The present book is a translation of the German original (Geschichte als Element antiker Kultur. Die Griechen und ihre Geschichte(n), De Gruyter 2014). It offers the first extensive treatment of Hans-Joachim Gehrke’s concept of ‘intentional history’ in English. Its chapters are based on public lectures the author delivered at Munich University in 2012/2013. The volume opens with a concise, albeit very informative, preface by Jonas Grethlein, followed by two prefaces by Gehrke himself (the translated version of the German original and a new one). The book’s main body consists of an introduction, four chapters and some concluding remarks. An extensive list of references (updated from the German edition) and a general index complete the book.

The Introduction sets the stage for the positioning of ‘intentional history’ in the outillage of theories and methods available to the historian of the ancient world: at the core of Gehrke’s historical interests is ‘that part of history which is relevant for the identity of social groups’ (5). To this end, he mentions his array of theoretical and methodological landmarks: Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora and Jan Assmann, as leading scholars in the field of memory studies; the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche, as pioneering thinkers about group memory; the anthropologist Wilhelm Mühlmann and the medievalists of the Vienna School of History, as theorizers of intentionality (according to ethnological and sociological principles); and the sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as theorists of the reification process of reality.

Chapter 1 describes the agents and media of intentional history. Gehrke argues that the agent of intentional history is the group. Greek poetic and historical texts, starting from the very archetypical poems of Homer and Hesiod, used to speak in the first-person plural ‘we’ and were therefore received from the audience with a sense of collective identification. Stories transmitted this way became reified, integral to the community’s repository of accepted, ‘real’ facts. Chapter 2 focuses on ‘mythistory’ as the characterizing feature of intentional history. Mythistory corresponds to ideas of history that are crucial in forming group self-understanding. The main narratives analysed in this perspective are those of the Trojan War and the Dorian/Ionian migrations. Chapter 3 focuses on early historiography and its interaction with the early phases of the rhetorical genre; special attention is devoted to the influence of the mythographers, such as Hecataeus, and Ionian philosophers, such as Xenophanes, in the transition from mythistorical narratives, that is, from intentional history to more rationalizing tendencies as they are expressed, to different degrees, by Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. The ‘father of history’ Herodotus is here pictured as a histōr who represents the new intellectual-critical movement in Greek thought but, at the same time, is at ease in a world dominated by storytelling: ‘in Herodotus one finds a compromise between the old intentional history and the modern, critical, research-based kind of history’ (84). Chapter 4 is devoted to the interaction between historians and epideictic oratory in the fourth century. Gehrke shows that the intellectual-rationalistic search for truth, on the one hand, and the epideictic-rhetorical demands of intentional history, on the other, are often found in combination in Greek historiography (e.g. in Theopompus, 118ff.).

The concept of ‘intentional history’ is not entirely Gehrke’s conium. As he underlines in his foreword (vii–x), it was the anthropologist Mühlmann who first introduced the notion in the framework of his fieldwork study of Polynesian populations: ‘intentional history’ is, therefore, history in an ethno-sociological sense, as the subjective representation of a group’s history. As such, it reflects the group’s identity in both an aggregative and oppositive perspective (according to the definitions by Jonathan Hall and Irad Malkin). Gehrke’s focus is on the ways and media through which Greek communities remembered, imagined and narrated their past. Archaic epic poetry from Homer and Hesiod, as well as monuments and oratory, were likewise involved in the process of shaping the past by circulating stories rather than history.

Moreover, ‘stories were not merely accepted and passed on, but were creatively and critically transformed and imaginatively developed’ (19). This does not imply free room for arbitrary manipulation of the past according to present needs. As Gehrke explains, there were rules and limits in shaping the past. On the one hand, the plurality of stories and strands of tradition was a direct consequence of the intrinsic competitiveness of Greek society and its lack of a central power capable of imposing a fixed version of the past from a top-down perspective. On the other hand, ‘there were rules that were recognized; it is just that they were self-imposed rules’ (21). Importantly, therefore, intentional history has nothing to do with ‘propaganda’: ‘this plurality of Greek intentional history, which was deeply anchored in its very nature, meant that it was unsuited for making effective propaganda … because the means were always ready at hand to refute or relativise any given claim’ (21). For the ancient Greeks and, to a certain extent, any premodern society, net of its relevant specificities, the past has much more to do with stories, and therefore with Gehrke’s intentional history, than with history as a scientific narration of the past according to a positivistic approach.

This book deserves a place of honour on the bookshelf of any scholar, student and general reader who wants to engage with the past tout court in a much broader and even more profoundly historical perspective than sticking to a merely positivistic approach focused on factual history, provided that, especially as far as the premodern age is concerned, the latter is accessible in a separate dimension from the forms of (intentional) narration and representation that have come down to us.