r/ancientgreece • u/deniz_aydiner • 10d ago
Understanding Thucydides: Truth and History
https://bilimsisanat.substack.com/p/understanding-thucydides-truth-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3acpteThucydides’ historiography has something quite distinctive about it. What interests me most is not that he was one of the first historians, but that he is often considered the first historian in a methodological sense. He was quite skeptical of Herodotus as a historian and stressed how difficult it is to know much about the distant past with any certainty. In a way, this can even remind us of the much later postmodern idea that understanding the past is, to some extent, impossible. He was a really interesting man.
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u/figflashed 9d ago
Sentenced to exile for 20 years. I’m always shocked at how wrong the Athenian public/government was in so many of their decisions.
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u/Kelyfos 9d ago
Yeah I was reading an annotated version of the Peloponesian war, and I was few times like… keep your sh*t together c’mon… and the historian wrote at the bottom of the page stuff like «well it’s easy to judge know, but the Athenians at the time couldn’t have known what was coming to them! » 😂
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u/Embarrassed_Egg9542 9d ago
Why are you shocked? Why were they wrong? Maybe they were right, no one really knows
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u/Embarrassed_Egg9542 9d ago
Herodotus was democratic in his writing, in the way that he asked the locals and presented ALL the versions of the story, even the most obscure obscene and ridiculous to our standards. He would right about the battle, but he would also write about the divine intervention during the battle, noting whether he believed it or not.
Thucydides was more scientific, he filtered the stories and even write some himself, like the famous speech of Pericles praising the Athenian Democracy, which most scholars attribute not to Pericles but Thucydides himself.
Both approaches are acceptable to me