of their land.” Yet he does not stop there but adds that indeed “it was the Athenians who—after the gods [meta theous]—drove back the Persian king.”[12] Thus, while Herodotus does not describe the acts of the gods in specific detail, he does believe that the Greek victory was ultimately a matter of special divine intervention.[13]

As this example demonstrates, Herodotus viewed historical causation as working on both a divine and a human level. Despite the fact that the will of the gods was ultimately determinative, at least on the largest scale, human desires, intentions, and motives played a major role as well, and men could still be held responsible for their actions, especially their evil actions. This is best illustrated by Herodotus’s story regarding Xerxes’s decision to invade Greece.

When Xerxes succeeded to the throne, his father Darius had already been making preparations to mount a huge invasion of Greece. At first Xerxes had little desire to carry out these plans. However, one of his main advisors, named Mardonius, argued strongly in favor. Convinced, Xerxes declared his intention to build a bridge from Asia to Europe (i.e., across the narrow strait of the Bosporus). A second advisor, Artabanos, advised caution, stressing the importance of not offending the gods through prideful acts:

You see how the god strikes with his thunderbolt those creatures that tower above the rest, and does not permit them to be so conspicuous, while those who are small do not at all provoke him. And you see how he always hurls his missiles at those houses and trees that are the largest and tallest. For the god likes to lop off whatever stands out above the rest; and so, on a similar principle, a huge army is destroyed by a small one; for whenever the God has become resentful toward an army, he casts panic or lightning into it, and it is thus completely destroyed through no fault of its own. For the god will not tolerate pride (Gr. mega phroneein) in anyone but himself.[14]

Xerxes responded with anger and accused Artabanos of cowardice; however, that night he began reconsidering his intentions and determined to abandon his plans. But the matter did not stop there. When he finally fell asleep, Xerxes had a dream vision in which a male figure appeared and told him that he would not be doing himself any favors by refraining from battle and that he should stick to his plans to attack. Xerxes at first ignored the dream, but when the dream came to him again the next night, and then appeared also to Artabanos (when he was sleeping in the king’s bed!), he became convinced that the dream was from the gods. Artabanos himself was convinced that the dream had a divine origin, and Xerxes decided to attack. Indeed, he augmented his plans to in effect conquer the entire world after receiving an additional dream that he interpreted as predicting this outcome.

Nowhere does Herodotus state clearly that these dreams were from the gods. And yet when we consider these incidents in light of Herodotus’s history as a whole, it is clear that they fit rather neatly into one of his major themes, the theme of pride, or hubris.

Morality and the theme of pride

The practice of drawing moral lessons from history is surely the most pervasive aspect of sacral history in later historiography. And in the view of the well-known classicist Michael Grant, it was Herodotus who “initiated among the Greeks the moral and didactic view of events which was already so familiar in Hebrew literature, and which later persisted, often to an exaggerated extent, among almost all subsequent ancient historians.”[15]

Herodotus follows traditional Greek wisdom in constructing the main theme of his history. The famous oracle at Delphi proclaimed numerous maxims, of which the two most famous were “know yourself” (Gr. gnōthi seauton) and “nothing in excess” (mēden agan). The two bits of wisdom were closely related. “Know yourself” was not a command to discover one’s true identity but rather an appeal to realize one’s limitations as a human being and not in any way to imagine oneself the equal of the gods. “Nothing in excess” meant something very similar—one should not seek to gain more than one’s appropriate share in life. The quest for excess wealth, power, or anything else was likely to lead to regret and even to punishment by the gods.[16]

The same lessons can be found in the Greek lyric poets and in the great works of Greek tragedy. Solon, the famous Athenian statesman who came to be considered one of the traditional Seven Wise Men, taught this principle: “Excess (Gr. koros) breeds arrogance (hubris) when great prosperity (olbos, wealth) attends men who lack sober judgment.”[17] And in Sophocles’s famous play Oedipus the King, the chorus declares:

Insolence [hubris] breeds the tyrant, insolence
if it is glutted with a surfeit, unseasonable, unprofitable,
climbs to the roof-top and plunges
sheer down to the ruin that must be. . . .

If a man walks with haughtiness
of hand or word and gives no heed
to Justice and the shrines of Gods
despises—may an evil doom
smite him for his ill-starred pride of heart![18]

These principles became a major theme of many Greek tragedies, and the pattern is sometimes referred to as the tragic cycle: olbia, koros, hubris, and atē. Olbia, legitimate prosperity and happiness, leads to koros, which is satiety and surfeit, which in turn leads to hubris, overconfidence and insolence, which brings on atē, which is reckless confidence, blindness; and finally comes nemesis, which is divine anger and revenge.[19] T. J. Luce describes this pattern as follows:

Continuous good fortune leads to fullness or satiety (koros: the metaphor is one of eating). The excessive prosperity that results engenders insolence or arrogance (hybris) that manifests itself in attitude, speech and/or action. Often cautionary advice or a prediction of disaster is given (e.g., by a Teiresias, Cassandra or dream), but the warning figure is ignored or disbelieved. Once the person has overstepped the proper limits allotted to himself as a mortal (moira), his doom is sealed (atê). Punishment ensues, sometimes personified as Justice (Dikê) or Retribution (Nemesis or Adrasteia).[20]

Herodotus refers at the very beginning of his work to the idea of the instability of good fortune:

[I shall tell of] cities both lesser and greater, since many of those that were great long ago have become inferior, and some that are great in my own time were inferior before. And so, resting on my knowledge that human prosperity never remains constant, I shall make mention of both without discrimination.[21]

Herodotus actually includes the poet-statesman Solon in his story of the Lydian king Croesus. When Solon, known for his great wisdom, was received as a guest at court, the king showed Solon all his great wealth and then tried to persuade him to pronounce him, Croesus, the happiest and most prosperous man (Gr. olbiotatos, from olbia) in the world. But Solon refused, insisting that “the man who is very wealthy is no more happy and prosperous than the man who has only enough to live from day to day, unless good fortune stays with him and he retains his fair and noble possessions right up until he departs from this life happily.” This was because “the gods are jealous of human prosperity” and often “[show] many people a hint of happiness and prosperity, only to destroy them utterly later.”[22]

Such statements are often interpreted to mean simply that life and good fortune are unstable and subject to dramatic swings, with no reference to the moral behavior of the person in question. But this is to misconstrue what Herodotus is getting at. Regarding the defeat of the Trojans by the Greeks in the great Trojan War, Herodotus states: “This all took place . . . because a divine force arranged matters so that the Trojans, by their total ruin and destruction, would clearly demonstrate to all humans the fundamental truth that when great injustices (adikematon) are committed, retribution (timoría) from the gods is also great.”[23]

In the story of Croesus, we are told by Herodotus that after Solon left, “the god took a dreadful vengeance (Gr. tisis) upon Croesus, apparently because Croesus had thought himself the happiest and most prosperous of men.”[24] Note that the god did not strike down the king merely because of his great wealth, but because of his attitude, his insistence that he was the richest and most successful person on the earth and his assumption that he was better than everyone else—more than human, as it were. Thus it was his pride that prompted the divine reaction, not simply his wealth.[25] As Aristotle once wrote, “Those who think themselves extraordinarily fortunate do not feel pity, but are overbearing; for if they think that all good things are theirs, it is obvious that they count on it being impossible for them to meet with any ill, since this also is one of the good things.”[26]

The divine vengeance on Croesus was twofold. First, he was warned in a dream that his handsome and successful son would be killed by an “iron spear.” Despite his strenuous efforts to prevent this from happening (i.e., attempting to defy the prophecy of the dream), his son was in fact killed by such a spear. Subsequently, Croesus sought an answer from two different oracles, inquiring whether he would succeed if he were to attack the Persian Empire. Both oracles came back with the same response: if he were to wage war against Persia, he would “destroy a great empire.” Not stopping to ask a key follow-up question—which empire?—he went ahead with his plans for attack, only to find out in the end that the empire in question was his own. Croesus was defeated, captured, and ordered to be burned at the stake, only to be saved at the last minute (after the pyre had been lit) by a rainstorm after uttering a heartfelt prayer to Apollo. In effect, Croesus had repented of his cockiness toward the gods and was in turn blessed before it was too late—but only barely!

It is important to point out that nowhere does Herodotus state that Apollo actually sent the rainstorm that put out the fire. The reader is left to infer this from the fact that the rainstorm “suddenly converged out of the clear, calm sky,” only moments after Croesus uttered his prayer. We are never told directly that the gods acted in such-and-such a way. There are few overt miracles in Herodotus, and even then he never presumes to tell us except by implication what the gods were thinking or doing.

The same principle of divine revenge for pride, hubris, is at the heart of Herodotus’s principal narrative, the attack of the Persian king Xerxes on the Greeks. We have already examined the story of Xerxes’s dream that persuaded him against his better judgment that he should attack and conquer Greece. In fact, however, his ambition quickly swelled to carry him beyond his original goal. He received another dream, which the priests interpreted to mean that “everyone in the world would become the slaves of Xerxes.” He then prepared a massive expedition over a period of four years—Herodotus tells us that it was the largest he had ever heard of. Xerxes then proceeded to cut a canal through the entire isthmus of the Chersonese. (Apparently Xerxes was not familiar with Herodotus’s story about the Cnidians who had tried to make an island of their nation by cutting a canal through their isthmus and were instructed by the Delphic oracle that they should not dig through the isthmus: “If Zeus had wished it to be an island he would have made it thus himself”!)[27]

Shortly thereafter, Xerxes ordered an extensive bridge to be constructed out of boats linked together to enable his army to cross from Asia to Europe across the Hellespont (i.e., the Dardanelles), in essence linking the two continents. When a storm sprang up shortly thereafter, destroying the bridge, Xerxes became enraged and ordered the Hellespont to receive three hundred lashes by the whip and a pair of shackles to be dropped into the water as punishment.[28] All these actions demonstrated just how arrogant Xerxes had become, anticipating his ultimate defeat.

In sum, the general underlying “lesson” of Herodotus’s Histories, as one historian concludes, was about “the relationship between human beings and the divine forces that rule the world.”[29] As already mentioned, this relationship is not always made explicit, and the precise connection between a man’s actions and his punishment by the gods is sometimes unclear, for example when Croesus tells Cyrus that the gods had punished him not for his arrogance but because of a murder committed by his ancestor.[30] Nevertheless, the theme of “pride comes before the fall” is nearly as prominent in Herodotus as it is in Mormon’s record.[31]

Clear parallels exist between the Greek tragic cycle and Mormon’s thesis regarding the effects of pride on Nephite civilizations. In a fascinating article published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Richard Draper draws some intriguing parallels between the Greek notion of hubris, as found in the tragedians, and the theme of pride in the Book of Mormon. He argues that while hubris can be translated as “pride,” pride is really the attitude of superiority that frequently (not always) leads to hubris, which is “that one last act—an act of wanton deliberate rebellion . . . which unleashe[s] irreversible divine wrath.” Atē, he says, can be viewed from a Book of Mormon perspective as “the point at which a person or a people has become fully ripe in iniquity,” at which point “they come under the judgment of a just God from whom there is no escape.”[32]

Thucydides

While the sacral element is much less prominent in Thucydides than it is in Herodotus, it is entirely incorrect to view Thucydides, as some scholars do, as fundamentally amoral in his views of society and politics, adhering to the hard-nosed realist philosophy that “might makes right.”[33]

In reality, his History of the Peloponnesian War has a strong moral foundation, but it is less prominent than what we find in Herodotus. Thucydides was a younger contemporary of Herodotus and also wrote a single historiographical work. But his approach to historiography was much more rigorous than Herodotus’s, and many modern historians view him as a pure rationalist, the first true “scientific” historian. As an Athenian intellectual of the later fifth century BC, he was strongly influenced by the sophistic movement. In his preface he described his intellectually austere approach to history, renouncing all attempts at entertaining his reader:

It may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element. It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.[34]

He informs the reader that he rigorously questioned his sources (which were mostly oral) and did not permit himself to derive the facts of his narrative “from the first source that came to hand” and did not even fully trust his own impressions, but always tested the accuracy of his sources “by the most severe and detailed tests possible.”[35]

As it was for Herodotus, war was also the focus of Thucydides’s attention, but even more exclusively. In Thucydides’s History we find almost none of the digressions that Herodotus is famous for. Herodotus of course dealt with many foreign cultures—Egyptians, Persians, Scythians—and provided long chapters discussing those peoples’ way of life. Thucydides in contrast wrote only about the Greeks and their immediate neighbors such as the Macedonians, and there was no call for such anthropological discussions of strange foreign ways. Thucydides described the Peloponnesian War as not only an extremely long war (lasting fifty-six years) but as one that “brought with it unprecedented suffering for Hellas [Greece]” (1.23).[36] Numerous cities were captured and devastated, resulting in countless exiles and much loss of life, but also many internal revolutions as the democratic and oligarchic factions vied with each other for power. (Those cities that had oligarchic governments were allied with Sparta, those with democracies with Athens.)

Yet despite his intellectual rigor in constructing his narrative, Thucydides was by no means merely interested in recording mere facts. On the contrary, he thought much like a philosopher; he was in effect a philosopher who wrote history. While that may not seem particularly strange in a modern context, it is particularly surprising in the context of ancient Greece. History as a field of intellectual endeavor was a kind of illegitimate son for the Greeks, compared to philosophy and literature. The problem with history, for the ancient Greeks, was that it did not lead to any meaningful knowledge. Philosophy deals with universals, they thought, while history deals with particulars.

In his Poetics, Aristotle stated: “The poet’s function is to describe not the thing that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen.”[37] (By poetry he was thinking primarily of the tragedians. The purpose of the story of Oedipus in Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King or of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon was not simply to tell the story of those persons as historical (or legendary) individuals but rather to communicate something of human nature—for example, the powerful tendency of people in power to be prideful and overconfident.) Although Aristotle’s words were written decades after Thucydides’s death, they reflect a sentiment that was not uncommon among Greek intellectuals, and Thucydides made a point of indicating that he fully intended to transcend the limitations of history:

If [my work] be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.[38]

Thus, an accurate knowledge of the past was important not for itself but because it could be used as a basis for understanding the future. History, if written properly, could help one understand the universals of human nature and allow one insight into how human beings behave, particularly under the stresses of war. What were the ideas about human nature he was trying to communicate? His primary goal was to demonstrate from the facts of history certain basic moral concepts that were already fairly widely held among the poets and philosophers: that “power is dangerous and corrupting, and in the wrong hands it quickly leads to immoral behavior, and then to civil strife, unjust war and destruction.”[39]

How did he communicate these moral truths? In many cases he did not outwardly moralize but used more indirect techniques. One such method was the juxtaposition of facts. For example, concerning the savage civil war in Corcyra (an island state allied with Athens), he states the following regarding the behavior of the Athenians:

While the revolutionary passions thus for the first time displayed themselves in the factions of Corcyra, Eurymedon and the Athenian fleet sailed away; after which some five hundred Corcyraean exiles [plundered] their countrymen in the island, and did so much damage as to cause a severe famine in the city.[40]

In other words, without saying anything explicitly, Thucydides implies that the Athenians, by sailing away and making no attempt to stop the abuses of power that were taking place among their allies, were acting immorally. On other occasions, however, he does engage in overt moralizing. In book 3 he includes a lengthy passage that describes in detail the moral decline of the Corcyreans during their civil conflict, which the Greeks referred to as stasis. This passage is so key to understanding Thucydides’s moral views that I will quote it at length. As in the case of Herodotus, it is worth considering the parallels with Mormon’s views about the effects of pride and arrogance on human society.

They [the democratic faction in Corcyra] seized upon all their enemies whom they could find and put them to death. They then dealt with those whom they had persuaded to go on board the ships, killing them as they landed. Next they went to the temple of Hera and persuaded about fifty of the suppliants there to submit to a trial. They then condemned every one of them to death. Seeing what was happening, most of the other suppliants, who had refused to be tried, killed each other there in the temple; some hanged themselves on the trees, and others found various other means of committing suicide. During the seven days that Eurymedon stayed there with his sixty ships, the Corcyreans continued to massacre those of their own citizens whom they considered to be their enemies. Their victims were accused of conspiring to overthrow the democracy, but in fact men were often killed on grounds of personal hatred or else by their debtors because of the money that they owed. There was death in every shape and form. And, as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars; some were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state—democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from outside. In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities—as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. . . .

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. . . . Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents. . . .

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order. There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions. Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself, for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.[41]

Thucydides’s discussion here is a particularly complex and intellectually sophisticated analysis, but its secular and objective tone should not obscure the fact that it is at heart a deeply pessimistic moral analysis of human nature. It is important to stress that Thucydides declares that these events were not unique to Corcyra, but that similar civil strife occurred in many other states during the war, and in Athens herself. Thus, he is essentially asserting that there is something in human nature that results in a great increase in moral decay during times of great stress, especially war and, in particular, civil strife. However, he argues in the final paragraph that human nature even outside the context of war is “always ready to offend[,] . . . incapable of controlling passion . . . [and typified by] the pernicious power of envy.” The passage is reminiscent in many ways of Mormon’s extended discussion of pride among the Nephites in Helaman 3.[42]

Apart from his moral didacticism, was Thucydides trying to communicate any religious ideas? Is there any connection between his moral ideas and religion?

Herodotus, as we have seen, clearly believed in the gods and that they could intervene, at least on occasion, in human life; above all, he felt that their will would sooner or later be carried out. Thucydides’s views regarding the gods are much less clear. He has often been described as an atheist or agnostic, but this view is based primarily on negative grounds: he strictly avoids all mention of the gods’ involvement in human affairs. In reality, he says so little about the gods that it’s quite difficult to know what his specific religious beliefs might have been. But it is quite reasonable to conclude that although he may have taken a somewhat skeptical view about such aspects of traditional religion as ritual and myth, he did hold to certain underlying elements of religion.[43]

One possible reason for the absence of any overt mention of the gods in his history is that, unlike Herodotus, Thucydides believed that proper historical method required that a distinction be made between human and divine causation. In other words, he made a clear distinction in his mind between verifiable facts and speculation about divine actions and excluded the latter altogether—not because he necessarily disbelieved in all divine intervention altogether, but because such speculations did not belong in a factual history.[44]

In any case, Thucydides clearly did believe in basic moral principles of Greek religion.[45] He distinctly acknowledged the influence of religion in restraining men’s behavior, and he consistently associated the collapse of morality with the collapse of religion.[46] It is also possible that he may even have viewed “prodigies” (strange or disastrous happenings viewed as portents of the future) as actual signs from the gods. The traditional Greek view was that the gods caused such portentous events as earthquakes and droughts during times of great moral evil to indicate their great displeasure at what was occurring. At the very least Thucydides acknowledged that such signs (whatever their actual causes) became quite common during the war:

Old stories of past prodigies, which had not found much confirmation in recent experience, now became credible. Wide areas, for instance, were affected by violent earthquakes; there were more frequent eclipses of the sun than had ever been recorded before; in various parts of the country there were extensive droughts followed by famine; and there was the plague which did more harm and destroyed more life than almost any other single factor. All these calamities fell together upon the Hellenes after the outbreak of war.[47]

Thucydides is claiming here that while stories of disasters being signs from the gods previously seemed to be pious myths, they now took on greater credibility. What is very interesting about this passage is that he describes all these occurrences as pathemata, meaning “calamities,” or causes of suffering. It was perfectly reasonable, of course, to describe earthquakes and plagues this way. But what about eclipses or droughts? The fact that he lumped all these together shows, as the scholar Nanno Marinatos has pointed out, that Thucydides accepted the idea of sympatheia, the ancient sacral idea that there was a natural sympathy or “connection between the moral and physical spheres of the universe.”[48]

Is it even possible that Thucydides was attempting, like Herodotus, to demonstrate the classic tragic pattern of hubris/atē? Some students of Thucydides have suggested that he was in fact writing a kind of tragedy. The pattern is less explicit than in Herodotus, but it seems clear that the basic motif pattern was so deeply rooted in the Greek worldview that most Greeks would have perceived the pattern as inherent in the narrative.

If one turns to Thucydides History immediately after reading Herodotus’ Histories, the narrative from book 1 to book 7 seems to follow the Herodotean patterns of success-overconfidence-disaster: The Athenians, whose rise to power and success is detailed early on in the Pentecontaëtia [Thucydides 1.89–117], become increasingly arrogant and overconfident throughout the narrative and ultimately suffer complete disaster in Sicily. . . . Even a fifth-century reader not au fait with Herodotus would, however, have been likely to pick up the message: as Cornford demonstrated long ago, the Athenian trajectory follows a pattern recognisable from fifth-century tragedy, which also had a strong presence in lyric poetry.[49]

A key element for Thucydides was pleonexia, which can be translated as “greediness, arrogance, overreaching.” In his account of the stasis at Corcyra, he states that “the cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed (pleonexia) and ambition (philotimia, love of political office and power).”[50] There is an obvious connection between pleonexia and hubris, namely the attitude that one should have more than one’s proper share. But the characteristic of overreaching was not limited to individuals or even groups. According to the eminent classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones:

This is not the tragedy of Pericles, or of Alcibiades, or of any man or men, but the tragedy of Athens. Athens at first judges events rightly, but later is betrayed by hybris into injustice, and loses the faculty of correct judgment. How far this can be put down to divine agencies is a matter for speculation, and the historian does not commit himself.[51]

The climax of this story is the account of Athens’s disastrous attempt to conquer the powerful city of Sicily. At one point, Thucydides states that civil conflict was at the basis of Athens’s failure: “In the end it was only because they had destroyed themselves by their own internal strife that finally they were forced to surrender.”[52]

Nowhere does he state that Athens was guilty of pleonexia or hubris or that the gods punished them with utter humiliation and the destruction of their powerful fleet that had served for years as the basis of their empire. Yet this concept is “baked into” the events of his narration, and it is hard to believe that Greeks who read Thucydides would have missed the clear allusions. In book 2, in his summary of the famous funeral speech by the statesman Pericles, Thucydides comments that the Athenians were specifically told that the city

would be victorious if she avoided trying to add to the empire during the course of the war, and if she did nothing to risk the safety of the city itself. But his [Pericles’s] successors did the exact opposite, and in other matters which apparently had no connection with the war private ambition [philotimia] and private profit led to policies which were bad both for the Athenians themselves and for their allies. (2.65)

Throughout the war the Athenians became increasingly direct and even brutal in their exercise of power over their empire, which consisted of roughly two hundred individual city-states throughout Greece. Shortly before the ill-fated Sicilian expedition, Thucydides presents the so-called Melian Dialogue, a classic presentation of power politics. The “dialogue” consists of a debate between the Athenian authorities and representatives of the island of Melos, whose citizens were allies of Sparta and refused to change sides and ally themselves with Athens. Athens was a much more powerful state and makes no bones about exercising that power:

We recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think: since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept. (5.89)

Upon the surrender of Melos, Athens applied its power in the most brutal way possible, putting to death all the men of military age and selling the women and children into slavery. Thucydides’s placement of the Melian Dialogue immediately before his account of the Sicilian expedition strongly suggests an element of tragic irony or even divine punishment of the Athenians for their increasing hubris.[53]

Later Greco-Roman Historiography

Later Greek historians and their Roman counterparts were less reluctant than Thucydides to bring the gods into their narrations. They only occasionally included accounts of divine intervention, but mostly they moralized, either indirectly or explicitly. Xenophon, who wrote among many other works a continuation of Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides’s text abruptly breaks off several years before the end of the war), is not reluctant to bring the gods into his narrative, although he does not do this frequently. He states, for instance, “Many examples could be given both from Greek and foreign history to show that the gods are not indifferent to irreligion or to evil doing.”[54]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian of Rome, disparages those of skeptical mind “who ridicule all the manifestations of the gods” and who insist that “none of the gods concern themselves in anything relating to humankind.” He considered himself among those who, in contrast, “do not absolve the gods from the care of human affairs, but, after looking deeply into history, hold that they are favourable to the good and hostile to the wicked.”[55]

Roman historians are especially notorious for their tendency to moralize. According to historian Ronald Mellor, that posture was intrinsically linked to their worldview:

Roman historians always regarded moral teaching as a central function, perhaps the central function, of historical writing. They saw all change in moral terms, and they saw important historical issues like causation as fundamentally moral questions. Thus history must do more than merely tell pleasant stories from the past; it must pass moral judgments. For it was from the study of the past, from the virtues and vices of their ancestors, that the Romans derived their conception of public morality.[56]

Sallust, a contemporary of Julius Caesar and of the collapse of the republican government of Rome, outlined his views of the extreme corruption among the Roman elite of the period. His writings are filled with moralizing commentaries like the following:

It was then [following the destruction of Rome’s inveterate enemy Carthage] that fortune turned unkind and confounded all her enterprises. To the men who had so easily endured toil and peril, anxiety and adversity, the leisure and riches which are generally regarded as so desirable proved a burden and a curse. Growing love of money, and the lust for power which followed it, engendered every kind of evil. Avarice destroyed honor, integrity, and every other virtue, and instead taught men to be proud and cruel, to neglect religion, and to hold nothing too sacred to sell. Ambition tempted many to be false, to have one thought hidden in their hearts, another ready on their tongues, to become a man’s friend or enemy not because they judged him worthy or unworthy but because they thought it would pay them, and to put on the semblance of virtues that they had not.[57]

Livy, who wrote a marvelously detailed history of Rome from its founding down to the age of Augustus, prefaced his work with the following description of his approach and of the historical art in general. He clearly conceived of historiography as a kind of moral philosophy teaching by examples, for the benefit of both individuals and states.

I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.[58]

Nor did Livy shrink from including the gods in his narrative, particularly in the accounts of the earliest periods of Roman history:

There is no reason, I feel, to object when antiquity draws no hard line between the human and the supernatural: it adds dignity to the past, and, if any nation deserves the privilege of claiming a divine ancestry, that nation is our own; and so great is the glory won by the Roman people in their wars that, when they declare that Mars himself was their first parent and father of the man who founded their city, all the nations of the world might well allow the claim as readily as they accept Rome’s imperial dominion.[59]

Tacitus, widely considered the greatest of all Roman historians, describes the young emperor Octavian (soon to be given the name of Augustus) in the following moralistic terms:

He seduced the army with bonuses, and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians. Indeed, he attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace. Then he gradually pushed ahead and absorbed the functions of the Senate, the officials, and even the law. Opposition did not exist, war or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed, both politically and financially. They had profited from the revolution, and so now they liked the security of the existing arrangement better than the dangerous uncertainties of the old regime.[60]

Clearly, for Tacitus, the absence of men of moral courage in the Roman Senate was a main reason why Octavian was able to gather the reins of power into his own hands; the Senate’s acquiescence in his demagoguery (“seducing” the army with bonuses, distributing cheap bread to the masses)—because it brought them greater success politically and financially—was what led to the loss of liberty.

The greatest biographer of the Roman Empire, Plutarch, himself a Greek, became known throughout the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds for his series of “Lives,” which, although they were filled with biographical details of each subject, were written primarily as moral instruction—moral examples to be used to inspire the reader to greater virtue.

Virtue in action immediately takes such a hold of a man that he no sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the steps of the doer. . . . Moral good, in a word, has a power to attract towards itself. It is no sooner seen then it rouses the spectator to action. And it yet does not form his character by mere imitation, but by promoting the understanding of virtuous deeds it provides him with a dominating purpose.[61]

* * *

These works were among the most influential writings from classical antiquity throughout the early modern period and into the modern era. Shakespeare used Plutarch’s Lives as principal sources for several of his plays. English translations flooded the early United States, and the Founding Fathers were among Plutarch’s greatest enthusiasts.[62] But apart from Plutarch himself, the classical notion that history should be morally (and even religiously) edifying is found in Western historiography long after the fall of the Roman Empire. Although some medieval historians were more sophisticated and wrote more complex accounts than others, one of their underlying themes in nearly all cases was that sin resulted in punishment from God.

Notes

[1] See Lisa Irene Hau, Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 2–3.

[2] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 2:509–10.

[3] Cicero, On the Laws 1.5, in The Republic and The Laws, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 98.

[4] Herodotus, Histories 1.95.1, in The Landmark Herodotus, ed. Robert B. Strassler and trans. Andrea L. Purvis (New York: Anchor, 2007), 56.

[5] See Michael Grant, The Ancient Historians (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), 62.

[6] Kenneth Waters, Herodotos on Tyrants and Despots: A Study in Objectivity (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1971), 4, emphasis added.

[7] John Van Seters, In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 39.

[8] On the presence of religious and moral thinking in Herodotus, see Charles William Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 78–79; and Stephen Usher, The Historians of Greece and Rome (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 18–21.

[9] Victor Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1973), 340. W. K. C. Guthrie subtitled volume 3 of his History of Greek Philosophy “The Fifth-Century Enlightenment.”

[10] See Ehrenberg, Solon to Socrates, 332–51.

[11] Herodotus, Histories 9.100, trans. Purvis, 714.

[12] Herodotus, Histories 7.139, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1954), 487.

[13] For more on divine judgments, see J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Divine Verdict: A Study of Divine Judgement in the Ancient Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 67; see also the discussion in Perez Zagorin, Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 18.

[14] Herodotus, Histories 7.10, trans. Purvis, 500.

[15] Grant, Ancient Historians, 57.

[16] See Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 47–52.

[17] M. L. West, trans., Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 76.

[18] Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 48.

[19] See Hugh Nibley, The Prophetic Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1989), 366; Hugh Nibley, Teachings of the Book of Mormon, Semester 1: Transcripts of Lectures Presented to an Honors Book of Mormon Class at Brigham Young University, 1988–1990 (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2004), 32; and Pardon E. Tillinghast, ed., Approaches to History: Selections in the Philosophy of History from the Greeks to Hegel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963), 2–3.

[20] T. James Luce, The Greek Historians (London: Routledge, 2003), 39. Hybris is a less common spelling of hubris.

[21] Herodotus, Histories 1.5, trans. Purvis, 4.

[22] Herodotus, Histories 1.32, trans. Purvis, 20, 22.

[23] See Herodotus, Histories, trans. Purvis, 2.120. There is also the more technical question of what the Greeks meant by the “jealousy” (phthonos) of the gods. David Rolph Seely wrote an excellent study, “The Jealous Divine in Herodotus” (master’s thesis, BYU Classics Department, 1982), in which he outlines a divergence of opinion among major scholars. Some believed that “jealousy” should be understood more or less literally as “a malicious force that is not necessarily concerned with justice or retribution, but that is primarily concerned with an arbitrary destruction of anyone who enjoys prosperity.” Others contended, however, that it can only be taken seriously as retribution rather than as envy. I believe that when the overall context of Herodotus’s narratives is taken into consideration, as argued here, the latter view makes much greater sense.

[24] Herodotus, Histories 1.34, trans. Purvis, 22.

[25] See Jacqueline de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 42–46. See also Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31–63.

[26] Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.8, as quoted in Nilsson, Greek Piety, 57 (emphasis added).

[27] Herodotus, Histories, trans. Purvis, 1.174.

[28] Herodotus, Histories, trans. Purvis, 7.34–35.

[29] Hau, Moral History, 192.

[30] Hau, Moral History, 184.

[31] The phrase is derived from Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (KJV).

[32] Richard D. Draper, “Hubris and Atē: A Latter-day Warning from the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3, no. 2 (1994): 12–33.

[33] As Oswyn Murray argues in John Boardman et al., eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 195–96. Simon Hornblower opposes this view in Thucydides (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 189–91.

[34] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22. Except where otherwise noted, I am following the edition translated by Rex Warner and edited by M. I. Finley (London: Penguin, 1972).

[35] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.

[36] More precisely, the Peloponnesian War consisted of two wars, from 460 to 446 BC and 431 to 404 BC. But Thucydides depicts it as a single war with a ceasefire in the middle.

[37] Poetics, 1451a36, as quoted in C. Thomas Powell, “Why Aristotle Has No Philosophy of History,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 4, no. 3 (July 1987): 343–57.

[38] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22, in The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler and trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 1996), 15.

[39] M. I. Finley, introduction to Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 31; see p. 24.

[40] See Hau, Moral History, 199–200.

[41] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 3.81–84 (emphasis added).

[42] See especially Helaman 3:11–13, 33–36 and the discussion in chapter 11 under the heading “Key Themes of Mormon’s Record.”

[43] See Stephen Usher, Historians of Greece and Rome (London: Hamilton, 1969), 62–63.

[44] See Nanno Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion (Königstein, Germany: Verlag Anton Hain,1981), 57.

[45] See Mary Frances Williams, Ethics in Thucydides: The Ancient Simplicity (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998), 7; and Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion, 65: “So ultimately, if Thucydides’s personal belief towards the divine is not strictly provable, his affirmation of the social and moral validity of the religion of Greece is certain.”

[46] See Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion, 32–33.

[47] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23.

[48] Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion, 56.

[49] Hau, Moral History, 200–201.

[50] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 3.82.8.

[51] Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 144; see Hau, Moral History, 208.

[52] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.65.

[53] See Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion, 43.

[54] Xenophon, Hellenica 5.4.1, as quoted from Xenophon, A History of My Times, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), 226.

[55] Xenophon, Roman Antiquities 2.68.2. See the Loeb Classical Library edition translated by Earnest Cary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 2.511.

[56] Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (New York: Routledge, 1993), 47.

[57] Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, 10.6, in The Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. S. A. Handford (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 181.

[58] Livy, The Early History of Rome 1.1, as quoted from the Aubrey de Sélincourt translation (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 34. Jane D. Chaplin, in Livy’s Exemplary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3, has documented at great length the use of moral “exempla” in Livy as well as other ancient historians. Exempla, as she explains, can be models of morality in the narrow sense, like the famous Roman matron Lucretia who commits suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, or, more broadly, “any specific citation of an event or an individual that is intended to serve as a guide to conduct.”

[59] Livy 1.1, Early History of Rome, trans. Selincourt, 33–34.

[60] Tacitus, The Annals of Rome (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 32 (emphasis added).

[61] Plutarch, Pericles 2; see The Rise and Fall of Athens, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 166. See also Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[62] See Carl J. Richard, “Plutarch and the Early American Republic,” in A Companion to Plutarch, ed. Mark Beck (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 598–610. See the various articles therein on the reception of Plutarch (part IV, 529–97).