2 HISTORY
The main historical sources
In the modern world, archaeologists have uncovered much of the early history of
Greek civilization, as we have seen in relation to the Minoans and Mycenaeans.
However, even after the invention of writing, the Greeks do not seem to have written
their own history until prompted by the spirit of enquiry (historiain Greek is learning
by enquiry) associated with the Ionian philosophers who challenged the mythical
view of the world represented in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. It can surely
be no accident that the earliest writer of Historiesknown to us, Hecataeus (c. 500),
who was also a geographer, came from Miletus, the Ionian home of more than
one early philosopher. Only a few fragments of Hecataeus survive including a notable
first sentence: ‘I write these things as they seem to me to be true; for the stories of
the Greeks are many and ridiculous in my opinion.’ Other prose writers called
logographerscompiled accounts of local traditions, genealogies and more general
matters. Local histories continued to be written in the fifth and fourth centuries and
they are thought to be the basis of the history contained in The Athenian Constitution
traditionally attributed to Aristotle referred to later in this chapter. The main literary
sources referred to and cited in this chapter for the Classical period are Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon, and Diodorus Siculus, and for the Hellenistic period, Arrian
and Plutarch and Polybius.
Herodotus (c. 484–c. 420)
Born about 484, in between the two Persian campaigns, in Halicarnassus, a colony of
Dorian Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor, Herodotus offers to the public the result of
his enquiry in order to preserve the memory and renown of great and remarkable
deeds done both by the Greeks and the non-Greeks (for which his work is barbaroi