The Disipline of History & Herodotus

In the Greek world into which Herodotus was born, prose writing was becoming more and more common for technical works on such subjects as philosophy, law and politics, and science and technology. The Greeks were interested in their past, but what passed for history was really a stock of myths and legends which were thought to be true. The interest was not historical in the sense we use the term, as an inquiry into the facts of such events as the Trojan War or any other occurrence or period. It was something quite different from that, a form of Hellenic or regional consciousness and pride and a search for community solidarity. The past could reinforce these social elements, and the old tales could in fact be revised when needed by new historical developments or political and social changes. This task was in fact made simpler by the great range and quantity of the available myths and by the imprecision that was inevitabl

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onal causes are to be found whenever possible, though cases will occur where the supernatural is called in to explain the miraculous or "heaven-sent." Only in the next literary generation will the historian deliberately exclude, almost totally, divine control of the affairs of men. . . Clearly, Herodotus took the first step in this direction and paved the way for what followed. Waters states that the history of Herodotus stands somewhere between the narrative fiction or legend of the Homeric poems and the totally non-poetic productions of certain of his successors. Herodotus undertook one device that is frowned upon by subsequent historians and that raises questions when used by journalists and others today, and that is the tendency to put words into the mouths of historical characters. This non-authentic speech owes much to the Homeric poems. Homer and his audience believed these stories, so here again the issue is whether the speech can be authentic or not or purports to be authentic when it clearly is not. Waters considers the nature of the sources of information used by Herodotus, noting that oral information dominated quantitatively the source material available to Herodotus. Waters find that oral sources dominated
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Approximate Word count = 3963
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)