Biography and History

Ever since human beings developed an interest in their own past, they have tried different way through which to explain and understand the events of their lives. Seemingly unrelated events seemed to form patterns and those patterns were related conceptually to the movement of the earth around the sun in its own orbit and from that point onwards there emerged the view that our lives were governed by the stars. This was a very comforting notion because those with power and privilege could always rationalise it and those without felt comforted that their travails in life were due to influences beyond human control. One may say that an astrological ordering of life is essentially the ideology of a conservative staus conscious society.

It is to yhe credit of the Greeks that they refused to accept this idea. Events in their human exixtence had to be explained in terms of everyday occurences. In the Homeric myths we have the idea that heroes are especially blessed by the Gods on Mount Olympus. By the time we get to Hesiod and Herodotus a new insight is strirring in the Greek mind. While the play of Fortuna is not entirely rejected, we now have the notion that events that happen in the lives of people is due to certain underlying factors that are visible at least in terms of the consequences. Thus when Herodotus spoke of the invasion of Darius I and the Greek response to it he had necessarily to place this cataclysmic event in the context of the interaction between the Greeks and Others. This is the point that Francois Hartog makes in his fabulous book, The Mirror of Herodotus. The awareness that their are cultural differences and therefore the kind of lives worth recording is the first step in the establishmment of a principle of historiography.