What is the "proper" approach to writing about history? The perspectives of two ancient historians, Thucydides the Athenian and Cornelius Tacitus the Roman, offer us the opportunity to learn from how they presented historical events and the manner in which they did so. While objectivity, lack of personal bias, extensive reliance on source documents, personal interviews, and even first-hand experience of events and knowledge of event-shapers are all valuable qualities in an historian's work, they are not absolute necessities. Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, draws upon oral historical traditions and cultural myths to describe such remote events as the Trojan War, and on the speeches he attributes to some of his contemporaries in the war between Athens and Sparta. Tacitus, in the Agricola and the Germania, seems to be more concerned with providing "evidence" of a particular political and ideological orientation than in capturing what we might call "reality" or true "objectivity." Despite these superficial drawbacks, both writers are historians; they offer readers unique insight not only into actual events and the behaviors of key individuals and groups, but also into the underlying cultural norms, ethics, belief systems and values that existed in their lifetimes.
Thucydides (35), speaking of the Hellenic past, admits at the outset of his text that:
. . . I have found it impossible, because of its remoteness in time, to acquire a really precise knowledge of the distant
past or even of the history preceding our own period. . . .
This "impossibility" does not prevent Thucydides from speculating, based on his understanding of the myths and legends of his culture, upon the nature of that past. He also recognizes that "most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truthö (Thucydides, 47). He seems to suggest, quite subtly, that if people will not take the time to find out the truth, one o...