The Historian
Before I jump into posts about other old, dead Greek guys who I think are important, I should probably discuss my sources – especially since I promised to stick to the best ones I could.
Most of those who lived in Rome and Classical Greece recognized Herodotus, a man of Greek heritage likely born to a wealthy family in or near the city of Halicarnassus in about 484 BC. While Halicarnassus started out as a Greek colony originally created in Mycenaean times, by the time Herodotus was born, it had been a Persian territory for quite some time.
Herodotus lived at about the same time as Socrates of Athens (more about him, later), and of all the people who wrote about the past of Classical Greece, he stood out. Most of the people of the time – and even professors of history, today – credit Herodotus not just with the books he wrote, but even more importantly, with the methodology he used.
Before Herodotus, Greek “historians” primarily devoted themselves to re-writing ancient stories that had passed down since Bronze Age Mycenae. They treated as literal truth the stories of gods and heroes found in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other stories about the Trojan War. The made no effort to distinguish fact from fiction, or history from myth and legend.
They figured it was “good enough” to accurately record the stories they heard, and call that “history.” The Greeks recognized the pattern of that form of “history,” and referred to the writers as “logographers.”
However, what Thales did with his investigation of the natural world, Herodotus did with history. Rather than blindly copy the stories he heard, Herodotus traveled around Persia and the countries touched by the Eastern Mediterranean, collected as many different stories about the same events as possible, visited as many sites of historical events as he could find, and then did everything he could to validate the accuracy of the reports.
In short, Herodotus didn’t just copy stuff down, he did as much leg-work as he possibly could to discover the facts (comparisons to early-21st Century journalism I’ll leave to the reader…).
When Herodotus took this approach, he changed history from the collection of tall-tales to a proper field of study based on rational inquiry. As he wrote the “Histories,” Herodotus noted the different versions of the stories, cited sources, discussed what he’d done to validate accuracy, identified information about which he felt skeptical (and why), and provided rational critiques.
In so doing, this “First Historian,” developed what we now call “historiography” – which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as, “…the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particular details from the authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination.”
Herodotus’ methodology included several good rules of thumb. Firstly, try to find the oldest sources available, written by people who actually witnessed or participated in events. In modern history terminology, we call these “Primary Sources,” and consider them the most accurate.
Secondly, find as many different primary sources as possible, written by witnesses to the same events. People frequently write things in such a way as to cast themselves, or their people, in the best possible light. Multiple accounts about the same events tend to allow one to better evaluate what actually occurred, and what a particular writer may have added or altered.
Thirdly, walk the ground and talk to the people, there. Find out where a monument stood or a particular battle took place, compare what exists to the reports, and use that to help evaluate the validity of particular accounts. Sometimes, a simple walk through the fields provides amazing insight into historical events, and observations about how people actually live can point out a falsehood.
Fourthly, use current knowledge to rationally critique the stories at hand and keep in mind that stories grow and change in the telling. For instance, if a particular story discusses the deeds of a hero in a battle who killed someone with a spear thrown from a mile away, one can safely consider that an exaggeration, at least, or perhaps an outright lie.
(After all, nobody can toss a spear for a mile and, even if they could, the travel time it would take to cover the distance means the target will have long since moved out of the way. Even modern-day snipers can’t reliably hit targets at that range, with rifles made for the job.)
Fifthly, remember stories written after an event has occurred will likely contain some errors, and the longer between the event and the telling, the worse the flaws. Even honest people forget things, or remember them differently from one another, and not all historians strive for honesty. Some of them skew history deliberately, for one reason or another, and a lot of them have agendas they wish to promote.
(That last bit, incidentally, applies to this blog — at least to some extent. While I’ll do my best to provide facts as best I can, given the constraints of time and resources, I make no claims that what I write, here, has any academic value. While I have a degree in Political Science and History, this blog falls under the category of “popular history” at best, as my writing background is journalistic, and not scholarly. Also, this blog exists to allow me to explore a rationalistic world-view, and to provide a forum for discussion by those of us who strive, as best we can, to live according to the dictates of reason.)
Since Herodotus lived in the fifth century, BCE, he had a lot better access to original sources than most people, and because he went to great pains to evaluate them rationally, the Histories stands as one of the best reports of the ancient world available to us. Among those who emulated his efforts, Thucydides of Athens provides the best account of the events of the Peloponnesian War between the leagues of city-states led by Athens and Sparta. The outcome of this war, and the soul-searching the Athenian philosophers undertook to understand the what had happened, profoundly influenced the development of western philosophical and political thought.
Moreover, we have to remember that, even if an historical source lacked accuracy, it still may have greatly influenced later thinkers – including those who lived during the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Since the men and women who lived in the past 500 years have had profound impact on our lives today, I think it’s a good idea to examine the ideas that influenced them.
This means that, while Herodotus may not have gotten everything perfectly right, he tried as best he could and his work reflects his intellectual honesty. On top of all that, his descriptions of the words and deeds of the Greek thinkers who lived before Socrates profoundly influenced not just modern thinkers, but also the people of Herodotus’ time.
Not everyone who read Herodotus’ Histories in Classical Greece believed everything the man had to say. Some of them profoundly disagreed, and wrote out their arguments and refutations, and those sometimes made for insightful and influential works, as well.
However, Herodotus (and others who adopted his methodology, especially Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Polybius and, to a lesser extent, Tacitus) set a really high bar. They profoundly influenced how historians in western civilization think about, and write about, history. I’ll rely on him, and them, quite a bit – especially if I can’t find primary sources (which may no longer exist, or may have never existed).
Now, for the links:
http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.1.i.html
https://www.britannica.com/topic/historiography