The Invention of History: Herodotus and Thucydides

today we're talking about the invention of history um and in some cases this is going to provocative topic maybe we think well is history something that is ever needs to be invented or isn't it something that has always been and so i want to talk a little bit about what we mean by history as we're reviewing this idea so in terms of you know history versus the past when we get in our various time machines whether we built them into a delorean or a tardis or however a lot of times we use the word history go back in time back go back in history to be synonymous with the past but as we understand the um the terminology a little bit more technically that in fact the historic period uh is only the most recent portion of the vast past right so the past goes back to the big bang and whatever precedes it but the historic period is very brief indeed so we know that maybe when we think of the word prehistoric and so when we think of cave people as in this particular prehistoric playset the idea of it is that prehistoric times is that portion of the past which is by far and away the vast portion of the past that exists before the invention of writing when the historical record begins and that therefore the discipline of history can start to take off so you know coming back to prehistoric times we have artifacts including in some cases pictorial artifacts so this is a mammoth and ibex that are painted on a cave wall that's in france now what's now france you know some maybe 9 000 anyway some large number of thousand years ago and so when we are studying that component of the past uh the human past prior to the development of writing we can use things like archaeology paleo anthropology paleontology genetics there's all sorts of different ways that we have now to study um that period of past even things like linguistics because language is evolving and splitting off from each other prior to the invention of writing but the discipline of history proper focuses on written documents and thus begins with the invention of writing although just because you have writing doesn't mean you would necessarily um have history yet that it comes afterwards we of course have it now but um people didn't immediately come up with the idea so if we look um at kind of the the etymology the immunological history of the word history and the word story starts like so many of our kind of scientific related words with the ancient greeks and ancient greeks so the word astoria which means originally in its original ancient greek form it means inquiry or possibly it means also the knowledge that you get from doing that such inquiry so when you've had an investigation and you gain knowledge this inquiry is the and or astoria is the uh the results do you have a comment sheet or you know you're just okay um okay where we get down to the last one okay so um you know that like so many uh things the roman culture is is bilingual and so so many greek words are brought into latin and so historia comes into latin uh and that then becomes through the middle ages old french estoir uh and then into english as the normans go across as two different uh words both of them you know you can even see like estoir you know how's the french are lazily eliminating the beginning letters you know the h and everything like that uh and then as and also the more technical so we have the word story in english coming from the same root but then also the word history um as english speakers also go back and they know latin and they're trying to say talk about something a little more technical so my my comment is is that for a lot of history it is his story right and so that is a very popular folk etymology that now exists and it is appropriate in a bunch of different ways in the sense that for almost all of human history history is largely uh about men and specifically powerful men and so the vast m you know component of all of uh human population does not get described in history so as we go back in time especially fewer and fewer is just the elite the most rich people and specifically men are mostly in power and so it's harder for us to identify women so sometimes we when we do this when we try to focus lectures on for example the first medieval playwright who as also a woman female author the um last week we talked about uh maybe it wasn't last week but anyway recently we talked in when we were talking about the the cynic philosophers we had a female philosopher and so we don't always have you know ancient women who were philosophers likewise next week we're talking about the last pharaoh who is a woman right so we do want to be able to where we can show you know the roles of men and women throughout history but throughout a lot of history has been his story and so then modernly we've people have coined the term her story for recovering women's stories or women's history throughout um throughout history but we should point out anyway just because of going back to the greek the word his doesn't exist here in the actual greek etymology right so just because it's a fun folk etymology and we can make a play on words in english it doesn't we shouldn't be confused and think that that it really means that and so that's that's an important point so story and history and so until then modern times in english especially there isn't that much of a difference um but now in the modern times there is a difference between story which can be a narrative sequence of something that actually happened my story of you know how i came to finish this lecture today and come here in front of all of you whether or not that's a real history or whether i'm just remembering it that way or as something that's fictional so i could write a story set in some fictional location narnia or something like that and that can also be a story whereas history specifically is now thought of you know in terms of the academic discipline so the study of the past as described in written documents or the written documents themselves so just to go back to be after we have writing or maybe not as we're just getting writing before we have history so even before writing people use narrative people are using stories to explain the world around them to do things like form community identity to transmit inherited knowledge so you may well have stories that explain why we as a people do all the things that we do we if you were the romans the story that they like to tell is that they are they have filial piety that they believe in uh for example law and rules and that they are very valiant uh and and usually in some male perspective they're very patriarchal so they'll tell all those kind of stories and they'll have stories that not only um that not only uh you know say those things explicitly but rather show it by showing what their perceived answers to or remembered ancestor what aeneas is like for example uh nia ania says in in the aeneid which is a written story but anyway in it what he says is superios and yes i am pious aeneas my whole my whole um identity is filial piety and that's showing kind of this roman's understanding of themselves um you could also use it though for uh any kind of a story that's for example explaining the calendar when it's time to plant all those kind of things and those things can be worked into myth myth and story right so when the how that is being transmitted before writing is orally and then that's aided generally by reciting those stories or telling them through poetic means and so we know very well you know if you uh i i have the for example the the preamble to the u.s constitution memorized because when i was a little kid there was a cartoon called schoolhouse rock which set the whole thing to music you know and so uh so it goes we the people in order to form a more perfect union establish us to ensure domestic tranquility you know anyway it goes on from there but anyway so i know that i have that whole thing memorize you probably you may not ever say the alphabet without doing the alphabet song you know and so because you know we have a lot of those things it's easier for us to remember uh poetry or songs right so in the context of ancient greeks which we're talking about there was a tradition of bards who recited poems these poems according to their own internal uh story or legend or myth are attributed to important early epic poets homer and hesiod although we don't know because they're prehistoric we don't know for sure if those are historic figures or if they're simply the um person to which the authority to which they're all attributed and the question goes uh is debated but anyway these poems are originally composed in that pre-literate um what we call anyway the greek dark ages this time period after the fall of the minoans and the mycenaeans when the greeks stopped having a written language and before they then adopted what's now we think of as the greek alphabet after it had been developed by the by the phoenicians right and so anyway that time period 1100 to 800 before the common era so the epics um like the iliad and the odyssey they're about characters and events the people if they were hearing the story they generally assumed that those guys had existed in the past so they're not sitting around in ancient greece listening to the bard and saying oh i don't think achilles was a real person that achilles this must be a fictional character or anything like that they generally have the assumption that all of these stories about their past as they're being told happened but they were not the poet that's telling them the goal in telling those stories is not to reconstruct what was the most likely events of the past so the bard isn't that sitting around trying to let's say what we would now think of as do history rather the bard is telling a story that has been inherited and that they are perfectly free frankly to to ad-lib to or add to or change depending as the telling allows as their own muse their which is to say as they're inspired by when you say the muse we're inspired by a muse but the muses are literally gods right and so they're uh the idea is that the poets are are divinely inspired to tell these and so therefore um and therefore they're representing some kind of truth or reality without using some kind what we now think of as historical methodology to get at the past right so the stories are set in the past but they're not set um chronologically in a particular time we're not gonna they're not dating it in terms of a calendrical scheme like we have right now with bc the people who are living in bc times aren't counting down backwards until such a time as they get to the year one you know that's not what they're doing rather they largely don't have calendars like that where they're not counting in long numbers but instead of saying them counting in the terms of a regular year so this happened in the third year of the reign of king xerxes over the persians or in the case of a a civic city-state that is having at magistrates that doesn't have a king this happened in the year when you know odysseus and and dionysius were eparcs over the city and so they just remember that as the dcsf you know dionysius year as opposed and that's just how it's remembered as opposed to saying it's 53 bc they of course weren't using bc at all but they also aren't likely using most of the other systems either it's mostly regnal years so anyway they're set in a general heroic age and it may well be actually that these stories may have have a kernel of historical truth and so we know in the case of the iliad although in modern early modern times people doubted that anything in homer was anything but myth but later upon further investigation it turns out that there is a quite a kernel of truth or kernel of historical truth uh in terms of the trojan war story there was a troy there was uh probably a war prior to the greek dark ages that took place but it is didn't take place as remembered by homer so much of homer is simply all mythic elaboration almost all of it and and indeed uh homer and the ancient greeks had entirely forgot that this war was probably fought not between greeks and trojans but between greeks and trojans as allies against the hittites who had been who had collapsed as a civilization didn't exist anymore and they totally forgot about so shaheen um i have a hypothesis that the story of the iliad may date back to a much older indo-european story because there is a parallel epic in the indian literature which is called the ramayana which has a similar story of a queen being abducted and then her husband going with his brother in an army and fighting for about 10 years to get her back okay you know so there's and there's a lot of indo-european you know customs so for example like in the odyssey when um odcs goes back and he has to undergo the challenge of shooting an arrow through those 20 lined axes in the ramayana ram who is the king the main character in this in order to win the hand of his wife has to do the same thing so i i sometimes wonder if maybe these stories are older but then you have historical wars and then these stories are then put on conglomerated on to that yeah so then there's other possibilities like you're saying that there are archetypical stories or stories that are so ancient that are told but then they get retold and get by the time they're written down so by the time we can't we can't say what all the versions of homer were going back 300 years prior to when they started writing it down because again it's a living tradition that the bards are constantly creating anew and it could go back even way before as shaheen is even saying but we only can tell once it does get written down and freezed and get put into what we're going to call the historical record which is to say the written record and that's when we can start looking at it um bunches of other myths though we shouldn't also just because we find you know where early modern people were proved wrong um and there oh there really was a troy that doesn't mean that every single um myth or early story let's say for example like atlantis needs to have a kernel of historical truth people go nuts trying to decide about what atlantis was and there's no reason to believe that there's any historical particle behind atlantis since its first the story is first attested in plato doesn't go back before that and aristotle who's played a student said plato made it up and so so therefore we shouldn't necessarily have to go looking for if a volcano blew up in ancient greece and that kind of thing to find atlantis okay so um although nowadays so now we uh have computers and so we can't help but think of um our brains by analogy of the the computers that we have that we understand kind of how they work and so we think of parts of our memory as being rom and ram and we think of ourselves as having hard drives and glitches and any other kinds of problems that we think of i mean this is a brand new analogy that nobody before you know 40 years ago 50 years ago whenever you know was ever um thinking of because they didn't have access to computers or they didn't understand them anyway at least the way that computers exist now i mean 100 years ago or or um when people were thinking about their minds and how people working they were thinking of mechanical things because there was the age of mechanism so clocks and watches and and gizmos and so you know the in the the wizard of oz which is now from an ancient era the mechanical man is a tin man that is mechanical as opposed to a computer which is what he would be now right and so although we make these analogies memory doesn't work in the same kind of fixed way that computers do we're not writing and down on a hard drive and then that's fixing it and it's a perfectly restored data bit that we can then pull back rather memory when we first write it down are we still just recording it we're not writing it starts out biased because we are already seeing it from our perspective when we're putting it in our heads and it's also initially recorded with all kinds of different associations so you may be feeling some kind of emotion at the time that you're remembering this thing and a lot of times you know if you're going to really remember something over the long haul it's like shame you know or pain or any of those kind of associations that you're having with something you might have associated with great joy but you're more likely to remember something that you really were upset about or shamed with and though then when you go back and access it the first time you do you're also um reviewing that within your new context so your whole life has changed you're in a different place than you were 20 years ago you go back and look at that you see it within your worldview and your framework and every single thing that's happened to you since then and there's all kinds of things going on around right now that is causing you either shame again or or happiness or whatever it is and that gets layered onto the memory as you re access it and re-write it and it gets rewritten in this new way you know in your brain and that's the memory you'll remember and in a point of fact actually we have studies that even with things that you think are so very important so everybody thinks oh well what you knew where you were when jfk was was shot or more recently when when you heard about 9 11 when you heard that the uh world trade center been hit with a plane and yet in studies is somewhere in the range of 35 or something like that of people are absolutely wrong so their memory is just simply false it can be demonstrably false they are not where they think they were whatever but they've they've remembered it at a given time and now that they remembered it they remember it and they remember it that way and so it's been written that way and so memory isn't um anyway like a computer in some sense memory is closer though to that living oral tradition of those stories or myths that were in the timeless heroic it doesn't have to be so because oral tradition doesn't have to be fluid it can get quite fixed and so if it's especially about for example sacred stuff then what can happen like with for example the investor the vedas people memorized it exactly as is and so in fact the language gets fixed and the point is that actually around it becomes a sacred language that only the priests know or can repeat because it doesn't you know doesn't change under those circumstances but in a living epic where the bard is reciting anew where they're rearranging all the stories where a new story might lend itself because of the let's say the local patron who is here so you want um a particular character in the iliad uh is somehow uh associated with for example the local lord of the town that you're paying you know being paid to sing for it and so as you've compared him to the hero then that hero might get a whole bunch of more story and that story might be more related to what this particular um local lord is doing right and so that kind of thing can immediately happen as it's um a living thing that is getting rewritten in the telling right i'm just a little unclear so are you saying that oh yeah i'm sorry yeah are you saying that um what sort of originally begins begins as a broadly shared story or narrative becomes shaped to meet the needs of local patrons yes and and to somehow to elevate those patrons is that the idea yeah that would be one way that it would change it doesn't necessarily have to be the patrons i just suggesting that's an easy explanation for why so you always artists need patrons and so the bard class here needs to be able to um you know essentially be attached let's say to a court or or the public or wherever whoever is doing it so if it's if it's a city then maybe you're speaking about the heroes of that city and but if it's a court you're maybe speaking about a particular lord and so in doing that you have your entire um tradition of you've memorized as much of uh homer as the next bard but then there is a there are techniques where um like ornamental epithets there are ways that you start into a part of a story and it can be filled out and expanded or contracted as the poem is getting composed you don't have the whole thing memorized word for word unlike in the case of let's say the vedas or quran or something like that you have um uh you have a system where that you can improvise it's like jazz right yeah i i was just thinking uh wondering about whether or not in in in in broad and broader terms in terms of sort of modern histories that we have as to whether or not we not we do the same thing for communities for whole communities we shape and sometimes reshape uh past events that we're all quite familiar with to meet the specific needs or growing or changing prejudice as we will of oh yeah of whole communities so you can do this with written history too so it involves rewriting it right so and so one of the things that written history does is written history fixes the old text but you can always write it again and so if you were wanting to um you know anybody who's a historian you know of the you know whatever the state of delaware is also gonna they're gonna write the history of delaware there's a history that they write at the general you know the united states and thirteen colonies and then they put the delaware story in and give its prominence and that kind of a thing and so you probably aren't doing it all from scratch but you're reading um you know a big general historian's uh work and then your work is secondary in that case uh and so that kind of thing we do when we're writing a biography we look at the historical context and so you don't have to do it all from scratch so even with written text you're like you say it's still still doing that but the difference with oral text is uh it that it isn't being preserved anywhere the original right so all of these different trails of the different bards they're all filling it out and changing it and so it's only the happenstance of whoever then is writing it down you're getting that one version of it and or maybe they look they go through a couple different versions and they pick the one that they like the most but but there are variants that we have as people are first writing down homer but then we end up with a particular text that is the one they kind of fix on when it's written okay so the iliad then homer had continued to evolve as it's retold by bards until the text is finally written down and fixed as such it preserves the tradition uh that was archaic in classical greece so so in other words once that gets written down this text is now or the story is now hundreds of years older than um than when it's actually written down and so some of the things um that occur in the story so mycenae you know being the leading greek city-state that's totally archaic that's something they're preserving back to the pre-dark ages before the fall of the bronze age collapse and that's been remembered and that's not true anymore but other things there's all kinds of mechanistic and things that would be quite anachronistic for the time period of the trojan war so for example i mentioned the the lack of not even knowing about the hittites or forgetting that the hittites probably were even the bad guys in the story originally you know so they've they've ceased to exist as a as an empire and they're not in the memory anymore not the story anymore okay um however okay so we have that anyway brains memory and oral tradition in some sense written records are going to be more like computers computers being writing things down and not using paper but anyway obviously doing somewhat a similar thing and so written text is when it's written fixed although it can be rewritten and it changes through textual transmission and of course interpretation changes so even if it gets written down one particular way you you will understand it differently as we invent new ideas and then have new contexts from which to read the older texts so one of the things that happens then is that every piece of writing actually reflects the context in which it it's written so if time is evolving and initially things are in this kind of yellow green and then they become kind of green and then they become blue and then they become purple then when somebody is in the green period and writing all their text is going to reflect that time period even if they're trying to write about this yellow time and likewise in the pink time they're going to even if they're trying to write about the past they're still writing from their own time and place in context and so almost certainly especially in ancient times they're going to introduce crazy amounts of anachronisms because they just don't have the capacity to write about the past that way they don't have the people make it if people right now it's very hard to forge stuff because it's you introduce anachronisms almost inevitably when you try to people do anyway it's easier if it's shorter keep it short so anyway writing is is this fixed artifact right it leaves a fixed artifact from its time so within then the living tradition of oral epic updated tradition of epic you're less likely to observe the evolution of human society right so human society is always doing this thing where it's changing changing changing if you are just living though with that live oral epic that's tracking along with you and it's changing along with you you don't have the comparison you're not seeing what the or epic used to be like so you're less likely to observe change through time right so this idea that there is history or historical change is less likely to show up in your be on your radar right you may have the sense that okay back in the heroic times the gods were closer to us that people were more heroic that everything was more great that was the way ancient people generally speaking all thought of the past but it's not um it's not a very specific time it's just the past was golden age now we're living in you know this decayed time comparatively it by contrast once there start to be a bunch of old scrolls lying around so once you start writing things down and you go back and you consult them and you start to see these things are really weird you know there's things that they're saying here that is unlike our present day reality and this is true anytime you want to read if you go back to an ancient text they'll say anytime you read it in the original you start to or translation into english you start to say what is what are they even talking about all of these strange things that um you know again it would be hard for us to forge because we're not aware of all of their context and so we'd have to come up with these things for us many of these things in the ancient texts often don't have any other place where they exist so they'll talk about something or some place or something and it exists only in that one text and so it's called apex lagaminon which is to say a thing that only exists in that one place and so we can't and that's one of the things that happens with old texts lots of people knew about that thing but now they're all dead and there aren't any other texts that talk about it right and so anyway we have all of these um artifacts and when you have that you start to observe the reality of change over time and then perceive the need to study it and so i think you can see here where we're starting to get to the point where they're why people wouldn't have invented history prior to a particular time and then why after for example writing occurs you start to think of it as a thing almost naturally and so um the time that uh in the west we identify uh this invention occurring is in the fifth century before the common era by the ancient greeks in this kind of very core classic time when we also see the beginnings of philosophy and so many things in western thought we saw it before when we did the um uh origin of comedy and drama even so lots of things are happening and they're specifically with two um near contemporaries kind of an older and junior uh contemporary herodotus and thucydides so herodotus right this is sometimes called the father of history he himself chose to write about what were relatively recent political events he's specifically writing about the greco-persian war but he's also focused on a broader narrative where he's comparing the cultures that he's aware of so he's interested in in how persian customs are very different from greek customs and other people the egyptians and the scythians and so forth so on all the different peoples that he's aware of in this kind of cosmopolitan society one of the things that he does that's pretty innovative some of his contemporaries maybe are doing this although all their work is largely lost is that he is citing his sources and he's attempting to use them critically so he isn't just writing stuff down or just actually the normal ancient thing which is simply taking out of the text and writing it as if you had just written it and so it's very common as you're compiling a new text in the ancient world because every single text you have um you have to make a copy anyway you know you don't have any kind of printing press or or uh xerox machine or any of these kind of things and so if you're going to just make a copy of any book it has to be copied out by hand and likewise a lot of times what what what authors are doing when they're when they're doing that is they're taking let's say i'm writing on this particular topic so i'll take all the texts that everybody had written in the other scrolls and i'll just put it in mine and you combine them all together and you make these kind of texts that grow as a result of that and so rather than simply doing that silently which is quite the norm um herodotus says where he got this information from a lot of times he himself is a witness or he's heard it directly from somebody he's been interviewing in on his travels or he'll say where the legend comes from that he's he's repeating and he uses them a little critically by saying whether or not he he'll tell you it anyway but sometimes he'll say but i don't believe that uh that kind of a thing and so what he's looking for um is also motivation says he's trying to uh explain though the causes or events and for him he sees on the one hand that things he does believe are faded by the gods but almost always in those cases herodotus believes there's still some human agency that's going on and so even though there is what um philosophers or whatever we'll call like the the first cause which is to say the divine cause he nevertheless doesn't just leave it at that and say well that was just what zeus's will was he rather says this would this was motivated by this or that scheming that occurs on the on the human level so by contrast uh thucydides this younger contemporary of herodotus is sometimes called the father of scientific history which is being mean to herodotus kind of on purpose so anyway people though there's a big difference that already exists just within half a generation here between herodotus is work and thucydides work so thucydides writes about even more contemporary events so he's writing about the peloponnesian war which is a war that um he actually was a participant in so it's immediately contemporary events as opposed to even something that's a generation in the past he is very skeptical of fables and myths and he is also skeptical of recourse to divine intervention at all to explain events and he prefers instead to present his history as objective as being impartial as you know being essentially this just the facts ma'am kind of uh presentation is his overall goal and one of his things is he's looking for motivation he develops a ideas of a kind of political realism and still is influential today modern readers there are people who are in the pentagon who are studying thucydides because of this idea of him as a military strategist and also a political realist he also limits his um whereas uh herodotus is interested in in let's say ethnology and anthropology and comparative customs and that kind of thing thucydides is really focused on what we might think of as as like war politics political history so political science and does a a fairly good job of narrowing the the focus or the discipline of history for the next um couple thousand years to that uh to that kind of political focus a war in politics and that kind of thing um that's changed in the la in the most very recent generations as as social history and other kinds of histories have emerged but for a whole long time um vicidity and history was kind of the norm and especially even in modern revival so let's just look about their stated purposes of these two different writers so um we talked about history as the definition the word as as herodotus first uses it it means on the one hand inquiry or rather the knowledge that you gain from doing an inquiry or investigation he says that right in the beginning of his prologue as he writing he says here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by herodotus of helicarnassus the purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both greeks and non-greeks among the matters covered is in particular the cause of the hostilities between the greeks and the non-greeks so um you can see that he's right there as he's laying out his overall objective it's about it's a response to inquiry he's done the study his goal is obviously preservation of of the story here the preservation of the events and achievements but um specifically he's looking at causation right so there's a bunch of stuff that's already um what we think of as history right at the beginning so how does he do it so here this is going to be both a positive and a negative as people both applaud herodotus here and also critical of him so one of the things that he does is he takes those kind of epic myths that we were talking about those long held traditions and he tries to historicize them so he wants to look at is there in in the midst of this divine story is there a historical kernel that we can look at so when he wants to look back at the beginnings of the conflict he says right at the beginning between greeks and non-greeks um greeks had a had a particular view of the world where it's really either you're greek or you're not greek right so the barbarians and the greeks is what the greeks would say so between specifically um this heartland of the big power of the non-greeks that are involved here persia so the conflict as he seizes between asia and europe uh greece herodotus recounts a bunch of these stories of kidnappings where women have were kidnapped by various people so io europa media and helen helen of troy right so we talked about um that as the kind of the foundation of the trojan wars is mythically the idea that um paris who is one of a trojan prince uh is uh a guest of a greek king he takes the greek king's wife helen and elopes back with her to troy and that's the cause of the war and so similarly these other kidnappings um are also mythological stories although when you go further back to io and europa we're actually talking about um zeus right who's the who's the character in the myth but not so for herodotus he's essentially historizing these by saying that yes ayah was a real person but she's kidnapped by other real people not by god right so in doing this then on the one hand he's historicizing these legends or myths but he also though gives both uh persian and greek versions of the stories so he's done his inquiries he's asked what the persians say about this he has asked what the greeks say and so he says for example where they disagree says the persians report that io came to egypt not agreeing therefore therein with the greeks and this they say was the first beginning of the wrong so he's trying to get to the very first tit for tat in terms of this age-old blood food between asia and europe and it goes all the way back to uh to iowa although there's different versions of the story so he wants to uh recount both of that right um so not everybody uh anciently or modernly has thought very much of this so his contemporary we talked about the beginnings of of comedy and so uh the great comic playwright who's a contemporary aristophanes um lampoons herodotus transformation of divine myth into natural stories so he has a play called the icarnians and he uh in the play he blames the peloponnesian war on quote the buck the abduction of some prostitutes so we've taken this thing of of uh you know this story that has been in part of their religion of zeus you know uh going off with europa uh and this kind of a thing and now it's simply just you know women getting prostitutes or whatever getting getting abducted and so uh that's criticism from the one side you know of of humanizing or historicizing a divine story but on the other side more frequently now uh held critics blame herodotus for two readily believing fables right so there probably was no woman that got turned into a cow and this kind of a thing we don't have to try to look for a kernel of historical truth in that so we'll just say though that in the course of that that at least this critical use of sources is a pretty important innovation so asking what different people have to say on on different different versions of the story and then deciding between them is one of the aspects of the discipline of history so let's go to thucydides and look at how he looks at this so thucydides has at his heart first-hand observation and goal he thinks that if you go back anytime through transmission through oral transmission that you're going to get to fable very fast and so he doesn't think you should do that he writes to begin his story thucydides in athenian wrote the history of the war between the peloponnesians and the athenians beginning at the moment that it broke out and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any other that had preceded it so he he thinks that this is worthy of writing about it and he's writing about it because he uh was there when it was happening i lived through the whole of it being of an age to comprehend events and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them so he is using his placement as an eyewitness to give you truth in just the facts right to hear um this history rehearsed when he's talking about his history now um for their be inserted in it no fables shall perhaps not uh be shall be perhaps not delightful so he isn't doing this um possibly he's talking here about his predecessor about herodotus right so herodotus has put in all of these fables and no one can doubt that they're very entertaining her out of this book holds up as great entertainment to this day the city says this is probably you're not going to get that out of my book because i'm not doing that but he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which according to the condition of humanity may be done again or at least they're like shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable and it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession than to be rehearsed for a prize and so he again he's probably criticizing herodotus who is said after he'd written his work went to the olympics and read it out as part of a contest and was given prizes and and ovations as the people were very um very excited to hear this this story this history recounted so instead this entities wants here to um it's a great war he wants to uh maybe the greatest word he thinks and he wants here to preserve lessons from it right so that it'll be profitable if something similar happens again this is an everlasting possession not just something that you're gonna binge watch so essentially then we'll look here at the context of these two as they've emerged i've already suggested that one of the things that the reason why the idea or the necessity for history emerges is because once you start having writing you start to be aware that there's change happening and so then you look at this and have a study for it they also are emerging in very particular contexts of these two major wars and so i want to look at kind of what their works are and also anyway try to tell the history of both of those wars and the little time we have so we'll see if we can do all of those things so we have the greco-persian war the peloponnesian war these are two interestingly asymmetric wars so on the one hand the first of these is fought between the world's greatest empire just spans the the known world and then just an alliance of petty city-states which seems like there's no way that that's much of a contest um and then uh interestingly afterwards the successor wore the peloponnesian war this is fought between a land power sparta and all of sparta's allies and a naval power athens and her empire and in some sense there's no capacity for either one of them to get the better of each other because you can't fight each other if we want them always in the water and the other is always on land um so we have we made a little bit of a of a chronology so that we could kind of talk about it so from 550 to 350 um the beginning of this kind of time frame and so that when the persian empire is expanding out and it conquers the component of the greek homeland that is in asia asia minor so ionia and so that's what the beginning of this then proceed precipitating all of the the two wars the ionians revolt against their persian overlords the athenians help out and then the persians to punish the athenians they first they retake ionia recapture it no no no trouble there but then they invade greece and their their pursues and this long uh war between the greeks and the persian empire until finally in 449 the athenians and the persians make peace that's then you can see herodotus the immediate time period when herodotus then is going to compose his histories with that just in the nearby rearview mirror likewise then there's the war between the former allies here that are fighting the persians athens and sparta the peloponnesian and thucydides here is uh writing at the very end of that having been a contemporary through all of it and just to just put on here just to show the kind of same time frame this is also the same time frame when socrates is active and is executed right at the end of it right a little clear okay so the beginning of the persian greco-persian war 500 bc um the persian empire is amazingly huge right so it's from its homeland here uh in persia versus you know india and afghanistan all the way across to egypt arabia and into europe with major capitals the biggest capital being babylon and mesopotamia the greeks are not nothing they have from their original heartland here on both sides of the aegean and inside on the islands they have for the past 300 years been colonizing all around the mediterranean and as have for example the phoenicians who colonized carthage in this whole kind of an area nevertheless this is mercantile and is perhaps making them rich and populous and all this kind of thing but if you get invaded here it's not like the messily oats are have a huge fleet and they're going to come and save you it's pretty much everybody's on their own and this is why for example when the ionians here get conquered by the persian empire in general there was nothing that anybody could do about it these are all just city-states they're in competition with each other generally not allied except for um in times of sort of their when they're when they all either have to hang together or they'll surely hang separately kind of thing um so um on the city level athens had grown uh to being pretty substantial so it's by far the most substantial the city states and it had become culturally very very significant already as we saw with uh some of the intellectual achievements was achieving nevertheless the different imperial capitals would have been much bigger babylon would have been had been anyway for a thousand years had been the world's largest city and was again probably the world's largest city at this time anyway one of the four imperial capitals so um when we zoom in even because the greeks are all divided into these city-states there's only so many of them during the persian war that are all allies together so the biggest ones being most important ones being athens and sparta but then a huge proportion of them are neutral so they're just not not taking part in it either way and then others are either conquered by or already incorporated in the persian empire or actually allies right so it isn't looking like if you're setting up all the game paces here you're not thinking that that's gonna the greeks have much of a chance on that so herodotus hailed from helicarnassus so this over here right right here right so he's actually a person persian subject so um he's thus a greek who lives in the persian empire and so he has a different perspective than if he was an athenian that was fighting uh from the outside so plutarch um who's writing just centuries later who's a greek speaking roman accuses uh herodotus of bei which is to say he likes those barbarians you know he's a pro foreigner and so um that may well be a nice actually uh in terms of saying that he's taught you know has able to present both sides and herodotus is certainly trying to do that although he definitely has a greek bias but he is writing within a different universe being part of the persian empire so in his gold and of trying to talk about both sides he ends up exploring a wide scope of customs as he attempts to put the greek ideas into the context of all these other ideas that people all around the world have and he's interested in all of that in his inquiry and so for example so for example herodotus when he's talking about customs he talks about how there's a bunch of examples in his inquiry that prove that all customs are actually relative that the things that we hold dear in greece um are not held dear elsewhere and so he says if anyone no matter who we're given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best he would inevitably after careful consideration of the relative merits choose that of his own country so you um you just think of all your customs and that they're the best and so if you went around and and sailed and found anybody else's you would say what's wrong with those people no this is the way it should be everyone without exception believes his own native customs uh and relig and the religion he was brought up in to be the best and that being so it is unlikely that anybody but a madman would mock at such things and so he's speaking about a particular persian emperor cambises that had um had mocked the egyptians because of their beliefs and they have you know having divine animals and things like that that um he just thinks that cambises was mad to do that he says there is an abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the ancient customs of one's country one might recall so now he's takes that as a principle and now he's going to give an example one might recall for example an anecdote of darius so emperor darius who's the king of kings of persia when he was king of persian persia he summoned the greeks who happened to be present at his court and he asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers so i'll give you anything here guys how much gold is it going to take for you to eat your father's dead bodies they replied that they would not do it for any money in the world later in the presence of the greeks and through an interpreter so that they could understand what was said he asked some of the indians of the tribe called khalitiyai who do in fact eat their parents dead bodies what they would take to burn them the way the greeks do they uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing so one can see he says by this what custom can do uh and so we don't have um necessarily uh you know different confirmation of this particular tribe or customs i'm not presenting it here to say that there is for sure there was an ancient tribe in india that had this separate um uh and after you know after death custom there's a couple interesting parallels in some in some of the different tribes that have been in india but anyway the point of it here is not what the precise anecdote that herodotus is giving uh because often his anecdotes um you know sometimes they pan out sometimes they don't you know in terms of whether these things actually exist rather what it's showing is his view on customs right and how he's saying more or less that uh customs are relative uh and that everybody thinks theirs are the best but when you look around at a broader perspective you start to see that that's not that's not the case so like i say when if you lined up all the pieces on the board um victory against the persian empire then would have seemed very unlikely obviously much of the greek heartland were already subjects of persia and when the ionians revolted in 499 the athenians and their allies sent troops to help so ionia is here it had been a persian and so the athenians and the people in ubia sent troops to help and while that was happening while the revolt was happening greeks went to sardis which is the imperial local imperial capital and they sacked it so they made the persons really quite angry and then when the persians came back and put down all the revolts and reconquered all the greeks that are living in the area attached to persia by land they then turned their attention to athens and they said wait a second where did those guys what's going on over there and so they decided uh to move against them um the persian empire initially sends a substantial local force so it's gathered from the local anatolian state trapeze it's not the whole empire that's doing it herodotus says it includes 60 fully loaded triremes so the big warships every single one of herodotus is numbers uh ancient historians start right out of the gate exaggerating numbers and so that's a custom but herodotus starts and everybody does it from the next forever through the middle ages um the athenian there he says that there's nine thousand athenians and one thousand plutians who gathered together to meet the persian forces at a place called marathon which is famously 25 miles north from athens when the persians lost that engagement when their when their army starts to collapse and they go to flee herodotus says uh six thousand four hundred of them were killed before the rest could get away onto boats and stuff compared to only 192 athenians and plutians and so it's not like a a giant massacre either way but what it does is it proves that little city-states with the particular type of fighting that the greeks have developed in terms of the hoplites are able to defeat what had otherwise been seen as in totally invincible persian forces and so that actually puts a lot of confidence in the athenians going forward in the next stages of the battle it also makes the persians think we're going to do it right this time yes i just wanted to ask if there's like an estimate of what the numbers could have been as opposed to this number um so so it's they always range so modern historians have trouble deciding i think what uh what the numbers ever could have been because the ancient people tend to inflate them so much and we're going to see with the next round here oh anyway the next time herodotus adds it all up and decides in the real big invasion he says 2.5 million troops invade and it's historic modern historians you know as they go back and look at it this is simply physically impossible for ancient um societies even the persian empire to muster that many people it's impossible for um an army of that many people to be able to get food to it you know because they would just immediately ravenously destroy all of the local supplies anywhere could be you know you have to get to to get to the point where let's say a city and this antiquity could achieve close to a million people it was requiring food stocks from being brought from everywhere you know all around and it's only the rarest of these to do it so in that case historians say maybe even it could be 200 000 maybe like this mega army something bigger than it ever happened before but i mean i think that that is even um people are still not sure that they can believe it right um so so we don't know but it's uh the way that people try to do the calculations i think is based on what they estimate the total adult population could possibly be how many of those could possibly be conscripted into service what you would ever be able to do in terms of bringing food to them and that kind of a thing so um after that first defeat that obviously made um the athenians very happy and you know the the institution of the marathon has been you know a celebration of that victory ever since and so the fact that the guy ran to to tell the news to the athenians and then died um and now lots of people run marathons in in in essentially remembrance of that particular battle the battle of marathon so likewise though you could imagine it made the persians say well that wasn't that wasn't our full forces that was just some local state traps and so now we're going to really show these guys we mean business and so whether he um however many people they actually uh decided to marshal xerxes now the new emperor of the persians um decides he's gonna this is gonna be an all-out fight and so according to herodotus he conscripts troops from 40 different nations uh to be part of this invasion force and one of the things they begin by doing is actually making a bridge across the helispont so this waterway that is separating europe from asia so that it's not a bridge that they couldn't they didn't have the engineering fee capacity to possibly make a bridge across across this thing it's only recently been able to be bridged right but they make these on this pontoon boats and so they put all the boats together and they build it across so that they can just send as many tens of thousands of troops across as they want and so it's a very amazing feat they also conclude that they're going to dig a canal across a peninsula mount athos where a previous persian fleet had been lost essentially showing that the power of this empire is beyond what the gods can do to to stop it by separating them from water or or land so they can do beyond that so we have actually um from xerxes tomb um just a list of you know kind of like not a list but anyway uh ethnically diverse relief sculptures of all these different troops that he has so each one of these little guys you know has their little characteristics of what you know whether they're wearing wherever the phrygian is where he's wearing a phrygian cap or whatever all of his accoutrements that symbolically make him all of these different things so there's a persian a median an elamite a parthian an arie and a bacteria and a saudian so in other words these are all from the persian heartland arikosi and etc all the way through hindus so indians over here babylonian assyrian arab egyptian armenian cappadocian lydian so now we're getting into the the anatolians here uh ionians so greeks in other words libyans ethiopians so they brought everybody you know so so what ends up happening in the whole course of this is um uh again like i say herodotus gives an impossible number of 2.5 million they're famously delayed at thermopylae by those 300 spartans which there's plenty of movies about now but ultimately um you know those guys all died and ultimately the army advances to athens but the athenians kind of famously abandoned their city so they're ready to this is an all-out war as far as they're concerned as well so they are no longer in the same way that the persians have marshaled the entire world to come after them they are also prepared to um you know they've thrown all the dice too they give up their city and now their city is going to be the ships and so their navy and so they all get on the navy uh and the navy then ultimately defeats the persian fleet at salamis which at that point xerxes panics and decides that even though he has all these hundreds of thousands of troops around him and there's the bridge that's connecting um europe and asia the king of kings doesn't want to get stuck over here in the middle of nowhere with troops that could at any moment die of plague or whatever happens to troops sometimes and so he takes most of the troops back across and ultimately they're unable then to conquer the greek heartland as a result of that so um herodotus and telling this story as i mentioned in terms of causation one of the things that is a huge greek theme always is hubris and so the idea that uh the king of kings um is is essentially saying that he's beyond what gods can do so that he can actually do what um he's joins together what the gods have put us under so the gods have on purpose kept europe apart from asia and uh and xerxes um has connected them and likewise he obviously he caught that canal and that kind of a thing so in doing that thing um he is ex you know essentially exhibited hubris and that's going to be his downfall both as a human quality but also uh because the gods punish that kind of thing and so for hot it just both are important so then from we'll just get from the persian war so we had that to moving over here to the next the successor so the athenians having been the kind of superstars in that last war although the spartans got a lot of credit for that whole 300 thing they follow up their seemingly impossible asymmetric victory by taking initiative as a naval power and they create an alliance that's called the delian league and it's so-called because its headquarters is on the sacred isle of delos and so it's initially meant to be a defensive league and the athenians aren't saying that they're in charge of it it's like nato it's maybe headquartered in belgium but somehow over time 90 of all the troops or whatever coming from the u.s right and so the league consisted mostly of the consisted of most of the greek islands and that league then takes the initiative and successfully liberates from persia and incorporates into the league much of the greece creek coastline of asia so um just to kind of see it so athens and its posse is here on the on the greek mainland then the league consists of like all of these islands including delos which is right here and that's theoretically the center and then all of the coast essentially all the cities that had been in persian hands and are now liberated and they all become part of the athenian league here but over time participation in the league ceases to be voluntary at first all the greeks are excited to get on board this thing they persians they are now seen as quite beatable and they are being beaten there's a lot of glory once this starts to happen the treasury is moved from delos back to athens so now the headquarters is shown it's really is athens and it's ceasing to be a a free league and instead is becoming an athenian empire in athenian hegemony so sparta's ally um corinth so sparta's down here and it has many land allies one of them is corinth so corinth um when samos one of the islands over here where's sabos here it is when samos rebels and the athenians go to put the rebellion down the corinthians help the same oseans and so when that happens sparta ultimately is dragged into the war as an ally of corinth and so it becomes then a more all-out war as a result of that so when that happens though because athens as you just saw with its empire it's an entirely a sea power and the spartans don't have a navy and they're a land power essentially as long as the athenians hole up behind their walls and just sit there the spartan land forces will come every year and they'll ravage all around this area of attica the little bit of land that they can reach by land uh and and the athenians just sit inside their walls and they're able to be completely resupplied by um you know they're already importing most of their grain anyway so all of the all their food and everything like that is not coming from from locally so the strategy is completely sound however it's not the kind of thing that's really popular so you can imagine looking at your enemies that as they're constantly rampaging around outside your walls as they are taunting you as they are let's say defiling all of your land and destroying it all it's hard especially in the case of a democracy for the leader just be able to to be able to explain this and say oh this is very honorable of us right and this kind of a thing and so it's able to work according to the cities as long as the athenian's greatest general pericles is maintaining it he's this great statesman and he's able to explain the strategy to people and get people to do it so let's look at how thucydides is his first hand observations are working so he himself hails from a wealthy athenian family and he serves as a general during the war he doesn't hide uh that as a general his expertise of the expedition didn't do well so his um charge failed and he writes um it was also my fate to be in exile from my country for 20 years after my command at amphipolis so he's part of this failed amphipolis expedition he gets he gets censured for it and exiled for it but the one nice thing for him was that that exile allows him to go around and do research for his book right so this cities though one of the things that we see when we read about him when we read his text is that he's very skilled in this new greek art of rhetoric so in that same time with socrates and the other pre-socratics the sophists uh one of the things that they're doing is developing ways of of of having specific kinds of rhetoric so that you can persuade people by argument and this skill that thucydides has he may well have been trained as a sophist he has some of their philosophical uh leanings it seems like allows him to when sometimes it's called reconstruct or rather maybe construct speeches whole cloth and those occur throughout his text and they're kind of one of the main things so on the one hand he is doing this just the facts he's telling narration and things like that but then at pivotal moments pericles will come forward and he'll give this entire oration one of the most famous relations the pericles funeral oration but it doesn't mean that thucydides was there as a stenographer and he was taking notes and this is recording uh the speech as it was given in many cases he wasn't where the different speeches were taking place and so under those circumstances he admits that he is saying what ought to have been said and so this already now is a little different from how we understand um how history should be written today although historians were still doing this up until the uh 18th century kind of in in uh in imitation of thucydides um it seems to cast some doubt on on pericles reputation as an orator was was pericles was he an orator was there yeah well i mean the problem with this is one of those one of those issues when um he didn't give the oration the way we have it right so that oration has influenced everything from uh you know to the gettysburg address right so there's all kinds of different uh ways that that particular speech has been influential um he definitely was an orator but we simply don't neces have you know his actual orations what we have is how thucydides using his best skill is essentially trying to show that but because the acidities is also he's very pro pericles and so he's also we we have to then we can't be sure of what what's going on even though um even though the cities is is telling us he's giving us just the facts he nevertheless is himself a partisan he is may not be telling us why um why he thinks these particular judgments the way herodotus does admitting the different biases that herodotus has instead he's he's he's giving him saying he's objective but we have to decide whether you know we have to kind of read into his text to determine what his biases maybe are and so i'll mention that one of his biases that we can see as it comes through the text is he's he's from a noble family and so he's from probably the oligarchic faction as opposed to the democratic faction in athens and he's therefore throughout his texts critical of the democracy he thinks that it can work when there's a great leader who's kind of running the show but he also is going to show in his text um why it can go really bad when it's not and so he he also highlights where he's opposed to his own city's policies and even constitution question okay okay so i'm going long i'm sorry but we're getting close to the end so um so the uh another example besides the pericles funeral oration and this is just going to give us a kind of a sample of how thucydides let's say writing and thinking and philosophy kind of play out is in a constructed dialogue that he has uh between the millions people from the island of melos and the athenians so the millions and uh the athenians that the spartans are are now having a truce with the athenians and this is after pericles death the athenians now have decided that during the truce they're going to go around and expand their empire where they can so although milos is a traditional ally of the spartans they've actually been neutral in the war and so therefore they're not necessarily going to get any protection out of sparta and it's not breaking the truth to go after and attack them so um as presented by thucydides the athenians offer the millions essentially this ultimatum surrender and pay tribute or you know be destroyed that's your those are your options so the athenians um and they're having this dialogue essentially we're not wasting time with you millions you are you know we don't have time to argue with this because um you know morality aside the reality is might makes right or in the words that thucydides puts into the mouths of the athenians here the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must so essentially the athenians here are presenting we're talking about this real politic they're presenting this real politic um ultimatum to the millions the millions say hey look we're a neutral city and not an enemy so athens doesn't have to conquer them there's no reason for them they can just sail back home the athenians say though if they accept that milos is neutral and independent that'll make the athenians look pretty weak all these other islands are part of their empire their own subjects all the people that are on the other islands that are paying tribute will think that milas was left alone because the athenians aren't strong enough to conquer it the millions counter that by saying look if you if you invade us that's going to alarm all the other greek neutral states and they'll probably go over uh against you onto the onto the spartan side um the athenians essentially say look all the states on the mainland aren't are not going to care because you're on the islands and all of the ones on the islands are already you know conquered yes isn't this essentially how diplomacy works well but i don't know if it always was how diplomacy works it's how it's starting to work at this point and certainly um and certainly because this dialogue is so famous um it's it's been studied and this is kind of how it's been working in modern times again since uh since thucydides has been uh in in part um like the father of real politic so yeah so and one of the ways diplomacy might work other than a real political way like this is they might they might have done a trumped-up um cause right they might say to the millions you know you desecrated this or that or we have this reason to you know as a defensive war to to attack you the romans usually for example almost always had to kind of an excuse about why why it was important or why somebody had attacked them first in some way in order for them to then conquer everybody right and so in this particular case the athenians are just bare bare bones might makes right the millions say look it it's going to be shameful and cowardly of us millions if we just simply submit without a fight and the athenians say no no no that's not true because it would it'd only be shameful to submit to us if we weren't so badass you know you guys you guys have no chance so there's no you see so there's no there's no shame in that but the athenians say well you know even though you're stronger we could still win you know so we're not gonna there's always a chance you know that we could win and so we would regret not trying and the athenians say well that's pretty wishful thinking and you're probably going to regret that you did try because you're going to get destroyed right so the millions argue that they have the assistance of the gods because their position is morally just but the athenians counter probably with thucydides kind of thinking on this that the gods will not intervene because it is the natural order of things for the strong to dominate the weak and so that's what's going to happen millions say well our spartan kin are going to come to our defense the fenians point out the spartans are very pragmatic and they never put themselves at risk when their own personal interests are not at stake and that ends up being true in this case and finally the athenians just expressed their shock that the millions just aren't realistics like they are we're so realistic in athens you should be too um if there's no shame in submitting to a stronger enemy which by the way the athenians didn't do in the face of persia as we just saw especially one who is offering such reasonable terms so the millions do not change their minds they display politely dismiss the envoys battle ensues the athenians ultimately crush the millions they conquer the island they execute all the adult men they sell all the women and children into slavery and then taking the depopulated island they take 500 of their own people and plant it there as a colony and so now there's now athenian mealiots and all the amelians are gone so not a um athens doesn't come off great in in that in that particular part of the history despite the fact that an athenian is writing it right so based on kind of that kind of trajectory post-periclean as athens is kind of hubris is running out of control and thucydides narrative we now get additional athenian overreach that leads to their destruction so after conquering milos we have the famous villain of the end of um thucydides story alcibiades the demagogue so he convinces the athenians to invade syracuse and to conquer the island of sicily so um the athenians this is out in the mediterranean the athenians hardly know what's going on out in syracuse uh what it turns out is syracuse has grown huge and rich and is in fact quite a big thing the athenians are not realizing what a big deal it is they send a huge expedition and then once that goes out and they're fully committed they send an entire relief expedition so essentially they put all in every last chip is more or less into this invasion and ultimately the whole force is lost and so everybody's either killed the fleet is either sunk and all the reigning athenians that are on sicily are all enslaved themselves and so it's more or less a catastrophe uh for athens and from vicinity's um portrayal of it and the reality of it this has been a core argument throughout all of history subsequently about against the danger of demagogues so populists who just tell people and democracies what they want to hear and then also it's also been an argument against democracies in general because democracies from thucydides argument here are susceptible to demagoguery case in point boris johnson in the leadership of the you know uk yeah well we're about to we're living in fun times right there's some reasons why we're talking about this stuff ancient times so the cities gave this to us as a eternal gift uh because it might prove profitable as he said sometime again in history if we see events that are similar in the future right so after that total fiasco it's kind of athens makes kind of a remarkable discovery i'm sorry recovery and so sparta as always is really slow and doesn't follow up it's it's on its victories and things like that they're too conservative and so athens takes a rebuilds a fleet actually and retakes the initiative however the spartans finally kind of get their act together and decide that they got to do this and under the leadership of lysander they finally invest in and build their own fleet and uh then at a particular battle here at uh agosphotomy uh the athenian fleet is totally defeated by lysander and athens is left without army or fleet and uh is facing starvation and plague and so it ultimately surrenders and so athens completely from total victory completely loses the whole war spartan sparta uh eliminates the democracy and sets up a rule of of 30 tyrants to be locally so uh the fruits of athens the athenian hubris so although thucydides unlike herodotus does not presume to cite divine intervention as a punishment for hubris um the athenians we see are quite naturally punished for the hubris that he cites anyway in the text while he presents his work as just the facts he nevertheless has a partisan perspective as we've kind of mentioned so he's obviously from his city's oligarchic faction he's opposed to the populist faction and which he thinks is uh susceptible to demagoguery and bad decision-making and he's also quite against um athens imperialist policy so he would have preferred a more defensive policy than aggressively going around and trying to conquer everything his rhetorical skill for example in that million dialogue as we kind of looked at that kind of logical argument that he constructed whether or not any any any such diplomacy actually took place we can't say um what it does though is it shows i think even though he isn't he's showing us objective history he's more or less portraying not it being not being his arguments his arguments come through when you hear what the different people say in their speeches right and so it also foreshadows then athens future on the receiving end of their might makes right philosophy when athens no longer has the might to make right right so that's kind of then essentially tried to put any way into context you know the background of the two different first histories that the two different first historians kind of wrote and to conclude i just want to look at a little bit of the reputation and legacy of both of these two founders of the discipline of history so as we kind of saw herodotus was and for a whole long time for thousands of years has been and continues to be assailed by contemporaries and also um everybody since so we saw on the one hand aristophanes ridiculed him for reducing myths about the gods to naturalistic human history but he's come in for a lot more um uh criticism from thucydides onward in being maybe too credulous maybe believing too many fables or or putting in too many fables that are fun to read but are not not really shouldn't be part of real history nevertheless the fact that he uses sources critically and tells about his sources was very important to the development of the discipline of history thucydides does not mention any sources ever and he doesn't say where he's getting his his um information from other than eyewitness and that kind of thing himself in a lot of cases he can't witness the things that he's talking about um he also gives us something quite interesting and important in terms of this um pulling back and looking at a bigger picture and scope of history and civilizations um you know which is to say by which initiating other things like comparative anthropology customs and that kind of a thing more so than simply just war history just political history that history often is quite focused on and in so doing though he also has created a very enduring narrative of east versus west of asia versus europe which it's almost impossible to get outside of that box him having made it to begin with even though in a lot of cases it's artificial and unhelpful even to this day uh thucydides his technique of seeming to present the facts as observed makes his work seem very very modern even today you read it and you think right this could have been written very recently it's unlike herodotus who's telling very fabulous things this seems to be um anyway something that you know it is very modern and indeed one of the reasons for that is he becomes uh and his history becomes a model for how history is written in the 19th and and early 20th centuries the positivists who are attempting to do that same thing right the ultimate objective history uh that is including the kind of this um just the facts perspective um limiting his inquiry to politics government war he kind of set that focus for centuries millennia in terms of later historians and it's only been much more recently that we have expanded that to economic and social and all kinds of other histories that occur cultural art history he also continued to be read as the father of political realism among military strategists including all the neocons in the united states during the iraq war and everything like that they all have copy of thucydides um in the post-modern era however where we have been philosophically for the last couple generation or so as we kind of see all narrative as suspect and all authors as having bias we have started to and i've sort of highlighted a little bit as we look under the covers a little bit to see well even though he's not claiming any bias and he is claiming objectivity there is nevertheless um he's picking what events he's talking about he's um framing the speeches as he would like he's making juxtapositions he does pericles funeral oration and it's talking about the glories of athens and everything about the democracy and then the very next scene that he includes is the plague where everybody's killed in athens and the suffering and even pericles dies and so he juxtaposes things and you're making those kind of choices even if you aren't um picking fables and saying well i happen to believe the persian's here but the phoenicians tell it a little differently the way herodotus does so um i wanted to do more of this kind of a thing that we kind of started with but it's already gone long anyway but i just wanted to say um there are also interesting consequences for this invention of history so in some ways when we are living when we were living in this time when we told stories when we told miss that we're more in keeping with how let's say our mind and memory works when we invented history we started to think that our brains worked like history does and we started to think that our memories are are more like uh just the facts and this kind of a thing and this has had a lot of consequences for us uh in the modern era as historians have been engaged in this wonderful game of debunking everything when we say uh you know i'm busily telling you guys that atlantis isn't real or that king arthur is not a historical figure all of these kinds of um things that um you know where because we get such a emphasis of history and we have such a value of historicity but then we end up finding out that um all of these valued and treasured stories that are part of our identity are something else than history and so hopefully as we start to become awareness of his of history as an invention and as a discipline we can also see beyond it we can use it as a useful tool but see beyond it in terms of how we can also understand narrative in a different way and identity and and value other things like myth in addition to valuing history and so that's my little talk on the invention of history [Applause] um how did they used to like write about time so i'm sure they didn't write like 400 bce right so how did they denote that so it's um it's complicated until in especially in this kind of antiquity but what they would have been doing is they will say uh they're giving relative chronologies so they'll be saying in the same year that um you know that the greeks defeated uh you know the persians at salamis or something like that um that that will be like the name that'll be a given year and then we'll say 10 years after that or this kind of a thing or they will use in the third year of the reign of of king xerxes and things like that so they use regnal years they are largely not using long long calendrical systems although for the ancient greeks one of the ways that they um they had to do that if they if they wanted to is they would count olympiads and so the olympics in the ancient times were being held every every four years just like now and they could say well in the in this is the 36th olympiad uh or something like that and so they were they could use things like that and that would give us kind of a relative system but they didn't see enough need for it that they were using it a lot likewise for example when rome takes over even though there is a system called abu bay condita since the founding of the city so they'll say it's been 578 years since the founding of the city of rome which is actually not rome was actually older than they thought it was but anyway that's the traditional date of the founding and they were kind of counting it they very rarely used the system so it's we get a little lucky when they do you know and that kind of a thing but generally speaking it's part of the drawb of uh modern historians to add things up to look at relative chronologies to decide what year anything happens and so sometimes you'll see in chronologies that it could be you know quite off depending on when something you know might have happened it could be like a 10-year range because they haven't necessarily fixed exactly when that is but it's more or less working out relative chronology now how we put it together to get to that um that year so we're very we're very cognizant of a.d or common era and bce but anyway that's fairly new um it's it's i'm just sitting here trying to formulate my question almost as much as anything else but it it's um going back and this is sort of connects with what you're talking about was what you're the the the the root material of history is time and that time being what it is it's not only fluid but it's disappearing yeah all the time so that we're we're left with with a broad spectrum of how do we uh how do we think about what has happened in the past on the on the one hand you can think of it as being on one end of the spectrum and we see this happening today in terms of my understanding of history i'm not a historian but that's my understanding is that you will have those who will talk about the invention of history the science of history if you will yeah and then as i was coming over here i was thinking well the the flip side of this i would have a different lecture which would be called the fiction of history which is to say it is a and you know that fiction has double meanings more than single meaning here doesn't mean that it's not real but it does definitely doesn't mean that it is a creation yes and and so the question to me comes to what degree is it um is it an accurate reflections of things that happen to the past and to what degree uh is it a simple creation of a whole cloth in some circumstances yeah uh greatest example and you you this is often reflected in conflicts so when you have the um the great the the battle between the turks and um and the armenians over there that particular history you know did this holocaust occur or did it not uh one will argue this is an actual reflection of our history the other will say no this is a fiction yeah right so right but but in a sort of a broad philosophical term there there there is this question about um how much how is it possible actually even possible to recreate the past based upon simple factual things okay and and then um and and then how much in fact is us creating uh creating history or inventing or fictionalizing history to meet our own self-interests for example because we talked about it at the beginning and that's a huge huge topic and i don't know how history historians modern historians are addressing that can you can you talk a little bit about that is is that in fact a is that a controversy today uh is it is it an issue oh yeah i i should have very much so so um we kind of talked about a little bit of at the beginning here which is that we've said that um one of the things especially that we're dealing with when we're going back in antiquity it's not that um that all the people in ancient times are all extremely rich older men the vast majority of them aren't you know and most everybody the huge proportion of the society here are slaves we we can't say almost anything about them because nothing nothing survives other than what you can get in aggregate in in archaeology or any other kind of thing like that and so history by its very nature is uh very distorted um because it has based on surviving evidence and so this and the surviving evidence is is almost always of elite culture and so for us to get to the broader you know and that's all history was even caring about before but to get to the newer kinds of history where we are looking at economic and social uh this broader cultural and you know popular history um it it requires a lot of filling in the gap and so as a result of that that's why we were kind of talking about when we're trying to do the population numbers of the of the troops they're they're vastly different same thing the estimates the same thing even though the size of a city it's you know huge range of what it what it's possible it could have been and so one of the things that we should have to be aware of to you to your point is uh we have had this uh in the modern time period we've had this valuing overvaluing of history and historicity and so for example in christianity in the west people have when they got access to the bible and their vernacular and they started reading it themselves they read it as if it were history they became newly newly interested in historicity and people to this day i talk to all the time who have grown up christian and who when they find out that a particular story in the bible isn't historical that there is no evidence that such and such that abraham or whatever is a historical figure then they'll say well i you know then it's you know then it's not true but uh what i would argue on the on the other side of it is that history actually is not achieving truth what we have with history is not finding things that are true but rather we have at best uh what historians can tell us is the most likely scenario based on the evidence that have survived about what happened in the past and the level of our assurance of it is quite variable too we can say this is extremely unlikely to have happened to there's a good chance that this happened and this is why um most historians are going to always be giving these those kind of weasel words right right where you're saying you have to always say the mo the likely scenario is this the most likely scenario is that as opposed to being you know saying for sure this is proved or this isn't proof that's not really what the discipline allows us um you asked like a three-part question so i don't know if i got all the parts it is this question about how the other part the other end of the spectrum being this question uh um how much is is actually it is made up i think how much is made up so to the extent that you know uh if you read a read a book like the alexandria quartet this whole notion of a fact well a fact is is really only as good as the number of perspectives a different company bring to bear in fact to establish it as a fact and then the circumstances if you're you have to talk in the microphone you're going to talk this long so because because i can't recount the whole thing okay yeah yeah so so so yeah that's getting into again this kind of overall philosophy of um of narrative which is all be coming into question in our modern post-modern deconstructed uh you know uh philosophies that are there and so that has definitely um intersected history big time at the academic discipline of history since since history is a narrative discipline right and so the so that is what has all been brought into question i think and so that's why we are in a place where um i'm kind of wanting to bring that more awareness to the general public because i think a lot of times people look at history as something that is simply true or not and i think that we need to open the lid on that and examine it thanks we live in a an era of a lot of fake news yes whether it's true or whether it happened whether it didn't whether i had sex with that woman or i didn't yes and there are also shades of meaning i wonder how historians down down the down the road will look back at various sources will they read the new york times will they look at the facebook will that computer chip the extent or can they play it play it back or not yes so so contemporary historians have um the absolute opposite issue that and ancient historical is just to say historians of antiquity compared to historians of today you know tomorrow's historians of today so and the historians of antiquity we have just this dearth there's no evidence there's a desert and we wander around we find one little piece of evidence and you know you have to polish it and shine it and you you love it because it's the only thing that has survived and it's wonderful um in the future the glut mess you know of data that will be available to historians the only the only potential that they have to be able to wade through it all is that hopefully things like google are also improving and so they're going to be doing search engines or whatever so they can search through and find the different data and i know that that that's already happened you know a lot more where where data is organized in and much easier to locate and find and sift uh things but like you say what is the what what is gonna what's the overarching narrative you still have to in order to know what to search you almost still have to have a narrative to start out with in order to know what you're going to look for right i think even now there are some facts which are unknowable for example the cause of death of marilyn monroe will never be known there's been there's been so much yeah written by it yes well and so that's always going to be the case with history there's lots of things that are that are unknowable um and the best we can say for much i mean there are whole bunches of it there's some stuff that is we can say is impossible you know but you know there's a bunch of it that you know we can only say this is the most likely scenario or the three most likely scenarios john maybe you can comment on the theory that history and its invention and how it is written is really determined by the strong the powerful the political uh the political power mongers as it were who control what is written and control what is heard and and and presented over the media i'm thinking for example the chinese have expunged all record of tiananmen square yeah the soviets for example uh the russians parade their their uh liberation of poland but don't mention the fact of their of their non-aggression pact with hitler and the fact that they eviscerated poland for two years from 39 to 41. so what do you think of this this this theory that really the invention of history and how it is written depends upon the victor the strong the powerful well so that's that's certainly an aphorism you know history is written by the victors um and it's and it's inarguable that um that the more powerful you know the victors and people who are exercising their power are you know you know attempting to rewrite you know always attempting to rewrite history as you know in all those ways those excellent examples that you just cite um the one thing that has been true and we don't know what the future holds in terms of who's in power and who's going to be the victors you know going forward in particular those particular events um one thing that's true is that uh historians tend to be a um cantankerous lot which do like to find for example uh in antiquity for example one of the main criteria on which to judge where there's something let's say is a legitimate fact that is where we can believe the source is something called like the criterion of embarrassment and so if you have um recorded something like thucydides did where he records that even though he's a general he he failed as a general and amphipolis we believe him because he's written something that's embarrassing about himself right and so if you are constantly writing a um you know a censored uh uh account where you and the red army just marched in as liberators and didn't do any atrocities in poland and hadn't been allied with hitler before that and all this kind of thing you know it may well if no other if no other sources ever survive um the historians then will only have the capacity of they have that particular source and they'll just be source critical of it and decide that it has these inherent biases and can't be believed in this in that way but it wouldn't be able any any other telling of this story is going to remain hypothetical if that's the only thing that survived however if anything else survives you know in terms of a counter narrative then when you have a narrative that lacks those sorts of criteria believability we treat those just like herodotus did right at the beginning uh with much skepticism you know and so the part of the whole discipline is reading the sources for their biases and tending attempting to correct them but but yes um i mean my time machine i tell any um any any ancient or medieval monarch if they want to have good press they just needed to commission a historian to write their bio because there's so many um who did and then we have you know saint louis um you know life by juan v you know but then we have other kings who we don't have a thing and so there's no there's they're they're existing in a um they're existing in a chronicle on their uh desert and they and so they're not gonna get they're not remembered that way or maybe they attacked monks and the monks wrote that they're terrible you know they would have been a great king but the monks didn't like him and that's the only people that that's the only writing that survived you know uh we covered the role of uh the facts uh the role of the ideology and uh my question is what is the role of the question itself in the inquiry uh of his this history is because uh well we talked we also mentioned about the biases and so so on uh without the question i think the this inquiry is a little bit uh could be superficial and maybe uh we study first the world wars in order to understand where we're going heading uh in this kind of world maybe this is this and uh from their perspective the ancient greeks perspective uh i guess there might be this question especially in uh this uh what's his name again uh the question of the regime uh either democracy or oligarchy yeah and how the events unfold and then um maybe this kind of the the procession of the events might have might have been better with the other uh kind of uh political regime maybe yeah is this was this a motivation for him uh to start his inquiry what do you think about that no i think you were right actually this is one of the reasons why when i was trying to um tell this story i was trying to do it kind of from the perspective of the invention of history but then i kind of felt like i have to have all this context to explain these two guys and so one of those part of that context is like we said that that whole city-state perspective and so the greeks are sitting around and thucydides is one of them and he's he's a contemporary of socrates and they and are busily thinking about um you know they're coining this word politics but they're coining it um to mean about the things that happen in their city-states right and so they are really fixated on the idea that politics and government and forms of government and the way they're orchestrating it is based on essentially independent city-states that are always in competition with each other that include various kinds of rival forms of government whether it's an oligarchy whether it's a participatory democracy of some kind or whether it's a tyranny and so then they are also busily making their inquiries based on those that contemporary competition but this um will cease to be uh anything that anybody cares about when in just a couple centuries when the age of the independent city-states ends and they're all subsumed into one empire and then they have a very different um questions that emerge so they're not thinking in terms of these this kind of city-state political government types because the question of what government you should have you know 200 years into the roman empire is not a question that's open to anybody anymore we're going to have an empire that exists forever where there's one you know one emperor right so i i think that you're quite right that the reason why they're asking um a question like that is because that's the middle of what they're living in so they're always as always every writer is a product of their own historical context [Music] you

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Length: 109min 22sec (6562 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021