Abstract

Aristotle and other Greeks contrasted history and poetry because epic poetry or myth was an alternate way of apprehending the past. Myth was accepted as no less factual than history, being distinguished by its lack of any coherent dating scheme. Even Herodotus and Thucydides could not write a true history of early Greece; they were necessarily confined to contemporary history. The problem is not why Greek culture was "unhistorical," but rather why anyone should have proceeded from myth to history. Their traditional mythic understanding of the past, operating similarly to patterns of memory observable in other cultures, preserved relevant information at the cost of massive loss of data, which appears to survive only in random fashion