Making History • HIST 1105 • Wrapping up weeks 2–3
Herodotus · Thucydides · Livy · Sima Qian · the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle · Bede · al-Biruni · Machiavelli
Roughly 1,500 years and four civilizations.
The board · 1 of 2 · what each one says history is for
Memory and renown — that great deeds “may not lack renown” — and, almost in passing, the reason they went to war.
A warning you can reuse: a pattern in how power behaves, recognizable the next time it happens.
“A universal net” over all the old traditions — sorted by type, and each chapter closed with a signed verdict.
A “conspicuous monument” of examples: choose what to imitate, mark what to avoid, and save the state’s morals.
The board · 2 of 2 · what each one says history is for
Livy’s preface with one clause added: the good is “worthy of the service of God.” History as the arrival of the faith.
No stated purpose at all. Kings, bishops, battles, portents — entered and left for the reader to make sense of.
Truthfulness as a virtue in itself — and a duty to correct what you can and “leave the rest as it is.”
Imitate “the paths beaten by great men” — not to become good, but to become effective.
The second question · what counts as proof
Thucydides: only what he saw or had from reliable witnesses. Herodotus: travel, interviews, and a note where his sources disagree. The Chronicle: whatever the house happened to write down that year.
Livy: earlier writers, in a library — the legends he will “neither affirm nor refute.” Sima Qian: the imperial archives and every old story he can net. Bede: named informants, papal archives — and miracles, which are public, ongoing, and checkable.
al-Biruni screens for physical possibility, then chases each claim back to its originator. Machiavelli barely asks: an example only has to demonstrate the mechanism. The most and least source-critical writers on this list are separated by five hundred years — in the wrong direction.
Where the disagreement isn’t
Not one of them writes to satisfy curiosity alone. Renown, warning, virtue, salvation, a judgment, a technique — every single one has a customer in mind. “Knowledge for its own sake” is not a premodern idea.
A parable shape (Croesus, Lucretia), an invented speech (Pericles, the sparrow), a flat annual list, a table of contents that files a loser among sovereigns, a worked example with a body in the piazza. In every case the shape says something the facts don’t.
Whole societies pass through these texts without a mention. Every one of these is an archive with a doorman — and the empty years in the Chronicle are just the most honest version of it.
Where the disagreement is
Yes: Herodotus names four incompatible stories; Livy will not affirm or refute the legends; al-Biruni publishes his rules first. No: Thucydides discloses once and then writes seamlessly; Bede’s sparrow speech carries no warning label. Confidence is not transparency.
The deepest split on the board, and it isn’t about rigor. Bede reasons carefully about a parted river. al-Biruni rules it inadmissible before asking who reported it. Both are scrupulous men. They disagree about the furniture of the world — and every evidence standard, ours included, rests on a claim like that.
Livy, Bede, and Sima Qian want you to become better. Machiavelli wants you to become effective. Same verb — imitate — and the histories they produce are unrecognizable to each other.
The trap · the story you will be tempted to tell
“There have always been multiple perspectives from which the past can be viewed… the predominant ways of recording history have changed over time.” Popkin, p. 27 — against “a story of progress”
Rank the eight by how much they resemble what we do now. Thucydides (5th c. BCE) and al-Biruni (11th c. CE) land next to each other near the top. Livy (1st c. BCE) and Bede (8th c. CE) land next to each other well below. The order you get is nothing like chronological, which is exactly what a ladder cannot survive.
He called the Middle Ages “a twilight of fiction” (p. 41) because he graded them on a purpose they never had. That is the same error as praising Thucydides for sounding rigorous: you are scoring resemblance to yourself and calling it progress.
Difference is the finding. If it were progress, the dates would cooperate — and they don’t.
Discussion · looking back across weeks 2 and 3
It covers both weeks. The prompt is the question this whole session is circling: what is the story of history over the last two weeks of readings? Notice that “story” is doing something — if your answer is a straight line, say why the dates cooperate.
Next · week 4
Voltaire and Kant: reason advances, civilization improves, and so the past is going somewhere. The first of our eight questions answered by a theory rather than a purpose.
Ranke: show the past “as it actually was.” Not a new purpose — a claim to have no purpose at all, which is the most interesting position on the board.
Both will present themselves as the end of the story you just spent two weeks refusing to tell. Ask of each: what is it for, and who is it for? The answers have never once been “nothing” and “no one.”