In reading Herodotus and Thucydides, I was struck by how sophisticated it was of both of them to, in their own way, analyze a set of events and retell those events through prose in their own voice. If we look back on the semester's readings we know that the origins of 'documenting' history (and values and norms) came from an oral tradition that used memesis. So here we have two authors that effectively separated themselves from the historical knowledge and broke it down according to their own methodologies -- that's pretty impressive!
A major difference between the two of them is their stylistic approach to the prose. Thucydides takes on a very detached narrative style (one could say with a smack of academic flair?), where aside from describing his methodology at the beginning, he does not refer to himself at all. Herodotus on the other hand takes on a much more personable approach where he is constantly referring back to himself and his own opinions as a way to contextualize the source of the material he is presenting. We know that both accounts of the wars they document are not perfect as they are writing from their own ethnocentric perspective. However throughout much of Western history (especially after the Enlightenment), we have been inclined as a society to follow a Thucydides-type of approach to narrating history, where we remove ourselves from the narration in order to appear objective. Personally I prefer the approach Herodotus takes: explicitly subjective if equally manipulative! I suppose it comes down to the ongoing questions we keep asking in this course: is it better to reach for Truth even if we know we will never be perfect in reaching it? Or is it better to realize our limitations as humans and through that realization, evolve beyond seeking one Truth?
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