way some historical data. The writers of this new type of work were known as logographers:
Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, neither among the Greeks nor among the other nations they knew, first in the breach of ethnocentrism and then in the destructive backlash of their own traditions.
The ahistorical if not anti-historical bent of the Greeks was also noted by Oswald Spengler, and for Spengler the history produced by human beings is always related to their level of development and their relationship to nature:
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.
Spengler agrees that for the Greeks, history was not a process and was as static as the myths that history would come to replace:
For Herodotus and Sophocles. . . the past is subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in its structure--in the last analysis, of such stuff as mouths are made of--whereas for our world-sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries of millennia.
The work of Herodotus is described by M.I. Finley as a great leap forward. Herodotus, says Finley, extended the scope of the logography to take in a much wider area, including the Egyptians and the Scythians along with the Lydians and the Persians. He also had the idea of trying to control the mass of accumulated data through personal investigations on the spot by making a series of quick visits to all the places, by a rational analysis of the information assembled,...