Herodotus: The truth is too boring, I’mma spice things up and add a couple of plot twists.
CowardNomad on
That, but seriously. Ancient interviews (not about dreams, of course) do keep a dimension of information that will be lost to time – the actual experiences, speculations, rumours roaming at the streets, and feelings of people living through that period. Often historial events are driven by people’s perceptions of the situation they’re in instead of the actual situation.
If one is aware that future generations will probably have improvements in way of studying the past, technically the best act one can do in the present is to write down everything one can, whether one think it is bullshit or not, thus providing as much information as possible for the people down the line to sort and decide, instead of doing “analysis” and discarding information one think is unimportant to form a narrative to support one’s analysis. With information against one’s analysis being intentionally unrecorded, one is actually intentional lying via omission, forcing the future generations to see the events through one’s lens.
If Herodotus is a liar, he’s a bad one by bluntly telling you he doesn’t believe everything he heard but he’s writing it down anyway. If Herodotus is a liar, then Thucydides is a sophisticated liar that forced us to view most of the Peloponnesian war in his way, in his interpretation, because he consciously and intentionally shaped his case to be the only convincing one, in his own book with sources he decided. I do not mean this as an attack on Thucydides, I just mean my boi Herodotus deserves some more respect for giving the raw data.
5 Comments
Ancient history: Verified by dreams
Herodotus: The truth is too boring, I’mma spice things up and add a couple of plot twists.
That, but seriously. Ancient interviews (not about dreams, of course) do keep a dimension of information that will be lost to time – the actual experiences, speculations, rumours roaming at the streets, and feelings of people living through that period. Often historial events are driven by people’s perceptions of the situation they’re in instead of the actual situation.
If one is aware that future generations will probably have improvements in way of studying the past, technically the best act one can do in the present is to write down everything one can, whether one think it is bullshit or not, thus providing as much information as possible for the people down the line to sort and decide, instead of doing “analysis” and discarding information one think is unimportant to form a narrative to support one’s analysis. With information against one’s analysis being intentionally unrecorded, one is actually intentional lying via omission, forcing the future generations to see the events through one’s lens.
If Herodotus is a liar, he’s a bad one by bluntly telling you he doesn’t believe everything he heard but he’s writing it down anyway. If Herodotus is a liar, then Thucydides is a sophisticated liar that forced us to view most of the Peloponnesian war in his way, in his interpretation, because he consciously and intentionally shaped his case to be the only convincing one, in his own book with sources he decided. I do not mean this as an attack on Thucydides, I just mean my boi Herodotus deserves some more respect for giving the raw data.
Why make an actual meme when you can just repost?
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/s/O0q8brwAQ6
Edit: This user is a repost bot
If my book is made up, then why is it called *Verae Historiae?* Checkmate, historians