/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.5157169]

Herodotus Histories or Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War?
There can be only one.

[Anonymous No.5157179]

Herodotus traveled throughout the ancient world to learn the customs and histories of people in int their own words, stretching hundreds of years before his time.

Thucydides was a contemporary account of a war.

They aren't really comparable.

[Anonymous No.5157210]

>>5157179
>implying Thucydides didn't write in response to Herodotus telling of fantastical things that couldn't be real
>implying they weren't both trying to get Greeks to wake up and stop fighting each other

[Anonymous No.5157242]

In Herodotus people feed their enemies' children to them and wacky magic shit happens. Herodotus all the way. Thucydides's book might be a better historical document but he's kinda boring

[Anonymous No.5157257]

>>5157169
Thucydides
more credible, imo the best text greek wrightings
and great start to understand Athenian Democracy

[Feminister !!F9QVQ82MjmE No.5157265]

>>5157210
>implying Thucydides didn't write in response to Herodotus telling of fantastical things that couldn't be real
I don't think so. And it's fucking retarded nowadays to look at Herodotus and say, "Oh how, that's crazy, he should have know!" Herodotus is often skeptical--he says sailors tell him of their voyage around Africa, and that the sun started rising from an off direction at a certain point in the voyage, and so Herodotus says they're probably lying; of course today we know they were telling the truth, since when you go below the equator, the angle of the sun's rise will change. Similarly, with a lot of the incorrect info Herodotus relates, it might not seem impossible then.

I mean, there's just no way of comparing. Thucydides was writing about events in his lifetime and his own culture through mostly first-hand sources, it was easy as hell for him to be relatively accurate.

[Anonymous No.5158164]

>ancient authors get assmad that Herodotus simply wrote what he heard
>includes tons of incredulous comments and stuff like "I will report all three accounts of its origin which I was told by the inhabitants.."
>lives in the heyday of the sophists and manages to capture the spirit of their relativism and epistemology without being poisoned or paralysed by it
>realises the importance of ethnography lies just as much in a people's self-conception as in what "actually happened"
>tfw Herodotus is a bro

[Anonymous No.5158194]

>>5157265
>I don't think so.
re-read the introduction

[Anonymous No.5158412]

>>5157169
Herodotus for the philosopher
>Solon
>Periander
Thucydides for the dramatist
>Funeral Oration
>Melian Dialogue
>Defeat at Syracuse

I suppose it is better to be a philosopher than a dramatist, I think it was the same way then.