Chapter 25 : Historical Present

In fact, whenever you introduce past events as if they were coming to be and present, you will make your speech and writing no longer a tale, but a thing involved in the struggle. Xenophon says:

A certain man, who fell under Cyrus’ horse and is being trod on, strikes the horse in the belly with his sword. The horse, rearing, throws Cyrus off and he falls.

Thucydides is like this in very many places.

Commentary

tale: the Greek word is a rhetorical term used for the “narrative” or “exposition” of the facts in a case. Longinus is refer­ ring to the device which we call the “historical present.” It was not a con­ sistent or fixed feature of Greek prose; Russell gives a synopsis of its history, with references to the scholarly litera­ ture on the subject. The only other Greek rhetorical writer to discuss it is Aristides (Spengel 11.552-53), who is aware of the paradoxical quality that comes from the shift of tense, for he says it lends a “strange appropriateness” to what is said.

The failure of the historical present to become a feature of Greek rhetoric probably derives from the tense-system peculiar to Greek, especially the “aor­ ist” tense: this is a set of forms that can denote the time of an event as either past or present (or even future), and in any extent, from a split second to an aeon. The action, however long it may actu­ ally take, is conceived of as a single event. Hence the Greeks did not have to worry about the problem of dramati­ cally annihilating the sense of time which separated the audience from the events narrated. In English, as in Latin, the historical present is singularly vivid; it presents the actions as actually occur­ ring before our eyes. Dickens is espe­ cially fond of the device: the opening chapter of Bleak House, for example, is a masterful intermixing of present par­ ticiples serving as main verbs inter­ spersed with both past and present tenses of narrative.

The historical present is a common feature of colloquial speech, e.g., the famous “So he says to me” and “I says to him.” John uses it in his account of the burial of Jesus (19:42-20:1):

There they laid Jesus therefore because of the Jews’ preparation day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand.

The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

Xenophon says: the passage is from The Education of Cyrus (7.1.37); the last clause of the quotation (“and he falls”) is not in our texts of Xenophon.

in very many places: Russell says that Thucydides uses the device far less than Xenophon; Longinus’ adjective is in the superlative, a fact which suggests that such was not his impression of Thucydides.