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Herodotus And Thucydides Similarities

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In this essay I will be addressing comparatives of two ancient Greek historians, Thucydides and Herodotus. These first historians gave us a prospective of ancient Greece during the 5th century, In order to compare and contrast historical methods and objectives of Herodotus and Thucydides I will examine the characteristics of their method, and also in their historical objectives in writing history, how do Herodotus and Thucydides differ in their aims and methods of writing history? The context in which history is written is very important because a circumstance of time and place can reflected in the writer's message and how it’s interpreted by the reader. I will start with Thucydides who was Athenian, not only being an historian, …show more content…

While the difference between history and myth is not simply fact and fiction, it is in some ways sensible to make other distinctions between oral and written sources. History should be interpreted with an objective mind, without a clear bias approach you can easily be manipulate to a false understanding. Herodotus and Thucydides, gave us understanding of ancient Greece and its ideology, but we are also fortunate enough today to have two sources of historical works that we can study for generations to come. Having two sources to draw up conclusions is a gift, I believe that both historians offer us a different perspective. Herodotus' method consisted of relying on other peoples' testimony, to speculate about the sincerity and motives of the sources upon which he compiled the accounts of his own perspective of ancient Greece would be for debate. Herodotus has more of a positive outlook to his writings, while Thucydides wrote on the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, “beginning the account at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.”-Thucydides 1.1 Thucydides tends to have more of the negative outlook, believing that it has become man’s nature to start wars for own personal gain, and also, war could be avoided if man chose reason over brute

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