Teaching Ancient Biography
by Dr. Margaret Cotter-Lynch, Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Original text © 2005. Margaret Cotter-Lynch.
Introductory Lecture on Literature and History
I. Literature and History
What’s the difference? What’s the relationship? How do we tell?
At this point in the semester, we are shifting from reading and talking about “fiction” to reading and talking about “history.” What does this mean for the way we read, and the way we talk about what we read? Our usual associations are that fiction is “made up,” while history is “real.” But for our purposes, we must remember that all of these are stories: at some point in time, somebody wrote down a series of events in a narrative sequence. In some stories, these events are clearly all true. In other stories, the events are clearly all made up. Most stories, however, are a mixture of true things and made up things.
The relationship between fiction and history, then, can be more complicated than we may at first assume, due mostly to the fact that fiction and history as we experience them in this course are both literature, i.e. written works, in this case from the distant past. In many cases the line between “real” and “made up” is unclear.
Here are some examples of the interaction of fiction and history in literature, from other books we have read this semester:
The Iliad was once believed to be history. Then, for many centuries, many people thought it was pure fiction. Then, in the late 19th century, archaeologists found the ruins of a city, on the reported site of Troy, with evidence that it had burned around 1100 BC, fitting the stories at the time thought to be fictional. Now, most people say yes, there was a Trojan war, but it was probably fought over trade, and not over a girl.
In The Aeneid, Virgil self-consciously makes up history; i.e., he fabricates a past to explain the present and predict the future.
In “Agamemnon,” Aeschylus picks and chooses amongst a variety of traditions and stories about a maybe-historical figure. Aeschylus chooses which strands of the story to use, to lose, and to make up, based not upon the criteria of “true” versus “false,” but according to which elements will best emphasize the points he wants to make (about communication, law, knowledge, etc).
One way to understand the difference between fiction and history is the criteria upon which the elements of a story are chosen. Almost all stories have a point, message, or moral. When an author is writing fiction, s/he will choose which events to include by asking the question: how can I make my point in the most pleasing or entertaining manner? When an author is writing history, s/he will begin by asking: how can I fit together things that really happened in order to make my point?
What can literature do, whether historical, fictive, or a combination of the two?
explore/explain themes:
e.g. rage, vengence, love, mortality
Stories are a way to explore and explain how things work and why.
In fiction, you can make things clearer than they may be in “real life.”
literary choice: 1) make up a story to highlight a particular theme
2) tell a true story in a particular way to highlight a particular theme
make comparisons:
e.g. Turnus is like Achilles, like Hector, like Menelaus…
Comparisons in literature provide us with a way of understanding the present through comparison with the past. We all do this in real life.
Stories, true and fictive, are useful in that they give us a library of events/experiences/situations through which to understand the world in which we live.
What questions do we ask when we read stories?
stories labelled as fiction: how is the story told? what is emphasized? what is left out? what is the form, and what effect does it have on our perceptions?
stories labelled as history: all of the above questions, plus what really happened? how reliable does the author seem? how does he know what he’s telling us? do we trust him to tell us the truth?
When you read Plutarch and Suetonius, you should ask:
1) What’s happening?
2) What does the author want us to think about what happened?
· lesson?
· moral?
· explanation?
· relevance?
3) Watch for patterns as you read, particularly cause and effect.
