“The historian’s most important quality is accuracy”. Discuss this view, with reference to any two historians in the classical period and explain how they contributed to history and if their work is reliable.

Herodotus and Thucydides are two of the first historians that contributed greatly to historiography yet their styles of conveying and writing history are vastly different. Herodotus changed the way in which history was presented but it is mainly suggested that he was a great story teller and told facts. Yet, Thucydides is regarded as the Father or history as he went further, Thucydides did not merely attempt to retell history but went as far as to analysis sources and ask existential questions and hence he presented truth in history.

Herodotus’ methodology was a combination of  “disciplined enquiry, based on research, observation, scepticism about information,”  and a “richness of storytelling”.

Herodotus broke away from the traditional written form for history which was epic poetry. He instead wrote in prose, “in what was then a relatively new literary form”. He did this because he believed that “prose is more flexible.” He believed that unlike poetry, prose allows for the entertainment of “all sorts of possibilities” and the playing “of stories one against the others” and as such he believed that prose supplied “freedom to historical writing”. Herodotus in this sense was a true story teller rather than a historian as even his reasoning behind his writing style was not to present history  but because he believe prose was more entertaining to the responder. Herodotus' work is characterized by "ring composition," a return at the end of a section to a subject announced at the beginning. This was a common feature of epics at the time, and digressions were also not uncommon in epic narrative. There is also a sense of rhetorical development at many levels of the narrative.

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Herodotus’  in his book The Histories presents  “more than one story… about an event” with these stories “often differing because [they are] told by different groups in a conflict”. In this way Herodotus sets before his audience what he knows and allows them to judge what is ‘truth’. He himself does not “decide that one account rather than another is to be believed.”

Despite his "fantastic" accounts of giants ants, flying snakes, etc, Herodotus did not accept absolutely everything he was told. Sometimes he casts doubt on reports he was told or dismisses accounts outright but in general Herodotus ...

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