by Chris Campbell
All of the historians discussed so far in this series have belonged to academic institutions, but who nevertheless sought to take their work into the public domain and use their research to shape broader understandings of history. This has meant, though, that all of the historians have been modern; history departments in universities, as we would recognise them today, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, emerging during the nineteenth century and expanding substantially in the twentieth.
But, of course, the serious practice of historical investigation goes back much further. Any British history undergraduate’s core introductory course will likely have begun with at least a passing mention of Herodotus (c.484-425 BCE) and Thucydides (c.460-400 BCE), whose most famous accounts, respectively, of the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian wars established them as the ‘fathers of history’ in the European historiographical canon.
Both differed in their own way. Herodotus wove cultural and geographical exposition into his accounts, often deviating to suggest that folk tales and mythology could form the basis of concrete historical knowledge. He occasionally admitted to being uncertain of the truth behind some of his claims, but his impact was, nevertheless, to set a precedent for the serious investigation and dissemination of history.
Thucydides, conversely, sought a more evidence-based approach, refusing to include details that he had not verified himself and establishing a more rigorous methodology that emphasised accuracy over linguistic colour. He is sometimes referred to as ‘the father of scientific history’, but that is not to say, of course, that Thucydides’ history was an entirely neutral record of events; he engaged deeply and on his own terms with issues that concerned him – questions of politics, authority, and the nature of power.
Yet, living in the Athenian world, both belonged to an intellectual milieu that saw oration and public performance as intrinsic parts of scholarship. Much of Herodotus and Thucydides’ work was designed to be read aloud in public and, as such, intended to be both convincing and engaging to an unspecialised audience. Though they themselves wouldn’t have conceived of a distinction between academic and public history, their work and their approach to their subject bore many of the hallmarks of present-day public historians.
Central to this was an idea that their histories should not only be absorbing for their audience, but should be useful for wider society too. Herodotus saw his accounts as tales of morality, with ethical lessons to be learned from the wars and perceived societal injustices that he covered. Thucydides roundly rejected the idea that history should be a public moralising force, but subscribed all the same to the power of history to teach; in particular, the idea that future civic and military leaders could learn from the successes of the past and improve on the mistakes.
In this, then, the two ‘fathers of history’ were deeply aware that their research was not destined for the library shelf but to inform and engage wider public discourses about the past, in a manner not dissimilar to the museum professionals, podcasters and TV producers today, who take history as the starting point for collective conversations about our present and future. The forces that combine the respective, distinctive, and perhaps increasingly disparate, approaches of academic and public historians trace their ways back to ancient Athens, and can be found united in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides.
Further Reading
Herodotus, The Histories (London: Penguin Classics, 2003)
Herodotus, The Persian Wars, Vols. I-III (London: Loeb, 1989)
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin Classics, 1974)
Benjamin Earley, The Thucydidean Turn: (Re)Interpreting Thucydides’ Political Thought Before, During and After the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
Virginia J. Hunter, Past and Present in Herodotus and Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
Jennifer T. Roberts, Herodotus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2011)
Jennifer T. Roberts, Thucydides: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2024)
Cover Image: Double Herm of Herodotus and Thucydides in Marble, Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology
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