history

The opening line of the oldest extant work of Greek prose is also the inaugural use of the word historía in something like its modern sense. Herodotus writes around 440 BC: Hērodótou Halikarnāssēos historíēs apódexis hēde — "This is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus." The word historíēs (genitive of historía) names what Herodotus has done: he has conducted an inquiry into the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, and what we are reading is the demonstration of that inquiry. Modern translations render the line "These are the histories of Herodotus" — but the Greek says "these are the inquiries." The slippage between "inquiries" and "histories" in our translation is the whole semantic history of the word in one move. We have come to use history for the result; Herodotus used it for the work.

The work was the work of a hístōr. In Homer the hístōr appears twice — both times as a judicial figure. In Iliad 18, on the shield Hephaestus forges for Achilles, a city in peacetime is shown with a dispute over the blood-price for a slain man; the elders sit in judgment, and the litigants "ran to the hístōr" for the matter to be decided. In Iliad 23, at the funeral games for Patroclus, Achilles invokes a hístōr to resolve a disagreement about the outcome of the chariot race. The hístōr is the one whose having-seen (or having-come-to-know by careful inquiry into others' seeing) carries authority. The agent-noun is from the perfect stem of the see-verb: literally "the one who has seen, and therefore knows." The judicial sense is the older one. The disciplinary sense — hístōr as historian rather than judge — is a development of the same shape: the one whose investigation yields a binding account.

The abstract noun historía ("the work of a hístōr") was a feminine first-declension formation, productive in Greek for naming a discipline by its agent-noun. It meant first "the activity of inquiring," then "the knowledge gained by inquiring," then "the account that displays that knowledge." All three senses are present in Herodotus; later Greek writers narrowed to the third. The word entered Latin as historia without change of form. Cicero called history testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis — "the witness of times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity." The very first epithet is testis, witness — and the Latin testis is on a different root from historia, but Cicero is making a near-tautology: history is the witness because historía already named the work of the witness-judge, the hístōr.

The English split between history and story is internal: both descend from Latin historia, but they came in through different routes and at different times. Story arrived first — through Old French estoire in the 13th century, with the initial hi- reduced as French pronunciation regularly weakened it. Through the late medieval period story covered the whole semantic range of Latin historia: a saint's legend was a story, the Trojan War was a story, a piece of news was a story, the building was three stories tall (the upper floors traditionally decorated with painted scenes — stories). History arrived later, in the late 14th century, as a re-borrowing of the Latin form directly, used for the more learned and weighty senses. For about two hundred years the two words competed for the same semantic space. By the 17th century the split had crystallized: history took the true-and-investigated sense, story took the told-and-possibly-fictional sense. The same Latin word now does two opposite jobs in English: it names the discipline of organized truth and the form of casual fiction. The Greek historía covered both because the Greeks did not need the distinction the way the moderns do.

The witness-root sits underneath. PIE *weid- meant "to see, to know," and the Greek branch took the agent-noun route. Where the Germanic branch produced witness ("the one whose knowing-from-seeing carries weight"), the Greek branch produced hístōr ("the one whose knowing-from-seeing has authority to decide") and then the abstract historía ("the work and the result of that authoritative knowing"). The two words are siblings on the same root: witness names the role at the level of the individual testimony, history names the role at the level of the organized account. A historian is, etymologically, a witness operating at the discipline-scale — one whose having-seen is the having-investigated-and-weighed of many seeings, whose result is binding because the investigation was conducted in the position of hístōr. To do history is to take up the position of the Homeric judge: to sit at the place where conflicting accounts arrive and to weigh them into a finding. The modern academic discipline knows this — historians understand themselves as inquirers, not as scribes — but the popular flattening of history into "the past itself, the events that occurred" hides the work that the word names. The judge has receded behind the finding.

The Greek branch also gave English the cousins of the same root. Idea, from idéa, is "the look of a thing, the visible form," from the see-verb idein; Plato used idéa and eidos for the unchanging templates the mind sees behind the changing world, and an idea in the deep sense is something the mind has come to see. Idol, from eidōlon, is "a little form, a phantom-image, a small seen-thing." Idyll, from eidyllion, is "a little picture, a small scene." These three are visual nouns — the things that the see-verb names as seen. Hístōr is the personal noun on the perfect stem: the one who has done the seeing-and-knowing. Historía is the abstract on the personal noun: the work that one does. Same root, three different parts of speech, three different stages of word-formation, three different domains — the visible, the knower, the discipline. Every time English uses one of these words, it is using a frozen piece of Indo-European morphology that still records the original equation: to see is to know, to have seen is to know, the work of the knower is to investigate and report.

And one more cousin: story-the-floor-of-a-building. Medieval Latin historia was used in Anglo-Latin for the rows of painted scenes that decorated the exteriors of buildings — each row a "story," depicting biblical or historical narratives. The architectural term storey (British) / story (American) generalized from the painted rows to any horizontal division of a building, then lost its decorative origin entirely. A two-story house no longer has any pictures on it, but the word still names the levels by what used to be drawn there. The Greek historía, the Roman historia, the medieval pictorial historie, and the modern numbered floor of a building are the same word. The discipline of inquiry, the casual tale, and the architectural division: three uses of one Greek abstract noun, refracted through fifteen hundred years of borrowing, in different parts of English vocabulary now treated as unrelated.