Summary

Historiography, the critical study of the past, emerged gradually in the Greek world, first with the rationalizing of the myths, then in the fundamental revolution of Herodotus and Thucydides in the second half of the fifth century bc. This brought the critical sifting of evidence and informants, the development of criteria for credence, and the sceptical attitude to various partisan communities. The sifting also applied to political acumen and the attention to larger concepts, political abstracts such as democracy, tyranny, freedom, and problems of human life, which is partly why they continue to speak to later centuries. The Persian Wars offered a subject of very recent importance, which helped the creation of prose writings on the past and pulled writers away from exclusive concern with myths and legends, though that interest never entirely left Greek historiography. The concern with social habits, geography, and ethnography so prominent in Herodotus also remained an important element in Greek historiography. Writing the history of the contemporary period was pioneered by Thucydides and became the touchstone for truly accurate research – mainly because memory was still fresh, and actual participants were still alive to tell the tale. Greek historiography remained remote from modern historiography in its literary aspirations, the use of rhetoric, and much else. Greek historians had a purpose and a message. The greatest Greek historians achieved a wider sensitivity partly by being in exile from their own home city, and the greatest had larger philosophical or political concerns, or some external personal purpose for writing historiography rather than an aim of simply producing a bare chronicle of the past.