HoP 500b Melissa Lane on Herotodus and Thucydides

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

This episode explores the foundational roles of Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides in the development of historical inquiry and political

Key takeaways

• Herodotus is characterized as a 'father of history, geography, and ethnography' who chronicled the Persian Wars and diverse customs.
• Thucydides sought 'akribeia' (accuracy) and focused on the contemporary political realities of the Peloponnesian War.

Main topics

• Herodotus and the Persian Wars
• Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Notable quotes

The Greek word [historia] means inquiry.

Conclusion

Understanding these historians is essential for grasping the political

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:08) Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be another installment of our mini-series in which we celebrate reaching 500 episodes by going back to touch on a few topics I skipped over in previous series of the podcast. Today, I'm joined by Melissa Lane, who is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University. And we're going to talk about the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Hello, Melissa. Speaker 1 (0:40) Hello, Peter. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2 (0:42) So before we started recording, I was just saying to you that when I looked back and thought about what did I miss out the first time around, I think maybe the thing I most regret missing is these Greek historians, in part because actually they came up a lot in later episodes. Like I talked about Byzantine historiography, for example. And of course, they were very influenced by these historians. And I also very much regret not having had you on as a guest before. Thank Speaker 1 (1:09) you. So Speaker 2 (1:10) now I can make up for both of those omissions. Since I didn't say anything about them originally, let's start with introducing the two authors, Herodotus and Thucydides. When did they live and what historical events are they writing about in their historical chronicles? Speaker 1 (1:26) So Herodotus lived through the middle two-thirds of the 5th century before the Common Era BCE, so from about 484 to something like 425 or 420. And he's chronicling primarily the Persian Wars as the Greeks... thought of them, which were a series of Persian incursions onto the Greek states, initially those island city-states that were closest to Persia, and then coming onto the mainland. And that took place in the early 5th century, so just before the beginning of Herodotus' own lifetime, 490 to 479. But Herodotus also looks farther back. He wants to give us a lot of background and a lot of... wider context for the Persian Wars. Thucydides is about a generation younger, so he's born around 460 and dies probably in the 390s. I should have said Herodotus was born in one in a Greek city that was on the mainland of what's now Turkey, Halicarnassus, whereas Thucydides is an Athenian, and he writes about the Peloponnesian War, which he lives through and in fact serves as a general for Athens and is exiled for his act as a general, and goes on writing his history of that war. And that Peloponnesian War, again, as the Athenians would have called it, is the breakdown of what had been the Greek alliance against the Persians that had been jointly led by the Spartans and the Athenians. And in the aftermath, that broke into two separate alliances, one led by the Spartans, one led by the Athenians, and they come to blows, initially in a set of skirmishes, and then in the main sort of body of what we call the Peloponnesian War in the last third of the 5th century. Speaker 2 (3:20) Okay, thanks. That's very clear. We're going to talk about Herodotus and then Thucydides individually, but let's look a little bit about... what they have in common or the two of them jointly. So first of all, maybe about the relationship between them. I think Thucydides never refers to Herodotus by name, but he's clearly thinking of him and reacting to him. I mean, I guess he's sort of the second historian, so he's going to react to the first historian, right? What exactly is the relationship between them as you see it? Speaker 1 (3:49) That's right. He doesn't refer to him by name, but there are a couple of places where he says... People say these silly things about the Spartans, very technical, detailed things. How many votes does each Spartan king have? And another issue like that. And he says, these people get that wrong. And those are both points that Herodotus has explicitly made in his histories. So in that sense, it's clear that Thucydides is reading Herodotus carefully. It's the only other major, well, it's really the only other prose work in Greek at this scale before Thucydides' writing. So, you know, it's clear that he would have seen him as a predecessor, but also as someone of whose method, in some ways, not just these detailed points, but he's also critical in some ways that Herodotus tells a lot of stories, even ones that he himself doesn't believe. in or sometimes without assessing his credence in those stories. And Thucydides wants to achieve what he calls acrobaia, accuracy. And so he only wants to put forward accounts that he believes are veridical. There's very few places in Thucydides where he'll say, well, here's one view, here's another view, and I haven't been able to decide between them. For the most part, he's... sifted through and is giving you the one account. And Herodotus is a much more polymathic figure. And some later historians were critical of him for that very reason that he sort of puts in everything in the kitchen sink and depending on what you think he's doing. But of course, in a way, Thucydides is one of the fathers of history. Herodotus is also a father of geography and ethnography. In many ways, they were doing slightly different things. And so to compare them by a single standard is also perhaps misleading. Speaker 2 (5:34) Maybe I could actually follow up on that and ask you what exactly it is they are doing. So we've been calling them historians, and there is a Greek word, historia, right? Is it safe to just translate the Greek word historia into the English word history? Speaker 1 (5:50) That's obviously what's happened, but it's not at all a good guide to what they would have thought of themselves as doing. So the Greek word means inquiry. Speaker 1 (6:01) It could be an inquiry of any kind, an inquiry into natural science, an inquiry into ethics, an inquiry into the veracity of stories about the gods, any kind of inquiry. And so it refers more to the method rather than to the subject matter, if you will. And I think another significant difference is that the bulk of what they're doing, especially Thucydides, because what Herodotus is writing about was just before and his birth or just at the time of his birth, but Thucydides is writing about something he really lived through. And I think for both of them, the things that they could be most confident in telling were contemporary events or events for which there were eyewitnesses. still surviving. What history has come to mean for us is sort of the way distant past. But when Thucydides talks about the way distant past, he says that has to be done with other methods and other standards. And it's not really part of my main inquiry, which is into this contemporary history. So in modern terms, contemporary history is a sort of bastard child within history departments. But for these figures, actually, that's where the action was, because that was where the bulk of the evidence that they were able to amass would have come from what they witnessed themselves, autopsy from another Greek word, and what they heard from others. Speaker 2 (7:24) Yeah, there's almost a paradox here, right? So you talked about them being called the fathers of history. I think especially Herodotus is often called the father of history. But if you're trying to get history as a project off the ground, It's a kind of strange thing to be trying to do. I mean, when modern day historians do history, and this applies to history of philosophy as well, right? What do we do? Well, we read other historians of philosophy. And similarly, straight ahead historians, they read other historians. But obviously, that wasn't available to Herodotus, at least. And for Thucydides, he can only read Herodotus. So what kind of sources can they draw on apart from these testimonies from eyewitnesses and maybe things they experienced themselves? Speaker 1 (8:03) The first thing we should say is it's not quite true that Herodotus was completely out of nothing. So there were other sort of chroniclers, if you will. There were a few people, fragments of which have survived, who wrote accounts of the Greeks or accounts of the Persians or accounts of the Lydians. And there were also in Athens, so this is... maybe contemporary with Herodotus, the development of chronicles of Athens and what came to be known as local histories. This just gets started at that moment. So there are some kinds of inquiries of this same sort of kind. One difference you can see immediately is that Herodotus' histories, the Persian Wars, but also he puts in so much more. He's chronicling everything. I'm thinking about almost the whole known world for him, so from Persia to Egypt and kind of everything in between, whereas those predecessors were talking about just the Lydians or just the Persians. So that's a very significant difference. And what they were doing, again, is something that Herodotus also spends time doing, but they're less chronicling, as far as we can tell, probably less events and more customs and habits, whereas Herodotus sets himself to recount the events of the Persian Wars, as well as putting in much more, and Thucydides, the events of the Peloponnesian War and that, but not just in a sort of bare, analystic style, which again, there were starting to be some compilations of just chronology in this city, this person, this office, but not sort of explaining a complex interplay of international relations. And that's something that, as far as we can tell, is distinctive to what the two of them did. So if we say what sort of sources were available to them, to go back to that part of your question, eyewitnesses are very important. They both clearly spoke with people. They talk about what they heard, what the Egyptian priests told Herodotus, what they told... other people. So he does have a predecessor who's maybe a bit closer to him, Hecataeus of Miletus, and he does refer to him a couple of times in his work and sort of compares. Well, they told, these Egyptian priests told Hecataeus one thing and they told me something else. Monuments, inscriptions, Greek cities and other places were starting to write up inscriptions, sometimes laws on stone or in other ways, and very occasionally documents. So Both of them will occasionally, it seems they've seen a letter or they've been able to obtain a documentary record, but that's much less significant for them, partly because writing is still a relatively new technology. The earliest laws written in the Greek world were from the 7th century, so just about. 150 years before Herodotus is writing. So they've used everything they can, but of course, the sources that were available to them were different. And that's why they put such a premium on their own