Different Aims and Purposes of the Historians Herodotus and Thucydides.

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Michael Argenti

Different Aims and Purposes of the Historians Herodotus and Thucydides

Every historian has certain personal, social and political contexts which affect their writing of history. This can be seen as early as Ancient Greek between the two historians Herodotus and Thucydides. The Greeks were amongst the first in the West to draw up histories by inquiring into such information that led to the facts concerning the past. It is a process that requires careful collection of information, judgment of sources, and the application of reason. Therefore, it attempts to develop history from a scientific rather than a mythical basis. Herodotus was the first Greek historian and is famous for the nine books he wrote on the rise of the Persian Empire, the Persian invaders of Greece in 490 and 480 B.C., the heroic fight of the Greeks against the invaders, and the final Greek victory (the ‘Histories’). Thucydides was a Greek historian of the 400’s B.C., who is famous for his ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’, in which he describes a war between Athens and Sparta (431B.C. – 404B.C.).

Both historians used differing skills of re-telling the past and analysing the events that occurred. Herodotus’ use of the historical method involved the careful accumulation of data, followed by deciding what conclusions the data support; this in turn greatly influenced later historians. Thucydides, on the other hand, worked in three stages when writing history: He made notes of events as they occurred, then he reworked them into a consecutive narrative, and finally he elaborated the narrative into the full history. Unlike his predecessor, Herodotus, he didn't delve into the background but laid out the facts as he saw them, chronologically.

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When documenting history, Herodotus’ main sources were ‘what he has been told’ and ‘what he has seen’. Whilst this may seem risky to rely solely on these secondary sources, in a time where most of the witnesses had been killed and the war itself had taken on mythical dimensions, this was the best he could do to ascertain facts. He had few, if any, written documents to rely on – he queried priests, leading citizens, interpreters, and eyewitnesses, – who were often fragmentary and unreliable. To further strengthen his findings he conducted land surveys and inspected battle sites.

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