Storytelling, Evidence, and Purpose

Older approaches are not, he says, “simply… outmoded approaches that have now been replaced by the ‘proper’ way of doing history”; instead “there have always been multiple perspectives from which the past can be viewed” and “the predominant ways of recording history have changed over time” (p. 27). This is the design principle of our whole syllabus: we are not climbing a ladder toward the correct method.

Egypt kept records of rulers going back centuries — Herodotus says so himself. Persia had its own traditions. Both Greeks knew Homer intimately. The Jews had preserved the story of their origins, later written into the Bible. And in China, Confucius insisted on remembering past events “to draw lessons from them that would guide appropriate conduct in the present” (p. 28) — a claim about the usefulness of the past we will meet again in Livy, in Machiavelli, and in Week 4.

Notice how much work “critically examined” is doing. Not recorded, not preserved — examined. A claim now comes with a procedure attached, and a procedure can be challenged by someone else. Popkin adds the part that makes today make sense: the two of them “had to define for themselves what history should take as its subject, what materials it should draw on, how they should be evaluated, and what purposes it should be designed to achieve” (p. 28).

These are not two neutral reports that happen to differ in rigor. They are two different genres with two different emotional jobs — defense and self-destruction. Popkin notes readers have taken Thucydides ever since as “a warning against the dangers that can befall a society that overestimates its own strength and allows its policies to be determined by irresponsible demagogues” (p. 29). Worth asking whether that warning is in the book or put there by readers who needed it.

The Greek word Popkin flags is istoria, which “can be translated as ‘inquiry’” (p. 28). The entire discipline is named after a procedure, not a subject. Herodotus is not claiming revelation, prophecy, or inherited tradition. He is claiming he went and asked — and Popkin notes he “devoted a good part of his writing to recounting the extensive travels and other efforts he had undertaken to collect information” (p. 28).

He opens with competing Persian, Greek, and Phoenician accounts of how East and West fell out — a chain of abducted women (Io, Europa, Medea, Helen) that reads more like mythology than causation. Then he declines to referee them and moves to what he can stand behind. Students read this as sloppiness. Name it as a choice: he leaves the seam visible. Popkin’s version — Herodotus “often indicated the sources of his information and critically evaluated them for his audience, telling them what he thought was true and what he considered doubtful” (p. 28).

Look at the shape: a warning ignored, an ambiguous prophecy, pride, reversal, recognition at the last possible moment. Real events almost never arrive with that shape already on them. The point isn’t that Herodotus is lying — it’s that the episode does moral work whether or not it happened this way, and the moral work lives in the form, not the facts. Popkin, dryly: Herodotus is also called “the father of lies” for exactly this (pp. 30–31).

In the same breath as his promise to include only what he personally observed or had from reliable witnesses (Popkin, p. 28), he tells you the speeches are partly his own composition — what the situation called for. Popkin does not soften this: such invented material “later became seen as blurring the line between history and fiction” (p. 30).

Pericles is not reporting a funeral. He is making an argument about what Athens is — open, democratic, cultured, worth dying for — while standing over the war dead in year one of a war Athens will lose. This is propaganda in the literal sense: a polis explaining itself to itself. And remember the previous slide: Thucydides wrote these words. Popkin notes the speeches let him “allow his characters to explain the motives for their actions” (p. 30) — which is to say, they are where his interpretation lives.

Thucydides narrates in his own voice constantly. So why is this a dialogue? Because the form lets him stage two incompatible logics — justice and power — colliding, without ever saying which he endorses. The apparent absence of judgment is itself an authorial decision. He also lets the Athenians say the quiet part out loud: “of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of nature they rule wherever they can” (5.105).

Almost everyone answers “Thucydides is more honest,” because he sounds more rigorous — Popkin notes his prose was “clear and precise, without rhetorical flourishes,” and “continues to serve as a model for serious history writing even today” (p. 30). But rigor-sounding prose is a rhetorical stance too. Herodotus flags his doubts and shows the seams; Thucydides smooths them and tells you once, in one chapter, that he has done so. Confidence is not transparency.

Same two authors, same surviving texts, opposite verdicts. Popkin’s point: which ancient historian a modern historian admires tells you what that modern historian thinks history is for. He resists the neat version too — it is “tempting to conclude that Thucydides appeals to more traditionalist scholars and Herodotus to those more open to innovation, but this is not always the case,” since Koselleck read Thucydides as a forerunner of postmodernism for demonstrating “that the gathering of facts is not identical with what is said or written about them” (p. 31).

It is tempting to award points for how much they resemble us. Resist it. Popkin notes Herodotus “noted that Greek beliefs in oracles often influenced their actions” (p. 28) — oracles are information here. Firing the gods as causes is not the same as not believing in them. And the reach was small: “whatever most of the population of the ancient world knew about history was largely transmitted through other means, such as public monuments and oral tradition. Written history was the preserve of a small, cultivated elite” (p. 36).