A story, as John Burrow says of his own History of Histories, is selective. It looks forward 'to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its criteria of relevance'. Hence a difficulty:

The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative - above all in Homer - was one of the sources of history as a genre. It would be a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The Iliad has a climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer's epic that saw as its 'point' an explanation of Troy's fall. The concept of a story is in essence a simple one, but that does not make all narrators either simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional.

LRB 20 November 2008 | PDF Download